Honest Ab: Evolution and Related Topics

Why Evolution Looks like It Has an Overall Direction

2012-02-10T09:50:00.000-08:00

When directional selection occurs, evolution has a direction. It rapidly chooses the winners. But directional selection usually does not last very long. One would not expect evolution to take a consistent, overall direction over the course of millions of years. What it takes to be a winner at one place and time is not what it takes at another.

And yet, in the popular imagination, the idea persists that humans are the “most evolved” species and that evolution pushes “upward” toward a human-like state. Worms are inferior to us because they did not evolve as much. Chimpanzees are inferior to us also, but not as inferior as worms. Ask somebody about evolution, and they will probably either say it is a plot of the Devil or else they will tell you a story that puts humans up at the top of the stairs. Literally. When the publisher was designing the cover to the paperback version of my first Encyclopedia of Evolution, the artist depicted stairs, with monkeys at the bottom and humans at the top. One cannot blame the artist, who merely drew what he or she had been taught to believe. The publisher, not the author, decides the cover images of a book, but this publisher immediately changed the image when I told them that it was scientifically wrong. More recently, an editor rejected a book manuscript because, he said, evolution is an inevitable upward progression, and since my book did not say this, I obviously did not know what evolution was.

This up-the-stairs version of evolution is the one that harmonizes most easily with old creationist views. In the Middle Ages, the natural world was depicted as a scala naturae, or ladder of nature. Rocks were at the bottom, simple organisms above the rocks, mammals and birds above the simpler animals, humans above all other animals, angels above humans, God above angels.

To many early evolutionary scientists, and to many people today, the scala naturae still exists, only God and the angels have been lopped off the top, and evolution has been substituted for creation. This is essentially the pre-Darwinian version of evolution that was proposed by French biologist (inventor of the word biology) Jean Baptiste de Lamarck. Simple organisms were continually forming themselves out of the mud, then modifying themselves into ever more complex forms until they became human, or something like a human.

Scientists today understand that there is no single, upward staircase of evolutionary progress. All species are equally evolved. Worms are very good at being worms. They can make a living in ways that humans cannot. Chimpanzees are very good at being chimpanzees. In some ways, bacteria can be seen as the most successful life form on this planet. There are more bacteria, and more kinds of bacteria, than any other group of organisms. They live in a greater range of conditions, and have persisted for three and a half billion years. The human species, in contrast, can live in only a narrow range of conditions, and has done so for only about 100,000 years, about 0.003 percent as long as bacteria have existed.

There is, however, no denying that life has seemed to make progress. Three and a half billion years ago, only bacteria (and probably viruses as well) existed. By a billion years ago, there were complex cells as well. Five hundred million years ago, almost all life forms lived in the oceans. By four hundred million years ago, some life forms lived on land. Bigger and more complex organisms have evolved over time. An evolutionary story is unfolding. If this isn’t progress, what is?

The reason that evolution seems to lead to progress is that evolution accumulates successes. Bacteria were successful. So also were the more complex cells that evolved from them. Natural selection kept both of them. Plants have been successful. So have animals. Natural selection has kept both of them. The Tree of Life gets bigger and bigger. Also, natural selection capitalizes upon whatever works, whether it is greater complexity or greater simplicity, whether it is life on land or life in the sea. Natural selection capitalizes upon opportunity. Each step toward greater complexity opened up new possibilities. Over evolutionary time, successes and complexities have accumulated. Some of the stories have vanished, such as the saga of the dinosaurs. But most of them are still here, to astonish us today as we behold and study them.

Check out the new YouTube video available at http://youtu.be/SsunNzKrj_s (Channel, StanEvolve). This week it is Charles Darwin explaining that humans, bananas, grapes, and chickens all have a common evolutionary ancestor.

Also remember to submit any comments, especially about topics you would like to discuss.

This entry appears in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published by Prometheus Books.

Memes Are Everywhere

2012-02-03T10:36:00.000-08:00

At the end of 2011, I wrote about the cultural and memetic evolution of the economy. Most of you probably understood what I meant. But I would like to include here a summary of the idea of memetic evolution, which I have extracted from Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published last year.

Humans exist in a sea of memes. For example, music is memes. Somebody invents a new piece of music, and performs it. A successful set of music memes gets performed by others. Because of memetic selection, there are more copies of Dvořák’s New World Symphony on the market than anything written by Johann Ditters von Dittersdorf. The reason that most folk songs are good is that they have endured centuries of memetic selection. Memetic selection appears to have condemned the deliberately atonal academic music of the twentieth century, such as the works of Anton Webern and Witold Lutosławski, to long-term obscurity. (You’ve never heard of them? That is my point.)

To a certain extent, memetic evolution is arbitrary. But memes, like genes, must correspond to underlying reality. In the case of music, harmonic consonance creates more of a feeling of peace and enjoyment than harmonic dissonance. Consonance results when the vibrations of different notes match one another’s overtone series. Humans desire more than just peace and enjoyment from their music, however, and a certain amount of dissonance is necessary to create a flow of musical events; resolution of a dissonance is part of the story of a piece of music. You cannot change the physical basis of consonance and dissonance any more than you can change the law of gravity. Rhythm is also based on the natural world and may be even more primal than harmony. The powerful drum beats of Japanese taiko and Lakota wacipi music bring back fetal memories of your mother’s heartbeat.

Computer programs are memes. Computer programmers commonly use evolutionary algorithms that consciously imitate natural selection. The program begins with a simple set of instructions, then generates slight variations, tries them out, then retains the ones that work the best. The weasel program is a simple example of an evolutionary algorithm. The computer iterates this process over and over, producing complex results that were designed not by the programmer but by memetic evolution within the computer. Old movies with battle scenes required (and boasted of) “a cast of thousands,” but modern movies often have such large-scale scenes generated by computer programs that use evolutionary algorithms.

Literature is memes. The marketplace is an arena of memetic evolution, as people choose some products over others. Science is memes, as scientists try out hypotheses, retaining and propagating the ones that successfully explain the natural world. Everywhere you look, there are memes, memes, and more memes, all of them evolving.

Check out the new YouTube video available soon on my YouTube Channel (StanEvolve). The video may not be available right away. Also remember to submit any comments, especially about topics you would like to discuss for this blog.

For more information about Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, which has now been published in Chinese as well as English, see my website.

In Memory of Lynn Margulis

2012-01-26T14:12:00.000-08:00

This essay will also be posted on my website at www.stanleyrice.com.

One of the greatest evolutionary scientists, Lynn Margulis, died last November 22. In this essay I would like to reflect on her contributions to our understanding of the world. Not just of a narrow aspect of science, but the whole world.

Lynn was a child prodigy who began her university studies at age 14. In graduate school, she studied genetics, and married her fellow graduate student, Carl Sagan (who was as creative and large a thinker as she). She was not content to just learn what others said about genetics. She wanted to understand why some traits were inherited only through the mother’s side. These traits appeared to be passed on not through the chromosomes in the nucleus but through the mitochondria, which are tiny energy factories inside of most cells. Some plant traits appeared to be passed on through chloroplasts, the tiny green photosynthesis factories in many plant cells. This meant that mitochondria and chloroplasts had, and used, their own DNA. She wondered why they had that DNA. When she read about the work of some Russian scientists in the early twentieth century, she had her answer. Mitochondria and chloroplasts started off as bacteria, which moved into and took up residence inside of larger cells that already had nuclei. They did not consume the larger cell, nor did it consume them. Instead they formed a permanent partnership, which has been going on for billions of years. Mitochondria and chloroplasts began, she said, by symbiosis—cells living together. The result was the genesis of a new, complex kind of cell. She called this process symbiogenesis.

When Lynn Sagan (later Margulis) wrote her paper, it was rejected fifteen times. She was persistent. Finally it was published. At first her ideas were scorned. But in less than a decade, most biologists were convinced that she was right. When I went to hear her speak, while I was a sophomore at the University of California, Santa Barbara (it was the first scientific seminar I ever attended), she was well received, even though the professor who introduced her made some off-color jokes. At the time, I was a creationist, and I thought that there were only two alternatives to the origin of a complex cell: either gradual evolution, or sudden creation. Lynn Margulis presented a third alternative. Her view was entirely evolutionary, of course; but the host cell and the bacteria had evolved, separately and gradually, then suddenly merged together.

Today Margulis’s view of the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts is a textbook standard. Scientists are working on an even more amazing example of symbiogenesis: many believe that the nucleus itself is the evolutionary descendant of a bacterium that moved into a larger cell that did not yet have a nucleus. I suspect that this idea would have been too wild even for Lynn in the early days.

In her final years, Lynn was looking for evidence that cilia and “flagella” of complex cells (such as paramecia) were the evolutionary descendants of spirochete bacteria. She had some good circumstantial evidence, but never did find proof.

She was also the principal biological champion of the “Gaia” view of the Earth, a view first proposed by atmospheric scientists James Lovelock. All of the organisms of the Earth form a single network of life. The Earth is therefore not just the home of life, but is alive. Not every component of the Earth is alive, of course; but neither is every component of a cell. A cell has living components, such as mitochondria, and nonliving components, such as water. But nobody would say that a cell is not alive. By the same reasoning, the Earth is alive.

Lynn was pugnacious. She was not afraid of a good scientific debate. And she was not afraid to be wrong. Clearly she was wrong in her assertion that HIV is not an infectious virus. But if she had never taken the risk of being wrong, would she ever have had the insights that changed modern biology?

I had a chance to talk with Lynn Margulis in 2004, as I was preparing my Encyclopedia of Evolution. She was 66 years old at the time, and could have retired comfortably and with renown. But she was still fighting for recognition of yet more of her insights. I mispronounced her name, and she corrected me: the emphasis is on the first syllable, Margulis. She said I would only be allowed to make that mistake once. I didn’t make it again. She enjoyed what I had written in my encyclopedia but was not afraid to point out what she considered errors. When I dedicated Life of Earth to her last year, she left me a phone message saying that the dedication brought tears of happiness to her eyes. She bought copies and left them for students to read at the University of Massachusetts, where she worked. I am glad to have brought a little joy and appreciation into the life of this great scientist.

We can carry on Lynn’s legacy if we continue to think big about the world. When Lynn started, most scientists were trying to decompose the big picture down into component parts. But now, many scientists consider that the interactions of those components are the most important thing. An entire research institute, the Santa Fe Institute, is devoted to understanding complex interactions and emergent properties. Geneticists now know that humans and mice have about the same number of genes, and most of them are the same genes; the big difference between a mouse and a human is not the genes but the interactions among the genes. I like to think that Lynn contributed greatly to this important change in the scientific view of the world.

Announcement: I just posted a new YouTube video on www.youtube.com/StanEvolve. It will be up soon. Darwin comments on…Newt Gingrich?

Also, please send comments about what you would like to discuss, and thanks for the comments received.

What Would You Do About…

2012-01-20T09:46:00.000-08:00

Note: I am posting a new Darwin video on my YouTube channel StanEvolve. It is not showing up on the main channel page, but if you click on videos, you will find it. It is called Charles Darwin and airplanes. It is about the difference between science and religion.

Note: I am now on Twitter @StanEvolve.

In the previous post, I asked for your input of ideas for this blog. Due to a Blogger website error, you may have missed that posting. If you missed it, take a look at it. I really want to know your input.

But I will also be asking your advice about specific situations. To start: please let me know what you think I should do in the situation I describe below.

I wrote a book review for the National Center for Science Education, which was read by a long-term prisoner in California. He wrote a letter to me, laboriously and carefully and intelligently. We began exchanging letters about evolution. He shared some of his questions and observations, and told me about some conversations he had with his fellow prisoners. I could not send any of my books—prisoners cannot receive hardcover books—but I printed out my summary of the Origin of Species for him, as well as the PDF file of Life of Earth.

I began to notice in his letters that he was dedicated to communism. I suggested to him that communism failed in part because it made incorrect assumptions about human nature (capitalism also makes mistakes, but not the same ones). He wrote back and said he was familiar with the Lysenko story (click here for the Wikipedia summary), but that The Great Stalin and The Great Mao were not responsible for the collapse of communism: it was the fault of infiltrators. He was not angry at anything I said, nor am I at anything he said, and our correspondence will probably continue.

But it is clear to me that he is a fundamentalist communist as unaffected by evidence as any fundamentalist creationist. Fundamentalist faith deflects all contrary evidence by making special accommodations; for example, creationists may say that God nudged the organisms around in the Flood to make the fossils end up in an evolutionary order.

So, what would you suggest that I do? Should I mention to my correspondent that he is using the same patterns of thought that fundamentalist creationists use? My inclination is to simply not discuss such matters any further with my correspondent; I am sure other topics will come up from time to time. But if you think I should write to him about it, let me know—and let me know how—in the comment box.

I look forward to your input on this and other things, and your responses to one another, rather than just waiting for it to happen. I have learned much of what I know by simply listening to others. I have the habit of walking right up to clusters of colleagues and just listening. Sometimes I tell them that I just want to listen and learn. Sometimes it is gossip (which, according to some studies, is nearly always good gossip rather than malicious gossip), sometimes it is major scientific or political insights. In fact, I have learned some things from the intelligent prisoner with whom I correspond.

For This New Year: Your Advice Requested

2012-01-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

It appears that Blogger reposted my December 23 entry rather than the one that I submitted. I will try again with this message.

This blog has, in its three years of existence, been primarily an outlet for my ideas: the kind of one-directional flow that feels most comfortable to a university professor. I want to change this beginning in 2012.

I would like to begin directly requesting my readers to give me advice. There is always a comment box option, which several of you have used, but my default (like that of most professors) has been to just talk and then acknowledge those few people who raise their hands. But interaction is the successful way to go. The internet is set up to encourage interaction. That means you! I would like to know what topics you would be interested in hearing about. I will continue to post things that I learn (primarily about evolution) but I will try to remember to always request your responses. I am not running out of my own ideas, but there will be plenty of time and space for yours.

I got to be smart by listening to other people—not just at scientific meetings, but everywhere, such as family reunions; not just from science, but from fiction, and from hearing people’s stories. Sometimes I crash a conversation that is going on in the hallway, and when they look at me I just said I wanted to learn something from them.

Let me know in the comment box (now or in any future comment box) what you would like to see discussed in this blog. Also check my website for news and essays. One news item: The Chinese edition of Life of Earth has just been published. I think you have to be in Taiwan to buy it.

Natural Selection of Economic Models

2011-12-31T14:15:00.000-08:00

We are now closing the year 2011, which has been remarkably like 2010. Continued global warming, continued opposition to the teaching of evolution and global warming, continued economic uncertainty, and another year with a Congress that considers its sole function to be partisan strife.

But one of these years, enormous changes will have to come. As economist Kenneth Boulding pointed out decades ago, and as environmental entrepreneur Paul Gilding has pointed out in his 2011 book The Great Disruption, growth cannot continue forever in a finite world. Gilding says that our current economic system will collapse, since it depends totally on economic growth. It will have to be replaced by an equilibrium economy. Gilding points out that this inevitable transition will not occur smoothly or gradually. At some point, a critical mass of people will realize that, in a finite world in which global warming will disrupt our lives, we have to change. Many of us realize this already; and we are a rapidly growing minority. The change will be disruptive, since entire industries (such as coal and oil) have refused to admit that we are about to collide with natural ecological limits; they will fight to keep people not just using but wasting natural resources. Big corporations will continue to demand government bailouts for their own business mistakes. They preach capitalism but demand socialism. The resulting chaos, in a world with natural disasters and scarce food, will not be pretty. One of these years—it might be 2012—will make 2011 seem like a very uneventful year.

Gilding says that we will emerge from the chaos with a new and sustainable economic system. He says that it is the next stage of human evolution. When I first read this, I assumed that he simply did not know what evolution was. But after I had read more of his book, I could see that he may be right. He did not mean biological evolution. He meant cultural evolution—some memes are propagated more than others. I have written about this process in books. But after reading Gilding’s book, I found a new example of cultural evolution: the economy.

The economy consists of many memes, which include: We have to keep growing to avoid collapse; we have to acquire ever more stuff in order to be happy; since the economy will always grow, we can put ourselves deeply into debt; ecological issues are something that we can take care of someday when we are all rich. These are the old, destructive memes that have brought our economy to the brink of disaster. But there are other economic memes: Our economy can be sustainable; happiness does not require lots of stuff; we can live within our means; we need to fit our economy into ecological limits now. There are millions of people (not enough millions) who believe this second set of memes; and there are hundreds of companies that abide by them. That is, in the world of economic memes, there is diversity.

And then along comes catastrophic natural selection: an economic collapse. If we were all hypnotized by consumerism, then this collapse would mean extinction. However, natural selection will in this case favor the sustainability memes, which already constitute a significant minority of the memetic variation in our population. Yes, there will be an enormous collapse; but many individuals and corporations are at least partly ready for it. There are, for example, hundreds of alternative energy companies ready to fill the void that will be left by the downfall of the petroleum industry.

This sounds like good news. I wish I could believe it, but I believe that political conservatives will prevent us from making enough changes to survive the coming collapse; they will suppress the solutions. The CEOs of financial corporations, for example, want to keep us in debt rather than to let us live without owing them money. Like a bunch of walnut trees suppressing other plant species by poisoning the forest with juglones (a process known as allelopathy), these CEOs are suppressing the sustainability memes. But they cannot wipe them out. At some point, a sustainable world may emerge, by the process of cultural evolution.

On this last day of the year, we sigh in relief that we have not yet fallen into disaster. We look forward to a new year in which, if we are lucky, the memes of sustainability will have a chance to make progress, and in which the collapse will not yet occur. If we are lucky.

Altruism: The Third Alternative for Ecology and Evolution

2011-12-23T08:06:00.000-08:00

Consider the following to be my holiday message to you. It is adapted from an essay I wrote for my website.

I recently read a book entitled The Penguin and the Leviathan, by Yochai Benkler, a leading scholar in business research. I have read many books about altruism, many of them by scientists such as Frans deWaal (The Age of Empathy), Dacher Keltner (Born to Be Good), and Martin Nowak (Super Cooperators). These books repeatedly make the point that individuals within animal species, individual humans, and businesses can profit from being nice and generous to others. Altruism, rather than violent competition, is the most important component of “the law of the jungle.” Just ask any of the chimps that deWaal has studied. The way to the top is primarily through cooperation, not violent competition. Even apes understand this. Benkler’s book is published by Crown Business, a division of a major New York publisher. Its intended audience is not science buffs but business leaders. In the title, the Penguin is Tux, the icon of Linux, whose business model is cooperation rather than top-down command, and the Leviathan is the cynical view of life presented centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes.

Benkler, though not a scientist, has done a very good job of summarizing the evolutionary science of altruism. But the thing that opened my eyes the most was that Benkler presented altruism as a third alternative for how a society could operate. The other two ways are state control and free market. We usually think that these are our only two choices. But, as Benkler explains, this is not true.

Both state control (as exemplified by dictators on the political right or the political left) and free market economics operate from the assumption that humans are fundamentally selfish. State control attempts to force people to not be selfish. The free market tries to capitalize upon those utterly selfish economic machines known as humans. But Benkler points out that altruism is a fundamental instinct of the human mind. As Michael Shermer said, it feels good to be good; humans enjoy being altruistic. Altruism motivates much of what we do.

Our only hope, from Benkler’s viewpoint, is to build our society and economic system in a way that facilitates altruism. Governments should not try to solve all social and economic problems by law and by creating big agencies; governments should be (in my words) conduits of the altruism that already exists in people’s minds. Governments should be altruism enablers. Similarly businesses should embrace altruism, appealing to their customers’ instincts to want to create a better world for everybody. Customers are selfish, but also altruistic. Customers are increasingly offended by corporations that display conspicuous selfishness; that assume the customers are merely selfish; or that use little greenwashing gimmicks to make themselves look environmentally friendly or socially altruistic. We customers are not stupid, nor are we totally selfish. We are (some of us more than others) partly altruistic and we expect our governments and businesses to also be altruistic.

Benkler makes the point that right now, when dictatorships are falling and the free market has proven ineffective enough that it has shaken the very faith of Alan Greenspan himself, is the time when altruism has a chance to influence the very structure of the economy and government. Governments and business CEOs have been good only at spending money, with disastrous consequences that nobody can ignore any longer.

Altruism, perhaps the greatest gift of evolution, is also the only way to solve our environmental problems. Neither of the other alternatives, government fiat or the profit motive by itself, have significantly deflected our worldwide momentum toward ecological disaster.

Joy to the world? Altruism? Maybe.

A Statement of Respect

2011-12-16T11:03:00.000-08:00

This morning, my colleague from graduate school, Art Zangerl, died after a long battle with cancer. He personified what it means to be a dedicated scientist. He had a zeal for using science to understand not just his own area of study (coevolution of insects and herbivores) but the whole human experience of the world. I remember him doing research while we were still graduate students; he would nearly run from one room to another, carrying electrophoresis gels. This was a new technology back then, and Art studied the PGI locus to understand population variability in weeds. He was never afraid to embrace new technology, while not discarding the old. I remember him sitting at a calculator that was the size of a small table, a Wang, which used a cassette tape to store its calculation. This was long after calculators were hand-held. He also had a passion for studying things (such as invasive weeds) that had an important effect on the human economy. He worked with May Berenbaum, who may be the most famous entomologist in the world. Among other things, they studied photophytodermatitis (or is it phytophotodermatitis?) caused by wild parsnips. Everyone respected, admired, and loved Art.

In the photo posted above, taken about 1981, Art (behind the equipment) and Mark Boudreau (who is now a professor of sustainable agriculture) were using an infra-red gas analyzer to measure photosynthesis. You can see that it was a home-made apparatus, and Art was a major contributor to its construction.

Art’s wife posted his final message online right after his passing. One of the things that he regretted seeing in our society today was the large number of people who attack science general and evolution in particular in the name of religion. He wrote, “Evolution is like a magic key. Once you understand it, really understand it, so much becomes clear.” He said that evolution helps us understand the darker side of human nature, but also what he called the social side, such as altruism. Although evolution has made us a species capable of hatred, we are also a species that can fight against hatred and oppression. Art particularly admired the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

I hope that I can leave behind as good a legacy of honest intellectual inquiry and genuine human warmth as Art Zangerl.

Staying on Message

2011-12-09T13:42:00.000-08:00

This is just a brief note to say that, in this blog, I will attempt to stay “on message” about evolutionary science and related subjects. Inevitably this will take me often into politics and religion, which would not happen if politicians and religious leaders would just focus on their own fields without trying to use evolution as a whipping boy to pick up votes and donations.

I assumed that other evolution blogs would do the same. I was disappointed to see, in August 2011, that Jerry Coyne’s blog was taken up by lots of photos of impressive architecture around St. Petersburg, and even the long-running and respected blog Panda’s Thumb is frequently used for just posting pretty sunset photos. P. Z. Myers’ Pharyngula blog also seems to wander around quite a bit. Nothing wrong with these things, and Jerry Coyne is one of the leaders of modern evolutionary thought, but my intention is to make this blog a useful place for you to learn about evolution. I hope you send your friends to my blog for useful information about evolution. See also my website, where I have a section with lots of photos, but rather than just being pretty sunset photos, they are photos with stories to tell about evolution and biodiversity.

So the Appendix Isn’t Worthless After All

2011-12-02T10:03:00.000-08:00

The vermiform (“wormlike”) appendix is an extension of the human large intestine. It is homologous to a part of the caecum of other mammals. Humans (and cats) are among the most finicky eaters in the mammal world. Humans use intelligence to choose foods that are safe and nutritious to eat, at least we did so under the prehistoric circumstances in which our bodies evolved. But most mammals, particularly herbivores and omnivores, just eat stuff, and rely on their intestines to process the food. Dogs just gobble things down. As for cats, which are not necessarily any more intelligent than dogs, I do not know why they are finicky. (One of our cats once ate a ribbon off of a Christmas tree, not an impressive example of intelligence.) An important part of intestinal food processing in most mammals is the caecum, in which bacteria break down many otherwise indigestible food materials. Humans have big brains and small caecums; most mammals have smaller brains and larger caecums; once again, I have no explanation for cats. In humans, part of the caecum has degenerated into the appendix, which really does look like a worm, and is not large enough for any significant amount of food to enter. It is a dead end tunnel off the side of the intestine.

The human vermiform appendix is largely considered to be vestigial and worthless. But it turns out to not be entirely worthless. Sometimes disease bacteria multiply in your intestine, and drive out the good bacteria that normally live there. Then the disease bacteria eventually die away, if you are lucky. Eventually the good bacteria return to their intestinal home. But where do they come from? Apparently, many of the good bacteria hide in the little appendix corridor, and emerge after the bacterial war is over. The appendix is therefore a refuge for good bacteria. This is particularly important for modern people who take oral antibiotics, which devastate the bacterial populations in the main part of the intestine, but not on the appendix.

But even though the appendix is not worthless, it is still vestigial. It is reduced in size and function compared to our mammalian ancestors. In humans it no longer serves a digestive function. It has degenerated over evolutionary time, though not far enough to have become worthless. It remains today, as in Darwin’s day, an excellent example of a vestigial organ.

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The Garden of Eden in Ancient Oceans

2011-11-18T09:46:00.000-08:00

There never was a Garden of Eden, but there was, perhaps, a Garden of Ediacara. (See the book by Mark McMenamin by this title.) Ediacaran organisms (named after the place in Australia where their fossils were first recognized) were blob-like creatures that lived in the sea about 600 million years ago. In this innocent garden, there were no predators. As soon as the predators evolved, it seems that the Ediacarans all got eaten.

It is easy to see what an attraction it is to an animal to eat other animals instead of eating plants. Animal flesh is much more nutritious than leaf tissues. Leaf tissues have a lot of water and fiber, while animal flesh is a highly concentrated source of protein and fat—even more so than seeds, which are rare compared to leaves. One might even say that many herbivores would be carnivores if they could. Live squirrels sometimes nibble on roadkill squirrels, and deer sometimes eat captive chicks. Natural selection has favored squirrels that are really good at finding and eating nuts and deer that are good at browsing. They are not very good predators. But if a nice dinner of meat is presented to them, who are they to turn it down? Nonhuman vegetarians, like most human vegetarians, are tempted by meat.

Predators are usually swift, intelligent, and have good eyesight. Each of these adaptations allows them to find and catch prey more effectively. It is true that prey would benefit from having these adaptations as well. Swiftness, intelligence, and sharp eyesight would allow prey animals to escape predators. But in most cases, predators are superior in these respects, and natural selection has favored prey that can see only well enough, and are only smart and fast enough, to hide. By spending less of their time and energy on defense against predators, the prey animals that survive animals can produce more offspring and find more food. Predators generally produce fewer offspring than prey animals do. Sometimes, prey animals are poisonous, and predators evolve the ability to tolerate the poisons.

Prey defenses do not have to be perfect. Some defenses appear to be almost perfect: some mantises look just like sticks or leaves, enough to fool even naturalists walking through the woods. But even a little bit of camouflage is better than none at all. I saw a cartoon once in which a lion told a zebra, “You call that camouflage?” Black stripes on white (or white on black, I forget which) honestly do not look like the grasses of the African savanna. Except, that is, at nightfall, which is when the lions are most active. Zebras are blatantly obvious in the middle of the day, but that is when the lions are dozing. Predator adaptations need not be perfect either. As I write, our cat seems unable to tell the difference between my computer mouse and a real one. Natural selection has not favored the evolution of sufficient intelligence in cats to allow them to distinguish an actual mouse from other objects. Even though computer mice have not been part of the evolutionary experience of cats, an extremely intelligent cat should be able to tell that a bright green object without legs is not a mouse. But cats, such as the hundred million feral cats in the United States, are intelligent enough for their own purposes. To have greater intelligence, a bigger brain, would be a waste of resources for them.

Some prey animals have social defenses. They form large herds in which each animal looks out for the safety of the others, to a certain extent. Lions can subdue an individual zebra or wildebeest, but when confronted by a flood of hooves and confusing black and white stripes, where to begin?

The Garden of Eden was, by tradition, filled with vegetarian animals. Vegetarian tigers and lions. As you can see, such a Garden could not have persisted for very long; inevitably, some of the animals would have evolved into predators. There will never be a world in which, as in the vision of the prophet Isaiah, the lion lies down with the lamb. The natural world is not like the Bambi movie, with Friend Owl imparting wisdom to little Thumper. In the real world, Friend Owl would be eating Thumper.

This is coevolution: natural selection favors prey that can escape or hide from predators, or even fight them off, but not so much that they cannot grow, and predators that can catch the prey, but not so much that they divert too much energy away from their own metabolism, movement, and growth.

This entry is adapted from my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published earlier this year by Prometheus Books.

Darwin Had a Sense of Humour

2011-11-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has read the Origin of Species would say that it is clearly and beautifully written, with occasional bursts of beauty, even though it is verbose and formal like all Victorian writing. But funny? I wasn’t expecting Darwin’s writing to be funny. But there is a passage in Descent of Man that is funnier than anything I have read by other Victorian writers.

Darwin begins the Descent of Man by presenting evidence of the close similarity of humans and apes. He mentions several anatomical characteristics in which humans and apes hardly differ at all. In this book and in the Expression of Emotions, Darwin notes many behavioral similarities (gestures, facial expressions, etc.) that humans share with apes. But Darwin had very little to say about physiological similarities, because so little was known about physiology at the time. Enzymes? Genes? How nerves work? None of this was known.

Darwin did the next best thing. He presented evidence that humans and other apes have similar physiological reactions to chemicals. One of the chemicals that he chose was alcohol. Here is a really funny passage, in which Darwin explains not only that monkeys can get drunk, but even have similar responses the next day (Chapter 1):

“Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spirituous liquors: they will also, as I have myself seen, smoke tobacco with pleasure. Brehm asserts that the natives of north-eastern Africa catch the wild baboons by exposing vessels with strong beer, by which they are made drunk. He has seen some of these animals, which he kept in confinement, in this state; and he gives a laughable account of their behavior and strange grimaces. On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons. An American monkey…after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men. These trifling facts prove how similar the nerves of taste must be in monkeys and man, and how similarly the whole nervous system is affected.”

A passage that is both funny and scientifically significant. Way to go, Charley!

Darwin Celebrates Halloween

2011-11-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

Last Monday was Halloween (or, in the traditional spelling, Hallowe’en, or Hallowed Evening). I taught my evolution class that morning. I wore a T-shirt with a skull on it, with the word “Evolution” over it. Evolution is the name of a little store in the Soho section of New York City which sells items that are vaguely connected with evolution (e.g., tarantulas in plastic).

I then put on a zombie mask and screamed out to the class, “Brains! Brains! BRAINS! BRAINS! I’m Charles Darwin and I’m going to eat your brains and your children’s brains and turn you all into atheists!”

I then removed the mask and explained that Darwin was not a zombie, and that I had no intention of turning anybody into an atheist. I said something like this. “Now, if your religion requires you to believe things that are scientifically disprovable, then I will have to tell you that you are mistaken. But science cannot tell you whether or not there is a purpose behind the universe, or even if there are other universes, or whether this purpose is a personal God. Many scientists believe in God, without any contradiction with their roles as scientists.”

Then I told them about Darwin’s American friend, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, who was the chief defender of Darwinian evolution in America, but who was as traditional and orthodox a Christian as you could hope to find. A Sunday school teacher, no less. Darwin explained in a letter to Gray how much he regretted that he could not agree with Gray on a religious view. Darwin wrote to Gray, “With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us.”

I then told them about the correspondence I have been maintaining with a prisoner in California. He first wrote to me a couple of years ago when he read my review of an evolution book. He must already have been pursuing an understanding of evolution, because he got my name from a book review I wrote for the National Center for Science Education Reports. He has written to me with many questions, and I have sent answers back to him. I have also sent him paper printouts of things I have written (hardcover books are not allowed in prison mail delivery).

At one point, the prisoner wrote to me about becoming an atheist and the freedom of thought that this allowed him to have. I wrote back to him recently, explaining that atheism was not necessary in order to accept science in general or evolution in particular, and that many scientists are religious. I do not want to lead anyone to atheism. In this way, I am doing exactly what Darwin did. I have not yet received a reply from the prisoner.

I used Halloween as a humorous opportunity to bring up a discussion of this important topic.

Don't miss the YouTube video that I have posted about Darwin and zombies!

Dinosaur Adventure, part 5. A Race against Time.

2011-10-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

Mike O’Brien is a man driven to accomplish as much as possible as well as possible as quickly as possible. For good reason: As I explained previously, the fossil footprints are eroding away. And not just gradually; when the river floods, whole chunks of limestone are broken up into little chunks. There is a drought going on in Texas. The Paluxy River has pools of water but no flowing water. Right now is the time when most of the dinosaur trackways are exposed. Right now is the time to make casts, photograph, and map the footprints. The water has not been this low since 1988. Glen Kuban and I also wanted to accomplish as much as possible, but we cannot resist dropping our work (literally, in Glen’s case; the broom thunks to the ground as he begins talking) to explain the trackways to tourists who walk along the trails or in the riverbed.

But first it was necessary to remove the sediments that had accumulated over the tracks. On the east side of Dinosaur Valley State Park, where Denio Creek enters the Paluxy River, there is a site that needed to be cleaned off before casts, photos, and maps can be made. Mike borrowed a water pump from the park staff, with which he sucked water from a pool into a hose with a nozzle. He used the powerful jet from the nozzle to scour away sediments (see photo). Glen and I pushed brooms around to scoot the water and any remaining rocks and sediments back into the pool. We worked for about two hours, at the end of which time the dinosaur footprints began to just look like holes in rocks. How quickly fascination can turn to fatigue. But Glen and I stopped occasionally to marvel at some of the hundreds of footprints that had been hidden for years. Glen remembered them from 1988, when they were last exposed.

But Mike just kept spraying. He looked like a World War Two hero in a trance with a machine gun. He reminded me of Audie Murphy in the 1955 movie To Hell and Back. He also reminded me of a Gila monster, which is a poisonous lizard that, once he bites (according to legend) he doesn’t let go until sundown. (I mean this in a nice way.) The sun was getting low in the sky.

Unfortunately, I had to leave, but the next morning, Mike and Glen would be back in the riverbed photographing and making casts of the tracks. Their work, for which they are not being paid, is essential: they are preserving a record of some of the most important dinosaur tracks in the world.

Don't miss the YouTube videos of the Paluxy River site!

Also, tonight (October 29) is when Jupiter is in opposition to the Earth, which means it is as close as it will be this year; if you have a telescope, go take a look at it, and see the moons, which are in very different positions every night. This is what Galileo saw that made him question the world-view that almost everyone else had at that time!

Dinosaur Adventure part 4. A Creationist Misadventure

2011-10-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

I usually post once a week but I want to fit five "dinosaur adventures" into October.

While Glen Kuban, Mike O’Brien, Brian Miles, and I worked on the dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River on September 24, we answered many questions from park visitors about the footrpints. Nearly everyone had come with an attitude of fascination about the footprints and a desire to learn about them.

Then along came a creationist couple, apparent followers of Carl Baugh, the weird preacher about whom I wrote previously. They started talking to Glen, since it was clear from the work that he was doing that he was no mere tourist. (What follows is based upon a few observations I made; I was helping Mike most of the time.) This couple made a series of strange statements (even by creationist standards). Glen, who has been clocked at three hundred words per minute, was flooding them with information to demonstrate why they were wrong, both scientifically and theologically. I wanted to tell Glen that no amount of information would change their minds, and he might as well come back and continue working with us. But Glen’s circuit had been closed.

The first strange statement was that the woman said one of the footprints in the riverbed had fit her foot perfectly, and that therefore it had to be a human footprint. This is Carl Baugh’s gospel: humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time and left their footprints in the mud that is now the Paluxy River bed. Glen gave her a few hundred words of rebuttal. What I would have said is, “Listen, lady, human feet come in lots of different sizes. If that footprint fit your foot exactly, then it must have been your footprint. These deposits are 110 million years old. Golly, lady, you don’t look a day over 50 million.”

Then the woman said that the dinosaurs could not have existed before the Fall of Adam, because they would have died before the Fall, and the Bible says there was no death before the Fall, and that Jesus’ sacrifice would have meant nothing at all if any of these dinosaurs had died before Adam. Glen gave her a few hundred words of rebuttal. What I would have said is, “Listen, lady, it’s news to me that Jesus came to Earth to save dinosaurs. Do they have souls? Can you find this in the Bible?”

The woman then said that Glen had been brainwashed throughout his entire life by evolution. Glen explained, in no more than three hundred words, that he used to believe the same thing she did—he had been a creationist who believed that there were human footprints mixed in with the dinosaur prints. He had changed his mind about creationism because he came here in 1980—and has been coming ever since—to actually study the footprints.

The woman then asked if Glen was a Christian. Glen said yes. The woman disagreed with him. (Why did she ask him, then?)

The woman’s husband finally felt he had to intervene. He told Glen something like this (I here take some literary license): “My wife politely explained to you that unless there are human footprints in with the dinosaur footprints in this riverbed, then the entire Bible is wrong, all of Christianity is a lie, and Jesus should never have bothered to come to Earth. My wife here politely told you that she, not you, has the prerogative of determining whether or not you believe in Jesus. My wife POLITELY told you that if you disagree with a single word that she says, that you will burn in hell forever. So why are you talking so fast, which sounds to me like you are upset?” Glen gave him a few hundred words of rebuttal. I would have said, “Well, it appears that when your wife reads the Bible, her brain is incapable of making any errors. She must be personally inerrant. Maybe we should all worship her.” (Besides, just because Glen talks fast does not mean he is upset. Oh, did I say that already?)

Second thought, maybe it’s fortunate that I was not the one talking to the woman.

As I recall, the conversation ended when Mike called Glen over to help. We had a lot of work to do and not many hours of daylight remaining, facts that Mike was continually aware of. We were already dismantling the photographic apparatus so that we could move to another site.

Actually, it turns out Glen was a little upset, not at the couple’s creationist beliefs, but at their arrogance: they assumed that they knew everything about the Bible and about science, without having seriously studied either one. Glen had asked the woman some questions about Biblical passages, which she ignored.

Interestingly, the person who should have been talking to the creationist couple was Brian. He did not go into detail, but I gather that he is a conservative Baptist. His church had hosted Carl Baugh one time, something that Brian considered a big mistake. Brian, as a petroleum geologist, knows perfectly well that the fossils have a millions-of-years evolutionary order. You can use the fossils to determine the relative ages of rock layers and this knowledge can help you find oil and gas. But the woman would probably have told him that he, also, was not a Christian.

It was time for us to go to another track site. Mike hoisted his T-pole onto his shoulder and said, “Well, I will just bear my cross,” as he walked back along the Via Dolorosa of dinosaur tracks toward his van. To be continued.

Dinosaur Adventures part 3. Scientists at Work

2011-10-21T08:22:00.000-07:00

Glen Kuban is not the only person who is in a rush to study the dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River (Dinosaur Valley State Park, Texas) before they erode away. Glen is hard at work mapping the exact locations of, and making casts of, the footprints. He has done this for a long time, and Glen’s casts and maps from earlier decades are all that remain of some of the footprints. Before making casts, it was necessary for Glen to clean the sediments away and get the water out of the footprints. When I met up with him on the morning of September 24, he was baling water out of holes with a bucket—and each hole was a footprint.

Mike O’Brien, who works for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, is also trying to preserve a record of the footprints. He uses a camera mounted on a large T-pole, to produce a gridwork of overhead shots. Mike had made metal grids which we put at precise locations in the riverbed. Later, Mike will electronically stitch these photos together to produce a large image with all of the footprints on it. He hopes to eventually interface his images with Google Earth.

Entirely by chance, we had been joined by Brian Miles, a petroleum geologist who is also the volunteer curator of a small paleontological museum in South Texas, the Brazosport Museum of Natural Science. Brian had heard Glen Kuban and me talking, and he wanted to join us for a few hours. We were glad to have him along. While Mike held his T-pole perfectly perpendicular, Brian would operate the remote control shutter. So on this day there were three of us helping Mike with his overhead photographs (see photograph above). We helped him move the metal grids around also.

Glen, Brian, and I spent a lot of time explaining the footprints to the scores of visitors who were walking in the river bed. Nearly without exception, they were fascinated by the footprints and by what could be learned by studying them. Parents helped their fascinated kids walk right alongside the dinosaur trackways. Some of the teens and tweeners asked some really good questions. And they made some pretty insightful guesses. Some of the guesses were way off, but some were pretty good. And all of these guesses could have been formed into scientific hypotheses. Dare I hope that some of the kids we talked to that day might go on to become scientists, science educators, or at least science hobbyists?

The sun was hot (around 100 degrees) and we got sunburned and thirsty, but we had a good day of work. Glen helped me make videos; Mike got a lot of photos; Glen, Mike, and I explained a lot of things to the visitors. Oh, and by the way, all four of us were doing this for free. To be continued.

Don’t forget to check out my videos about the dinosaur footprints on YouTube. There will be a new one today, starring Glen.

Dinosaur Adventure part 2

2011-10-14T09:06:00.000-07:00

As described in the previous blog entry, I went to Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas, where I met with Glen Kuban, who showed me hundreds of dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River. During the ongoing drought, the riverbed was exposed, and with it footprints left by dinosaurs 100 million years ago, when the ground on which we stood had been part of the Gulf of Mexico. In the globally warmed Cretaceous world, sea levels were higher, and reached up into what is now north Texas; also, North America was not quite in the same place that it is now.

Glen helped me make a few video clips, which I am posting, about one a week, on YouTube. In two of them, Glen shows the viewers the dinosaur footprints and explains what you can learn from them. Last week I posted a Darwin video clip; this week, an interview with Glen.

The most interesting revelations about dinosaur life come from not the individual footprints but the trackways of prints. The trackways were left by at least two species of dinosaurs. One was the large, long-necked, herbivorous dinosaur species in the genus Paluxysaurus, which was a sauropod similar to the brontosaurus. What can we learn about these dinosaurs from their trackways? First, Glen pointed out, a group of them was walking in the same direction. They apparently lived in herds rather than as loners. Second, the trackways were close together, indicating that the sauropods walked with their legs underneath them, like birds, rather than out to the side, like lizards. Third, these dinosaurs, though their tails may have weighed a ton, did not drag their tails. This sounds to me like the sauropods had a pretty healthy metabolism and lots of muscle. If they had dragged their tails, they would have left grooves in the mud. See one of the above photos of sauropod trackways. These are the same trackways that I photographed back in March, when they were underwater and visible as green smudges in the photos that I took at that time.

The other species of dinosaur whose prints are common in the Paluxy River bed was a theropod in the genus Acrocanthosaurus; it was sort of a medium-sized T. rex. These dinosaurs left three-toed footprints. The above photos include some adult footprints and a baby footprint (with my foot for scale). The theropods were walking in lots of different directions, and were probably foraging. While it is possible that they were tracking the sauropods to attack and eat them, it is also possible that they were searching for shellfish to eat in the tidal flats. By knowing the size of the dinosaur and the distance between the footprints, it is possible to calculate the speed at which they were walking. Most of them were ambling along, as you might expect if they were looking for seafood left by the receding tide, but in another location the prints were far enough apart that they must have been running at almost 30 miles per hour, which is a very rapid speed for such a large animal—and this was in mud! Imagine how they could have run on solid ground!

The footprints were made 110 million years ago, and subsequently hardened into stone, along with the sediments that had covered them. There may be hundreds of thousands of dinosaur footprints in this layer of rock in northern Texas, but almost all of it is covered with hills. Only in a few places, such as the Paluxy River bed, has this rock layer been exposed by recent erosion. You can’t even find them in the nearby Brazos River, which has apparently eroded through them. Since nobody is going to spend millions of dollars to bulldoze away the hills to expose new footprints, the Paluxy prints represent a rare trove of dinosaur footprints.

And they do not last very long once they are exposed. Large areas of the Paluxy River bed, which used to have dinosaur footprints (even as recently as the 1980s, when Glen began his work), have broken up due to erosion caused by the river. It doesn’t take very long. The river undermines the trackway layer, and then the layer (of soft limestone) cracks and crumbles. Glen and I stood on an approximately 100 square meter slab of limestone with tracks in it, while right beside it was a larger area of riverbed with broken stones which had formerly had dinosaur footprints.

So if you want to see the Paluxy footprints, you’d better go now, while the drought is going on (before God heeds the entreaties of Governor Perry) and before the footprints erode away. To be continued.

Don't forget my website and, if you are interested, my religion blog.

Don't forget my website and religion blog (if you are interested).

Dinosaur Adventure, Part 1

2011-10-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

I had three choices of how to spend the weekend of September 23. I could have gone to the field meeting of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences; I could have gone to the Prairie Festival at the Land Institute; or I could go look at dinosaur footprints in Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas. I chose the third option. This was the weekend when I had a chance to meet with some of the people who know more about these footprints than anyone else in the world. As an evolution educator, author, and blogger, this was an opportunity I did not want to miss.

I visited Dinosaur Valley State Park last March, as described earlier in this blog (see here and here), but on the previous visit I was by myself and the river was still flowing. Some of the photos I posted from that visit show dinosaur footprints underwater. This time, in addition to my chance to meet the experts, the river was nearly dry. Texas has had a long drought, costing the state economy over $5 billion, and to which the April 21, 2011 day of prayer proclaimed by Governor Rick Perry has not brought an end. Such a drought is a disaster in all ways except one: it exposed the bed of the Paluxy River, which has dinosaur footprints.

They say that you can throw a rock anywhere in Texas and it will hit a barbecue place that is better than anyplace else in the world. I entered a barbecue place, where a sign on the wall said, “Cowboys: No shirt, no service; Cowgirls: No shirt, free beer.” Yep, I’m in Texas all right. In reality, this place had no beer and everyone was clothed. I was with Glen Kuban, who has an expert knowledge of the Paluxy River dinosaur footprints.

As we ate our brisket, Glen told me his story. Our lives were strangely parallel: we are the same age, we graduated the same year, and we made the same migration from creationist fundamentalism to Christian theistic evolution at about the same time. We were both elected as Fellows of the American Scientific Affiliation, a Christian scientific organization, the same year. The difference is that, while my abandonment of creationism involved learning about research done by other people, Glen’s abandonment of creationism resulted directly from his research into one of creationism’s most notorious claims. Also, I am a professor, while Glen sells molds and casts of fossils and fossilized footprints, primarily to museum gift shops. Glen is sort of a latter-day Alfred Russel Wallace or Henry Walter Bates, the nineteenth-century naturalists who funded their travels and work by selling specimens they collected in the tropics. He also maintains a website with lots of Paluxy information.

Here is the notorious creationist claim. In 1982, a creationist named Carl Baugh was looking around at the fossilized dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River. He found some impressions that, to him, looked like they might be human footprints. He also obtained some footprints that looked like very flat carved human footprints (see earlier blog entries above). Whether he carved them himself or credulously obtained them from someone else I am not prepared to say. If humans and dinosaurs left footprints in the same mud at the same time, then the entire evolutionary time scale is off. This does not necessarily prove the creationist version of Earth history; after all, why would dinosaurs and humans have been walking leisurely along in the mud in the middle of the Flood of Noah? But, thought a young Glen Kuban, the Paluxy footprints would be a really important thing to study.

So in 1980 Glen began to study the footprints. He quickly discovered that the so-called human footprints that were still in the riverbed were actually dinosaur footprints partially obscured by mud when they were originally made and afterwards. And another discovery surprised him. He found that the creationists, even those who used the “Paluxy man prints” as evidence of creationism, did not seem to be interested in studying the Paluxy prints. They seemed to be satisfied with hearsay and content to accept Baugh’s carved prints as evidence sufficient to overturn all of evolutionary science. Glen may be the only person in the world whose view of creationism was changed by actually studying the Paluxy dinosaur footprints. It appears that some prominent creationist writers and speakers continued to tout the “man-prints” even after they knew, and admitted, that the man-prints were fake. We’re not saying who the creationists are.

I looked forward to the next day, September 24, on which I would work in the dry riverbed with Glen and with another expert, Mike O’Brien. To be continued. This month's blog entries will be about the dinosaur footprints.

I have also posted a YouTube video in which Charles Darwin visits the dinosaur footprints.

I also maintain a religion blog which I have not heavily advertised because I want to keep this evolution blog and my website focused on science.

A Serious Humorous Interlude

2011-09-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

Please remember to visit my YouTube site for videos in which I explain evolutionary concepts in the guise of Charles Darwin. You’ll be glad you did!

This is a humorous poem that takes a backward look at human evolution. I first saw it when I was in high school, back when I was a creationist. I enjoyed it then and I enjoy it now.

Darwin’s Mistake
(Evolution—From the Monkey’s Viewpoint)

Three monkeys sat in a coconut tree Discussing things as they are said to be.

Said one to the others, “Now listen, you two, There’s a rumor around that can’t be true, That man descended from our noble race. The very idea is a great disgrace.

“No monkey has ever deserted his wife, Starved her babies and ruined her life. And you’ve never known a mother monk To leave her babies with others to bunk Or pass from one on to another Till they scarcely know who is their mother.

“And another thing you’ll never see, A monk build a fence round a coconut tree, And let the coconuts go to waste, Forbidding all other monks to taste. Why, if I put a fence around a tree, Starvation will force you to steal from me!

“Here’s another thing a monkey won’t do, Go out at night and get on a stew, Or use a gun or club or knife To take some other monkey’s life.

“Yes, man descended, the ornery cuss, But, brother, he didn’t descend from us!”

This poem has appeared in many places on the web, without attribution of authorship. One website, however, identifies the author as Gilliam S. Weaver and tells his story.

Are We the Inevitable Products of Mathematical Equations?

2011-09-23T07:45:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading Martin Nowak’s Super Cooperators, a book written with Roger Highfield. Nowak is a biomathematician at Harvard. He has spent a career designing mathematical models that demonstrate the conditions under which altruism can evolve. Altruism is when one animal is nice to another animal of the same species.

Nowak’s view of the world resonates with my spirit. He sees the natural world as full of cooperation. Cooperation is at least as important as the “survival of the fittest,” which Darwinism is often portrayed to be. I find his viewpoint inspiring just like the viewpoint of Lynn Margulis (whom Nowak hardly mentions). The fact that Nowak is a fellow devotee of the music of Gustav Mahler doesn’t hurt any either.

And some important results have emerged from Nowak’s mathematical models. I cannot summarize all of them, but one that I remember is the following. In simple, direct interactions, when a cooperator and a defector come in contact, the defector always wins. That is, the cooperator becomes a sucker for offering help that is not reciprocated. In large populations in which all the animals are equally likely to come in contact, altruism doesn’t have a chance. But in populations in which small groups can form, where animals can choose their friends, so to speak, altruistic groups can emerge. And when they do, they can beat out the pathetic defectors every time, at least temporarily. This is particularly the case in animal societies where the animals know the reputations of other animals, which is something they can do within small groups. This is, in fact, probably the most important way in which altruism evolved. It is an example of multi-level selection: selection among groups within a larger population.

However, in one sense, I consider Nowak’s work to be unrealistic. He begins the book by expressing his feeling that all of truth can be expressed precisely by mathematics. Toward the end of the book, he claims that his equations would be true anywhere in the universe. He admits that his conclusions are not too different from beliefs, such as the Golden Rule, found in traditional religions. But he still thinks he has made a monumental universal discovery. “Now, for the first time, aspects of these powerful ideas [from religion] have been quantified in experiments, captured in equations, and enshrined in science.” He seems to mean that ideas such as the Golden Rule are really true for the first time in the history of the universe as a result of his mathematical simulations.

Nowak’s mathematical approach is unrealistic because it omits all historical contingency. In Nowak’s models, animals are cooperators or defectors for logical reasons. So maybe his equations would work reliably on the planet Vulcan. But they cannot be relied upon for human behavior. The equations mirror many, but not all, aspects of human behavior. The primary historical contingency is religion. The memes of religion have parasitized the human mind to such an extent that, throughout human history, many people have considered it a religious duty, absent any benefit, and more important than life itself, to bring death and destruction to others. Nowak’s models do not include the thirst for evil that is so common in human motivation, in which loss is reward because it ensures eternal life in a heaven.

Almost Everything Evolves

2011-09-16T09:25:00.000-07:00

The following appears in my book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published earlier this year by Prometheus Books. I also just finished lecturing about this subject in my evolution class this morning.

The process of natural selection involves these elements: variation; reproduction; limitation. We usually think of genes in this context: natural selection favors the best genes, which must cooperate with other genes to create the best organisms, within populations. But there is nothing about the process of natural selection that requires that the evolvers be organisms. As it turns out, almost everything evolves.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins pointed out that it is not just genes, but any kind of information, that evolve. Dawkins called non-genetic pieces of information memes, a counterpart to genes. The result is cultural evolution, the counterpart to biological evolution. Cultural evolution turns out to strongly affect biological evolution, because for most complex animals, the most important part of the environment is the culture of its species.

All that is necessary for something to evolve, according to Dawkins, is a faithful but imperfect copying mechanism for instructions, and a system that is ready to obey those instructions. DNA and the cell fulfill these requirements. So do computer programs and computers. And so do memes and the human mind.

A meme can be as simple as an idea. Somebody thinks of an idea, which is a mutant form of some earlier idea that somebody else had. This is the variation step. In the population of human minds, this new idea contributes to the memetic variation of ideas that is available in the culture. The person then tells the idea to another person, or publishes it or sends it. This is the reproduction step. The human mind has a limited capacity for recalling and using ideas. This is the limitation step. The result is that the most successful ideas get propagated in the culture. The less successful ideas remain rare, the arcane knowledge of a few people, or become extinct. The most successful ideas are not necessarily the best ideas, but just the ones that people like the most. For every good and true idea, there are probably a dozen bad and stupid ideas that rattle around in people’s brains. Many of us try to eradicate the bad ideas from our minds, but with only partial success.

Usually, memes are parts of complex sets. As a result, memetic selection not only favors the memes that are most useful to the animals that think or learn them, but work best as part of a memetic set. Human languages are sets of memes. All humans have an innate capacity for language, but they always learn their particular languages from other humans. The result is that languages evolve.

Evolution is like a branching tree. The branches become separate species when the animals no longer recognize one another as potential mates. Languages have the same pattern. The main Indo-European branch of evolution split into smaller branches, one of which was Latin, which then evolved into smaller branches such as Iberian and French, which evolved into twigs such as when Iberian evolved into Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. Mutations accumulate in languages, and memetic selection preserves the variations that are most useful or most appealing to the speakers. After awhile, so much divergence has occurred that the speakers may be mutually unintelligible, as when a speaker of Spanish tries to understand French, or when a Parisian pretends he cannot understand a Frenchman from Dijon. An awareness of the branching evolutionary pattern of languages grew during the nineteenth century at the same time as the awareness of biological evolution. A successful word-meme is one that functions best as part of a language, not necessarily by itself.

Let the Earth Bring Forth Plants

2011-09-09T10:12:00.000-07:00

The first chapter of Genesis in the Old Testament is a hymn to an orderly and bountiful cosmos. Surprisingly enough, it begins by describing a universe that existed before God began to create. This universe had two problems: it was chaotic and empty (the old King James English says “formless and void”). During the six days of creation, according to this hymn, God solved these two problems. On the first three days, he brought order into the heavenly, the fluid, and the earthly realms: making light separate from darkness, air separate from water, and land separate from sea. On the last three days, he filled the heavenly, fluid, and earthly realms: filling the heavens with stars, the water and air with fish and birds, and the earth with “creeping things.” It is obvious to everyone except creationists that this chapter was never, even when it was first written, intended as an historical description of the history of the cosmos. It described the work of creation as categories, not as a timeline. Astronomy, geology, and biology now provide explanations for the processes of creation described poetically in Genesis.

As beautiful as it is, however, the first chapter of Genesis reflects the human-centered viewpoint of the time in which it was written (about 500 BCE), a viewpoint to which most modern people still cling, even if they are not particularly religious. This viewpoint puts humans at the pinnacle of creation, something that most people (including those who think they understand evolution) still do. The writer of Genesis did not praise humans as much as you might think, however: humans were created on the same “day” as all of the creeping things. Humans did not even get their own special day of creation. But Genesis clearly states that humans rule all of the creation, and uses terms that imply that humans have the right to conquer and rape the creation.

One example of this domination is the creation of plants. Plants appear on Day 3, along with the dry land. That is, in this hymn, plants are not considered to be living organisms; they are just a part of the landscape. In a sense this is true: any landscape without plants is quickly ravaged by erosion, as I have explained in my book Green Planet. But the God of Genesis does not give plants any role of their own other than to be eaten by animals. Behold, he says on Day 6, I have given you every green plant for food.

But plants are organisms. They’ve got to make a living like everybody else. Plants have populations that evolve. It is not in the interests of the plants to just sit there and allow themselves to be eaten by animals. The plants that natural selection favors are those that can avoid getting eaten by animals.

As a result, the world is not just a big salad bowl. Nearly every wild plant has several or many characteristics that make it unpalatable to animals. In some cases, plant defenses are clearly visible: spines on cactuses, stinging hairs on nettles. In other cases, the defenses are invisible but even more effective. Most plants have leaves that are at least mildly toxic. Plants produce thousands of different kinds of chemicals that are toxic to animals. Some of them accumulate poisonous mineral ions out of the soil and put them in little sacs (vacuoles) in the leaf cells, where the poisons will not harm the leaves but will harm any animal that chews the leaf, breaking open the sacs of poison.

Humans have bred crop and garden plants that are palatable, and this has created for most of us the illusion that plants are just waiting to be eaten. They are like Al Capp’s cartoon shmoos, which fall all over themselves in an attempt to get eaten, with stupid grins on their faces. Be warned: wild plants do not have brains, they are in fact stupid, but evolution has produced in them many defenses that appear to those who study them to be very clever. Wild relatives of crop plants, such as beans, tomatoes, and potatoes, are poisonous. Some tribal peoples subsist on wild cassava. But they have to boil and squeeze the cassava pulp to remove poisons first.

Even the parts of plants that are not poisonous are not simple gifts to feed animals. Many species of plants produce soft, colorful, sweet, fragrant fruits. These fruits make themselves very visible to animals, and reward the animals for eating them. Such fruits, abundant and hanging low, are in fact part of our image of paradise. (The word paradise itself comes from the Persian word pairidaeza, a walled garden.) But the plants have something to gain from this arrangement. The fruits have seeds in them. Animals usually eat the entire fruit, swallowing the seeds. It is just too much work for the animal to pick out the seeds, especially since the pulp clings closely to them. Plants cannot move around and carry their seeds to new locations, nor can the seeds move under their own power. Many plants therefore get animals to carry their seeds to new places by getting the animals to eat them. They pay the animals by feeding them the sweet and nourishing pulp of the fruit. The animals deposit the seeds, along with a pile of fertilizer, far away from the parent tree. Both the plants and the animals benefit. In other cases, plants take advantage of the animals. Seeds with spiky burs entangle the fur of mammals, which carry the seeds to a new location while they are trying to scrape the burs from their fur.

Plants and herbivores are involved in what has been called an arms race. Plants evolve defenses, and herbivores evolve ways of circumventing the defenses. Plants then evolve new defenses, and herbivores evolve ways of circumventing these as well. For both the plants and the animals, this interaction is expensive. The plants have to use their energy and molecules to make poisons rather than using them to grow new leaves and roots. Animals have to use energy and molecules to digest the plants despite their defenses. In human societies, spending more money on defense means spending less on growth (such as infrastructure and education). Plants and animals find themselves in the same predicament as humans do.

This is coevolution: natural selection favors plants that are prickly or poisonous, but not so much that they cannot grow, and animals that can tolerate or avoid the poisons, but not so much that they divert too much energy away from their own metabolism, movement, and growth.

One you have learned about the coevolutionary relationship between herbivores and plants, you can never again look at a serene natural landscape the same way as before. The Lord is my shepherd, said the psalmist, leading sheep into green pastures. The psalmist also said that God prepared a table for him in the presence of his enemies. But the psalmist could not have guessed that, to a certain extent, the green pastures themselves were one of the enemies. There never was a natural Garden of Eden in which all the plants were uncomplicatedly nutritious.

This entry was part of my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published earlier this year by Prometheus Books.

Hurry Up and Wait

2011-09-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

Both of my parents served in World War II, my father as a soldier (luckily, never deployed) and my mother as a dental hygienist. They told me that life in the military consisted of “hurry up and wait.” Others have described the military life as long periods of boredom interrupted by brief periods of terror.

And that is what evolution is like also. Most of the time, in most species, it does not seem to be occurring—fluctuating directional selection creates long-term stabilizing selection. But sometimes, rapid directional selection occurs. When? Just as you might expect, and as the Grants observed in the finch populations—it occurs when there is a major environmental change. The environment around a population may change, or a few members of the population might migrate to a new location that has different environmental conditions. When conditions change, directional selection gears up to make the population change along with it. On the Galápagos Islands, the conditions changed back and forth. But sometimes environmental conditions change and then do not change back. Or the migrants do not go back home, remaining in permanently altered conditions. Under these circumstances, directional selection has permanent and rapid effects. It may lead to the formation of a new species, and do so rapidly. Such bursts of evolution have been called punctuations.

Scientists have a name for the overall hurry-up-and-wait pattern of evolution: punctuated equilibria. That is, long periods of equilibrium, during which stabilizing selection is the main process, punctuated by brief periods of rapid directional selection. New species usually originate during these punctuational events. A species comes into existence by a punctuation of directional selection, and then stays fairly unchanged until it either becomes extinct or experiences another punctuation. This pattern of evolution was first pointed out by evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1970s. It is the punctuations that demonstrate just how rapidly evolution can occur.

This entry appears in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, from Prometheus Books.

Do Conservatives Hate Altruism?

2011-08-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

On August 16, billionaire Warren Buffett announced his belief that rich people, such as himself, should pay higher taxes than they currently do. This was a direct statement of altruism. He was almost immediately attacked by Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann who said in a loud sarcastic manner, “I have a suggestion. Mr. Buffett, write a big check today. There’s nothing you have to wait for. As a matter of fact the president has redefined millionaires and billionaires as any company that makes over $200,000 a year. That’s his definition of a millionaire and billionaire. So perhaps Mr. Buffett would like to give away his entire fortune above $200,000. That’s what you want to do? Have at it. Give it to the federal government.”

Not surprisingly, Bachmann was wildly inaccurate. The president does not want people to earn only $200,000; he just wants slightly higher tax rates on people earning more than $200,000.

What Bachmann did not say, but clearly implied, was “Sucker.” Any rich like Buffett who would actually want to pay more taxes to help his fellow citizens must clearly be a sucker.

In encounters between animals of the same species, there are cooperators and there are defectors. Whenever a cooperator encounters a defector, the cooperator loses (becomes a sucker) and the defector wins. It would seem inevitable, in a world that consisted only of simple and direct interactions, the defectors always win, even though they cause themselves to become extinct. The world, however, is not that simple. Intelligent animals such as humans can recognize and remember one another as individuals, and they can remember the bad reputations of defectors and the good reputations of cooperators. In a world of complex interactions, cooperators can work together and drive the defectors into obscurity. In ways such as this, altruism (animals being nice to each other even if they incur a cost) can evolve.

Republicans clearly hate altruism. Some hate it more than others. Mitt Romney and Rick Perry do not make statements as extreme as those of Bachmann. It seems inconceivable to extremists like Bachmann that citizens should ever want to help each other. The Tea Party tirade of anger is not so much against “big government” as it is against a societal expectation that we, as fellow citizens, should be expected to help one another out, and that government should be a mechanism to facilitate altruism.

This conclusion is obvious not just from Bachmann’s statement, but from statements by the founding mind of modern extremist conservatism, Ayn Rand. She wrote, “If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.” She was as wrong as anyone could be about anything, and so are her modern disciples. Humans are the most altruistic species, and the most successful, in evolutionary terms. Our survival cannot be assured if the Republicans succeed in destroying altruism.

What Rick Perry Thinks about Science

2011-08-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

The new Republican candidate, Rick Perry, is what many Republicans (such as Michele Bachmann) call a liberal. Maybe that just means that he does not scream and condemn all his opponents to Hell. He speaks smoothly and politely. But his approach to science, and therefore perhaps to all of the data of reality, puts him in with people like Bachmann who just make things up and expect us to believe them.

First, Rick Perry tells us that global warming is not happening. He says this despite the fact that his state, Texas, has already suffered $5.2 billion of damage from a year-long drought and its current heat wave. It is an unprecedented environmental catastrophe in Texas. He offered no evidence. He simply said, “from my perspective,” global warming is not reliable science. He used that phrase twice. Has he studied the issue? No, nor did he make any such claim. He just chooses not to believe it, and that settles it. But his position is rather frightening. Not only does he oppose taking actions to reduce our carbon emissions and to promote alternative energy sources, but he says we should not even be studying the issue. This seems to imply that he would have NASA and NOAA discontinue their investigations. Or else, might he require them to reach his conclusions?

Of course, Michele Bachmann uses even worse logic about global warming. In 2006, she said that we do not need to worry about global warming because Jesus has already saved the world. Of course, she does not say, “We do not need to worry about the economy, because Jesus has already saved the world,” or “We do not need to worry about terrorism, because Jesus has already saved the world.” She just picks out environmental issues and says, don’ worry, be happy.

Second, Rick Perry has come out against evolution. Typical of his smooth style, he did not say (as did the church marquee; see previous blog entry) that anyone who accepts evolutionary science is going to Hell. His words were almost innocuous. He said “It’s a theory that’s out there, and it’s got gaps.” He went on to say that “…in Texas, we teach both creation and evolution, and I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.” The problem is that he just presented his personal opinion as being the final conclusion of the matter. It does not require any further thought. He was even wrong about what is taught in Texas. They do not, as a matter of fact, teach creation in Texas (at least, according to the state guidelines). He has a right to his opinion, but he wants to make his opinion into federal policy if he is elected president.

Conservatives just make stuff up. To a conservative, it is not what you know, but what you believe. You can create reality by believing something to be true or untrue.

The rest of the world should be alerted that, if we have a Republican president starting in 2013, the United States will do absolutely nothing about global warming, and if Obama remains president, the Republicans will continue to prevent him from taking action. Rest of the world, take note: You will have to take the lead on resolving global warming, because the United States will not, and we may even discontinue researching it or paying attention to it. You will have to solve the problem without us. The same is also true of scientific leadership. Scientific research, in the United States, may soon become a mere restatement of Republican beliefs, no more to be trusted than Lysenkoist genetics from Soviet Russia. Rest of the world, take note: You will have to take the lead in scientific research, because the United States will not. The United States will ride the falling stars of fossil fuel dependence and creationism until they, and we, crash.

Does God Hate Darwin?

2011-08-12T10:57:00.000-07:00

According to a church marquee in Durant, Oklahoma, where I work, God must be really mad at me. I teach evolution at the local university, and according to this church, I am calling God a liar. If this is true I better watch out. Of course, that is not what I am doing. I am saying that fundamentalists are (often willfully) wrong about how to interpret the Bible; but if I disagree with them, then I MUST be calling God a liar. They think that their opinions are inerrant. I suspect that it is they who should be worried about offending God.

See this YouTube video of Charles Darwin making a response!

Why is Evolution so Slow?

2011-08-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, released earlier this year by Prometheus Books.

As we have seen in previous entries, evolution can occur rapidly enough to account for the diversity of life on this planet. Why, then, has evolution occurred so slowly? There are lots of mutations out there in populations, and selection can operate rapidly. If all of the conditions had been just right, life could have evolved into its many complex forms within just a few million years. Why didn’t it?

The answer to the question just posed is that the environmental conditions in which each population lives keep changing back and forth. Sometimes warm, sometimes cool. Sometimes wet, sometimes dry. And the interactions of species with one another keep changing. Evolution could make rapid progress, if there were some force directing it toward a goal, but instead it wanders around aimlessly—because evolution has no goal.

Consider one of the best-studied examples of evolution: the finches of the Galápagos Islands. In 1835, a British naval ship, H. M. S. Beagle, stopped at the Galápagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador. The young naturalist on board, Charles Darwin, had just enough time to explore some of the islands. Based on what he saw, and what he heard from others, it appeared that each island may have had its own species of birds and tortoises, even though the islands all had a similar climate—brutally hot and dry, except in the misty mountains. When Darwin got back to England, the ornithologist John Gould identified many of the birds in Darwin’s collection as finches. It became obvious to Darwin that all of the finches, which differed greatly in size and in the way they gathered food, were the recent descendants of a kind of finch that lived on the mainland of South America. Evolution had occurred; it had occurred rapidly; and before long Darwin had figured out how it occurred: by means of natural selection. The original immigrant finch populations evolved different ways of getting food. These finches, now called Darwin’s finches, have become famous as the group of organisms in which the process of evolution was discovered.

American evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant began an intensive study of these birds in the 1970s. They established their base on the island that the British called Daphne Major to study the process of natural selection, mostly in the medium ground finch Geospiza fortis. In order to study natural selection, it is necessary to demonstrate that the offspring of some of the birds survived better, and laid more eggs, than the offspring of other birds. Sounds easy? Not on your life. In order to do this, the Grants had to keep track of each bird. They had to know which birds mated with which other birds, how many eggs they laid, and then keep track of their offspring. And then do it again and again, every year. Even on that small island there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of medium ground finches. The Grants, with the help of colored bands that they placed on the birds’ feet, became personally acquainted with hundreds of birds each generation, over the course of more than thirty generations.

In order to study natural selection, you have to choose a trait or feature that evolves and that can be measured. The Grants chose to measure beak size. Why beak size? Because a small difference in beak size, as little as a half of a millimeter, can make all the difference in what kinds of seeds the birds can crack open and eat. With a slightly larger beak, a finch can crack open and eat the seeds of puncture vines; with a slightly smaller beak, a finch can eat smaller seeds from other plant species.

The birds with the larger beaks preferred to crack and eat the larger seeds: they could get more food with each bite that way. Their beaks, however, were a little too unwieldy to efficiently handle the smaller seeds. The birds with smaller beaks simply could not eat the larger seeds, but were fairly adroit with handling the smaller ones. The population of finches always contained a mixture of small-beaked and large-beaked birds—in fact, a whole range of beak sizes.

Enter El Niño and La Niña. El Niño is a set of conditions in which strong ocean currents from the warm waters of the west bring lots of rain to the Galápagos Islands, as well as to much of North and South America. As a result, plants that produce small seeds grow profusely over the ground. El Niño is not necessarily a time of plenty for all organisms. During La Niña periods (when El Niño conditions are not occurring), strong ocean currents bring up cold water from the depths along the coast of South America, feeding marine life such as shrimp and fish and offering a bonanza to birds that eat them. El Niño (and the storms that come with it) is a blessing to some organisms, and a catastrophe to others.

The Grants measured finch beaks during a La Niña drought that began in 1977. Small seeded plants became rare, and large seeded puncture vines became common. Because more large seeds were available, it would make sense that natural selection would favor large beaks at that time. The Grants did not simply find that the average beak size in the finch population increased during the drought. They found that large-beaked parents laid more eggs, and their large-beaked offspring also laid more eggs, each generation. They had observed natural selection in the act of occurring.

Then in 1982 El Niño brought lots of rain. Very quickly, plants with small seeds sprang up all over the island, and puncture vines became rare. This time, natural selection favored the smaller-beaked birds, and it was the larger-beaked birds that went hungry and laid fewer eggs.

The fluctuation in beak sizes—first larger, then smaller—that the Grants observed was very small, on the order of about a millimeter. But this small change is very important to the survival of the birds. A change of a millimeter could occur within just a few years in a population. The Grants had observed rapid evolution: a rapid increase, then a rapid decrease, in beak size. The Grants had seen, and showed the scientific world, how rapidly evolution could occur.

Even more importantly, their work revealed why evolution usually does not occur rapidly even though natural selection does. The direction of natural selection changes often. Every ten years or so, the climate flops back and forth between El Niño and La Niña. The changes in beak size, on the order of a few years, are rapid; but on the order of centuries, the changes largely cancel one another out. The course of evolution wobbles rapidly along a very slow and often unvarying path. If Nature would just make up its mind, the way animal breeders make up their minds, Nature could breed its species a lot faster than it does. If only Nature had a mind and a purpose, which it does not.

Altruism Under Attack

2011-07-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

I am revising my Encyclopedia of Evolution, which Facts on File plans to reissue only in electronic format. Don’t look for it at your local bookstore. But, I hope, you can buy it soon online. Librarians! Alert! You can have it on your computers for your patrons!

When I got to the “altruism” entry, I dutifully recited the scientific arguments for why humans are the most altruistic species. My summary is concise and interesting, but for a fuller picture, you can read Michael Shermer’s book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule; and Frans deWaal’s book Age of Empathy. You can even read Dacher Keltner’s Born to Be Good. Well, maybe you don’t have to read the books. The subtitles tell you everything you need to know. Altruism is basic to the human psyche.

Their viewpoints are without doubt correct regarding the instinctual capacity that humans have for altruism. And I wish that I could believe that such altruism will actually prevail in the world. But I am sad to report that altruism is being strangled.

It is quite clear, on the national political scene as this blog is being posted, that the Republicans are willing to destroy the nation’s financial future in order to promote their power. Every thought they have and every action that they take is only for their own power. They have no sense that altruistic cooperation with Democrats would not only be good for the whole nation but also enhance their own electability in 2012. They seem oblivious to even the benefits they would receive from altruism. Rather than acting like altruistic humans, or chimps, or bonobos, they are acting like gorillas, using force as the sole means to consolidate their power.

And that is the way society is also. I am speaking, of course, from Redneck Central, in rural Oklahoma. I have neighbors—such people are all over the place in rural Oklahoma—who believe that they have the right to vandalize my property and threaten me with physical violence if I raise any objection to their vandalism. They act like gorillas, not chimps or bonobos or humans. When you look at them, they even look like gorillas; they look like they have been taking steroid injections since age six. Hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, producing the capacity for altruism, has been jettisoned by these people in my neighborhood.

Oh, by the way, these people claim to be followers of Jesus Christ. I wonder if Jesus would have said, Blessed is he who destroys his neighbor’s property and threatens his neighbor with physical violence.

I dutifully write about the evolution of altruism—in my encyclopedia, as well as in my book Life of Earth—even though I no longer believe that there is enough of it left in American society to save us from social chaos.

What You Don’t Know About Evolution Can Kill You

2011-07-18T09:14:00.000-07:00

As noted in a previous blog entry, evolution can occur rapidly. Perhaps the best example of how rapidly natural selection can work is the evolution of resistant organisms, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A mutant bacterium that has the ability to resist penicillin will thrive in the body of a person who is taking penicillin. This is because the penicillin has wiped out the bacteria that cannot resist it. The result is a person who is carrying around a culture of resistant bacteria. These bacteria can then spread to other people. This occurs readily when humans are in close contact, such as in hospitals, or overcrowded prisons, or schools. This same mutant bacterium, in the absence of antibiotics, is inferior to the non-resistant bacteria.

Humans have developed many kinds of antibiotics. But for each of these antibiotics, there are populations of bacteria somewhere that have evolved resistance to them. Fortunately, not all bacteria have evolved resistance to all antibiotics. But some populations of bacteria, called “superbugs,” have evolved resistance to several kinds of antibiotics. Many of you, like me, have known someone who became ill or died from a resistant bacterial infection that they acquired in a hospital or nursing home.

It takes only a few years for populations of bacteria to evolve resistance to any particular kind of antibiotic, and it has taken only a few decades for resistance to antibiotics in general to become a major public health problem. Many viruses, such as HIV, have evolved resistance to antiviral medications as well.

In a similar fashion and almost as rapidly, populations of insects have evolved resistance to pesticides used to control them. There are many populations of insects, many of which spread diseases from one human to another, which will no longer die if you spray them. There are populations of disease-carrying rats that cannot be killed by rat poison. Environmentalist Rachel Carson pointed out in 1962 that the overuse of pesticides not only polluted the environment but also proved ultimately useless because of evolution: “If Darwin were alive today the insect world would delight and astound him with its impressive verification of his theories of the survival of the fittest. Under the stress of intensive chemical spraying the weaker members of the insect populations are being weeded out. Now, in many areas and among many species only the strong and fit remain to defy our efforts to control them.”

In all these ways, from the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to the evolution of pesticide-resistant vermin, agricultural and medical researchers (some of whom are creationists) have had to take evolution into account when developing strategies to control the spread of infectious diseases and pests. Germs and disease vectors are moving targets, and evolution is the reason for this. Evolution happens in hospitals (and down on the farm, too) not over the course of millions of years but over the course of just a few months. What you don’t know about evolution can kill you.

This entry appeared in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, from Prometheus Books.

Religion and evolution, again

2011-07-08T10:17:00.000-07:00

I began Chapter 7 of my new book Life of Earth by saying that there is no such thing as religion. It is not an instinctual thing within the human mind. Instead, religion is a set of ideas (memes) that have parasitized some instinctual capacities of the human mind. The feelings and patterns of thought upon which religion include (according to my bulleted list on page 166) sexual ecstasy, loss of awareness of having a defined body, altruism, the need for an authority figure, awareness of death, and agency. These feelings and patterns of thought are instinctive, but religion itself is not. The memes include the idea of a God or gods, of an afterlife, of a heaven, etc. In this, I had become convinced by the viewpoint of Richard Dawkins.

Wouldn’t you know it, the very week that my book came out, I changed my mind. Religion is in fact a thing and it is instinctual.

The evidence for this includes the fact that, whenever you find religion, you nearly always find all of its components. Of course, Buddhism does not contain all of them. But, maybe Buddhism isn’t really a religion. This is what Sam Harris seems to think.

But the main thing that changed my mind was an experience that I had in a supermarket. I encountered a man whom I have known for years, and who has disputed with me for years about politics and religion. He is usually zealous, and I am quiet, in these disputes, but I at least imagined that there was an underlying respect. But this time he crossed the line. He drew a crowd by yelling at me about (as it turned out) his rejection of global warming. Before I could say much of anything, he drew out his main weapon: religion. He made it clear that he could not be wrong, because Jesus was on his side. Conservative Christianity was his sword, and he used it as such—as a discrete entity, not just as a loose collection of memes and feelings.

And then I was amazed as I observed myself do the same thing. I was swept away by zeal and made a religious argument against him. I said that Jesus was not his little finger puppet to use to win arguments. This was my weapon. Science is a set of memes, but when I had to reach for a weapon, I used religion. It was an instinctual, primal, and visceral reaction on my part. At the moment, it seemed to me as much of a single, coherent instinct as hatred, love, hunger, or thirst. Religion seemed to me to be a discrete entity, almost discrete enough to hold in your hand and use.

I am quite certain my thinking on this subject is not finished. And there is no reason that it should ever be. Next week I might go back to agreeing with Sir Richard. And maybe I can benefit from some of your insights. Feel free to share them in the comment box.

Evolution 2011: The Altruism-Fest, part two

2011-06-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

One of the most popular of the participants in the Evolution 2011 meetings at Norman, Oklahoma was not even a human. She was a killdeer.

Killdeer are plovers (birds) whose nests are simple depressions on the ground. Their eggs are spotted, and the mothers choose splotchy-colored brownish places to lay their eggs (see photograph). Killdeer have been extremely successful, and are found along the edges of parking lots over much of North America. You have probably seen them, running along very fast, with white fronts and two black bars on their breasts, and calling out “killdeer, killdeer.”

A mother killdeer made her nest in the mulch near the parking lot at the convention center where Evolution 2011 took place. I parked my car right next to it a few times. When a human first approaches, the mother killdeer starts calling, then spreads her wings to threaten the intruder (see photograph). Then she runs off a few meters away, falls on her side, and exposes inner feathers in such a way that she appears to be injured. This behavior may draw the attention of the intruder away from the nest and toward the mother bird, who is pretending to be an easy piece of meat to catch. If the intruder approaches her, she runs off a little further and repeats the process.

As the mother killdeer was putting on her show and making a lot of noise, right as many attendees were leaving for lunch, a little crowd gathered around my car to watch and marvel. They were marveling at one of the most interesting examples of altruism.

The mother bird is putting her life at risk to protect her eggs. But it is worth the risk, because when the little birds hatch, they will carry many of her genes into the next generation. The evolutionary principles—kin selection and inclusive fitness—are east to understand, but always marvelous to behold.

I am the author of Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, recently published by Prometheus Books. See my website for more information.

Evolution 2011: The Altruism-Fest, part one

2011-06-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

I recently returned from the Evolution 2011 meetings in Norman, Oklahoma. I previously described the excitement of learning about new research into evolutionary science. I now want to analyze the meeting as an example of altruism.

The papers and posters that were presented at the meeting were important, but the information in these presentations can be obtained from journals and online sources. There is no need for scientists and students to gather from all over the world just to get information. What is most important at meetings such as this is that evolutionary scientists get together to discuss one another’s work and benefit from one another’s criticism and encouragement.

In some meetings, scientists like to criticize one another’s papers; in particular, they like to criticize the papers presented by grad students and postdocs of their rivals. My sense is that this has become less common in recent years, and I saw none of it at the Evolution 2011 meetings. The entire atmosphere was encouragement and dialogue. I did not witness any verbal attacks, even when some of the presentations were clearly amateurish projects. Those projects will never get published, but we all considered it important to encourage the young investigators who did them. I think it is safe to say that all of the young graduate (and undergraduate) students who presented their work went away with encouragement for their dedication and intelligence. I made a special effort to praise instances of particularly good work by graduate students.

In other words, Evolution 2011 was not so much a gathering of competitors as it was an altruism-fest. Altruism is when animals do nice things for other animals in the same species, and benefit as a result of it. An altruism-fest is quite different from what critics of evolution might expect an evolution meeting to be. Creationist critics consider evolution to result from bloody fights and the law of the jungle, and they openly declare (as I showed in my March blog entries) that evolution leads to slavery and holocaust. If you can judge people by what they do more than by what they say, then it is clear that altruism is a prominent feature of modern evolutionary science. Evolutionary scientists freely share ideas, and develop bonds of friendship, even when these bonds offer no immediate promise of reciprocal benefit.

Of course, it was not all altruism. It was also a chance for graduate students to increase their visibility in the job market. All of the presentations used PowerPoint and most of them had clever illustrations that made their main points easily understandable. Many were humorous and many had imbedded video footage. The sessions functioned like leks, which are gatherings of male animals showing off while females walk around and check them out. Only in this case, the showing off was not reproductive but intellectual, and the presenters and observers were equally men and women. I do not get the sense that evolutionary biology has very much male bias anymore.

Not only is evolutionary science alive and well, but so is altruism. And where do you find it? As much at a meeting of evolutionary scientists as at a meeting of preachers, perhaps more so; and certainly more than at a meeting of businessmen and women or diplomats.

I did not stay for the banquet. Altruistically, I gave away my banquet ticket to a postdoc from Siberia. I expected nothing in return, but I believe I live in a better world in which I contribute to the general ocean of altruism. While everyone else was having their banquet in Norman, I was eating breaded frog legs at a Chinese buffet in Okmulgee. Frog legs at a Chinese buffet? Only in Oklahoma.

And, as described in the next blog entry, not all of the altruism at these meetings was human.

I am the author of Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, recently published by Prometheus Books. See my website for more information.

Evolution 2011: Evolution is Alive and Well

2011-06-22T12:49:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from the Evolution 2011 meetings in Norman, Oklahoma. This is the pre-eminent meeting of evolutionary scientists in the world, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society for Systematic Biology. Anyone who thinks that evolutionary science is based on very little evidence should experience the flood of data reported at the Evolution meetings every year. All over the world and in every group of organisms, the evidence continues to pour in that evolution is occurring all around us and has been occurring for billions of years. Those of us who have been around longer took special effort to encourage the graduate students and postdocs who have done amazing and creative research.

I will briefly mention three of the graduate student papers that I found particularly interesting.

Sarah Ann Bodbyl Roels (University of Kansas) conducted an experiment in which bees selected floral traits in a monkeyflower species for several generations. Both the treatment and control were inside of identical greenhouses, with the bumblebee hive inside one of the greenhouses. This is a particularly good example of experimental design.

Carolina Bonin (Scripps Institute, La Jolla) obtained DNA samples from seals near Antarctica to determine patterns of paternity in a population that had been driven nearly to extinction. Getting DNA from a male seal is not an easy task; you have to run up with a sample vial on a pole, poke the male to get a blood sample, and run like hell as the male flops along after you. Impressive work.

I was most impressed with the work of Kelsey Byers (University of Washington), who has figured out which chemicals stimulate the bumblebees that pollinate monkeyflowers. She did this by inserting electrodes into the exposed brains of bumblebees, and measuring electrical stimulation in response to different volatile chemical components of nectar. This is a very creative approach to the study of pollination.

The meeting was also an opportunity for people from all over the world to talk about what is happening on the creation/evolution front. Oklahoma is perhaps the world epicenter of creationism, and visitors from other countries wanted to know what is going on here. In the photograph, Vic Hutchison (the grand old man of evolution education in Oklahoma) talked with foreign students Bjorn Ostman (originally from Denmark) and Olga Dolgova (originally from Vladivostok, Siberia) about the evolutionary political scene in America.

Organizing this meeting and making sure that everything happened on time for the hundreds of participants was a big job, and I want to thank Rich Broughton, Larry Weider, and Ingo Schlupp, all faculty members at the University of Oklahoma, for their amazing work in making this meeting a success.

I will post two more entries about the Evolution 2011 meetings.

I am the author of Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, recently published by Prometheus Books. See my website for more information.

Critical Examination of the Near Death Experience, Part Four. How could Near Death Experiences Have Evolved?

2011-06-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

As I established in previous blog entries, the Near Death Experience (NDE) is no mere delusion. But neither is it a glimpse into Heaven. It is entirely subjective, occurring within the brain of the person experiencing it. It is a highly structured, detailed, and intense subjective experience. It is something that the brain does in extremis, that is, when imminently threatened with death.

This immediately raises the question of how the capacity for humans to have such a highly structured set of brain experiences could have evolved. Natural selection cannot, after all, favor something that occurs just before death, since the person who experiences them cannot leave offspring.

I wish to suggest that the Near Death Experience evolved because it offered a fitness advantage to people who experienced them and then returned to life. Consider what would have happened back in cave man days. A warrior was killed. Then he came back to life! And he had such things to report! Such visions! Clearly, he had some special contact with the gods. He would be rewarded with high social status and all of the additional mating opportunities that this would afford. Something similar could have happened to any shaman, male or female, who might have gone a little bit too far with the Salvia divinorum or the mushrooms.

Someone who had mere delusions from a brush with death would not be nearly as credible as one who had specific and credible visions such as those associated with the Near Death Experience—credible enough that people still believe them, and books about them are best sellers even in an age of science.

It has been noted that people from many different cultures have similar near death experiences. While it is possible that this is because they have all seen Oprah, it could also be because the brain-based capacity for experiencing a near-death experience had already evolved before the common ancestral populations of all modern races left Africa about 100,000 years ago, before modern races had differentiated.

I have, therefore, offered in this series of blog entries first a medical then an evolutionary explanation for the Near Death Experience. It is neither mere delusion, as skeptics often claim, nor is it a glimpse into heaven.

Critical Examination of the Near Death Experience, Part Three

2011-06-10T10:15:00.000-07:00

This is the third essay in a series that examines evidence presented by Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry which, they claim, prove that the Near Death Experience (NDE) is an actual vision of the afterlife. In the previous essays, I explain that, while the NDE may contain information that the subject has picked up from his or her environment in some way not yet understood, the NDE itself is a subjective experience.

The authors make the claim that victims or patients that experience NDEs could not have been having a subjective brain experience, because these people were in fact brain-dead at the time that they had the experiences; that is, they were EEG (electroencephalogram) flat-liners. As they write on page 46, “It is medically inexplicable to have a highly organized and lucid experience while unconscious or clinically dead.” Now, if the people who had NDEs were brain dead at the time, then there is no other explanation than that given by the authors: that the people’s spirits had in fact left their bodies and begun their trip to heaven. This is because nerve cells produce electrical and magnetic fields. If the nerve cells were operating at all, delusionally or otherwise, they would have produced some trace on the EEG. Moreover, the authors are very inconsistent on this point. An entire chapter, chapter 4, is about visions that people have had during anesthesia. People are not brain dead during anesthesia. So is NDE something that happens when the spirit leaves the body, or isn’t it? Did my spirit leave my body when I was last under anesthesia?

But the authors have no direct proof that the subjects were brain dead while having their NDEs. The authors have relied upon stories submitted to their online website. Although I agree with the authors that the contributors were seldom if ever actually lying, we simply do not have medical corroboration for the claim that they had NDE during actual clinical death. It is possible that the victims were brain dead for a while, but they may have experienced their NDE either just before or just after their brain-dead period, at a time when they might have been capable of perceiving the things that they later reported.

I would also like to point out that, as I mentioned in the first essay, Persinger’s God Helmet and the drug ketamine produce some of the same mental images as those that appear in NDEs. Of course, NDEs are much clearer and more detailed than those that emerge from God Helmet and ketamine experiences. But this is not surprising, since the God Helmet and ketamine may only partially stimulate whatever brain circuits may be involved in the NDE.

The authors are correct in asserting that an NDE is no ordinary mental experience. They invite you to try closing your eyes and then describing the experiences around you. You cannot do it, even if you are alert, so you could not do so when you are in or in a coma. This is a good point. But the brain, when it experiences an NDE brain, is in extremis, which is a condition you cannot simulate. The mind might become hyper-aware as its last gasp before dying. Warriors sometimes enter an altered mental state when they are in the middle of a battle, one in which time seems to slow down and in which they do crazy things that actually work. The Viking word for such a warrior was “berserker.” It is an altered mental state that occurs under extreme conditions. Maybe the NDE is such a state also.

I would like to offer a possible explanation for the Near Death Experience. This hypothesis is not proven but will explain the phenomena outlined in Long and Perry’s book and in these blog entries.

• First, the patients experienced dreams or received sensations from around them just before clinical death. These sensations were time-distorted, with the result that they seemed to occur throughout the period of death.
• Second, when the patients entered clinical death, electrical imbalances were maintained in the brain, even though there were no impulses traveling along the neurons.
• Third, when the patients were revived, they remembered the things that happened in their brains just before the period of death, which were preserved in the electrical imbalances. This hypothesis would explain how the patients could experience NDEs without actually processing any new experience while they were clinically dead (with flatlined EEGs).

You are particularly encouraged to make comments on this hypothesis.

One important question remains. The NDE is a detailed mental experience that cannot be simply a delusion. It therefore must have evolved. I will approach this question in the next entry.

Critical Examination of the Near Death Experience, Part Two

2011-06-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

This is the second essay in a series that examines evidence presented by Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry which, they claim, prove that the Near Death Experience (NDE) is an actual vision of the afterlife. In the previous essay, I interpreted the evidence to indicate that people who experience NDEs are in fact perceiving something, but not the afterlife; they are perceiving, in some way not yet understood, their immediate environment. But there are several reasons to believe that the NDE is a subjective experience inside of the brain. This does not mean that it is a mere delusion or dream. It is clearly a unique kind of experience.

But it is probably subjective. Here are some reasons.

First, not everyone has the same visions. This is hardly surprising for a subjective experience, but cannot be true of someone actually looking into the afterlife, unless, that is, each of us has our own private heaven waiting for us. The authors say that nearly all people who have an NDE report intense joy. Only about one-third report the tunnel, and two-thirds report the bright light. Fewer than one in four reports the stereotypical life-review (see previous essay). And I suspect that there may be even more diversity of experience than the authors report. Long and Perry say that NDEs are blissful experiences, but I remember reading somewhere that a small but significant percentage of people have what they think is an encounter with Hell. The authors, moreover, report a woman who heard, in her NDE, the universe saying Allah ho akbar! Really? Is the afterlife a Muslim one? Obviously, if there is an afterlife, it was experienced as such—and experienced subjectively—by this Muslim woman. Finally, most NDE reports include an altered sense of time. This is a trick that our brains play on us all the time, for example in dreams that seem to last for a long time but which had to occur during a brief minute or so of rapid eye movement.

Second, suppose that we do in fact have our own private heavens waiting for us. If this is the case, then the people in the NDE visions cannot be actual people. How can Granny actually be existing within MY private heaven? Doesn’t she have her own heaven to live in and experience? Why should my dead relatives be sitting around waiting for me to go rocketing up through the tunnel of light? One person reported having seen her grandmother back in the house in which she lived before her death (Chapter 4). How likely is it that her dead grandmother in heaven lived in a house exactly like the one she had on Earth?

The kind of subjectivity experienced during an NDE is probably not a mere cultural phenomenon. Some careless critics dismiss NDEs as the “Oprah effect,” in which people are very likely to report their NDE in terms that they have learned from watching Oprah’s frequent coverage of this phenomenon. This may sometimes occur. A person who experiences an NDE, one that consists of vague sensations, may subsequently interpret these sensations in terms of a life review, tunnel, loved ones, etc., based on what they have seen on television or read in books. The authors claim that since many of the components of an NDE are the same in people from many different cultures proves that it is not something upon which they have imposed their own interpretations. The problem with this claim is that many different cultures have seen western television. The authors point out, however, that NDEs reported from before 1975, when Raymond Moody wrote the first thorough book on the subject (Life after Life), are essentially the same as those reported in the post-Oprah era. But the fact that people who have NDEs are not merely repeating what they have heard on Oprah’s show does not prove that they are really seeing into the afterlife.

I believe the evidence demonstrates that the NDE is a subjective experience—a very unique one, and which may incorporate information from sensory modalities we do not yet understand. At the very least, if they are seeing into the afterlife, each person is seeing it in his or her own way. Still, there remain some unexplained questions, which I will address in upcoming essays.

Critical examination of the Near Death Experience, Part One

2011-05-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

A book by Jeffrey Long, M.D., with writer Paul Perry, entitled Evidence of the Afterlife, has been a bestseller. It is a book about Near Death Experiences, which many people, including the authors, claim to be evidence of life after death. I have read about Near Death Experiences for many years, and am very skeptical that they are manifestations of an afterlife, despite the fact that I would like to believe that they are. For some of you, it is important to know whether these experiences reveal the existence of an afterlife; for all of us, it is an interesting example of how to apply the scientific method to phenomena that involve the human brain.

This subject is, of course, relevant to evolution for two reasons. First, if they truly are glimpses into heaven, then science is a deficient way of understanding the human experience, even though it may be a perfectly adequate way of explaining atoms and cells and organisms. Second, if Near Death Experiences are not mere delusions, then evolution has to explain them somehow. It is also interesting from the viewpoint of the process of scientific thought: how can you examine such a subject, while avoiding bias?

A Near Death Experience (NDE) may occur when a victim or patient begins to die, or actually dies, usually under medical care, and then returns to life. When they return to consciousness, they may report that they have had an intense experience that they usually interpret as seeing into the afterlife, in which the souls of dead people still live. There are certain stereotypical experiences that are very common in NDEs, including the following:

• Bliss. Most NDE are blissful experiences.
• The Comforting Presence. The person experiences the presence of a powerful spiritual being who leads them through the NDE, and does not pass judgment on them.
• The Life Review. The person sees a movie-like rerun of the events of their lives.
• Out of Body Experience. The person reports seeing themselves lying unconscious or dead, and sees medical or other personnel attempting to revive them.
• The Tunnel. The person progresses through a tunnel toward a bright and welcoming light.

It is obvious that Long and Perry have a bias: their purpose is to convince you that the victims or patients are actually seeing or entering into a real afterlife; that is, the experiences are not merely occurring within their brains. It cannot be denied that, if this is true, it is one of the most significant facts in the world, and the authors’ enthusiasm would be justified. However, their enthusiasm leads them to make critical errors in interpretation and analysis, errors that may or may not be fatal to the belief that NDEs are visions of the afterlife.

One piece of evidence that the authors are not being objective is that they do not consider or present credible alternative interpretations. Instead, they use straw men as their alternative hypotheses. For example, their logic seems to be that if an NDE is not a hallucination then it must be a vision of the afterlife. In fairness it must be added that some of their careless critics have created these straw men for them. But this is no more convincing than a Tea Partier claiming to be correct because a Communist is wrong. In these blog entries, I intend to develop an alternative interpretation.

The authors also reveal their bias by also entirely omitting any mention of the evidence that connects the elements of NDEs to stimulation of the right temporal lobe and by the drug ketamine. Stimulation of the right temporal lobe, either by a medical occurrence (stroke or epilepsy) or by experimental induction (Persinger’s famous God Helmet) produces some, though not all, of the characteristics of NDEs. It is clear that an NDE is not merely a delusion produced by epilepsy or brain chemicals, but it appears to be partly so, and the authors could at least have mentioned this evidence.

We must admit that NDEs are no mere delusions brought on by lack of oxygen (due to cessation of blood flow to the brain) or other trauma. NDEs differ significantly from delusions experienced by living people.

• They are vivid and clear. The emotionally-charged clarity of an NDE is usually strong enough to change the life of the person who experiences it.
• They are nonrandom. They contain some of the elements listed above, and usually very little else.
• They contain experiences that are difficult (the authors claim impossible) to explain in scientific terms.

The vividness and emotional power of NDEs also distinguish them from dreams. The authors claim that people dream about those whom they have recently encountered, while NDE include visions of people who are dead. The authors are incorrect about what they say about dreams; the very night before I read their book, I had dreamed of two people of whom I had not recently thought and to whom I had no particularly strong connection. But it is fair to note that NDEs contain visions of a nonrandom set of people: dead family members, even those that they did not know where dead.

Among the experiences that are difficult to explain are the following examples. One victim reported overhearing a conversation that occurred outside of the hospital room down the hall. Another reported that, while he was in a coma, someone had brought a candle and left it in a drawer; he was able to tell the nurse which drawer it was in. Another man knew which drawer his dentures had been placed in. A woman reported meeting a grandmother who had died before she was born, and she did not know who it was until, later, she saw a photograph of this grandmother. Perhaps the most interesting of all was the woman who reported seeing a shoe on a window ledge that she could not have seen from her room (page 73). It would seem impossible for a person in a coma to actually see and know things that occurred during the coma.

Nevertheless, there are alternative explanations, though not easy ones. These observations cannot be brushed off as mere delusions. How could someone know what was going on while they were in a coma? We know of no way this could happen. But it is possible that people experiencing an NDE do, in fact, have some kind of perception of what is going on around them, a modality of perception that is not merely seeing or hearing. A person in a coma cannot see which drawer a candle or a set of dentures is placed, but may sense it in some way we do not yet understand and which a coma does not inhibit. This opens up new possibilities for research; the ability of the human body to perceive stimuli, and transmit them to the brain, may be much greater than we had thought. But this does not prove that the victim was seeing into the afterlife. In fact, the best description of what might be happening was provided in the authors’ own words. In Chapter 8 they write, “It is a unique and remarkable state of consciousness.” And on page 201, they write, “…there is far more to consciousness and memory than can be explained solely by our physical brain. I find that incredibly exciting.” I think the authors are right about this and wrong about NDEs being visions into the afterlife.

Some of the other experiences can be explained by the ability of the brain to deceive itself. The woman who “saw” the grandmother who had died before she was born may in fact have seen a photograph of her years earlier, and had forgotten about it consciously. The woman who saw the shoe on the ledge may have seen it while being wheeled down the hall (the shoe was, after all, beside a window) and then forgotten it. The people who had visions of these things were not lying; they may have simply forgotten what they had seen at a previous time. We’ve all been there.

I conclude this first entry about Long and Perry’s book with this tentative conclusion: people who experience NDE are having a unique and vivid kind of mental experience, into which is incorporated things they have previously seen or that they have perceived during their comas in a manner not yet understood. There is no reason to conclude that they are seeing into the afterlife. In fact, as described in later entries, there are reasons to suspect that they are not.

Altruism and the Definition of the Human Species

2011-05-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

As I have argued in my book, Life of Earth, altruism is one of the most basic aspects of the human mind. I believe it is a fundamental component of human behavior. Almost everybody has at least a little bit of it. There are some people (psychopaths) who do not have it; aside from them, every human being practices altruism. There are some people who practice what Barbara Oakley has called “cold-blooded kindness” who know how to simulate altruism even when they do not feel it. But these people recognize that altruism, even if they cannot themselves experience it, is a fundamental aspect of human identity.

Species can be defined on the basis of fundamental characteristics; but there are always outliers that are included within the species even if they do not have these characteristics. In an alpine meadow in the Black Hills, I saw a Delphinium (larkspur) whose flowers had only four petals, none spurred; but larkspurs are defined as plants whose flowers have five petals, one of them spurred. This plant was a mutant larkspur. Similarly, humans are characterized by 46 chromosomes; but people with 45 chromosomes (Turner’s syndrome) or 47 (Trisomy 21, formerly Down’s syndrome) are included within the human species. Psychopaths are humans, even though they lack altruism.

This raises the question of whether people who reject altruism are fully human. I am not talking about psychopaths; I refer to human beings who know and feel altruism but make a deliberate decision to reject it. Unlike people with genetic mutations, who are included within the human species but lack some defining human characteristics through no fault of their own, anti-altruists have chosen to place themselves on the fringes of the definition of what it means to be human.

The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the population. Think about this. This is an imbalance of wealth that more closely resembles ancient Babylon than any modern nation. There is more. These 400 people insist that they should pay fewer taxes. Right now, according to page 86 of the IRS instructions for Form 1040, the top tax rate is 35 percent, which is one of the lowest in the world. Republicans are now proposing that the top tax rate be only 25 percent. This would vastly reduce federal revenues, which would mean that essential services on which many poor and middle-class people depend would be nonexistent. Only an anti-altruist would rejoice in this. To one of the wealthiest 400, $10,000 means nothing; to the bottom 50 percent of Americans, $10,000 can spell the difference between survival and collapse.

And there is yet more. On a news program on NPR, one of these richest 400 people called in and said that if his taxes were not lowered, he would take revenge (he did not use this phrase) on his fellow citizens by cutting back on employment and pay in his corporation. His attitude was fiercely hateful toward his fellow citizens. He hates the rest of us. Really. He may technically be a citizen of the United States, but his loyalty is not to his country but only to himself. He would choose to inflict an unlimited amount of damage on others rather than to give up even the slightest amount of the increased luxuries that would come from a tax reduction for the richest Americans. He obviously hates anyone who is not as rich as he is; in fact, he probably hates the other 399 of his fellow super-rich.

And yet this man depends upon the altruism of all of the rest of us. He may be able to pay for any medical procedure that he needs or desires, but these procedures were developed by researchers who are paid much less than he is, and often at taxpayer expense. He would not be able to afford health care using only procedures which were developed entirely by his personal funding. If he fell down on the sidewalk, he would expect someone to call an ambulance, rather than to say, gimme 500 bucks, sucker, then I’ll call the ambulance. His reasoning is, I am rich therefore I do not need to do anything for anybody unless I am paid for it; but because I am rich, you need to do things for me, even when you are not paid to do so.

I believe that this man has, by his own volition, placed himself outside of the range of behavior that defines humanity. Technically, he is a human, but no more so than the four-petaled larkspur is a larkspur. Perhaps this man should live on an island, and if he gets sick, he should receive only medical care which was developed at his own personal expense. See how long he could survive without the altruism of the rest of us. See how long he could survive by being an incipient subspecies that is not quite human.

DNA, Intelligent Design, and Theodicy, Part Two

2011-05-19T12:23:00.000-07:00

In the previous entry I presented one of the main points that John C. Avise made in his recent book Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design. If God designed the world, why are there so many, and such horrific, mutations in the human genome? Not only is there a huge number of different genetic diseases, but each one of these diseases can be caused by numerous different mutations. Mutations happen so often that the same diseases keep evolving over and over and over. This presents a major challenge to theodicy, which is the attempt to justify God in a world of suffering—in this case, genetically-based suffering. Thus one of Avise’s points is that, if God designed DNA, he could have made more efficient repair mechanisms to counteract the (perhaps inevitable) mutations.

Avise goes on to make another, very important challenge to theodicy: the very structure of the genome itself is inconsistent with the idea that the genome, or the human body, or the world was designed by God. Not just the mutations in the genome, but its very structure.

The human genome is full of stuff that interferes with the use of genetic information to produce healthy and functional enzymes and bodies. First, consider the fact that only about 1 percent of human DNA codes for those enzymes. About 68 percent of the DNA consists of non-coding DNA that is between the genes, and about 31 percent of the DNA consists of non-coding DNA that is inside of the genes. This is, at best, a clumsy system, because whenever a cell divides, all of this DNA is copied, not just the DNA that the cell will use. In addition, since each gene is broken into little “exon” fragments by a large amount of internal “intron” DNA, the genetic information must be spliced together in order to be put to use. That is, to get a functional enzyme, the genetic information from lots of exon fragments has to be cobbled together. If it works, there is no problem, but the whole system is so cumbersomely complex that it often fails. Not only are many genetic diseases caused by mutations in the genes themselves, but many genetic diseases are caused by (or also caused by) failures of the cell to deal properly with the non-coding DNA and the splicing.

Much of the non-coding DNA bears the clear mark of evolutionary origin. For example, there are a lot of pseudogenes, which are old genes that are not used anymore. Some of them are extra, duplicated copies of genes, complete with their introns (unprocessed pseudogenes); others are DNA copies of RNA transcripts, from which the introns have been removed (processed pseudogenes). There are also lots of mobile genetic elements, which either have or had the ability to move around among the chromosomes. Some of them are transposons, which can “cut and paste,” to use Avise’s metaphor, moving from one place to another. Some of them are retrotransposons, which can “copy and paste,” with one copy being left behind and the other going to a new place in the genome. Many of these retrotransposons are old dead viruses. We know this because they still have major chunks of the reverse transcriptase enzyme, an enzyme used only by certain kinds of viruses! Retrotransposons cannot actually become viruses anymore, because they have lost the genes that allow them to make protein capsules. Another evolutionary pattern is that species that have the most similar genetic DNA also have the most similar non-coding DNA, which makes no sense if they do not share a common evolutionary ancestry. You see, we know where much of this non-coding DNA came from, and it is not part of a system designed by a God.

There are even examples of some genes fighting against other genes. Some mutations cause a gene to over-represent itself in the next generation (“selfish genes”), which is harmful to the organism that carries it; and there are other mutations that suppress those selfish genes. So not only does the genome contain a clumsy load of non-coding DNA, but even DNA that fights against itself.

We know that such complexity of non-coding DNA is not necessary for the function of a genetic system, because bacteria do not have any of this: no introns, no pseudogenes, no transposons. They get by just fine without them.

The more we learn about DNA, the more we see that there is really no place for a Creator or Designer to fit in. It looks like, in Avise’s words, the Creator’s “primary role was to set into operation natural evolutionary forces.” Yes, you can believe that God designed evolution, and then let evolution do everything. But this would be like saying that angels push the planets around the sun by means of the laws of gravity and momentum. To slip God into an invisible realm behind the operation of natural laws, including genetic processes, seems more and more like fantasy.

And it sets God up for culpability for an immense amount of human suffering. Mutations of genes (previous essay) and malfunctions of genetic operation (this essay) cause human misery and death, in addition to killing perhaps one-third of fertilized egg cells. If God is behind the processes of human genetics, says Avise, then God is the “world’s leading abortionist and mass murderer.” Does this offend you? Then you need to reconsider what you believe about the role that God might play in the universe.

Creationists often claim that all of these mutations and flaws have occurred just since the Fall of Man. There is no Biblical basis for this belief. Genesis says, cursed is the ground, not cursed is the chromosome. Some creationists insist that the pre-Flood world had few if any mutations, which is why people lived to be over nine hundred years old. Either way, this entire burden of bad genes would have accumulated just in the last few thousand years. Mutations are not accumulating that rapidly today. Some creationists believe that Satan designed all the bad things in the genome. This is, needless to say, also without any scriptural basis. In no part of the Bible is Satan depicted as being smart enough to have redesigned the entire architecture of the human genome.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

DNA, Intelligent Design, and Theodicy, Part One

2011-05-13T15:11:00.000-07:00

John C. Avise published a book last year entitled Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design. I would like to share some ideas from this book for your consideration. Avise looks at the age-old question of theodicy (why a good God would permit suffering) in light of the our understanding of human genetics, especially the new revelations that have come from the Human Genome Project just in the last dozen years.

Avise's main point is that if the world were designed by a loving intelligence (which Intelligent Design proponents publicly hesitate to call God), the DNA system shared by all organisms from amoebas to humans would look a lot different from the way it is. And his first set of examples is the sheer number and horror of mutations that fill the human genome.

Many mutations are neutral, or can be easily overcome by technology. And some of them cause a great deal of psychological suffering, such as the mutation that causes trimethylaminuria, which is physically harmless but causes the victims to smell like rotten fish no matter how clean they are. But many other mutations are deadly or, worse yet, can cause a person to have a lifetime of suffering. Perhaps the most disturbing mutation is the one that causes Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. This one mutation, of a single amino acid in a protein, causes the victim to have an uncontrollable compulsion for self-mutilation: they chew their own lips and fingers, and find sharp objects to stab their faces and eyes. The victims are fully able to feel their pain and they know what they are doing, but cannot control it.

But there is more to the story. Most of these genetic syndromes have come into existence many times. Consider glycogen storage disease, in which a defective enzyme causes glycogen (animal starch) to build up in tissues throughout the body. A childhood friend of mine has this disease, which he inherited from his father; by middle age, he was almost constantly incapacitated by this disease. I do not know if he is still alive. Geneticists know of 86 different mutations that can disrupt the enzyme and cause this disease. That is, this genetic disease has mutated into existence 86 separate times. The author directs our attention to several databases, one of which is the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), which lists over 18,000 genes, three-quarters of which have documented mutations. And these are just the single-gene defects!

The author's first point is that an intelligently-designed genome would not have such a stunning number of mutations. If God designed the DNA to make us adapted to the world we live in, could God not have done a better job? Evolution, in contrast, is dependent upon random mutations, upon which natural selection acts by eliminating the bad ones (that is, disfavoring and perhaps killing the individuals who express them) and favoring the good ones. The existence of a large pool of mutations, which natural selection has not completely gotten rid of, is consistent with evolution but not with Intelligent Design.

One answer that Intelligent Design proponents have to this problem is that the Designer created a mutation-free set of human DNA when our species came into existence, then abandoned the system to take care of itself. But if this is the case, the system was so poorly designed that it could not, in fact, take care of itself.

The connection to the problem of theodicy is obvious, and Avise makes it. Defenders of God (which is the meaning of theodicy) claim that God allows bad things to happen as an inevitable consequence of free will. Their platitude is that if fire did not burn, then it would not be fire. I can understand why God would not automatically give all of us a perfect set of genes; limitations, including genetic ones, are necessary for character development, to show God on judgment day what kind of people we are (from the traditional Christian viewpoint). But Lesch-Nyhan syndrome? Potentially deadly mutations in three-quarters of human genes? Isn't this a bit excessive?

I will summarize some of Avise's other points in the next entry. Please post your comments and/or send the link to this blog to others who might be interested.

Don't miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

Science and Philosophy

2011-05-03T19:25:00.000-07:00

(My struggle with computer and biological viruses continues, hence the delay.)

In an earlier entry, I wrote about why I do not read philosophy books. The main reason was that philosophers tend to think they can answer every question by just thinking about it hard enough with our modified ape-brains, a concept I found unacceptable.

But apparently there was a group of philosophers that I did not know about. It was with some excitement that I discovered, while reading a recent issue of Science, the existence of the field known as experimental philosophy. No, not the philosophy of doing experiments, a la Karl Popper; but using experiments to study philosophy. The author, Shaun Nichols, had my attention.

Nichols addressed one of the most difficult philosophical topics, the question of free will. If there is such a thing as free will, then humans have a soul, or at least a self, that can make decisions independently of the chemical reactions that occur inside the brain. If there is no free will (if determinism is correct), then everything we do can be traced by a network of cause and effect to our genes and our environments (prenatal, developmental, recent, and immediate). Now, in actual practice, it may be impossible to disentangle the causation; and so, just for the efficient operation of society, we have to assume free well (we cannot let murderers roam free just because they have a mutant version of a brain protein). But this does not answer the philosophical question.

Nichols admitted that the problem of free will was, from the viewpoint of philosophy, intractable. But he addressed the question of why people believe in free will vs. determinism. And this question can be addressed using psychological data. He pointed out that most people actually believe both viewpoints. When they are calm and discussing general principles, many people accept determinism; but when they are confronted with details of, for example, a gruesome crime, these same people will claim the perpetrator had free will and deserves punishment.

This is where the experiment comes in. The researchers studied the responses of experimental subjects (as usual, university undergraduates, the most thoroughly studied group of people in the world) to stories about realistic events: did the subjects blame the perpetrators of bad deeds (thus displaying a belief in free will), or did they not (determinism)? In one experiment, the students tended to blame the perpetrators for emotionally appalling deeds, but not for minor infractions. This demonstrated that their belief in free will was determined by the emotional impact of the deed. But prior to administering the questions, the researchers had presented them with one of two introductions. One introduction suggested that the universe is indeterminist (that people have free will); the other suggested a determinist universe. Students who had been experimentally preconditioned by the indeterminist introduction attributed moral responsibility to all of the infractions, whether minor or appalling. Students who had been experimentally preconditioned by the determinist introduction were less likely to lay blame for minor infractions—but they usually blamed the perpetrators of appalling deeds for what they did. This is an experimental affirmation of the hypothesis that people are more likely to believe in free will in circumstances in which an emotionally significant deed has been done.

If, in fact, our brains cannot know the truth, then philosophers seem destined to frustration—unless they take a new approach, such as experimental philosophy, which brings psychology, and thus science, into the realm of philosophical inquiry.

Reference: Nichols, Shaun. “Experimental philosophy and the problem of free will.” Science 331 (2011) (March 18): 1401-1403.

Welcome Aboard, Mrs. Ples—Your Cabin is Number 10,587,282A

2011-04-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

There will be some continued delays in my posts because of viruses: they are filling me, and have filled all my computer connections. I am using a spare computer in a classroom right now.

After I returned from my fun creationist weekend (see previous seven entries), I began wondering about how Noah might have sorted out the biodiversity that he had to fit into the Ark, if you believe the Flood story of Genesis 6-9 literally. In particular, I wondered about what Noah might have thought about the apemen whose existence is now thoroughly proved from the fossil record.

First, consider human diversity. Creationists commonly claim that the genetic diversity of Homo sapiens was preserved on the Ark because, perhaps, the three wives of Noah’s three sons were black/Australoid, white, and oriental/Native American. There is no Biblical basis for this, but creationists have never had a problem with just making stuff up. Sounds like a good premise for a Britcom, actually, or an episode of News from Lake Wobegon. Mrs. Shem always fixed hummus, Mrs. Ham always fixed okra, and Mrs. Japheth always fixed lutefisk.

Then, consider what Noah might have done with Homo ergaster. This species of animal looked just like us except that the entire species had brains much smaller than ours. What would Noah have done if the Turkana Boy showed up? (Actually, an adult pair of his species; the Turkana Boy died in adolescence of a tooth infection.) The answer? This species did not yet exist at the time of the Flood, according to many creationists. Their remains are only in the most recent layers, such as in Africa’s Rift Valley, so they must have lived after the Flood. Which means that they must have been (presumably degenerate) descendants of Noah. Apparently the whole species developed small brains, which means either that God miraculously microcephalized them or else that natural selection favored microcephalic mutants. But I guess this would explain why they seemed to make nothing but Acheulean hand axes. What did they use for cutting meat? Hand axes. What did they use for trimming their toenails? Hand axes. What did they use for tightening stone screws in their Flinstone-mobiles? Hand axes. Makes sense.

Finally, consider what Noah might have done with the australopithecines. These animals walked like humans but might otherwise have been chimp-like. Among the famous australopithecines who did not make it to the Ark were Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus), and Mrs. Ples (Australopithecus africanus). Presumably, Noah would have sent all of these apeman species to animal quarters. Noah, like modern creationists, would presumably have had no hesitation in classifying animals into human and nonhuman categories. (I understand that creationists consider the fossils of these species to also be post-Flood.)

But Noah’s confidence may have resulted from the fact that he lived in the Middle East, where there were no primates other than humans. The other mammal species were things like cows and sheep, all of which were clearly less intelligent than humans. This is perhaps the reason that the monotheistic religions, which posit an absolute distinction between humans and animals, evolved in the Middle East, according to Frans DeWaal. The religions that evolved in parts of the world where non-human primates are common did not, and perhaps could not, make such a clear distinction, because monkeys and apes resemble us quite strongly. Queen Victoria, when she saw Jenny the orangutan at the London Zoo in 1842, declared her to be “painfully and disagreeably human.”

Creationists have no more hesitation at drawing an absolute distinction between the saved and the damned than they do between humans and animals. Anyone who has, like me, been treated as damned by a creationist will know what I mean.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Eight (final installment)

2011-04-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

On the weekend of March 5, I visited two creationist museums (see previous seven entries). One was the museum in which Carl Baugh had displays which, he claimed, proved that humans and dinosaurs left footprints in the same layers of mud.

Before I went home, ending my fun creationist weekend, I visited Dinosaur Valley State Park to see some real dinosaur footprints, still in the river bed (see bottom photo). The water is high in spring, and only a few prints were visible: round holes that are the footprints of large herbivorous Paluxysaurus dinosaurs, and three-toed footprints of small carnivorous Acrocanthosaurus dinosaurs. Some of the prints are visible under water, especially when green algae grow inside of them (see top photo). This was the part of my Texas trip that was refreshing and realistic, and I recommend a visit to this park if you are in the area.

Before I left Glen Rose, I did one more thing that altered my mind. I stopped at a barbecue place. It is well known that you can throw a rock anywhere in Texas and it will hit a barbecue place better than almost any other in the world. I had the brisket. The waitress brought me a pile of meat. It was pretty good, but it usually takes me a week to eat this much meat. I quite literally left Glen Rose feeling like what I thought a Neanderthal would have felt like. Neanderthals, you may know, ate mostly meat, according to scientists who have studied their coprolites. But recently a scientist studied Neanderthal tooth deposits and found that they also ate grains. Well, I suppose they must have had a piece of Texas toast with their barbecue.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Seven. The Ghost of Marlyn Clark

2011-04-12T10:25:00.000-07:00

It is not with fondness that I remember Dr. M. E. (Marlyn) Clark, who was an engineering professor at the University of Illinois while I was a plant ecology graduate student there. Marlyn was, to put it mildly, grim. He scowled, and looked incapable of smiling. We were both members of Twin City Bible Church in Urbana, although in that large church our paths had not crossed. That is, until I was asked by the Board of Leadership to teach an adult education class about Christian views of creation and evolution in 1982. Having recently left creationism, I presented the theistic evolution side; I invited Clark to present the creationist side. This was a mistake. When he found out that there was another side other than creationism being taught at this church, he and his associates began a campaign of disinformation against me, about which I later heard from student members even of other churches in town. He demanded a sort of trial to be arranged against me at the church, at which I was not allowed to speak. I knew, of course, that Clark and the other creationists (who were militant members of Phyllis Schlafley’s Eagle Forum and strong supporters of bloody terrorist raids by Nicaraguan contras against the Sandinistas), but I expected at least a modicum of fairness from the church leadership. It turns out that, after this trial, the church leadership took no further actions and even insisted that the creationists not cause the class to be cancelled. However excruciating an experience this was for me, it was formative: it was the beginning of my transformation from comfortable Christian evolutionist to passionate Christian anti-creationist. Perhaps I have Marlyn Clark to thank for that. It is regrettable that Clark left this kind of negative memory. He did some fine engineering work with computer models of the human circulatory system; this part of his legacy remains a blessing to many patients with cardiovascular disease.

Then, 29 years later, I encounter him again, posthumously. On March 5, as I left Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum (see previous entries), I saw Marlyn Clark’s “Wall of Truth.” It was (see bottom photo) a model of geological strata from a creationist “Flood geology” viewpoint. That is, it was an attempt to fit the geological record into a creationist viewpoint. Creationists believe that all fossil deposits were produced during the Flood. Therefore, there could be human artifacts at all levels of the strata, from Paleozoic to Recent. And some creationists believe they have found evidence of this very thing. Clark donated money to build a wall, near the museum entrance, that summarized this evidence: a bowl that was found in a coal deposit, and which he assumed had to be the same age as the coal, as well as the hammer and footprints found elsewhere in Baugh’s museum. One thing you will notice right away about this wall: the putative human evidences are found at different levels. This means that humans had to emerge from their hiding places and run around on hundreds of feet of mud, without sinking in, several times during the Flood, leaving footprints at two different levels, and dropping a hammer at yet another. Whatever the putative evidence of the Wall shows, it does not demonstrate a Flood. The skulls and tusks at the top represent post-Flood australopithecines and mammoths. (The figure looking out over the Wall is a nine-foot-tall statue of Tom Landry. Baugh intends it as an example of what magnificent specimens of humanity the Homo bauanthropus men were, at least from the viewpoint of Texas creationists.)

When I left the deliberately-created psychological delusions of Baugh’s museum (described in earlier entries), and emerged into the fresh air, I thought I had left creationism in general and Marlyn Clark in particular behind. But I got into my car and looked up through my windshield. I saw what looked like a green merry-go-round (see top photo). It was not labeled but I recognized it instantly. It was Marlyn Clark’s Flood Tank. Over thirty years ago, Clark built a merry-go-round that was supposed to prove something or other about Noah’s Flood. It was no ordinary merry-go-round. First, it had the ability to lurch, not just spin. And around its perimeter is a water-tight ring into which water and sediments could be placed. Once the machine is running, you can watch the water slosh around and mix up the sediments. Clark’s hypothesis was that, if there was a worldwide flood, it would not have produced a uniform slurry of sediments (his null hypothesis), but would have made distinct layers (the creationist hypothesis). Of course, you don’t need a giant merry-go-round to prove this. If you mix soil into water, the sand will settle out first, then the silt, then last of all the fine clay. Soil scientists do this with their sedimentation columns all the time. Clark’s machine did in fact produce distinct sediment layers, and he proclaimed the triumph of his theories. Only in the most alternate of alternate realities might one consider an eight-foot-wide merry-go-round to be a realistic simulation of the Earth during a Flood. At the moment, the Noachian merry-go-round is non-functional. But maybe Baugh will set it up outside his museum. I doubt that he would let the kids ride it. But maybe a frog will get buried in the sediments and fossilized. Maybe a giant will leave a footprint.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Six. Lies and Damned Lies at the Creationist Museum

2011-04-06T12:56:00.000-07:00

On March 5 I visited Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum near Glen Rose, Texas. In the previous entry, I described some of the displays. But the most prominent display of all, nestled among scriptural scrolls, is the Darwin display. All it has in it is a few of Darwin’s book, one of which has one of his more lugubrious photos on the cover, and a collection of slave shackles and handcuffs (see photo).

The message is clear, just as it was in Bill Gordon’s museum in Oklahoma: belief in evolution causes human oppression and slavery. If you believe we evolved, then you think people can be treated like animals, but if you believe humans were created, then you will treat them like fellow children of God. The footprint displays were lies; but this one was a damned lie.

First, consider the clear message that it proclaimed: Darwinian evolutionary science causes such things as slavery. As anyone knows who has read the masterpiece 2009 book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, both sides of Darwin’s family were abolitionists, and Darwin detested slavery. Moreover, Darwin transferred his early belief in the common origin of all human races from Adam and Eve into his later acceptance of the common evolutionary origin of all human races. Desmond and Moore’s book also documents the creationist beliefs of American slaveholders and their scientific sympathizers. Louis Agassiz was most notable among them, but there were many others. If we must draw a causal inference, it would be that because slavery was forced out of existence during the period of history in which scientists and some societies and churches accepted evolution, then evolution deserves the credit. No causal inference either way is, however, justified. Certainly Darwin did not cause black American slavery. This is something only hypnotized victims of Baugh’s sermon could believe as they glanced at the displays.

Second, consider what the display did not mention. The history of Christianity in the western world for the last two millennia has, until very recently, been the story of murder and oppression. Ask any Huguenot victim of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre if Lamarck caused their plight. And nearly all of the five hundred sovereign Native American nations had been conquered, and many exterminated, by Darwin’s time. It was religious zeal (and greed and plunder) that caused the Spanish settlements started by Columbus to enslave, then torture and kill, the Caribbean natives, against which the lone Christian voice was Bartolomé de las Casas. The Pilgrims, so much revered by creationists and other Christian conservatives, surrounded Pequot villages, set them ablaze, and shot anyone attempting to escape. Here is what William Bradford wrote: “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they [the colonists] gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully.” While massacres based on the Christian religion are today rare, the uncomfortable fact remains that one of the conservatives’ favorite books of the Bible is Revelation, which depicts a violent Jesus making the Earth run red with blood.

Baugh’s display added stupidity to dishonesty. It was not until I got home and looked at the photograph (look at it again!) that I noticed that one of the slave shackles was from the “Georgetown County Plantation Police.” The printing seemed awfully crisp to be on a real, well-used slave shackle. So I googled the name. It turns out that fake Georgetown County Plantation Police paraphernalia are sold on the internet. Badges are more popular, but you can get the shackles on Amazon for $39.99. (“Customers who bought related items also bought Wild Planet Spy Gear Night Goggles!”) If Baugh just stopped at being a fraud, and satisfied himself with entertaining lies about giant humans and about how moonlight allowed pre-Flood humans to live almost a thousand years, it might be funny; but he has slipped into the world of attempting to stir up hatred of evolutionary scientists.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Five. Mysteries of the Cretaceous World at the Baugh Museum

2011-03-31T14:08:00.001-07:00

Before I begin this essay, I want to let you know that the National Center for Science Education has posted its Upchucky Award winners for 2011! And now, on with the essay.

I visited Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum on March 5. After Baugh had finished his presentation (see two previous entries), I looked at the displays I had driven down to Glen Rose, Texas, to see. The bed of the nearby Paluxy River is famous for the trackways of footprints that dinosaurs left in the mud 110 million years ago (according to scientists). But Baugh claims that it was only about 4000 years ago, and that humans had left their footprints in the mud also. In his museum you can see excavated pieces of Paluxy River limestone that have what are supposed to be human footprints in them. One of the stones has what is supposed to be a human footprint overlapping the print of a three-toed predatory dinosaur (see photos). Think about what it would mean if these displays are genuine. It would mean that the entire timeline of evolution, in which dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago but the human genus did not evolve until about two million years ago, is wrong. If you glance quickly at these displays, as most people visiting the museum were doing, it seems to be pretty clear that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time on a young Earth. But if you look closely at the stones, as I did, you begin to notice a few things.

During the Depression, when the dinosaur footprints of the Paluxy River were already famous, some enterprising individuals carved human footprints in the stone and sold them. One might naturally assume that the footprints in Baugh’s museum were also carved. Baugh claims that, while some Paluxy human footprints were fakes, the ones in his museum are genuine. Unfortunately, the only way you can evaluate this claim is by looking at the footprints, as I did. They did not look like fakes to me, at first glance. But, I am not even a geologist, much less an ichnologist (expert in fossil burrows and tracks). How would I know? I was, however, suspicious. The footprints looked good—a little too good, as a matter of fact. Every toe was perfect. I could see no chisel marks, but I concluded that the human prints are fakes, even if Baugh did not carve them himself. For a summary of the human footprint story, click here. In other displays, you can see putative human sandal prints which are supposedly the same age as the dinosaur prints. And even what Baugh claims is a child’s handprint.

One of the footprints is quite large. Baugh has an explanation for this. The footprints were produced by a species of giant humans, which Baugh, no stranger to ego, decided to name after himself (Homo bauanthropus).

There are other items on display at the museum that, according to Baugh, prove that not just humans but technologically advanced humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs. One is the Cretaceous hammer (see photo). It is an iron hammer with a wooden handle that was found, according to the display, embedded in Cretaceous rock further south in Texas. How could a hammer get into a Cretaceous rock? There is actually an easy answer to this question. Somebody in the nineteenth century dropped a hammer into a crack in the Cretaceous deposits, and then erosion filled in the gaps. You can see eroded limestone filling cracks in today, down at the river.

The museum is designed for a quick glance at the displays, rather than careful thought. If you think carefully, however, you quickly realize that the creationist explanation makes no sense. Cretaceous deposits, in Texas and all over the world, are above the Paleozoic, Triassic, and Jurassic deposits, all of them full of fossils. And, in many parts of the world, there are Cenozoic deposits on top of the Cretaceous layers, and they, too, have fossils. That is, if all of the fossil-containing layers were formed during Noah’s Flood, then these Cretaceous layers had to be deposited in the middle of the Flood. Here’s what had to happen. The Flood had been going on long enough to deposit thick layers of sediments full of plants, animals, and technologically advanced people. Then the waters receded, and dinosaurs and humans who had been hiding somewhere came out and walked (not ran) over hundreds of feet of mud without sinking into it. One of the humans lost a hammer. Another lost a finger (see below). Then the Flood came back and buried all of them.

By the way, you don’t want to miss the Cretaceous finger. It looks like a finger from a statue, since there is no evidence of any internal structure such as bone. But Baugh claims it is a real finger, which apparently broke off of a giant who was fleeing the Flood.

The visit to the displays, just like the experience of Baugh’s lecture, creates an alternate psychological reality. Quickly glancing at the displays gives you the impression that humans and dinosaurs lived together on a young Earth. But one of the displays, as I describe in the next entry, proclaims that evolution is the major source of evil in the world in the past and today.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Four. The Lost Paradise of Carl Baugh

2011-03-27T11:10:00.000-07:00

In my previous entry, I described the psychological experience that I had when I visited Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas on March 5. Baugh created an aura of scientific truth by presenting little fragments of information, just enough to mesmerize the audience. I mentioned that the actual claims he made were incredible, and had no scientific or Biblical basis. I present these claims here.

First, Baugh claimed that a chemist in Louisiana (Edward Boudreaux) had proved how God created the Earth from a ball of plasma (which is a form of matter in which electrons are torn away from nuclei in atoms). The chemist’s calculations proved that such a ball of plasma would have cooled down in 47 hours, which was plenty of time for the “dry land to appear” on Day 3 of Genesis 1. There is, of course, no mention of any ball of plasma in Genesis. So why would anyone go through the trouble of inventing the idea that God created the Earth from a ball of plasma? According to Genesis 1, before God began to create the heavens and the Earth, there was water. Therefore, some creationists claim, God made everything out of water. Everything, including uranium and lead and other heavy atoms. The only way for God to do this would be to transform the water into plasma, which could then form into every kind of atom. Therefore one motivation for this theory was to make sense out of the Biblical statement that water existed before the universe.

The second motivation was to prove how there could be both uranium (a radioactive element) and lead (a product of radioactive decay) in the crust of a very young Earth. The fact that there is lead in the rocks makes it look as though the Earth is old. But, Baugh claimed, Boudreaux’s plasma theory shows how the original rocks could have had both uranium and lead in them. (Baugh, and the chemist he was quoting—the one who had written the book the last copy of which sold for a hundred dollars—seem to have overlooked the fact that it is not just uranium and lead that allows scientists to calculate the age of the Earth, but the fact that zircon crystals contain both uranium and lead.) It may have occurred to you that, while God was performing miracles, he could have just made the uranium and lead and all the other atoms, skipping the plasma stage. Boudreaux’s calculations are totally unnecessary, because they simply posit a different set of miracles.

Next, Baugh started telling tall tales about what the Earth was like before the Flood. What a fantastical world! Creationists often claim, without Biblical evidence, that the pre-Flood Earth was surrounded by a vapor canopy, which would have created worldwide tropical conditions and very high atmospheric pressure. I expected to hear about this from Baugh, but he barely mentioned it. Instead, Baugh made the claim that, prior to the Flood, the Earth year consisted of only 336 days, allowing the moon to circle it exactly twelve times at 28 days per cycle each year. In some unexplained way, the Flood slowed down the revolution of the Earth but not of the moon. Now, what is so important about the 28-day cycle of the moon? You guessed it—because the moon regulates the ovulatory cycles of women! Most of us would assume the ovulatory cycle fits the moon, but Baugh claims God made the moon fit the ovulatory cycle, and the Earth fit the moon. The whole movement of the Solar System was originally created for the sake of the ovulatory cycle of women. None of this is in the Bible but, well, at least nobody can accuse Baugh of misogyny, can they?

Baugh was on a roll. We all know that the surface of the moon has dark patches created by volcanic eruptions. But, Baugh claimed, before the Flood, the moon had a perfectly smooth surface. In some unexplained way, the Flood caused volcanic eruptions on the moon. A pure white moon would have been seven times brighter than it is now, and it would have emitted light at 518 Hz (I didn’t quite follow this part) which would have stimulated DNA repair enzymes that would have allowed people to live over nine hundred years—but only if the moon was brighter. (It is not quite clear how moonlight could have gotten through a thick canopy of water vapor.) The moon had phases before the Flood just as it does now, explained Baugh. Apparently the reason for this, if I understand his explanation, was that an unrelenting full moon would have worn people out by making them have sex every night for nine hundred years. I may be misunderstanding this just a little, but I am not making it up. (From what I have read about Baugh’s look-alike Garner Ted Armstrong, the latter might have attempted such a marathon.)

It is both entertaining and disturbing to see that many creationists think that God has given them permission to just make stuff up and claim Biblical authority for it. This practice is without theological justification, but it works. Baugh craves adoration, and there was a room full of people giving it to him, gladly yielding to him the authority to invent scripture as he goes along. Meanwhile he raises thousands of dollars to buy Bibles to prove what the exact words of the Bible ought to be. I wonder why he does this. Since he just makes stuff up, about changes in the length of the year and the face of the moon, why does he need to be so careful about the exact wording of the Bible?

The high air pressure underneath a vapor canopy would, Baugh claims, have caused giant vegetables to grow and animal wounds to quickly heal. Off to the side of the museum is what looks like a gigantic barrel, which Baugh intends at some future date to make into a hyperbaric chamber, with high air pressure (and presumably a source of 518 Hz light). Maybe he will grow some giant vegetables in the barrel, or maybe he will experiment on himself to see if he heals up quickly. Hospitals do in fact use hyperbaric treatment to help wounds to heal. If this is all that Baugh wants to prove, there is no need for him to have his own hyperbaric chamber. So why is it there? Maybe he and his staff someday will disappear inside and live forever, in complete separation from the world of inconvenient reality.

I then proceeded to look at the displays in the museum, about which I will write in the next entry.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Three. Into the Land of the Dinosaur Preacher

2011-03-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

On March 5 (which was Lynn Margulis’s seventy-third birthday), I continued my fun weekend of learning about creationism (see previous two entries). On this morning, I visited Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas. This museum, as some of you may know, is the one that purports to prove that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. The museum is on the banks of the Paluxy River, which is famous because the bed of the river contains entire trackways of dinosaur footprints. And, Baugh claims, human footprints as well.

I was in for a real treat. It was not just creationism that I saw. It was an entire world of psychological illusion.

I arrived just after 11:00, just in time to hear Baugh’s monthly sermon. I parked my car in the gravel lot, walked past a big yellow school bus (wondering about the legality of using a public vehicle to take kids to this place), and slipped in through the front door. It was standing room only; all the seats were occupied by the approximately 100 people who had come early to hear Baugh. A man was singing hymns to a music track.

Then Carl Baugh came to the microphone (see photo). A late middle-aged man, he bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the late Garner Ted Armstrong. His mellifluous baritone voice announced that all of the money from the collection that the ushers were taking would go to benefit the singer. And then he began his sermon. The first half hour was not about creation-science at all. It was about old editions of the Bible. Baugh’s museum had recently purchased a Bible, using funds provided miraculously by a donor, which had been edited by Desiderius Erasmus and published just prior to the King James Bible of 1611. The King James Bible is the one that many fundamentalists revere, even more than original documents. Some churches, like the Baptist church just outside the town where I work, actually proclaim “KJV 1611” on their sign. Why? Because, Baugh said, the King James Bible is the one that has saved more souls than any other version. I suppose this means that nobody actually knew what the actual words of God were until 1611, perhaps (I may guess) even the people who heard Jesus himself. This Bible that Baugh had purchased contained editorial revision marks. This Bible, therefore, represented the final step before the publication of the King James Version. Baugh told the audience that one of the world’s foremost experts on seventeenth-century Bibles, at Oxford, was going to verify the authenticity of the book.

Now it was time to build some excitement in the crowd. Baugh’s cell phone rang. I thought it was odd that an experienced speaker would forget to turn off his cell phone, and then would pointedly refuse to turn it off after it had interrupted his presentation. He announced he would ignore the call. The phone rang again. He said he would answer it because it just might be the manuscript expert calling. Guess what—it was! The world expert on seventeenth-century Bibles just happened to be starting his work at what would have been 5:00 pm on a Saturday in England. Well, guess what, said Carl. There is a whole audience here who wants to know what you are finding out about the manuscript! It did not take long for me to figure out that the phone call must have been from one of Baugh’s associates, perhaps standing outside or in an office. It was a smooth attempt to manipulate the audience. This was just in time for Baugh to announce that he was looking for a new donor to buy another old Bible. A local informant tells me that Baugh has conducted bids before, using a cell phone with a fake bidder on the other end.

Baugh then showed another old Bible. It was one of the original King James Bibles, only the printer had changed just a single word, and for this crime he was imprisoned by order of King James. Almost all copies of this Bible had been destroyed, but Baugh had gotten hold of one. What was the word that the printer had substituted? (While driving down into Texas, I had been listening to NPR, and there was a report that a new edition of the Bible had been published that changed the word “booty” to “plunder,” but I doubted that this was what Baugh had in mind.) The printer, Baugh said, had changed “Jesus” to “Judas” in just one verse of the New Testament. After the presentation, people lined up to see the “Judas Bible”, but only if they washed their hands and made sure they did not drop any dandruff on it.

The reason I have gone into this part of Baugh’s presentation in some detail is to show you that the Baugh’s entire purpose is to cultivate followers and donors, rather than to convince anyone of the truth of his creationist evidences. What I witnessed here was not just an atmosphere of psychological manipulation, but acts of psychological manipulation. And it was working. Whenever Baugh asked if the audience was agreeing with him, there were mesmerized nods, rather than affirmations. The audience was not enthusiastically engaged, but hypnotized. I could feel it myself—I could feel my own brain becoming soft. It was at least fifteen minutes before I realized what was going on.

When Baugh got into his “scientific” presentation, the astonishing content of which I will present in the next entry, it was clear that he was manipulating the audience with the aura of science, rather than trying to present evidence to them. He made some incredible claims, but verified them by saying that they had been published in a book that had sold out, and the last one had been bought for a hundred dollars by a professor, who just happened to be in the back of the room. (By this time I was wondering if any such thing had happened, but I have no proof that it had not. I cannot locate the book on Amazon.) Anything in a book that sells for a hundred dollars must be correct, I suppose.

Baugh rushed through a PowerPoint of “evidences”, skipping the details, claiming that the scientific terms like “nucleosynthesis” were really big and complex and hard to pronounce, then ending with the triumphant claim that he had found scientific evidence for God’s Truth. Wow, all these scientific terms and even a few Greek symbols—that settles it. How could he be wrong, when he could almost pronounce the word nucleosynthesis? And how could you doubt him? He spoke so smoothly, and slipped in jokes. He had time for jokes and homey stories, but not for the evidence, which flashed by on the screen. (There needs to be a term for this. It is not quite like Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness,” or Charles Seife’s statistical “proofiness.” It is the illusion of proof that comes from flashing through a series of scientific-looking slides. If any of you know a good term to describe this, feel free to post a comment.)

In the next entry, you will find out some of the scientific claims that Baugh made that morning—claims without evidence, and even without Biblical basis. It is all part of the mind-numbing psychological effect that he deliberately cultivates in his museum.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

The Battle of the Church Marquees

2011-03-21T11:41:00.001-07:00

In an entry earlier this year, I posted a photo of a church marquee in Durant, Oklahoma that renounced evolution. A few years ago this same church had a marquee that renounced the Big Bang. (Both of these photos are on my website, under "Evolution photos."

But a different kind of church marquee appeared in Tulsa, Oklahoma on March 20, 2011. It was a marquee announcing the celebration of Evolution Sunday. And it had my name on it, as the guest speaker.

Fellowship Congregational Church, under the leadership of Rev. Paul Ashby, is to be commended for embracing the truth of evolution and trying to figure out its spiritual insights and consequences. I publicly announce my thanks to Paul Ashby, to Jim Derby (retired geologist who arranged the meeting), and to the people who attended my lecture and asked good questions.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Two. Noah's Ark! Wow!

2011-03-17T12:47:00.000-07:00

In my previous entry I wrote about my visit to Mr. Bill Gordon’s Museum of Creation Truth outside of Bokchito, Oklahoma, which was crammed full of replicas of items and copies of photographs that were mostly about a mythical pre-Flood world rather than about creationism.

There was one photograph on display that, were it really what Bill claimed it to be, would convince all of us of creationism. If it were real, we should all go to Turkey as fast as we can and check out the most important discovery in the recent history of humankind. I refer to Noah’s Ark. Yes, the real Noah’s Ark, in the Ararat Mountains of Turkey, according to its promoters, such as Ron Wyatt, an amateur archaeologist.

According to Wyatt and other promoters, the Ark was entombed within rock on the slopes of Mt. Ararat, where it came to rest at the end of the Flood. And there it lay, hidden from the eyes of humankind, until an earthquake revealed it in 1948, just in time for the Last Days before the Return of Jesus Christ. And there it is, for anyone who wants to see it. How do you get there? Well, conveniently enough, the government of Turkey has made it into a national park.

The putative “ark” is a geological formation that looks like a long pointed boat. Wyatt and others claim that this formation is the right size to be the real ark and that its sides contain petrified wood, the actual wood used by Noah. The promoters also claim to have found the anchor-stones that Noah used (which are, as you might have guessed, not mentioned in the Bible). The promoters make a long list of other claims about it.

It turns out that these claims are all false. For example, the sides of the “ark” are hardened mud, with fossils in them. I have no intention of repeating all of the evidence. You can read it from the mainstream creationist literature—this “ark” was even too much for them to believe.

And it is not simply a mistake; Ron Wyatt is either a fraud or seriously deluded. According to creationist writer Andrew Snelling in the hyperlink above, Wyatt also claims to have found such things as the following: the true site of the crucifixion of Jesus; the Ark of the Covenant; the true Mount Sinai (with a plaque announcing it as such); the true site of the Israelites’ Red Sea crossing, also with a marker ‘built by King Solomon’ as a memorial; chariot wheels from Pharaoh’s drowned army; the actual rock Moses struck to release water; Noah’s grave, complete with the skin that held the wine that made him get drunk and naked, as recorded in Genesis 9:20 (okay, I just made that last part up); Noah’s house, complete with the biggest flush toilet in the ancient world (okay, I just made that part up too); Mrs. Noah’s grave (containing a fortune of gold and jewelry—I did not make that part up); and Moses’ stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, held together with golden hinges. Hey, why not throw in the Holy Grail and the Holy Prepuce as well? Unfortunately, Ron Wyatt was a little too late to be the discoverer of the Holy Prepuce. During the Middle Ages, there were up to eighteen cities that claimed to have the true foreskin of Jesus Christ (I am not making this up). The Italian city of Calcata claimed to have the real one as recently as 1983. But then some thieves stole it while it was being paraded around the city.

The fact that the government of Turkey made the rock that looks like a boat into a national park means that the Turkish government knows how to get western tourists to visit and spend money. Sounds like a fun place to visit. But I don’t have enough money to go to Turkey. Instead I settled for Carl Baugh’s museum in Glen Rose, Texas, which I visited the next day, and will describe in upcoming blog entries.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part One. The Creationist Museum in Rural Oklahoma

2011-03-14T19:31:00.000-07:00

Greetings from the heart of creationist country, rural Oklahoma.

I devoted March 4 and 5, 2011, to learning more about creationism. I have spent a lot of time being angry about the way creationists twist the facts and make them fit into preconceived notions, and the way they use their theories to bolster ultra-conservative positions; and a lot of time carefully explaining why creationism is wrong. But on this weekend, I decided to just have fun observing the phenomenon of creationism and letting it warp my mind just a little, the way one might use recreational marijuana (which I have never done).

It was an ethereal weekend. In part this was because the air was filled with the scent of skunks, who were all out getting run over as they pursued or were pursued by mates. My first stop, on Friday afternoon, was the little creationist museum outside of Bokchito, Oklahoma. It was only a dozen miles away from the town in which I work, but I had never visited it before.

I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into. The museum was in a post oak forest behind a heavy metal gate. And the name of the museum sounded like a clear condemnation of unbelievers: “Museum of Creation Truth.” And the proprietor likes to breed wolf-dog hybrids. And there was a statue of a sea serpent outside the museum (see photo). Should I have been scared? No, as it turned out. The proprietor, a late-middle-aged man named Bill Gordon, was the friendliest and mildest-speaking man you could meet. He told me that wolf-dog hybrids were just like puppies and they liked to nuzzle up against him.

But Bill’s mind was just like Noah’s Ark: it was packed full of pieces of information that seemed unconnected to one another, sort of like animals packed into the Ark with no ecosystem or phylogenetic arrangement. This museum was his life’s work. He must have spent a lot of money on the displays, which (he is a contractor) he must have built himself. (He does not seem to be making much money on it, unlike the fabulously rich televangelists.) If Bill could cram this much stuff into a museum, then we must reconsider the credibility of Noah’s Ark.

The question that was on my mind was, why? Why a creationist museum in rural Oklahoma? Aren’t most people already creationists? As it turns out, Bill’s answer was, in effect, that most people in rural Oklahoma may be creationists, and Christians, but lazy ones. On Sunday mornings, most of them sleep in or go fishing. Neither one of us mentioned the big news item of the week: the sentencing of a Bokchito woman who murdered her disabled daughter, hid the body parts, and laughed at the judge during her sentencing. Maybe rural Oklahoma isn’t such a religious place after all?

There was a fundamental disconnect between the displays in the museum and its proprietor. The displays (which are, as we will see later, typical of creationist museums) were offensive lies. The main one was the display of Darwin and models of slave handcuffs and shackles. Another display was entitled Nazism and Racial Policy. The clear message is that evolution leads to slavery and other forms of oppression. This message ignores the evolutionary science of altruism, and ignores all of the slaughters and tortures committed in the name of Christianity, from St. Bartholomew’s massacre in France to the massacre of the Pequots by the Pilgrims. Another display proclaims that there are lies in the textbooks—not errors, but lies. And several posters made it quite clear that only very, very, very stupid people accept evolution. The proprietor gave away Jack Chick tracts, including the “Big Daddy” tract that shows a Semitic-looking evolution professor screaming at a very Aryan-looking creationist student. I certainly felt the displays screaming at the local evolution professor, who is me. But Bill avoided these displays and was, as I said, very friendly. Which should I believe—Bill, or his displays? Does he tell other visitors that people like me are evil liars?

I did not have time to think about this, since Bill was leading me quickly around to his favorite displays. I could feel my mind (not for the last time this weekend) softening, under the bombardment of information and the soothing background of recorded hymns.

I mentioned that many of the displays seemed unconnected to one another. They included the following: replicas of items found in Carl Baugh’s museum, about which I will write in a later entry; a photograph of (supposedly) a fossilized giant human found in County Antrim in Ireland (an 1895 hoax, which the “discoverer” took on tour in Ireland and England, and he charged sixpence to view it); a poor-quality photo (supposedly) of a plesiosaur caught off the coast of New Zealand in 1977 (this must have been the sea serpent depicted in the statue outside); a photo of the Lake Champlain monster; a photo (supposedly) of another plesiosaur that washed up at Monterey, California in 1925; photos of purported sauropod petroglyphs; an image of the Oronteus Finaeus map of 1532 that supposedly shows Antarctica as it would appear without an ice cap; photos of the huge stones of the pre-Inca walls in Peru, and the giant stone of Baalbek; and of the Baghdad Battery, which is an urn that, if filled with grape juice, produces a couple of volts of electricity. I was genuinely surprised. I have seen all this information before, but not in creationist literature. I have seen it in those “mysteries from forgotten worlds” books, and from the “chariots of the gods” books by Erich Von Däniken, who claimed that visitors from other planets had revealed technological marvels to ancient people. What did any of this have to do with creationism?

Apparently an important component of creationist theology is that the pre-Flood world was a planetary, biological, and technological marvel. There was, they say (without any Biblical basis), a vapor canopy over the atmosphere, which created high atmospheric pressure and made plants and people grow into giants, and created a worldwide tropical climate. This was the reason that people lived more than nine hundred years back then. It must have been one of those giants that carved what Bill called a giant’s hammer-stone in one of the displays. And apparently it was pre-Flood giants that built the pre-Inca walls and chiseled out the Baalbek stone. And these pre-Flood giants also knew what Antarctica was like before its ice cap formed, and they passed this knowledge down through a series of secret mapmakers, the last of which was Oronteus Finaeus. Postflood humans, they claim, forgot the secret wisdom of the ancients, and went back to making primitive stone tools. And, of course, evolution has to be wrong because there are still plesiosaurs swimming around in the oceans. (The problems with these claims are too numerous to mention. First, the pre-Inca walls are in the Andes, which have fossils in them that creationists believe were produced by the Flood. Second, the Oronteus Finaeus map does not, in fact, show an accurate Antarctica; in particular, it does not show the peninsula.)

Bill got nearly everything in his museum—mostly replicas and copies of photographs—from two men who are among the most unreliable sources of information on the planet, aside perhaps from Erich Von Däniken. One is Carl Baugh—whom we will meet in a subsequent blog entry—and the other is Kent Hovind, who is currently serving time for tax evasion. It became apparent to me that Bill is hopelessly credulous of certain infamous creationists. He seems to believe them as much as if they were Jesus, although he would deny this. If Kent Hovind or Carl Baugh (whom I was planning to check out the very next day) says it, Bill just drinks it in. Bill’s parting gift to me was a Kent Hovind DVD. It is a sad thing to see a man’s mind wasted on such credulity.

One photograph particularly caught my attention, and I will write about it in the next entry.

Oh, and he also had a photo of Jesus’ tomb. The real one. Really.

Why I Do Not Read Philosophy Books

2011-03-09T13:36:00.000-08:00

I grew up, in my child geekhood, thinking that the pursuit of philosophy was the noblest thing the mind could do. When I was in high school, entering adolescent geekhood, I still thought this. I didn’t actually read the philosophers; I didn’t even get through Philosophy Made Simple. But I tried. I remember sitting in the school library trying to read Plato in the Great Books of the Western World series. I was, of course, the only student in the library, which was part of the cafeteria. The librarian kept saying what a wonderful spring day it was. Of course, looking back on it, she was right. I should have been out observing the natural world. Come to think of it, watching grass grow would have been a good idea. But I focused on Plato. For just one afternoon, then I quit.

Since that time I have been too busy with science to read philosophy. But I always thought it a valid field of study. And it is clear to me that it is essential for everyone to think about the Big Questions, even if they do not have time to read what Socrates said about Them. Plato (or Socrates, whichever one it was) was clearly right: The unexamined life is not worth living.

I recently heard a radio interview of James Miller regarding his book Examined Lives, in which he explores the lives of twelve philosophers, noting that they seemed to always try to bring their personal lives into conformity with their philosophies, even if they frequently failed (especially Rousseau). The host asked the listeners to call in and say which philosopher they based their lives on. It was a rerun so I did not call, but my answer was clearly Charles Darwin.

Darwin understood how the world works and where it came from. His insights have been confirmed by all of modern science, including the brain sciences, which show how our very patterns of thought and feeling have evolved. He was no formal philosopher, but he did the best he could. For example, he understood that the eternal theological stumbling block, theodicy (why does God allow evil) is solved by natural selection: evolution favors whatever works, whether it makes animals happy or miserable. As Francisco Ayala (also a biologist, not a philosopher) says, natural selection lets God off the hook for the problem of Evil. Darwin tried to rationalize happiness and goodness, emphasizing that being good can provide evolutionary advantages. Most of all, Darwin felt the thrill and awe that one cannot avoid when studying the natural world. He got a little tired of studying barnacles, but otherwise he was constantly happy despite his illness, as he studied pigeons and orchids and worms. A philosopher asks, what is the good life? Darwin said the good life is to understand the beauty of the world. “…endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved” were the final words of the Origin of Species and, I think, better than anything Plato ever wrote. Certainly Nietzsche. (Did I spell that right?)

Perhaps Darwin’s most important contribution was to get us to realize that we cannot ascertain philosophical truth by just thinking about it. Our thoughts are the emotional, often illogical, self-deceiving patterns that allowed our ancestors to survive, and to reproduce more than other people who were not, therefore, our ancestors. To understand philosophy, then, we must understand brain science.

But philosophers do not often take that step. I started to read a book several years ago entitled Philosophy in the Flesh which took this approach. I got lost, and discontinued the book, but the idea is commendable.

When a listener called in, asking about science, I expected Miller to say something like what I just said. It would have been a welcome convergence of science and philosophy. But Miller made some truly confounding statements. He implied that science is very specialized, that ordinary people cannot understand it, that scientists only think about their specialized fields, and therefore science is not very useful for thinking about the Big Questions. It sounded to me like, if you want to understand the world, study the philosophers; if you want to make carbon nanotubules then go home and turn your brain off, study science. (In fairness I must add that I have not read his book. I base this just on the interview. But, am I likely to read his book? Not now.)

It is because most philosophers take Miller’s approach that I consider philosophy to be a waste of time. Science leads to reality because it tests hypotheses about the physical world, and because it helps us understand how our brains work. If philosophers embraced this, it would become a useful discipline. But philosophers seem to be stuck in the rut of thinking about what Socrates said (or Nietzsche [did I spell that right?] for God’s sake, nor not). Philosophy is a valuable subdiscipline of history (which, by the way, is an extremely important field of study): the history of what people who loved to think thought. But you are no more likely to come closer to truth by embracing Aristotle’s categories of reality than you are by coming up with your own; maybe less so, since Aristotle’s thinking may have been influenced by Macedonian aspirations to empire.

One time, I planned to write a book called Everything. If I ever do this, I will start with science, not philosophy; Darwin, not Socrates.

Biodiversity and Noah’s Ark: The Solution You’ve Been Waiting For

2011-03-02T08:36:00.000-08:00

I have sometimes wondered if the indifference that many creationists feel toward rescuing biodiversity from extinction is that they do not want to believe there is very much of it. In particular fundamentalists must believe that there have never been more animal species than could fit into Noah’s Ark.

The obvious problem is, how could two of every kind of animal fit into the Ark? This question has been asked thousands of times on websites and in blogs and books, including several of my own, which criticize creationism. The dimensions of the Ark are fairly well specified by Genesis (there is only so much leeway that you have in defining the length of a “cubit”). Creationists believe that Noah had all of the species of dinosaurs on the Ark also, since dinosaurs had to be alive before the Flood and Noah took two of every kind onto the Ark—though dinosaurs apparently became extinct in the post-Flood environment. We know that this is what they believe, for kids sit on saddles to ride dinosaurs in the creation museum run by Answers in Genesis.

The problem is that scientists keep finding the bones of new species of giant dinosaurs. It’s not just brontosaurus (Apatosaurus) anymore; it is Supersaurus and Ultrasaurus and Argentinosaurus. How would a pair of each of them fit onto the Ark? Creationists have an answer: hibernation. Noah could just pile them up, and not have to feed them, if the dinosaurs came in and fell asleep. This would require a miracle, not recorded in Genesis. But creationists have no problem just making stuff up. However, creationists would need to make up a lot more miracles than just hibernation. How can you physically fit all of those giant dinosaurs in the Ark? If you take the volume of the Ark and divide it by the number of species, you find that there is, in fact, space for all of them. But in order to use that space for giant dinosaurs, you would need the following miracles. First, God made all of the giant dinosaurs turn rigid. Then, God levitated them. Then, God guided them into slots, as if He were playing Tetris. If you admit the possibility of these miracles, then the problem of space on the Ark is solved. And to creationists, made-up miracles is an unlimited resource.

I would like to suggest a much more elegant approach for creationists to use, one that would be harder for evolutionists such as myself to answer. The approach is for creationists to assume that God is like Dr. Who. Dr. Who had a time travel spaceship called TARDIS, which stands for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. On the outside it looks like a red British call box (phone booth). But inside, it has infinite volume. Now, if Noah and family built an Ark, then God changed it into a TARDIS, then there would be plenty of room for everything inside—and only a single big miracle would be necessary, rather than lots of little ones.

I’m just trying to be helpful to the creationists. I hope they appreciate it.

This essay will also appear on my website.

Conservatives and Social Evolution

2011-02-27T14:16:00.000-08:00

So many conservative politicians are hypocrites to an extent that has become legendary and comic. (This is an evolutionary, not political, blog; I will tie this political commentary in to evolution.) It is easily visible on the national and local levels. Here are some new stories.

The new speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner of Ohio, presents himself as the exemplar of pure ethics: to eliminate wasteful spending and earmarks. Everyone thinks he has a real heart for the American people, perhaps because of his frequent crying. But are these tears of altruism, or of deception, or of delusion? They are certainly not tears of altruism. Both President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates (who was originally appointed by George W. Bush) claim that the F-35 fighter plane engine is unnecessary; it would cost $450 million right now and as much as $3 billion over the next few years. If the commander in chief and the defense secretary think it is a waste of money, who could possibly support it? John Boehner, of course, whose state would be one of the places where the engine would be built. Boehner wants to cut all sweet federal deals except those that come to his state. On February 16 the House voted against funding the engine.

But should we be surprised that Boehner showed such hypocrisy? No. In 1995, Boehner handed out tobacco lobbyist checks to his fellow representatives on the floor of the House before debate on a bill to end tobacco subsidies.

Meanwhile, in my own state of Oklahoma, the House Common Education committee debated a bill introduced by Republican representative Sally Kern that would protect the freedom of students to not be penalized for creationist beliefs. The bill was totally unnecessary—students, like everyone else, are already protected from being so penalized, and the bill was a waste of time and money. This argument, which I made to the committee by email several times, seems to have prevailed, since several Republicans voted against the bill, which failed on February 22. Now here is the interesting part. Rep. Kern called two witnesses to support the bill. One was a former geology professor at the University of Oklahoma, whose strong political views (including what have been described as misogynistic ones) got him removed from his department and placed under the direct control of the dean; the other was a teacher who had stood up during Richard Dawkins’s University of Oklahoma lecture and called him a liar, and who was escorted out by security guards. Couldn’t Kern find anybody other than people with anger management issues to support her views?

It appears that reasonable and non-hypocritical conservatives are rare. And this brings us to social evolution. The conservative political position is not a matter of reasoned political viewpoint, nor is it based on evidence. If it were, conservatives would be consistent rather than hypocritical, and would be able to present evidence rather than to call upon rants by people who have anger management issues. The conservatives are the modern day equivalent of the cave man who says that his big club wins the argument. Don’t forget that natural selection favors the cave man with the big club, because he is the one that gets to have the most offspring. As described in the previous entry, I think that natural selection may be favoring demes of impulsive and voluntarily ignorant conservatives within a diverse Oklahoma population. And they use religion as a weapon.

On February 23, the Southern Poverty Law Center announced that there are 1,002 active hate groups in the United States. Most of these are conservative groups that hate the progressive viewpoint. Could it be otherwise?

The Evolved Capacity for Evil, Part Four

2011-02-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

In previous entries, I have explored the idea that good and evil are both part of the human brain; in particular, there is genetic variability for the impulses that underlie goodness (e.g., altruism) and evil (e.g., psychopathic violence) in human populations. Natural selection may favor altruism in some demes, and violence in other demes, of the same population at the same time.

I have one further speculation to make. Ever since scientists began to discover that the things that people think, feel, and do are determined in large measure by brain chemistry and structure, and the genes that underlie them, the idea of free will has come under attack. How can the people we call evil be held accountable for their actions, if their actions result inevitably from the interaction of their genes and their environments? This may not be an important question, since humans help to create their own environments, and since we have to control evil people even if they are not spiritually culpable. But modern brain science discoveries do raise an important question: what about free will?

Every human behavior is an interaction of genes and environment. It is always both. In some people, genetic abnormalities are so severe that their behavior is almost a stereotypical script; for them, genes are more important than environment. For most people, genes influence feelings and attitudes, while environment (including their current capacity to make decisions) is much more important. It is a sliding scale from the overwhelming importance of genes to the overwhelming importance of environment.

Perhaps the same thing is true of free will. It is perhaps nonsensical to ask whether humans have free will or not. All humans have free will, but some humans have very little of it, while most of us have a great deal of it. It, too, may be a sliding scale.

I propose this possibility for your consideration. Please comment on it if you like.

The Evolved Capacity for Evil, Part Three

2011-02-19T07:01:00.000-08:00

Copernicus was born this day in 1473. Cheers!

In the two previous entries, I have established that human behavior is physically determined, and that there is variation (that is, both good and evil, altruism and abuse) in populations. I choose to emphasize the good, but am continually aware of evil. Jesus said, be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.

There are always evil people, some of whom are very successful. Sometimes they change the course of history. But are there relatively good vs. evil populations? That is, are there times when altruism is more vs. less common?

It is possible, though unproven, that there is an altruistic arch to human history. In tribal days, there was a lot of altruism. That was the only way a person could survive in a small tribe. There was war between tribes, but war was sporadic. Most of the natural selection was within tribes, where altruism provided a direct advantage. It is even possible, as Sewall Wright’s interdemic selection model might suggest, that the most altruistic groups prospered at the expense of the less altruistic groups (that is, for altruism to fellow group members). Then when civilization began, altruism didn’t matter as much. A king could enslave others, abuse them and exult in it, not needing anything from them, so long as he kept the army happy. This is basically the story of ancient human history. Then, more recently, as societies became more interdependent, altruism became important again. There were a few holdouts—the obviously insane Mao stayed in power because the army and party leaders saw him as their way to get power—but they were the exceptions. If this arch of history is correct—altruism, oppression, altruism—then we can imagine that the future is altruistic. We can imagine that democracy is spreading in Muslim countries right now. I hope so. This would mean that natural selection will continue to favor those people and cultures that are most altruistic.

But there can be local variation. While most populations become more altruistic, some can become less so. And, within an overall population, some demes can become more altruistic, some less. People spend most of their time, and choose their mating partners, within demes more often than from another deme. And this brings us back to the impaled coyotes about which I wrote four entries ago. Is it possible that, in the rural South, some demes are evolving toward evil?

It is possible. Here in the rural South, there are groups of people who appear to enjoy violence and value physical power. They even look different: the men are thick-necked and thick-everything-elsed. They place no value on intelligence. They have it, but it is down in the basement. They pile up weapons and impale coyotes. Individuals with evil genes may prevail in these demes, because not only natural but cultural selection favors them. They have a thin crust of friendliness, so long as you don’t ask them about the coyotes. They worship a God of war. They do not like to build things; they buy them, then wreck them. Let’s call them Destroyers.

This is clearly not true of all rural Okies (such as me). I have seen a lot of my fellow Okies who are just as uneducated as the ones described above but who are altruistic and friendly. They even look different than the others. They may have even fewer teeth than the evil ones, but they are not scary. They value intelligence: they love to tell you about their work, and they exult in the skills that they have. They love to build things. Let’s call them Builders.

The Destroyers and the Builders are two demes, side by side, within the same population. There is occasional interbreeding. But the rules of natural selection are different, at least in degree, in the two demes, favoring oppression in one and altruism in the other. Over time, natural selection has favored the altruism of the Builders in the modern human species, but if circumstances change, such as political or economic chaos, the Destroyers are ready to emerge from their rural hiding places.

The Evolved Capacity for Evil, Part Two

2011-02-16T11:35:00.000-08:00

Here are some more thoughts that came to me as a result of reading the book by Barbara Oakley Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. For part one, see the previous blog entry.

In the previous entry, I established that behavioral differences among individuals are due to genes, which influence brain chemicals and brain structures; to environment; and to habitual reinforcements. By describing the physical basis for behavioral differences, we in no way excuse them. Clinical psychopaths have to be stopped. And subclinical psychopaths, the kind that abuse others, often from positions of business or religious or governmental authority, need to be relocated into some position where their evil will harm as few people as possible. Oakley presents good evidence not just that many evil leaders, such as Slobodan Milosevic and Mao Zedong, had brain problems but just what some of these problems might have been. Failure to stop them has resulted in the gruesome deaths of millions of people.

I mentioned that human populations have plenty of genetic variation for behavior that evolution has clearly produced it. I have written a lot (and I’m not done) about altruism—evolution has given humans an instinct to be good, however imperfectly. But how could evolution favor genetic variation that makes people bad, at the same time? Which is it?

Well, it is both. Most people, through time, have obtained direct personal benefits by cooperation and by even more intense forms of altruism. But some people have obtained direct personal benefits by being evil. In many cases, they pretend to be good, while being evil. A psychopath knows that people have emotions; they just don’t care. They know right from wrong, which is why they can pretend to be good.

Natural selection favors successful reproduction. Good people are successful when their cooperation gains them status and resources and mates. Evil people can be just as successful. After all, according to some figures, about one out of every 200 men in the world have the Genghis Khan Y chromosome.

And there is more to it than this. Human behavior is a spectrum. We all know people who, if their genes were just a little bit more evil, or their amygdalae a little more defective, or under slightly different conditions, would be monsters, but they are able to function in society—we just know to not trust them. (A former colleague from a previous job described a mutual acquaintance who temporarily rose in the field of academic administration, in this way: “And then all the little horns started coming out of his head.” She was tipsy when she told me this but I believe she was correct.) And, in addition, each of us moves around on the good-evil continuum.

The conclusion from this blog entry is that human populations have heritability of behavioral characteristics, and evolution has worked upon human behavior. This is why we have always had and will always have good and bad individuals. Natural selection maintains genetic variability. But there is more. In the next essay I explore the question of whether natural selection can result in good vs. bad populations.

The Evolved Capacity for Evil, Part One

2011-02-11T10:35:00.000-08:00

My blog entries have been sporadic recently, because we have had recurring storms that have closed down educational institutions. (I do not have internet connections at my house.) I was expecting that I would get back to my series of essays based on my new book, Life of Earth. But during the most recent snow days, I happened to start reading a book by my fellow Prometheus Books author, Barbara Oakley. The book is Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. How could you not want to read a book with that title?

I found myself frequently lost in the mass of information, but that is, I think, the nature of the subject. Maybe nobody could make it fully comprehensible. And the author’s stories, of historical figures and personal experiences, drew me in anyway.

At first, one would think the book was intended as an argument against the Skinnerian blank-slate theory. (Last year I read Skinner’s Walden Two as one of my rare ventures into fantasy.) But very few people take that theory seriously anymore, and Oakley’s purpose is not to tell us that but to tell us how genes affect human behavior.

First, there are no genes for behavior patterns, but there are genes for inclinations such as impulsivity and anxiety. There are many examples interspersed through the book, but I will mention just one. Serotonin is a chemical that carries messages in the brain. After it has delivered its message, it has to be re-absorbed by the neuron that released it. This reuptake is the business of the SERT (serotonin transporter) protein. If serotonin lingers in the spaces between the brain cells, anxiety can result. A word about genes: they contain stretches of non-coding DNA, such as tandem repeats, which are not transcribed into the protein. Just junk, you say? Read on. The SERT gene has two forms (alleles), the short form (with 14 tandem repeats) and the long form (with 16 tandem repeats). Aside from these seemingly meaningless insertions, the alleles are identical. The short allele results in the production of less SERT, and therefore contributes to anxiety. I hope I got that right.

Second, differences in brain structures influence behavior patterns as well. Psychopaths, for example, often have a defective corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the left and right sides. They also have a smaller amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the middle of the brain. Perhaps these people need more excitement in order to feel normal, and have less fear, both of which contribute to a dampening of conscience. A dysfunction of the right orbital cortex (just behind the eye) also makes it difficult for a person to form a conscience. The brain structure differences between one person and another are influenced by which alleles the person inherits.

Third, brain chemicals and structures both influence brain circuitry. This circuitry is what determines behavior. One example is that the amygdala sends fear signals to dampen the cingulate cortex, but this communication is inhibited if the person has one or two copies of the short version of the SERT gene. Indeed, people with the short allele have smaller amygdalae and cingulate cortices. Again, I hope I got that right.

It gets even more complicated. The behavioral abnormalities recognized by psychologists often overlap: each disorder has some characteristics of the others. This may be because each behavior pattern is influenced by many parts of the brain and many brain chemicals. This is one reason why people who have the “same” disorder differ from one another so much. But, based on the three points above, it is clear that differences in genes result in differences in behavior, all other things being equal.

Of course, all other things are never equal. Environment is important too. Nearly every trait, and perhaps every behavioral trait, is both genetic and environmental, never one or the other. Part of this is the prenatal and childhood environment. Time and again, researchers have found that people with the same physical brain problem may develop more or less normally if they had good childhoods, but develop behavioral problems if they had abusive childhoods. I say more or less, because the normal people with brain problems still have to struggle a little—but they are generally successful. Environment is why some people with brain problems become clinically dysfunctional and some do not.

Of course, there is even more, something that is largely absent from Oakley’s book. We can influence our own habits of thought, to a certain degree. New brain cells develop in our brains, but too few to be of much use. However, the old cells keep destroying and rebuilding connections. Frequently-used connections, therefore frequently-used behavior patterns, are reinforced. This is not enough to wholly compensate for chemical or large-scale structural problems, but it helps.

Genes create our brains; environments create our brains; and we create our own brains.

Genes make us capable of evil behavior, but also good behavior. Sometimes pathologically good behavior. Everyone’s favorite mutants are the people with Williams syndrome, traced to defects on chromosome 7. These people are completely trusting of strangers; they are super-altruists. I’ve never knowingly met one, but my impression is that they are the sweetest people you could know, sort of like straight out of the pre-pome Garden of Eden. It turns out that they stress out about everything except strangers, but hey, nobody’s perfect.

The point for this evolution blog is that there is a lot here for evolution to work on, in both trusting and evil directions. Scientists would say there is a lot of heritability for good and evil behavior patterns. Evolution can, of course, work on the alleles, for which every human population has plenty of variation. Evolution can also work on the culture. The only thing it cannot work on is you as an individual. But you as an individual can work on evolution—that is, at least you can contribute to cultural evolution.

More on this next time. Meanwhile, I just note that differences in behavior patterns appear to be due to genes, brains, environment, and habits, not to spirits, human or Holy.

The Capacity for Evil

2011-02-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

I have frequently written about the importance of altruism in the evolution of the human species. We are the most altruistic species that has ever existed on Earth. We do not have kin selection as strong as that of bees, but we make up for it with indirect reciprocity, in which individuals gain social status by being conspicuously generous.

But we are constantly reminded of the dark side of human nature—how humans can exult in destruction and torture. Under certain circumstances, such as in Bosnia in the 1990s and Sudan in the 2000s, this capacity for evil can emerge in an insane fashion. But it is always there. What we must do is to starve it as much as possible, occupying our minds with good things.

In rural Oklahoma, where I live, some people are cultivating the enjoyment of evil. When I was driving along the highway, I saw a fence line on which half a dozen coyotes had been impaled. I stopped to take photos, two of which I share here with you.

I hope you find these photos as deeply disturbing as I do. Now, it may be necessary to cull a coyote population. But there is no need to put them gruesomely on display. Of course the coyotes were dead before they were impaled (I think). But there could be only one reason for doing this: the hunters relished the fantasy of torturing animals, and wanted to make a proclamation to anyone who was driving down the highway. And what is that proclamation? They want everyone to know how much they hate the natural world. Many of these rural people are creationists, but they apparently think that God made animals so that we could enjoy torturing them. Remember this is the state in which a law against cockfighting barely passed.

We would like to think that these people who fantasize about animal torture make an absolute distinction between animals and humans—which their creationist beliefs tell them to do. But I am not entirely confident of it. When they get really mad—and the conservative political movement encourages them to do so as frequently as possible—they might take thoughtless action and do something that they would not rationally choose to do. Might their rage spill over into cruelty against humans?

I hope that my fears are excessive (and I do not sit around thinking about them). But January 31 was the 135th anniversary of the law that forced all Native Americans onto reservations. It was not long ago when some of my Cherokee ancestors were considered to be not very different from coyotes. For black people, the memory is even more recent. In east Texas, in 1998, a black man was dragged to death behind a pickup truck.

These same people believe that Jesus will return and usher in a battle of Armageddon in which millions will be tortured and the earth will literally run red with blood; one radio evangelist said it would be literally as deep as the shoulders of horses. The Jesus whom these people worship is a demon who loves to exult in torture. Of course, this does not resemble the Jesus of any part of the Bible other than the book of Revelation, which should be torn out and thrown away. And of course the Armageddon blood will be human, not coyote, blood. Before you say it can’t happen here, think carefully. I hope that, in fact, it cannot.

Evolution has given us a spectrum of options, from altruism at one end to torture at the other. In my writings, I emphasize the former; but many creationists in rural Oklahoma seem to focus on the latter.

Another Creationist Intellectual Breakthrough

2011-01-26T10:24:00.000-08:00

According to this photograph, which I took last week, creationists do not just reject evolution; they also reject standard English, confusing "ancestor" with "descendent." This is at a church in rural Oklahoma.

If you have not read the recent posts, see them below.

Monkeys and Weasels, or, Why Evolution Can Occur Rapidly

2011-01-24T12:59:00.000-08:00

Many people, quite reasonably, wonder why they cannot see evolution happening. The usual scientific answer is that evolution happens so slowly that you cannot see it. While this is true, it is not because evolution has to be slow. Evolution can be very rapid.

Creationists never tire of saying that evolution cannot happen, because it would take forever for something to evolve. They like to use the monkey and typewriter (or, nowadays, word processor) example. Suppose you had a room—or a mall, or a continent—full of monkeys typing away at keyboards, randomly striking the keys. How long would it take for one of the monkeys to, by chance, type an entire Shakespeare play? I will not attempt the calculation, but we all know it would be a very, very long time. If the monkey and typewriter scenario were really the way that evolution works, then clearly evolution would be impossible. If we had to wait for evolution to, purely by chance, cough up a jellyfish, or a sequoia tree, or a human, we would be waiting essentially forever.

But evolution is not just a matter of chance. The mutations are produced by chance, but natural selection accumulates the good mutations non-randomly. This considerably changes the monkey and typewriter scenario. If a monkey types a letter at random, but it is the correct letter, natural selection will save it, and do the same with the second letter, the third, and so on. The monkeys, typing at random, may in this way quickly produce a work of Shakespeare, provided that each correct keystroke is preserved. Selection is a ratchet: it saves the good key strokes, and discards the bad ones. In one famous example of this process, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used a computer program that started with a random series of letters. Each generation, the program introduced random mutations into the series of letters, and saved whichever mutations caused the string of letters to more closely resemble the Shakespearean phrase, “Methinks it is like a weasel.” This quote comes from Hamlet who was looking at the shapes of clouds. The clouds had random shapes but Hamlet was trying to select the ones that looked like animals. It took only about forty generations for the computer program, now popularly called the “weasel program,” to transform a string of random letters into the Shakespearean sentence. Forty generations is not very long. Therefore, in theory, evolution should proceed rapidly. The monkeys could go home before lunch.

This entry will appear in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just released by Prometheus Books.

Parasite Load

2011-01-19T12:15:00.000-08:00

There are many parallels between ecosystems and the world of free enterprise commerce. A well-functioning economy resembles a healthy ecosystem in many ways: natural selection favoring the most effective individuals, whose interactions are sometimes competitive, but are also frequently altruistic (within species) or mutualistic (between species). Every ecosystem has parasites, but any ecosystem in which parasites proliferated to the point of commandeering most of the energy flow would quickly degenerate and collapse.

The modern American economy is dominated by parasitic corporations. One such corporation is Bank of America. They are good at doing only two things: taking bailout money, and compensating their CEO. They did repay all $45 billion of their TARP money, but they continue to be incompetent at everything else. But they, the parasites, inflict their incompetence upon us, the hosts.

I have learned this through experience. I recently tried to refinance a mortgage through Bank of America, which was a fiasco. My application was reassigned to a series of five different people, and at each transition documents were lost and new rules popped up out of nowhere. Finally, I decided to terminate the application. Fortunately, I did not need the money.

What I encountered was sheer incompetence. Average consumers work hard and earn money from their work, but corporations are parasitic upon their employees and customers. In particular, financial corporations keep the entire country under a burden of usury. They are parasites on us. They give us nothing useful in return, certainly not money. When you pay back some of what you owe, on time, what you get in return is a higher interest rate (or at least that was the case until Obama’s financial overhaul package became law). Financial corporations suck America dry, drinking in a large proportion of the economy like drunk ticks.

Fortunately there is one thing we can do. We can simply choose to not participate. We can refuse to participate in the business ecosystem, burdened by its parasites, except where necessary. We can just say no to any unnecessary expenditures. I know that this is “bad for the economy” but it produces a sense of personal, even spiritual, liberation to just not buy things.

The image that I keep in mind is this. Bdelloid rotifers (is that what you were expecting?)! Fungal parasites kill them, but they simply dry up and blow away in the wind, leaving their fungal parasites behind! And that is what I am trying to do, by meditating upon the good things I have in life, and not thinking about things I would like to obtain.

Earth is a Lucky Planet, Part Three. Goldilocks’s Earth

2011-01-12T11:01:00.000-08:00

In two previous essays, I discussed the Rare Earth Hypothesis of Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. Earth is a lucky planet, first because the Sun is a stable star; and second because Jupiter and the Moon help to stabilize conditions on Earth. In this third essay, I explain how Earth itself is a mighty lucky planet.

Earth happened to form in the “habitable zone” of the new Solar System, in which temperatures were in the right range to allow water to exist in liquid form. No medium other than water is known in which lifelike processes can occur. Some scientists speculate that the liquid methane on Saturn’s moon Titan may be a medium for life. Even if this is the case, molecules move very slowly in liquid methane, and any metabolism of life forms on Titan would be very slow and the resulting life forms would be very simple. And Earth has plenty of water. The water may have been delivered to the young Earth by comets hitting it before 3.9 billion years ago. The ice in the comets melted and vaporized, creating a haze of steam, much of which was lost into space as new comets continued to rain from the sky. When the collisions became less frequent, and Earth cooled down, the steam became oceans, and water vapor saturated a hot, dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide and nitrogen gases. Mars, Earth’s little brother, also had oceans when it was a young planet.

The Earth is also just the right size. If the Earth were too large, its gravity would be so great that complex organisms (not to mention mountains or even continents) would not be able to stand up. If the Earth were too small, however, it would be unable to hold onto its atmosphere, partly due to a lack of sufficient gravity, and also because particles streaming from the Sun would have stripped the gases away. Mars, which is about half the size of Earth, has an atmosphere—just barely. Its atmosphere is about one percent as thick as ours. At first this seems strange, given that its gravity is at least one-quarter as strong as that of the Earth. But Mars is small enough that its core has cooled off and solidified. On Earth, the currents of molten lava produce a magnetic field that deflects much of the dangerous solar particle stream. Mars has no such protection. The solar particles have scoured away most of its atmosphere, as well as its surface water. When Earth and Mars first formed, they were both wet planets with carbon dioxide atmospheres. Earth kept its atmosphere, and evolved; Mars lost its atmosphere, and (apparently) died. The surface of Mars is without life; and if there is life on Mars, it is deep in the rocks and therefore microbial in size.

The fact that the Earth is not too large and not too small, and is just the right distance from the Sun, has been compared by some scientists to the story of Goldilocks, the Aryan girl who thought that she had the right to barge into somebody else’s house. She found that Baby Bear’s food and bed were “just right.” And if Earth were not “just right” in size and chemical composition, there would be no life on Earth more complex than microbes.

Our planet is also fortunate to have radioactive elements in its core. Without radioactivity, the core of the Earth might have cooled down and solidified, causing Earth to have a fate similar to that of Mars, though it would not have happened quite as quickly.

Our planet also happens to have plenty of carbon, which may be the only element from which life can be built and sustained. As any aficionado of Star Trek knows, silicon-based life forms such as the Horta are conceivable, since silicon atoms have several chemical similarities to carbon. However, silicon is probably too heavy to allow a silicon-based life form to participate in a silicon-based ecosystem. Silicon is a mineral; it is always a mineral. Carbon atoms can form carbon dioxide gas, which circulates through the atmosphere and is turned into complex molecules by photosynthesis. But silicon dioxide is quartz and just stays in the crust of any planet on which it is found.

The most obvious way in which Earth is lucky is that it has water—lots of it. Earth is not quite unique in this respect—Jupiter’s moon Europa is covered with oceans that are capped with ice. But on Earth, the water exists in all three states: ice, liquid water, and water vapor. Not only do life processes, as we know or imagine them, occur in liquid water, but water moves from oceans to continents and back in gaseous form. Europa has liquid water (kept from freezing not by any warmth from the Sun but by the pull of Jupiter’s gravitational field) but has no water cycle as does the Earth. Thus when you consider carbon and water, Earth is lucky not just in what it has but in what it can do with it: carbon and water can circulate around and around on the planet.

Ward and Brownlee conclude that simple microbial life may be common in the universe. But for advanced life to evolve, it is necessary that planetary conditions remain within certain limits for a long time. Such long term stability, and the complex life and advanced civilizations that would require such stability, appear to be vanishingly rare in the universe.

This essay is adapted from chapter 1 of my forthcoming book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-aged, Stressed-out World, to be released soon by Prometheus Books.

Transcendent Values?

2011-01-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

I would like to begin the new year with an evolutionary insight I just had. The one aspect of religion to which some religious people cling even after they have given up many conventional doctrinal beliefs is that there really is such a thing as transcendent good and evil. No matter what planet in the universe, it is always good to treat other sentient beings with love and respect, and it is evil to harm or oppress them. (Of course, this does not apply to non-sentient beings such as the bacteria I just showered away.) That is, goodness is not simply something that worked for our species; it transcends evolutionary contingency.

Then I started thinking about dogs and cats. Dogs and cats are both altruistic, at least to the extent of having kin selection, which means that they cooperate with their close genetic relatives. But for cats, that is about as far as it goes. Housecats can be affectionate, but only because they identify us with their kin. Dogs are a different matter. They can devote themselves selflessly to the leader of the pack, whether a human or another dog. They have a very strong sense of direct reciprocal altruism. That is, cats use us, but dogs really do like us.

And this pattern relates to their method of catching prey. Cats hunt alone, whereas dogs hunt in packs. Pack altruism has evolved in dogs as a matter of survival; the only altruism cats have is a temporary affection for other animals they perceive as kin. What we consider to be transcendent values of goodness—such as mutual respect and aid—are adaptations for social animals like dogs, but not for individualistic animals like cats. If dogs were intelligent, they may even have altruistic as excessively developed as it is in humans.

Therefore, what I considered transcendent values might only be an evolutionary adaptation found in social species, such as humans and dogs. Therefore, maybe there are no universal, transcendent morals. This is not a happy insight for someone who wants to be religious, as I still do.

Of course, this makes no difference in how we actually live. Love, peace, mutual respect, and cooperation remain essential evolutionary adaptations for social species such as humans. Regardless of the theology, there is no question about how we should live during the upcoming year.

Looking Into the Future

2011-01-01T11:45:00.000-08:00

Welcome to a third year of evolution blogging. It is customary to look into the future at the beginning of January.

I just watched the movie Idiocracy. I know that it was released in 2005, but I just saw it. (Read this blog! It is your source of news that is no more than six years old!) It explores a simple and seemingly-irrefutable idea: that stupid people have more kids than smart people, and over time this will result in the stupidification of the human race. This is an interesting evolutionary hypothesis.

Obviously the extent of the stupidification in the movie is a humorous exaggeration. The society in the movie had food, fuel, and some waste disposal, for nobody was starving and there were no plagues. The movie is meant to make us laugh at, then think about, the things that we are doing, and that are happening to us, today. Among these are our immense production of garbage (which, in the movie, resulted in a huge garbage avalanche), the destruction of the natural world and of our farmlands, and the spread of consumer culture in which the sole function of people is to stupidly buy things, in response to advertisements that rely on our most fundamental motivation (sex). One corporation (which bought a large part of the government) has replaced all the drinking water (and crop irrigation water) with an electrolyte drink, so that water is used only in toilets. This makes us wonder if some corporations, in the world today, really have the power to run the government by their financial power, and to monopolize essential functions in our society.

There is a genetic basis for differences in intelligence among humans. However, the environmental aspect (in the womb, childhood, education, socialization) remains overwhelmingly important. Therefore the fact that, in many cases, stupid people have more kids than smart people is not likely to cause the human species to greatly stupidify itself. There is still an important role for educators such as myself. At the same time, it appears that current trends portend a significant even if not catastrophic decline in intelligence.

Movies like Idiocracy are meant to make us think, and to choose as a society that we will educate ourselves before we decline into such depths of dysfunction.

Earth is a Lucky Planet, Part Two. Thank God for Jupiter?

2010-12-27T09:38:00.000-08:00

In a previous entry, I introduced the Rare Earth hypothesis of Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, which states that Earth-like planets on which complex life could have evolved are very rare in the universe. One reason was that Earth revolves around a stable star, the Sun.
Ward and Brownlee also point out that the Earth resides in a very lucky neighborhood of the Solar System. The two sources of luck are Jupiter and the Moon. First, consider Jupiter.

When the Solar System first formed, it was a disc of small asteroids. Many of these asteroids ran into each other and were crushed into planets by their own gravity. These planets continued to mop up asteroids until about 3.9 billion years ago. After that time, few asteroids remained that could crash into the planets. Most of the craters on the Moon (which, as large as some planets, also helped to clear away asteroids) are older than 3.9 billion years. The Moon, which has no wind or weather, has preserved an intact sample of the asteroid impacts that imperiled the early Solar System.

Another important component of the Solar System is comets. There are billions of these dirty balls of ice that orbit the sun just beyond the outer edge of the Solar System. Most of them remain at the edge of the Solar System, but some of them have very elliptical orbits, which bring them close to the sun. They whip around the Sun like a slingshot, and fly back out into the outer edges of the Solar System. While comets are near the sun, solar radiation vaporizes some of the water, creating the comet’s “tail” that everyone recognizes. Before 3.9 billion years ago, there were also a lot of comets, but they are now, like asteroids, comparatively rare.

The principal reason that asteroids and comets now only rarely fall from the sky is the planet Jupiter. Jupiter is so massive, and has such a powerful gravitational field, that it has sucked up most of the asteroids in the inner solar system, except for those in the asteroid belt, whose orbits have been stabilized by that same Jovian gravitation. Any asteroid or comet that happens to come within several million miles of Jupiter is drawn inevitably into its gaseous embrace. This is exactly what happened to the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994. After whipping around the Sun and heading back into the outer reaches of the solar system, this comet slipped too close to Jupiter, whose gravity fractured it into pieces. Each piece created a huge flare of radiation as it fell into Jupiter’s dense atmosphere, and each of the black spots that remained visible for a few weeks was similar in size to the Earth. Therefore Jupiter continues to clear away asteroids and comets from the Solar System. Without Jupiter, asteroids and comets might be hitting Earth so frequently that life would not have a chance to exist for very long.

And then there is Earth’s closest neighbor, the Moon. Most planets have moons, but Earth is the only planet in the Solar System with a moon so large in relation to it. Mars has two tiny moons, Deimos and Phobos, named after the two horses of the war god’s chariot. Jupiter and Saturn have moons larger than ours, but tiny in relation to the planetary masses. Our Moon is large enough and just far enough away to profoundly influence our planet without severely disrupting it. Everyone knows that the tug of the Moon causes the tides. Were it not for tides, there would be no intertidal zone, the only home of thousands of species of organisms. But tides may be of relatively little importance to the planet as a whole, even though they are important to barnacles. The major effect of the Moon on Earth, crucial to the survival of life as a whole, is to stabilize its movement.

As planets revolve around their suns, they rotate on their axes. These rotational axes wobble, pointing in different directions at different times. Any planet with a large amount of wobbling would have unstable climatic zones, since sometimes the equatorial zone and sometimes the polar zones would directly face the sun. The part of a planet directly facing its sun will receive the most intense radiation and be warmest. How could tropical, temperate, and polar plants and animals evolve, if the climates of those zones are extremely variable? This appears to have happened with Earth’s less fortunate little brother, Mars. Earth, however, has not tilted more than about 20 degrees from the plane of its revolution. Even the little bit of wobbling that the Earth does experience has been enough to cause about twenty Ice Ages during the last two million years of Earth history. We have the Moon to thank for the relative stability of Earth’s movements.

Earth is mighty lucky to have neighbors like Jupiter and the Moon. Otherwise, complex life might never have evolved here.

I adapted this essay from part of chapter 1 of my forthcoming book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-aged, Stressed-out World, to be released soon by Prometheus Books.

Also do not forget the new YouTube channel that I announced in the previous post (see below).

Announcing a new YouTube channel

2010-12-21T12:32:00.001-08:00

I have started a new channel on YouTube, called The Darwin Channel. You can search for it under my YouTube name, StanEvolve. I have posted three video clips, and more are coming. The first three are:

Darwin meets a monkey
Darwin eats a banana
Charles Darwin and natural law