A Kind of Republican You Will No Longer Find, Example 1

On the day that I am posting this, Donald Trump is visiting Tulsa for his first big rally leading up to the 2020 Election. VP Mike Pence is going to wander around Greenwood, the district in Tulsa where, 99 years ago, whites massacred blacks and destroyed one of the most prosperous black communities in the United States. Pence, an evangelical Christian, is going to meditate on how wonderful a peacemaker and reconciler Trump is, and how all black people should love Him no matter what He says or does. Thus far, as of two hours ago, no violence has erupted, despite the expectations of the white racists that blacks would massacre white people or at least destroy their businesses. Al Sharpton spoke at a rally last night, but the associated demonstrations were peaceful and positive—a Juneteenth celebration of black progress, rather than a violent blast against ongoing white racism. I will keep you posted about what happens next.

(Photo from Radio KWGS website)

There are many moderate Republicans who are ashamed of Trump, but Trump is such a powerful voice of hatred that these moderate Republicans maintain their silence and fall in line behind Him.

But this has not always been the case. There was a time when the Republican Party was not as full of hatred as it is today. I have fond memories of Republicans who, even though I now believe they were wrong, were constructive. I will share their stories with you in the next two essays.

When I was in fifth grade, it became abundantly clear to me that I needed glasses. The teacher wrote test questions on the board for us to answer, and I could not read them, nor would the teacher allow me to approach the board. A straight-A student, I was a little upset, though my final grade was hardly affected by it.

I got my glasses in sixth grade. The optometrist who examined me and prescribed them was James O. Miller of Exeter, California. I almost immediately revered him. He was a practitioner, not a scientist, but he found all aspects of science fascinating. He got most of it from a little magazine, The Griffith Observer, published by the Griffith Observatory, to which Miller was drawn by his interest in optics. Dr. Miller explained everything to me, even though I was just a little kid. He drew a diagram to show me what caused my nearsightedness (the focus from the lens was not on the retina). In a larger measure than I probably realize, he set me on the path of becoming a scientist.

Dr. Miller was a staunch Republican back in the days when Richard Nixon was running for president and Ronald Reagan was governor of California. One of my eye checkup appointments was during the 1968 Republican convention. He had the radio on in his office, and his assistant, as instructed, told him who the VP nominee was. He had never heard of Spiro Agnew. (Have you?) Miller was also what we would today call a Quiverfull Christian. He had so many kids that they had their own basketball team. I am not making this up. He joined bus trips to Sacramento to lobby for conservative causes. I was on one of those buses with him.

But his Christian views would be almost unrecognizable by modern evangelicals. Like Loren Wilkinson (see previous essay), Dr. Miller considered everything in the natural world to be joyous evidence of God and something that Christians should protect and cherish. Most modern evangelicals consider the Gaia Hypothesis to be paganism, but when Dr. Miller told me about it, he said, “I never saw such clear evidence of God in my life.” Christians like Miller are now rare, or at least obscure.

James Miller died of a sudden heart attack while he was jogging. He was enjoying health and nature until the last moment.

In Memory of Lynn Margulis

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.

Conservatives are Nature-Worshippers

This essay is a follow-up to the one on June 17.

Environmentalists are sometimes accused of being Earth-worshippers. I have heard this excuse more times than I can remember from the religious right. And it doesn’t help when scientists like James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (and myself, in my forthcoming book Life of Earth) refer to the Earth as Gaia.

But these scientists are using Gaia as just a metaphor for the living systems of the Earth. They do not believe the Earth is really a goddess or even an organism (I got this straight from Margulis). In fact, these and all other scientists are only too aware that the Earth is not godlike in its invincibility. The Earth is quite resilient—it has many processes that allow its habitats to recover from damage and disturbance, to maintain a balance of temperatures and atmospheric carbon. But it has its limits. It was in fact Lovelock himself who wrote a book about The Revenge of Gaia. The Earth can be pushed past the tipping point into disaster. Or what at least we consider disaster. Maybe bacteria, which were the only life forms on Earth for over two billion years, would not consider it a disaster. The Earth has its limits because it is not a goddess.

It is the political right that worships the Earth. They think that the Earth can recuperate from any abuse that we lay upon it. The right-wing co2science.org website says that we can pour as much carbon as we like into the air and plants will clean it up. Fred Singer, a famous anti-environmentalist, says that global warming will cause lots of new biodiversity. Conservative economists like the late Julian Simon think that the economy will create new resources whenever they are needed. They are worshipping a godlike, indestructible Earth goddess who leads our economy with what Adam Smith called (figuratively; but to some today, literally) the Invisible Hand.

This essay also appeared on my website in 2008.

Gaia

In 1978, James Lovelock, an independent British inventor of scientific equipment, proposed that the Earth was a unified living system, which he called Gaia. The Earth did not just have organisms living upon it, but could be thought of as an organism in its own right. It had physiological processes that regulated its internal conditions, just as an organism does. One of the first biologists to join him in this viewpoint was Lynn Margulis, who was famous for having figured out that complex cells evolved from the merger of simpler cells. Simple cells merged together to form complex cells, and complex organisms form complex ecosystems, which form the entire Earth. It is not just cells that are alive, but life exists on all these different levels.

Some animals (the homeotherms, such as humans) can regulate body temperature. Some scientists, following the lead of Lovelock and Margulis, claim that the Earth can do this also. Five billion years ago, the Sun produced less light, but the Earth was even warmer than it is today because there was a lot of carbon dioxide in the air, causing a greenhouse effect. As the Sun grew brighter, green cells in the oceans of the Earth removed carbon dioxide from the air (through photosynthesis), reducing the greenhouse effect, and keeping Earth’s temperature about the same as (even a little bit cooler than) it was before. This is one example of Earth having a type of homeostasis, or physiological regulation. Some scientists even use the term geophysiology for such processes. (Photosynthesis cannot rescue us from the greenhouse effect now occurring, simply because it is occurring too fast.)

This does not mean that the Earth has intelligence. All it needs is negative feedback processes. If the atmosphere has too much carbon dioxide, plant cells will remove it, and if it does not have enough carbon dioxide, decomposition will produce it. No intelligence required. Of course, intelligence is not needed for most processes within animal or plant physiology. Trees losing their leaves in autumn is a physiological process involving the length of the night and a pigment called phytochrome and a shift in hormone production, all of it accomplished without brains.

The Gaia viewpoint continues to reside on the fringes of scientific thought, often because scientists take it too literally. Some dismiss it because they think Lovelock and Margulis literally believe the Earth to be a goddess, when in reality they use Gaia as a metaphor. But every year more scientists accept some version of the Gaia concept, once they realize that it is a system of negative feedback processes rather than a goddess. It may have been unfortunate for Lovelock to have chosen the name Gaia; then again, who would have noticed the concept if he had written about the Earth as an integrated set of negative feedback processes?

So, if I were a scientist with a reputation for big-time highly-funded research, I might hesitate to use the word Gaia in public. But since I am a science educator and writer (and I do research also, on the cheap) who wants to get people to grasp the major concepts of the way the world works, I decided to go ahead and throw my hat in the ring with the Gaia theorists. Once my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World comes out later in 2010, there will be no turning back. I had to write the book in a hurry, without sitting around and wondering about my reputation. Too late now; the book is in production. But I don’t think I am going to regret my decision.

A version of this essay has also appeared on my website.