The Stars in their Courses

This is from an email I wanted to send to the office of the Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters. However, neither he nor the department had any way for the public to contact them. They hand down their decisions from an undefiled lofty summit, without any input from the public they supposedly represent.

Walters has become infamous for mandating that all Oklahoma Public School classrooms teach from the Bible, and he means this literally. He has sought bids for the state to buy 55,000 Bibles to distribute among Oklahoma classrooms. But to my knowledge he has not provided any guidance about how to do this in a manner that is acceptable to him, personally.

I pushed the limits of truth in this letter. I retired from public university teaching in Oklahoma. My university classroom would not, itself, have been required to teach from the Bible. I taught biology and evolution, not astronomy, but there was some cosmology and astronomy in my courses.

“Dear Superintendent Walters,

“I have been an Oklahoma science teacher for many years. Among the subjects that I have taught are biology and astronomy.

“In order to comply with your order, I would have to use the Bible as the basis for astronomy. I assume from what I have heard that you are a creationist who accepts the recent miraculous creation of the Earth. But that is not what I am writing about.

“Instead, my understanding is that even creationist astronomy does not include astrology, that is, the belief that stars and planets directly influence human affairs.

“Imagine my surprise when I re-discovered Judges 5:20. (I have read the Bible twice, but I forgot about this verse.) Judges is a book, which you would consider historical (it is not psalms, proverbs, or prophecy) about the Israelite conquest of Canaan. This passage is from the victory song of Deborah (a woman army leader) and Barak about a recent Israelite victory over the Canaanites. It reads, “From heaven fought the stars, from their courses they fought against Sisera.”

“Am I supposed to teach that astrology is, under some circumstances, true? If so, perhaps the state should also require classroom horoscopes and, if so, your department would issue the official horoscopes for public school use.

“If, instead, you consider this passage to be poetic allusion, then I would have no difficulty with this passage. However, how is a public school teacher to decide which Biblical passages are literal and which are poetic allusion? Your department should also issue official guidelines about this as well, perhaps an official state manual for Bible interpretation.

“Could you help me out in my confusion?”

There is much legal uncertainty about whether Walters will have to rescind his command for public school Bible instruction.

Gutenberg and Printing: A View from Strasbourg

 Strasbourg, France, where I now live, is justly proud of Johannes Gutenberg (about 1406-1468), who invented the printing press. He was born in Mainz, nearby in what is now Germany, and returned to it later, but his crucial first steps in developing the printing press were taken in Strasbourg, where a statue and a plaza commemorate him. I have posted a YouTube video, from Strasbourg, France, about Gutenberg.

One would think that Gutenberg’s idea for a printing press would have been a flash of insight that everyone would have immediately appreciated. But he did his initial work as a sideline and without funding from other people, as far as we know. His main work seems to have been as a goldsmith, polishing gems, and making mirrors. He got his idea for the printing press from another kind of press: the wine-press, which removed juice from grapes. Perhaps if he had just stuck to his polishing and mirrors, or had gone into the wine-press business, he might have had fewer financial setbacks. At least, the return on investment was very slow. His few major investors sued him. But, if Gutenberg had not persisted, the world would not have had what is now widely considered one of its most important inventions.

As a result of the printing press, ideas could now be publicized through a large number of copies, rather than copied by hand or by meticulous engravings that were affordable only for illustrations. Gutenberg developed an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that could be melted and re-used. The greater number of copies allowed the written ideas to spread more widely and gain a recognition that they would not otherwise have had, or had only after a long delay.

 

Some examples of such ideas, themselves changing the course of history, are depicted on panels on the Gutenberg monument. One of them shows the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, with a Gutenberg press squarely and symbolically in the middle of the Continental Congress. Copies of the Declaration then spread around the world, where they stirred the ideas of liberty and democracy more than any handwritten document could have done.

Another example is the idea of emancipation of slaves and the end of the institution of slavery. Were it not for the printing press, relatively few people would have been aware of how cruel a system slavery was. Anti-slavery documents stirred the hearts of good people and embarrassed those who owned or profited from slavery. This plaque graphically depicts the cruelty of slavery.

 

Another example is education. The ideas and works of all kinds of intellectuals, from Descartes to Kant to Mozart to Milton to Newton, might have been lost had it not been for the printing press making their creations widely available. As the plaque shows, it was almost entirely white male creators who benefited from this, but the spread of knowledge was a process which, once started, could not be restrained.

Who knows what great ideas might be lost even today because, even if published, go unnoticed. How much worse it would be had there been no way to publish them. This shows the important role that chance plays in evolutionary adaptation (in this case, cultural evolution).

Evolutionary Altruism and Human Genealogies

This is a letter I mailed to Tiya Miles, a Harvard professor, minority activist, and novelist, regarding her most recent novel, Cherokee Rose. I wrote on paper to her academic address, since she must be flooded with emails.

Dear Tiya Miles,

My name is Stan Rice. I am an emeritus professor of biology at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. I am the author of five popular science books about evolution, botany, and scientific thinking. I have also had a long scholarly interest in Cherokee history, due to my tribal membership, but I have no credentials in Cherokee or Native studies. I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading your novel, Cherokee Rose. I immediately recognized the James Vann character. It is a story that needed to be told.

The irresistible lure of family history, of mixed racial ancestry, has recently been an important part of my life as it was for one of your main characters, Jinx, and I assume for you also. Like Jinx, my interest in Native ancestry exploded long after the death of the last person who knew much about it, my mother. I remembered and wrote down everything my mother told me about our family’s past, but I did not seek further information from her. She was not interested in asking her Cherokee father about our family history either. She and all her siblings, long after the deaths of my Cherokee grandfather (the last one to speak Cherokee) and white grandmother, wished that they had asked them about everything they knew. I have reconstructed an historical framework and filled in the rest with imagination. As with you and Jinx, my ancestry is a major part of my identity today.

Human interest in ancestry is somewhat hard to explain from my scientific point of view. My evolution books deal with the evolution of altruism. My Ph.D. advisor was on the faculty of Harvard University, your institution. Among evolutionary biologists, altruism extends in primarily one direction, forward—an animal helping its offspring and indirect descendants—and is proportional to the degree of genetic relatedness. Parents care about offspring because they have a genetic relatedness of one-half, and their nieces and nephews because they have a genetic relatedness of one-fourth. Against this background, why should anyone care about ancestors? My Cherokee genes are 17/256, just a smidgin’ over one-sixteenth. Which is, biologically, nothing. My fascination with the story of Cherokee experiences, and the nearly universal interest in genealogies, are inexplicable from the biological viewpoint. This is one reason, of many, that I not only liked your novel but strongly identified with Jinx.

I spent my life ignoring the question of Cherokee freedmen. But I know firsthand about Cherokee hostility toward Blacks. Both sides of my family, especially the Cherokee side, was strongly racist toward Blacks. I was fortunate to have escaped this influence, as far as I am aware. I think this attitude is changing in the Cherokee tribe. I heard Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., whom you seem to have met, give a presentation at a little rural library in Oklahoma (before I moved to France). He had just discovered that one of his ancestors was a freedman. His message was that Cherokees need to face up to the fact that some of our ancestors were slave owners. (Mr. Hoskin is the kind of positive and empathetic leader our tribe has not had since Chief Wilma Mankiller.) My sixth great grandmother, Nancy Ward, one of the most famous Cherokees in history, was apparently the first Cherokee to own slaves. As I understand, she was a little unclear on the Southern concept of slavery; she did not abuse her slaves or treat them as chattel, but as employees who could not quit their jobs. Which does not alter the facts of the case. For me, the plot of your novel (about freedmen) is a personal one.

I have written, separately, to your assistant (as per your website request) to ask if you might be interested in writing a jacket endorsement of my upcoming book, Forgotten Landscapes, about the Native American transformation of the “wild” landscape of North America. I hope this request is forwarded to you. But even if you do not have time to look at my book, I wanted you to know that I, as an informed reader, appreciated your novel not just because of its superior fictional qualities but from a personal space in my heart.