The Human Side of Science: Watson's The Double Helix

When first published in 1968, James Watson’s The Double Helix received extensive praise and comments. The only contribution that this current essay has to add to the discussion is what a biologist, me, thinks about it 52 years later. It is the autobiographical story of how Watson and his friend Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. Before this discovery, it was possible for biologists to think that DNA was not what genes are made of. After the discovery, it became obvious how DNA could contain, and transmit, genetic information. Francis Crick was not exaggerating very far when he said that they had discovered the secret of life.

When it was published, this book was a best-seller. Today, no editor or agent would touch a book for the popular market that contained the word pyrimidine. At the time, Watson was hailed as a hero, and he, along with Francis Crick and others, received the Nobel Prize for this discovery. He was a young American scientist working in England. Today, the general public has largely forgotten Watson, in retirement at age 92, especially after he made comments that were interpreted to mean that some ethnic groups were genetically superior to others. The truth, not surprisingly, is in between these extremes. He deserved his acclaim, although he was and is a flawed hero.

The main cause of his book’s success was that readers in general were surprised that scientists are regular people who have motivations in their day-to-day lives that are like anyone else’s. They get up and go to work, and some days are better than others. Some days are filled with elation, others gloom, most in between. The way scientists evaluate their colleagues is, as for everyone else, based partly on merit and partly on personal likes and dislikes. For example, Watson said that British scientists looked down on him as an uncultured American with unkempt hair.

Watson also felt antagonism toward one of the few women scientists, Rosalind Franklin (“Rosy”), because she seemed to him temperamental. He and other scientists built their schedules around not having to share a cab ride with Rosy, which took some effort since younger scientists at the time earned so little money they could not afford a car or even a single-person cab fare across town. At one point, in Watson’s recounting of events, a fistfight nearly broke out with Rosy. Shocked by Rosy’s untimely death, Watson re-evaluated his view of her, and concluded in the epilogue that Rosy was honest and generous, and before her death all hostility and bickering between them had been forgotten. I wonder if Rosy thought so. Watson was dismissive of women in general; he thought many of them were pretty (especially French exchange students) but, speaking of Crick’s wife Odile, he said that any idea of putting science into Odile’s head went against her convent upbringing. Even today, women scientists encounter a little bit of perhaps subconscious “Don’t bother your pretty head with this stuff” from male colleagues. Watson had a little, maybe more than a little, of this prejudice, which was common at the time the book was written.

The general public thought, and perhaps still thinks, that we scientists advance our understanding of the world in a step by step and entirely logical fashion. This is partly the fault of us scientists: we present “the scientific method” as something that an unemotional computer could do. This myth of science has been recently exploded by two books: my Scientifically Thinking [https://www.amazon.com/Scientifically-Thinking-Liberate-Problems-Embrace/dp/1633884708] and James Zimring’s What Science Is and How It Really Works. But in reality scientists have lurches forward and backward in our understanding, and a seemingly trivial event can open the door to understanding.

Watson struggled mightily to force the data to fit ideas that turned out to be totally wrong. The first was that DNA was a triple helix, not a double helix. The next was that the strands were held together by magnesium ions. It was Rosy who pointed out his error to him: water would just wash away the magnesium. The next was that the bases met in the middle of a double helix, but they were the same bases: A opposite A, T opposite T, etc. He got very enthusiastic about his ideas which quickly crashed. He told his colleagues all about the triple helix, but was quickly proved to be wrong, a very public humiliation; and as for his same-base pairing, he wrote a letter to the most famous chemist in the world, Linus Pauling, twelve hours after thinking of it, and within 24 more hours he knew it was wrong. The idea for complementary base pairing, rather than same-base pairing (the now famous A opposite T and C opposite G), came to him when he was fiddling around with cardboard models of the bases on what had promised to be yet another ordinary day.

Scientists also confront prevailing political prejudices. Today, climate scientists face the unbridled hostility of political conservatives about global warming, and even medical scientists are told to shut up about insisting on Covid masks. Back in the 1950s, the most famous chemist in the world, Linus Pauling, could not get a passport to England because Sen. Joseph McCarthy considered Pauling a communist, because Pauling called for world peace rather than a nuclear arms race.

Science also has its own internal esthetics. Once Watson and Crick figured out the double helix structure with complementary bases in the middle, it not only explained all the known facts (such as Chargaff’s rule and X-ray diffractions) but he felt that “…a structure this pretty just had to exist.” Apparently even Rosy agreed, which, he implied, she seldom did. As shown in this image, Rosy’s careful work with X-ray diffractions was a major step in understanding the structure of DNA.

Most younger people today, even science majors, may never have heard of Watson. They may not know that there was ever a time when the structure of DNA was not known. The Double Helix gives us a glimpse back into a world that was eager to know the secret of life, and into a life that exemplified the episodic nature of science.

Fourth of July, Celebrating What? Part two.

As I posted previously, the Fourth of July is a celebration of white supremacy.

The “self-evident truths” about “unalienable rights” applied only to white men, later to white women, and never completely to people with darker skin. Non-white people have very little to celebrate.

I have reached the conclusion, slowly over the years, that the white races have been the primary source of evil in the world. In many places around the world, lighter-skinned people have conquered and enslaved darker-skinned people. This was even true in India, where lighter-skinned people invading from the north conquered darker-skinned southern people and created a caste system to keep the dark people suppressed. The genetic signature—a Y chromosome from lighter races—proves that, in many parts of the world, light-skinned men dominated and inseminated dark women, as described in David Reich’s masterful book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.

We all know that each and every human being is both good and evil at the same time, and that every race, however defined, has both good and bad people. But I have now concluded that the people of the world should make the preliminary assumption that white people are evil. That is, this is what we should assume in the absence of further evidence; the null hypothesis should be that white people are evil. What this means is that white people carry a burden of guilt for being the primary oppressors in human history. It is therefore the responsibility of every white person to present evidence for public examination that they are actively dedicating their lives to making the world a better place. It is not good enough for white people to simply not be bad. White people should have to prove themselves good, or otherwise should be assumed to be evil. The burden of proof is therefore on white people to prove themselves to be good.

For many or most white people, this should be pretty easy to do. Just post on your social media outlets the evidence that you are a good person who loves people of other races. But if you remain silent, the dark majority of the world will assume that you are one of the oppressors.

For dark people, the world should make the preliminary assumption that they are good. This is the null hypothesis, to be accepted in the absence of further evidence. Of course, many of them are not, and the evidence for it comes from criminal records, financial or other scandals, etc.

Therefore, I proclaim to you what we must do. White people must present evidence that they are actively performing acts of goodness, while for dark people, all you have to do is not be evil.

Every person is still responsible for their own goodness or evil. If you are religious, you would say that God judges each of us individually, regardless of race. But the standards of evidence are different. White people have to work to counteract our history of evil; dark people just have to not make it worse.

What about those of us of mixed ancestry? I celebrate my Cherokee ancestry, but I look white. I am ashamed of my white ancestry, but what can I do? I must err on the side of love: I will make myself obviously good, so as to stand out from the history of evil created by my white ancestors. Maybe I don’t have to try as hard as a pure white man, but I still need to work hard. If you are half-white, you might have it easier, but you still have work to do.

When you have a world full of white people and almost-white people trying to make the world better, and dark people just not being evil, that sounds like a much better world than the one we live in right now.

And with all of this, I don’t have time to go around shooting off fireworks and driving a big pickup truck around with a Confederate flag waving from it. Okay, my fellow whites and almost-whites: get busy, and post on social media about the good things you are doing. Maybe you are already doing them. Well, let your neighbors, especially your dark neighbors, know you care about them. This will lead us to the next essay.

This essay has appeared in a blog about evolution primarily because, from an evolutionary viewpoint, human races do not actually exist.

A Scripture Verse for Scientists

The last thing that even religiously-inclined scientists might expect is a Bible verse that describes the spirit of science. But such a verse exists. It is Mark 4:22, also found in Luke 8:17: Nothing is hidden that shall not be revealed.

The verse was referring to secrets that we think nobody will ever find out about. But new scientific procedures can reveal old crimes. For example, when the Bolsheviks executed the family of the last Czar of Russia, and buried their bones, they assumed the bones would never be identified. But, decades later, DNA technology made the identification possible.

This is the idea behind forensic science, everything from forensic psychology to forensic entomology. In case you have not heard of forensic entomology, it is the study of insects and their traces to find out more about the circumstances of a death. Knowing about which maggots and other insects are in or have been in a corpse can reveal the length of time since, or the season of, the murder.

You will not get away with it! Our scientific technology will find you!

This is what science is all about: seeking to reveal hidden patterns and truths in the natural and human worlds. There is nothing that scientists consider to be “off-limits” to inquiry. This even includes the psychological processes that underlie religion and what is often called the human soul. How can a person have a brain and a soul that seem to be mirror images of one another? Would it not be simpler to say that it is unnecessary to invoke a soul in order to explain the human phenomenon?

In fact, scientists would not quite go so far as the scripture verse says. We know that there are some things we will probably never be able to explain. Some things will remain hidden. But, scientists would say, not if we can help it!

One Drop

Throughout the ages, white racists have boasted of their racial purity. In an earlier essay I said that there is no such thing as a pure white race. But it is not only that white racists have racial pride—something that other races often have as well—but they also have fear of contamination.

The example that comes first to mind is the one-drop rule for blackness before the Civil War. From the white racist point of view, you were black if one of your parents was black; or one of your grandparents was black; even if one of your great grandparents was black. That is, even quadroons (one-quarter black) and octoroons (one-eighth black) were considered black. And if your mother was a slave, you were a slave. Sally Hemings, only one-eighth black, was Thomas Jefferson’s slave. However much he may have wanted to free her, he apparently could not afford to do so, because it was against the law to just say, “Okay, you’re free now.” Some black people in the past remarked that blackness must be very powerful, if its power cannot be attenuated even by generations of white ancestors.

This fear of black contamination continued long after the Civil War. In 1890, Louisiana law classified Homer Plessy, an octoroon, as black even though he was seven-eighths white. He was therefore required to ride in the “colored” train car. He refused and was arrested. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the court ruled in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896) that segregation was not only legal but could be based on the one-drop principle.

The famous French writer Alexandre Dumas, creator of the Three Musketeers, was part black (from Caribbean ancestors).

It was not just blacks who experienced this. My great great great grandmother Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit was one-eighth Cherokee. No photos exist of her, but she probably could have pretended to be white. But since she was registered as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she had to go on the Trail of Tears, and take her one-sixteenth Cherokee daughter Minerva (my great great grandmother) with her.

Why are white racists so afraid of the genes of darker people? Former president Barack Obama is half black, half white. White racists hate him. But black Americans were happy to accept him. I am not aware that any of them ever objected to his partial white ancestry.

You can send your DNA off to have it tested for your likely ancestry. Often, people who thought themselves pure white found out that they were partly black. I do not know if any of these white people were racists; they might have just found it interesting, and found themselves wondering about what secrets have been lost from their family history. Maybe white racists are afraid to have their DNA tested in case they find themselves to be tainted with blackness.

A Genetic Record of Conquest and Dominion: A Cherokee Story

Here are further thoughts that came to me as I read David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Pantheon, 2018). See my previous essay for more about this book.

All of human history has consisted of conquest and dominion. One human group, whether tribe or nation, has conquered one or more others for as long as there have been humans. And in the course of these conquests, the conquering men have had children by the conquered women.

That is certainly what happened in America. Europeans came to America and started conquering Native Americans. Except when they intermarried with them. When they did so, it was usually a white man with a Native woman. This happened over and over again in my family. My sixth great grandmother, Nancy Ward, was a full-blood Cherokee who married a white trader, Bryan (Bryant) Ward. Their half-Cherokee daughter, Betsy Ward, married the white general Joseph Martin. Their quarter-Cherokee daughter Nancy Martin married a rich white (German) ferryboat owner named Hildebrand. Their one-eighth Cherokee daughter Elizabeth Hilderbrand (somewhere along the line the r was added to the name) married a white man, James Pettit. Then things reversed temporarily when their one-sixteenth Cherokee daughter Minerva Pettit married Usquuh-ne, a.k.a. Lewis Hicks, who may have been full-blood Cherokee. But at least on the maternal Cherokee side of my family, it has mostly been white men and Native women. The picture is of Elizabeth's grave in Ft. Gibson, Oklahoma (1801-1887).

This is also what happened to black people. Most American blacks (except the Gullah speakers from the islands off the coast of South Carolina) have partial European ancestry, mostly from white men, many of them slave owners.

The historical evidence for this is reflected in the genetic evidence. In your cells, the Y chromosome (if you have one) came only from your father, and your mitochondrial DNA (abbreviated mtDNA) came only from your mother. In a perfectly fair admixture (in which, for example, white-mother-Native-father pairings were as common as white-father-Native-mother pairings), the Y:mt ratio would be 1:1. But among American blacks, the ratio is 4:1 white to black. In some populations in Central America, as in Colombia, the ratio is as high as 20:1.

To put it in personal terms for me: Up to my great grandfather Andrew Hicks, all of the mtDNA was native. At that point, beginning with my white great grandmother Mary Franklin Hicks, all of the mtDNA was white. My grandfather married a white woman too. I got all my mtDNA from my mom, but it was probably all white. Therefore, perhaps all of my Y chromosomes, and all of my mtDNA, are white. My native genes are mixed into the other chromosomes somewhere.

Back to the white Y chromosomes. Did the white Y chromosomes in my family, and maybe yours as well, come from white men raping dark women, or from dark women choosing white males in order to get some of their wealth and status? Undoubtedly some of both. Both of these Y sources constitute oppression of women: rape is absolutely direct oppression, while the appeal of white wealth and status is an indirect, and possibly subconscious, oppression. In the case of white male owners and black female slaves, it is difficult to see it as anything except rape, since the woman had literally no choice in the matter.

But in my family, things were a little more complicated. As musician Becky Hobbs wrote in her musical Nanyehi, which was about our shared ancestress Nancy Ward, “Cherokee women have always done and will always do whatever they want.” Bryan Ward did not rape Nancy. But the white connection gave Nancy Ward status and respect in the eyes of the white conquerors, and she used this status to her advantage. (She already had status in the eyes of Cherokees.) One of the things she did was, I believe, to arrange to have her half-white daughter Betsy married to Joseph Martin, later a general. This gave Betsy influence in the white world far beyond what a full-blood Cherokee was likely to have. General Martin did not rape Betsy. The trader Bryan Ward and the general Joseph Martin got advantages among the Cherokees because they had Cherokee wives, and Nancy and Betsy got advantages from Betsy marrying the general who was in charge of Cherokee-white relations. All of this status and advantage came to a screeching halt when Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit, one-eighth Cherokee and Nancy’s great-granddaughter, had to go on the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory along with all the full-bloods, and take little Minerva with her.

But here is the most complicating factor. In three of the Cherokee-white marriages in my family history, the Cherokee woman was the squaw wife of a man who already had a white family. Bryan Ward had a white family down in Georgia, outside of Cherokee territory, and he eventually returned home to his white wife. General Martin had a white wife and family back in Virginia. Apparently, in both cases, the Cherokee women knew that they were second wives. Nancy’s great granddaughter Elizabeth Hilderbrand, however, did not. By Cherokee law, after about 1829, polygamy was illegal in the Cherokee Nation. When Elizabeth found out her white husband James Pettit had a white family in Missouri, she sued the crap out of him in the Cherokee Supreme Court and won. She was the only woman to do this in the history of the short-lived Cherokee Supreme Court. I’m proud of her. You can read about this in Theda Perdue’s Cherokee Women (University of Nebraska Press, 1998, page 151).

The biggest example of male warrior conquerors inseminating female victims was the empire of Genghis Khan. In some areas of western Asia that were once part of his empire, up to eight percent of males carry what was likely to be Genghis Khan’s Y chromosome, many centuries later. But this was not all rape. Genghis and Kublai Khan established empires that produced a lot of public works and other benefits for the conquered people. The men who ruled the empire must have been much in demand by the native women.

In all these cases, it was conquest and dominion, even if the dominion was one that the conquered women thought that they consciously chose. We just need to admit this fact about ourselves, our human species.

Human Racial History

There are some conservatives who believe in the superiority of European genes. But this is impossible. The reason is there are few if any European genes.

What we call “European” is a mixture of several different races, all of which were distinct from one another in the past but which, today, have blended together. Five thousand years ago, there were European races that do not resemble any modern races. One race had dark eyes, dark hair, and white skin; another had blue eyes, dark hair, and dark skin. These races did not become extinct, but all of their genes have been mixed together in Europeans. In addition to different Homo sapiens races, European ancestors also included some Homo neanderthalensis.

Take, for example, the famous “ice man” mummy Ötzi who got shot by an arrow as he crossed the Alps 5,000 years ago. He was a member of a race that no longer exists but was widespread in Europe 5,000 years ago.

At one time, Europe was the home of hunter-gatherers. Then people migrated from the middle east, bringing agriculture with them. In a separate migration, horsemen and herdsmen from western Asia brought Indo European languages. Europeans are the mixture of at least three human races, maybe more.

So, you Eurocentric racists, show me: will the real European please stand up?

The migration and subsequent blending of ancient races helps to explain some genetic anomalies from ancient times. The modern Europeans most closely related to Ötzi are the native people of Sardinia. How did that happen? Did Ötzi’s clan embark on an expedition to Sardinia, or maybe the Sardinians invaded Europe? Not at all. Ötzi’s race lived throughout Europe, but as later races migrated into Europe and intermixed, this intermixture did not occur in Sardinia. Sardinia contains a little remnant of Ötzi’s race. But even there, the Sardinians who most closely match Ötzi have mostly non- Ötzi genetic origins.

Such migrations and intermixtures have occurred throughout human history. People scratched their heads in confusion when it was announced that the natives of Papua New Guinea had up to six percent of their genes from the Denisovans, which were a race of Neanderthals who lived in what is now Siberia fifty thousand years ago. (Unlike European Neanderthals, who had red hair and light skin, the Denisovans were darker.)

I know that I, like others who are not expert geneticists, wondered if some Denisovans got on a boat and sailed down to Southeast Asia. But I should have known better, if only because the Papuans live not just in New Guinea but in the highlands, which is largely a world apart from the coastal plain. Any Denisovan voyagers would probably have left their genes among lowland populations. Instead, what probably happened is that people similar to the Denisovans lived throughout Asia, not just Siberia, and that the Denisovan genes were swamped out by human migrants everywhere in Asia except remote places like the New Guinea highlands.

That is, populations such as in New Guinea and Sardinia have remained partially genetically isolated. There are even some Amazonian tribes who have a little bit of Australian ancestry, even though they are mostly descended from migrants who came from Siberia. This suggests that, when the ancestors of Native Americans arrived, there were already some people living in the New World. This pre-Amerindian ancestry was swamped out everywhere except a few scattered tribes.

I got these ideas by reading David Reich’s book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Pantheon, 2018). His main point can be summarized in this way, largely from his own words: The Tree of Life concept does not work for humans, because the branches of the tree keep rejoining. There has never been a single “trunk” of the tree in the past; it is mixtures all the way down (or up).

So the next time you start feeling racial pride (white power, black power, or frybread power) just remember who you really are.

Intelligent Design vs. Writing a Novel

In summer, I have time to write novels. Maybe someday I will actually publish one.

Writing a novel is one of the closest experiences a human can have to being a Creator. The writer creates a world that must make internal sense, and in which something meaningful happens to characters about whom a reader can care. There has to be what one agent called a “redemptive arc,” in which the character’s struggles are resolved, even if the character dies. There has to be a balance; if I introduce some important force into the story, I have to have it as part of the resolution, and not leave it dangling. Perhaps most important, every scene must advance the plot in some way. Especially in today’s fiction market, there is no room for casual “asides.” (One famous example of an “aside” occurs in All the King’s Men, the novel about a corrupt governor in the early twentieth century, in which Robert Penn Warren inserted a totally unrelated story about adultery in the Civil War era.)

In three of my novels, I have imbedded a short story. In Edd’s Land, I imbedded Plantation Odyssey; in Nancy’s War, I imbedded Strangers in Green Hollow; and in Q’s the Name, I imbedded Seaside Alders. Each of the imbedded stories is a piece that was conceived as an independent novel but had no chance of surviving to term on its own. But I couldn’t just stick them in; I had to make them advance the main plot of the novel. In all three cases, I figured a way to do so.

In one of my novels, I realized that I needed to introduce the two main characters on page one. I had introduced one of them on page one, the other on page three; I realized this was a defective structure.

I also have a tendency to put in intellectual speeches, usually about religion and botany. But when I do so, I make sure they, too, advance the plot.

To have a careful structure that carries the reader along on a journey of understanding without confusing them or tripping them up or making them have to work hard to figure things out; most readers are tired, even the ones who seek understanding rather than cheap thrills. This is what it means to be a Creator.

But when you look at the universe, this is not what you see. I will give just one example. Genes of DNA (the genome) encodes the proteins that do the work of the cell. But in every case, the gene is broken up into fragments by introns, and separated by non-genetic DNA. As a matter of fact, the non-genetic DNA comprises at least 98 percent of the DNA in the cell! In some cases, as with the photosynthetic enzyme ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase, part of the enzyme is encoded in the nucleus, and another part in the chloroplast, before being assembled. It is a jumble of confusion. Nobody understands it. Nobody can look at the structure of genes and say, “Behold! Now I understand the mind of God.” Francis Collins tried, bless his heart, but it didn’t work. It looks like a Rube Goldberg apparatus. The only reason that gene expression works at all is that natural selection gets rid of any that do not work, and there must have been, over billions of years, a lot of failures. In addition, the genome contains lots and lots and lots of dead viruses.

In other words, God is either a Rube Goldberg, or is not a Creator in the fundamentalist sense.

Whoever “wrote” the genome of a typical human (or flatworm or tree) was not doing what a human creator does, giving it a logical or even comprehensible structure. The genome is more like a computer drive in which not only is the final document saved but also all of the fragments and editorial comments appear in the form of blockout print. Who would ever think of sending “John walked down the road This part is confusing. Why was he walking down the road toward isn’t it supposed to be towards? his destination Well where else would he be walking but his destination? Insert the scene from the beginning of chapter 3 here” to an editor?

The creation is not like a movie, even a bad one. It is like a movie in which all of the outtakes from the cutting-room floor are inserted at random places in the movie. No competent author would look to the genome for inspiration about how to write.