Earth, We Have a Narrative, Part Four.

Scientific presentations already follow a narrative format: the introduction sets up the problem, the methods and results sections work through it, and the discussion (or conclusions) resolves the problem. Two consequences of the narrative structure in scientific papers are:

• Everyone knows the materials and methods section is the boring part of the story. In many journals, it either appears in smaller print, or as an online supplement.
• Null results—that is, when the hypothesis is not confirmed—seldom get published. Narratives they may be, but not very good ones. But, as Stuart Firestein explains in Failure: Why Science is So Successful, this is very unfortunate, because the null results of one investigator or team can, when read by another team, save them a lot of wasted time and expense. The second team can, by studying the null results, either give up while they have time, or devise a better method. Failures, null results, are as much a part of the narrative as the protagonist’s setbacks are part of the hero’s tale.

This happens a lot in literature. People like stories that have happy endings, or are at least resolved at the end. A story is supposed to make sense, even if the world does not. In this way, a story can help us understand the world, or at least accept it, a little better. Only in rare instances is a happy ending actually required: the four damsels and three swains agreed on the happy-ending rule in Boccaccio’s Decameron, but this is unusual. Even in tragedies, things get resolved: at the end of Hamlet, we find that things really were rotten in the state of Denmark.

(Joke intermission. In a Russian tragedy, everybody dies; in a Russian comedy, everybody dies happy.)

Music also follows a narrative structure. Music definitely follows a narrative arc. In fact, it can be arcs within arcs. Most musical pieces follow the “ABA form” or “sonata form,” as I learned it in music theory class in 1975. Introduction of one or more themes; Development of interacting themes; then Recapitulation (recap) of the triumphant, modified theme or themes. You find this in nearly all classical music that people like to listen to. The theme-and-variations form, and the verses-and-refrains form, are variations of this structure. Frequently, the development is in the relative minor (if the introduction is in major), as in A minor following C major; or the other way round.

In symphonies, each movement usually has an ABA form. The first movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony has dramatic themes in the introduction, then a development that builds up tension. That is an understatement. At the end of the development, there is an extremely strident chord repeated thirty-six times. Just before you scream, the recap begins. This symphony has such a powerful narrative structure that a Tulsa audience of hundreds listened to the conductor give an hour-long lecture about it before performing the symphony. The first movement is so exhausting that Mahler wrote in a three-minute relaxation period before the second movement. The conductor duly sat down on his podium as if he had just wrestled a Viking. Now that’s a story.

Many classical symphonies follow a narrative structure in their (usually four) movements, with an ABA form within each movement. The first movement is an introduction. The second movement is often slow and thoughtful. The third movement is often lively and everybody looks forward to it. The fourth movement is a resolution and frequently features the return of the original theme. The fourth movement, or any other movement, can also have a coda, which is a big bang ending that extends past the resolution of the theme. One of the most famous codas is at the end of the famous first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Just when you think you have heard the final notes, along comes this surprising coda. This symphonic movement has such an obvious narrative structure that musical humorist Peter Schickele applied a football-game-style commentary to it.

Mozart was a master of musical narrative structure. Mozart was unrivalled in the way he made the horizontal (tune) and vertical (chord) structures work together perfectly, with seeming effortlessness, as in the Gran Partita.

Sometimes the narrative form in music is completely overt. Each of Antonín Dvořák’s symphonic poems (such as The Water Sprite, The Golden Loom, and The Wild Dove) tells an intricate folk tale, usually grisly. I love them!

The first chapter of Genesis is a song. It has six stanzas for the six days of creation. Each stanza ends with a refrain, “and there was evening, and there was morning, another day.” Creationists, by forcing it into a literal meaning, have killed its beauty. I even rewrote Genesis 1 into a form that fit the tune of Oh What a Beautiful Mornin.’ (“The creation of Earth is like music, the creation of Earth is like music...” and “It’s such a beautiful cosmos, you’d better keep it that way.”)

The middle of the twentieth century was a time of embarrassment for classical music. Composers, usually working on university faculties (hence this music is sometimes called “academic”, suitable only for study and not for enjoyment) and having very few listeners, wrote music that was deliberately formless and void with darkness over the face of the deep, as in Genesis 1:2. In most cases they didn’t even have tunes. Students, including me, were made to pretend to like them. I could list some of the pieces and composers, but you almost certainly have never heard of them. They have become extinct, except when some musicians drag out the fossils and play them for audiences that endure them. Nobody goes around humming them. Today much of that pretense has been abandoned in schools of music. These pieces of “academic” music just leave the listener feeling confused. Music does not have to end with a bang, but it should end at some sensible spot. This is why most people, in thinking about the early twentieth century, can name only composers like Hindemith, Gershwin, and Joplin, who wrote tunes. What’s there not to like about the March at the end of Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses? But “academic” composers looked down on Hindemith, especially since he insisted on sending every movement on a nice chord.

Science is stories. Literature is stories. Music is stories. We cannot not think in stories. We cannot not feel in stories.

This is only one reason that the vast story of evolution resonates less with the human spirit than does creationism. Evolution does not have a narrative arc. I tried to give it one in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, but it just didn’t match up to Genesis 1 or to Adam and Eve (Genesis 2). Ursula Goodenough tried it too, with even less success than I.

Science needs as much interesting narrative as it can get, but not at the expense of reality. I am particularly annoyed by the sound bite at the beginning of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, in which a woman says, “We have to believe in impossible things.” No, we don’t, not even (as Lewis Carroll wrote) five impossible things before breakfast. If we let the narrative dominate, then science is as useless to us as religion. This is not, however, likely to happen.

The Garden of Eden in Ancient Oceans

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.

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

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).

Altruism in Recent History

In recent decades, evolutionary altruism appears to have become more common in the human species. Even as recently as World War Two, people of civilized countries thought that there was absolutely nothing wrong with killing thousands of civilians who happened to live in an enemy country. The Firestorm of Dresden and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed reasonable to Americans, even though very few of the victims were actually responsible for German and Japanese aggression. The Rape of Nanking and the conquest of Europe seemed reasonable to Japanese and German citizens. While many soldiers had a hard time shooting fellow human beings, most soldiers and civilians approved of mass bombings of civilians whom they did not have to look in the eye. Somewhere around the time of the Vietnam War, this attitude changed. It was no longer acceptable to massacre a village, such as My Lai, just because there might be some enemy combatants there. Today, whenever an American bomb kills civilians in Afghanistan, there is a worldwide uproar. All around the world, people of every religious conviction or of no religious conviction are uniting in their rejection of torture, genocide, and war-related cruelty. This sounds like good news. I cling to it, because it is almost the only good news about the direction the world is headed.

But we must remember that this altruistic progress is the result of the beliefs and actions of individuals rather than of governments. Governments, at best, acknowledge the human rights that their people demand, and at worst suppress them. Government administrations do not advance human rights. The American government responded to civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., first with hostility, then with acquiescence, and only after many years with admiration. The progress of altruism has always and only come from the bottom up. When altruists find themselves in positions of power, they also find themselves in positions of frustration, and seldom accomplish very much.

And it is usually not facts and figures that stir people’s hearts to create a change. It was not the list of deaths and battles in Vietnam that altered American opinion; it may have been a single Associated Press photograph of children running from the village of Trangbang on June 8, 1972, screaming in pain from the burning napalm with which they had just been doused. We are still an altruistic species, and when we see something like that, it moves the hearts of everyone—with the exception of psychopaths.

A passage similar to this appears in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, to be released soon by Prometheus Books. See my website for more information.