The Mystery of Joan of Arc

I have been reading Mark Twain’s book (a free online version) about Joan of Arc. As in Connecticut Yankee, Twain presented Joan of Arc as an eyewitness account. According to the legend, Jeanne d’Arc was a sweet and holy little girl in Domremy in eastern France. She seemed to be utterly perfect, as well as beautiful, like Mary Poppins only very humble. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, she became a military heroine. Nobody who knew her, friends or family, could understand why this happened. She claimed that several saints, and the archangel Michael, had told her that she was the one to rescue France from English rule and to crown the Dauphin, the prince, to be the king of France. And somehow, despite numerous setbacks, she got even her opponents to believe and support her and follow her as she went to see the Dauphin. She had no military training, had never killed anything or anyone with a sword or spear. Like most country children, she could ride a horse. She claimed she would, personally, lead the French army to victory over the English.

At that time, the French army was totally demoralized, and simply accepted the English rulership that had been imposed since the battle of Agincourt. To oppose the English would be suicidal, they thought. But Joan convinced them God would support the French victory.

And the French won against the English army that was gathered at Orleans. Joan was only seventeen years old when the Dauphin, now king, made her the general of the French armies. Almost immediately afterwards, her church enemies had her burned at the stake on what the church now considers trumped-up charges. Almost immediately after this, her case was reconsidered and she was sanctified. She is now one of the great legends of history.

 

 

This photo is from a church in Strasbourg, France.
 

Great uncertainty will always remain about what really happened. Alternative interpretations of the Joan of Arc legend have been presented. Some have claimed that she was mentally unstable, which means she imagined the little voices in her head, or that she had Menière’s disease (an affliction of the inner ear) which means she actually heard sounds but they were not voices. James Phillips and colleagues say that all claims of medical or psychiatric disorders of St. Joan are unconvincing. The claim that she was actually not a simple country girl but was a bastard daughter of the previous king does not explain how she could have, despite weakness and youth, led armies to victory. If indeed she did convince the Dauphin that she was his bastard sister, why would he have let her lead the army instead of doing it himself? The claim that she was a witch substitutes one incredible explanation for another.

Maybe she was crazy, and this made her able to speak her message with utter sincerity and without hesitation. The disillusioned French might have been waiting for just such a person to appear on the scene. The human mind is not a logic machine. Under the right conditions—and nobody can predict exactly what these might be—even the best human minds can believe anything. Among the right conditions are that the human brain’s built in bullshit-detector has to get fooled, something that only a truly and sincerely crazy person can do.

I, like thousands of others, will make my pilgrimage to her birthplace Domremy-la-Pucelle (pucelle means virgin) and walk in the garden where she is supposed to have had her first visions. I will wander and wonder. Domremy is only a two and a half hour drive from where I now live, much closer than Paris. I will wait until my grandchildren are a little older and can appreciate history a little better. If I have any new insights at that time, I will let you know.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all—and one I have not heard reported before—is that this story, of the seventeen-year-old girl leading an army to victory, has happened at least twice and possibly three times or more in history. I will complete this thought in a subsequent essay.

More Evidence, As If We Needed It, of Global Warming, part four

I conducted a sixteen-year study of budburst dates in Oklahoma deciduous trees, and I found that winter buds opened in spring earlier and earlier each year, consistent with global warming. The results were highly significant. I did not, however, have time to publish this study in a scientific journal before I retired. I decided instead to publish it on my website. Here is the link to the article, with illustrations. Please note that the mailing address on the cover page is now obsolete; you may contact me through the website email link (stanriceauthor@gmail.com).

I here address an interesting point about this research, aside from its unsurprising conclusion. And that point is, what do we do with the data?

(This is a photo of the just-opening buds of black hickory. Oaks have lots of bud scales, but hickory just has two big scales for each bud.) 

My statistical analyses indicated quite clearly that all but one of the 22 tree species had earlier budburst over the course of 16 years—an average of about one day earlier each year. But this is an average. Budburst came later in silver maples—but this is because they died in the summer droughts. Pecan trees opened their buds about one day earlier each ten years, whereas sweetgums opened their buds about three and a half days earlier each year. This means the makeup of our forests might change with global warming, since not all tree species will react to it the same way.

Also, it is completely incorrect to assume that global warming means that each year is warmer than the previous year. One year can differ strikingly from the next. What we are looking for is an overall trend. This is obvious from the data presented in my graphs in the paper.

Science must also avoid what is called extrapolation. We cannot simply take this one-day-per-year rate and extend it into the past or the future. Particularly, the future. If, for example, sweetgums opened their buds three and a half days earlier each year (with the average date in my study being February 24 in 2009), this would mean that in 2029 they would open in the middle of winter, about December 19, and back in 1999 they would have opened at the end of March. I was on site in 1999, though I’d not yet begun my measurements. But I know they opened before the end of March. And they cannot open their buds in December unless winter completely vanishes. This is unlikely to happen. At least, not soon.

What this means is that one-day-per-year earlier budburst is what I observed in the study period, but there were earlier times, and may be later times, when this rate did not occur. Extrapolation is invalid, as Mark Twain explained. If the Mississippi River gets 10 miles shorter each year, then at some point, Twain quipped, St. Louis and New Orleans would be next to each other and need a joint board of aldermen. If it gets 10 miles longer each year, then in a few years it would stick out over the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America?) like a fishing rod.

Scientists should not extrapolate beyond their data. We can interpolate, within the range of data, but not extrapolate outside of it. All I can say is, this is what happened during my sixteen-year study period. As you can see from the figures in the paper, budburst dates sometimes came earlier (especially 2017) and sometimes later (for example, 2018). It changes every year, but these changes are against a background of earlier budburst, as indicated by the statistical analyses.

Yes, sixteen years in which at least twice a week, during February and March, I walked past each tree and looked for budburst. It sounds like a lot of boring work. But it was not, for me: I came to know each of these trees as an individual, and I looked forward every year to its emergence from dormancy.

As indicated in these four essays, the science of global warming is not just something to argue about—and we are all tired of arguing—but an invitation to the adventure of scientific discovery. We can, by using science, listen to what the trees have been telling us all along.

Darwin and Ecology

I’d forgotten all about it. Back in 1992 I wrote an article for a minor journal, “Charles Darwin’s Influence on Ecological Theory.” The editor accepted it for publication, but wanted revisions. I was going through a job change right then, and chose to drop the project. The article itself is outdated, and not well written. I am unwilling to revise and post it. But in this essay I will summarize some of its main points.

Here is the abstract:

“Prior to Charles Darwin, ecological relationships between organisms and their environments, and among organisms, were interpreted in terms of the Great Chain of Being, of bidirectional adaptation, and of the Balance of Nature. Darwin made valuable contributions to ecology through his careful measurements of plant and animal populations, and his understanding of the complexity of interactions among plant and animal species. But his major contribution to ecological theory was that natural selection, the evolutionary mechanism he proposed, made the Great Chain of Being and Balance of Nature concepts obsolete.

Many twentieth century ecologists believed that communities of plants and animals were superorganisms and functioned as organisms in their own right. The superorganism concept was irreconcilable with Darwinian natural selection, and only recently has ecological theory come to terms with this. For the Darwinian view of ecology to be fully successful, a response must be made to the recent proposal of a modified superorganisms concept, the Gaia Hypothesis.”

This is all interesting, even though not too original, even in 1992. You can read a lot about pre-Darwinian ecology in Ernst Mayr’s book The Growth of Biological Thought and many essays by Stephen Jay Gould.

Here is a summary of the article, which I have made as interesting as possible, but which remains (fair warning) somewhat heavy going compared to most essays on this blog.

The term ecology was first used, apparently, by Reiter in 1885 and Haeckel in 1886. St. George Jackson Mivart came up with his own version of it, which he called hexicology. (I used to think Mivart was a Catholic saint, but St. George is just his first name. He got in trouble with the Catholic church when he wrote “Happiness in Hell”.)

Even in the twentieth century, ecologists (who, like Frederic Clements, considered themselves Darwinians) thought the natural world functioned as an organism and therefore kept itself “in balance” the way your physiology stays in balance. Another example is Victor Shelford. Arthur Tansley quickly pointed out that an ecological community was a super-organisms but does not resemble an individual organism. Nevertheless the super-organism concept has led to some humorous examples. Some of its practitioners liked to walk through a Pinetum (a pine woodland) or a Quercetum (an oak forest). This approach continued until at least 1991. The idea that plant communities are discrete and nameable like organisms was eclipsed largely by Robert Whittaker’s vegetation studies starting in 1956.

For centuries, thinking about the natural world was constrained by the Scala Naturae and what I call a bidirectional view of adaptation.

First, the Scala Naturae was like a great ladder of life that included not only organisms but was a seamless fabric that included minerals (such as the fibrous asbestos) at its base. Because all of the links in the chain must exist, even pre-Darwinian scientists such as Linnaeus accepted human-ape intermediates such as Homo troglodytes and Homo sylvestris. Darwin’s research shattered the Chain.

Classification schemes were based on almost anything other than Darwin’s branching tree of life. Some were based on mathematical symmetry, such as the quinarian systems proposed by MacLeay in 1819 and Swainson in 1835. Strickland wrote in 1846 that these patterns reflected God’s pattern of thought during creation. Darwin’s research shattered these ideas. These systems had an artistic, rather than functional, completeness: species existed because the symmetry demanded them, not because of ecological opportunity, much less evolution.

Second, by bidirectional adaptation, I mean the idea that organisms fitted their environments, and the environment fitted the organisms. Edward Blyth’s 1837 example (cited in Loren Eiseley’s Darwin’s Century) was that the ptarmigan was adapted to the mountaintop and the mountaintop to the ptarmigan. Blyth’s idea was in such contrast to Darwin that Eiseley’s assertion (Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X) that Darwin got the idea of natural selection from him seems unbelievable. No scientist believes now that the environment adapts itself to organisms.

The Balance of Nature was also an old idea. Herodotus believed that a superintending providence kept predators from eating all of their prey, mainly because the prey had high reproductive rates. Similar ideas are found in Plato, Cicero, and Plotinus. Linnaeus wrote in 1759 that “…all natural things…lend a helping hand towards preserving every species…” Herbivores, for example, kept any one plant species from crowding out the others. Buffon had similar beliefs. Perhaps the most famous and extensive defense of this idea was in Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), one of the most famous pre-Darwinian science books. “Perhaps there is no species of terrestrial animals whatever, which would not overrun the earth, if it were permitted to multiply in perfect safety; or of fish, which would not fill the ocean…” Superfecundity, he explained, had two advantages: “first, that it tends to keep the world always full; whilst…it allows the proportion between the several species of animals to be differently modified …as different situations may afford them room and food…One species of insects rids us of another species…” Anticipating chapter 3 of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Paley wrote, “An elephant produces but one calif; a butterfly lays six hundred eggs…In the rivers, we meet with a thousand minnows for one pike; in the sea, a million herrings for a single shark.” Paley, and most pre-Darwinian scientists, believed that the relationships among species were designed by God just as were their bodily characteristics. You can read more in the Egerton article [].

Darwin not only passed on these concepts of ecological complexity, but painstakingly counted the number of plant seedlings that emerged from a cleared plot of land, and how many of them died. John L. Harper described this as Darwin’s “preoccupation with numbers” in “A Darwinian approach to plant ecology” (1967). Most famously, Darwin linked the abundance of clover to that of house cats, via mice and bumblebees. His metaphor of the Entangled Bank depicted the impossibility of explaining all the ecological interactions. You might as well, he said, throw up a handful of feathers and try to predict where each would fall using only the laws of physics.

Alfred Russel [one L] Wallace found examples in his extensive travels that the world was not made for man’s benefit, for example birds of paradise that live in tropical mountains inaccessible to humans, and durian fruits which can kill people when they fall from the tree. Later in life, during his period of spiritualism, Wallace asserted that the world was made for man, a view ridiculed by (who else) Mark Twain.

Popular nature writing is still filled with pre-Darwinian views. Most people believe that flowers and pollinators help each other out, as a law of nature. But in a Darwinian view, flowers that can trick their pollinators into servicing them without having to provide any benefit might prevail, and pollinators will steal nectar if they can get away with it. Ecologists use terms such as “larcenous” insects and “deceptive” flowers.

And the idea that ecology must have been designed by God persists in creationist literature.

The Gaia hypothesis was not intended to be anti-Darwinian but invokes a planetary-level homeostasis that is difficult to reconcile with Darwinian natural selection. I concluded in 1992, “Thus ecologists are left with the question of whether the earth just happens to remain in apparent homeostasis, because of Darwinian natural selection acting on individuals, or whether the earth keeps itself in real homeostasis…” As I understand, this is still the case.

Listen Up, Chauvanist Humans! A Message from Your Local Cottonwood Tree

I am a female cottonwood tree named Fluff. I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, according to your human maps. I object strongly to being called “it,” especially by humans who think they can cut me down. I am she.

Nearby is my mate, a male cottonwood tree. I did not choose him as my mate, but the seeds from which we grew happened to land very near to one another. He is somewhat arrogant, proud of his bright pink catkins, and of his sexual prowess: he can produce a hundred pollen grains for every one of my seeds.

Here is a photo of one of my autumn leaves. Is it not beautiful?

I cannot speak, so I will let botanist Stan Rice speak on my behalf. He will tell you, “Look at her beautiful green catkins” in the spring and “Listen to the susurrus of her glistening leaves” in the summer. He adores me for who I am, not for what I am. About ten percent of plant species are like me: some of us are female, and some are male. We are, as Stan tells me, dioecious. My species (which Stan calls Populus deltoides) is far from being the only dioecious species even in Oklahoma. Several species of willows; mulberries; bois-d’arc trees; holly bushes; to name a few, are also dioecious. We all deserve to be called she and he. Then there are the monoecious plants, which have separate male and female reproductive organs, but in different places on the same plant. Oak trees; walnut trees; pecan trees; pine trees—all of them are monoecious. But even more common are the species that have both male and female structures inside the same reproductive organ, usually a flower. Everyone sees the stamens of a freshly opened flower, but few notice the pistil which contains the future seeds. Even these plants, however, are gendered beings.

[Editor’s note: spell-check programs are extremely human-chauvanistic. It is difficult to get Word to not change deltoides to deltoids, as if any self-respecting organism would have arms with deltoid muscles into which covid vaccinations can be jabbed.]

A letter written recently by animal rights advocates calls for the use of gendered personal pronouns to describe animals. The lead author is Jane Goodall, who has for decades kept up a reasonable effort to get the respect of personal, rather than impersonal, pronouns used for chimpanzees. The evidence that chimps are as individual and sentient as humans is overwhelming. The use of he and she for chimps is nearly universal among thoughtful writers today.

But this letter has called for personal pronouns to be used for “non-human animals,” without precisely specifying what these are. Personal pronouns clearly apply to chimps, as well as gorillas, seals, whales, etc. Most people use he and she for their pets. But what about mice? If you can’t tell whether a mouse is male or female, should you use “they”? “The mouse left their droppings on the floor” may be awkward, but maybe it is something that all of you humans need to learn to do. What about an earthworm, which is both fully male and fully female at the same time? “I picked up the earthworm from the sidewalk and, to save his/her life, tossed him/her onto the grass.”

The problem goes far beyond pronouns. Humans arrogantly assume they can assign personal names to their pets. Stan tells me he once, as a child, had a ghost catfish that he named Sam. It died because Stan did not know he was not supposed to use tapwater in a fishbowl. I cannot imagine a fish would object to being named Sam, but then again, how would I know? How can a cottonwood empathize with a fish? Although I am more likely to do so than What’s-His-Name who thinks he is my mate.

People often name their cats something like Snookums. How degrading! At least names like Shakespurr, Purrscilla, or Walter Cronkat are funny, but the cats did not choose these names. Humans do not choose their names either, at birth, but can change them later if they wish. Animals do not have this option.

For plants, the problem is unthinkably worse. Even the humans who care the most about us, like Stan, do not give us personal names very often. Stan has a database of trees in Durant, Oklahoma, and he has not given one of them a personal name. He knows many of them personally. He knows exactly where Qs26 (for Quercus stellata 26) lives, and even says hi to it when he walks by, but never by name. He certainly has not asked him/her the name he/she prefers.

The problem gets even worse when we descend into the microbe realm. Even the use of the verb “descend” is condescending. Microbes are as fully evolved, adapted to their ways of life, as are cottonwoods or even humans. One human did try to empathize with microbes. As documented in a book by David Ketterer, Mark Twain wrote a manuscript (not well known, nor well written) called Three Thousand Years among the Microbes. He was a human who shrank down to microbe size and lived on their time scale. He stayed for about three human weeks, which was about three thousand microbe years. He got to know them by their microbe names as individuals. He gave them human names, but only when they asked for them. One of them told him that she wanted to be called Catherine of Aragon. There were trillions of microbes on one planet—the planet being a single human being. They all had different personalities. Not only that, but each microbe itself had billions of microbes on and inside of him/her, and they were as dismissive of and unmerciful toward their microbes as humans are of theirs. The microbes thought Twain was crazy when he told them there were billions of humans, each with a universe of microbes living on and in him or her. Twain wrote another manuscript, equally obscure, called The Great Dark, in which a human looked in a microscope with a drop of pond water for a few minutes and was transported to a ship, which had a microbe crew, on an ocean. His wife was with him and did not grow a human-day older during the entire decade of the voyage. Every crew member had a distinct name and personality. Twain even said that each atom had its own consciousness and personality. Twain was just trying to expand our awareness of the vastness of the big and small in the cosmos. His ideas could certainly not be right, since (as I wrote in a previous essay [ref]) atoms are small but not infinitely small, and molecules involved in metabolism have a lower size limit. Twain, of course, could not have known this.

Stan and I just had a little talk. He is a writer as well as a scientist and educator, and he told me it was physically impossible for him to assign personal pronouns, much less personal names, to all individual organisms. I told him that this didn’t matter; he should at least try. He walked away sadly. I feel bad about alienating him, and maybe if he comes back and says hi to me, I will re-start the relationship.

Race as Shorthand, Not as Reality

It has always been impossible to define race. Most humans who have ever lived have had characteristics that were recognizable for their race, although nobody could ever figure out how many races there were. For example, are subsaharan Africans all one race? Bantu people (e.g. Nigeria) look very different from Ethiopians and San (e.g. from Namibia).

But in many societies the dominant people found it extremely important to define race with an exactitude that the concept will not allow. This was particularly true for people of mixed ancestry, as many of us are. This resulted in such absurdities as the one-drop rule in pre-Civil-War America, in which “one drop of black blood” made you black, and if your mother was a slave, you were a slave, even if you were only (like the children of Sally Hemings) one-eighth black. The former Apartheid leaders of South Africa struggled with this concept so much that, in their pitiful final days of rulership, they had to define people from India as honorary whites. No more needs to be added to this, other than that if you have not read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (a slave and a master, who were both one-eighth black, were switched in the nursery), you should.

Still, look around you, and you will find that race is a useful shorthand for identifying people. Even the bluest of liberals cannot avoid it. And, for me, seeing all the different races helps me to rejoice in human diversity, more so than I would if I (perhaps more accurately) saw each person as unique. On the trams of Strasbourg, I enjoyed seeing Muslims and Jews, each in distinctive garb, mixing with saffron-robed Buddhist priests.

But many people want to make each race a category of blame. The most obvious modern example of this is that millions of conservatives consider all Muslims to deserve blame for the terrorist actions of a small number of them. The solution to terrorism, they believe, is to keep all Muslims out of America. By which they mean, all people Arabic ethnicity. (I’m not sure what they would do with red-headed white Muslims from Turkey or the former Yugoslavia.)

But I’m here to tell you, from personal experience, how evil this is. I am of partial Cherokee ancestry. My sixth great grandmother was Nancy Ward, the famous peace activist of the Cherokee Nation prior to the Trail of Tears. Her cousin, Tsiyu Gansini, was the last holdout of Cherokee warriors, whose Chickamauga warriors did not surrender until 1794 on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Tsiyu Gansini and his warriors committed numerous atrocities, and Nancy Ward could not stop them. Nancy Ward said “My cry is all for peace,” while Tsiyu Gansini said, “We are not yet conquered.” Today we would call the Chickamauga warriors terrorists.

And yet the United States considered all Cherokees to be guilty of the Chickamauga terrorism. In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, and all Cherokees, not just terrorists (of whom none remained by that time) were forced out of their homeland by the United States Army in 1838. Even though the Cherokees by that time had their own written language, newspaper, constitution, Supreme Court, and they lived in white-man houses and had white-man agriculture,

the United States still considered them savages and took their land. It was the category of “Cherokee” that allowed the government to hold all members of the category responsible for the terrorist acts of a few.

When I think about the really nice Muslims I have known, including the couple who struck up a really friendly conversation with us on the tram in Strasbourg, I know none of them approved of Islamist terrorism, any more than my ancestor Nancy Ward approved of the terrorist acts of her cousin, Tsiyu Gansini.

Mark Twain, Scientist?

Don’t forget the Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip! If you are interested, please try to register by May 3 (click here). See blog entries below for more information. One of the things we will do during evenings when we finish our day trips is to discuss what we have seen, and maybe to discuss science in general. Here are some thoughts I would like to share about science. Feel free to post comments about your insights into this topic.

Novels and short stories are experiments. At least the good ones are. The author creates a character and circumstances, then sets the experiment in motion to see what happens. In the best stories, these experiments test hypotheses. Therefore the writer is not in complete control of the outcome: the plot must follow internal rules of cause and effect, even if these rules are not the same as those on our Earth.

One of my favorite examples is Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). He believed strongly that upper class and lower class people were not different in their basic abilities and character. In particular, he despised slavery because the slaves were as fully human as the slave-owners—an idea controversial at the time even in the North. This is particularly true because a single drop of black blood made you a potential slave: an octaroon (one-eighth black) could justifiably be held in bondage, according to the scholars of the South.

Twain did not simply rail against the unfairness of slavery and class, but ran fictional experiments to test the relevant hypotheses. Most people have heard of The Prince and the Pauper, where a prince and a pauper switched places. Fewer people have heard of Pudd’nhead Wilson.

In Pudd’nhead Wilson, a quadroon slave mother was taking care of the master’s baby and her own octaroon baby. The boys were visually indistinguishable. So she switched them. Experiment begun. Her baby grew up to act like a typical slave-owner, and the master’s fully-white son like a typical slave.

Enter the local amateur scholar, Mr. Wilson, whose unusual ways prompted the locals to call him Pudd’nhead. He was trying out a new scientific technology—fingerprints. He fingerprinted the two babies before the mammy switched them. Later, his fingerprint records were the convincing evidence that proved what had happened. Experiment ended. The erstwhile slave became the new master, and for the former master was sold “down the river.” These last three words of the book, said one reviewer, would have made a better title. “Down the river” was toward plantations where work and life were harder, though not as hard as in the Caribbean where slaves seldom lived long enough to reproduce.

In addition to using fiction to test hypotheses, Twain was interested in science. Fingerprints, of course. But he also wrote an essay, “Was the world made for man?” which was a direct criticism of Alfred Russel Wallace’s spiritualistic interpretation of evolution.

Twain also performed a literary experiment in The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg. (I read this novel in an original edition with uncut pages that was sold for a few pennies at a garage sale.) In this novel, Twain tested the honesty of local businessmen, and found them all to be corrupt. One wonders whether this literary experiment was entirely realistic, whether a typical set of small town businessmen would act this way. It was from Twain’s later, cynical years. But maybe it was realistic; there are days on which I share Twain’s cynicism.

Both the scientific questions (“What is?”) and the fictional questions (“What if?”) can be approached through hypothesis-testing.

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Eleven: Was the World Made for Man?

It was on this day in 1831 that the Beagle voyage, on which the young Charles Darwin rode, began. No one, least of all Darwin, had any idea how significant this voyage would be—especially in terms of answering the question posed in the title.

This question of whether the world was made for man received its most famous answer from Mark Twain in a stunning and brilliant and humorous essay by that name. As I write this, I cannot find the essay online, and my copy is back in the office. Therefore all quotes are from memory. As I recall, Twain’s argument was that the world cannot have been made for man because of the vast period of prehistory to which man, “as impatient as the Creator undoubtedly was to see him and admire him,” was irrelevant. Twain ridiculed the idea that the vast periods of geological time were a preparation for man. Before God could make man, He had to prepare the world for him. “It was foreseen that man would need the oyster, and coal to cook it with,” so God spent millions of years making oceans with oysters and swamps that later became coal. “Now the oyster probably thought that the millions of years preceding him were meant as preparation for him—but that would be just like an oyster, which is the most conceited being that there is, except man.” And then there were the long dinosaur ages, with what Twain called dinosaurians and Arkansawrians. Lastly, Twain compared the time that man has been on the Earth to the coat of paint at the top of the (at the time new) Eiffel Tower. He supposed that the coat of paint was what the Eiffel Tower was made for, if the world was made for man.

Interestingly, Twain intended his essay as a response to Alfred Russel Wallace, friend of Charles Darwin and co-discoverer of evolution. Wallace saw the vast periods of evolutionary time as part of God’s great story which culminated in mankind. Wallace was a spiritualist, and probably made more money giving spiritualist speaking tours (mostly in California) than from his evolution writings. In other words, Twain was criticizing someone that modern ID proponents and creationists would consider an evolutionist.

But clearly the Biblical viewpoint is that the world (1) was designed (2) for man. Of course, Adam and Eve lived in a garden, and their descendants were hunters, gatherers, and small farmers. Genesis actually depicts the rise of cities, such as Babel, Sodom, and Gomorrah, as evil. But modern religious people mostly believe that God wants us to live in cities with advanced technology. They therefore think that the world (1) was designed (2) for man (3) to live as we live today (in terms of our economy and technology).

All three points are clearly wrong. The world was not designed at all, certainly not for humans. Our chromosomes are filled with dead genes and dead viruses, and horrible mutations from which natural selection has incompletely cleansed us. There are more parasites than the most creative human could have thought of. I have heard creationists claim that Satan created all parasites, because they are so acutely embarrassed of the problems that result from attributing them to a loving God. I and others have written much about this, and I must leave the point for now.

But clearly the world was not designed for us to live with modern technology. Today, this is most clearly demonstrated by the greenhouse effect causing global climate disruption. There are seven billion of us, with eighty million more each year, and the average person produces directly or indirectly more carbon dioxide every year than the last. The natural ecosystems of the Earth simply cannot process all of this extra carbon dioxide any better today than it could at the end of the Permian period, when a massive die-off occurred as a result of climate change caused by volcanic eruptions, or at the end of the Cretaceous period, when a massive die-off occurred as a result of fires caused by an asteroid. The ecosystems of the Earth have not evolved the ability to deal with massive fluxions of carbon dioxide that occurred at those times or that is occurring today. They did evolve the ability to deal with lesser perturbations.

Modern religion assumes God designed the world for us to live in it as we do today, with advanced technology and massive carbon emissions. In three ways, this assumption is proving wrong and, in the third case, dangerously wrong.