Killing Time? The Evolution of Hobbies

As I have continued reading Lonnie Aarssen’s book, What We Are, I ran across another interesting idea. He claims, and is probably correct, that human evolutionary psychology has been strongly influenced by the awareness that we are going to die. Many aspects of our cultures result from our responses to the certainty of our deaths.

One category of response is to create something that outlives us. Most of the estimated 90 billion people who have ever lived have not left any trace, other than perhaps a name on a record somewhere, that they ever existed. It doesn’t take many generations for this to happen. My great-grandfather exists now, as far as I am aware, of two photos from about 1890, a grave, and some DNA in his descendants.

 

But people who have had more money and power than did my great grandfather can do a lot more to create an enduring legacy. Rockefeller and Carnegie had endowments that are still giving awards to people. Simon Bolívar has a country named after him. These legacies create the false impression, while we are alive, that we will not die, and after we die, that we are still alive. In the Becky Hobbs/Nick Sweet musical Nanyehi, devoted to our ancestor Nancy Ward, the great Cherokee leader, the Nancy Ward character says, when you see the white swan’s wing, know that I am still alive. Of course, she isn’t, and there is remarkably little of her personal effects that can still be found (she died about 1822). But Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bolívar, and Nanyehi are still having an impact on the world.

Sir Francis Bacon noted that childless men put more into their legacies (he was thinking of creativity and intellect) than do men with big families precisely because they have no physical posterity. Wikipedia lists no children for Bacon. I have one child and two grandchildren, but this is below the world average.

The main motivation I feel in creating a legacy of writing is that I do not feel that I should hoard for myself the insights I have encountered in life. I want to share them.

Another category of response is to lose ourselves in hobbies. This allows us to ignore the fact that we will die. My Dad, for example, recorded country music on hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes, and spent countless hours documenting and organizing them. They have almost all disintegrated. I have his tape of country songs sung by our next door neighbor’s brother, Truitt. Are these hobbies just a way of killing time?

That is clearly one purpose of a hobby. But some of us try to turn our hobbies into legacies. I have thousands of photographs. They would be depressing if they were just a pile of pictures. But since 2007 all are digital, and I scanned the others. I labeled each photo with a descriptive name, and the year, so that the next generation of my family will know what each one was. Just in case they ever look at them. Of course, my daughter and family are in my photos also. You can see about a thousand of these photos (mostly of natural areas, not of me and my family) at my newly refurbished author website.

One of the best ways to create a unique legacy is to write a book. Major commercial publishers have published six of my books; I plan one more; all about popular science and history. I have also written articles, which are on various databases. My website is me, in the future. The books that I know I cannot publish through increasingly unstable commercial publishers will be, or so I plan, on Amazon. My tech-savvy son-in-law can probably find a few minutes a year to maintain my digital presence long after my passing. The essays on this blog, starting about 2008, will be available perhaps as long as the internet exists.

And that is pretty much what I do these days. I have no hobbies that are just for killing time. Time is precious, and I want to use it—all of it—to make the world better. This includes activities that maintain health and vigor, since I do not want all of my work to collapse if I have a stroke or something. And to keep me happy, since I do my best work as a writer and a grandfather by being happy. I hope to put a reasonable finish to my work and then, one day, I just won’t wake up.

Of course, my main legacy (both biological and cultural, even spiritual) will be my family, which so far is resisting extinction, and consists entirely of good people. World, you will be glad we were here.

Native American Hunters Kept Passenger Pigeon Populations in Check

 ...that is, until Native Populations crashed about 1600 because of exposure to European diseases, which caused a ninety percent population decline.

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How NativeAmericans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.

I have posted a video about the impact of Native American hunting which corresponds to chapter 3 of my book.

From about 1600 to 1800, billions of passenger pigeons darkened the skies of North America, a story too incredible to believe except that it actually happened. Why did passenger pigeons not have such huge populations before 1600? I make the case that it is because Native Americans, primarily little boys practicing with bows and arrows, hunted the pigeons enough to prevent them from having a population explosion. That is, until after European diseases caused a massive dieoff of Native Americans. This is a major way in which Native Americans had an impact on the North American landscape: by preventing the passenger pigeon explosion that did, in fact, occur after the crash of Native populations.

Native Americans did not just live in North America; they had a significant impact upon its ecology. This is something that white historians and readers who think of Native Americans as savages have overlooked.

Forgotten Landscapes: Truth and Sanity

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.

 

I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.My first video is Darwin Restores Truth and Sanity.

In March 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. I’m sure Donald Trump thinks he can rewrite American history by simply speaking His version of it into existence, but even He cannot do this. All he can do, by executive order, is to remove all National Park and Monument signage that does not have His version of American history on it. He cannot rewrite the textbooks and change all school and college courses, however much He would like to do so.

What version of American history does He want to impose? The white supremacist version. He wants to proclaim that white settlers moved into an empty North America and brought the bright white light of civilization to the few savages who already lived there. Trump is offended by signage that makes reference to slave owners and to white who killed Native Americans.

My book, Forgotten Landscapes, is in fact the way to restore truth and sanity to American history. I do not, like Trump, do so by calling my critics liars and insane. Instead my book presents the evidence:

• That Native population densities were large before European diseases decimated them
• That Natives managed the North American landscape through fire management, hunting, and agriculture

This is not the first time the Trump Administration has tried to erase Native Americans from history. In January 2025 the Justice Department proclaimed that Native Americans did not quality for birthright citizenship. The very day I made this video, the Supreme Court was deliberating a birthright citizenship case. (Update: On June 27 the Supreme Court decided that Trump had the right to limit birthright citizenship: This means that Cherokees like me might very well not be citizens of the United States or of any other country.)

The only way to restore truth and sanity to American history is for all of you, individually, to make sane and truthful use of the evidence. My book provides that evidence.

What Was I Thinking? Remembrances of My Dissertation

In 1987, I submitted my Ph.D. thesis, “Environmental Variability and Phenotypic Flexibility in Plants,” at the University of Illinois. What was I thinking? I was dealing with three variables: plants, the growth flexibility of those plants, and the variability of the environment—in this case, of sunlight intensity. I intended to write about all three of these things in this essay, but it quickly got out of hand, so I will just tell you about how I dealt with the complex problem of measuring environmental variability in three habitats: abandoned agricultural fields, tallgrass prairies, and forest floors.

One of the major problems with measuring environmental variability is construct validity—that is, how valid is a way of measuring something so that it is a believable construct of what you claim to be measuring? I explain this concept in my book Scientifically Thinking. There is no single valid way of measuring environmental variability. What I did instead was to measure it three different ways. If these three ways all gave the same results, then they were probably valid, and I could believe the results.

First, I made instantaneous measurements of light (that is, the colors of light that stimulate photosynthesis) with a “quantum sensor” designed to do exactly this thing. The problem is, this kind of light intensity varies from one moment to the next.

So I used a second method. What I really wanted to know was the spatial patchiness of shade caused by leaves. So I made three-dimensional profiles of leaf area in the three habitat types. To do this, I used nine pieces of wood, a string, and a nail. But neither of these methods could prove that variability of sunlight intensity would actually have an effect on plants.

So I used a third method as well. I used phytometers, that is, actual potted plants. I measured the weight of the plants (plus the soil, or course) in lots of different places in the three habitats in the morning and the afternoon. I measured environmental variability as the differences in how much water the plants transpired.

This was how I tackled the problem of construct validity. I measured what I wanted to know three different ways. I was taking a chance. What if the three ways gave three different answers? But I got lucky. All three methods agreed. Chalk one up for construct validity.

I had expected that weedy fields would be the most variable, the forest floor the least variable, and prairies intermediate between them. And this is what I found. I still marvel that it came out that way.

I announced my results triumphantly: weeds had the most phenotypic flexibility and lived in the most variable environment; forest floor plants had the least flexibility, and lived in the least variable environment; and prairie plants and their environment were intermediate. The results all lined up. Despite all of its limitations, this quixotic quest was successful. I believe the results, largely because I took a risk with construct validity, and it paid off. There is no way I could have gotten these results by sheer luck. Here is the plain English summary of my thesis.

A lot of the scientific method is about validity. You have to measure it, and every time you do, you are taking a risk. But if it works, you are closer to understanding the world.

Are Scientists Saving the World, Or Just Making Work for Themselves?

Ecologists have a lot to do. We are busy studying a rapidly-vanishing natural world and trying to figure out how to save it. But I am increasingly frustrated because a lot of “ecological research” is just a repackaging of what we already know, and which can have no easily-imaginable impact on saving the natural world.

What we need more of is research such as what I am now finishing—a study that demonstrates that temperate trees are opening their buds sooner in the springtime due to global warming and doing so at an amazing rate. My data set has 6,068 observations, all of which I made individually. They show that Oklahoma deciduous trees (in this case, of 22 different species) are opening their buds on the average one day earlier each year. This makes them more vulnerable to the occasional late-spring frosts such as the deep freeze that descended upon Oklahoma and Texas in February 2021. Back when buds opened in March, such a freeze might have had little effect, but buds are now opening in February, and the effect of the freeze on them was profound. I know many other scientists, such as Carol Augspurger, recently retired from the University of Illinois, who are also conducting important research.

I very much doubt that my findings, or Carol’s, would make any difference to politicians, who pay attention only to the contributions made to them by oil corporations who want us to burn baby burn as much carbon as possible, regardless of what the effects might be at some future time—or, as we now know, what the effects might be right now. Oil executives are rich and do not live where wildfires or hurricanes can harm them.

But I ran across a scientific paper—alas, there are many papers like this—in which 12 authors wrote about a phenomenon that they think they discovered called nonstationarity. [https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/fee.2298] What, you may ask, is nonstationarity? It is the confounding of changing properties that govern ecological phenomena. Ecological systems, they claim, are under constant change and exhibit spatially and temporally varying trends. Do you follow me? They claim that ecological research needs to accommodate spatial and temporal variability in ecological patterns and processes.

All of which we already knew. The authors just developed some new software to study it differently. No new data, no new discoveries, just a new kind of analysis that tells us the same things that we already knew. They had no new data about real trees, or real birds, or real lakes, or real oceans.

What is an example of temporal nonstationarity? The fact that tree rings are sometimes thicker and sometimes thinner. They even have a photograph of some tree rings to prove their point. We have known this for almost a hundred years. It is very interesting, but not new. They claim that their work is “key to…translating findings to local policies and practices.”

Politicians, interested only in money, would not be interested in the results of my analysis of 6,068 budbursts and their climatic correlates. But they would be utterly hostile toward the idea of professional ecologists and academics using taxpayer money to repack old news into new conglomerates. The authors list six National Science Foundation grants that went into their paper. The authors came from numerous academic institutions and even from a taxpayer-funded National Laboratory. I suspect that the main effect of this paper is to advance the academic careers of the authors. The paper was prominently published by the Ecological Society of America, the major scientific society of ecologists, which should have a better idea of what ecologists should spend our time doing.

Premature Optimism about Science and Religion in America

One of the foremost opponents of all attacks on evolutionary science has been Niles Eldredge, retired from the American Museum of Natural History. One of his many books was The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism (the last phrase was printed backwards on the cover, spine, and title page). When Eldredge wrote this book, he was pretty angry at the creationists.

In recent decades, I’ve stopped getting upset about what the creationists do. You cannot stop them from making false claims, and profiting from the support of millions of people whom they have duped. They are part of the conservative movement which now controls America, and they are not going to step back from the power and money that comes with it. They know they are lying, and it does no good to point out their errors to them, or to the people who willingly believe them.

Instead, what I do is to use creationism as an opportunity to teach science, and to do so by the use of humor. I have now published two articles in Skeptical Inquirer magazine entitled “Creationist Funhouse,” episodes one and two  (readable by subscribers only). More are on the way.

Eldredge allowed himself to be optimistic toward the end of his book, which was published in 2000. He wrote, “The tired old creationism debate—mired as it so thoroughly is in the nineteenth century—simply has not prepared us for the kind of positive interaction between science and religion that I see as eminently possible as we enter the new Millennium and grapple with tough environmental issues.” As Eldredge and the rest of us now know only too well, religion and science are further apart than ever, because “religion” now often means unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump, and there is less hope than ever for environmental problems to be solved, once again because of unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump. Eldredge’s millennial optimism was a good try, but reality has proven worse than we could have imagined back in 2000.

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.

Climate Change Workshop, part 5.

The climate change workshop for teachers, sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education (OESE) and the Oklahoma Climatological Survey continued this afternoon and evening.

The first two presentations were about phenology. Phenology is the seasonal pattern of biological processes: the time of year that trees burst their buds, that animals hibernate or migrate, etc. Phenological data are particularly valuable to a study of global warming because the organisms integrate many physical factors. How do you measure temperature? Average maximum temperature? Average minimum temperature? Threshold temperatures? But you can let the organisms themselves do the measuring. If global warming causes winter to be shorter and warmer, and spring to come earlier, perhaps the best way to measure this is to quantify the budburst date of deciduous trees or the flowering date of herbaceous plants.

The first presenter was Dr. Lara Souza of the University of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Biological Survey. What happens when species experience global warming? They could either stay where they are and adapt (either through natural selection or acclimatization); go extinct; or migrate to other locations with cooler temperatures.

Consider some examples. Camille Parmesan and associates showed that some British butterflies moved north during the twentieth century. They gathered their data from insect collections, in which the date and location are recorded. Another study, by Lenoir and associates, showed that most but not all species of mountain plant species shifted their distributional range to higher elevations. You can download the Lenoir data from Science (these data are open access, unlike many of the articles in Science) and have students compare the average elevation in the early vs. the late twentieth century for each species, either by making a graph or by doing a simple statistical analysis (paired-t test). The Rocky Mountain BiologicalLaboratory, at about 10,000 feet elevation in the Rockies, also has an excellent data set about the first day in spring at which many species of birds and mammals became active; this data set stretches back to 1974. Some, but not all species, have become active much earlier in the spring in the past forty years. The RMBL website is being reconstructed, but the link should lead you to the data at a later time. Another study, led by Laura Burkle, revisited some nineteenth-century pollination study plots to see how much changes has occurred in phenology. She found that, in many cases, the plants were flowering earlier but the pollinators were arriving at the same time compared to 150 years earlier.

Lara then told us how students can contribute their own data to, or work with data sets made available by, the National Phenological Network. There are also some citizen-science projects being done, including common garden experiments where people in different places plant the same plants, and keep track of their phenological responses. With the example of lilacs, people all over the country have planted not just lilacs but exactly the same breed of lilacs so that they can make direct comparisons of the same breed of plant in very different geographic locations. (There are some limitations. For example, lilacs do not grow well in Oklahoma.) Students can participate in these citizen-science projects and contribute their data to a national database.

The Saturday evening presentation was by me. Now think about this. A group of energetic teachers who have been in a workshop for a day and a half. Should I just give them a scientific seminar? Uh, no. Especially since there is no place else for them to go except to my presentation! There used to be a bar down the highway but it closed. So it behooved me to present a standup comedy routine before getting into the science.

Standup comedy is not something entirely new to me. In June 2012, when I was staying with my sister in La Jolla, I walked past the San Diego Comedy Club, and it was open mike night. Why not? I signed my name on the list and went to get my Darwin hat. It was a pretty big audience, or so I thought. The only problem is that the real audience was only about six people, and everyone else was on the list for performing. Each person did his or her little thing, then left, so when they got to me (number 28) the room was pretty empty. Most of the routines were pretty lame, and most of them for the same reason: they talked only about themselves. I might have been the only comedian to talk about something other than himself. I didn't tell them my real name. I talked to them, instead, about hagfishes. Anyone who knows about hagfishes knows that you can get a lot of truly disgusting comedy material out of them. At the end, the emcee took a vote for best performance. I was one of two nominees. The emcee chose as the winner a third person who was not nominated. If I were a budding young comedian, I would have been bent out of shape, but I have a day job, so whatever. The audience was in the parking lot as I walked to the supermarket, and they said, "Hey, Darwin!" and told me they liked it. I told them I was a professor and I did things like this in my classes.

Then I gave my scientific presentation, which I briefly summarize here. I have nine years of data about budburst times of deciduous trees in Durant, Oklahoma, and the results clearly show that budburst has occurred earlier during the course of those nine years--not consistently every year, but clearly overall. But not in all species.

Then, I wanted to know what might happen in the future. Suppose that Oklahoma gets so warm that winter disappears altogether? Would that mean that the deciduous trees would grow new leaves as soon as they drop their old ones? (They will still drop their leaves, a process controlled by daylength.) That is, can I extrapolate my budburst data? The answer is not always. The answer is yes for sweetgum trees, whose buds are fully formed in the fall, but the answer is no for sycamores and pecans, whose buds require a period of cold temperatures in order to complete their development. This conclusion is based on research I conducted with my student Sonya Ross. Therefore, if global warming occurs so much that winter disappears, the budburst of some tree species will actually be delayed.

I let them go, but they all stayed to hear me perform my Evolution rap (which is on YouTube here) and my cowboy version of Wrangham's cooking hypothesis (which is on YouTube here). I then shared some refreshments with them. For workshop participants, as for students, they learn more when they are having fun--to an extent, anyway.

What Do You Do with an Old Thesis?

I defended my Ph.D. thesis in Plant Biology at the University of Illinois in 1986 and graduated in 1987. This was back in the microfilm days. Can anyone find my thesis online? I can’t. I still have a paper copy (made back in the days of hand-drawn figures).

One thing you can do with an old thesis is post it online yourself. If you have a website, stick it there as a link. Maybe then a search engine can find it directly, without having to go into the tissues and organs of a university website.

But when I looked at my thesis, I realized it was almost unreadable. It seems inconceivable that this thesis was written by the guy who later produced books that general readers loved, especially Encyclopedia of Evolution and Green Planet. The only thing that made this possible was my subsequent career of teaching, and my continual practice at writing. I had a mission to make science understandable and interesting to students and the general public—and eventually, I learned how.

So I took a couple of days this summer (yes, it was only a couple of days) to rewrite my thesis in plain English. Actually, if I had taken longer, I probably would have gotten bogged down in it and produced a summary less useful to readers. And here’s what I was able to do that I could not in the original:

·         I used plain English, rather than scientific jargonese.

·         I explained the background ideas, which would have been obvious to other experts in the field but which can be presupposed in the general reader.

·         I included photos and stories about the work, showing science to not be some dispassionate truth but to be a very human process, both fun and challenging.

Any of you out there with old theses that nobody looks at—perhaps even you—consider doing what I did. You can read my rewritten thesis on my website.

New video

I posted a new video on the StanEvolve channel: Barbecue with Wranglin’ Rich. It presents Richard Wrangham's cooking hypothesis of human evolution. And it has the approval of Wranglin' Rich himself. His email from Harvard noted, "Dear Stanley: I love it! Thank you for sending the link, and for promoting the cooking hypothesis. I will proudly share with my family. Actually I have a question. You cited an article from Life Magazine from the 1960s, but I don't think I know it. Can you give me a citation? It sounds like something that Carleton Coon might have said. I looked at some of your other productions. Great stuff! Appreciatively, Richard." I told him what I could of the article. Hope y'all enjoy the new video.

Evotour 2012, part one. Eclipse of the Sun

I have begun a journey to California and back, during which I will be visiting sites of evolutionary interest. I will be making Darwin videos about these places, which I will post soon on my YouTube channel.

Evotourism is a new concept, which may someday draw attention among science-literate tourists the same way ecotourism now does. I am looking into the possibility of leading evotours, and my first step is to visit or revisit sites of evolutionary interest and make videos of them.

Until just three days ago, I was not planning to include the eclipse of the sun in my tour. Then I read that the eclipse would be seen clearly in New Mexico, and I knew I would be going through New Mexico as part of my trip. So I rearranged my schedule to be in Gallup, NM on May 19, to watch, photograph, and, if possible, make a video of the eclipse, which was to occur at 7:30 mountain daylight time.

I left my motel room about 6:00 and headed south on a state highway, expecting to easily find a place to pull off to the side of the road and set up my telescope and my camera tripod. This turned out to not be so easy to do. I wanted a clear view of the horizon, but there were few places from which I could do this. And almost the only side roads, off of the state highway, were private ranch roads with cattle guards. The residences did not look like the kinds of places that would welcome loiterers even outside the fence.

At last I found a side road of a side road with a church sign, and a little dirty spot to pull over. To my surprise, when I set up the telescope, I discovered the eclipse had already begun a little before 7:30. The disc of the moon was approaching from the lower right. I quickly set up my camera and took still photos and took some videos, which I tried to narrate despite the occasional cars whooshing down the country highway. For a perfect moment I saw the annular eclipse—the moon forming a perfect black disc centered in the sun. It was impossible to take photos or videos of the eclipse without the filter, and therefore nothing else was visible—until right at sunset, when the moon had nearly passed to the upper left, when a sun with a big bite taken out of it nestled down into piñon branches.

What I narrated about was that humans used to think that gods or demons caused the sun to darken and the moon to turn to blood (eclipses) and the starts to fall from the sky (meteors). This is the language used in the scriptures we still revere. The scientific view of nature, starting with Copernicus and Galileo and other astronomers, and continuing with physics and chemistry and biology, and finally the evolutionary understanding of humans and even the human brain, has shown us that the universe is not full of demons but that we are a part of its natural laws. We are at home. I did not express this as clearly on the video, where I’d been caught unprepared, as I did in this essay. But it was good enough. I may post it on YouTube soon, except that I got the date wrong on the narration, on all the takes.

For all I could tell, the people in the convenience store and driving along the road had no idea that an eclipse was occurring. The few people I talked to had no interest. Either they attended the little fundamentalist church beside whose sign I stood, or else they were totally absorbed in their own pleasures or problems or projects. In the old days, eclipses disturbed people. Today, they should be sources of wonder. But it appears that the geocentric theory has not been replaced by the heliocentric theory as much as by the egocentric theory.

My next stop on the evotour is Petrified Forest. I’ll let you know about it.

Note: Someone posted a comment on a previous entry, but when I click on it, my computer goes into an unresponsive mode. I have not read the comment but I suspect that someone has inserted a virus. Beware! Update: The problem was apparently a computer glitch caused by Google. The comment was not a virus.

For This New Year: Your Advice Requested

It appears that Blogger reposted my December 23 entry rather than the one that I submitted. I will try again with this message.

This blog has, in its three years of existence, been primarily an outlet for my ideas: the kind of one-directional flow that feels most comfortable to a university professor. I want to change this beginning in 2012.

I would like to begin directly requesting my readers to give me advice. There is always a comment box option, which several of you have used, but my default (like that of most professors) has been to just talk and then acknowledge those few people who raise their hands. But interaction is the successful way to go. The internet is set up to encourage interaction. That means you! I would like to know what topics you would be interested in hearing about. I will continue to post things that I learn (primarily about evolution) but I will try to remember to always request your responses. I am not running out of my own ideas, but there will be plenty of time and space for yours.

I got to be smart by listening to other people—not just at scientific meetings, but everywhere, such as family reunions; not just from science, but from fiction, and from hearing people’s stories. Sometimes I crash a conversation that is going on in the hallway, and when they look at me I just said I wanted to learn something from them.

Let me know in the comment box (now or in any future comment box) what you would like to see discussed in this blog. Also check my website for news and essays. One news item: The Chinese edition of Life of Earth has just been published. I think you have to be in Taiwan to buy it.

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.

The Battle of the Church Marquees

In an entry earlier this year, I posted a photo of a church marquee in Durant, Oklahoma that renounced evolution. A few years ago this same church had a marquee that renounced the Big Bang. (Both of these photos are on my website, under "Evolution photos."

But a different kind of church marquee appeared in Tulsa, Oklahoma on March 20, 2011. It was a marquee announcing the celebration of Evolution Sunday. And it had my name on it, as the guest speaker.

Fellowship Congregational Church, under the leadership of Rev. Paul Ashby, is to be commended for embracing the truth of evolution and trying to figure out its spiritual insights and consequences. I publicly announce my thanks to Paul Ashby, to Jim Derby (retired geologist who arranged the meeting), and to the people who attended my lecture and asked good questions.