Thomas Gilcrease, Master of Altruism

As described in Connie Cronley’s masterful and readable biography of the Oklahoma progressive crusader Kate Barnard, young Native men and women who had oil rights on their Oklahoma allotment properties were frequently the targets of white grafters who would stop at almost nothing to get the oil rights of those properties. This would include a kind of gentle kidnapping known as “spiriting away.” The young Natives, usually from the Muskogee Creek Nation, were invited on trips and given a good time. Alcohol was usually involved. The young Natives were kept under constant supervision, and once they were good and drunk, they were asked to sign a contract giving one of the Tulsa oil magnates the rights to their oil. One young woman was taken on a hog-shooting trip, beered up, and told to sign a contract. She said that she had been threatened with jail if she did not sign.

Yes, this happened in the United States, early in the twentieth century. It happened in Oklahoma after statehood. In one case, the oil multimillionaire was Thomas Gilcrease.

 

I will quote from Cronley’s book (p. 159):

Usually, the minors were taken to neighboring states—Texas, Missouri, or Arkansas—but the case of a Creek minor named Marcus Covey was remarkable for the distance he was taken. Marcus disappeared in late 1911, just as oil was discovered near his allotments. His parents…were frantic to find him. His mother contacted the secretary of the interior, and his father, a member of the Masonic fraternal organization, asked the Masons’ help in finding the boy. The Secret Service searched for four months and finally found Marcus in Southampton, England. “He was sent there by one Thomas Gilcrease,” the Secret Service agent reported, and was found “in company with a hired lieutenant of Mr. Gilcrease’s.”

Nobody in Tulsa, where I live, would fail to recognize the name. Thomas Gilcrease became one of the most famous philanthropists in Tulsa. His money was the basis for what is popularly known as the Gilcrease Museum, which is a museum and historical society of world renown. It even publishes its own journal. Its major emphasis is Native American history and culture. I have attended Native American displays and events at “the Gilcrease.”

Now that your mind has had a chance to process this breathtaking story, let me break it down a little further in terms of evolutionary theory. Thomas Gilcrease was a master of altruism, that is, of doing good things in the service of his own resources and power. In this, he is no different from thousands of other rich people. It’s just the astonishing hypocrisy that makes this story stand out.

In evolutionary theory, there are three levels of altruism, and each of them confers an evolutionary advantage that far outweighs the cost of the good deeds themselves, as I described in my Encyclopedia of Evolution.

• Kin selection. A rich person can invest in his offspring, or his extended family, which are the only way that his genes can get passed into future generations. Gilcrease certainly made his family rich.
• Direct reciprocity. Do something generous for me, and I might do something generous for you. You can’t be sure, but it usually works. Gilcrease was good to his friends, and undoubtedly received favors from them in return.
• Indirect reciprocity. By being generous, a rich person can buy a reputation for generosity. This will make society in general trust him more, which will cause him to get even richer. A good reputation can be worth more than money in the bank. The generosity has to be, however, very conspicuous. Gilcrease raked in the benefits of adoration bestowed upon him by Tulsans. Gilcrease got rich partly by kidnapping a young Native man and stealing his oil, and this allowed him to endow a museum that is a world leader in promoting Native studies.

Gilcrease could have helped the Creek tribe (he was himself one-eighth Creek) more by simply not kidnapping young Marcus than by stealing his oil money and then giving it back to the Creek tribe indirectly through his museum. But it was a lot more fun this way. If he had simply not stolen the oil, who would know it? To Gilcrease, the adulation he got from Tulsans, including Creeks, was a thousand times more satisfying than the quiet knowledge that he simply did not kidnap the young Creek man. Oh, and I bet there were tax breaks for his generosity also.

Thomas Gilcrease ruthlessly stole money then leveraged it to buy admiration. This is the highest expression of the evolution of altruism.

More about Gorilla Lawyers

In an earlier essay "Gorilla lawyers and jury abuse" I wrote about the evolution of gorilla lawyers in the Oklahoma justice system. Then, in September 2022, there was an interesting new development not in the case but with regard to the District Attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, who argued the case against the accused rapist.

I described my experience in the jury pool for a case that Kunzweiler was arguing. It was clear to me that he was enamored of his male-gorilla role over the jury. He insulted all of us, particularly two women who both ended up being excused, and who left the courtroom in tears and hugging each other. This is the sort of thing that a gorilla-lawyer loves to do. Another woman told me, “I felt like I was on trial.” The only person who was worse was the defense attorney, who even looked like Edward G. Robinson.

The interesting new development is that, on September 27, 2022, Steve Kunzweiler was stabbed by his mentally unstable daughter. There had to be a story leading up to that event, which at this writing has not been publicized. Is it possible that Kunzweiler was such a strict and negative person that he drove his daughter to the crime? Or would it have happened anyway? All I can say is, he was not a humble person and may have precipitated the crime in some way, although neither he nor anyone else deserves to be stabbed.

This makes me wonder if, that day in March 2022, Kunzweiler came to the courtroom with family matters on his mind. He took out his stresses on us, the jury pool. This was unprofessional. The jury pool was made to suffer from his anger.

One can only hope that, as he recovers from the nonlethal wounds, Kunzweiler will learn a little humility, and it might make criminal justice in Tulsa County a little more efficient—for lashing out at the jury is a waste of time if their job is to determine the innocence or guilt of the defendant. As a Republican, Kunzweiler is a hard-liner against not only defendants but, it appears, against the jury as well. Might he reconsider his stance? Considering how few Republicans ever change their minds about anything, I am not holding my breath.

Update: The very next day, Kunzweiler broke ranks with all other Republicans in calling for more, not less, government spending—on mental health interventions. Republicans tend to be mean on everything unless it affects their own lives directly, as in these two other examples:

• Dick Cheney was famous for his hard line on all social issues, except one: he thinks gays and lesbians are just people. This is undoubtedly connected with the fact that his daughter Mary is a lesbian.
• Florida governor Ron DeSantis opposes federal intervention, even for natural disasters; he opposed federal help for New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy. But he suddenly accepted federal help when a hurricane hit his state, as occurred in September 2022.

Garbage in Oklahoma: Another Message from Fluff

 

Hi. This is Fluff, a female cottonwood tree in Tulsa (she/hers). My thoughts are being passed on to you by a botanist named Stan Rice (he/him/his), who is the only human who stops to talk with me.

Right at the base of my trunk, the City of Tulsa has designated an area in which volunteers can place bags of trash. The volunteers can pick up pieces of garbage from the banks of Joe Creek, which is a drainage ditch near where I am growing, put them into plastic bags, and leave them for the city to pick up.

Joe Creek certainly needs the trash pickup. The banks of the creek are thick with garbage, most of which has floated in from upstream. Stan has estimated the number of pieces of garbage along Joe Creek. It is approximately one thousand pieces of garbage per mile. There is a similar density of garbage along the banks of the Arkansas River.

Stan has made over a hundred estimates of the number of garbage items, easily visible from an automobile, along Oklahoma highways. The number ranges from ten to a thousand, with the average being about a hundred, per mile. This means that, on a typical 200-mile drive through Oklahoma, you are likely to see twenty thousand pieces of garbage. No wonder Oklahoma has such a bad reputation, completely apart from the political news of…don’t get me started. Since Stan made so many estimates, it is not likely that bias (which I discussed in an earlier message) accounts for the results: Stan did not just see a trashy place and count the pieces of garbage. He made a systematic, unbiased survey.

Every once in a while, you will find plastic bags of garbage along the roadside in which volunteers have picked up garbage for the highway department to pick up. Once Stan even saw a man actually picking up garbage. But, from month to month and year to year, such acts seem to make very little difference in the amount of garbage along the road. The reason is the huge number of people who throw litter on the roadsides. While most people do not litter, a very large number of people do, and do so in huge amounts. One of the most common ways is that people pile light garbage in their pickup truck beds and drive along the highway, pretending to not notice that the garbage blows out of the truck bed.

And nearly all this garbage is recyclable. Not that it makes any difference right now; the City of Tulsa recycling facility is shut down due to a fire. Recyclables, put into separate bins by many conscientious homeowners, now gets mixed in with the regular garbage.

But I told Stan about another source of garbage along Joe Creek. Thieves break into houses and grab stuff to take with them. Later, they hide under the bridge and sort through it to find anything of value to them, whether it is costly items or pieces of information they can use for identity theft. They simply dump the remainder into the creek bed. Since I stand by the creek all day and all night, I have seen this happen. In addition, the homeless people gather garbage with which they construct shanties in which to live along the creek. Much of the garbage problem is also a crime problem, and a poverty problem. And a sanitation problem. It is not at all uncommon to see piles of human excrement on the path. Designating a place under a cottonwood tree for volunteers to place bags of trash will not solve these problems.

In addition, I told Stan that it is nearly inevitable that people will start bringing bags of household garbage to leave at this spot. The people who live in apartments have large dumpsters for their garbage, but these dumpsters are frequently overfilled. And then there is the stuff too big for dumpsters. Stan once saw a semi-truck fuel tank left at a recycling depot. I told Stan that the spot at the base of my trunk will quickly become a pile of junk. The location is easily accessible by truck, including pickup trucks that will bring in big pieces of junk to dump them.

The problem is that you Americans get, use, and throw away too much stuff, almost all of it in large packaging. The creek bed in my shadow is thickly studded with Styrofoam fragments. You don’t need all that stuff to be happy. Of course, what would you expect a cottonwood tree to say?

I produce a lot of leaf litter each autumn. But unlike industrial human litter, my leaves decay rapidly and help to build up the soil.

The City of Tulsa sign, beside my trunk, has been out for a couple of days and is already covered with graffiti. The city officials have good intentions, but what can they do against the mass of human filth?

There is so much garbage along the creekside path, including broken glass, that Stan doesn’t like to walk there anymore. But I hope that he comes along to say hello to me once in a while. Until next time, farewell from Fluff, the cottonwood tree.

Fourth of July, Celebrating What? Part one.

Celebrating white supremacy, that’s what. Count me out.

Supposedly, slavery and the wars of genocide against Native Americans were over in the nineteenth century. Lincoln declared slavery to be illegal in 1863, even though the slaves in Texas were not told about it until “Juneteenth” in 1865. And, officially, the last massacre of Natives by whites in America was at Wounded Knee in 1890.

But, even with the official ending of slavery and of Native massacres, the slaughter continued in other forms. You could even say that the peak year was 1921, and the best place in the world to be a white supremacist was near Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I live. I am writing to you as an almost-white man in Tulsa in 2020.

The year 1921 was when the Tulsa Race Massacre took place, in which whites killed blacks with a ferocity and determination that they would never have used against slaves. The 1920’s were also the peak of lynching, of which Tulsa was a local capital. I will say nothing more about this.

But 1921 was also the official start of the Osage Murders just west of Tulsa. The Osages were the richest people in the world at that time. The U.S. government had forced them to live in dry, rocky hills that were considered to be of no value. But the Osages managed to keep, in writing, their control over the mineral (including oil) rights to their lands. When it was discovered that the Osage Reservation had the richest oil reserves in America, the Osages became very wealthy. They even had white servants. But then white men began killing Osage Natives, after marrying into their families in order to get control of their mineral rights.

The most famous example was five Osage sisters, who died one by one (by gunshot or poisoning) until only one remained, as explained by David Grann in Killers of the Flower Moon, one of the most gripping books I have ever read. The white murderers killed their own Osage family members. This started in 1921. By 1926, the murderers (led by the richest white man in Osage County, William Hale) had been identified and the case appeared to be closed. This photo is of the surviving Osage sister, Molly Burkhardt.

But Grann’s book also presented evidence that there were a lot of other deaths that were never recognized as murders. The murders orchestrated by William Hale were simply the most spectacular, culminating in blowing up a house with dynamite. But there were many other cases in which white courts appointed white guardians for Osages, who were considered incompetent to handle their own affairs; and in scores of cases, the Osage wards died at a much higher rate than the general population. These were probably poisonings.

These were not just isolated instances of bad white people. They were indicators of a widespread and murderous hostility. The Osage Murders were not simply a few evil white men. The Oklahoma soil is drenched with the blood that whites have shed from black and Native victims.

(In case you have heard of Osage County before, let me tell you where. Tracy Letts’s stage play about the incredibly dysfunctional Okie family was August: Osage County.)

It wasn’t just the Osages. My own tribe, the Cherokees, had our land allotments taken away from us by white judges and swindlers. This included by grandfather’s land. Today, hardly any Cherokees have their original land allotments. I have always borne resentment toward the governments of the United States and of Oklahoma ever since I learned this aspect of my family history.

But, at least, the Cherokee land grab was peaceful. It happened in courtrooms and bank boardrooms, and did not involve murders, as it did with the Osages. Or, at least, that is what I always thought, until I read Grann’s book.

Grann describes, among many other things that whites did to the Osages, cases in which doctors would pretend to treat Osages for ailments by giving them injections they claimed were insulin but turned out to be poison. Murders by poison were undoubtedly much more common than by more violent means. Usually, no inquest was made. In some cases, the victims died of “consumption.”

“Consumption” is tuberculosis, or TB. In the early twentieth century, lots of people had TB. One of them was my grandfather’s brother William. He died at a sanatorium in 1917. My family has always accepted this version of his death. But what if he was actually poisoned? And what if his white overseers got his land as a result of it? The photo is of Great Uncle William Carroll Hicks.

Another aspect to the white oppression of Native Americans is that maybe my grandfather was lucky to be swindled. If he had managed to hold onto his land and whatever oil it might have contained, might he have been murdered? Maybe the swindle that took his land away from him was what allowed his family, and ultimately me, to exist.

Presumably, such murderous oppression is no longer going on today. But maybe it does continue. The American government used Vietnam War military equipment against the Pine Ridge protestors in 1973, and had them ready to use against the Standing Rock protestors in 2016. Native Americans are considered to be enemy combatants by our own government.

This is the background against which white police shootings of black men take place. It is impossible for us humans to be so logical as to see each shooting independently on its own merits. It is inevitable that the world—everyone except white Americans—see this as a potentially murderous oppression of black people. But it isn’t just blacks. The rate at which Native Americans are shot by white police is greater even than the rate at which white police shoot blacks. Each year, white police shoot an average of 2.9 Natives per million population. For blacks, it is 2.6; for Hispanics, 1.7; for whites, 0.9; for Asians, 0.6. See here for more information. Every time a Native or black person is shot, we inevitably see this against a background of slavery and genocide.

You don’t even have to be completely black or Native to suffer oppression. My grandfather was only one-quarter Cherokee, but he had no more rights to his land than did the full-bloods. And don’t forget the famous civil rights case of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the “black man” Homer Plessy was seven-eighths white.

Go ahead and celebrate freedom, if you are completely white.

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

A Kind of Republican You Will No Longer Find: Example 2

Chances are you’ve never heard of James Miller, whom I described in the previous essay. But you have probably heard of Paul Harvey. Many radio stations carried his fifteen-minute program in which he gave his conservative Republican version of the news. His introduction sounded like, Stand by for news?

For him, mainstream media were intolerably liberal. He would give his right-wing reinterpretation of everything, building up to a climax that often contained the word con-damnation. But he never, ever went to the extremes that you find nearly every moment on Fox News today. And he never propagated conspiracy theories, like Tucker Carlson saying that the metric system was an instrument of world domination which America must oppose. Paul Harvey was, compared to nearly every modern Republican, a reasonable and even a nice guy.

And something Paul Harvey had that almost no conservative has anymore is empathy. Harvey cared about people. This was illustrated in a frequent segment that he had called The Rest of the Story. He would tell the stories, usually of overcoming adversity, behind many famous people past and present. It was invariably an uplifting message.

I ran across a book with 82 of his stories in it. Here were some of his stories:

• Agatha Christie faked her own murder before she became a famous writer.
• Patrick Henry kept his insane wife in his cellar.
• Mark Twain had a dream in which he foresaw his brother’s death.
• A novel entitled “Futility” described the sinking of a huge ship, called the Titan, which had proclaimed itself invulnerable. This was in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic sank.
• Wagner played music for his dog, and waited for his dog’s approval before finalizing it.
• Adlai Stevenson shot a little girl when he was a little boy, and lived his life in remorse.
• French detective Henri Latour’s final case was one in which he discovered the guilt of his own son.
• Charles Lindbergh designed an artificial heart before he went on to become a famous pilot.
• Sarah Winchester built a huge mansion to house the ghosts of those who had been killed by the rifle marketed by her late husband.

Back in the 1970s, Paul Harvey was the voice of conservatism. Now, Rush Limbaugh gets the Medal of Freedom. Somewhere along the line, Republicans have become the voice of evil.

Evil, but increasingly of impotence. Trump’s Tulsa rally yesterday was supposed to be a bang-up start to an exciting re-election campaign. He chose Tulsa, where I live, because it is the most reliable of Trump’s support bases. He expected to ride a Red wave of support, and wanted to see violent protesters spewing hatred at him and destroying public and private property, so that he could appear to be the great Savior of America. None of this happened. There were a lot of empty seats at his rally inside the BOK convention center, and there were no crowds outside, so his campaign staff dismantled the outdoor stage. Trump blamed the poor turnout on rioters, of which there were none. The protests were peaceful, and their mood turned festive toward the end.

Perhaps worst of all for Trump was that he had nothing to say about any major issues in the nation or the world. Nothing about the economy or economic competition with China. He had an opportunity to call out for racial unity, and to proclaim himself the president of all Americans, not just white Americans. He could have so easily said these things, and he would have had an outpouring of admiration. Instead, he chose to call everyone who protested against Confederate statues as being “maniacs who want to attack our country,” and an “unhinged mob who want to erase our heritage.” In both cases it was clear that by “our” he meant Confederate. Trump’s hour-and-a-half speech was so uneventful that even the protesters decided to just chill out and watch the gradual demise of Trump’s boastful self-image.

This blog is dedicated to science. This includes the evolutionary science of altruism, about which Republicans used to know a thing or two but about which they are now clueless.

Makes me wish for the days of Paul Harvey again. And as he always signed off, “Good day?”

A Kind of Republican You Will No Longer Find, Example 1

On the day that I am posting this, Donald Trump is visiting Tulsa for his first big rally leading up to the 2020 Election. VP Mike Pence is going to wander around Greenwood, the district in Tulsa where, 99 years ago, whites massacred blacks and destroyed one of the most prosperous black communities in the United States. Pence, an evangelical Christian, is going to meditate on how wonderful a peacemaker and reconciler Trump is, and how all black people should love Him no matter what He says or does. Thus far, as of two hours ago, no violence has erupted, despite the expectations of the white racists that blacks would massacre white people or at least destroy their businesses. Al Sharpton spoke at a rally last night, but the associated demonstrations were peaceful and positive—a Juneteenth celebration of black progress, rather than a violent blast against ongoing white racism. I will keep you posted about what happens next.

(Photo from Radio KWGS website)

There are many moderate Republicans who are ashamed of Trump, but Trump is such a powerful voice of hatred that these moderate Republicans maintain their silence and fall in line behind Him.

But this has not always been the case. There was a time when the Republican Party was not as full of hatred as it is today. I have fond memories of Republicans who, even though I now believe they were wrong, were constructive. I will share their stories with you in the next two essays.

When I was in fifth grade, it became abundantly clear to me that I needed glasses. The teacher wrote test questions on the board for us to answer, and I could not read them, nor would the teacher allow me to approach the board. A straight-A student, I was a little upset, though my final grade was hardly affected by it.

I got my glasses in sixth grade. The optometrist who examined me and prescribed them was James O. Miller of Exeter, California. I almost immediately revered him. He was a practitioner, not a scientist, but he found all aspects of science fascinating. He got most of it from a little magazine, The Griffith Observer, published by the Griffith Observatory, to which Miller was drawn by his interest in optics. Dr. Miller explained everything to me, even though I was just a little kid. He drew a diagram to show me what caused my nearsightedness (the focus from the lens was not on the retina). In a larger measure than I probably realize, he set me on the path of becoming a scientist.

Dr. Miller was a staunch Republican back in the days when Richard Nixon was running for president and Ronald Reagan was governor of California. One of my eye checkup appointments was during the 1968 Republican convention. He had the radio on in his office, and his assistant, as instructed, told him who the VP nominee was. He had never heard of Spiro Agnew. (Have you?) Miller was also what we would today call a Quiverfull Christian. He had so many kids that they had their own basketball team. I am not making this up. He joined bus trips to Sacramento to lobby for conservative causes. I was on one of those buses with him.

But his Christian views would be almost unrecognizable by modern evangelicals. Like Loren Wilkinson (see previous essay), Dr. Miller considered everything in the natural world to be joyous evidence of God and something that Christians should protect and cherish. Most modern evangelicals consider the Gaia Hypothesis to be paganism, but when Dr. Miller told me about it, he said, “I never saw such clear evidence of God in my life.” Christians like Miller are now rare, or at least obscure.

James Miller died of a sudden heart attack while he was jogging. He was enjoying health and nature until the last moment.

How to Make Your Day with Citizen Science!

How can you make an ordinary hike into an odyssey of the mind? Do some citizen science, of course!

It was a nice day in early summer, so I decided to take a hike. In Tulsa, there is really only one place to do this: Turkey Mountain, so called because it is not a mountain and has no turkeys. I could have gone to Red Bud Valley, which is a really nice place northeast of Tulsa, but the only road into and out of it is one across which trains park for hours at a time, blocking access in and out. In contrast, Turkey Mountain is near my home and is accessible.

But I have been there so many times! I almost know every trail and every tree and every rock. Of course, I always need the exercise and the fresh air. But there must be something more I could do, I thought.

There was. First, I told myself that I would deliberately look for interesting things that I might have previously overlooked. I am a botanist and I know a lot of plants, but there are quite a few that I don’t know. I did not want to carry a key with me (a big book which allows plant identification). Therefore, for many years, I just ignored the plants I didn’t know.

All of that changed with the advent of iNaturalist. Get the app on your phone; take a photo; the app will identify the species of plant (or fungus or bird or scorpion or even bacteria in some cases; it identified Nostoc commune for me, the star jelly, a cyanobacterial mat); upload it to a database with millions of observations. Therefore, I deliberately looked for new things. iNaturalist can identify plants even from crappy phone images; I verified them when I got home. Perhaps the best part is that your observation is added to the database right away, and anybody in the world can look at it, though it appears to be limited to North American observations. Within seconds you can contribute to a worldwide scientific database. Such is the power of citizen science! Bring it along with you on your hike. Participate in citizen science.

(I know you are wondering. Star jelly is mat of single cells that looks like black dried snot except that it comes back to life whenever it rains. Way cool. For centuries, it has been considered extraterrestrial in origin, e.g. asteroid poop. And an article in the magazine Fate, to which I am afraid to link, still says this. If I wrote horror novels, I would have a giant star jelly attacking Godzilla. How about, Attack of the Killer Star Jelly?)

Here is an example of how participating in citizen science helped me learn things. I had always wondered what the grass was that grew along the trail in the forest. I found out it was a panic grass (genus Dichanthelium). But as I looked, I saw the “grass” was mixed in with a rush, Juncus tenuis. They look alike until you look closely.

But this is not, so far, actual science. Somebody might use the iNaturalist database to conduct scientific research, but if I just uploaded images, I was still a participant rather than an actual scientist.

Then I noticed something. It is the peak flowering time for wild carrot, Daucus carota, also called Queen Anne’s lace.

One of the strange things about the bunch of little flowers (called, in this case, an umbel) is that in the very center there is a purplish-black knob which is actually an undeveloped flower. Why is it there? I remember us botany students discussing it back when I was in grad school. Maybe, I thought, I will look it up when I get home. But instead I decided to do some science.

I noticed, first, that some of the umbels had the knobs and some did not. Second, I noticed that there seemed to be more pollinators on the umbels with knobs than those without. The hypothesis popped into my head: the knob looks like a pollinator, and it attracts other pollinators. The insects think that, if there is already a pollinator present, the umbel must be a good place to eat.

Nice idea. Now, to test the hypothesis. I needed to find a big sample of umbels with knobs, and umbels without knobs. Just looking at some of the many umbels along the trail, I found a total of 232 umbels: 136 with knobs, 96 without. I then counted the number of pollinators on each flower, and recorded these numbers on my phone notebook. (I stopped using paper when I found that sweat would destroy my paper notes.) These are the results I got:

	Percent of umbels without any pollinators	Average number of pollinators per umbel
Umbels with knobs	39	2.42
Umbels without knobs	47	1.53

The results seemed clear: flowers with the black knobs attracted more pollinators: there were fewer knobbed umbels without pollinators, and the average number of pollinators was greater.

Notice some things I had to take into account in designing this little survey.

• First, I had to avoid bias. I really had no idea if my hypothesis was correct when I started; I was not trying to get a certain answer. I even did the analysis itself before reading any background material, so as to not let other people’s results bias my analysis.
• Second, I needed an adequate sample size of umbels with knobs, and those without. If all of the umbels had knobs, I could not have tested the hypothesis. The explanation would then be lost in the evolutionary past. But there were plenty of both kinds of umbels.

I needed a large sample size because there are many other factors at work in this system. Pollinators do not behave independently of one another. They tend to move in groups, which means that, inevitably, some knobbed umbels will remain unvisited, while some un-knobbed umbels will have pollinators, even if the pollinators have a clear preference for knobbed flowers.

The next step was one I did not have time to take, and is beyond the reach of most citizen-scientists: statistical analysis. Almost any result can occur by chance. This result does not seem to be due to chance, but a statistical program on a computer (if you can afford one) will calculate the probability that the results are due to chance. You can’t do this on your cell phone. Not only do you need a program, but you need to know what you are doing. With all of those zeroes (39% and 47% of the observations), you cannot do regular parametric statistics. If you do, and get a very significant result, it is probably okay, though. But unless you have a computer program, you can’t do either parametric or nonparametric statistics. Back in grad school, we did it laboriously by hand. On clay tablets (just kidding).

Okay, now it’s time to look at the literature. Why is there a purplish-black spot in the middle of the umbel? Legend has it that Queen Anne, an avid lace-maker, pricked her finger and left a drop of blood in the middle of the lace. But, let’s stick to science. My hypothesis, that the black knob attracts insects, is the leading explanation, according to The Carrot Museum in the U.K. (You read that right. There is, in fact, a Carrot Museum, although it is online. It is dedicated to the history, evolution, science, sociology, and art of the carrot.) If I had not stopped to do some citizen science, I would never have been provoked into searching online and discovering the Carrot Museum.

But according to a 2013 article in Plant Species Biology, the dark knob in the middle of the umbel does not attract pollinators. This study used videography and triangulation. So, who is right? Me, or those authors? This raises an interesting possibility: maybe the dark knob attracts pollinators sometimes, but not others. I just got lucky. We were both right.

Then there is the possibility that the dark knob is simply a developmental oddity that is harmless and that neither natural nor artificial selection has eliminated.

Now, was this an interesting hike or what? Oh, those poor people who run or walk along with earbuds, thinking that the natural world is not interesting enough for them! But if you are reading this you probably don’t have this problem.

Family and Friends in Times of Disaster

These last couple of weeks, we have experienced natural disasters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tornadoes have raked through parts of the city. Heavy rain has swollen the Keystone reservoir. The Arkansas River is within inches of being higher than it has ever been. Though relatively few people have actually been harmed by these disasters, all Tulsans have had to be ready to evacuate from either or both of these kinds of catastrophes. Just today, Tulsa was on the national news again, this time because the flood waters are receding as fast as they rose.

And that is where being a member of a family or a network of friends is very important. My wife and I have a sturdy home not far from the river; though not on low land, flooding is possible. My daughter and son-in-law have a flimsy apartment on high land. And I have a second home, the one where I reside when I teach at the university in Durant, 160 miles away, out of the current danger zone.

In the event of flood, we will go to my daughter’s apartment; in the event of tornado, they will come to our house; in event of both, we all go to Durant. We have a plan. Those who do not have family or friends have only one place to go: an evacuation shelter.

My family is really fortunate to have the flexibility of three residences. A network of family and friends is, and has been throughout history, the most important way that humans have survived, and recovered from, disasters.

Natural disasters will become larger and more unpredictable in the future because of global warming. This is Tulsa’s third “five-hundred-year flood” since 1984. The only way the world can survive climate change disaster will be international cooperation. Many nations are cooperating in global warming prevention and adaptation.

The United States used to be one of those nations. But, as part of his interminable anger, Donald Trump pulled us out of international agreements on global warming. And, in several other ways, he has done his best to piss off even our closest allies.

It’s not just tension with China. Trump refused to endorse the joint statement from the 2018 G7 meeting. Our allies in the G7 group of nations seem to have decided that they must cooperate among themselves, leaving America in its self-imposed tantrum. Below is a BBC news photo, available at the link above, that shows a typical moment in what is supposed to be constructive cooperation between America and its allies:

Leaders in this photo, besides Trump and Bolton, include Japan's Shinzo Abe (4), Germany's Angela Merkel (6), France's Emmanuel Macron (7), and Britain's Theresa May (8).

As a result, the United States cannot expect any international assistance in the event that we should suffer a natural disaster, or, for that matter, any other kind of disaster. Trump says that he wants a policy of America First, but what he is actually doing is creating a policy of America Only. In so doing, we are rejecting any help that anyone else might ever be willing to give us. We are like the man who tells his family and friends that under no circumstances will he take shelter in their houses if floods or tornadoes come.

As we have known since the days of Petr Kropotkin, mutual aid (cooperation), a form of evolutionary altruism, is our most important human adaptation. Trump is rejecting nature’s most important evolutionary accomplishment.