Gutenberg and Printing: A View from Strasbourg

 Strasbourg, France, where I now live, is justly proud of Johannes Gutenberg (about 1406-1468), who invented the printing press. He was born in Mainz, nearby in what is now Germany, and returned to it later, but his crucial first steps in developing the printing press were taken in Strasbourg, where a statue and a plaza commemorate him. I have posted a YouTube video, from Strasbourg, France, about Gutenberg.

One would think that Gutenberg’s idea for a printing press would have been a flash of insight that everyone would have immediately appreciated. But he did his initial work as a sideline and without funding from other people, as far as we know. His main work seems to have been as a goldsmith, polishing gems, and making mirrors. He got his idea for the printing press from another kind of press: the wine-press, which removed juice from grapes. Perhaps if he had just stuck to his polishing and mirrors, or had gone into the wine-press business, he might have had fewer financial setbacks. At least, the return on investment was very slow. His few major investors sued him. But, if Gutenberg had not persisted, the world would not have had what is now widely considered one of its most important inventions.

As a result of the printing press, ideas could now be publicized through a large number of copies, rather than copied by hand or by meticulous engravings that were affordable only for illustrations. Gutenberg developed an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that could be melted and re-used. The greater number of copies allowed the written ideas to spread more widely and gain a recognition that they would not otherwise have had, or had only after a long delay.

 

Some examples of such ideas, themselves changing the course of history, are depicted on panels on the Gutenberg monument. One of them shows the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, with a Gutenberg press squarely and symbolically in the middle of the Continental Congress. Copies of the Declaration then spread around the world, where they stirred the ideas of liberty and democracy more than any handwritten document could have done.

Another example is the idea of emancipation of slaves and the end of the institution of slavery. Were it not for the printing press, relatively few people would have been aware of how cruel a system slavery was. Anti-slavery documents stirred the hearts of good people and embarrassed those who owned or profited from slavery. This plaque graphically depicts the cruelty of slavery.

 

Another example is education. The ideas and works of all kinds of intellectuals, from Descartes to Kant to Mozart to Milton to Newton, might have been lost had it not been for the printing press making their creations widely available. As the plaque shows, it was almost entirely white male creators who benefited from this, but the spread of knowledge was a process which, once started, could not be restrained.

Who knows what great ideas might be lost even today because, even if published, go unnoticed. How much worse it would be had there been no way to publish them. This shows the important role that chance plays in evolutionary adaptation (in this case, cultural evolution).

Where New Adaptations Come From

 I posted a video in which I explain where new evolutionary adaptations, and cultural innovations, come from. I filmed the video in Strasbourg, which has many old villages crammed together, such as Hoenheim (where I live) and Bischeim and even one called Souffelweyersheim.

Here is how I learned the process of natural selection. A new mutation appears, then if it is a good one, natural selection favors it. It starts off very rare—only one individual carries it—and ends up common, maybe even going to fixation (completely replacing the other versions of the gene). This is the way I taught it, and the way I wrote about it in my Encyclopedia of Evolution.

But the reality is more complicated, as is usually the case in science. If the mutation appears in a large population, say, a million organisms, then it is extremely rare—one in a million. No matter how good it is, it can get lost by random events before it has a chance to get selected. It has virtually no chance.

But suppose the large population, a million individuals, consists of small interconnected populations, maybe a hundred each. If the mutation occurs in one of them, it has a chance of becoming common, maybe even going to fixation. One chance in a hundred. Then if it spreads to another population, it has another one chance in a hundred to go to fixation. If this happens a hundred times, the new mutation now has ten thousand chances out of a million to be successful.

This is the shifting balances theory of Sewall Wright, who was one of the most important figures in the modern theory of evolution. He was publishing books right up until his death almost at age 100. New adaptations get started in small populations. That is the only way they have a ghost of a chance of succeeding. This is how natural selection must work.

Cultural evolution works the same way, but with ideas instead of genes. Suppose somebody got a great new idea in Hoenheim (or even Souffelweyersheim!). In a small village, the idea might have a chance to spread. If it becomes common in Hoenheim, it might become common in Strasbourg as well. And from there it might have a chance of success in Paris. (This may be unlikely, since Parisians consider themselves the cultural center of the universe, and Strasbourg, to them, is unspeakably provincial.) And from Paris, maybe the world. But the new idea popping up in Paris would get swamped out by all the other ideas in Paris.

This is not the whole story because, of course, Paris consists of lots of small populations, local neighborhoods and arrondissements. A big new idea in the 49^th arrondissement might spread to the 5^th.

One of the major examples of a cultural innovation starting in a place considered provincial is the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg perhaps had to start in an out of the way place—in fact, it was Strasbourg, where I now live. He did not start in Paris or Vienna.

 

Scientific (and Other) Insights from a Novelist

E. L. Doctorow, who died in 2015, was one of the most significant American novelists. Several of his books were made into movies. City of God was not one of them. It did not really have a plot that one could follow. It was the convergence of numerous story lines, several of them within the minds of characters whom I never quite identified. But City of God was an astounding book. As a scientist, I was amazed at how beautiful and poetic (without sacrificing accuracy) Doctorow was when he wrote about everything from cosmology to ants. And, of course, about evolution. This is an intellectually challenging book. I recommend it to my fellow scientists. The book is thick with theology, which it neither embraces nor hates.

I just want to mention some examples. Unlike most people in the arts, Doctorow understood how evolution works. This includes cultural evolution, a process that is very similar to biological evolution except that it uses memes (ideas) rather than genes. Memes live in human minds, and spread from one human mind to another; their fitness consists not only of how many minds they live in, but how effective they are at getting those minds to spread them to other minds. Memes can have a life of their own. Doctorow’s example was movies. Movies propagate themselves; they are a malign life form. He speculated that maybe movies came to Earth about a hundred years ago, forced us to create them. He called them a tapeworm in the planetary guts. I know it sounds strange to us; we believe that we make movies and decide to watch them. But what if they are manipulating us? This is the discombobulating aspect of cultural evolution; ideas and cultural creations can parasitize us. A current example, which Doctorow did not live to see, is how extremely violent ideas can propagate from one conservative mind to another, turning otherwise nice people into people who are a hair-trigger away from killing you.

He also wrote that “…whatever condition God provides, some sort of creature will invent itself to live in it.” (Invent itself is a figure of speech.) This is a fundamental understanding of where biodiversity came from and why. Evolution is not a stepladder toward greater complexity, as both its detractors and supporters often depict it; it is the generation of opportunists that fill previously empty resources spaces, whether deep oceans or minds.

 

I previously wrote about how white people, in general, carry a burden of guilt for oppressing darker races, and we whites (or almost-whites) need to take extra steps to prove that we, individually, have broken from our sordid heritage. Some cultural groups have more of a burden than others. Doctorow wrote a lot about the Nazi attempts to exterminate Jews, using a little-known example from Lithuania. Doctorow wrote that the Germans “bent the Jews to the shape of their hatred.” They committed any and all atrocities that they could imagine. They even boarded up Jewish hospitals and set them on fire, with patients and staff in side. It was an offense punishable by death for the people of the countries they conquered to keep a record of their brutalities, much less resist them. A major plot within City of God is the search for a box with a diary in it of what the Nazis did in Lithuania.

 

I think the German people had, and continue to have, a heavy burden to prove to the world that they are no longer Nazis, and that they are as far away from being Nazis as anyone could be. They have repented, and they need to keep showing the world over and over that they have repented. Everyone has to be nice; the Germans have to be extremely nice. And they are doing this. Germany is, today, one of the least racist countries, and one of the most positive forces for good in the world. They are doing penance for their Nazi past. If you want to find Nazis, you are more likely to find them in America, or France, or Austria. Now, if only the modern descendants and defenders of the Confederacy would do penance! It would make the United States a much better place not just for the former slaves, but for white people as well. Germany outgrew its Nazis; can conservative America outgrow its celebration of slavery?

 

The Cultural Evolution of Mimicry and Deception

Mimicry and deception are everywhere in nature, thanks to evolution. Some mollusks attract fishes by waving fishlike gills. When the fishes approach, the mollusks lay their parasitic eggs on them. Orchids mimic bees and wasps, and attract bees and wasps, which try to mate with the flowers and only end up pollinating them.

Mimicry and deception are everywhere in human society, thanks to cultural evolution. I want to briefly share an example. What do you do if you are pretending to be a scientist, and you are trying to spread your gospel which just happens to be totally contrary to all scientific data? And you want journalists to spread your gospel for you? Well, you cannot do much, unless someone gives you a lot of money. If you have the money, you can pretend to be a real grown-up scientist and you might convince journalists to believe you.

Let’s suppose you are trying to convince people that there is no such thing as global warming. The first thing you can do is to send out your literature in an envelope that looks like it comes from a legitimate source. Thousands of us scientists received an envelope that looked like this:

This plain white envelope looks like it is from the New York Times. But where is it really from? You don’t want people to know, so you put your return address, but not your name. A journalist would notice, but only if he or she had time to look closely. It doesn’t actually claim to be from the New York Times, because the NYT logo is in the lower, not upper, left.

The second thing is to have literature that looks really, really slick. A journalist might not take seriously something amateurish, such as the “National Sunday Law” weird religious pamphlets that millions of people (42 million, in fact) have gotten in their mailboxes. Those pamphlets were obviously printed up at a local rural Oklahoma print shop. But the anti-global-warming book inside the white envelope was really slick:

Third, the name of your organization should closely imitate that of a respected scientific organization. For example, if I wanted to make my literature look like it came from AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s premier scientific bodies), I could call my group the AAAST (American Association for the Advancement of Scientific Thought). Only an experienced scientist might notice the difference; a journalist might not. This global-warming denialist group called itself the NIPCC, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which looks really similar to the pre-eminent world body that studies climate change, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

Fourth, you get together with other similar groups, and you praise each other’s work. This book was published by the Heartland Institute, but was co-sponsored by CO2science.org (Craig Idso) and by the Science and Environmental Policy Project (Fred Singer). Craig Idso and Fred Singer are in fact co-authors of the Heartland book. If you visit the website of the latter group, and click on “about us,” you will find a blank, at least I did. You see, the three authors have formed three organizations, each of these organizations has gained the endorsement of two other organizations, and all three are well-funded, perhaps from the same source.

Suppose I wanted to convince everyone that the Earth was the center of the universe. I could start up that AAAST that I mentioned earlier. Then I could get some of my friends to start the STAA (Scientific Thought Association of America) and others to start the Ptolemy Institute, and I would instantly have two other societies endorsing whatever I might say, that is, if they want to still be my friends and receive...

And receive the funding that we all receive from the same source. The Heartland Institute keeps its funding sources secret. But leaked documents reveal that most of their funding comes from the Koch Brothers, who get their wealth from people burning lots of oil. They probably get a few dollars here and there from other sources, but Heartland is mostly a front for the Koch Brothers. If I had a rich donor, I would ask that donor to fund three institutes, not one.

Fifth, you have to make your funding look like it is not all from a single place. Heartland claims that it receives 60 percent of its funding from foundations, 19 percent from individuals, and 18 percent from corporations. But, you see, the Koch Brothers have a foundation, and a corporation, and they are also individuals!

Other “think tanks” are more transparent about their funding. The Cato Institute (whose lie-filled diatribe against Rachel Carson somehow got repurposed into a chapter in a book that was inexplicably published by National Geographic) acknowledges the Koch Brothers right on their homepage.

But, as it turns out, the Heartland Institute is not just funded by oil interests. It must also be funded by tobacco corporations. Heartland proclaims that smoking is bad but it should not be in any way discouraged, except in kids. This is so ridiculous that nobody could believe it, even the tobacco corporations themselves. Heartland’s website claims that anti-smoking advocates “personally profit” from their opposition to smoking. They give no data, not even any anecdotes, to support this preposterous claim. They imply that tobacco corporations aren’t in it for the money but they just want to make life better for everyone. But all of the profits (from book sales, or salaries for scientific research) that come from opposing tobacco amount to just a few hours’ worth of tobacco corporation profits. Their statement indicates that teachers such as myself who try to get students to stop smoking are reaping profits from this. But I have not earned one penny from my anti-smoking educational efforts.

What this amounts to is that Heartland will say anything if you pay them enough. Only oil and tobacco can pay them enough.

I don’t think I need to convince you that what Heartland and its associated groups are doing is wrong. I wanted to tell you about it because of the deceptive practices that they use, practices worthy of any sinful orchid or any parasite. The only thing more amazing than their strategy is that people fall for it.

Earth, We Have a Narrative, Part Three.

And the little son of a birch looked up and said, Daddy, tell me an understory.

Why do we love stories? I here suggest that our brains evolved that way, at least since our evolutionary lineage, Homo sapiens, became distinct from the other ape lineages.

The natural world can be a brutal, frightening place. It is full of predators, poisonous critters, diseases, droughts, storms. And, most of all, other human tribes who want to claim our hunting grounds as their own. Humans have fought over hunting grounds since prehistory, and as late as 1755, when the Cherokees fought the Creeks over the hunting ground at Taliwa, now part of Georgia. My sixth great grandmother Nanyehi was the Cherokee war hero in that battle.

To fight a battle, a tribe needs a military leader. Often, tribes have distinct war and peace leaders; traditional Cherokees had a war chief and a peace chief simultaneously. If the military leader brings about a victory, he brings the news back to the tribe and relates it in a narrative format, in which he is the hero, supported by his loyal followers, and in which victory was not due to luck but to the prowess and skill of the warriors, especially him, and to the blessings of their gods. And he (or she) might bring back physical plunder to share altruistically. This is the most visceral form of narrative.

In the ensuing time of peace, guess who gets the most resources and the most reproductive opportunities? Why, the military leader (war chief) and his top aides. That is, the leader who not only won the battle but could tell a story. All in the tribe who bought into the story stood a better chance of getting resources and reproductive opportunities. The genes for brains that not only were capable of, but craved, the narrative form spread in the population. Making sense of the world, especially in the form of religious narrative, might have been one of the major selective forces that resulted in the particular form of human intelligence that we have.

And the myth must be about an individual, not a collective. Even when the Soviets tried to champion stories about heroic collectives of peasants against the bourgeoisie, they had to create individual heroes; and Stalin was only too happy to assume the role of hero himself.

As I will explain in my forthcoming book tentatively titled Scientifically Thinking, due out in 2018 from Prometheus Books, the human brain did not evolve to reason, but to rationalize; not to see truth but to create it, so as to manipulate other people. Natural selection favored brains that were delusional. Not too delusional, but sometimes pretty close to it, as when religion causes some people to follow a leader to senseless deaths. We cannot jeer at the Jonestown cult, because their brains were not too different from ours. We evolved from the tribes that followed their leaders to the deaths of many in the tribe, but from which enough survived to enjoy the spoils of war and to reap the fitness benefits from it. This may have worked well enough in the past, but today our population and technology has grown so much that this kind of thinking threatens our survival. Having an ape brain couldn’t have come at a worse time.

The scientific method can unleash our minds. But you can see the kind of uphill battle we face.

The Noösphere

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French priest and paleoanthropologist in the early twentieth century. He believed and wrote about a predestined arc of evolution that would eventually lead to the “omega” endpoint, nothing less than Jesus Christ. His works were not published until after his death, but were read by millions. I doubt that anyone really understood what he meant—Sir Peter Medawar referred to his work as a “bouquet of aphorism”—and so his views, never taken seriously by scientists, have been largely forgotten by everyone else.

Along with the rest of Teilhard’s ideas, the concept of the “noösphere” has fallen into obscurity. This would be, in Teilhardian terms, the epitome of evolution, in which a worldwide network of consciousness would form.

But guess what. That particular part happened. We call it the internet. And it really did result from evolution—cultural evolution. Technological improvement has been a major product of human cultural evolution for thousands of years. Along came computers, and eventually a way for computers to communicate with one another, and therefore for users to communicate with one another. You can now tap into the thoughts of the world—including many that you would just as soon not know about. The noösphere exists.

I want to briefly mention my surprised enjoyment of one particular aspect of the internet: Facebook. There are many friends with whom I lost contact over the last forty years—some from high school, some from undergrad days, some from grad school. How to find them again? It would take an immense amount of searching back in the old days. To get the address of one particular friend, I wrote to a church I knew that person had attended. I got back an envelope with the address written on a scrap of paper, and nothing else. I felt like I was involved in some kind of hard-boiled private-dick novel. I felt almost criminal.

But nowadays you can search for people by name on FB. If you get several matches, you can look for the one that has recognizable biographical information, and a photo that may look like your friend plus forty years. If you don’t know a woman’s married name, too bad, but many of them want their old friends to find them, and use their birth name as a middle name. I must have found at least fifty friends on FB whom I would otherwise never have had contact with again.

Perry Mason would probably not need the Paul Drake Detective Agency any more. He could just have Gertie search online. Thanks, Pierre.

And while the noösphere isn’t quite the Christic endpoint of evolution as Teilhard imagined it, it is perhaps the most important thing in the world today.

My Fun Evolution Trip Part 2: Carhenge, the Other Interesting Thing in Nebraska

I continue my series of posts about a very interesting trip I took this summer. Part of the trip took me through Nebraska. I will simply note that there is, in fact, a Nebraska National Forest, in the western part of the state, with scattered ponderosa pines (not, as you might suspect, giant cornstalks).

Carhenge is exactly what its name suggests: a smaller (but not miniature) model of Stonehenge built out of big old hoopdie cars. A farmer with more money than he knew what to do with (something unlikely to happen today) decided this would be a sufficiently outlandish artistic expression. Why would anyone do this? And why am I writing about it in a science blog?

In addition to the menhirs and dolmens of cars, there are models of fishes, insects, and even dinosaurs made out of car parts.

One car has even been made to look like a covered wagon.

I use Carhenge—which you just have to see, otherwise you will not believe it—as an example of memetic variation. Just as biological natural selection is based on genetic variation, so cultural evolution is based on memetic variation. And there is no telling where these new memes can come from. The idea for Carhenge did not come out of nowhere—in Neolithic times there were many astrological henges, mainly in Europe, and Carhenge is not the only modern imitation. Carhenge, once it was created, became part of the pool of memetic variation.

But it never really caught on. Apparently nobody saw it and said, “I’d like to build me one of these.” There are lots of imitation Stonehenges in America, including one in Missouri built out of old refrigerators, but no other carhenges. So, in this sense, Carhenge was a failure of cultural evolution. And in another sense: I would have expected local people to form neo-pagan skyclad groups that would celebrate the summer solstice there. Carhenge has had one or two solstice celebrations, but not enough to take on a life of its own, certainly not with skyclad pagans (this is, after all, Nebraska). There is graffiti everywhere, mostly people’s names, and some of it Christian.

There is a time capsule there. When the time capsule is exhumed, more people might remember Carhenge than would remember you, or me.

The Red Queen Strikes

Lewis Carroll’s Alice encountered the Red Queen, who had to keep running just to stay in place as the world around her kept moving. Many evolutionary biologists, starting with Leigh Van Valen, used this imagery to describe how populations have to keep evolving just to stay where they are. The reason is that their biological environments keep changing. So if you can imagine a population of animals perfectly adapted to their physical environment, they must keep evolving new defenses against parasites. The parasites, being primarily small organisms with rapid life cycles, can evolve faster than most of their hosts. Confirmation has come from the fact that populations of animals such as snails that encounter more parasites are more likely to have sexual reproduction than populations with fewer parasites, which might reproduce without sexual recombination.

We live in a social environment with its own, and rapidly accelerating, version of the Red Queen. We are constantly evolving (by memes, not genes) new technologies that allow faster information transfer and processing, better medicine, etc. But even if we choose to remain in place—if we decide that what we have is good enough—we cannot do so, because our social environment is full of rapidly evolving parasites. Parasites in cyberspace continually evolve new ways to steal our personal information. Even corporations that consider themselves legitimate are always coming up with new plasmids in the fine print that allow them to charge us extra fees, or new designs that promote built-in obsolescence, or new attractions that make us think that we want their products when, honestly, we do not. You want to buy whole wheat bread because it is healthier? Better check to see just how much whole wheat is in it; the dark color may mostly be caramel. You have to be careful when you run your free AVG virus-check on your computer, because it will automatically sign you up for “protection” that is not free unless you take the initiative to uncheck the box. An anti-virus virus, as it were. You have to be careful when you go to a medical provider. No matter how small your problem, the provider may try to prescribe for you an expensive course of therapy.

Our economy is a jungle of parasitic perils. We have to watch every transaction, every account, all the time to catch entities that accidentally-on-purpose take money from us. Durant City Utilities charged me an extra $100 for water I did not use. I pay these utilities by automatic debit, and had I not scrutinized every transaction, I might never have caught their error, an error they admitted once I pointed it out to them. No matter what I do or don’t do, no matter how much stasis I may choose in my life, the economic environment is coming up with new ways to parasitize me. And you. No wonder it’s hard to get work done; we have to spend our time being paranoid about economic parasites. It’s sort of like a war.

What can we do, not just to protect ourselves but to go to war against the threats we face? I suggest we take stock of our strengths and opportunities, and use them. You may have more power than you realize. One thing we can do is to write letters to corporations and tell them that we know what they are doing to victimize us. In some cases, we can make them take notice. When I sent a nasty note to AIG, back when they were getting government bailout money while paying millions of dollars to their executives, they undoubtedly ignored it. But if I write a letter to a tobacco corporation saying that I teach hundreds of students not only about the dangers of tobacco but also about the illegal tactics that these corporations use (including their 1994 perjury to a House committee), they might take notice. They might take even more notice if I share contact information with my students so they can write letters too. Better yet, I can offer extra credit to the students. Or I can write and encourage others to write to sugar corporations about their deceptive marketing of a product that is dangerous in the excessive uses that they promote. We can, you see, go to war with them in the marketplace of ideas and consumer spending.

The marketplace is also filled with a cultural version of mindless parasites. The “people” with whom you interact may not even be people. When I first opened a Twitter account, I immediately had two followers whom I did not know, who had female names but no bios, and photos without faces (just alluring body parts). They soon disappeared. They were probably “bots” rather than actual people. And every writer has probably had some version of the experience I am about to relate. I sent a query letter to an agency listed in Writers Digest, but which had no website. I got a response back from what sounded like a personable agent saying, your project sounds interesting, send us the first couple of chapters. I emailed back, requesting further information about the agency. In response, I got exactly the same email as before. It appears, based on the online comments of other authors, that this agency is just a front for a law firm that thinks authors will pay them to represent their work to editors whom the author must contact. I wonder how many “literary agents” actually do not exist.

It would be nice if we could leave our parasites behind the way rotifers do, by just drying up and blowing away in the wind, leaving our fungi behind. But for us to survive in a Red Queen world of corporate parasites, we need to be constantly vigilant (trying not to slip into paranoia). We also need to fight back.

Two Parties of Political Parasites

Cultural evolution has its own versions of parasitism, and these versions are as diverse as they are in biological evolution. I wish to briefly describe two examples of cultural parasites: the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party.

Parasitism is a spectrum, but it can be roughly categorized into chronic and acute parasites. Acute parasites make you very sick very fast, and you either die or you get well pretty soon. Chronic parasites make you mildly sick for a long time. For parasites that spread by direct contact, natural selection often favors evolution from acute toward chronic parasitism.

The Democratic Party is a chronic parasite. Democratic politicians are relatively harmless. But their ideas continue to sap the economy and the country. They do not seem to take the problem of deficit spending seriously. And their solution (more so in the past than at present) is often to create a government bureaucracy to solve a problem. Each component of the bureaucracy has a certain amount of inefficiency, and the whole thing compounds into a tremendous amount of inefficiency. They are like a very big but harmless tick that rides on your back and gives you a massage. You will notice that the Democrats nod their heads toward science and the environment, but take little meaningful action. (One exception: Barack Obama decided to take action on global climate change last week, rather than to wait for Congressional Democrats or Republicans to do so.) At this time of year, we all recognize the IRS as a very inefficient system. We have to pay taxes, but what about the hundreds of hours of our lives required to correctly fill out all of the forms? (Don’t forget the AMT form. It appears to be required.) I think that, for the first time ever, I have gotten the hang of it, and it took only a dozen hours or so for me to complete my taxes.

Do you remember back to 2009, when President Obama wanted to give tax credits to working people? It was $400 per individual, $800 per couple. But to get these credits, you had to fill out a separate schedule, which required more calculations. He meant well, but this sort of thing is a Democrat’s idea of being nice: create a nice new level of bureaucracy.

In contrast, the Republican Party is an acute parasite. They approve budgets that they know they will not go along with, and then when the government tries to pay its bills, they create an artificial crisis. They have one scheduled this month. They plan to not raise the debt ceiling to pay the bills they already authorized. The last time they did this, they led us a few hours into default. If they cause the country’s credit rating to drop, we will be even deeper in debt due to possible hikes in interest rates. They can kill us, and they know it; they apparently plan to take us to the edge of mortality once again.

The Republican Party is the Ebola virus of cultural evolution, and the Democratic Party is the walking pneumonia of cultural evolution. I will take my chances with the pneumonia, but I’m (cough, cough) not happy about it.

Our Common Humanity

I have just a brief thought this time. It is about our common humanity. All races and cultures share a lot more things than not. While this fact should be obvious, especially to those who know the fact that all modern humans evolved from a single population that lived in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, scholars in the social sciences seem to not always be aware of it.

One theory that is important among linguists is that human languages are so different from one another that people raised in different cultures and speaking different languages cannot hope to really understand one another. But I suspect this theory (which appears to be less popular now than it was a few decades ago) is wrong, because the fundamentals of human nature had already evolved in that ancestral African population, all members of which spoke a single language. No matter how much linguistic evolution has occurred since that time, all people and all peoples have had more or less the same things to talk about. While some phrases may remain forever untranslatable from one language to others, the ideas and feelings are universal. At least, this seemed to be the impression in a hallway discussion among students a couple of decades ago. An upper middle-class white student, a working-class white-Native American student, two Indonesian Muslim women students, and a Taiwanese student discussed this idea, which they heard in a lecture given by a Francophone African professor. How could they do so if they were culturally unable to relate to one another? Of course, humans are not all alike, but there are more differences between individuals in a culture than between cultures.

I suspect that 2014 is going to be a wild year for human relationships, with a lot of strife within countries and between them. If we see another artificial government fiscal cliff in America, as we did in 2013, the thin glue of altruism may not prevent our society from fracturing. We need to repeat, and keep repeating, the truth that all humans share a psychological core of ideas and feelings, of which altruism is one of the most prevalent, especially when political and social leaders preach intolerance. We have to keep telling this to ourselves, because the people who like to emphasize the differences, and create fractures, are so much more noticeable. For every Islamist suicide bomber, there is a Malala Yousefzai; for every petty African dictator like Kenneth Mugabe, there is a Nelson Mandela; and for every bloviating Republican like Rush Limbaugh, there is a reasonable Republican like Mickey Edwards. Well, it is possible that the bad people outnumber the good, but there are still plenty of good people almost anywhere you look. And (I’m telling myself) instead of getting angry at the dividers (to whom strife is a nutrient), we need to keep in contact with the uniters.

Big Bend: The Little Lines Separating Us

As I related in the previous entry, I saw examples of evolution and natural history during my recent visit to Big Bend. But I also experienced a reminder of one of the peculiarities of human evolutionary history: all humans are descended from a recent common ancestor, therefore the human species is genetically very uniform. When I descended from the Chisos Mountains and went down to the Rio Grande, I came face to face with a reminder that the lines separating human cultures and races is very thin indeed.

When I was in high school in 1974, I was our school’s representative to Boys’ State, a simulation of state government run by the American Legion. Most of the instructors were military officers, and military recruitment was one theme. One of our guest speakers was an astronaut who brought a prepared speech, but when he saw us, he threw down his script and just answered questions. Some wiseass asked him if, from orbit, he could see the little lines separating the countries. He said no, and that he couldn’t see the lines separating race and religion either. He got an ovation from that. Remember that this was back before the fundamentalist culture wars in America, and back when race relations were more strained than they are now.

On May 16, I came right to the edge of the Rio Grande. It was not a grand river at this time; it was more like a large creek, only about thirty feet wide in some places. The challenge to rafters is to find water deep enough to float on. This is the little line that separates the U.S. and Mexico. Technically, the border runs down the middle of the river bed; the river ran in a narrow channel right next to the cliffs of the Mexican side, while on our side there was a wide rocky floodplain. Therefore, I must have actually been standing in Mexico. I reflected on how porous the border actually is, despite billions of dollars spent by the federal government to repel any Mexican who might venture (or any American botanist who might wander) across the border. Commerce is what happens when people try to make a living, and commerce is going to happen across the U.S.-Mexico border whether regulated or not.

Such was my conceptual view, but then something happened that put a human face on it. I met two entrepreneurs, trying a creative way to earn money for their families. “Jesús the Singing Mexican” stood under a tree on the Mexico side of the river and sang folk songs he thought Americans would recognize. He had a donation basket (actually an old plastic bottle) on the American side, and a canoe with which I assume he would slip over to empty it occasionally. His friend Ventura had some trinkets, rocks, and fossils on the ground near the trail. The prices were labeled in pencil on cardboard or rocks. I was about to walk past them when Ventura came running down to greet me and talk me into buying something. Had he seen any federales, I assume he could quickly have gathered his stuff, called for Jesús to bring the canoe, and retreated to the Mexico side very quickly. While I have no desire for trinkets, I really wanted to reward this entrepreneur, who might have been a Mexican and who had not had any business that day, and it was a very hot day. (Note to Border Patrol: I do not actually know whether Ventura was a Mexican national.) I bought some items, which did not include drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or firearms (please note, ATF and DEA) but which included a couple of wire sculptures for my wife and daughter. My $20 bill must have been dynamite on his side of the river, assuming he was Mexican. He said he had walked a couple of miles to set up his wares. He said that now he felt like running home. (To protect these two men, I will not mention the exact location where I met them.) Ventura was a really nice guy. When he found out I was a botanist, we talked about the trees on the tops of desert mountains. We formed the kind of close relationship that people want to have with their customers.

Of course, I have no proof that these two men were Mexican nationals and that our business transaction was illegal. For aught that I could prove to the contrary, they were Hispanic Americans sneaking into Mexico. But assuming that our activity was illegal actually made it more enjoyable. I have frequently commented in my blogs about the state of abject chaos in the American federal government, especially Congress. (The same may be true in Mexico.) I have no respect at all for our government. The feds could have, had they seen us, self-righteously denounced the illegality of our business—the same feds who cannot get anything done except to waste money. That is, assuming that Ventura and Jesús were actually illegal Mexicans.

There is only a thin line, even thinner than the drought-stricken Rio Grande, between me and Ventura and Jesús; there is a deep gorge between me and Congress. I actually respect Ventura and Jesús.

I suddenly realized that I was alone with them, with a pocketbook and an expensive camera. Of course, if they had taken anything, it would have become an international incident and brought their business to an end. It was in their interests to be nice to me. But I never felt uneasy in their presence. I am distinctly uneasy in the presence of the IRS, which has still not given me my tax refund, after over two months since filing, and which admits its own horrible work. (The ousted IRS chief said to Congress on the very day that I met Ventura and Jesús, “We provided horrible customer service.”) I have given up expecting IRS to do anything right. I’ll choose Jesús and Ventura any day.

The last thing Ventura wanted was water. Alas, I had only a mouthful left. I wished I had thought about filling my leaky half-gallon jug at the hotel before I left, then I could have just given it to Ventura—whom I, of course, had not expected to encounter. Jesus (not Jesús) said that if all we have to give is a cup of water, to do so. All I had was cash, so that is what I used. If I also had water, what nice symbol of mutual respect it would have been. Technically, it would have been illegal for me to give him that water, even if he had been dying in the desert. But all he wanted was to not have to drink the green water in the Rio Grande.

Meanwhile, the U.S. federal government considers people like Jesús and Ventura to be dangerous enemies of the United States. I can just imagine the helicopters descending on “The Singing Mexican.” Or more likely a drone. (Okay, I’m exaggerating.) Federal documents distributed to all park visitors say, “Mexican merchants will be arrested for illegal commercial operations which may result in a find and/or additional incarceration while awaiting adjudication prior to deportation.” For poor Jesús, this would undoubtedly mean a very long time sitting in jail before trial, especially since “the sequester” gives the federales an excuse to keep him locked up and leave his family without income for months.

And guess what. The Feds consider me to be an enemy also. “Items purchased illegally will be considered contraband and seized by officers when encountered.” Of course, I do not actually know whether my purchase was illegal or not.

To all this, the U.S. government gives a really bizarre justification. Why are Jesús and Ventura so dangerous? Because when they walk on the trails they will “crush plants along the river and cause erosion of riverbanks, and an increase in garbage and contaminants along the Rio Grande watershed.” What? The government document almost seems to be saying, “Them dirty Mexicans are contaminating everything, their footsteps will hurt the crabgrass and salt cedars, but it’s just fine with us if Americans pull their canoes and rafts up over the riparian vegetation.” By the way, salt cedars are invasive trees that the government spends a lot of money trying to eradicate, and I did not see any garbage that these two men may have left. Maybe they peed in the salt cedar bushes, which is something that Americans never ever ever do.

What advice do the federales give to Americans? They point out, “Lack of water is a life-threatening emergency in the desert.” (I would not have known this had not the wise and benevolent government pointed this out to me.) So what are you supposed to do if Jesús or Ventura asks for water? Jesus (not Jesús) would say, give them some. The U.S. government says to inform government officials of their location. This command comes not in a general location in the park newspaper but in the specific bullet point about what to do if one of the Mexican nationals asks for water. Of course, the nearest officials are many miles away and cell phone reception is poor. So you are supposed to leave Jesús and Ventura behind and drive off quickly to report them so that friendly federales can swoop down and arrest them and give them water. (Note: If they were Mexican nationals, Jesús and Ventura were not immigrants, just visitors.)

The lines separating us are so little that I cannot resist crossing them. They are certainly too small to see from outer space. Numerous races and cultures evolved in prehistory. It looks likely that the future of human evolution will be merger, not further differentiation.

So here’s to “Jesús the Singing Mexican” and to Ventura the trinket vendor and to our common humanity.

Note that the next entries will be about the Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip, which begins Thursday May 30.

Destroying the Fourth Dimension

The human species is unique in having the ability to store knowledge than any one brain can contain, and the ability to pass this knowledge on from one generation to the next, especially in the form of writing. This is one of our greatest evolutionary adaptations. It allows a fourth dimension of adaptation: time.

When religious extremists, of whatever variety, wish to brainwash people into following them, one of the things they sometimes do is to attempt to erase the knowledge of the past. Their message is clear: God’s work begins right now, with them, and whatever has gone before is irrelevant. The extremists present themselves as the sole and unprecedented source of God’s words and will.

This is nothing new. According to Edward Gibbon, Christian zealots destroyed the Library of Alexandria, the last and greatest collection of ancient writings. During the Reformation, Catholics destroyed Protestant books, Protestants destroyed Catholic books, and everybody destroyed Jewish books, along with the persons who read them. Nazis burned Jewish books. But we sometimes think that, in modern times, we no longer do this. But do you remember when, in 2009, the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, NC, planned to burn Bibles? They failed to get the necessary fire permit so they just tore them up instead. They wanted to destroy all versions of the Bible except the King James Version.

Just this past week, religious extremists struck again at the fourth dimension. Before fleeing Timbuktu, in Mali, Islamist militants set fire to as many as twenty thousand ancient manuscripts. The manuscripts were Muslim books and writings, but the militants were passionately convinced that nobody before them really knew what Allah wanted people to believe. They tried to erase the past and make people think that they have the one true interpretation of Islam, and that everyone who went before them is irrelevant. They claim to venerate Mohammed, but to them Mohammed is just a stick figure that they use to justify their own blasphemy.

Perhaps the main reason that no group of zealots has ever been able to wipe out all of the knowledge that preceded them is that this knowledge was widely distributed. Especially after the invention of the printing press, lots of copies of books were spread everywhere, and no one could track all of them down. I wonder if this might be changing. If all of our books are eventually released only online; and if the books themselves are not sold, but only the temporary right to read them; is it not possible that a centralized, religiously-crazy government could use the internet to destroy all copies of a book that they oppose? This sounds like a weird story for a dystopian future, but it may be closer to reality than we like to think. I have no doubt that, if they had this ability, the Islamist extremists in Mali would have destroyed all writings except their own interpretation of the Koran.

One of our main evolutionary adaptations is the distributed network of brains and books—interconnected, but independent.

Natural Selection of Economic Models

We are now closing the year 2011, which has been remarkably like 2010. Continued global warming, continued opposition to the teaching of evolution and global warming, continued economic uncertainty, and another year with a Congress that considers its sole function to be partisan strife.

But one of these years, enormous changes will have to come. As economist Kenneth Boulding pointed out decades ago, and as environmental entrepreneur Paul Gilding has pointed out in his 2011 book The Great Disruption, growth cannot continue forever in a finite world. Gilding says that our current economic system will collapse, since it depends totally on economic growth. It will have to be replaced by an equilibrium economy. Gilding points out that this inevitable transition will not occur smoothly or gradually. At some point, a critical mass of people will realize that, in a finite world in which global warming will disrupt our lives, we have to change. Many of us realize this already; and we are a rapidly growing minority. The change will be disruptive, since entire industries (such as coal and oil) have refused to admit that we are about to collide with natural ecological limits; they will fight to keep people not just using but wasting natural resources. Big corporations will continue to demand government bailouts for their own business mistakes. They preach capitalism but demand socialism. The resulting chaos, in a world with natural disasters and scarce food, will not be pretty. One of these years—it might be 2012—will make 2011 seem like a very uneventful year.

Gilding says that we will emerge from the chaos with a new and sustainable economic system. He says that it is the next stage of human evolution. When I first read this, I assumed that he simply did not know what evolution was. But after I had read more of his book, I could see that he may be right. He did not mean biological evolution. He meant cultural evolution—some memes are propagated more than others. I have written about this process in books. But after reading Gilding’s book, I found a new example of cultural evolution: the economy.

The economy consists of many memes, which include: We have to keep growing to avoid collapse; we have to acquire ever more stuff in order to be happy; since the economy will always grow, we can put ourselves deeply into debt; ecological issues are something that we can take care of someday when we are all rich. These are the old, destructive memes that have brought our economy to the brink of disaster. But there are other economic memes: Our economy can be sustainable; happiness does not require lots of stuff; we can live within our means; we need to fit our economy into ecological limits now. There are millions of people (not enough millions) who believe this second set of memes; and there are hundreds of companies that abide by them. That is, in the world of economic memes, there is diversity.

And then along comes catastrophic natural selection: an economic collapse. If we were all hypnotized by consumerism, then this collapse would mean extinction. However, natural selection will in this case favor the sustainability memes, which already constitute a significant minority of the memetic variation in our population. Yes, there will be an enormous collapse; but many individuals and corporations are at least partly ready for it. There are, for example, hundreds of alternative energy companies ready to fill the void that will be left by the downfall of the petroleum industry.

This sounds like good news. I wish I could believe it, but I believe that political conservatives will prevent us from making enough changes to survive the coming collapse; they will suppress the solutions. The CEOs of financial corporations, for example, want to keep us in debt rather than to let us live without owing them money. Like a bunch of walnut trees suppressing other plant species by poisoning the forest with juglones (a process known as allelopathy), these CEOs are suppressing the sustainability memes. But they cannot wipe them out. At some point, a sustainable world may emerge, by the process of cultural evolution.

On this last day of the year, we sigh in relief that we have not yet fallen into disaster. We look forward to a new year in which, if we are lucky, the memes of sustainability will have a chance to make progress, and in which the collapse will not yet occur. If we are lucky.