Darwin Explains the Origin of Feces!

In this video Darwin explains the origin of feces. A body could, in theory, completely assimilate all organic molecules. After all, there is plenty of food value left in feces; just ask your local scarab beetle or bacterium. But the body of each species only digests the food as far as it is economically worthwhile to do so. To completely assimilate all organic material, an animal would need to haul around a gigantic digestive system. It isn’t worth it.

I got to thinking about this when I read the French science fiction novel Le Voyageur Imprudent (The Careless Traveler), by Rene Barjavel. The traveler visited a future in which humans had evolved into huge females with thousands of breasts, and small males with a hole instead of a mouth, into which a female breast could precisely fit. The males had no excretory openings; they completely assimilated the milk. Sounds crazy? It is, but it made me think.

Enjoy the video!

Silent Struggle of the Leaves!

I have posted another video in a series, The Hidden Lives of Plants. This inaugural video is the Silent Struggle of the Leaves! The URL is here.

Join me out in a peaceful forest. Actually, it is not peaceful; there are silent struggles going on. I don’t just mean spiders eating insects down where you cannot see them. Animals are not the only organisms that hunt, hide, fight, and feast. The plants do so also, slowly and silently.

Plants deploy their leaf area in order to get sunlight for photosynthesis, which is how they make their food. Natural selection rewards the plants that do this the best. But these are not necessarily the plants that make the most leaf tissue or leaf area. Leaves have to pay for themselves; they must produce enough food to make up for their construction and maintenance costs. Any plant that produces too much leaf material would risk losing the game of natural selection as surely as a plant that produces too little.

That is, the silent arena for struggle in a forest is not so much a battlefield as it is a marketplace.

I am working on a book, tentatively entitled Silent Struggle: The Hidden World of Plants. Watch for it!

Consumer Cultures, Right and Left

America consists of a mixture of different cultures. More than ever before, these cultures mix but do not blend. Part of this is because many members of the dominant white culture do not want to dilute their firearm-barbecue-bacon-yellow beer-pickup truck culture. Major store chains cater to their strange and often dangerous wishes.

Much of what these “conservatives” consume is for its cultural value only. Take, for example, pickups. They like to say they use their pickups for work. But this is largely untrue. I am collecting data about pickup trucks. I have not analyzed it yet, but it appears that less than twenty percent of the trucks are used for work. Eighty percent of the pickup trucks in Oklahoma have empty truck beds and are not towing anything. They are just for show. It is an expensive practice that depletes our resources and puts lots of extra carbon in our atmosphere.

But conservatives are not the only people who have a subculture. There is also a largely white subculture of liberals who are proud to eat portabella instead of beef, who do not own guns, who drink wine and dark beer, and drive fuel efficient vehicles. There are major store chains that cater to their strange though usually harmless wishes, too.

To see this, all you have to do is to take a stroll through a Whole Foods. Being a member of the liberal subculture, I could easily spend hundreds of dollars on the things that are available there. But if you look at those things critically, you find that very little of it is actually important, and consuming those things is not necessarily making the world better. How is using Mad Hippie Facial Cream ($26 for 2.1 ounces) or Dead Sea bath salts making the world better? My wife and I buy some of their unpackaged bulk items, and a few other things, but we find most of the products at Whole Foods humorous.

One of these packages shows a homeopathic remedy that contains poison ivy extract (Rhus toxicodendron, now Toxicodendron radicans), and a “soup cleanse” book that undoubtedly contains healthy recipes but they will not “cleanse” you of “toxins” any more than any other healthy diet.

Finally, this package is just salt. But the Indian company that sells it makes it sound that salt is part of the freedom movement of Mahatma Gandhi.

One way to make the world better is to consume less, and make more efficient use of what you consume. Don’t drive big pickups around, and don’t waste your money on Mad Hippie Facial Cream. Consume less stuff, and the corporations that cater to conservatives and to liberals will not be very happy with you.

Natural Selection for Efficiency

At the moment, I am able to post essays from a different location than what I normally use. My usual location remains unworkable. I now resume my usual series of essays.

In a previous essay I wrote about how our economic system is (almost) forcing us to waste resources. In nature, sexual selection often favors wastefulness (think of colorful bird feathers and flowers), and in the human species, social and sexual selection can favor conspicuous consumption. However, this always occurs within the broader picture of natural selection favoring efficiency.

One example is the evolution of CAM, which is a type of photosynthesis found in many succulent plants. The leaves of most plants absorb carbon dioxide and make it almost directly into carbohydrates such as sugar during the daytime. But CAM plants absorb carbon dioxide at night, make it into acid, store up the acid, then use the acid as a source of carbon dioxide from which to make sugar in the day. Carbon fixation therefore occurs in two phases: the night shift, and the day shift. And, like a factory that might need to hire two sets of employees rather than just one, this system is more expensive than just making sugar during the day shift. In fact, the night shift consists of an almost completely separate set of enzyme reactions from the day shift.

Under cool, moist, or shady conditions, CAM would be clearly wasteful. As my educational mentor from grad school days said, CAM plants don’t have it made in the shade. But CAM plants grow in desert conditions. In order to absorb carbon dioxide during the day, a plant has to have its pores open, and when it does so, it loses water vapor. In a cool, moist, or shady environment, this is not much of a problem. But out in the desert, it might cause the plant to lose too much water. For succulent plants it is more efficient to open their pores at night, when it is cooler, and store it up in the form of acid. The wasted energy is more than compensated by the water that is saved.

Here is an analogous situation. Suppose you have a factory that has to shut down on hot days. But even when the factory is shut, you still have to pay the workers. Is it cost-effective to pay a night shift of factory workers so that the factory can stay open in the summer? It depends. If the factory is in Minnesota, probably not. But in the desert, such a factory would be closed from May through September. Not surprisingly, CAM plants are more common in the desert than in Minnesota.

It seems obvious that CAM photosynthesis has evolved and become common in conjunction with the spread of deserts in the late Neogene period. And it has evolved more than once, as existing enzymes have been reassigned to new functions. However, it appears that CAM may have first evolved as an adaptation to low carbon dioxide availability rather than to hot, dry conditions. How else to explain CAM in primitive aquatic plants such as Iosetes? (See the article by Jon Keeley.) A similar adaptation, C4 photosynthesis, may have first evolved in grasses not because of hot conditions but because of low levels of carbon dioxide during glacial periods especially in tropical highlands. CAM and C4 photosynthesis may have begun as an adaptation to low carbon dioxide availability, and they later proved useful in hot, dry conditions. (I did not explain C4 in this brief entry because it’s more complex.)

Everywhere you look in the world, natural selection has favored efficiency. In many cases, after the needs of efficiency have been met, sexual and social selection have favored wastefulness. But in our society right now, we continue our binge of wastefulness even when we are not meeting the basic needs of efficiency.

We may have to learn not just efficiency but extreme frugality in the decades ahead of us. Of course, it is possible that the very rich, and people with lots of guns, might not have to do this, but then there’s the rest of us. Stories from the past tell us that much human creativity has been employed in the invention of new forms of frugality. I grew up hearing stories about how Native Americans used every part of the bison (in contrast to white Americans, who would shoot a buffalo, cut out the tongue to eat, and let the rest rot), and my Dad telling me that a World War II soldier could clean up, shave, and brush his teeth using one helmet-ful of water. Storing runoff water from the roof in cisterns is a practice thousands of years old. The thrifty Scots did not waste anything from sheep; hence the invention of haggis, which (in its original form) was a combination of oatmeal and sheep lung and other organ tissue and which is reportedly a food item.

We can only hope that, when called upon to do so in the years ahead, we humans can display the kind of creativity in our cultural evolution that CAM and C4 plants have displayed in their biological evolution. Sexual and cultural selection can favor wasteful displays, but only if there is a surplus of energy, materials, and opportunities, however slight, left over from the demands of natural selection. A big colorful male bird that starves is just a dead bird.

Are We Being Forced to Waste?

It is clear that large corporations are trying to force us to be wasteful. Here are just three examples I have recently experienced, individually trivial but collectively painting a picture of waste.

First, I tried to buy some of those little paper cupcake wrappers. I tried two supermarkets, and could not find them. Instead, what you had to buy was the paper wrappers and a disposable pan to put them in. (In addition, the pans and papers were inside of extremely durable plastic, the kind that you need a Klingon bat’leth sword to open.) Second, in a major supermarket, there were a couple of shelves of jars of instant coffee, but an entire rack of boxes of instant coffee with disposable cups. If current trends continue, you will be unable to make instant coffee in your own cup at home. Third, there are whole displays of dry laundry detergent packed into individual packets, to save you the trouble of measuring the amount you put into the washing machine.

One can only hope that such wasteful items will go the way of the paper dresses of the 1960s—dresses actually made of cellulose, which could be worn once and discarded. They were uncomfortable and flammable. I have heard interesting stories about what happened when a woman wearing one got caught out in the rain. You cannot readily find them anymore. In the 1960s, few people gave a second thought to throwing everything away; the paper dress market failed because the novelty wore off. But today, one would think, the sheer wastefulness of disposable clothing would make it a market failure.

I do not believe that most people demand to use disposable cupcake tins, to use disposable cups even at home, or that most people are too lazy to measure their laundry detergent. If consumer choice were the driving factor, such wastefulness would sink these products. But manufacturers, and the supermarkets that carry their products, can make more money if you buy a box that contains twelve disposable coffee cups with individual servings of instant coffee than if you buy a jar of instant coffee with ten times as many servings in it, for about the same price. A manufacturer’s paradise would be if consumers had to buy, for each meal, expensive MREs (meals ready to eat) instead of ever fixing their own meals. Corporations will never be able to do this, but they can constrict the more efficient items to smaller and smaller shelf space and present a large display of disposable items to consumers. Consumers prefer the more efficient items but not enough to actively refuse to buy the wasteful ones. It is as if Wal-Mart made a corporate-level decision to market only paper clothes, a highly unlikely but no longer unthinkable prospect. Already, major food product corporations are pressuring the government for restrictions on farmers’ markets, ostensibly for sanitation concerns. Never mind that all the cases of food  contamination on the news involve large corporations.

Individual evolutionary fitness has long been served by the efficiency of resource use. Our prehistoric ancestors almost never threw away stone tools; they kept re-sharpening and reusing them. Recycling was the norm until recent decades; Dickensian rag-pickers were recyclers. Home canning reused the glass jars every year; I doubt that my grandmother on rural northeastern Oklahoma farms ever bought anything in a can until she moved to town. Natural selection rewarded such behavior: less waste meant that you had more resources.

But there have always been evolutionary fitness benefits to wastefulness. A rich, wasteful person (like a bird with outlandish feathers) can attract mates. The difference between conspicuous ostentation and the modern supermarket variety of enforced waste is that the individual cannot readily choose what to do. A person may choose to display their wealth by showing that they are free to generate a lot of garbage. I do not so choose. But I am being pressured by corporations to so choose.

This is an example of the process of individual selection in evolution. I choose efficiency, but corporations choose waste; and they are stronger than I am. Group selection would dictate efficiency as well, but the decisions are largely made by corporations, the individual profits of whose CEOs determine that consumers should be wasteful.

Wastefulness will sink us. We should use less energy and materials—this is an essential component to averting climate disaster from global warming. Our only hope is that the collective feeble insistence on frugality by conscientious consumers (who also want to save money) will out-compete the corporate interests that largely control our society.