The "rev" Bob near Independence Hall...with a Federalist T-Rex.
CARTOONS FROM THE REV
May 13th, 2012SERMON: “Witnessing for Darwin” by the not-so-reverend bob
May 13th, 2012I wondered whether it would be prudent to keep my little brass “bob bless” pin on the lapel of my sport coat as I worked my way through security at the airport. Would that quarter-inch of pin welded on the back be seen as a potentially deadly weapon? Apparently, I need not have been concerned (though two screeners did get a chuckle after close inspection of my solid-bronze Dimetrodon skull belt buckle).
As the jet powered up and began rolling down the runway, I was like a kid again, thinking “Whee! I’m on a jet!”. The pilot in me noted how long it took for the jet to rotate up into the air, and felt the dramatic clunk of the wheels coming up. I watched the ground drop further and further below me, until I could see the random “pattern” of the distinctive clumps of mesquite bushes on the desert floor. I wondered if someone else would look for a pattern of divine design in the obvious spacing between the plants. What I assumed I was observing were the natural limits on proximity dictated by the features of those particular plants in that particular environment. I made a mental note to read up on how desert plant spacing is determined.
When cloud cover obscured the ground, I returned to reading an essay on early human evolution. And as I read about the evidence for when our hominid ancestors first began using tools (about 6 million years ago), I couldn’t help but see myself at the leading end of that ancient process that, at a certain point, really began to speed up (in this case, up to about 600 miles per hour!).
My "bob bless" pin.
It’s difficult to imagine that we were once not much better at using tools than modern chimpanzees are today (they use rocks to crack nuts, stripped twigs and spit to draw termites out of logs). But that’s how we were. For us humans, however, the use of tools turned out to be the beginning of a major shift in our evolutionary direction. For at this point in our history, we began our dependence on technology that continues to this day. The morphological implications were huge — for our reliance on tools seems to have had a great deal to do with our bipedalism. And one thing led to another until we no longer needed the natural defense systems of apes (for instance, we lost our protruding canines as we relied more and more on defensive weapons of our own design, and as the need for massive chewing muscles went out with our increased consumption of meat and the added calories available from cooked food, our brain cases could increase in size).
Over millions of years we continued to evolve as tool-using primates until there came a point (some 300,000 years ago) when we hominids were all cooking our food over fires and hafting flaked stone points to wooden spears. This is the point in history where our brains stopped increasing in size (having likely reached the limit of size that would still allow human mothers to deliver their big-brained babies) and we were likely talking to each other in some form of language. After this point, our technological and social progress took a series of dramatic turns that led to our more recent “Neolithic revolution” and then the modern industrial/technical age we now find ourselves in.
I stood in the aisle of the jet as we flew on into the night, heading further east, and pondered the physics that allowed me to be standing with relative ease on an assemblage of human-designed and manufactured parts, all of which (along with dozens of my fellow humans) were rocketing along some 30,000 feet above the earth. I looked at my fellow hominids, and noted how all were focused on some task or conversation or asleep. And I couldn’t help but think how we take all of our progress for granted, as if we have always been so insulated from the challenges of life in a natural world.
Back in Dallas, the greeter at the cafe I ate in had asked me about my “bob bless” lapel pin. I told him about the church of bob, and he said he wasn’t very religious himself, but his girlfriend had a job at a Christian camp, and that if she were to reveal to them that she accepted anything Darwinian, she’d lose her job. “And she really likes her job” he said. “But how can they ignore it [the science]?”, he asked. I gave him some encouraging words about science, and the name of the church of bob’s website, and felt like any other evangelist on the road.
Despite the similar sensations of that exchange, however, science is not — as I’ve said before — religion. I may be an atheist, but science is not atheistic. The religious say science is atheistic only because science will not support their system of non-evidential beliefs. Science is attacked not because science attacks God (it is, in fact, neutral), but because it does not actively support Him. There is a huge difference.
Creationists use examples such as a jet liner to show how such a machine infers a designer. This is correct, of course. But to take that idea of “design inference” and apply it to nature is another thing altogether, and it simply does not work. All attempts to prove this sort of “intelligent design” are pure pseudo-science, and absolutely no different than astrology, reading tea leaves or alchemy. Creationism is always an argument from ignorance, in that it takes refuge in the notion that because a phenomenon is not yet scientifically explained, it must, therefore, be divine in origin. The key word in that sentence is “not yet scientifically explained”.
There may well be things that we will never be able to explain through science. However, it is wise to note the many times in our recent history when it was proclaimed that we were at the end of what the sciences could reveal. Each time, science has found a way. (And, I would note, each time that science finds a way, at least one existing religious explanation has fallen into obscurity — hence the antipathy of religion to science as general debunker of false claims).
It’s as hard, perhaps, to accept that I’m flying at 600 miles per hour, 30,000 feet over the ground as that I am evolved up from a fish-like ancestor that couldn’t even dream of having hands that would grasp a stone-tipped spear (much less write on a laptop computer in an airport terminal, as I am right now). But, then, how could our ancestors have imagined any of this? I can accept that I am really in a jet because I’m actually flying on one. In the same way I have to accept that I am an evolved species because I really do exist, and the evidence for my origins is now known to me.
The challenge for us living humans, then — at least when it comes to accepting our natural origins — is not imagining the here and now so much as trying to imagine ourselves back then.
t.n.s.r. bob
CARTOONS FROM THE REV
May 6th, 2012
REVIEWS FROM THE REV: “Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth” by Chris Stringer
May 6th, 2012
It’s a good question: “Why us?” And it’s a question that’s bound to come up at a certain point in the contemplation of our natural origins. After all, we bandy about truths such as “99% of all species that have ever lived on earth are extinct” without getting that chill up our spine that reminds us that we could very easily have been just one more extinct species. And the unsettling truth is that there were many others of our species — or, at the least, closely related human species — that did, in fact, go extinct.
But the fact that we are still standing protects us from any sense of our true vulnerability and damn good luck in the game of evolution. “Lone Survivors” tells us our story as we understand it today. And today’s understanding is very different from what we knew only forty years ago. It is a story that is continually unfolding. But in this book we get the benefit of the first-hand experience and accumulated wisdom of Chris Stringer “one of the world’s foremost paleoanthropologists“.
This is a well written and well organized book. I’ve read enough on the subject to sense what particular “camp” (or “school of thought”) the author is partial to, but one of the quietly wonderful parts of this book is how the author tracks the progression of his own ideas as they have been challenged by new evidence (significant parts of it from his own discoveries and research). This is one of those uncommon (but, thankfully, not scarce) books written by the scientist actually doing the research he describes. Add to that the detail that the scientist in question is writing from the back side of a forty-year career that seasons his conclusions and you get a fine, fine book.
The thing I notice about reading current science books is that many of them include last-minute additions, written as the books were “going to press”. But, then, this is the inherent challenge of reporting science: authors must state what they know today, always understanding that somewhere, someone is finding out something new that will add new dimension to their current understanding of the world. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of human evolution. Though we had no hominid fossils at all when Darwin correctly predicted that humans had evolved in Africa, we still don’t have an exhaustive collection of our ancestry. And so this remains an area where each new discovery has a tremendous impact on our knowledge. But “Lone Survivors” does a tremendous job of telling our story up to now.
t.n.s.r. bob
The Rev gives is 3.5 out of 4!
SERMON: “Trimming the Family Tree” by the not-so-reverend bob
May 6th, 2012Although it’s easy (and correct) to critique religious views that place humanity at the logical end of a creation timeline (whether that creation occurred in the Biblical Garden of Eden or through hundreds of millions of years of evolution), it is worth taking a step back to consider that this teleological bias infests just about every human head, be they believer or scientist.
When (as a boy) I first learned about Neandertals, they were seen (along with every other early hominid) as our direct ancestors. At that time, all different shapes and sizes of early primates and humans were just sort of crammed into a single family tree, with explanations abounding about how one evolved into the other and, eventually, to us.
Of course, it’s fair to be kind to these ideas (that are now clearly wrong), as we haven’t had all that many ancient human fossils to examine, and the technology to truly examine them scientifically has been developing rapidly over the last forty years.
As my geo-chemist friend pointed out with regards to studying the tectonic actions of Earth “We only have one data point”. Meaning that we’ve only found one planet (so far) that has the qualities of Earth to study. When it comes to our early human ancestors, we have a few more “data points” than that but, still, we don’t have all that many.
When a new fossil discovery hits the press, there is always a bold proclamation about how “everything we thought we knew” is thrown out the window, or an equally confident claim of where the fossil fits in our family tree.
But it is a testament to the steady work of science that all such announcements are eventually put through the wringer, and out the other end comes a more sober evaluation of what the new discovery can reliably tell us.
And so the sequencing of Neandertal DNA (quite a story of technology and tenacity in itself) has opened up new swaths of data from bones that we thought had already told us all that they could.
The story of the story we tell of the Neandertals is enlightening. At first thought to be our classic “caveman” ancestor, brutish and dumb, they have had a sort of re-birth as noble, red-haired, cultured savages who may have been our equals (in their time). Both of those descriptions are turning out to be a bit overdrawn, and it seems like we are settling down to an understanding that — though necessarily based on frustratingly few pieces of evidence — seems much more likely to be accurate.
In my short monologue "Forbidden Love of the Pleistocene" I tell the story of a doomed love affair between a Cro-Magnon man and a Neandertal Babe. Hey -- it could have happened!
For the Neanderthals now appear to be cousin to our Ice-Age “modern” human ancestors. It also appears that (though highly evolved in their own right) they may have lacked a handful of key social and cognitive traits that many think made the difference when it came down to a question of “them or us”.
More importantly, it seems to me, we are coming to appreciate them for who and what they were, without the need to either demean or ennoble them out of our own emotional needs to feel guilt or superiority (after all, there is a chance that we played an active role in killing them off about 40,000 years ago).
So what about this “cousin” relationship? Darwin predicted that it was Africa that was the nursery for modern humans, and he guessed this without a single ancient human fossil to go by. Subsequent fossil finds (and modern DNA sequencing) have so far proven him right. There are still some who hold a view that many populations of humans evolved in multiple regions on the planet, but the mainstream view now is one that we did, in fact, evolve in Africa before spreading out into the rest of the Earth.
But here’s where things have gotten interesting. As always seems to be the case, when scientists first decided that we had, in fact, all “come out of Africa”, they looked for a single migration event that led directly to us. It seems we can’t help but think that way. But the science now supports a more nuanced view that, frankly, fits much better with how nature actually works.
Our current view, then, is that there have been lots of lines of humans through the millennium, most of them evolving in Africa, and occasionally migrating out of there where some groups found long-term success (the Neanderthals in the Middle East and Europe, Homo Erectus in China before we “modern” humans arrived). There are signs in our DNA of a lot of cross-pollination between ancient humans in Africa, which makes sense when we look at other animal populations. (The fact is that we can’t tell from fossils alone whether our ancestors had spectated to a point where they could no longer exchange genes. It looks like they hadn’t, despite some surely dramatic morphological and cultural differences. And, knowing humans as we do, there can’t be much doubt that we would find a way to have sex with just about anything that looked remotely like us).
The DNA evidence also seems to confirm that there was mixing of genes between the Neanderthals and the modern humans that first migrated into their areas (there is no sign of this mixing in modern African populations, nor of modern human DNA in Neanderthals), as well as some mixing going on between modern humans and Homo Erectus in Asia.
What we begin to see is the natural ebb and flow of reproduction among related species in a way that fits with what we observe in other animals. And here is the key: it has taken us a while to really see ourselves as being “just like” the other animals. (Even in science, we held on to an idea of our specialness, even when it kept us from properly interpreting the data of our origins).
But having at long last made that intellectual leap, we can now begin to appreciate what we think we know about our evolution. The picture is complex and rather sobering. For it turns out that there have, indeed, been countless groups of human varieties since we split off from our last common ancestor with modern apes (but even then, there was much cross-breeding for a very long time!). If this is true, what happened to all of the other groups of “humans” that did not lead directly to us? The answer is that they went extinct, in groups large and small.
But not too large, for it appears that the most critical factor in the evolutionary leap that we refer to as the Neolithic Revolution may have had almost everything to do with population size.
Modern studies of hunter-gatherer populations give us a picture of what happens to groups of humans when their numbers drop below a certain threshold: we revert to more primitive means, losing the gains in culture and technology that we achieve when we have more of our fellow humans to exchange ideas (and genes) with. This, combined with our extended period of childhood (compared to other primates and, it is assumed, other early humans) may be what gave us the advantage over all of the other groups of our “cousins” that managed to hang on to their basic, set ways, for thousands of years but, in the end, could not adapt well (or rapidly) enough to avoid oblivion.
The nice (if we can call it that) thing about this conclusion is that it does make us feel a bit special for being, well, the ones that “won”. On the other hand, there rests beneath this understanding the uneasy realization that we were incredibly lucky. For the evidence also suggests that our lineage was down to just a few thousand individuals at times in our history (for more on this look up our “Mitochondrial Eve”). It also tells us that perhaps Homo Erectus or even the Neanderthal’s might have done equally well had they ever had the right “breaks” that allowed their numbers to expand.
The other stunning part of our story is how we went from being a fairly dispersed species of low population density for pretty much all of our history to numbering in the many billions in an astonishingly short time. That, somehow, once we got a foothold on our “modern” state of mind (and had developed the social structures and technology to support our increasing numbers) we went from one more smallish troop of naked apes to the dominant life form on the planet.
The “true” story of we modern humans is one of heartbreaking drama, and deeply humbling knowledge. Entire species of our fellow humans went extinct at different times (the Neanderthals as recently as 38,000 years ago, Homo Florensis — the “Hobbit” — perhaps only 8,000!). We lost our cousins (or drove them to the brink of extinction) the same as any other modern animal that stands as one of the survivors.
But we couldn’t even come to this picture of the many branches of our human family until we let go of the idea of a single-file, heroic march through time. Only then could we see the evidence for what it could actually tell us.
This capacity: the courage to see ourselves as we really are, is a huge achievement for us as a species, and perhaps we must give most of the credit to the objectivity of science, and the scientists themselves who have had to fight the same self-centered tendency that is shared by their entire species.
As time goes on, we will continue to discover more fossils. New technologies (and new knowledge) will wrest more information from those discoveries. It may well be (it must be, in fact, highly likely) that there will be even more dramatic twists and turns to our human story. But at least we are now, it seems, ready to hear the truth.
t.n.s.r. bob
CARTOONS FROM THE REV
April 29th, 2012
Seems like something has already take up residence in the bank building being refurbished as the new Las Cruces Museum of Natural History (in Las Cruces, New Mexico)
REVIEWS FROM THE REV: “Why Evolution is True” by Jerry A. Coyne.
April 29th, 2012
“The process is remarkably simple. It requires only that individuals of a species vary genetically in their ability to survive and reproduce in their environment. Given this, natural selection — and evolution — are inevitable.” — Author Jerry A Coyne in “Why Evolution is True”, page 11.
Any book that has the endorsement of both Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens has my interest. But I’d also read references to Jerry A. Coyne’s “Why Evolution is True” in another science book I was reading, so I sought it out.
What a great book! First off, let me say that the title of this book tells you exactly what you will find inside. This is a fine primer on the actual evidence for evolution, along with a solid description of what the theory does and does not say.
The subtitle to this book could easily be “and why Intelligent design if false”.
Upon reflection, it is a sad commentary that a writer and scientist of this caliber has to spend an entire book working to refute a religious claim that continues (and with some real success) to pass itself off as a valid, competing scientific theory on the origins of life on earth. But that is the reality we live with. In the United States, fully 40% of those surveyed believe that God created the earth and all that is in it pretty much according to the account in Genesis. And believers in creationism are vocal in classrooms across this country, forcing the false notion that both “theories” deserve equal treatment.
But, of course, there are not two theories at all: there is one scientific theory (proven to a point to be considered “fact”), and a religious notion with no supporting scientific evidence at all. Those are not propositions deserving of equal treatment. It is akin to (as Richard Dawkins points out in The Greatest Show on Earth — reviewed this blog) a student in a history class claiming that ancient Rome never existed, but was made up by historians for their own purposes.
Read this book and be a soldier for reality. We need all of those that we can get.
t.n.s.r. bob
The rev gives it four Dimetrodons out of four!
SERMON: “The Real Story of Creation” by the not-so-reverend bob
April 29th, 2012There is one, huge, honking reason why we humans have trouble with the idea of evolution, and it is a reason that I think we give scant attention to: it is the fact that we exist. Because we exist and — more importantly — are conscious of our existence, we can’t help but examine ourselves, find ourselves wonderful, and think that somehow our wonderful existence must — on some level at least — have been the point of everything that has come before us. We are the reason for, well, life. “Clearly” we think, “the universe had us in mind from the very start?”
"Why" the reverend asks, "should it make us feel less 'special' to have evolved from earlier life forms?"
This sounds silly and overblown, but is it really? Don’t we start any consideration of our origins with the premise that we must find a system of “creation” that would clearly lead up to us? In other words, the process of evolution must be as complicated as we see ourselves to be, which, under the influence of our natural solipsism, means there has to be an intelligence behind it all that is at least as clever as we are (but only more so). And suddenly, we have replaced the idea of “life” having had us in mind from the start with the idea of The God of the Universe (who, apparently, had nothing better to do with 13.75 billions years of his eternal existence, and decided to run a grand chemical experiment to see if he could turn mass and energy into living hominins who would, occasionally, tell him how great he was).
This is not, I’m afraid, an understatement of the self-centeredness of our species, nor of the absurdity of the proposition of our own divine creation. The truth is that we can only hold such irrational ideas because we are a natural storytelling (and believing) bunch of hairless apes, and there remains much mutual support for such beliefs among us profoundly-social primates.
But the problem is this: we have built back from the end of the story, assuming that the story began as a tale with us as the ending. Even more fundamentally, we assume there was a story in the first place. There wasn’t. There was (and is, if you want to be absolutely clear about it) only nature.
By nature I mean purely natural forces, and the biological, geologic and meteorological products of those forces. For there wasn’t even “nature” (at least in the sense that we understand it today) 5 billion years ago. Only the cosmic beginnings of what would coalesce into our planet.
Seriously. We now know this.
Our planet formed from dust and debris and matter and gravity and atoms and elements born in other exploding stars (that “made” the stuff our planet is made from). This is how all of the planets and stars were formed — each of them “local” events (when compared to the vastness of the expanding universe). And, after untold millions of years of “forming”, the mix of solid crust, liquid water (and the chemical composition of that water), the fact that we had a solid core to produce a magnetic field to hold our atmosphere in place against the forces of solar winds, and time (lots and lots of time — about a billion years after the earth “formed”), something began to stir. Or maybe not even stir. In the beginning it was simple photosynthetic bacteria that began to occupy the earth.
And for the next 2 billion years that was it. That was the only life on the planet. For 2…billion…years. What kind of creation story is that? What kind of intelligence is behind that? There is the popular (perhaps apocryphal) quote that says “If there is a God, he must be inordinately fond of beetles” (having created hundreds of thousands of species of them). But perhaps we should change that to God being “Really, really fond of simple photosynthetic bacteria”.
Here’s the rundown of the history of the evolution of life on earth as laid out by Jerry A. Coyne in “Why Evolution is True”:
“If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn’t see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BC, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight.”
Most creationists either do not know the evidence for all of this, or are actively resisting it. I expect more of the latter than the former, for even the ignorance is fed, at some level, by an innate resistance to the notion that we aren’t special in the way we prefer to imagine.
But of course we are special, and by any measurement pretty damn amazing results of a non-random process of selecting random mutations in living, reproducing species. But we have to be clear that this is what happened. All it takes, it turns out, for evolution to occur is the presence of DNA that is exchanged and re-combined through (often sexual) reproduction.
Mutations in DNA happen all the time, all over the genome. But no-one is deciding what mutations will occur. This is truly a random process — there is no predicting when and where it will happen, nor what the result will be. Mutations are often the result of biological “copying errors” (take that, perfection of design). But whatever the cause, those mutations are then expressed in the developing individual, and, once expressed, have entered into the race for survival, living, reproducing, competing and dying on the stage of life where natural selection exerts its unforgiving force on every living thing.
Yet despite what every creationist seems to believe, natural selection is not an intelligence (though it creates an outcome that mimics an intelligence). It is simply describes the process whereby the reality of climate, food supply, competition for resources, competition for mates, and an animal’s innate suitability for a specific niche in the world place that animal under selective pressure. Those that are better at surviving tend to survive and pass on their particular set of mutations. Those that aren’t, don’t. But conditions are always changing, so today’s winner will not always be the winner. Dinosaurs were winners for 160 million years, but then they lost. Big time. Right now, we’re the winners. Right now.
Once you take the time to understand what evolution is, and what it is not, the arguments against it are shown to be what they actually are: nothing. I mean it — there are no valid arguments against evolution. There are only dodges based in fear, ignorance and credulity (because of the things we want to believe about ourselves).
The reality is that there was never any plan or system in place. Everything that we see around us is the eventual balance of forces that tends to come about over time. Earth settled into its shape because of the materials it is made of, which set the levels of gravity where they are. The dominant cosmic lement of carbon became the building block of all biological life. Our bodies took the shape they did because of the mix of air we evolved in, and the gravity that gives us weight. Our eyes evolved to work well in the kind of light we experience, our guts to the kind of food we can eat.
We are constantly taking in nutrients, feeding the bacteria that still makes up half of our cellular weight. We carry in our DNA huge collections of genes that have been switched-off by random mutations (left in the “off” position by the selective pressures of natural selection). In many ways, our complex and inspiring bodies are nothing more than the result of a survival “arms race” (as Dawkins put it) that began with the first bacteria competing for a place in the sun.
And DNA, it turns out, builds up entire bodies by completely local actions. There is no blueprint, but each gene and protein does it’s own little thing and, before long, voila, there is a new living being.
How can this be? It can be because we evolved from the simplest of life forms that gradually grew more complex (even incorporating other organisms, and turning them to our own use). Every step of our evolution was built upon the life form we were before every mutation. Nothing about us ever simply came into being out of “nothing” (that is, ironically, the creationist view of what God is supposed to have done). We did not go to sleep one night as a bacteria and awake the next morning a fish, or dream our fishy dreams to awake as a primitive ape. Evolution posits no such thing. However, the inescapable evidence of our DNA shows the “indelible stamp of our origin” (Darwin’s famous words) — it is a record of the many different animals we were. There is no other plausible explanation for this than that which evolution supplies.
This drives creationists crazy: it simply cannot be — it sounds too improbable and impossible. There has to be a plan.
Why? Who says so? Who can say to reality “You cannot be thus” or “You must be this”? No one has that kind of power. Not you, not me, not the scientist (for this is the implication — that scientists are simply making this stuff up to disprove the God they hate so much). The scientist reports what is true, what is actual, what is declared by the evidence. And the evidence tells us that we evolved from bacteria — every one of us representing that unbroken chain of life back to the very beginning.
As Jerry Coyne puts it in “Why Evolution is True” (reviewed this week): “The process is remarkably simple. It requires only that individuals of a species vary genetically in their ability to survive and reproduce in their environment. Given this, natural selection — and evolution — are inevitable.”
We humans are a rather, um, late arrival on the scene of life.
Inevitable, yes. Designed? No.
But how could an entire human body evolve from a single cell? As has been pointed out by another: you did it yourself in nine months.
No wonder Darwin said “There is grandeur in this view of life”. For there is. But in order to find it, we have to first let go of the diminished, narrow, ignorant view of life as having been created by a divine intelligence. Then, and only then, will we see, face to face, the true story of our creation.
t.n.s.r. bob
CARTOONS FROM THE REV
April 22nd, 2012
REVIEWS FROM THE REV: A GREAT SCIENCE TALK!
April 22nd, 2012
Neal deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Colbert. (Unfortunately, I cannot find who to credit for this photo. My apologies to the photographer)
This is an outstanding experience. For one thing, Neil deGrasse Tyson is the most impassioned champion for science. He is inspiring. For another, Stephen Colbert turns out to be the best of interviewers. He is funny, yes, but what comes out most is his sincere interest and humanity. And underneath all of the great information is the sight of two smart, interesting people truly enjoying each other and the subjects they discuss. It’s a long video, and the audio is a bit distracting for the first part, but stick with it. You’ll be glad you did!