Big Bend: An Isolated Evolutionary World

I just got back from my visit to Big Bend National Park, which is out in the Chihuahuan desert, which has a lot of creosote bushes, and blooming desert willows (not really willows) in the washes. The Chisos Mountains arise from the desert and create their own little world, a little cooler and a little wetter. These mountains are isolated from others. The trees that live there are not only rare but are genetically isolated from all other populations. I hiked among the pinnacles of the Chisos Mountains and got to see some of these rare trees.

This photo is of me beside Quercus grisea, one of the species of oak that lives mostly in the southwestern desert mountains. Though globally rare, this tree is locally abundant. Usually the trees are small but, in moist canyons, they can grow quite large, as in this photo.

There is another oak species, the Graves oak (Q. gravesii), which is abundant in moist desert canyons.

The Chisos oak, Q. graciliformis, is locally abundant in canyons at Big Bend but is found only in the Chisos Mountains and in one range of mountains just over the border in Mexico.

Many oak species, of which I saw at least five, grow in small isolated populations of desert mountains. Cornelius Herman Muller studied them starting in the 1930s, sorting out the taxonomy of these species. He studied their morphology, and was not very receptive to the molecular taxonomy that was becoming the standard research tool by the time he retired. When I met him at UC Santa Barbara in 1978, I did not know that I would one day be retracing some of his steps.

Near the base of the pinnacles, I encountered one very small patch of moist forest that contained bigtooth maple and hophornbeam trees, something breathtaking to encounter in the desert. Tiny isolated populations like these are what make Big Bend a UNESCO biodiversity site.

These rare and isolated trees are little pockets of evolution. They are in danger of extinction. They got there because, as climate changed after the last Ice Age, they retreated from a formerly widespread range. Some of them ended up north and east, where the climate was suitable for them. Others were stranded on desert mountains where only a few square meters can support them. Humans are causing global climate change that is accelerating this process of extinction. In the photo above, you can see that the gray oak trees behind me are largely dead from recent droughts. I saw many dead trees which had had large trunks. My purpose was to see these evolutionary oddities before both humans and nature drove them into extinction; I think I got there just in time. So if you want to see this lost world, better come soon!

I hiked and climbed to the top of Emory Peak, the highest mountain in the entire area. I estimate that my hike on Wednesday May 15 burned over 5000 calories.

I heard reports of other isolated tree species that I did not see. I was looking for the rare lateleaf oak (Q. tardifolia), and thought I had found one, but it was only a Q. rugosa transformed by my bias. I also found some limber pines, probably the southwestern form (Pinus reflexa). Some National Park Service biologists told me there were quaking aspens there also, and the park literature talks about douglasfirs. The soil is so loose and dry that I could not go off the trail looking for them. I tried once, only to fall and almost injure myself.

I got back in time to make final arrangements for the Evolution Road Trip, sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education. We have a good group of nine participants signed up. I will let you know what happens!

Evolution in Oklahoma, a Road Trip: Piles and Piles of Fossils

Don’t forget the Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip, May 30-June 2. We have enough registrants that the trip is unlikely to be canceled, but there is still room! Tentative deadline is May 3, but we can accept a few more applications after that date. We just need to plan ahead about how many rooms and vehicles, and how much food, to provide. Read more about it here as well as in blog entries posted earlier (below).

One of the places we will be visiting, in our search for fossils, is Fort Washita, near Durant, Oklahoma. It is a site of great historical interest. It was built by the U.S. Army to defend the Chickasaw tribe against western tribes, whose land had been taken in order to resettle the Chickasaws from their ancestral homeland that the U.S. had confiscated. Then, in the Civil War, Ft. Washita became a Confederate fort. History and politics back then was a big mess, just as it is today, only there was a war going on right here on our American soil.

Ft. Washita was located on a hill because it allowed visibility across the prairie in order to observe the approach of understandably hostile tribes, or (later) Union soldiers. Today, most of the surrounding landscape is forested, but when the fort was built it was mostly prairie, with some scattered post oaks and bois-d’arcs. It is possible that some of the very large post oaks and bois-d’arcs that are today on fort property were alive when the fort was active. Each bois-d’arc tree appears to be several trees that have grown together. This probably occurred because the animals that originally dispersed the large fruits (e.g. mammoths and gomphotheres) have been extinct for thousands of years. The mammoths would have spread the seeds out in their dung, but since the mammoths were extinct the fruits simply landed on the ground and all the seeds began to grow in a clump.

But the main topic of interest is something that very few visitors notice when they come to the fort. I am embarrassed to admit that I did not take notice of it until recently. Most of the original buildings are made from rocks quarried from an extremely fossiliferous layer. Some of the stones appear to consist almost entirely of mollusk fossils. We’ve all seen fossils, but perhaps nothing quite like this.

So join us for the Road Trip if you can!

Evolution in Oklahoma, a Road Trip: An Encounter with Creationism

Time is running out to sign up for the Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip May 30-June 2. Information and links are available immediately below (previous blog entries). More information, and online registration, is available here.

We will also visit a couple of creationist museums on this trip. The purpose is not to create any confrontations, either between us and the creationists or within our group (since there may be some diversity of viewpoints among the attendees). What we intend to do when we visit the museums is to find out what the creationists have to say; to ask insightful questions; and then to afterwards discuss what we have seen. In particular, we will discuss some of the creationist claims that are not even clearly stated in the Bible, but appear to have been made up whole cloth by the creationists. I have met these creationists and they are not stupid; so, what IS their motivation? What makes them believe things that, to anyone outside their circles (even to most conservative Christians) seem ridiculous? Let’s talk about it.

The museums are the Creation Evidences Museum in Bokchito, Oklahoma and Carl Baugh’s dinosaur-and-human-footprint museum down in Texas (which I described in blog entries from March 2011). The Baugh museum is not worth a six hour round trip by itself but it is right next to Dinosaur Valley State Park. We will see many dinosaur footprints there, if the water is low. When I visited in Fall 2011 (see blog entries) the water was very low. We probably will not have such prime conditions on this visit, but we can see at least some dinosaur footprints and discuss what you can learn from them.

We hope to have all registrations by May 3, so we can make a decision about whether the trip will have enough people. We need 9 and we have 6.

Above all, it should be a great group of people for discussion, the kind of people you will enjoy spending a weekend with.

Evolution in Oklahoma, a Road Trip: A Dramatic Geological Past, part two.

I continue now to describe some of the geological things that we will see on the Evolution Road Trip May 30 to June 2, 2013. See here for more information.

Back in Pennsylvanian days, about 300 million years ago, sediments had been building up and turning into rock in what is now Oklahoma for over a hundred million years. Then something dramatic happened. Part of the land rose, part of it fell. Cambrian and Ordovician rocks now looked down into deep valleys. Big rocks eroded down into those valleys. Soon the valleys were filled with what was to become conglomerate rock. And such conglomerate! See the photo. The component rocks are big, and sharp-angled, both of which facts mean that the rocks did not get carried very far before being mashed together. At the scenic overlook north of Exit 47 on Interstate 35, you can see contorted layers of Ordovician limestone right next to Pennsylvanian conglomerate. Two hundred million years ago, this is where the cliff was.

Today, young couples spray-paint proclamations of love on the exposed strata. But do they have any idea what “4ever” means against the backdrop of 500 million years of geological history sometimes hidden, and sometimes exposed, in central Oklahoma?

Even in the gentlest rolling hillsides of south central Oklahoma, there are surprises. There is a very thin layer of limestone crammed with fossils (see photo). This layer is a little harder than the others and creates a shelf that I have driven past many times and never noticed. Thanks, Gordon, for pointing this and all of the preceding things out to me.

I have learned so much since my old creationist days. And I continue to learn. Most of these geological sites are near Sulphur, Oklahoma, which has a whole bunch of youth Bible camps. I am sure that one of these camps was where the Church of Christ cult of which I was a member had its summer youth meetings at which young men and women could meet and marry within the cult. (We were the branch of the C of C that rejected not only instrumental music and Sunday school but even insisted on using a single cup rather than individual cups during communion.) I never went to one. But here I am, perhaps driving right past them, in search of evidence about the evolutionary past that my erstwhile cult so vigorously denied.

We All Love Stories, Even about Oaks

If you came to this blog seeking more information about the summer evolution road trip, it can be found in the previous entry, and more information will be available in upcoming days.

You could almost define Homo sapiens as the species that loves stories. We evolved that ability around African stone age campfires, where the ability to tell and to understand stories conferred social advantages. We interpret our lives as stories; we could not imagine ourselves as eternal beings. And in science, we love stories also. Stories about how the digestive system works. (The epitome of this approach was the book, published about eighty years ago, entitled Through the Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera. And apparently Mary Roach, author of Bonk and Stiff, is coming out with a new contribution to the literature of alimentary expeditioning, Gulp.) Stories about how ecosystems work. And stories about evolution. We are (well, most of us) much more interested in the stories of evolution than in the theory. We have to be careful to not read too much into the stories. It is all too easy to think of Tiktaalik crawling out of the water toward life on land, as if he were Odysseus trying to get home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. At least, we have to be careful to keep that kind of thinking out of our science; but it remains part of our folklore.

I sometimes like to imagine the saga of the oaks. Somewhere in Eurasia, maybe 80 million years ago, there was a population of trees that produced acorns: the first population of oaks (genus Quercus). What was the secret of their success? Was it the acorns, or was it something else? These early oaks may have resembled the white oaks (section Quercus), which have spineless leaves and acorns that mature the same year that they are produced, for these oaks are found throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

Then geological and climatic changes occurred throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The Atlantic Ocean formed, and the Rocky Mountains arose, and the arctic climate got colder. This separated the oaks of Europe, Asia, California, and eastern North America from one another. Unique oak species evolved in each of these locations and in others. In some cases, this produced new species of white oaks, such as Q. aliena in eastern Asia; Q. robur in Europe; Q. macrocarpa (the bur oak) in eastern North America; and Q. douglasii in California. In other cases, isolation resulted in whole new sections of the genus. For example, the black and red oaks (section Lobatae) have spines on their leaves and their acorns mature the year after they are produced. They apparently evolved in North America, but then diverged into different species such as Q. rubra (red oak) in eastern North America and Q. kelloggii in California. The ring-cupped oaks (section Cyclobalanopsis) evolved and diversified in Asia. Sections Mesobalanusand Cerris evolved and diversified in Asia and Europe, and section Protobalanusin western North America. What was the story here? Did the divergence between white and black oaks have anything to do with the spines or lack of spines on their leaves? Or with how long it took their acorns to mature? We might never know. In some cases, oak species ended up isolated in unusual places, such as Q. copeyensis in Panama.

Climate changes were also important. The Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains not only separated eastern and western oak populations in North America, but also created rain shadows; the resulting deserts further isolated the oak species. In dry regions (of which there were almost none until about 30 million years ago), many oaks evolved into evergreens, keeping their leaves over the winter. In many places, some of the oaks are evergreen and some are deciduous. All the oaks in eastern North America are deciduous except Q. virginiana (the live oak), and in California they are all evergreen except Q. kelloggii.

The oaks represent just one of many thousands of evolutionary stories: of genealogy, of migration, of response to adversity (such as changing climates). Just as Samuel Butler wrote The Way of All Flesh in the nineteenth century about five generations of the Pontifex family, an oak expert could write The Way of All Leaf.

Pick any group of trees, whether walnuts or sycamores; or any group of wildflowers, such as the phlox; or any group of animals; or any other group of organisms. Each has an evolutionary story, indeed an evolutionary saga.

Evolution in Oklahoma, a Road Trip: First Announcement

I am pleased to announce that Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education and the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences are sponsoring an evolution road trip in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas this summer. That is, so long as we get at least nine registrants. The dates are Thursday May 30 (my 56^thbirthday) to Sunday June 2. Our home base is the University of Oklahoma Biological Station on the shores of beautiful Lake Texoma. The cost will be $350 per person; for participants who want a single room, the cost is $400. You can’t beat that for a four-day weekend of outdoor science! The trip is open to anyone interested in science, regardless of background, but we particularly want to draw local pre-college science educators. If you are a schoolteacher and want to go on this trip, you can get professional development credit and (if we get enough participants or donations) a partial refund of the costs. Furthermore, if we have enough participants, we may be able to give partial refunds to everyone.

For reasons that I will explain in upcoming entries, I am pretty excited about this trip. I realize that many of my readers live far away from Oklahoma. But if you’ve never been here, you might be surprised. No, it doesn’t look like the flat dry set of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. It is a fascinating concatenation of ecology and geology (which is part of the reason that there is so much oil and gas here). Y’all come, y’hear?

The trip is designed especially for pre-college science instructors, although anyone with an interest in science is invited to participate. We expect to get together a group of people who will enjoy talking with one another and investigating some perhaps little-known highlights of southern Oklahoma and northern Texas—perhaps little-known even to people who live around here. I admit that, until Dr. Gordon Eggleton showed me around, I had no idea how many exciting bits of geological evidence there are in southern Oklahoma. There is a dramatic and hidden history underneath the Oklahoma dirt. Today, Oklahoma sits quietly in the middle of the North American plate. But a hundred million years ago, it was a pretty exciting place.

You can read all about it at the University of Oklahoma Biological Station website (http://www.ou.edu/uobs/evolution.html). The full brochure, with photos, is there, along with a registration form and instructions.

In upcoming blog entries, I will write about some of the things we will see on this trip. If you want to read about it how, visit the website above. If you cannot come but would like to make a donation to help defray the cost for participating schoolteachers, you can make a donation to the University of Oklahoma Foundation. Contact me at srice@se.eduif you are interested. You will be provided with a letter to acknowledge the tax-exempt status of your donation.

Passing the Consilience Test

In the cult classic movie Harold and Maude, Maude recites a quote, but cannot remember who had said it. “Oh, well,” she said, “I did.”

The statement “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is now famous. I’m not sure who said it first—I have heard it was Carl Sagan, but I’ll bet he was quoting one of the giants on whose shoulder he was standing. What I wish to consider now is, what constitutes extraordinary evidence? An important kind of extraordinary evidence is consilience.

Consilience means that a theory has been supported by numerous, independent lines of evidence—independent, that is, unless the theory itself is true. William Whewell (pronounced “hule”) invented the term, and used Isaac Newton as an important example. Newton’s theories of motion and gravitation were supported by the movement of objects on Earth and of the planets. Whewell rejected the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, even though evolution has proven to be one of the premier examples of consilience. Evolution is supported by fossils, biogeography, the process of natural selection, and now by molecular evidence. Without evolution, there is no reason to expect that older fossil assemblages should be less similar to modern organisms than younger fossil assemblages, for large placental mammals to be absent from Australia and Borneo, or for chimps to have the same pseudogenes that we do.

There are numerous examples of consilience in the history of science, though few as important as evolution. One example is DNA. Watson and Crick figured out the structure of DNA not only from chemistry and crystallography, but also because this structure made it obvious how could replicate and how genetic information could be stored.

The newest example of massive consilience is the theory of global warming. It is a theory because it is assembled from numerous hypotheses, all of which have been tested and confirmed. Among the lines of evidence are:

• Direct temperature readings by thermometers in the last century and a half

• Direct carbon dioxide measurements from the atmosphere in the last half century

• Indirect temperature estimates from ice cores

• Carbon dioxide measurements from ice cores

• Melting of polar sea ice in the Arctic

• Melting of land ice in Greenland and Antarctica

• Rising sea levels (despite the refusal of the North Carolina legislature to permit it)

• Phenological changes in many species of animals and plants

• Warmer winters allowing insect outbreaks in coniferous forests

• Methane bubbling out of Siberian lakes that no longer freeze even in winter

• Storms of increased intensity in coastal areas

• Droughts of increased intensity and duration in continental areas

And so on. I have contributed some of the phenological data to the above list. (Plants and animals have become active earlier in the spring by about two days per decade or, in some local cases such as my data set, two days earlier per year.) There was a time, about thirty years ago, when global warming was an extraordinary claim that required extraordinary evidence. The evidence is now in, and it constitutes consilience. There is no reason to expect all of those separate lines of evidence to converge on the same theory unless the theory is true. Consilience can be thought of as the opposite of pseudoreplication, in which you measure the same thing over and over.

Edward O. Wilson has written many books of great significance, and you all know about most of them. In case you might have overlooked it, I wish to suggest his book Consilience. He indicated that evolution provides a framework for the consilience of all branches of knowledge. This claim was sufficiently broad and sweeping to evoke some strong responses, perhaps most notably from essayist Wendell Berry, who wrote Life is a Miracle in a sincere but, I think, failed attempt to refute Wilson. I am an immense admirer of Berry, but admit that he was wrong about this one.

It is interesting that the anti-science movement has fought against both evolution and global warming. They have taken on two of the aspects of modern science that not only have the most evidence, but the most consilience.

Jerry Coyne’s Critique of Accommodation

All evolutionary scientists agree that the creationists are wrong, in almost every way; but they disagree in how to deal with the problem. Scientists disagree about whether to oppose all religion, or to accommodate those religious ideas that are consistent with evolutionary science.

“Accommodationists” are evolutionary scientists who accept the legitimacy of some religious views, even if not believing them. For example, some scientists see “let there be light” as an ancient description of a Big Bang. They believe that “all truth is God’s truth” and if a religious belief contradicts the clear facts of science, then the belief must be wrong. They accept a highly figurative interpretation of the Bible. Galileo was an accommodationist; he said the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. Some scientists, such as Sir John Polkinghorne, have gotten advanced degrees in theology so as to not make amateurish theological assumptions.

Of course it has not escaped anyone’s notice that religion has retreated whenever science has advanced. Galileo’s story is a case in point. See my earlier series of essays about the vast gulf between science and religion, from October 2, 2012, to January 2, 2013. One wonders if, someday, the accommodationists will have anything left to accommodate. Even the oft-repeated question, “Why does anything exist rather than nothing?” might have a cosmological answer someday.

Some accommodationists are sincere believers in some form of religion. Others are simply being practical: religion is here to stay, and we might as well work with it. Religion may be ineradicable (I am trying to use the word neutrally): even if there is no genetic basis for religion per se, its mental components and the memes that activate them will always be part of the human experience in some form. I am reminded of the scene in Nicholas Mosley’s novel Hopeful Monsters in which two children in Soviet Russia had a secret cave with Orthodox icons in it. Accommodationists think that opposing religion itself is not only going to fail but it is going to make some religious people, who might otherwise be open to science, dig in their heels. I have actually seen science teachers who are religious show resistance to evolution, then soften into cheerfulness when they realize that the evolutionary scientists are not preaching atheism.

Many accommodationists are greatly bothered by the tone taken by many of their critics, one of the most prominent of whom is P. Z. Myers, who writes the Pharyngula blog. It is an extremely popular blog and, in the eyes of many outside of science, represents scientific belief. Sam Harris is famous for saying that Francis Collins’s religious beliefs make him a very poor choice to be the head of NIH. Another vocal anti-accommodationist is Jerry Coyne, president of the Society for the Study of Evolution. Coyne, however, published an article in the journal Evolution in 2012 that makes a very reasonable critique of scientists accommodating religion and is well worth reading. Most Evolution articles are for members only, but this one is free.

Some of Coyne’s points are common sense. The mere fact that some scientists are religious does not mean science and religion are compatible. “That people can simultaneously hold two conflicting worldviews in their head is evidence not for compatibility but for” the flexibility of the human mind. “This argument for science/faith compatibility is like saying that Christianity and adultery are compatible because many Christians are adulterers.”

But Coyne makes some very basic and insightful points. It is similar to the point I also made in the first of my essays on science and religion, though of course he thought of it first. Coyne says, “In science faith is a vice, in religion it is a virtue.” Furthermore, science itself is based on the assumption that “deities do not affect the universe.” Coyne says this is a “conclusion born of experience; the experience that only a naturalistic attitude—that is, a scientific one—has helped us understand nature and make verified predictions about it.” Name an example of any time that religion has helped science make a discovery.

Coyne’s position is further strengthened by a study published this year in Science by psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan. This article is available to members only, but this link shows you the abstract. Gervais and Norenzayan preconditioned some study participants by showing them images (such as The Thinker statue by Rodin) that promoted an attitude of critical thought, and preconditioned others by showing them the otherwise similar discus-thrower statue (Discobolus by Myron). Regardless of their general religious beliefs, experimental preconditioning to critical thought significantly reduced the participants’ acceptance of religious statements. To many of us, this is experimental verification that religion dulls the proclivity (though perhaps not the ability) to think carefully.

Coyne’s solution is to quit accommodating. He particularly criticizes the John Templeton Foundation and the AAAS DoSER (Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion) program, as well as Stephen Jay Gould. He isn’t even very pleased with the National Center for Science Education. And he goes further. He says that scientists should actively try to “weaken the grasp of religion on America…” He points, correctly, to the recent and dramatic secularization of Europe. However, he does not claim that European secularization was caused even in part by anti-religion missionaries telling people to stop going to church. So he cannot use the example of Europe to demonstrate that scientists will be successful in an attempt to de-religionize America.

Then, at the end of the article, Coyne seems to draw a different conclusion. Coyne presents data that indicate an association between how religious and how dysfunctional a society is. But which causes which? I live in rural Oklahoma and know of no one who says, “I am religious, therefore I will beat my wife and get into drugs and crime.” Maybe, after all, we scientists should not go around trying to weaken religious belief: Coyne says, “…weakening religion may itself require other, more profound changes: creating a society that is more just, more caring, more egalitarian.” Now this conclusion is one that, I think, even Francis Collins could accept. And if, as a result of the advancement of altruism in society, religion dwindles away, this is a risk that accommodationists will have to accept.

Announcement: I just posted a YouTube video about symbiogenesis on my channel.

Confessions of an Oklahoma Evolutionist

I gave a presentation last Saturday afternoon in Tulsa. There were 35 people in attendance. It was every teacher’s dream. Not every lecturer’s dream: if your idea is that the audience will just passively absorb what you say, then this audience was not for you. But they were actively engaged in my presentation, and then asked questions for a half hour afterwards. While I think my presentation was good and had many valuable insights, the best part was clearly the audience discussion. In particular, I was not always the person to answer the question. I was ready for disagreement, but it turned out there was none. Convened by the Humanist Association of Tulsa, the audience seemed to consist mostly of Unitarians. But they were very knowledgeable people, including some who were retired scientists and science writers.

Briefly, my point was that evolutionists cannot ignore religion. Religion evolved and may be an instinct. Religion can be good or bad, and we should facilitate the good things and oppose the bad things. I focused on my own experiences, and those of my ancestors in Oklahoma. It was a very personal story, long on experiences and short on science, as appropriate for this audience. A PDF of the script from which I extemporized is at my website. The direct connection is here.

The audience brought up some interesting things to discuss. If I get a chance to post video clips from this session (which I will announce later), I hope to include some of the audience dynamics. One person wanted to know whether technology speeds up or slows down natural selection. Another wanted to know about the humanity and intelligence of the Neanderthals. Another wanted to discuss the origin of languages and the possible pivotal role of women in this process. While I had a lot to say from my extensive reading and writing on these topics, I was happy to defer to my wife, Lee Rice, who has studied and taught linguistics. She took a break from being a camera-person to leading a brief discussion. Thanks!

Julie Angle, on the education faculty at Oklahoma State University, was present, and whenever there was discussion of teaching evolution in Oklahoma, I was able to ask her to help. I said that if I have questions about science education, I would turn to her. I did not plan her presence; it was a lucky blessing. Thanks!

It is always a pleasure when a speaker, even one dressed up like Charles Darwin, can let the audience keep a good discussion going. I tend to be a control freak, but I have learned to deliberately let discussions take on a life and an evolutionary trajectory of their own.

Thanks to Larry Roth and the Humanist Association of Tulsa for sponsoring this presentation.

Darwin Presentation in Tulsa on Saturday Feb 16

Here is an announcement of my presentation this Saturday:

OESE president-elect Dr. Stanley Rice will give a presentation titled "Confessions of an Oklahoma Evolutionist: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" on Saturday, Feb. 16 in the Harmon Conference Room of the Genealogy Center at 2901 S. Harvard Ave. in Tulsa at 2:00 PM. For details, visit the Oklahoma Science Teachers Association online here.

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.

The Passing of a Great Scientist (Carl Woese)

Carl Woese died on December 30, 2012. He was the scientist who discovered the archaea, or “archies” (pronounced “arkies”) as we called them when I knew Woese at the University of Illinois. Archies look like bacteria under the microscope, but they usually live in extreme environments, such as deep ocean vents. But, in terms of biochemistry and DNA, archies are as different from bacteria as they are from us; in fact, archies are a little more closely related to humans than they are to bacteria.

Biochemical characteristics marked the archies as unusual: they have a different kind of phospholipid than either eukaryotes or bacteria have, and their DNA is associated with histones, just like that of eukaryotes. But DNA sequence analysis was required to truly demonstrate the uniqueness of archies. Woese was one of the first scientists to do DNA sequencing and apply it to evolution. This was back before PCR and all the other kinds of automation that genomic analysis now has access to. It took Woese the better part of a year to determine a DNA sequence that now can be done overnight. Woese’s work established that archies had a separate line of evolution from that of all other organisms. Based on his work, scientists and scientific amateurs know that life consists of three domains, rather than five kingdoms. We can no longer lump bacteria and archies together into the Kingdom Monera.

When Woese’s work was getting into full swing about 1980, he made a bunch of shirt pins that proclaimed “The 80’s belong to the archies.” This was parallel to the University athletic slogan, “The 80’s belong to the Illini,” referring to the football team. Only Woese’s promise came true.

An important consequence of Woese’s work was the way it fitted together with the insights of Lynn Margulis, who died in 2011. Margulis showed that important cell components (mitochondria in most eukaryotes, and chloroplasts in many protists and most plants) were the evolutionary descendants of bacteria that invaded, then formed a mutualistic partnership with, eukaryotic cells. Since Margulis first demonstrated this, many scientists have concluded that the nucleus itself was a mutualistic invader: an archie that moved into a eukaryotic cell. This would explain the (slight) genetic similarity between archies and eukaryotic nuclei, as well as their shared histones. Woese and Margulis disagreed on many things but most biologists have accepted the insights that both of them revealed and which have revolutionized our view of the history of life.

I took a seminar from Woese about 1982. He was very interested in some of the basic ideas and assumptions of science. As a young grad student (and also going through a period of withdrawal from various forms of creationism), I did not understand much of what we discussed, based as it was on the writings of David Bohm. But Woese was convinced that there was an ecstatic aspect of science, a deep meaning which he associated with a Buddhist view of the universe. (I do not know if he was a practicing Buddhist.) Woese’s view of science opened his mind to creative thinking; he wrote a paper once in which he suggested that life began in the clouds rather than in the ocean. And he questioned assumptions; for example, he said, perhaps there was a first “life state” rather than a first cell.

Many scientific colleagues considered Woese to be unconventional and strange when he first began his work on the archies. But he had at least two decades to see his ideas incorporated into the fundamental understanding of the evolutionary history of life. There is a pedestal outside of the life sciences complex at the University of Illinois commemorating the Archaea that Woese discovered there (see the photo).

A Christmas Altruism Message

Merry Christmas, everyone. Pull up a chair by the fireplace and listen to some stories about altruism.

Society is based on altruism. One of the most common examples is traffic regulation. Nearly everyone obeys traffic laws almost without thinking about it. Think of the billions of dollars that would be lost in our economy if, instead of traffic regulations, we just had open competition on the roadways. It would be chaos, with millions of hours of productive work time lost by people stuck in traffic worse than they already are. I would be perfectly happy to yield to pickup trucks with half-ton ram’s horns on the front, but I wouldn’t necessarily see them coming in time to stop. Also, I do not think a free-market economy would work well for traffic regulations. I would be happy to let someone driving a big pickup pay me to let them always have the right-of-way, but the infrastructure necessary to keep track of the payments would consume most of the profits. Traffic regulations are perhaps the best example of everyone reaping immense benefits from altruistically surrendering just a little bit of freedom, and we all grudgingly love those little laws.

Christmas is a time when people dabble in a little more altruism than normal. And tell and retell the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, the Dickens story about the quintessential anti-altruist. Scrooge (whom I played in a high school drama, as difficult as that may or may not be to imagine) was an evolutionary failure in all three forms of altruism: kin selection (he was mean to his nephew), direct reciprocity (he was mean to Bob Cratchit), and indirect reciprocity (he refused to donate to charity). Christmas is also a time when everyone can congratulate themselves that they are, at least, not as mean as Scrooge.

One might think that everyone would, with Dickens, rejoice in Scrooge’s Christmas Day conversion into an altruist. But one might be wrong. Leave it to a conservative commentator to criticize Scrooge for turning into a nice guy. This commentator (whose name I forgot, but who worked for a conservative think tank) said, in effect, what was Scrooge thinking? Giving Bob Cratchit and his family that big goose? First, how would that affect the employer-employee relationship? What will happen on the day after Christmas, when Cratchit shows up for work and expects to get a goose every week? And, second, this would only encourage Cratchit to sue Scrooge after he and his family ate all the grease and developed circulatory problems.

Okay, I just made that second one up. But the conservative commentator really did make the first point. I couldn’t make something like this up. Truth is stranger than fiction. I first learned this when, as a child, I was watching Dragnet on television. In one of their episodes, they investigated a case in which someone had stolen a man’s lawn. It was an expensive dichondra lawn, rather than a grass lawn. Dichondra has shallow roots, making it easy to scoop up a dichondra lawn (I think, never having tried it myself). No one could make up a story about someone stealing a lawn (Dragnet always began with, “The story you are about to see is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent”). And only in the real world could a conservative commentator criticize the generosity of Scrooge. I only hope it was intended as a joke, although neither the guest speaker nor the radio host gave any such hint.

If you want another Christmas message, this time from Charles Darwin, check out the Merry Christmas from Darwin videoon my YouTube channel.