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.

Why Creationists and Other Conservatives Reject Global Climate Disruption

Many of us have wondered why the same people who attack evolution also attack human-caused global climate disruption. Many evolution education organizations, from the National Center for Science Education to Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education, now address both issues. Many of us have assumed that the two issues are connected by a general conservative attack on science, and perhaps by the fact that the Republican Party happens to reject both.

But I think there is a more direct reason. It is that conservatives believe that God designed the Earth so that we humans could live in technological comfort, raise lots of grain to feed to cattle, drive big fast pickup trucks, use water for private swimming pools, and have unlimited reproduction. The fact that God did not do so is deeply disturbing to them, and they reject this fact vigorously.

The early Old Testament writings assumed that God had designed the world, and designed it for man. These Biblical writers, however, assumed that big cities, based on massive agricultural production, were evil. Their ideal was wandering shepherds like Abel and Abraham and young David, not agriculturalists like Cain and big technologically-advanced cities like Babel (Babylon), Sodom, and Gomorrah. These early writers might have agreed that God did not design the world for the kinds of things we are now doing in it.

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.

Yes, Wayne, Absolutes Do Exist, But This is Not One of Them

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, plans to terstify before Congress today. According to a January 23 news release, LaPierre told a Weatherby Foundation awards ceremony that the Second Amendment gives Americans the unfettered right to own firearms. “Absolutes do exist, words do have specific meaning in language and in law,” he said. “No government gave them to us and no government can take them away.”

It is not clear from the news release what LaPierre was referring to when he said no government gave “them” to us. Did he mean that government did not give us the right to own firearms? If so, LaPierre is utterly and frighteningly wrong.

Absolutes do exist. The speed of light. The charge of the electron. In fact, a whole list of physical constants. But the right to own firearms is not an absolute. The federal government has, in fact, given us this right in the Second Amendment. But the Constitution provided a mechanism for amending the Constitution. Therefore the Constitution, and the Second Amendment thereto, are not absolutes.

Furthermore, there is no absolutely clear definition in the Second Amendment of what these “arms” are supposed to be. It is illegal to own nuclear weapons or missiles. Are these arms? It is illegal to use, and in most cases to own, machine guns. Even the NRA has not dared to call for the legalization of private ownership of machine guns and nuclear weapons. The right to bear arms is therefore limited, not absolute, even if you were to interpret the Second Amendment as an absolute commandment from God.

One could interpret arms, within the Second Amendment context, as whatever is necessary to maintain a militia. But we don’t have militias anymore. There are groups of people who think that the government is restricting their rights, for example, to polygamy. Does the Second Amendment give them the right to have arms to resist the federal government from enforcing laws against polygamy? Could not Warren Jeffs claim that the Second Amendment gives his followers the right to armed resistance? Would this be an example of a militia? And, if so, his followers could most certainly use machine guns and cannons and nuclear weapons to defend their compounds, since the Second Amendment does not prohibit them from doing so. I am sure this is not LaPierre’s interpretation. But he has told us that it is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of absolute truth.

LaPierre, and many NRA extremists (a term LaPierre rejects), are using absolutist terminology that is usually associated with religion. Conservative religious leaders consider all of their beliefs to be absolute, and that God has given them the right to enforce their religious beliefs on others. This is why religion has been such a successful component of human evolution (this blog is about evolution, remember): it is an adaptation (genetic and memetic) that allows some people to subdue others and to gain evolutionary fitness at their expense. The NRA is promoting a new religion: the absolute right to bear arms, as absolute as God Himself. The absolute right to bear arms is not found in the Bible, by the way. Jesus said, “Put away your sword, Peter; for those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” But the NRA is promoting a new religion in place of Christianity. And, like many other religions, the NRA religion sways people to adhere to its claims with visceral emotion rather than with facts. I am not saying that gun-rights advocates have no facts; I am just saying that whatever facts they may have are irrelevant when LaPierre talks about “absolutes.”

The talk of “absolutes” has made reasonable dialogue impossible. From the NRA viewpoint, there are only two choices: unrestricted ownership of weapons vs. total helplessness. The NRA has not permitted any discussion of intermediate possibilities. For example, what about stun guns? Could those be used as an intermediate form of school protection? I know that stun guns have a very limited range. But at least they provide some protection without actually killing people. At close range, a teacher’s stun gun could incapacitate a school shooter and allow his gun to be confiscated and for him to be subdued. What would be the strengths and weaknesses of a school stun gun policy? I would be interested in hearing this. But there can be no such discussion so long as the NRA divides the issue into helplessness vs. a full armor of assault weapons. I might want to hear a discussion of some intermediate possibilities regarding gun ownership and restriction; but I do not believe I shall ever hear such a discussion.

This is exactly the same approach used by creationists. They claim that if you do not accept a young Earth then you are an atheist. The NRA says you either accept unrestricted availability of weapons or else total defenselessness. Nothing in between. They have insisted on absolutes: an absolute dividing line between darkness and light, as between sun and shadow on the Moon. But this is Earth, with twilights and dawns.

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).