Disconnects between philosophy, cosmology and evolutionary biology

 I’ve read remarks by physicists that biologists are scientists who can’t handle the    math. Hmm. Try dealing with the complexities of the human genome guys.

Anyway, as a biologist who’s the first to admit that my math could be better, I have been trying to further educate myself in my senior years by reading books on astrophysics and cosmology, and the philosophy that flows from these sciences. I have become a big fan of astrophysicist Carl Sagan and his ‘successor’ Neil deGrasse Tyson, the nuclear physicists Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg; and the science philosopher Daniel Dennett to name just a few. But writings by some other astrophysicists and philosophers have me thinking that there’s some disconnect between these two disciplines, and then between both of them and modern evolutionary science.

I’ve just finished reading an interesting book by Jim Holt, who writes on scientific subjects for The New Yorker, entitled Why does the world exist? (2012). It explores the question: Why is there something rather than nothing? – a rather profound question. Of course if you’re religious then the answer is because God made the ‘something’. There’s a lot that could be discussed around that, but that’s not what I’m about in this blog essay. My concern, as I said, is the apparent disconnect between some intellectuals in these spheres of knowledge which to my mind muddies the pool.

A philosopher (I won’t say at which university) is quoted in Holt’s book saying that the universe is constructed the way it is in order to allow conscious observers to evolve, because without conscious observers the universe would be logically inconsistent. As a biologist I find this quite absurd. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Our planet earth is 4.5 billion years old. Life on this planet, all based on one and the same construct of nucleic acid, began about 3.8 billion years ago. Homo sapiens evolved about 200,000 years ago – a real Johnny-cum-lately compared with the millions of other species on our planet. Are we seriously suggesting that the universe was ‘logically inconsistent’ before we came along to think about it in our little corner of this vast universe?

The universe that we can see is composed of about two hundred billion galaxies, and each galaxy is composed of a hundred or more billion stars, many of them with planets going around them. The numbers are so large – about 30 billion, trillion stars - that there almost has to be life on other planets going around some of those stars. But whether there’s intelligent life out there amongst the life forms on these other planets is another issue. For that matter are we intelligent?!

Furthermore, according to Holt’s book some philosophers of science, and even  some astrophysicists, conclude that the whole universe is specially constructed to produce us humans.  This is not only laughably self-centered but shows great ignorance of the workings of evolution. Assumptions are made that if you have the right physical and chemical conditions on a planet that you will inevitably end up with intelligent beings such as humans. No way. Go back just 7 million years and ‘play the tape again’ and you would likely not end up with Homo sapiens. Yes, there were apes 7 million years ago. But in every minute since then there were chance happenings – who some ape met and had sex with, whether it turned right down a path or left and therefore met it’s end with a leopard, or not; etc. etc. etc. down through the millennia – happenstance choices made by individual creatures, free from the control of any god or computer chip, that could and did have major consequences on the future.  To give a stark example from recent history – Hitler’s mother had six children, four of whom died in childhood from diseases caught from someone else. Unfortunately for tens of millions of us Adolf survived.  So very easily history could have been different. And the same story could be told about a person who has done great good for humanity which we could have missed out on but for some minor happenstance.

Because of the great similarity of DNA amongst humans of all ethnic types, compared with other species, and supported by certain paleontological evidence, it is believed that humans nearly became extinct at one point early in our development. If that had happened the world would still be here and most of the other 20 million species on our planet would be in a happier state. This planet and solar system was not constructed for our benefit – we just happen to be here; and that’s only until we blow ourselves up or make the environment unlivable. And about 4 billion years from now the sun will explode and blow earth to bits ending all life here any rate.  And other forms of life on other planets in other solar systems will go merrily on their way, whether ‘intelligent’ or not, blissfully unaware that little planet ‘Earth’ ever existed.

Happy Halloween !

The Scopes Trial 90 years on

90 years ago today the famous Scopes ‘monkey’ trial opened in Dayton, Tennessee. John T. Scopes, a local high school teacher, volunteered to be the defendant in a trial sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union to test the Tennessee Butler Act, which outlawed in state-funded schools (including universities) the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."

Scopes was defended by the well-known liberal lawyer Clarence Darrow from Illinois who had become famous when he defended Eugene Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union for leading the Pullman Strike of 1894.  The leader of the prosecution was another famous lawyer  - William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was at the trial representing the World Christian Fundamentals Association. He had run unsuccessfully for President three times, and had been Secretary of State 1913-1915.

                          Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan confer during the trial.

 After eleven days John Scopes was found guilty. The Butler Act was not repealed until 1967. Books and plays have been written about this famous trial, and the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, based on the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, dramatized the story, even though names were changed.

In my last blog on June 26^th, following the racist murder of nine people in an African-American church in South Carolina, I made the connection between continuing racism and the denial of evolutionary science which shows that all humans are very closely related; that in fact there is no such thing as different races of humans.

But we in the northern part of the USA must be wary of pointing the finger at the South while our own house is far from perfect. None of us finds it easy to change our ways; but yesterday the state legislature of South Carolina voted to remove the Confederate flag from its Capitol grounds. Now the state legislature of my home state of Massachusetts should look at its own flag which could be interpreted as making a racist statement towards the native people of this land. The appalling treatment of African Americans has rightly had a lot of attention in recent decades. What has not had so much attention and correction is the terrible way the original inhabitants of the Americas have been treated for centuries. So I was heartened to see that yesterday, speaking in Bolivia, Pope Francis said: “I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”  Also yesterday, President and Mrs. Obama hosted the first White House Tribal Youth Conference. 

I want to close on this positive note by leaving you with the poem that my mother-in-law Beverly Kitchen (who has just celebrated her 97^th birthday) wrote for her 3^rd grade nature class in a suburb of New York City in 1926, just one year after the Scopes trial.

Star, Sun;

Sun, Spark;

Spark, World;

World, Steam;

Steam, Rain;

Rain, Oceans;

Oceans, Plants;

Plants, Mites;

Mites, Insects:

Insects, Fish;

Fish, Frogs;

Frogs, Snakes;

Snakes, Birds;

Birds, Animals;

Animals, Monkeys;

Monkey, People;

And here we are!

And, here we are indeed. All related parts of a wonderful creation.

Huge Irony, and the same old game

The murderous rampage by this sick young man Dylann Roof in Charleston, SC has left me deeply disturbed; and of course I’m not alone. After the initial horror and heartbreak, two things strike me: huge irony, and the same old game.

Dylann Roof was inspired he says by the Council of Conservative Citizens. Being ignorant of this group I Googled them. Very interesting. First I was struck by how many prominent politicians have been associated with the Council, including one of the many (if you get my drift) now running for President. Two parts of the Council’s platform struck me: ‘conservative Christian values’, and ‘the superiority of the European race’.

The first of these brings me to the huge irony because ever since Roof’s murderous assault in a church we have witnessed the most extraordinary expressions of forgiveness by family members of those slaughtered and many others as they gathered together in the historic Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston. Many have expressed forgiveness and a refusal to go down the road of hatred and revenge because they say that this is what their Christian religion teaches them. What I find ironic is that when the forebears of these good folk were brought here against their will they were not Christian; and only later did their descendants acquire the religion of their ‘owners’, and now it appears practice it a little better than some of the descendants of the ‘owners’. These racists say that they find in this same bible clauses that give them reason to declare people of color inferior.  Hold on a minute: Jesus of Nazareth was not a European; he was a West Asian, most probably with dark wavy hair and certainly dark brown eyes and a healthy 'tan'. His encounter with Europeans was not healthy in that it was Europeans in the form of Romans who executed him.

As for the ‘same old game’ part of my title, I’m referring to the constant linkage of European racial superiority and the need to link that with the denial of the proven facts of human evolution. European superiority is a lie and can only be perpetuated by more lying.  I’d like to think that if Dylann hadn’t dropped out of high school he might have learned a bit of basic biological truth; but then I’m probably kidding myself. I’m a subscriber to the Reports of the National Center for Science Education. There, amongst other things, I receive updates on court cases and struggles in state legislatures where concerned parents, more enlightened legislators or scientific organizations struggle to either overturn laws brought in to deliberately impede the proper teaching of biology, or in some cases to be sure that individual teachers do not impose their ‘creationist’ views on students in public schools. Not too surprisingly, the vast majority of these cases occur in the former slave states where, 90 years after the Skopes trial in Tennessee, the facts of evolution are all too often still not properly taught.  And yes, that’s why that damnable confederate flag still flies in too many places. Racism and the denial of evolutionary truth are intimately linked, and are of course carry-overs from the evil days of slavery.

Which brings me to my biologist’s perspective. Just as we associate a polar bear with the arctic, a tiger with Asia and a kangaroo with Australia, so a human is an animal that came into being (evolved) in Africa about 200,000 years ago.  For a while we were few – life must have been tough – and at one point we nearly died out as a species. But eventually we flourished and then a few small bands left out of the north east corner of the continent –  maybe some local dispute or hunger or just plain curiosity drove them. The few who did leave – probably no more than a few hundred - developed into all the humans that eventually came to occupy the rest of the world.  All Europeans for example are descended from just eight women. And we’re paler than most other people quite simply because our ancestors needed not to block out so much of the sun’s rays in order to make sufficient vitamin D.  Pregnant women deficient in Vitamin D can lose the baby. In those unprecedented northern latitudes this gave an advantage to paler skinned mothers who then had more offspring.

We biologists use the term ‘race’ for genetic variants within a species, but there is not sufficient genetic variation between any group of humans to justify the use of the term race to differentiate between human groups, we are all that close genetically. How do we know all this?  It is the accumulated work over the last hundred years of tens of thousands of anthropologists, archeologists, geneticists, chemists etc. challenged and refined over and over, so that I am certain with every fiber of my body that this is the truth. And I find this truth thrilling, and wonderful to know that if I walk down a street in any big city in the world all the varied looking people around me are in fact my cousins; and therefore dear Dylann we can and should love one another.  And simply enjoy our little variations.

The Lake House on the Pale Blue Dot

Recently I watched the 2006 movie The Lake House starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock about a couple separated by two years of time and yet connected by an old mail box outside of a lake house, perhaps near Chicago, to which they both drive, inside an hour, in order to deposit and collect letters from each other.  They of course fall in love and she, living two years ahead of him, is able to warn him to avoid a certain accident which she knows about, and saves his life. Then somehow they break through the time barrier and physically meet. Quite a nice movie.

By coincidence I was at the same time reading Pale Blue Dot: a vision of the human future in space by the late great science publicist Carl Sagan.  I’ll try and explain the connection. We can be separated by time as we’ll as distance, determined by the speed of light which is very fast but still has a velocity beyond which nothing can go faster. [I wonder if the same folk who are climate deniers will find fault with this J] When Neil Armstrong and ‘Buzz’ Aldrin walked on the Moon in July 1969 they were 1.3 seconds out of sync with us. But for Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock to be out of sync by two years they’d have to be 11.76 trillion miles apart. That’s a long way to go to a letter drop. 

Carl Sagan’s book takes its title from an extraordinary photograph that was taken by the Voyager 1 space-probe in 1990 as it was leaving our solar system after 13 years travel from launch.

  

This is what our home planet looks like from 3.7 billion miles away – a pale dot (encircled to help you see it) caught in a dusty sunbeam. It took five and half hours to beam the picture home.  Let me quote what this dim photo meant to Carl Sagan as expressed in the beginning of his book.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”. Every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. “

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

As I’ve been preparing this essay in recent days we’ve marked the 150^th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War which killed approximately 700,000;  then the 70^th anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of the Nazi death camps; and the centenary of the Armenian genocide. Oh, and Earth Day, at a time when the overwhelming evidence of climate change is being denied by too many politicians, and other species are being annihilated at the greatest rate since the last big asteroid hit and killed off approximately 90% of all species, but not obviously and fortunately for us – our own ancestors.

In Pale Blue Dot  Sagan worried, 21 years ago, about human destruction of this planet and wondered if we’d need to move somewhere else. The question is –where? There’s nothing very habitable in our solar system and the nearest other solar system to us is 24.7 trillion miles away, which at the speed of the Voyager spacecraft would take 6,675 years to get there. That’s a long time to be cooped up in a spaceship, and especially if there’s no habitable planet once you get there. 

When Sagan was writing we didn’t know much about planets in other solar systems. Now, perhaps not too surprisingly, we’re discovering that many stars, i.e. other suns, have planets going around them. This information has been pouring in in the last few years thanks to the Kepler telescope which was launched into orbit in 2009 and has been looking for planets orbiting other stars in our Milky Way galaxy which is estimated to have approximately 300 billion stars in it. And then remember there are well over 100 billion galaxies. With four or five planets per star this could mean trillions of planets. Therefore the chances of quite a few of them being of similar size and composition and distance from their sun as we are from ours – in the ‘goldilocks’ setting -  is overwhelming; and thus the likelihood of life on some of these other planets almost certain. 

That’s the good news. Tantalizing questions and challenges then arise. How do we find out if indeed there is life on some goldilocks planet in another solar system? They’re so far away. As we saw, the nearest possible one is 24.7 trillion miles away. Our telescope technology will of course improve with time, but at present we can’t actually see these other planets, simply detect the extremely tiny affect we can detect some orbiting object is having on its star. 

Supposing there’s not only life but intelligent life. Since the 1980s we’ve been beaming messages out into space. So far no one has replied, nor have we picked up anyone else’s message. And what would we do if we did? After taking this picture of how earth looks from the edge of our solar system, Voyager has continued off into outer space and we’ve lost contact with it. But on it goes, and just in case ‘someone’ comes across it they will find on board photos of what earth creatures (us) look like, a map of our solar system locating Earth, and some music and messages. Well, you know, just in case some extraterrestrials appreciate the Beatles. 

The thing it’s difficult for any of us to get our heads around are the distances between us and other solar systems. The nearest other solar system to us takes light four years to get to us. That would apply to radio waves as well, leading to a boringly slow conversation, but nonetheless possible. However, there’s no ‘goldilocks’ planet there. The Kepler telescope has discovered a promising planet with water on it, so therefore it could have life on it; but what we’re seeing of it has taken 124,000 years for the planet’s image to get here. And likewise, if there is a technologically advanced civilization there looking at us with powerful telescopes, they’ll be chuckling as they watch a few apelike creatures running around looking for food, because the picture reaching them will be of us 124,000 years ago. So if there are intelligent folk out there who have solved all the problems of poverty, discrimination, war etc. it’s going to be difficult to ask them for advice, because by the time they send us that good advice we’ll have buggered everything up long since.