Travels with Charlie

I chose this title aware that I am stealing it from John Steinbeck’s travelogue of 1962. Steinbeck’s book of that title helped give me a love of America as a young man. But I’m choosing this title now for a few words about another travelogue by a young man published in 1839 – The Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle by Charles Darwin. If you’ve read my blogs before you will know that I’m keen to un-demonize (for Americans at least) this 19^th C. Englishman that few know, and fewer have ever read. To be honest, I only got around to reading this book of his – a bestseller at the time of publication – recently. I want to give you a few insights into Charles that come to light through this book. 

Charles graduated from Cambridge in the summer of 1831 at the age of 22 with a B.A. 3^rd class, which means he just scraped through. His exasperated doctor father sent him to Cambridge with the idea of him becoming a country parson after Charles had dropped out of Med School. But after graduating his girlfriend dumped him. So, despite the fact that he’s afraid of the sea because he gets violently seasick, he gets a job as ‘companion’ to the captain of a British navy ship that’s commissioned to do some detailed survey of the coasts of Argentina and Chile plus some South Pacific islands ‘for about two years’.  His father says No. But his uncle intervenes and a couple of days after Christmas 1831 the Beagle sails from Plymouth, England with young Charles on board. The captain, Robert FitzRoy, fortuitously gives him a Christmas present of a recently published book The Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell which Darwin starts to devour between bouts of throwing up as the Beagle heads out across the Atlantic. 

Darwin is not the official naturalist on the ship. That job is held by Robert McCormick. But four months into the trip when they dock in Rio de Janeiro, McCormick quits. He was no doubt upstaged by the ardent collecting by Darwin of everything he could find or catch, including shrimp from the ocean. It couldn’t have been easy for FitzRoy either. He and Darwin shared a small cabin on a 90 ft sailing ship carrying 74 men.  The two men got into arguments over slavery – Darwin was appalled by what he saw of it in Brazil.  He writes: “These deeds are done by palliated men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants with their beautiful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.” FitzRoy was a very conservative Christian but apparently wasn’t so bothered by the slavery they encountered. 

 

Most informed people know that the Beagle visited the Galapagos Islands; and certainly Darwin’s observations there were to prove key later, but the Beagle had been at sea for three years and nine months before they reached the archipelago; and Darwin’s description of the five-week stay there occupies one chapter out of 21 in his book. On leaving, after a stay of five weeks, the Beagle headed west across the Pacific and home to England a year later, a voyage of four years and ten months, much longer than Darwin thought it would be when he embarked. Darwin’s genius was that despite any hardships he made enthusiastic use of every minute and turned the voyage into the defining time of his life. 

The majority of the time on this long voyage was spent by the Beagle’s crew exploring and mapping the coasts of Argentina and Chile including the dangerous Cape Horn and Tierra del Fuego. There were several occasions when Darwin took off with one or two companions on horseback with a mule pack exploring the wild hinterland for up to three weeks at a time often camping rough. One marvels how – without cellphones – he managed to always connect back with the Beagle before it sailed on. Not once but three times he experiences an earthquake in Chile, observing with horror the devastation of a town, as well as taking note that in one place the coast had risen several feet after the main quake, leaving seaweed high and dry. Informed no doubt by Lyell’s book he is constantly noting the geology and rock strata, and is dumbfounded to find fossilized sea-shells high in the Andes. 

Wherever he went, Darwin collected – one reason for the mules. They must have been tripping over the stuff on board the little brig, but at every opportunity he would send crates back to England to be studied by the relevant experts of the day. He collected just shy of five and half thousand specimens!  1,529 small creatures preserved in alcohol, and 3,907 dried specimens – plants, skins, bones, fossils, rocks; all catalogued in 12 volumes; while filling 24 diaries about his experiences and observations.  

As a young upper-middle class Englishman of the early 19^th century he is rather snooty about what he deems laziness amongst the Latin Americans of that time, but is impressed by the work of English missionaries in Tahiti and New Zealand, bringing an end to cannibalism and tribal warfare and reducing the mistreatment of women. But he is deeply shocked at the bad treatment of the aboriginal people in Australia by the deported convicts from England. 

He loved the tropical islands with their coral reefs which the Beagle visited, including atolls, and wondered how they formed. He reasoned that the coral reef would grow towards the surface while the volcanic island sank eventually producing an atoll. This concept was dismissed by experts at the time, but has now been shown to be true.   

At the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic on the way home he finds a letter waiting for him from his sister in which she informs him that as a result of all the specimens and information that he’d been sending home he has created quite a stir in England. Darwin would never leave England again, would quickly marry, be devoted to his wife and help raise a large family, while pondering his voyage of a lifetime and all that his observations meant. His genius lay both in his unquenchable curiosity coupled with a constantly questioning mind. It would be another 23 years after his return home that he would publish his other famous book On the Origin of Species in 1859. Good trip Charlie.  

Survival of the fittest, or luckiest?

The term ‘survival of the fittest’ was, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, not coined by Darwin but has been used, or rather misused, too often by people in positions of economic or political ascendancy to justify their dominance over others. Nevertheless, amongst all living things life has advanced and evolved through the natural selection of the slightly better adapted individual, provided that individual lives long enough to produce offspring. 

That proviso leads us to what I want to discuss in this essay; and that is the part played by fortune, or if we put a more personal slant on it – luck, or bad luck.  From the start this factor has always been there, and perhaps not sufficiently recognized.

In the very beginning it would have been all a case of luck – luck that the right chemicals bumped into each other at just the right moment and under the right conditions, perhaps even involving a strike by lightning. It’s a mystery as to how the first replicating molecule of nucleic acid got formed about 3.8 billion years ago. And then, because of being in a rich enough chemical environment, was able to replicate itself and  keep replicating. And we and all the multitudinous life on this planet are the result! How many times did this process start only to be snuffed out by something, and the whole thing having to start again, or not? On this planet it did of course succeed. Now the conditions don’t exist here anymore for it to begin again. On how many other planets, with all the right conditions at some point in their history, was the opportunity missed, leaving a planet out in the cosmos looking like Earth but lifeless, because of bad luck? There could be millions.

As life evolved on this planet, the natural selection of the better-adapted has been the driving force. But luck or happenstance has also played a part. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould used to love to point out that but for the huge asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula about 65 million years ago we humans wouldn’t exist. For about a hundred million years the planet had been dominated by dinosaurs. We can’t say they weren’t fit if they survived for so long. They must have been well-adapted to the conditions at that time. It is believed that the impact of the asteroid, that but for a second or two of timing would have missed, caused massive fires and such dust and smoke that most sunlight was blocked for years. These huge largely cold-blooded creatures couldn’t get enough food to eat and starved and froze to death. Meanwhile, our ancestors – small rat-like furry mammals that had been trying to keep out of the way of the dinosaurs  - survived. Many would have died also, but the fittest survived. So that then the splendid array of mammals that now roam our planet today evolved, including us.

Now, like the dinosaurs before us, we humans rule the roost. How much are fitness and luck factors in our survival ?  There is no doubt that the fitness factor that has us ruling the world to the tune of 7 billion is our cleverness that enabled us to harness fire, develop agriculture and build the modern civilization that we have.  Again, however, I want to point to the luck factor for various individuals and groups. Rather than ‘luck’ a more appropriate word would be ‘fortune’ or ‘circumstance’.  As the Phil Ochs song, made famous by Joan Baez, goes – “There but for fortune go you, or I.”

The quip that our ancestors didn’t need to run faster than lions to survive but only faster than the other guy, is true but is not the whole story. Supposing that instead of chasing the two men the lion was lying in wait to pounce. Then it would have been a matter not of fleet of foot or any particular fitness, but luck as to who of the two guys were on the side of the path where the lion lay in wait. 

Allow me to give a very personal example of luck as regards my own existence.   Before he died, my father told me that he and my mother decided one day that it was time to start a family. So they did what was necessary, and the next morning when they turned on the radio they discovered that Britain had gone to war with Germany. It was September 3^rd, 1939. They immediately stopped trying and hoped that my mother would not become pregnant because of the future they feared. I was born nine months later just as the bombing of Britain started in earnest. The three of us survived the war, and after it was over my parents tried for a second child, but my mother had a miscarriage and then later died. The point I’m trying to make is that if my parents had delayed making love just one more night – I wouldn’t exist, nor any other product of my parents.

That’s my self-centered story of fortune. But meanwhile that horrific Nazi juggernaut rolled across Europe and tens of millions of people were not as fortunate as me and my parents. Most horrific of all, close to 90% of Europe’s Jews were rounded up and murdered in the biggest single crime in human history. Lack of fitness was not the issue, rather the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or with the wrong family name.

Albert Einstein got out to America just before the war. We will never know about other gifted people, Jewish or otherwise, whose special genetically based aptitudes were snuffed out, perhaps delaying the discovery of some medical cure or important technology. Terrible misfortune befell those people, and humanity will never know the full extent of our loss because of their loss.    

In wild nature the better adapted – the fitter – are more likely to survive to adulthood and produce offspring, and in that manner plants and animals evolve. In modern human society, good fortune or misfortune becomes the much greater factor. If you are born into a well-off family in a developed nation today, your chances of surviving to adulthood, where if you wish you can produce offspring, are very high. Your chances are nowhere near as good if you happen to be born in Central America, several parts of Africa, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.; or even if you happen to be born black in America. 

Enough of millionaires boasting about survival of the fittest, meaning themselves. At this Holiday Season, all of us who find ourselves in fortunate circumstances should show our gratitude by reaching out to others less fortunate. Happy Holidays !  

Climate change: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and the Koch brothers.

OK, what do these guys have to do with climate change?  Well, when I thought about it – quite a bit. First, let’s quickly say it and move on: climate change is a FACT, it’s happening, it’s getting really serious and I don’t have time to argue that one anymore. I’ll just refer to former US President Jimmy Carter who in a recent speech referred to climate-change deniers as “nutcases”. I agree sir. 

Our CO2 production is out of control. The levels in the atmosphere started to climb with industrialization which has brought us the modern world. As a result I’m sitting in a warm house typing this on my computer, and looking forward to driving to my mother-in-law’s for Thanksgiving. All those things are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, except perhaps for a small fraction of my electricity that comes from nuclear and/or wind power. This growing CO2 production is basic to our modern society but is at odds with our survivability. I’m daring to suggest that the solution will need to go far deeper than whether we increase the gas tax or stop the Keystone pipeline. Good first steps but nowhere near addressing the fundamental issue which is the way we run our modern societies and how that simply doesn’t fit either with human nature or the way the planet works. 

I had already begun to think in this radical way (in some parts of this country they’d use a stronger word about me) when, in the December 4^th issue of the New York Review of Books, a review by Elizabeth Kolbert of a new book by Naomi Klein caught my eye. Ms Kolbert’s review was entitled Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?, and Klein’s new book is This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. So far I’ve only read the review, but this certainly got me thinking.

For decades, particularly in America since WWII, the argument has been ‘Yeah, OK, so some of these big capitalists can be a bit ruthless at times but the wealth they create will keep trickling down and eventually we will all benefit.’  And for a while perhaps it did work fairly well. But now the excess of greed, and the use of these billions to basically buy elections led a recent Princeton University study to declare that the USA now no longer qualifies as a fully democratic society! And there’s been very little trickle down during the last few years of economic recovery while a bunch of billionaires have hugely grown their wealth. And meanwhile, Congress does nothing to curb greenhouse gases. I wonder why?

It used to be said that what was good for General Motors was good for America. At least they make cars for the general public’s use and employ people at fairly reasonable salaries thanks to the UAW. Now it’s what’s good for the Koch brothers who own a large share of the filthy Alberta tar sands, or the Walmart family who pay outrageously low wages.

Put simply: I do not think unfettered capitalism, which is what we have in America now, is sustainable. Not for a democracy where ordinary people need to feel they’re getting a fair deal, and not if we are to avoid a climate disaster, and all that that involves including agricultural collapse in some important regions of this country and other parts of the world. We live on a ball with limited resources, and simple logic should point to the fact that we cannot continue to increase in population and consumption. There is a limit. We need a political and economic system that will work within these constraints, and work because it better fits our human natures, the way we naturally, genetically, are created to relate with one another.

I went on the website capitalism.org and the first thing it presented to me, front and center, was this quote from Ayn Rand: “The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve ‘the common good.’ The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature.”  Wrong again lady.

Before you think I’m about to sing the praises of Karl Marx – he got it doubly wrong. Karl bought into the pre-Darwinian, Lamarckian idea that creatures, including humans, were molded by their environment, plus he assumed that pre-civilization people were all well-behaved and we’d only been made brutal by feudalism and then capitalism. To be fair the Communist Manifesto was published eleven years before On the Origin of Species (1859). Karl never read Charles’ book. His colleague Friedrich Engels did and wrote Marx basically saying: ‘We’ve got a problem’. Put simply, Marxist philosophy is unscientific and is out of step with how human nature works.  Not too surprisingly therefore the two great communist (or former communist) countries, Russia and China have nothing to offer in terms of tackling climate change. China has now become the world’s largest polluter constantly building more and more coal-run power-stations, because they have the coal. And dear old Russia, now the second most polluted country, is getting what foreign currency it can from exporting oil and gas. Great! So no solution there.

The industrialists who developed modern capitalism in the late 19^th, early 20^th centuries latched onto the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, (which does not come from Darwin and which promotes a distortion of Darwin’s theory), in effect saying ‘we’re endowed with more smarts than the masses, (have less foibles about ripping others off), and so we’re ‘fitter’ and therefore deserve a larger portion of the pie’.  This is at least closer to what human nature can be like, but there are some flaws and oversimplifications in this approach as well.

We have to remember that what we’re looking for is a system that is in sync with human nature, and is sustainable both on the large scale – i.e. globally – and on the long term; for several centuries, not just decades, into the future. We can get insights as to how our bodies and minds work best by studying how humans lived for thousands of years in the past. Why? Because we have evolved to fit that environment and we evolve very slowly. Here we learn not only how to live healthily in terms of food and exercise, but how we have learned to live with our neighbors. It’s a good news, bad news story. We can have a tendency to mistrust the stranger, even fear him, because for thousands of years our ancestors lived in relatively small groups, not sure about the strange people the other side of the mountain. But the corollary of this is that humans are intensely social creatures. We love our families, we help our neighbors, we donate blood and even organs, and some even sacrifice their lives for others. This is not that common amongst animals. Altruism is not just a good idea, it is literally in our genes. Ayn Rand was doubly wrong because she claimed that humans were rational and pooh-poohed altruism. We’re not overly rational but we can be altruistic. And this is the good news.

We need to build societies that are sustainable over the long run in terms of consumption, and we need to base them on social systems that encourage the best in us towards each other, that encourages that built-in altruism, working with the way we’re built.  I’m an agnostic, but in each of the religious traditions around the globe there are teachings and communities that bring out the best in people. In the political and economic realm I hesitate to put words to it but ‘social democracy’ or ‘democratic socialism’ come to my mind, and countries such as Denmark which has the least super rich and the least poor of any nation have my interest. We surely can and must find a way of caring for each other and for the planet, and for the future generations. 

Happy Thanksgiving ! 

Designer Jeans from designer genes? 

On October 30^th this year Britain opened a national sperm bank. Its purpose is to aid those wishing to have babies and where the traditional delivery route of the sperm is for some reason not an option. Another reason for a national sperm bank is to help meet the demand which has outstripped supply the report said.

Many of these sperm donations will be used in in vitro fertilization or IVF which again was pioneered by the Brits when in 1978 the first so-called ‘test-tube’ baby was born, although it must be quickly clarified that Louise Brown spent almost all of her nine months developing as an embryo in her mother’s womb just like any other baby, and not in some large glass jar. It is just that for some reason Louise could not be conceived in the old-fashioned way; but by bringing her parents’ egg and sperm together in vitro as the Latin goes – in a glass container – and then putting the fertilized egg – after it has shown itself viable as a ball of cells called a blastocyst – into the mother’s womb. Since 1978 millions of babies around the world have found life in this way. After the initial shock and inevitable condemnation from ultra-conservatives, such a procedure is now generally viewed as just another way in which modern medical science can help bring life and happiness to grateful mothers and couples. 

Since 1978, and particularly the last fifteen years, advances in human genetics have brought a new dimension to the story, and further moral dilemmas. Once the fertilized egg has reached the blastocyst stage, and before it is inserted into the mother-to-be, it is safely possible to extract one cell from the ball of cells and to study the cell’s chromosomes. A common reason for such screening is this: if the technician can see in the cell that there are three copies of chromosome 21, instead of the normal two, this means with certainty that the child will suffer from Down’s syndrome.  Many will simply opt not to use this blastocyst. Other genetically based diseases can be detected.

I drive a twenty year old Honda. My ire is sometimes roused when a guy cuts in front of me in his brand new Mercedes or Cadillac. But in my calmer moments I do not advocate that fancier cars not be made simply because I can’t afford them. I admire their beauty and performance, and also know that these top-end cars pull up the engineering in our less expensive cars. But cars are not human beings so what’s my point. The human body is not a perfect design either, but it’s pretty darned good, and we evolved into this condition surprisingly fast. That means only one thing: evolutionary pressure, which is a euphemistic phrase for a very high death rate amongst our ancestors – culling in a ruthless way the not-so-fast, the not-so-strong, the not-so-smart etc.  

But this cruel mechanism of nature no longer applies to us humans thank goodness. Modern medicine achieves greater and greater miracles all the time, even giving sight and hearing to otherwise blind or deaf children, and curing all sorts of diseases and ailments that afflict many of us. Most of us knew someone who died of cancer. We cry out for a cure as if there can be an all-cancer vaccine or something. For some forms there are genetic predilections for these cancers. Why not nip them in the bud? 

Despite being well made, our bodies are not perfect, and that goes for the genes that control the blueprint. Too many people suffer from imperfections they did not choose, and their parents had no idea they were passing on to us. If wild nature’s ‘survival of the fittest’ technique is no longer an option, then medical science should continue to look for ways of curing at the source and not just treating the problem later.  

Improvements in the human race in future could well be through genetic selection and modification. It sounds pretty scary right now perhaps. At present straightforward IVF is still expensive, let alone genetic work on top, and therefore in the near future only rich people will be able to order healthier, even better-looking and more intelligent ‘enhanced children’. Perhaps it sends shudders down your spine. This left-leaning liberal democrat is going to play devil’s advocate here and ask - is it really so much different from the rich person who can buy a better-looking, better performing, even safer automobile? And house and lifestyle? If it sounds unfair and elitist, remember that just over a hundred years ago only rich people could afford cars; now most of us have one. Just maybe, genetically improved babies will become not so unusual a century from now, and therefore in time, as these better genes spread, improve the general health of the population, as evolutionary pressure did in earlier times.