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.   

Eternal Life

This seems a good subject for this weekend. But I’ve been pondering it ever since I read this in the January issue of National Geographic: “if you can live a few years more, there is a real chance you will never die, since mortality may be just a technical problem we solve.” Now as a 74 year old biologist, that caught my attention. Sure I’d like to see both houses of Congress controlled by Democrats, and see my granddaughter (currently 19 months old) graduate from college. But live forever?  

A bit of context: the statement I just quoted is part of a blurb written by Byron Reese to promote his new book which National Geographic saw fit to promote in its New Year edition. Yes, Byron is a young man – not a physician or biologist but a technocrat businessman and futurist. Reese’s book is entitled Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology will end Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger and War. And it seems - death. Heh, I’m for ending all five of those biggies that Byron says he can deal with; but since his book came out, ISIS, Boko Haram and Al Shabab seem to be using the internet and technology to head us in the opposite direction.  

But that’s not what I want to talk about in this blog. All sane people want to see the scourges listed in the book’s title go away. What I want to take issue with is the promise of ending death, the promise of eternal life. First, medical science should focus not so much on extending the life of elderly people as to tackling childhood diseases. I find it very painful to see images of children dying of cancer, their lives cut far too short.

I’ve already lived longer than both my grandfathers, and in another couple of years and I’ll have lived longer than both my parents. Modern medicine has given me better health in my seventies than it was thought possible a century ago. But live forever? – no way! 

Living things are designed to have a limited life span: some insects a day or two, some trees a thousand years. Amongst our ape cousins we humans have the longest lifespan, in part because of our extended childhood period leaving time for that big brain to develop. If in the next generation or so it is figured out how to extend life indefinitely  -  as a biologist I’m skeptical that it’s possible – then humanity would face an enormous moral crisis.

Generations pass on (it’s a good phrase) to make room for the next generations, not only physically and biologically but in terms of running our societies with new and better and more just ideas. If this medical breakthrough which Byron Reese predicts comes about it will be millionaires lining up to enjoy the expensive procedure while millions in Africa and Asia continue to die far too young. Furthermore, this planet is way overpopulated with humans as it is, driving many other species to extinction while being unable to feed all seven billion humans adequately. Curtail death and at some point we’d have to ban birth. 

I am extremely fortunate to be alive at this time in history. I feel the need to give back by helping people to appreciate the wonderful world of living creatures we have around us. In my very small way I vote and donate and advocate for a more just society. Then it will be time to move on, and younger and better generations can take the amazing story the next step.  To life! 

Simple humans

The acronym DNA and the word ‘gene’ are in common usage today but it was only in the 1940s that DNA was determined to be the genetic material, and DNA’s structure was not worked out till 1953. Then the race was on to find out how genes worked; a gene by definition being a stretch of DNA that codes for a particular substance. I had the great privilege to work on a small aspect of this in the early sixties for my PhD. In those days much of this work was done using bacteria for the simple reason that they have just one chromosome – a single thread of DNA. The bacterium that I worked with was a human pathogen called Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It gained a bit of notoriety around that time because it infected and killed the first heart-transplant patient; so I had to be careful. But my professor had chosen this species of bacterium because it had enzymes, and therefore genes, for digesting sugar in three different ways. We humans have just one way – the Embden-Meyerhof pathway. Pseudomonas had that plus two others. 

This was way before whole genomes came into the picture. It was assumed at that time that a bacterium would have about a thousand genes on its one chromosome. We hoped bacterial genomes would be fully elucidated one day, but doubted the human genome would be understood in my lifetime, and it was thought that it would probably entail mapping hundreds of thousands of genes. 

However, towards the close of the 20^thC estimates for humans were reduced to about 100,000 genes, a somewhat humbling figure seeing that E. coli had come out higher than originally expected with 4,485 genes on its single chromosome. Finally, with much fanfare involving President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair a ‘rough draft’ of the human genome was announced in April 2000. What was not so widely publicized was that it was found that our genome only operated on about 30,000 genes. In 2012 I volunteered and had my entire genome sequenced, but even mine didn’t have any more. In fact in the few years since then, figures have been revised downwards so that latest estimates are closer to 20,000 genes, arranged on 46 chromosomes. 

But surely human beings are far more complicated and therefore require more genes on more chromosomes than other simpler creatures. Afraid not. Our ape cousins, chimps and gorillas, have 48 chromosomes, cows have 60, bears 74, and turkeys 80!  The gene count is even more humiliating: water fleas have 31,00 genes – fifty per cent more than we do; and even the simple Nematode worm, less advanced than the common earthworm, beats us with 21,000 genes. It’s even more humiliating when it comes to plants. Lowly mosses have around 32,000 genes, the cute little wayside flower Birdsfoot Trefoil has 40,000 and Poplar trees 45,000. 

There must be something wrong: how can this brilliant creature that’s put men on the moon, blown up islands with H bombs, polluted the planet to the extent that we’re buggering up the climate, and cut people’s heads off for not bowing to the correct god - how come we have so few genes?  Yeah, well.  

 

I'll leave you with a picture of cute little Birdsfoot Trefoil. But It takes twice as many genes to make this cutie which while pleasing us with its beauty above ground, does the amazing feat of fixing atmospheric nitrogen in its roots, thus enriching the soil for others.

Cousins

Folks uncomfortable with the implications of evolution often say that it means we’re descended from chimpanzees. Recently in one of our southern states, parents sued a biology teacher because she was telling her class that evolution was wrong and that the real truth as to our origins was in the Bible. In her defense in court the teacher said that she had never seen a chimpanzee turn into a human, which says something about teacher certification in her state.

Chimpanzees are my cousins. Very distant cousins. By definition one is not descended from one’s cousins but we share a common ancestor. My first cousins and I share common grandparents, either on my mother’s side or my father’s.  I have eleven first cousins and I am happy to say that I’m in touch with all eleven mostly thanks to Facebook. Some might therefore read this blog. As an only child I really appreciate my cousins. I’m pretty sure that I have seven second cousins, but I’m not certain of the number. Again, I am very happy that I keep in touch with three of these second cousins, again thanks to Facebook and e-mail. We share a great-grandparent.

I have no idea about any third cousins, although they must exist, where we share a great, great grandparent -  two greats.  In his book The Ancestor’s Tale (2004) Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins estimates that we humans are approximately 250,000^th cousins of chimps, and our common 250,000 times great grandparents lived approximately six million years ago.

I share some facial similarities and even mannerisms with some of my first cousins. My second cousin Steve however is almost twice my height; and I’m sure if I did meet any third cousin we’d not be recognizably related, except by a DNA study. So those worried about evolution -  you are related to chimps but not that closely, unless it’s in comparison to some other creatures.  Go back not just six million years and a quarter of a million greats, but 340 million years and very approximately 175 million generations, and we find that we are cousins with all tetrapods (four-legged creatures), including those who’ve subsequently lost their legs like snakes and whales, or turned their front legs into wings like birds, or arms like us. We’re all cousins. Perhaps this is why some people are vegetarians.