New belongings

I’m long since retired, and as of last year don’t anymore hold any executive positions in any local organizations, which were basically environmental. So, still wanting to help build a better world, I have recently joined three national organizations.

The National Center for Science Education, NCSE, is based in San Francisco but I was fortunate to meet some of their staff at a meeting locally a few months ago. Their focus is to provide information and advice about keeping the teaching of evolution and climate change in our science classrooms. The NCSE has been behind some of the high-profile court cases – mostly successful – where some schoolboards have tried to introduce religiously-based alternatives to evolution in public schools. Perhaps the most famous case was in Dover, PA in 2005 when the judge, a Republican, basically caught the school-board representatives in a lie when they tried to claim that they were simply trying to promote looking at the possibility of ‘intelligent design’ when it was shown that they had inserted this phrase in their document where it had previously said ‘creationism’ which is a religious term and therefore against the US First Amendment forbidding the promotion of religion in public education. Nevertheless, a recent survey showed that 23% of biology teachers in public schools in America refuse to teach evolution – the very basis for understanding the wonderfulness of all the living creatures in this world of ours, as well as how our own bodies work. For more on NCSE’s work see their website at www.ncse.org

The Union of Concerned Scientists, UCS, is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Traditionally it has worked for greater nuclear safety, but now is in the forefront of tackling the disturbing number of broadcasters such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and our amazing Republican Presidential candidates and the Republican controlled Congress, in their climate change denial.

We’ve known since the 19^th century that CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat. You don’t need a high school diploma to know that if you burn coal, oil, natural gas or gasoline – all of which we’re doing on a vast scale – it’s going to raise the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and lead to global warming. Our planet is the blue planet because it’s mostly water – heat water and it expands. A new report released this week predicts sea level rises of as much as ten feet by the end of the century. I won’t be around but my grandchildren will be. But Miami and both coasts of Florida won’t be, New York and parts of Boston will be inundated, and several entire Pacific island nations will disappear. A move away from fossil fuels to other forms of energy is worth fighting for, urgently. www.uscusa.org

The third organization that I’ve joined is the American Humanist Association. None of these three organizations is loved in certain obvious quarters in America; but the AHA is perhaps the most misunderstood. Here’s AHA’s own definition of itself in it’s latest newsletter: “Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.”  In the same article written by AHA’s President and Vice-President, they go on to say: “Atheism is what we don’t believe; humanism is what we do believe.” They conclude: “It’s up to us humanists and our allies to make sure that we create a desirable, fair, and just world to live in.”  www.americanhumanist.org 

Those of you who’ve known me for a while know that for many years I worked for the inter-religious organization Moral Re-Armament (MRA), now known as Initiatives of Change. www.us.iofc.org  During the years that I worked with MRA I saw it move from a basically Christian organization to an inter-religious one, and in that way be able to play an important role in facilitating dialogue between the different faith groups in the world - something very much needed today with threats from extremist groups from more than one religion.

Being true to what I honestly believe to be true about us humans and the universe we live in, I hope to use the rest of my life working with these three organizations that I’ve described to help try and leave this world in a bit better shape than it’s in at present.

Perhaps humans are coming full-circle on climate change

Go back a few million years and our ape ancestors lived in trees in the lush jungle of East Africa and ate a largely fruit and vegetable diet, using our powerful arms to swing from tree to tree.

Then a huge ice-age came down over Europe leading to a cooler and drier climate in East Africa with the jungle turning to largely savannah. Several things followed: we were forced to walk on our hind legs across the open grassland; this freed our hands to hold and throw rocks, and later more sophisticated weapons, at animals for food as there weren’t enough fruit trees left; and then this higher protein meat diet helped us develop larger brains.

But that’s not all. I’m currently reading one of E. O. Wilson’s most recent books – The Meaning of Human Existence (2014) -  in which he reminds us that we humans are social beings (despite all the evidence to the contrary in the current American primary process), and that this has only occurred twenty times in animal evolution. The classic examples are ants and termites about which Wilson made his name earlier in his long career. These insects are hard-wired and work together like robots in huge colonies with each individual doing his genetically assigned task without question. Wilson reports that the only other mammals that exhibit a degree of sociality are a couple of species of mole rats. And in us humans our social abilities are good but certainly not all inclusive.

We early humans couldn’t just wander around as small groups like our ape cousins still do. In order for some – basically the guys – to go off hunting for perhaps days at a time, there needed to be a base-camp where mothers and babies resided leading to small village life and cooperation there, as well as cooperation amongst the gang of hunters. All this helped develop our brains and lead to mutual cooperation and social mores. The flip side of this was if this developing tribe, always struggling for sufficient food, discovered another tribe in the region, they were seen as competitors for this scarce food and therefore the enemy. We see this tribalism today in the passion of sports fans, and in political, ethnic and national enmities. So deep in human nature we have this duality between a wonderful ability to love one’s neighbor and sacrifice for one’s loved ones and beyond, while at the same time having a strong tendency to distrust the stranger who looks or sounds different. Nevertheless, the good news was the development of these social skills that we humans exhibit at our best, and which saved us from extinction when that earlier climate change nearly wiped us out.

Now we face another climate change situation, this time man-made. The challenge that faces us all now is whether we can rise to the next level of sociality, not of course hard-wired like ants, but consciously reaching both inward and outward and doing the unselfish thing to stem the worst effects of climate change which will hit hardest in parts of the world that had little part in creating these changes and have little resources to cope with the disaster that faces them, such as various Pacific islands that will be inundated by the ocean, and large swaths of Africa that will face terrible drought and starvation, not to mention the increasingly powerful storms that are causing damage in various parts of the world. All this will exacerbate the already serious tensions between nations and factions around the world increasing the likelihood of war.

It would be very ironic if one natural climate change brought about our intelligence and social skills that have produced nation states and democracies and caring institutions; and then a man-made climate change finds us lacking in sufficient caring and intelligence to be able to deal with it. We are strange creatures.

Not so well designed

My blog this time is a salute to and an unofficial review of a book I’ve just read: The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not by Dr. Abby Hafer who teaches human anatomy and physiology at Curry College in Massachusetts.

Genesis Chapter 1, verse 27 says: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him.”  Despite any religious doubts, as one gets older and some body parts don’t work as well as they used to, one starts to wonder. Dr. Hafer’s book educated me in much more detail about various parts of our bodies that quite simply aren’t very well designed. And what I like is that she does it with quite a bit of humor, as well as giving some well-deserved digs at the so-called Design Institute in Washington state that is pushing hard for religious creationism to be taught in public schools based on their claims of the evidence for our ‘perfect design’.  

Many men are aware of the danger of getting hit in the balls while playing some robust sport such as football or baseball. We’re told that they can only produce sperm if they are cooler than the rest of our body. But many other mammals have them safely inside their bodies, e.g. elephants; and all male birds, who have a higher body temperature than us mammals, have them inside too, and they work fine. Poor design on our part.

I have difficulty swallowing large pills. Hundreds of people choke to death every year in America. Our windpipe leading to our lungs, and our esophagus leading to our stomach share a common area in humans at the back of our mouth/throat area. Not so with some other animals. This tricky set-up is the price evolution made us pay for our variable voice sounds. OK, I’ll enjoy the opera and be careful taking my daily prescription pills; but don’t tell me I’m designed perfectly in the image of God.

Even more serious is the difficulty and pain that women go through giving birth to babies which led to countless tragedies in earlier times. OK, so it’s the price we humans have to pay for our big brainy heads – I can understand that, but don’t talk to me about ‘good design’. 

Most of us have heard the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. It was not coined by Darwin and has misleading connotations which led to the unfortunate term ‘Social Darwinism’ and the self-centered arrogance of a Donald Trump. It would be more accurate to say ‘survival of the fitter’ to describe evolution, because what evolutionary nature cares about is whether you’re put together sufficiently well enough to live long enough to breed, while meanwhile winning out in the competition for the best mate by being smarter and looking more beautiful.

While on the Brits, we are sometimes referred to in America as Limeys. This is a compliment as it has its roots in the fact that the British navy, as it explored the world and built the Empire in bygone days, discovered that if the sailors sucked on limes from time to time they wouldn’t get scurvy – a serious and often fatal disease in earlier times brought on by a lack of vitamin C. What I didn’t know till I read Dr. Hafer’s book is that many other animals, including cats, make their own vitamin C. And we have almost the entire biochemical pathway for making it too but, because of some mutation many moons ago, we lack just the last darned step in the process. Now no loving designer god would go to all the trouble of giving us this biochemical process and then, just at the last moment, say to himself: “I’ll make life a bit more challenging for him and leave out this last step”!   

Eyesight is a fabulous thing and I’m so grateful that I can see the beauty of my family and the beauty of nature and art, not to mention reading etc., etc. But, for all this our eyes are strangely put together. At the back of the eye are special cells called photoreceptors that when light falls on them send electrical pulses along nerve fibers to the brain, and we see. But, did you know that the photoreceptor cells – called rods and cones because of their shape – are in upside down, so that the optic nerves come out on top of the retina, run along on top filtering out some of the light, and then go down a hole on the middle of the retina in order to get back to the brain thus creating a literal blind-spot in all our eyes. If you believe in a creator god then he/she must prefer squids and octopi as in their eyes the photoreceptor cells are in the right way round.  

I don’t want any reader of this blog to go away thinking I’m just complaining. No! I’m very grateful for my body that has allowed me to do all that I have in a healthy long life. But don’t talk to me about perfect design. The wonderful truth is that all living things on this planet of ours – millions of species of animals, plants, fungi, amoebas and bacteria of all kinds – we’re all of us descended from a common ancient ancestral bacterial-like cell, and wouldn’t have evolved into all us wonderful creatures on this planet but for little mistakes in the copying process of our ancestors’ DNA that natural selection has worked upon over billions of years. This is the most wonderful and fabulous story in the world, and I love the fact that it has all played out, and you and I are here, simply because of imperfections.

Thanks Dr. Hafer.

CRISPR and crispier

CRISPR or ‘Clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats’ is a genetic engineering feat that has been borrowed/learned from bacteria that have been using the technique to defend themselves against viral infections for hundreds of millions of years. Yep, even E. coli can catch a cold and don’t like it. Viruses that attack bacteria are called bacteriophage or simply phages

Anyway, CRISPR is one method to alter or edit a strand of DNA. The majority of the thousands of bacterial species in existence have developed this defense mechanism. Clever eh? An aside here: the fact that ALL living creatures on this planet – viruses and bacteria included, along with plants and us animals, all use the same code system for their genetic material - is huge evidence that we are all from a single point of creation close to 4 billion years ago, and are therefore all related to one other.

Now it has been suggested that the CRISPR technique of genetic engineering be used to cripple the DNA of Aedes aegypti  the species of mosquito that carries the Zika virus, plus the dengue and chikungunya viruses, thus wiping out this species of mosquito which threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the coming years, spreading up into the United States further and further north as climate change continues to bring warmer and wetter weather.

BUT, already the alarm bells are being sounded – ooh we mustn’t harm this cute little mosquito. OK not quite in those terms. But let’s get things in perspective. We’re happy to kill viruses and bacteria and wish we could totally eradicate those that cause TB and the plague etc. But then there are other bacteria such as E. coli that we depend on for our digestion, and can’t live without. Another aside: I get irritated when the evening news talks of an outbreak of E. coli – heh, I have a billion inside of me – I hope. What they mean is a rogue strain of E. coli with some altered DNA; but let’s not get sidetracked.

OK you say, it’s fine to kill viruses and bacteria but a mosquito is an animal. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) over three thousand species of animals are in the process of being obliterated, mainly through human action, and few people care a ---- . Among these are the Siberian tiger, the Brown spider monkey (a fairly close relative of mine) and the blue-throated Macaw – a beautiful bird; all more closely related to me than a mosquito. OK: yes, we should ascertain the biological linkages of the Aedes mosquito: is it an important food source for some other creature? does it play a part in some pollination? Etc. etc. But what should not be dismissed, before any research has been done, is to even look at this possible avenue of removing this serious threat to human life.

I live in the Boston area and our regional newspaper The Boston Globe really has had its knickers in a twist over gene-editing in recent days with several articles critical of the process. Apparently the idea behind it comes from the billionaire owner of the newspaper. The article today is classic - reporting on a phone survey. It begins: “Most Americans oppose using powerful new technology (note the phraseology) to alter the genes of unborn babies, even to prevent serious inherited diseases, according to a new poll.” I’m not at all surprised. The USA is the only western nation where the majority of the population is so poorly educated, at least in the life sciences, that they don’t even accept the truth of evolution – a fact that has been known for many decades and is accepted in the rest of the developed world.  Americans hear the term DNA used in crime dramas on TV all the time but the vast majority won’t know what the letters stand for let alone how DNA operates in our bodies. So if asked over the phone if they want DNA manipulated in a lab, and using creepy CRISPR too, of course they’re going to flip and say NO.

I’m a proud member of the National Committee for Science Education NCSE. We are working to try and ensure that public school students are taught the wonderful truths of the life sciences, which in too many states they are not.  23% of biology teachers in public schools refuse to teach evolution. Without that basic concept one cannot understand how this wonderful and complex world of nature works and interacts. We should support the important research being done to understand gene editing, CRISPR included, and how we can use this knowledge to save human lives.

      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 !