Category Archives: Evolution

Political Gene-ius

3
by Education, Environment, Evolution, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

I often think it’s comical
How Nature always does contrive 
That every boy and every gal,
That’s born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative!
(WS Gilbert “Iolanthe”)

When I, aged 30, first met my Father we didn’t discuss cricket, and I have no idea whether he was a fan or not. But then I had no idea he was a Shakespeare fan until I learned he had somehow carried a volume of the Collected Works in his army kitbag all through the Middle East and New Guinea in World War 2, so perhaps he did love cricket.

My grandfather (yes, the one in the photo top right) certainly did play, and love, cricket, and was, apparently, a very handy fast bowler, even up to being in his Forties. I once proudly owned, and wore, his cricket cap from when he played in the County Durham competition, 100 years ago, but lost it in circumstances which remain painful.

He died not long after I turned seven. Before I was old enough to seriously appreciate cricket, and long before television, let alone direct tv broadcasts of Test Matches, came to Perth. Cricket could be followed, from England, on the radio in the early 1950s, and that was that. One of my many regrets about his early death was never being able to watch cricket with him. Both of us would have relished the experience.

But with no direct transmission from either father or grandfather, how did I get my love of cricket?

What used to be called the “lower vertebrates”, fish, amphibians, reptiles, generally speaking, fertilise eggs, lay them somewhere appropriate, and then piss off. Consequently the young, when born, are equipped to completely fend for themselves. All of their behaviour patterns are encoded in their DNA, and on hatching they simply seek shelter, food, and eventually mates in ways that were innate, not learned. [It's worth noting though that some species in all these groups have separately evolved live births, and others, after laying eggs, guard them until hatching, and then guard the young for a while. In such species it is possible the young do learn some behaviour associated with, say, feeding, from the male or female parent].

The “higher vertebrates”, birds and mammals, show considerable variation. All the birds (and three of the mammals) lay eggs of course. But there are some, the cuckoo species, that dump their eggs into the nests of other species to raise. There are some, all ground living types (emus, chickens, ducks etc), who have “precocial” young, with down cover, born ready to move off with their mother. Most others have young born naked and totally helpless, needing total care in nest from parents until their feathers develop and they can fly (and even then care continues). They therefore have a mixture of innate behaviours and learned (or at least modified) behaviours

Mammals also vary. Some, notably the herd/flock species, are up and moving within a few hours of birth and following the mother in the rest of the mob. Others are born completely helpless, and remain so for long periods, weeks, months, even years. The ones who develop quickly have less chance (and need) to learn from parents (though they will learn a great deal), those (notably the apes, including us, learn a great deal from the parents and have fewer purely innate components (though far more than we realise).

Well, in brief, we are into the nitty gritty of the “nature-nurture” debate – what part of a species, say Homo sapiens sapiens, behaviours are genetic, inherited, what part are learnt? Not simple, as the evolutionary history above shows. Certainly there are fundamental things – eating, drinking, danger, comfort, athleticism – that are strongly genetically based. Then there are superficial things – religion, taste in music and art, social unit structures, political beliefs, and, yes, sport preferences – that are strongly based on the context in which you are raised.

But, on the one hand the genetic ones are modified by upbringing (eg particular food preferences, response to dangers, how fit you are), and on the other, even some of the superficial socio-culturally-based ones have some genetic basis it has been found. Studies of twins raised separately for example show some tendency for them to be similar in their strength of religious belief (though the form strictly related to household raised in). Musical abilities are well-known to often “run in families”. And more recently (for example) studies show tendency towards respectively right and left-wing political beliefs have some genetic component (though again, the particular form this might take being related to up-bringing). Wonder if the otherwise inexplicable gun love in the US is part of this inheritance?

Interestingly, though not surprisingly perhaps, both the religious and political tendencies are related to serotonin production and the brain’s response, and since music also causes serotonin reactions, it may well be that is also related to the abilities of, say, the sons of JS Bach.

Anyway, all of that may help to explain (though of course there would be many other factors), why a religious believer might suddenly appear from an atheist household, or a fervent Young Republican from a Democratic one, or a genius musician from a non-musical family. May also explain why musical ability is rare, why the irrational belief in religion persists to damage societies, and why roughly half of the voters in most countries keep voting for conservative parties that will damage their interests.

Oh, and it might just explain why I am watching a cricket match on tv while I write this! There being more things in heaven an earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, or made a fault in our stars.

By special act

63
by Evolution • Tags: , , , , , ,

Questions for creationists:
1. Given anoxic conditions, water, variety of chemicals, electrical discharges, complex organic molecules arriving from space, how did/does “god” STOP life emerging on planets all over the universe?
2. Since all species are variable, how does “god” STOP evolution happening?
3. Since populations of species constantly become isolated geographically, how does “god” STOP speciation occurring?
4. Given two extreme genetic bottlenecks for humans – Adam and Eve (the latter being cloned from the former!), then “Noah’s family” – how do you imagine the human race became so diverse, and abundant,  in just a few hundred years?
5. If “all the animals” were each represented by a single pair on the Ark, how did they all become so abundant and diverse in a few hundred years
6. How did “Noah” collect animals from the then unknown continents of Australia, Americas, Asia, southern Africa, northern Europe?
7.  Why did Noah have an inordinate fondness for beetles?
8. If the whole earth was covered with water of sufficient depth to cover mountains, how did any plant species survive?
9. If any plant species did somehow survive, how did they reform complex ecosystems all over the world in a few hundred years?
10. Given that all the other people of the world had different ideas how they came to exist, and that none of them “remember” the Flood, what makes you think … oh, forget it, I know your answer to that one.

And here’s a bonus question, if you finish the others early:
11. Name any two of the hundreds of thousands of biological scientists who have worked on aspects of evolution since Charles Darwin. To make it easier you can include geologists and physicists. Struggling? OK, I’ll give you a start, Alfred Russell Wallace. Over to you.

Kissing Cousins

7
by Evolution • Tags: , , , ,

[Note this was written to follow on from discussions which began in comments on post "When you wish" below and continued into those of "Extraordinary". One of my most regular commenters on this blog, Eric, is trying to understand evolution. I, we, are trying to help him. This post arose from Eric's comment that "I don’t get the 'every generation' being a transition between the species at all." So, Eric, let's try it like this.*]

I don’t know if you are interested in your family history, but let’s assume you are. And let’s assume that you know all your ancestors, way way back (will come to how way back soon). And let’s imagine that not only do you have photographs of your ancestors going back 150 years (when the camera was actually invented) but there was a previously unknown mechanism which enabled photos of all your ancestors going way way back.

So you start to arrange the photos on your table. Parents first, then grandparents, great grandparents and so on, back through the generations. And let’s assume (last assumption, promise) that you have not only told your immediate family what you are doing, but have told your more distant family of cousins etc, your community, and, through the internet, the whole world.

OK, with me? Right. You are putting your great grandparent’s photos on the table, your children remarking how much you look like them and you not being sure if it is a compliment, when in walks your second cousin and says, hey, they are my great grandparents. You chat for a while and keep working. Down go the photos generation after generation.

Back to six generations and a previously unknown cousin from Germany drops in and points out you share a great great great great great grandparent. He still lives in the same village your ancestors migrated to America from (I have a real example of that, a sixth cousin living just a few miles from the village in England my six times removed grandparents lived in).

I don’t really know your background so I will switch to me now. I keep adding more and more generations (roughly 4 per hundred years). Back a thousand years. All those people, all 45 generations look much like me – variation in hair colour here, different height there, shorter nose over this way – all residents of the English Midlands.

About a thousand years ago a bit of a change – more men and women seem to be of strapping solid build with red or yellow hair. Just as I am putting their photos out, trying to keep track of which generations I am up to, there is a knock at the door and a couple of strapping red haired gentlemen tell me that I have just identified some common ancestors of their’s which means I now have Danish and Saxon distant cousins.

Another 500 years back and a knock at the door tells me those dark haired olive skin ancestors are the reason I have Italian cousins. And so on, back thousands of years. Little differences between generations, but all recognisably the same group. Tens of thousands of years, still the same, and if you put any of them in modern clothes they could drink in my local bar unnoticed.

Oh there are changes, as you [that is me, "I" became awkward!] realise when you look back to your recent ancestors, and when you hear knocks on the door from people from Germany, Hungary, Turkey. But still, generation to generation, no obvious change. And then as more tens of thousands of years tick over you get vists from Australian Aborigines, Asians, South Americans, and finally Africans. Still no obvious change from generation to generation, but your ancestors are now recognisably different – shorter in stature, with curly hair and darker skin – from those ten or twenty thousand years later or those today. You realise if you put the photos in a bundle and flicked them like those old children’s moving picture books, you would see a gradual change over time to the present day.

And still you go back, ancestor after ancestor. You’ve lost all sense of time. What is it, a million years maybe, gosh, that’s, um, 2500 generations. Curious, you hadn’t noticed change, but these G G G G …. Grandfathers of yours are much heavier built, more muscly, bigger jaws, bigger brow ridges. Other cousins drop by from Indonesia, far east Russia. Similar but a bit different again.

And still we go on, another 2500 generations and another. Is it your imagination or do these ancestors seem shorter, darker, more, well, hairy? No it’s not. You look along the table, can’t see the change, until you jump forward a couple of million years (big table this) and compare. And then you get a phone call from zoo, chimpanzee there wants to tell you that you and he are 10,000th cousins, sharing a 9999 great grandparent. Seems odd, he looks quite different to you when you arrive at the zoo, but on a table he has arranged all his ancesors going back same number of generations as yours. You look at his photos and notice the same pattern. The later ones all look just like him, “typical chimpanzees”, but as you get further back you notice small changes – slightly shorter arms perhaps, jaws a little larger, hair colour a little different, slightly more upright. He points at another slightly different looking chimpanzee, and you discover that when your friend got back to about a million years ago he got a visit from a Bonobo chimp who said he was his long lost cousin, just like the calls you had along the way. By the time you look at his ancestors and yours from about, say, 9000 generations ago, there’s not much difference at all, and when you get back to the shared ancestor they are of course identical.

Seeing that you are a bit puzzled your Chimpanzee cousin points at you and points at the ground, then points at himself and then at a tree outside. Light dawns – your common 9999 great grandparents were mainly ground dwellers, but around 4 million years ago his direct ancestors were in a group that became separated from yours, and while your ancestors adapted more and more strongly to ground living, his were in an area where tree living was all the go. Adaptation proceeded in the two directions in different parts of Africa, and by the time conditions changed and the two groups were in contact again they had become different enough not to interbreed.

You go home, pleased to have discovered more long lost cousins, and keep working through your photos. Back to 7 million years, 17500 generations and another zoo call, this time the gorilla wants to say hullo to his cousin. Same thing. A line of photos on a table, call from a distant gorilla cousin (separated in east Africa), not much change from one photo to next, but change over longer time. Seems quite different to Humans and Chimps initially, but doesn’t look that much different to the common human-chimp grandparent perhaps 5 million years ago, and as you get further and further back they converge in appearance (and genetics of course) until they look more and more like a kind of generalised ape – Australopithecus (again with various cousins).

And… Well, you get the idea. You can continue generation after generation through the other apes, then back through the early mammals, the reptiles, the amphibians and so on. Not much evident change from one generation to next but over immense time substantial change. No modern species the direct ancestor of any other modern species, just like your cousins are not your grandparents, but all are cousins to some degree.

There you are Eric, evolution over four billion years in a short post – gradual adaptive change, and equally importantly, geographic separation of different populations forming new species. What a wonderful world that has such potential in it.

* I’d love to claim the credit for this idea of how to present evolutionary change, but saw it (in the marvelous illustrations by Dave McKean) and read it originally in Richard Dawkins 2011 “The Magic of Reality” Random House, London. However I have added the calls from cousins, and the zoo, as my own piece of originality.

Sure and certain knowledge

12
by Atheism, Climate Change, Environment, Evolution • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s an odd little misunderstanding, just a minor difference in the way of looking at the world, but it has played a disproportionately huge part in making seven billion people content to allow a few energy companies turn off the world’s support systems and let them all die.

So, what is it, this misunderstanding that has the people who know what’s happening talking past the people who need to know what’s happening? Well it is just a different use of words like certainty and probability – a scientific use and a common use.

The general public thinks that things for which they have little or no evidence, just anecdote or faith, are certainties. Scientists think that nothing is certain, that all we have is the probability that something is true based on amount of evidence.

The public will use all kinds of language based on nothing but gut feeling and personal ideology to express their belief that something is true “exactly right” “certainly true” “absolutely no doubt” “no doubt” “probably” “possibly” “don’t think so” “nah, don’t believe that” “c’mon, pull the other one, that one has bells on it”.

Scientists, recognising that the presence or absence of bells is a bit hard to define precisely have by contrast developed an exact measurement for the likelihood of truth based on assessment of number of observations. It is a mathematical concept in which you can approach (by repeating an experiment over and over) more and more closely to 100% certainty but never quite reach it. For practical purposes though a probability somewhere in the 90% plus level is thought of as being a pretty sure thing (although it depends on the discipline and particular kind of experiment, physics for example demands much higher certainty than, say, the social sciences).

As well as the mathematical component though, the idea of scientific probability represents the scientific mindset – no result can be certain because the very next experiment may overturn it in whole or in part. If a writer is only as good as his last novel, then a scientific theory is, in a sense, only as good as its last experiment.

For the public though lots of things are certain, have to be otherwise you wouldn’t get up in the morning. These certainties are based on religion, ideology, common sense, authority, repetitive observations. Sun rises in East, there is a “god” or two, capitalism is the end of history, some people have psychic powers, the Liberal Party is there for the battlers, vitamin C cures colds. Then there are uncertainties where the outcome is merely probable – will my football team win next week, am I having a drink with friends on Friday night, are UFOs real, can acupuncture cure cancer, is Kevin Rudd challenging for leadership or is it a media invention.

So, the stage is set. When scientists are asked about climate change in general or particular aspects of it, they reply, as good scientists do “well there is a high probability that X is the case”. When asked “are you certain?” they reply “well, no nothing in science is ‘certain’”. They mean by this that certainty can never, mathematically, reach 100%, and they are obliged to repeat this fundamental tenet of science endlessly, thinking to themselves “well, of course there is no such thing as 100% certainty in science, don’t these idiots know anything?” Or they formalise this the way the IPCC does, saying that the chances of Y event happening in Z time have a probability of “90%” or “95%”.

Now in both cases the scientists are also thinking, and assuming the listeners are familiar with the concept, that for all practical purposes the projected outcome is certain. Will almost certainly in fact (because the scientists are sick of being called alarmist) be much more likely than the probability being quoted which will have been deliberately set on the low side.

The scientist leans back and relaxes at this point, happy in the conviction that he has merely restated the bleeding obvious about the scientific method and that everyone will totally understand what he means – and get on with saving the planet which he knows with absolute certainty is under its greatest threat in millions of years.

The listener or reader however, Joe Public, hears something quite different. They hear that things aren’t certain, just probable, and they interpret the “probable” as their own version of that prediction. Climate change becomes, in their own minds, no more likely than, say, the reality of UFOs. And you wouldn’t want to spend billions of dollars defending against UFOs now, would you.

This continues on to the details. Is this particular massive storm; record-breaking drought; record high temperature; record flood, the result of climate change? “Oh, we couldn’t say that with certainty”, says the scientist. Joe Public hears this as “No”.

Now while the scientists are maintaining scientific purity on the questions of certainty and probability, there are people, with vested interests in the short-term outcome (we all have a vested interest in the long term outcome, but most of us don’t know that), who have absolutely no scruples in pretending that scientific “uncertainty” is real uncertainty and therefore no one would want to do anything when everything is uncertain. So they add in bits and pieces of questions and comments on the siting of thermometers, melting of glaciers, troposphere temperatures, mediaeval warming periods, the north west passage, deep sea temperatures, climate sensitivity, snowfall in Chicago, cosmic rays and the like. None of them mean anything much in themselves, none of them have the slightest relevance in general to the overall pattern of rising CO2 levels causing global warming and consequent climate change.

The scientific community, realising (in some cases very belatedly) the con trick being played on them and on the community at large, and seeing the consequent failure of politicians to take any meaningful action to pull back on CO2 production, have at last begun to fight back a little. Oh they still talk about uncertainty and probability, but a few brave souls have begun to say “the science is settled”.

To see what they mean by this it is worth exploring an analogy. The theory that explains how evolution occurs (involving variation, natural selection, and geographic isolation) was extensively debated in the years after 1859 (when it had been simultaneously proposed by Darwin and Wallace after they arrived at it from different data). Some scientists (like Thomas Huxley “why didn’t I think of that”) instantly recognised its validity. Others were more cautious, looking for contradictions, wondering about mechanisms for the variation (in the years before either genes or DNA were discovered), debating the religious implications and so on. But over the next few decades the science became settled. That is the truth of the theory was clear, and now research was mopping up the details (again genes and DNA in particular) relating to the exact mechanisms. And also investigating both the comparisons and relationships between living species and their fossil records with new eyes that greatly fleshed out the actual path that the evolution of living organisms had taken on this planet.

The science of evolution is settled. There remain arguments over details of particular evolutionary sequences, whether there are other speciation mechanisms apart from the dominant allopatric one, exactly how genes interact during development and so on. But the science is settled and forms the basis, directly or indirectly, of all the sciences to do with life on the planet, and conversely is supported by all the other sciences (notably geology, chemistry, physics). Oh there are one or two scientists, brains addled by religion, who purport to believe that there is evidence for god in bacterial flagellae. But their argument (that some feature is too complex to have evolved) was one that Darwin was familiar with, and has been demolished thousands of times in the subsequent 150 years. It is amazing how otherwise apparently smart people can have their brains addled by religion.

In exactly the same way the science of climate change is settled. The fundamental elements (Milankovitch cycles, greenhouse gases, sun activity, geography) have been known for decades (in the case of greenhouse gas not much less than evolution). The science forms the basis for all the other sciences to do with the surface and atmosphere of this planet, and in turn is supported by all the other relevant sciences. Scientists argue over details of exact time frames, precisely how some mechanisms interact, likely impacts on ecology, historical sequences, and so on, but none of that has any effect on the fundamental science. Oh there are one or two scientists, brains addled by libertarian and neocon ideology, who purport to believe that climate sensitivity is a bit lower, or that clouds are going to roll in to our rescue, or that there is nothing new in the astonishing warming of the planet over the last 3 decades, but their arguments have been demolished thousands of times. Amazing how otherwise apparently smart people can have their brains addled by libertarian and neoconservative nonsense.

Look I am a scientist, OK? I understand the need to maintain the fundamental core of the scientific process, that nothing is ever 100% certain. I get that, ok? And I know that scientists are naturally shy and reticent (me too) and reluctant to involve themselves in public slanging matches and political debates, wanting to remain pure and above all that. But listen, this is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the planet. Cast aside your Clark Kent clothes in a handy phone box. Start speaking out. There will be death threats. The last thing the ideologues and the energy companies want is for scientists to discover they have a voice – they have already been trying to discredit science as a whole in case you ever did start to speak out, but you are still just in time if you hurry. Make it clear that the science is, sadly, settled, the data in, the planet in really big trouble. You wouldn’t say “oh, nothing certain about evolution” so don’t do it about climate change. Whatever the fine details that remain to be sorted it is absolutely irrefutable that adding more and more CO to the atmosphere is warming the planet rapidly, changing the climate, buggering up the ecology, causing damaging weather events, and it is going to get so bad that we are, not to put too fine a point on it, stuffed as a species. Nothing more certain.

Say so.

The evolution of chocolate

4
by Evolution, Media • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

There used to be, and still may be, a computer facility that allows you to program particular function keys on the keyboard to produce a whole phrase with one keystroke. Particularly useful for politicians (“there is only one poll that matters”, “I can’t comment on this because it is now the subject of legal proceedings”, “the leader has my full and complete support”, “this study was based on figures from last year/last month/yesterday and things have now changed”) but also useful when reporting science matters (“chocolate good for you scientific study shows”) or social ones (“Discovery of artefact rewrites history books”). In particular there is one that is used over and over again “New find rewrites evolutionary theory” which is more inaccurate than even the political ones. There was another example the other day where a discovery of a minor detail of the eye structure of a very ancient fossil might result in a minor change to our ideas about the exact sequence by which the two main groups of animals respectively developed eyes by using more of one cell type than another (the eyes of octopus and humans, for example, are based on different cell types). Yes, that’s all. Last year there was the find of a fossil primate which far from “rewriting evolution” (or “rewriting human evolution”) as headlines around the world trumpeted, merely filled in a small detail in one minor branch of the early primate evolutionary tree.

Every time you see a headline “rewrites evolutionary theory” mentally substitute “may result in minor change to some minor aspect of a hypothesis about evolutionary sequence in one minor group of species” – yes, I know that is longer, but it will be much more accurate. You see the time to “rewrite evolutionary theory” was in the first few decades after 1859, and only one discovery, that of genes, has ever done that. Not because it proved anything wrong about Darwin’s work, but because it provided a clearer understanding of the mechanism of genetic inheritance, something that was still unclear before Gregor Mendel started growing pea plants in a monastery garden in the 1850s (his work remained unknown for decades).

That’s it, nothing else in the last 150 years has “rewritten” evolutionary theory, and it is quite clear that nothing will now. That is because the fundamental mechanisms proposed by Darwin – variation, natural selection, adaptation, geographic separation, are as fundamental as the axioms of any mathematical theorem. His supporting observations, of different distributions of different plants and animals across the surface of the planet, and of fossils buried in the ground that showed the stages of evolution of life on Earth, are also so fundamental that they can’t be altered. All that does change, occasionally, is the finding of a new fossil that more clearly illustrates the exact sequence of the evolution of say, whales, or snakes, or birds, or indeed primates including that species particularly dear to our hearts, Homo sapiens.

So why does the media do it? Well, to sell newspapers and tv programs obviously – here is something new and exciting and revolutionary. But in the case of evolution I think there is another factor involved. The journalists appear to believe that there is a significant part of the Australian population that doesn’t believe in evolution (and writing that seems as silly as “doesn’t believe in gravity”) and that if they put up a headline suggesting that evolution has been challenged in some way people will rush to have their prejudices reinforced. If you were an American journalist this assumption might well be correct, but I think the Australian public is still a bit more scientifically savvy than that. However there are religious forces beavering away to have “creation science” (an oxymoron much worse than “military intelligence”) taught in Australian schools, and they are making inroads in some schools, especially in Queensland (“smart state one day, dumbed down the next”). The constant headlines in the media about “rewriting evolution” can only reinforce that campaign and take us down the slippery American anti-science slope.

It’s only a little thing I know, but it does matter. Next time you see or hear a headline like this let the media outlet concerned know you are not happy about it. Unless of course you believe that Gillard and Abbott really never look at polls, and that they are both fully supported by Rudd and Turnbull.

Or that chocolate really is good for you.

Life is a lottery

7
by Atheism, Climate Change, Education, Evolution, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

There is a media ritual when there is a big lottery prize looming that involves an interview with a “number expert” who can tell you what the “lucky” numbers are, ie those which have come up most often. The number expert can protest until blue in the face that every number, every time, is equally likely or unlikely, by chance, to appear. Makes no difference. “What are the lucky numbers?” will be asked, over and over. When the winner is announced comes the trip to the “lucky” outlet that sold the ticket. This outlet, is the suggestion, will be worth buying from again. But it won’t be of course, every outlet is equally likely, or unlikely to sell the next winning ticket. But the use of “luck” and the suggestion that some people are “lucky” is encouraging belief in the paranormal on the one hand, and belief in people being “rewarded” by a god on the other. There is no luck, there is only chance.

Whenever someone reaches a milestone like 100 years another narrative comes into play – “to what do you attribute your long life?” Well, in reality their long life can only be attributed to a chance allocation of pretty good DNA and a lot of luck through the decades, they have reached an advanced age by chance, just the far tail of a normal distribution of age at death – a few die very young, a few die very old, most die in between. Life’s a lottery and then you die.

Road accidents too. The media (and politicians) tend to react to an individual accident by blaming someone or something for it. But for a given number of cars on the roads, and therefore for a given number of chances of them coming into contact with each other or some object beside the road, there will be, by chance, a given number of accidents, and you, by chance, may be one of them. And those accidents will range, by chance, from those where a car and its occupants are scarcely dented, to major pile-ups and death and everything in between.

The inability to recognise or accept chance events has led to the idea of “miracles” raising its ugly and misleading head again. In any major accident or catastrophic natural event involving many people, there will be, by chance, quite often, survivors, perhaps only one survivor, perhaps two or three. Whether it is plane crash or train crash, tsunami or earthquake, the fact that many people die and one or more don’t is always headlined and described as a “miracle”. People don’t want to believe in chance, want to believe that good things happen to those who deserve them, that there is a “reason” for a survival (other than a reason involving a chance sequence of events or spatial relationships), and that if they, I suppose, were involved in such a disaster then they would be the ones walking out of the cloud of smoke, the wall of water. If only they knew what the secret was. And there will be plenty of people to tell them – money up front.

The constant reiteration of the “miracle survival” nonsense by television reporters encourages this sort of irrational thinking and comes full circle when they almost always, as the punch line to the survivor story, say to them “You should buy a lottery ticket”, taking the failure of logic full circle. The suggestion, of course is that having walked away from a plane crash the person has been blessed with good luck, and that while the “effect” lasts the person should take advantage of the residual glow of good vibrations and have them influence the way that lottery balls tumble, chaotically, randomly, in a big glass ball, in order to create a sequence of numbers that match, miraculously, with those on a piece of paper that the lucky person has bought. Does the reporter really believe this? Does the audience?

The alternative narrative is that some people are subject to “bad luck”, or, in the religious narrative, have behaved or believed (or failed to believe) in such a way that they will be magically propelled into path of speeding car or train, will be crushed by landslide, eaten by shark, have a roof tile land on their head, catch, at the last moment (perhaps by an exchange of places with another, lucky, person), a plane that then crashes. In these cases the event is deemed to be so rare that being killed by it must have a cause, an explanation, people “doomed” by some unexplained mechanism of heavenly forces. But all such events become possible given 7 billion people on a planet as small as ours. And all of these bad luck narratives, the “what were the chances” scenario, depend on a misunderstanding of the nature of chance. What are the chances that “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” so that Humphrey and Ingrid meet? Pretty good actually. I mean if you multiplied the number of gin joints by the number of people in the world at the time (3 billion?) the odds look astronomical. But only because Rick has decided after the event which has already taken place that this was a significant meeting. If you were to ask what is the chance of any man and any woman meeting in a gin joint somewhere the odds are, well, 100%, any night of the week. Since Rick was in the bar every night, it was the most popular bar in Casablanca, and there were few American women in the city, the chances of the lovely Ms Bergman walking into his gin joint were also very very good.

So there are many things that people, with the guidance of the media and religious leaders, think are not chance events which are in fact sheer chance. On the other hand people think some things are chance which are not. The creationists among us are constantly asking how you can “assemble a 747″ by chance in a “junkyard”, how “random mutations” could give rise to human beings from “primordial ooze”. But evolution works much as Bergman found Bogart, the odds aren’t some multiplication of the remote chances of single events with those of other single events, but a gradual refinement over time. Imagine that in Rick’s bar gambling was going on (you’d be shocked, shocked, I know). And they were playing a kind of poker in which each player kept one good card and discarded four and picked up a new four, and then kept the best of those and discarded three, and picked up three new ones and so on. You would eventually finish up with some very good hands, all round the table. Small chance on any one card, but chances improved as you discard and pick up, discard and pick up.

Drive by shootings are presented by the media as if they are totally random events, that at any moment your house, chosen at random by gangsters, will be peppered with bullets. What are the odds? Number of houses in Sydney, say, divided into the number of shootings? But rarely, it turns out, is the shooting actually random as distinct from being aimed at a rival bike gang, rival drug dealer, loan defaulter, love triangle rival. Not random, targeted. Chances of a small number of people being shot at, very high; chances of the rest of Sydney houses getting bullets through their front wall, virtually nil. Shark attacks, same treatment in media, reality that the number of attacks is tiny, the great bulk of them not “attacks” but accidents, and the result of risky behaviour by the swimmer or surfer, not random moments of doom.

When there are stories of unethical behaviour by a corporation – declaring bankruptcy with no money left for worker’s entitlements; dumping pollutants into a creek; moving overseas to evade tax; selling goods known to be harmful; funding political parties to obtain favourable treatment; sacking workers and outsourcing overseas; cutting prices to farmers – they are always treated as if these are singular events, a bad apple, no historical context, no implications for regulation or political action. In fact such behaviour is not random but is a direct consequence of laissez faire unregulated capitalism as practised in the last 20 years or so.

Finally climate is portrayed by deniers as being just a sequence of random fluctuations with no meaning or implication for action now or disaster in the future. The reality is that the ever rising trend line of temperatures, and the ever increasing consequences seen in melting ice, acidifying oceans, moving species, is what tells us we are in trouble.

James Randi said “To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage”. Takes a lot of courage actually, more than politicians or religious leaders possess. Now, if only we could give the media courage to call random events for what they are and talk about the causes of non-random events. They have been getting this precisely back to front.

Blowing in the wind

by Atheism, Climate Change, Education, Environment, Evolution, Media • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Science, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, these days, it seems.

If you had asked me a few years ago the answer was absolutely clear. No, not the technology, that’s just the side effect, a little bonus, cream on top.

The real importance of science, for the last 500 years, was as the one aspect of human endeavor that constantly advanced, constantly improved, built on previous work, earlier understanding, didn’t take a backward step. Each scientist stood on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said.

Up until the Renaissance humans had taken one step forward and two steps back in their understanding of the world around them. Some glimmering of understanding about the nature of the real world would be smashed down again by religion or war or cynical politicians or charlatans. But once the scientific method of hypothesis, experiment, modified hypothesis, became established by people focussed on investigating the real world instead of accepting the imaginary world of wishful thinking, the human race never looked back. Or not for long anyway.

The age and structure of the universe was established; the form and relationships of different chemical elements; the development of life on earth (and the place of Homo sapiens in that development); the history and geology and climatology of the Earth; the anatomy and physiology and psychology of the human (and other animals) body. All of this was a long way from superstition, and folk medicine, and mythology, and religion, and the last vestiges of those early and primitive beliefs were gradually being swept away as the twentieth century came to an end. At last the human race was on the move into the twenty first century, after 500 years of steady advance, with a clear vision of reality unencumbered by the past detritus of failed human beliefs.

A scary prospect, it seems, for some people. Couldn’t be allowed to happen. And suddenly all the junk thought from past millenia (with some additions) was back in the mix, spurred on by politicians and religious leaders and the media. Suddenly there were miracles, and magic remedies (homeopathy just the most egregious), and prayer, and creationism, climate change denialism, belief in ghosts and the afterlife, and heaven and hell, and mysterious forces, and supernatural beings, and faith healing, and magnets and crystals, and human domination over nature, and witches, and spirituality, all flooding back into human society and culture like an oil leak flooding into the Gulf. Just as poisonous to the human condition as oil is to seabirds.

Need a big clean up effort, both of them. Need decent science education in schools again, free of the baneful influence of religious followers. And we need a media that again accepts the scientific method and its findings, and refuses to give air time or column inches or internet bandwidth to charlatans, and religious leaders, and the deliberate deceptions of the anti-science self-proclaimed mystics and healers, and the no-nothingism of those determined to let the corporations destroy the planet. Big task to clear all this rubbish out, but once it is gone science can again get on with the task of illuminating the real world. And after the damage that has been done by the charlatans and con men and crooks in the last few years we have lost time to make up, urgently. The answers have been blowing in the wind of nonsense and lies for a decade now.

You with me?

Cross-posted at Huffington Post

Wind meet whirlwind

by Environment, Evolution • Tags: , ,

Much confusion in the media about the remarkable Craig Venter achievement of inserting laboratory-made DNA into a bacterial cell and telling it to go forth and multiply, which it did. All sorts of nonsense on one hand about how if Craig could intelligently design life so could god, and on the other that if Craig could create life it proved god didn’t. Also much nonsense about small bacteria growing into large Frankenstein monsters and grabbing nubile women off the Empire State building. On the other hand, I’m afraid, some misunderstanding from the good guys about how there was absolutely nothing to worry about here, just a tabloid beat up, what could possibly go wrong with new life forms artificially created in a commercial laboratory. And on yet another hand (it’s a many-handed monster), much nonsense about how a Brave New World was about to dawn where instead of waiting for robots created by Japanese electronic firms we could grow them in a test tube to do whatever humans wanted them to up to and including removing all the oil from the Gulf, ending world hunger, and stopping global warming. What are we to believe?

Well the truth is somewhere in the middle of all that primordial soup. The achievement has nothing to do with the origin of life (creating life now is considerably different to the origins of life 4 billion years ago), not is it relevant to intelligent design (but nor is anything else). It has some relevance to how we view life – life is just a bunch of chemical reactions, but we knew that already. And really, a wonderful new world isn’t coming (at least from this cause), the claims are as baseless as the similar ones for nuclear power and GM organisms and geoengineering and prescribed burning of forests. And no, a disastrous new world isn’t coming (at least from this cause), the Empire State building is safe from mutant monsters for a little longer.

But nor is everything as rosy as some of the all-knowledge-is-good, science-can-do-no-wrong, yaysayers for every scientific breakthrough. Trouble is, Craig Venter isn’t Charles Darwin. Organisms in nature have genes, and combinations of genes, honed into fitness by the white hot heat of natural selection. What is more, we forget, sometimes, what Alfred Wallace knew, that selection takes place not one species at a time in a kind of natural test tube – too hot, too cold, ah just right – but within ecosystems. Within enormously complex sets of organisms that have to inter-relate just so or the whole house of straw will come tumbling down, each species being vital for the whole structure.

We can’t predict how an individual organism will fit into an ecosystem, how it will affect the running of that complicated machinery. We do know, from examples all over the world, that introducing species into new habitats which they did not evolve in is a process assured of disaster. Australia is rife with examples – rabbits, foxes, rats, mice, cane toads, starlings, sparrows, mynahs, carp, thistles, serrated tussock, each bringing its set of disastrous consequences – but every continent has seen similar misguided or accidental introductions. These introduced species bring no natural predators or diseases, and other species have not evolved into niches that allow for their presence.

So the idea that an invented species, alien to all environments, can be casually introduced in large numbers to, say, clean up an oil spill, or produce oil, without any unintended consequences, flies in the face of hundreds of years of experiments. Furthermore, once released, whatever is said in advance about the organism being designed for only one purpose and being unable to thrive in the wild, doesn’t carry any guarantees with it. Much the same was said of the cane toad. Once species are released from test tubes they will rapidly adapt to the circumstances in which they find themselves, and it would be a brave geneticist who could predict what the end point of that process will be. Cleaning up a massive oil leak may turn out to be a doddle compared to putting genetics back in a bottle, getting rid of billions of organisms infesting a Gulf.

And there is still more to set the mind worrying. We know from the initial careless releases of genetically modified organisms that genes don’t stay neatly within their skins. Genes can leak out into related organisms. An obvious example is inserting genes for herbicide resistance into a crop, only to find that the gene can be picked up by weed species which, as a consequence, can no longer be killed with herbicide. Whatever chunks of DNA are carefully inserted into a bacterium to do some job apparently important for mankind may well leak out into other organisms who are not mankind’s friends. A similar process in geopolitics is called blowback, where funding the Taliban to beat the Russians results, twenty years later, in terrorists targeting you.

Look I think this is a great achievement. Along with cloning and stem cell work, creating artificial organisms is going to lead to huge advances in our understanding of how genes work in the body. But the hubris of thinking we know enough about ecology to start improving on natural selection has already got us into trouble, and could get us into a lot more.

Cross-posted at Huffington Post.

The lights are on, but nobody’s home

5
by Evolution • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Easter again, and it got me thinking about holidays and celebrations in general. The United Nations alone has a list of 57 "days" (special days to do with women's rights, racism, water, press freedom, families, environment, refugees, population, literacy, peace, and so on), plus weeks, and months and years to emphasize some special issue. Every country also has its own set of important days. And finally, as a hangover from the Dark Ages when there were lots of "saint's days" and religious holidays ("Holy Days" of course, the only break the peasants got from lives that were nasty brutish and short), we still have some religious events on our calendar, and I'm writing this during one of them.

While UN Days sometimes get passing mention in the media, many of them seem to me to be events that could well be incorporated into our calendar of holidays, replacing, perhaps, Easter Friday and Monday. Or the Queens Birthday (one day Charles' birthday I suppose). Or Melbourne Cup Day in Victoria. Or the various state "foundation days". Fifty seven days is too many of course, but perhaps each year we could rotate half a dozen of the United Nations ones.

But there is another date that I would like to see as a permanent holiday in Australia, the 12 February. In America there is a petition to ask President Obama to establish the day as a public holiday, and I think we might do the same with Mr Rudd. Oh, 12 February – Charles Darwin's birthday (he would have been 201 this year). Why a permanent holiday for young Charles? Well to bring to the attention of the public the extraordinary attack on science that has been underway for the last few years. There are several notable areas – the climate change denial industry, the creationists with their eyes on schools, the muffling of public contributions from the universities and CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology and abuse of these organisations, the derogatory comments about science from certain politicians, the media support for all kinds of bogus nonsense about UFOs and alternative medicines, and miracles and the "paranormal", the advertising industry with its claims that face creams are "clinically proven". In Britain a science journalist has been hit with huge legal bills after being sued by chiropractors because he pointed out that their claims were not based on science, and this will undoubtedly be a tactic used more often (Tasmanian forestry is another recent case).

It all seems a long way from Yass I guess, as we all go about our day to day business. But that business has been built on science – on communications, on medicines, on agricultural advances, on meteorology, on energy, and building, and environmental protection, on safe food and water, on mineral resources. Our understanding of the world around us also contributes to our enjoyment of it, and to our intellectual development. And we really don't want our schoolchildren being stunted intellectually by being told that one particular primitive creation mythology from one small part of the world from one particular time around 3000 years ago replaces all the scientific advances of the last 2500 years in biology, geology, cosmology, physics, chemistry, genetics and all the rest of the science that underpins our civilisation. Nor do we want them unaware that in their lifetimes the planet is in big trouble as the climate changes.

Conservative politicians (from both sides of politics) don't like science because it gets in the way of ideology with pesky things called facts. Big corporations don't like science because it can document the way they are ravaging the planet and might reduce their profits if it came to the notice of the public. Religious fundamentalists don't like science because it disproves that primitive creation mythology. Much of that came together the other day when a group of conservative politicians in Adelaide pretended to celebrate a "Human Achievement Day" in competition with Earth Day. The latter is an attempt, in a symbolic way, to make people more aware of climate change and the need to both conserve energy and find renewable energy sources. These politicians don't want that message getting out there, and so their HA Day involved encouraging people to use as much energy as possible. Supporters obliged. Conservatives know the symbolic importance of awareness days. ''Don't be stuck in the dark with the communists. Turn your lights on!'' their web site said.

Write to Kevin Rudd. See if we can get a Darwin Day. See if we can become a science based society living in the real world again.

Don't be stuck in the dark ages with the conservatives. Turn your minds on.

Chimp business

4
by Evolution • Tags: , , , ,

In this year of twin Darwin anniversaries, I find myself thinking of the great man (one of the few historical figures I would invite to a dinner party, but would he come, would he come?) even more often than in a normal year. I turn again to the Galapagos Islands, the place where, in a sense, all of the observations and ideas he had previously made on the voyage suddenly fell into place.

And I marvel again at the creationists and their stupidity which has such strong foundations in infinite ignorance. Here is a quote from a recent evolutionary thread – "I'm happy with the evolution of species within species, I'm convinced about mutation across kinds. Dog-Wolf I can cope with even if one is lupus and one canis since these words are our man-made nomenclature, Beetle-Man I find a bit too much of a leap." Leaving aside the originality of the "Beetle-Man" evolutionary link (I saw another that had Yeast-Human – whatever happened to good old primeval ooze?) this kind of sentiment erupts on every evolution post I have ever written or read. "It's all very well talking about antibiotic resistance in bacteria", someone will write, with that wonderful way they have of making a point made a million times before seem shiny and new (like Republicans and tax cuts), "but you show me where one species has ever become a different species". And they retire, having shown that Darwin fellow a thing or two about the real world.

We tend, I think, generous and empathetic to a fault, those of us on the reality-based side of the superstition curtain, to think that creationists have actually studied evolutionary theory, carefully considered it and then, having found what they believe to be one or two flaws, reluctantly and regretfully rejected it until such time as research resolves those questions. Just like the attitude of denialists to global warming.

But that sarcasm was unworthy of me, I know. Hard to resist though, when these people, whose brains scream maladaptation with every word they write, know, in fact, nothing of the evolutionary theories they are rejecting. When Darwin called his book "Origin of Species" he meant just that, an explanation of how new species came into being. His genius was to see, for the first time, that to answer this question you need to put together two apparently separate pieces of information. One everybody knew – species change over time. The second no one had previously spotted – if two populations of a species are separated geographically from each other both will continue to change over time and will eventually become so different that they will be unable to interbreed even if brought back together. This lack of reproductive potential between the two is how species are defined (they may still look very similar, and often do, a strange quirk for a "creator"), and it is important because once they can no longer breed with each other, the mutations that are accumulating in each, and the consequent natural selection processes, will continue quite independently. Each in turn can then give rise, in the right geographic circumstances, to two or more new species, and so ad infinitum.

The reason no one had spotted this obvious fact before is that on a large land mass subsequent movement of species, following their development, can obscure the fact that they were once separated (for example by the movements of glaciers, the rise and fall of sea level, the change of course of rivers, the rise of mountain ranges). What was needed was a world in microcosm, and that's what Darwin, the first naturalist to visit, found in the Galapagos group of islands. Here the development of species had occurred as populations became separated on islands too far apart for regular contact by small bird species (the famous finches). So here was a series of evolutionary events frozen in time (in a sense) and clearly visible. I have never, in the last 170 years, yet seen a creationist answer Darwin's very obvious question – why would a god go about creating a different species of finch on each island of a small group of islands? Incidentally the ability to see the process of speciation clearly in a group of islands was the reason why Alfred Wallace, working on islands in south east Asia, was also able to see how speciation worked, and went close to pipping Charles at the post.

So I suppose my question is how can creationists not be aware of this? How can they go on believing that "evolution" is merely the change within a species and not the origin of species? Do they really not know? Have they never had the wit to understand the simple proposition? Have they been deliberately misled by fundamentalist parents and teachers and preachers? Or are they refusing, dishonestly, to admit the obvious? They will grant change within a species, because changes in influenza (and other illnesses) alone make this hard to deny, but pretend that the question of separation of species has never been addressed (not just by Darwin and Wallace, but in the tens of thousands of cases of geographic speciation studied since by thousands of scientists). Because, and it is a very slippery slope indeed, once you admit that species originate in geographic separation, and then keep going their separate ways to become more or less different while maintaining clear evidence of their common origin, you have to come face to face with our Chimpanzee cousins. Once part of the same population as our ancestors but becoming separated by some chance geographic (perhaps climatic) event. And once you accept that relationship, that sense of a road not taken, can you really continue to say of the Chimpanzee "there but for the grace of god go I?" And can you really continue to talk nonsense about humans descending from beetles, or yeast, or primeval slime?

Many more attempts to reach across the curtain of superstition, bring the fundamentalists out into the light of reason, on The Watermelon Blog .