There is no one simple evolution story

I’ve never liked this stereotypical portrayal of evolution.

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It implies that evolution is linear, that it is going somewhere, and of course, that it is all about people — all the wrong messages. Yet it is ubiquitous, and probably the most common rendering you’ll find anywhere. Try googling for images of evolution, and you will turn it up, or variants on it, or jokes built on it…it’s a bit annoying and trite.

(Although, when I googled to find that image — which was easy — I also found this one.

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(Click for larger image)

Very nice. I like it.)

This is actually a problem. When we’re trying to get the message of the science of evolution across to people, one thing that helps is having a story — people respond well to narratives. The canonical image definitely tells a story, which is probably why it caught the public imagination so well, but the problem is that it is the wrong story.

Evolution should not be portrayed as an epic tale with a beginning and an end, with a narrative drive to a conclusion, with a single hero or even any heroes at all. Trying to shoehorn it into a simple linear story destroys the meaning. Does this mean our efforts to catch the attention of a fickle public are doomed, because science does not fit the story-telling conventions that best fit the human mind?

Not necessarily. Here’s an interesting analogy, a comparison of the evolution story to a dramatic convention that the public does eat up happily: evolution is like a soap opera. I can see it.

Both have lots of characters and story lines, every one full of anguish and drama, some ending happily (for a while), others ending miserably; individuals come and go, they get their brief period in the spotlight, then poof, everything moves on to the next big new event. There is no one grand goal for the ensemble, just a series of overlapping dramas, some ridiculous, some mundane, and the vehicle to tie them all together is usually something commonplace — a town or a hospital, for instance — and stories can abandon that unifying premise freely. And it never ends!

Days of our Lives has been on the air since 1965. Dozens, probably hundreds, of characters have come and gone. There have been murders, affairs, rapes, and (for all I know) alien abductions. The show isn’t going anywhere. And yet as any soap-opera fan will tell you, their favorite soap has had dozens and dozens of riveting, heart-breaking stories over the years, that make the series so gratifying and rewarding in the long run.

And that’s exactly the deal with evolution. It isn’t going anywhere, and yet it’s going to keep on going and going and going for as long as there’s planet to go on, and even after that it’ll probably be going on someplace else.

Cool. And yet, somehow, all that chaos and confusion and complexity and strangely unresolvable big picture manages to engross viewers day after day after day, in the case of the soaps. There’s a lesson there that we need to figure out: how can we map the science of evolution onto the imaginations of human beings?

SOP for prophets

I have been informed that I have survived a rather dreadful deadline. How is this for a prediction?

…Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, EvC, RichardDawkins.net and Uncommon Descent will all have so completely degenerated as to become nothing but embarrassing footnotes in the history of internet communication. I also predict that P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins will have so embarrassed their home institutions that overt attempts will have been initiated to have their tenures revoked on the grounds of moral turpitude and seeking to overthrow the government… Fortunately for them, by that date, February 9, 2009, the physical destruction of our civilization will have proceeded to such a degree that thinking people will no longer be concerned about intellectual trash like Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers.

It’s been over a week. No one has yet uncovered the loathsome pit of perversity I keep in the basement, nor has anyone even tried to stop Operation Whirling Squid, which will end with myself sitting in the throne of the World Emperor. I also don’t quite detect any panicking mobs fleeing the chaos of a collapsing culture.

I think someone was drinking a little too heavily there.

Effectively non-existent

For Darwin Day, Roger Ebert wrote an article on Darwin and evolution. Most of it is pretty darned good; he’s writing as “an intelligent, curious person who years ago became fascinated by the Theory of Evolution because of its magnificence, its beauty, and its self-evident truth”, not as a biologist, and I think that is an important perspective. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in Abstract Biological Esoterica to appreciate evidence and reason and the elegance of evolution! This is one of the reasons I oppose religion so vehemently: I am optimistic that most people are entirely capable of grasping the principles of good science, but that what we have in our culture right now is an explicit ideological barrier that hampers understanding. I’ve said it over and over that most creationists are not stupid people, they simply have this unfortunate indoctrination in a weird belief that their beloved children will be imperiled for all eternity if someone shows them a shell that is more than 6000 years old.

So read Ebert’s article, it’s good, it expresses considerable common sense. However, you know me — there are bits that provoke me to draw out the razor-edged claymore of angry scientist and start slashing indiscriminately. Stand back, I have a blade and I don’t care how wildly I use it!

Ebert has to have a section in which he tries to gently chide atheists, and I will not be chidden. In particular, he has a list of points he makes in these kinds of arguments, and one is a special bête noir for me.

Science has no opinion on religion. It cannot. Science deals with that which can be studied or inferred by observation, measurement, and experiment. Religious belief is outside its purview, except in such social sciences as sociology, anthropology, and psychology, where even then not the validity of the beliefs but their effects are studied.

Sigh.

All right, I’ll sheathe the sword for a bit. I hear this argument so often that I mainly feel disappointed when someone drags it out anymore — especially when I can agree that that person is “intelligent and curious”. The premise that science can’t have a stance on the validity of a religion is like the tranquilizer dart of the debates with religion; someone is thinking and questioning, and suddenly, swooosh, thock, ouch…they hear this argument that you can’t question the premises of religion, they get all sleepy and soporified, nod a few times, and piously agree. Gould succumbed to this, too, and here’s Roger Ebert, hit by the same dart.

WAKE UP.

Think about it. Why can’t science address the existence of gods? Why should we simply sit back and accept the claim of apologists that what they believe in is not subject to “observation, measurement, and experiment”?

In the United States today, we have tens of thousands of priests, rabbis, mullahs, pastors, and preachers who are paid professionals, who claim to be active and functioning mediators between people and omnipotent invisible masters of the universe. They make specific claims about their god’s nature, what he’s made of and what he isn’t, how he thinks and acts, what you should do to propitiate it…they somehow seem to have amazingly detailed information about this being. Yet, when a scientist approaches with a critical eye, suddenly it is a creature that not only has never been observed, but cannot observed, and its actions invisible, impalpible, and immaterial.

So where did these confident promoters of god-business get their information? Shouldn’t they be admitting that their knowledge of this elusive cosmic beast is nonexistent? It seems to me that if you’re going to declare scientists helpless before the absence and irrelevance of the gods, you ought to declare likewise for all of god’s translators and interpreters. Be consistent when you announce who has purview over all religious belief, because making god unobservable and immeasurable makes everyone incapable of saying anything at all about it.

And what of those many millions of ordinary people who claim to have daily conversations with this entity? That is an impressive conduit for all kinds of testable information: a high bandwidth channel between the majority of people on Earth and a friendly, omniscient source of knowledge, and it isn’t named Google. All these queries, and all these answers, and yet, somehow, none of these answers have enough meaning or significance to represent a testable body of counsel. Amazing! You would think that in all that volume of communication, some tiny percentage of useful information would emerge that we could assess against reality, but no…the theologians, lay and professional alike, will all claim that no usable data can be produced that would satisfy a scientist looking for sense. It sounds like empty noise to me.

We have the supposed histories of these believers, and they are full of material actions. Gods throw lightning bolts to smite unbelievers, annihilate whole cities and nations, raise the dead, slay whole worlds of people, suspend the laws of physics to halt the sun in the sky, create the whole Earth in less than a week, help footballers score goals, and even manifest themselves in physical bodies and walk about, doing amazing magic tricks. Wow, O Lord, please do vaporize a city with a column of holy fire before my eyes — I can observe that, I can measure that, I can even do experiments with the rubble. I will be really impressed.

Oh, but wait: it can only be an unobservable, undetectable exercise in mass destruction? And he’s not doing that sort of thing anymore? How about pulling a rabbit out of this hat? No, sorry, all done. God can’t do anything anymore where people might actually notice, or worse, record the act and figure out how the tricks are done. This is awfully convenient.

This is where the “Science has no opinion on religion” argument leads us: to an atheist’s world, where there are no activities by a god that matter, where at best people can claim that their god is aloof and unknowable, admitting in their own premises that they have no knowledge at all of him.

I can accept that, as long as these people are aware of the import of what they are actually saying.

The pumpkin argument

John Holbo has uncovered an old argument against atheists, one that might have oozed languidly from the fermenting brain of Ray Comfort. But no! This is from a 19th century book of poetry! I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Ray steals it soon, though.

Basically, it’s an invented disagreement. An imaginary atheist argues that in a well-designed universe, large oak trees ought to bear pumpkin-sized fruit, while little ground-hugging shrubberies out to have acorn-sized fruit. This is easily dismissed by the poet by having an acorn fall on the atheist’s head.

Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore,
Thy whimseys would have work’d no more,
Nor skull have kept them in.

It even has an illustration of a weeping atheist, which John thinks might look like me, back in my youth in 1792, when I hadn’t grown the beard yet and was fond of tricorn hats, and was always being pelted with acorns by puritans.

An account of the transmission of a nasty infection across the Atlantic

The Guardian has a well-done article on British creationism, which looks from here like a low-rent, twee version of the rampant excesses of our American idiocy (We’re #1!). It also looks very familiar, with the same dead arguments and the same old delusions.

We also get new twists on old tropes. Remember the horrible New Scientist cover that we knew was going to be abused by the creationists? It is.

“I am guided ultimately by the parameters that the Bible lays down,” admits John Peet, travelling secretary of the Biblical Creation Society. He estimates that 90% of the congregation at the Chertsey Street baptist church in Guildford, where he worships and where I hear him address the “creation club”, are young earthers. The theme of pastor John Benton’s sermon in the evening is “Genesis and Evolution: Do They Fit Together?” He holds up a recent New Scientist cover, headlined “Darwin was wrong,” as evidence that the scientific base for evolution is crumbling, that the Darwinian tree of life can be uprooted.

I’ve got my copy of that issue, and you dedicated warriors against creationism might want to pick one up soon. One simple strategy to counter that nonsense is to ask if they read anything more than the title, so that you can open it up and show that they are lying about the science.

That cover was a mistake, and it is one more headache for us to deal with it…but as we all know, creationists will misuse anything to suit their agenda. They (and also, unfortunately, many defenders of evolution) like to blame atheism for creationism, too.

Mackay, too, is clutching a copy of that issue of New Scientist when I meet him. This is manna from heaven – the science establishment offering up gifts to the creationists. They also claim that the aggression of the new atheists is helping them. They paint Dawkins as a “recruiting sergeant” for creationism because he links evolutionary thinking with atheism. “He has been a real help to the ministry, ” says Randall Hardy.

Creationists argue that the new atheists are fuelling the dogmatism; Richard Harries, the former Bishop of Oxford and a theistic evolutionary, last week threw that accusation back at them. “Creationists totally misunderstand the Bible,” he said. “Genesis is in the business of story, myth, poetry, metaphor. They [creationists and atheists] feed off one another. The debate has an unreality about it. Those of us who are not fundamentalists can’t find a place.”

Atheism and evolution are linked because science provides an evidence-based, rational account of origins that makes the myths of faith superfluous. If the fact that many scientists have abandoned the crutch of religion makes you flee from reason to embrace the absurdities of the creationists, you weren’t a friend of science in the first place. These are people who claim the existence of a cure makes them love their disease all the more.

As for Mr Harries, I can understand how he can’t find a place — he’s got nothing but vapor wafted about by furiously waving hands to stand upon. Of course the book of Genesis is a pile of metaphor and myth — so is the whole freaking Bible. But a metaphor for what? It’s all very nice to stagger away from the literalist interpretation of the bible — I sympathize, it’s what we atheists have all done — but then we’re left with this curious pile of pages that is a collection of very badly done history, bizarre behavioral proscriptions, uneven poetry, unbelievable fairy tales, and utterly insane politics and prophecy, which people believe fervently and which, even among those apologists who excuse it as mere “metaphor”, is endorsed as a guide to moral behavior and eternal life.

If he finds the debate unreal, think how we people free of the god delusion see it: a minority of lunatics espousing the kinds of silliness described in the Guardian article, which is hard enough for us to believe, with a majority of gawping fish on the sidelines trying desperately to avoid any association with the creationist kooks while averting their eyes from the rational people fighting their battles for them because they know, deep down, that their feeble apologetics for a “metaphor” they believe in makes the bewildered middle-of-the-roaders just as ridiculous as the creationists.

You aren’t doing it right

Muzzammil Hassan had a great idea: he established a television station to run programming that would counter stereotypes about Muslims. That sounds like a fine plan…but then his wife asked for a divorce, and his response was to murder and decapitate her, which rather confirms a particularly nasty stereotype.

Unless, perhaps, it’s not a stereotype, but simply a fact that Islam is a patriarchal religion of misogyny.

Café Scientifique this week, and next week

The Minneapolis Café Scientifique is taking place tomorrow evening: and it’s all about spiders in love. I want to go, but I’m still digging out from under my accumulated work.

I will be at the Café next week, here in Morris — I’m giving half of it, and Lynn Fellman will be giving the other half. We’ll be talking about genetics and genealogy, and reconstructing deep ancestry from your genes. Should be fun! Come to one or the other!

Francis Collins will be so disappointed

Collins has argued that one piece of evidence for god is the human moral sense, which he claims could not have evolved. I guess we’re going to have to call monkeys our brothers and sisters then, since researchers have found that monkeys have a sense of morality. (Let me guess; he’ll just push the magic moment of ensoulment back another 30 million years.) Furthermore, they have explanations for how altruism could have evolved.

Some researchers believe we could owe our consciences to climate change and, in particular, to a period of intense global warming between 50,000 and 800,000 years ago. The proto-humans living in the forests had to adapt to living on hostile open plains, where they would have been easy prey for formidable predators such as big cats.

This would have forced them to devise rules for hunting in groups and sharing food.

Christopher Boehm, director of the Jane Goodall Research Center, part of the University of Southern California’s anthropology department, believes such humans devised codes to stop bigger, stronger males hogging all the food.

“To ensure fair meat distribution, hunting bands had to gang up physically against alpha males,” he said. This theory has been borne out by studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes.

In research released at the AAAS he argued that under such a system those who broke the rules would have been killed, their “amoral” genes lost to posterity. By contrast, those who abided by the rules would have had many more children.

It’s a little glib and speculative, but it’s enough to shut down the claim that morality couldn’t have evolved.

I also have deep reservations about some of the claims in the article.

Other studies have confirmed that the strength of a person’s conscience depends partly on their genes. Several researchers have shown, for example, that the children of habitual criminals will often become criminals too – even when they have had no contact with their biological parents.

Ugh. Criminality is too flexible and too easily influenced by the environment — strip me of my income and throw me on the streets, and I’ll become a criminal, too, if it keeps me and my family from going hungry. But then, I suppose anyone could claim those are just the genes of my roots in the lower socioeconomic classes.