Darwin Saves
bacteriophage koan | saccade
koan | REM sleep koan
total perspective vortex koan |
emergence koan
Scientists are doing a great job advancing human knowledge.
However, they aren't doing a good job articulating the most
real value of their work, which is their method. I'm not just
talking about rejecting the counterfactual. There's the equally
important creative and efflorescent aspect of science. You
have to have theories of the world before you can make sense
of your observations. Darwin's theory is one of the biggest,
and one of the best. As he himself wrote in his journal in
1838:
Origin of man now proved — Metaphysic must flourish
— He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics
than Locke
Darwin made biology a lot easier, but he also pulled the
rug out from under religion. To understand that life is a
natural phenomenon like the weather or the orbit of the planets,
and that humans are subject to the same evolutionary forces
as every other species, is to relinquish a lot of our most
basic assumptions about ourselves: that we're special in some
way, that we're more important than other organisms, that
something magical must underlie the complexity of our behavior,
that the entire world has a purpose, and that its purpose
was to produce us. Darwin asks you to understand that the
universe is a series of accidents, like pebbles being tumbled
in a river.
As we extend our senses to smaller scales, we can start to
detect the basic molecular components common to every living
thing that we know of. As we extend our senses to larger scales,
we learn that these basic molecules are ubiquitous among every
star and planet we can see, among all of the millions of billions
of galaxies in the visible universe. None of these ideas are
easy to wrap your head around, especially if you're approaching
them with a cultural predisposition towards belief in the
god of the Bible. Before Darwin's theory finds the level of
understanding and acceptance it needs, natural selection needs
a better marketing team. The legged Darwin fish on car bumpers
are not doing the job.
Darwin has a lot of the really smart and charismatic people
on his team already: Stewart and Colbert, Wil Wright, all
my hip friends. Right now, though, if I had to pick a single
public face for Darwin, it's Richard Dawkins, and with all
due respect, Dawkins is not the ideal candidate for the job.
Don't get me wrong. Everybody should read The Selfish Gene
for the
clearest-eyed gloss of modern evolutionary theory on the
bookshelves. The problem is that Dawkins is not exactly mister
personality. He delivers his valid, well-reasoned criticism
of religious beliefs in the politely hostile, condescending
tone of an Oxford don. On TV it comes across as funny, but
on paper and (I'm told) in person, Dawkins can get to be like
Basil
Fawlty. Particularly counterproductive is his irritating
habit of referring to atheists as 'brights'. Dawkins seems
to share with many smart people of my acquaintance a misguided
conviction that his philosophical opponents are too stupid
or lazy to grasp the concept of natural selection. This is
usually not true, and Dawkins' hostility directly interferes
with his message being heard.
Particle physicist Steven
Weinberg made the wise observation that the Darwin people
are long on logical arguments against religion, and short
on constructive alternatives. He further observes that most
religious people are perfectly capable of understanding Darwin;
it's actually Richard Dawkins et al who don't grasp the full
philosophical implications of evolutionary biology, and the
very great threat that it poses to many of our civilation's
most fundamental institutions and mores. A book like the Selfish
Gene is enlightening, but also vertigo-inducing, and if you're
committed to the idea of a soul or an afterlife, quite terrifying.
Imagine if I came at you trying to undermine your most deeply
held beliefs and assumptions. Imagine if I took a sarcastic
tone from the outset, and that I treated you like your natural
skepticism was just ignorance. No information could possibly
change hands. The confrontational tone doesn't attract Darwin's
natural allies too well either. Maybe religion is just a bunch
of malarkey, says the typical passively secular modern citydweller,
but if it helps people get through the day, makes us nicer
to each other, makes people live good lives, isn't it worth
a little willful self-delusion? For a lot of the people living
today, the answer is going to be yes. But it can't last, can
it? As the world becomes more urban, more crowded and more
heterogenous, willful self-delusion is going to become an
expensive indulgence that we can ill afford. The question
is, how do we get to a place where everybody's hip to Darwin?
We the Darwinians need to talk more about the positive values
of our worldview. It isn't all "nature, red in tooth
and claw." The evolutionary framework renders transparent
previously inscrutable aspects of the world and our place
in it. Evolution by natural selection describes not just the
origin of species, but many other phenomena as well: epidemiology
and immune systems, consciousness (human and animal), music,
technology, languages, the structure of galaxies (maybe),
the behavior of computer simulations, the Internet, economies
and nation-states. Unfortunately, western civilization poses
some major obstacles to thinking in evolutionary terms. The
biggest poser is in our widespread and mostly unquestioned
belief that we possess a magical spirit, one that lives after
our death.
We cherish the idea of an immortal soul in the face of much
evidence to the contrary. I think that clinging to this idea
is costing us a lot more than it benefits us. Imagining the
realness and inevitability of your is own death is scary,
if you want it to be, but since it's fundamentally unknowable,
why assume it'll be so terrible? The moments before brain
death are just as likely to be delightful as awful. I think
that our fearful avoidance of death's finality and permanence
is actually much more painful, stressful, and wasteful of
effort than looking it square in the eye. Dying is as integral
to life as birth is, and we would do well to treat it like
we treat births, weddings and graduations: as a rite of passage.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could divert more of our efforts
towards making dying a nicer and more dignified experience?
Darwin puts death front and center in his theory of evolution.
From the first few pages of The Origin Of Species:
How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of
the organisation to another part, and to the condition of
life, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations
most plainly in the woodpecker and the mistletoe; and only
a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings
to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the
structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in
the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze;
in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in
every part of the organic world.
All these results...follow from the struggle for life.
Owing to this struggle, variations, however slight and from
whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable
to the individuals of the species, in their infinitely complex
relations to other organic beings and to their physical
conditions of life, will tend to the preservation of such
individuals, and will generally be inherited by the offspring.
The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving,
for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically
born, but a small number can survive.
Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the
universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least
I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion
in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly ingrained in the mind,
the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution,
rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly
seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of nature
bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food;
we do not see or we forget, that the birds which are idly
singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are
thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely
these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are
destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always
bear in mind, that, though food may now be superabundant,
it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year.
Note, as Darwin himself immediately does, that the word "struggle"
here is used in a broad and metaphorical sense, not in the
literal 'dog-eat-dog' sense. The struggle as we now understand
it is against the universe's continual trend towards greater
disorder, known to the scientists as entropy. Biologists view
life as a temporary reversal of this trend. Think of an eddy
or standing wave in a river. All of the water is going to
wind up in the ocean eventually, but under the right circumstances,
some of it can temporarily flow upstream, and can form self-organizing
patterns: waves, ripples, eddies. An eddy appears stable in
some ways, even though individual water molecules are continually
streaming in and out. If you take away the pebble or whatever
is making the water back up on itself, then no more eddy;
the molecules just flow downstream as usual.
The idea of matter organizing itself into metastable patterns
solely by natural happenstance may seem strange, but self-organizing
systems are ubiquitous in nature, from the tiniest size scales
to the most enormous. Here in the big city we're accustomed
to being surrounded mostly by the products of human intelligence.
It's easy to be lulled into a sense that all organization
in the world originates in human-like minds. Outside of our
habitations, though, the world is full of naturally self-assembling
ordered structures: snowflakes, rock crystals, caves and canyons,
whirlpools, tornados, hurricanes, solar systems, galaxies.
Some people, including me, look at modern
neurobio and conclude that the whole idea of conscious,
individual free will deserves some serious reexamination.
The perfectly sane response is, okay, smart guy, what do we
then base our morality on? How do we comfort the bereaved
and downtrodden? Where's the romance, the poetry, the feeling
of connection to deep cosmic energies, the motivation to even
get out of bed in the morning? Richard Dawkins made an earnest
effort to answer all those questions in Unweaving
The Rainbow, but from the downer of a title onwards, it's
not a magnificent rhetorical success. His
straight-up science books are way more imaginatively inspiring.
Carl Sagan is really the scientist to go to for a sense of
rapturous uplift that comes unencumbered by magic. The Dragons
Of Eden and Cosmos are especially good.
Before anybody is going to be persuaded to let go of their
magical thinking, we're going to need to understand why Christianity
and its ideological cousins persist in the face of so much
evidence contradicting them. Darwin actually had something
to say on this point. So far, belief in God and an afterlife
has been a good adaptive strategy for those hominids who harbor
it. People go to church for all sorts of reasons having nothing
to do with metaphysics or cosmology. They go to socialize,
sing, meditate, make business contacts, and connect with their
fellow humans generally. This is an invaluable social resource
to which the secular world has not yet far offered many decent
substitutes or alternatives. Yoga studios, art museums and
small, low-key jazz clubs are great, but they aren't enough.
We could consider the national parks to be more secularly
sacred, that would be a start.
Religion probably evolved long ago in human history, I'd
guess before semantic language. Humans have an instinctive
tendency to anthropomorphize any complex pattern we observe
in the world. Whether it's crops, weather, astronomical cycles,
other large animals, or the collective behavior of small animals
(especially the invisibly tiny majority), we imagine a humanoid
consciousness at work. We can't help forming emotional attachments
to our anthropomorphized imagos of the natural world, any
more than we can help forming emotional attachments to other
people. Severing emotional attachments hurts. Stephen Weinberg
says he finds "sadness" in the idea that the universe
and our presence in it are the result of a long series of
meaningless accidents. I see a different and equally valid
emotional possibility: Darwin's universe is free of judgment,
and that comes as an enormous relief to this overly and angrily
judgmental American.
I do think our fragility and improbability are reason for
a tragic sense, but that's not the same thing as sadness.
Evolutionary theory extends an invitation to humans to do
what we naturally do, which is to take the complexities of
the world we live in and spin out meaningful explanations
for them, usually in the form of body-centered linear narratives.
Reviewing our memories and teasing out patterns ought to feel
good; it's an adaptive strategy for survival in a tough world.
I also think that converting experience into causal linear
narratives is our best method for making sadness and pain
tolerable. Encapsulating pain in a meaningful and tragic narrative
makes it possible for us to eventually metabolize that narrative
into wisdom.
Western thought has mostly looked at nature with expectations
and desires of finding an ultimate meaning in it. To some
extent those expectations have been justified - all kinds
of seemingly inexplicable phenomena have turned out to be
amenable to straightforward mathematical description, like
electromagnetism and gravity. Enlightenment-era Europeans
were hoping that the entire universe might reveal itself to
have an intelligible plan, a giant underlying clockwork, the
product of a mind "out there" somewhere with whom
we could someday interface more directly. Darwin suggests
that while there are intelligible processes and rules at work
in the world, the specific outcome of those processes isn't
necessarily predictable.
The Eastern hemisphere offers us another strategy, which
is to find out more about the world as it is, and then say,
huh, that's the world as it is, and it's my job to accept
its endless tragedy in a serene and loving way. So then when
we find out that, say, complex eyes came about because so
many animals survive by eating other animals, and not because
a loving god designed them for us, we can just accept it and
deal. The big value of Buddhism for me isn't so much the cosmology
or the morals, it's the idea of design without a designer,
thoughts without a thinker. Here's my basic philosophical
strategy: tragic Darwinian narratives plus Buddhist acceptance
plus body-centered present-moment awareness
equals happier humans. We can balance
our natural enmity for those outside our tribes by continually
reminding ourselves of the basic tragedy of every human's
existence, the fact that every human will experience pain,
privation and eventual death. Acceptance of this fact doesn't
mean that we have to be all existential and gothed out. Tragedy
can also be hilarious, if it isn't happening to you personally.
See any episode of Chapelle's Show or Jon Stewart - the best
jokes are unexpected statements of uncomfortable truth. Both
comedy and tragedy are most effective adaptive strategies
for putting up with things that inescapably suck when they're
most truthful.
Antonio
Damasio's position, and I agree, is that human happiness
is a specific state of the human body, as unmistakeable in
its outward manifestations as it is in our close evolutionary
cousins dogs and cats. A morally wealthy society is one in
which the maximum number of humans are physiologically happy
the maximum possible percent of the time. At a minimum, that
means everyone is going to need food, shelter, clothing, fresh
air, social and familial connections, something constructive
to do all day, access to sanitation and medical care, effective
conflict-resolution strategies, and some guarantee of personal
safety. We can and will disagree on the logistics of how all
this is to come about, but it seems likely to me that we're
going to get there by exploring the landscape of secular humanism.
Timothy Ferris' book title Coming
Of Age In the Milky Way draws a metaphor for the history
of science from a person's childhood development. This is
the kind of patronizing language that makes people hostile
to scientists, and rightly so, but Ferris has a point. Viewing
your personhood as an emergent property of a bunch of automatic
processes can be unsettling and vertigo-inducing, but it's
the mature, adult thing to do. The good news is that with
adulthood comes adult freedom.
So here's my constructive secular contribution: some koans
from evolutionary science, contemplation of which may help
you attain Buddha-nature.
bacteriophage koan
From Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? by David S Goodsell
of the Research
Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank,
which is well worth a visit if you like elegant presentations
of visual complexity:
The 10,000th entry in the Protein
Data Bank, the bacteriophage phiX174, is a perfect example
of how the science of protein structure has progressed in
four decades. In 1960, the world got its first look at the
structure of a protein. That first structure was the small
protein myoglobin, composed of one protein chain and one
heme group--about 1,260 atoms in all. By contrast, the ten
thousandth entry in the PDB contains 420 protein chains
and over half a million atoms. Enormous structures like
this are not uncommon in the Protein Data Bank.
A bacteriophage is a virus that attacks bacteria. The phiX174
bacteriophage attacks the common human bacteria Escherichia
coli, infecting the cell and forcing it to make new viruses.
Do you think that viruses are living organisms? PhiX174
is composed of a single circle of DNA surrounded by a shell
of proteins. That's all. It can inject its DNA into a bacterial
cell, then force the cell to create many new viruses. These
viruses then burst out of the cell, and go on to hijack
more bacteria. By itself, it is like an inert rock. But
given the proper bacterial host, it is a powerful reproducing
machine. Is it alive?
saccade koan
Humans and other megafauna don't look at a scene in a steady
way. Instead, the eyes dart constantly around, locating interesting
parts of the scene and gathering detailed information about
them. Only the small central part of the human retina, the
fovea, has a high concentration of color sensitive photoreceptor
cells. Vision in the rest of the retina is surprisingly bad.
The high-resolution equipment is enormously expensive in bodily
resources, and by constantly having your eyes flicking around,
you can use them a lot more efficiently. These little flicks
are called saccades, and they're totally automatic. The saccade
is the fastest movement of an external part of the human body,
with your eye's peak angular speed reaching up to a thousand
degrees per second. Even while you focus your eyes on this
sentence, your eyes perform saccades constantly; you literally
can't stop yourself from doing them.
Along with saccades, your eyes are in a constant state of
vibration, oscillating back and forth about sixty times per
second. These impercetibly tiny movements refresh the image
cast onto the cells at the back of the eye. Without these
microsaccades, as they're called, staring fixedly at something
would cause your vision to cease after a few seconds. As it
turns out, your retina's photoreceptors only respond to changes
in lighting, not to the mere presence of light. It's easy
to see this in a cat or dog, whose vision is nowhere near
as acute as yours (though their hearing and smell are a lot
more sensitive.) My cats can track fast-moving objects like
a thrown bottlecap with laserlike precision. But if they're
chasing the bottlecap across the room and it comes to a stop,
they literally won't be able to see it against the woodgrain
of the floor, even from inches away.
The eye/brain system not only hides saccades from you, but
it also hides evidence that anything has been hidden. Long
before visual information makes it into consciousness, your
brain has edited out all the jerking around. But watch someone
else's eyes and the saccades are obvious. And there
are many other reflex eye movements. One of the basic ones
stabilizes images on your retina during head movement by producing
an eye movement in the opposite direction, thus preserving
the image on the center of your visual field. For example,
when your head moves to the right, your eyes move to the left,
and vice versa. Since slight head movements are happening
all the time, the vestibulo-ocular reflex, as it's known,
is very important for stabilizing your vision. People whose
VOR is impaired can't read, because they can't stabilize their
eyes during their normal small head tremors. The VOR reflex
doesn't depend on actual visual input; it works even in total
darkness or when your eyes are closed. To what degree can
you be said to have control over your eyes at all?
REM sleep koan
Something you do every night of your life is dream-intensive
REM sleep. No one knows why you do this, but there are some
theories. Here's the one I find most compelling, as set forth
by wikipedia:
According to a theory known as the Ontogenetic Hypothesis
of REM sleep, this sleep phase (also known as Active Sleep
in neonates) is particularly important to the developing
brain, possibly because it provides the neural stimulation
that newborns need to form mature neural connections and
for proper nervous system development (Marks et al. 1995).
Studies investigating the effects of Active Sleep deprivation
have shown that deprivation early in life can result in
behavioral problems, permanent sleep disruption, decreased
brain mass (Mirmiran et al. 1983), and result in an abnormal
amount of neuronal cell death (Morrissey, Duntley &
Anch, 2004). REM sleep is necessary for proper central nervous
system development (Marks et al. 1995). Further supporting
this theory is the fact that the amount of REM sleep decreases
with age, as well as the data from other species.
REM sleep occurs in all mammals and birds. It appears
that the amount of REM sleep per night in a species is closely
correlated with the developmental stage of newborns. The
platypus, for example, whose newborns are completely helpless
and undeveloped, has eight hours of REM sleep per night;
in dolphins, whose newborns are almost completely functional
at birth, almost no REM sleep exists after birth.
Here's what Gerald Edelman's
people think:
Almost all animals require sleep to function. The physiologic
reasons for the need for sleep are not well understood.
The Institute scientists have suggested the “Neural
Reapportionment” hypothesis, which suggests that sleep
is necessary in order for the body to reapportion or redistribute
its various resources which may be depleted, or moved/dispersed
during wakeful periods. Experiments are underway to test
this hypothesis by looking at how redistribution and readjustment
of neurotransmitters like glutamate, and intercellular movement
of mitochondria may be dependent on sleep.
Researchers at the Institute were the first to show that
Drosophila have sleep behavior and patterns similar to those
in mammals. More recent findings relate sleep patterns in
fruit flies to visual and olfactory stimulation as well
as social interaction. Sleep amounts seem to increase linearly
with intensity of social interaction.
For stimulating informed speculation as to the nature of
sleep, take a look at Carl
Sagan's book The
Dragons Of Eden.
Total Perspective Vortex
koan
In
The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, Douglas Adams
imagines a torture device called the Total Perspective Vortex:
The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly
big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most
people tend to ignore.
Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of
their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact
do.
For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm
lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire 'intelligent'
population of which lives permanently in one fairly small
and crowded nut tree. In fact the only Oglaroonians who
ever leave their tree are those who are hurled out of it
for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other
trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed
whether the other trees are anything other than illusions
brought on by eating too many Oglanuts.
Exotic though this behavior may seem, there is no life
form in the galaxy which is not in some way guilty of the
same thing, which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is
as horrific as it is.
For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just
one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity
of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a
microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You
are here."
For a variation on the same idea, consider this, from the
Jan 21 1998 issue of The Onion:
Ant Born
ENID, OK—Formicidae Polyergus Queen FPS-4003651-D407
is gorged on nutrient paste and resting comfortably following
Monday’s successful delivery of a beautiful ant larva,
designated GW-40036516-2093. According to doctors, the .0000000001-ounce
newborn ant has an "excellent chance" of surviving
the larval and pupal stages and maturing into adulthood
to become a productive food-gathering worker drone. Minutes
after its birth, 2093, along with its 4,306 identical sacmates,
was placed in the care of larvae-maintenance drones KJ-97865987-3008
through 3097. "Have you ever seen such a beautiful
baby ant?" nursery-maintenance drone 3061 said. "A
miracle like this, which only occurs about 2,810,000 times
in a lifetime, really reminds you what life is all about."
Here's the most current consensus on how biologists would
draw the family tree of all the organisms we know about. Notice
the animals, in the upper right corner with the plants and
fungi:
emergence koan
Emergent structures are a favorite strategy found in many
animal groups: colonies of ants, piles of termites, swarms
of bees, flocks of birds, herds of mammals, shoals/schools
of fish, and packs of wolves. In none of these situations
is there a 'leader' or a 'plan'. As the individual ants or
termites or whatever go about their instinctual business,
the colony just emerges. In an ant colony, for example, the
queen isn't handing out instructions or orders. Instead, each
ant reacts to chemical scents from larvae, other ants, intruders,
food and waste. Each ant also leaves behind a chemical trail,
which, in turn, provides a stimulus to other ants. Each ant
reacts automatically to smells according to genetically encoded
rules. Despite the lack of centralized decision making, ant
colonies exhibit complex behavior and have even been able
to demonstrate the ability to solve geometric problems. For
example, colonies routinely find the maximum distance from
all colony entrances to dispose of dead bodies. (These examples
are drawn from Stephen
Johnson's highly recommended book
on the subject.)
Below is a termite cathedral, a ten-foot
structure built by termites, even though no individual termite
knows how to build it. Substitute neurons for termites and
your mind for the cathedral, and troublesome questions arise.
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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