Evotour, part two. The Southwest Desert

Immediately after seeing the eclipse of the Sun, I headed to Petrified Forest National Park. Even though it was over 100 degrees, I still found it utterly captivating. This is a place that offers a wonderful way of looking into the evolutionary past.

The Petrified Forest today is desert, with only the skimpiest cover of shrubs and grasses, but over 200 million years ago, during the Triassic Period, it was a flooded forest dominated by Araucarioxylon arizonicum trees. The climate today is entirely different from what it was 200 million years ago. Entire petrified trunks are strewn over the ground, having eroded from the ancient sediments. Under wet, anaerobic conditions, the trunks decomposed slowly enough that silicate minerals diffused in and replaced the organic molecules, with the result that the trunks, which are now rocks, retain much of the original structure, including easily-visible wood grain. In the cross-sectional fractures, the ring structure of the wood can still be seen, though not in enough detail to study individual rings. Along with the silicon, minerals such as copper and iron have created astonishing colors. This is one of the best places to observe the effects of the processes of fossilization.

The presence of these fossilized tree trunks provides strong evidence for the long evolutionary history of the world. Creationists claim that petrified wood can be produced rapidly, and that the Petrified Forest could have been produced during a single Flood of Noah. They claim that this is just a Flood deposit. But all of the plant fossils in the Petrified Forest vicinity represent extinct forms of conifers, not just Araucarioxylon but also Woodworthia arizonica and Schilderia adamanica. Smaller plant fossils include clubmosses, ferns, cycads, and ginkgoes. Note that there are no modern conifers (such as pines) and no hardwood trees or flowers. How could Noah’s Flood waters have selectively picked out just conifers, clubmosses, ferns, cycads, and ginkgoes, and excluded all the hardwoods and flowering plants? The only reasonable explanation (without invoking a special miracle of which the Bible gives no hint) is that this deposit comes from a time in Earth history when hardwoods and flowers had not yet evolved.

There is a similar pattern in the animal fossils. Vertebrate fossils include crocodile-like phytosaurs, large Buettneria amphibians, and early dinosaurs. These deposits come from a time in Earth history when larger dinosaurs, mammals, and birds had not yet evolved. A Flood could not have picked out just the amphibians and small dinosaurs, and excluded all the large dinosaurs, mammals, and birds.

The next day I visited the Sonoran Desert. Most of this desert is behind fences and inaccessible from highways. But I managed to find a Maricopa County park south of Phoenix in which I could walk among the saguaros and other desert plants. Even though it was so hot that my video camera flashed a heat warning, I was utterly fascinated by this location. It is a showcase of evolutionary creativity. All of the plants were adapted to hot, dry desert conditions, but each of them in different ways. Most noticeable are the saguaros, which have spines (that keep animals from consuming their tissues to get water) and have a special kind of photosynthesis in which they store acid during the cool night and keep their pores closed during the day, when they manufacture sugar (this is known as CAM photosynthesis). But there are also the palo verde bushes. Palo verde means green stem, and these small trees have green stems rather than green leaves. There were also creosote bushes, which had small leaves, but the leaves gave off an unmistakable creosote scent. The volatile chemicals that create the scent actually provide heat stabilization to photosynthesis. Finally, there were black crusts on the soil surface, which are the resting phase of microscopic algae that come to life during rains and only during rains. The spring ephemeral wildflowers, which have adapted to the desert by growing like crazy for just a few brief weeks after the winter rains, were already gone. Evolutionary adaptations take many different forms, precisely because each group of organisms finds its own path of adaptation.

As a matter of fact, CAM photosynthesis has evolved many times, in different families of succulent plants. This is another fascinating evolutionary story. The enzymes involved in CAM did not evolve from scratch; they already existed and were used by these plants’ ancestors for a different function. Evolution borrowed them and repurposed them for this special kind of photosynthesis, and did so several different times in different parts of the world.

I apologize for the fact that two of the photographic images are on their sides, but Blogger insists on orienting them in that manner and there is no way I can change it. I saved the files in vertical orientation. Guess that's what you get for having a free blog from Google. I hope to post YouTube videos about the eclipse and the desert soon.

Maybe I stayed a little too long out in the Petrified Forest and the Sonoran Desert, because after I arrived in La Jolla to visit my sister, I experienced the temporary symptoms of recovery from heat prostration. But it was a fascinating exploration of evolution, one that I hope you will be able to experience someday yourselves.

Evotour 2012, part one. Eclipse of the Sun

I have begun a journey to California and back, during which I will be visiting sites of evolutionary interest. I will be making Darwin videos about these places, which I will post soon on my YouTube channel.

Evotourism is a new concept, which may someday draw attention among science-literate tourists the same way ecotourism now does. I am looking into the possibility of leading evotours, and my first step is to visit or revisit sites of evolutionary interest and make videos of them.

Until just three days ago, I was not planning to include the eclipse of the sun in my tour. Then I read that the eclipse would be seen clearly in New Mexico, and I knew I would be going through New Mexico as part of my trip. So I rearranged my schedule to be in Gallup, NM on May 19, to watch, photograph, and, if possible, make a video of the eclipse, which was to occur at 7:30 mountain daylight time.

I left my motel room about 6:00 and headed south on a state highway, expecting to easily find a place to pull off to the side of the road and set up my telescope and my camera tripod. This turned out to not be so easy to do. I wanted a clear view of the horizon, but there were few places from which I could do this. And almost the only side roads, off of the state highway, were private ranch roads with cattle guards. The residences did not look like the kinds of places that would welcome loiterers even outside the fence.

At last I found a side road of a side road with a church sign, and a little dirty spot to pull over. To my surprise, when I set up the telescope, I discovered the eclipse had already begun a little before 7:30. The disc of the moon was approaching from the lower right. I quickly set up my camera and took still photos and took some videos, which I tried to narrate despite the occasional cars whooshing down the country highway. For a perfect moment I saw the annular eclipse—the moon forming a perfect black disc centered in the sun. It was impossible to take photos or videos of the eclipse without the filter, and therefore nothing else was visible—until right at sunset, when the moon had nearly passed to the upper left, when a sun with a big bite taken out of it nestled down into piñon branches.

What I narrated about was that humans used to think that gods or demons caused the sun to darken and the moon to turn to blood (eclipses) and the starts to fall from the sky (meteors). This is the language used in the scriptures we still revere. The scientific view of nature, starting with Copernicus and Galileo and other astronomers, and continuing with physics and chemistry and biology, and finally the evolutionary understanding of humans and even the human brain, has shown us that the universe is not full of demons but that we are a part of its natural laws. We are at home. I did not express this as clearly on the video, where I’d been caught unprepared, as I did in this essay. But it was good enough. I may post it on YouTube soon, except that I got the date wrong on the narration, on all the takes.

For all I could tell, the people in the convenience store and driving along the road had no idea that an eclipse was occurring. The few people I talked to had no interest. Either they attended the little fundamentalist church beside whose sign I stood, or else they were totally absorbed in their own pleasures or problems or projects. In the old days, eclipses disturbed people. Today, they should be sources of wonder. But it appears that the geocentric theory has not been replaced by the heliocentric theory as much as by the egocentric theory.

My next stop on the evotour is Petrified Forest. I’ll let you know about it.

The Evolution of the Republican Brain—In Oklahoma

This morning, at the commencement at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, the keynote speaker was Mr. Jerry Buchanan, a prominent Republican from Tulsa. During his speech, he made reference to “Obama bin Laden.” He then made a perfunctory apology, but due to his gestures (including a grin and putting his thumb to his mouth) I inferred that the apology was not sincere.

I have written recently (see entry for March 20) that the political leaders of Oklahoma act as if they are not really part of the United States. I was hoping that what I then wrote about was an isolated instance, but a pattern appears to be forming, in which Republicans consider Democrats to not be fellow Americans but to be outsiders, even enemies. Throughout human history, our species has drawn lines between insiders, whom we treat with altruism, and outsiders, whom we despise. We have steadily encompassed more and more people, and even other species and the Earth, into the “insider” group. But in Oklahoma it appears that this process is reversing. It hasn’t always been this way. Back when Republicans hated Bill Clinton, they never implied that he was a terrorist, or in other ways spewed the hatred that they now spew toward President Obama. Whether this is because the Republican Party has changed from being the party of right wing activism to being the party of personal animosity toward others, or whether it is because Obama is (part) black and Clinton is white, I cannot say.

And this is exactly what we would expect from the way the “Republican brain” works. This phrase is in the title of Chris Mooney’s new book. Mooney (author of such previous works as The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America) uses recent research into psychology to say that people whose brains have an intolerance of ambiguity tend to join the Republican Party. The process is quite simple. Some people’s brains make them believe that everything is either totally right or totally wrong; and that whatever they happen to believe is totally right; and that anyone who disagrees with them is therefore not only wrong but evil; and that they are right (or blessed by God) whenever they take actions against other people that would, in most circumstances, be considered wrong. That is, when such people are “standing up for their beliefs,” no amount of ridicule or insult or misinformation is too much to heap upon others, and God releases them from moral and legal obligations when they attack others. While this is a perfect description of Republicans, it also describes extreme liberals; however, there just aren’t enough extreme liberals to bother talking about them.

I believe that this was what was happening in the mind of the commencement speaker this morning. Perhaps he believes that he should extend the normal respect of shared citizenship to President Obama, but subconsciously his brain is telling him that the president is related conceptually to terrorism. And I believe that this is also why most of the audience thought it was funny.

I confronted the speaker about this afterward. The speaker had told the graduates that their words should be positive, to create a positive future for themselves and a positive environment for everyone. I told him that his words about “Obama bin Laden” were not positive, but were highly insulting. He agreed. He insisted that it was a Freudian slip. I asked him to write a letter of apology to President Obama, and he promised to do so. I went up to him again and told him that his apology makes a great deal of difference. And that is why I am telling you about it. I will probably never know whether he actually sends an apology, but for the record, he apologized.

It is the Freudian part that I am writing about. I actually believe that Jerry Buchanan just made a mistake. But associating people who disagree with them, especially President Obama, with evil comes naturally and subconsciously to Republicans, and it slips out even when they do not intend it to—even when they do not consciously believe it, or just when they think it is bad publicity to say it. And the laughter of the crowd tells me that Oklahoma is dangerously Red. Dangerous, because they can say all kinds of hostile and inflammatory things before they even realize what they are doing. Will actions follow words? History, even recent history, even recent American history, does not offer us complete assurance that we have nothing to worry about, especially since there are enough guns in Oklahoma to supply an army as large as that of some nations. As long as the Oklahoma House opens its sessions with creationist rants (see March 20) and the people of Oklahoma think that it is funny to associate the name of the president with terrorism, the ground is fertile for real trouble.

Evolution gave us mammalian brains that react instantly to perceived threats. However, evolution has more recently given us advanced human brains that can learn to choose altruism over animosity.

Spent. Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, by Geoffrey Miller

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Some of you may remember the excellent book, The Mating Mind, which Geoffrey Miller (an evolutionary psychologist) published in 2000. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the evolution of intelligence: as a fitness indicator in sexual selection. Miller’s recent book, Spent. (with the period) Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, delivers just as much creativity.

Miller’s main premise is that much of our consumer behavior is governed by a (usually subconscious) desire to advertise ourselves to prospective mates. Of course, as with human intelligence, this behavior gets used in lots of contexts that are separate from the actual mating game (e.g. by older people). In this premise, Miller goes against the assumptions of many economists (that consumers are rational purchasers) and even against many other evolutionary psychologists (that consumers purchase things to gratify themselves).

In selecting a mate, what does an animal want to know? With the human animal, what a prospective mate wants to know is not just the quality of genes, but the quality of character. Miller says that a person’s character (which has a substantial genetic basis) can be summarized by six features: general intelligence, plus “the big five” that have been an important part of psychological measurement: openness (e.g. to new ideas), conscientiousness (reliability), agreeableness (friendliness), stability (e.g. of character), and extraversion. Miller explains that consumers sometimes spend a lot of money, and a lot of effort, to advertise these characteristics, even to the extent of negating a great deal of self-gratification. The advertisements must be, as much as possible, reliable or costly indicators—that is, difficult to fake. Consider one example: ecological conscientiousness. Rather than just to be unobtrusively green—by driving a small internal combustion car, or by not consuming as much—many people want to advertise their greenness, by buying a hybrid car that may not get much better mileage than a small internal combustion car but which costs a lot more, and everybody knows it. Miller gives many examples.

But sometimes Miller, who seems to be an impulsive writer, goes way too far. For example, he points out that an IQ test, or an SAT score, is a much cheaper measurement of general intelligence than is an expensive college degree. If all that an employer wants to know is how smart you are, why bother with college? A college transcript is also an indicator of conscientiousness: did you show up for class and do the work? Grades of D and F on a transcript are indicators of unreliability in a prospective employee. But surely there are less expensive ways of demonstrating conscientiousness. He even discussed fake degrees as if they might not be just as useful as real ones. I almost felt like I was reading The Wizard of Oz, giving the straw man a diploma and the lion a medal. And that is what Miller, himself an academician, has to say about college education. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t notice him discussing the value of things that you actually learn in college. I don’t want the nurse at the clinic taking a blood sample to be just smart and conscientious; I also want that nurse to know the difference between a vein and an artery! I almost got the feeling that Miller has some unhealed wounds in his academic career, though I do not know what they might be. There I go, psychoanalyzing an evolutionary psychologist! Of course, he was probably joking.

In one case, Miller discusses the “latent prison-gang-rape aggressiveness of many American SUV model names.” He said that you can recognize this if you stick the word [I am not making this up] “anal” in front of model names: Anal Expedition, Anal Explorer, Anal Commander… These are actual examples he uses. After sticking “anal” in front of all of these SUV names, he concludes the very thing he imposed, that SUV names suggest prison gang rapes. Surely a psychologist should recognize the absurdness of this. This must be a joke, although he did not suggest it even subtly. He said he would not be surprised to see an SUV called the Buick Water-Boarder.

He also makes some unrealistic proposals. Once again, I cannot tell if he is joking, although I assume he is. He said we could have numbers tattooed on our foreheads that are measurements of our six characteristics, starting, I assume, with IQ. Tattoos are easy to fake, so he suggests the tattoos should be dispensed only by licensed and reliable tattooers. This would make it easy for us to find compatible mates without having to pay for expensive courtship. And he suggests that income taxes be replaced by consumption taxes, with wasteful consumption being taxed the most. That is actually a good idea but he makes no suggestions for how to even begin doing it.

Geoffrey Miller is brilliant and I learned a lot from this book. But I got the impression that I was reading the Hunter S. Thompson of the evolutionary psychology world. You can decide for yourself whether this is something you might want to read.

The Evolution of Everything, by Mark Sumner

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The Evolution of Everything: How Selection Shapes Culture, Commerce, and Nature, by Mark Sumner (PoliPoint Press, 2010) is one of the most delightful books that I have read. It doesn’t quite deliver on its promise. For example, it has nothing about the use of natural selection in evolutionary computation. Furthermore, his application of evolution to everything is mostly metaphorical. But it is interesting, and gave me several new insights. Consider these examples.

Evolution depends upon and produces biodiversity. But humans, particularly conservatives, tend to devalue biodiversity. Sumner quotes Ronald Reagan, who said during the 1966 California governor’s race, “I mean, if you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres of so of trees—you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?” He then makes the point that businesses depend on diversity of products and stores just as natural selection depends on genetic variation.

Sumner also drew an analogy between evolutionary mass extinctions and market perturbations. Extinctions, in evolutionary time, are opportunities for species, especially small ones that grow quickly. Similarly, most new companies start during financial turmoil. “Post-extinction-event worlds are worlds for small animals. Post-economic-disaster worlds are worlds of opportunity for small businesses.” Massive corporations have many vulnerabilities; “TBTF” simply means that we are scared to let them fail.

Sumner also writes about altruism, and explains that from the Founding Fathers until the end of the nineteenth century, the American government embraced altruism by controlling banking and supported infrastructure, things that free-market conservatives today reject. “More than one voice would be quick to declare these ideas (the ideas of Washington, Hamilton, and Lincoln) to be socialist. Even un-American.”

Sumner had something to say about creationism, too. Only 40 percent of Americans accept continental drift, although it is measurable. This would seem to be a shocking statistic regarding American ignorance. But perhaps it is not ignorance so much as it is racism, which makes it even more shocking. Sumner says this result came from the way the question was worded. The survey asked, Were America and Africa once part of the same continent? Most of the “no” answers came from the South; and this, as Sumner points out, is where fewer than half believe that Obama was born in America. Other interpretations are possible, but Sumner’s interpretation certainly caught my attention.

Much of Sumner’s book is about the history of evolutionary thought, things that most of us already know. But it is so delightfully written that it was a pleasure to read things I already knew. For example, this is what he had to say about Darwin: “Although others had previously floated proposals about the mechanism by which evolution operated, Darwin’s hypothesis was meticulously researched, brilliantly argued, eloquently written, and vigorously defended. A hundred and fifty years of effort by the world’s most motivated detractors has done nothing more than prove that Darwin’s ideas were even better than he knew. Darwin is remembered because Darwin was right.”

A Science and Religion Discussion at an AAAS Divisional Meeting

The 2012 meeting of the Southwest and Rocky Mountain Section (SWARM) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the University of Tulsa has just finished. There were altogether about 500 registrants, although each session had few attendees. I was happy to participate in many aspects of this meeting, as symposium organizer (Endangered Species of Oklahoma), symposium participant (Science and Religion), and judge. The meeting was a success due to the tremendous amount of effort shown by the SWARM Executive Director David Nash, University of Tulsa Graduate Dean Janet Haggerty, Graduate School Coordinator Hope Geiger, and David’s sister Heidi who helps every year with registration. Their dedication was outstanding.

A summary of the Science and Religion session has been posted on the AAAS website by AAAS staff writer Ed Lempinen. (In the photos, you can see that I dressed as Charles Darwin, something I have done many times before). Ed’s lengthy and fair summary is very good and I will not repeat any of it. It accurately reflected the intention of the organizer, biologist Aaron Place of Northwestern Oklahoma State University, to find common ground of dialogue between science and religion. The general consensus that seemed to be reached by the end of the symposium, as I see it, is that both science and religion are about asking questions and seeking answers. Neither science nor religion should accept fiat statements of authority as final or even as evidence. For example, it would be unscientific for me to say, “Evolution occurs because Darwin said so,” or “God told Darwin that everyone needs to believe in evolution.”

This was not the case, however, with Dominic Halsmer, the Dean of Science and Engineering at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. Whenever a science-religion session is organized, one expects a diversity of viewpoints. Nobody should have been surprised that Halsmer presented an Intelligent Design viewpoint. This would have been inappropriate for a scientific session, but was only to be expected for this one. However, I believe that Halsmer went far, far beyond the scope of the symposium when he spent considerable time declaring to us, as incontrovertible fact, that God told Oral Roberts to build a university. This is a cult viewpoint and should not have been a part of any science-related symposium. This is as inappropriate as a Mormon scientist (there are many good ones) proclaiming at a scientific meeting that Joseph Smith saw God or a Heaven’s Gate proponent claiming at a scientific meeting that the Hale-Bopp comet had come to take them to heaven. It is Halsmer’s cult preaching, rather than his intelligent design, to which I object.

In all fairness, neither the organizer Aaron Place nor the SWARM Executive Director David Nash, with whom Place consulted before accepting Halsmer’s participation, had any idea that Halsmer would inject this cult teaching into his presentation. Halsmer made no such statement in his abstract. It is for this reason that I am going to make the following proposal to scientific organizations with which I am involved (AAAS-SWARM, Oklahoma Academy of Sciences, etc.).

Guidelines for presenters: All participants, including those from religious institutions, should understand that (1) their scientific papers should not include religious assertions, and that (2) any papers submitted for religion-science sessions should not include any cult assertions, that is, assertions not generally shared among religious believers. The meeting organizers shall be empowered to decide whether this guideline has been infringed.

I believe this is both fair and necessary for presenters at scientific meetings to be apprised of this guideline in advance. Many meetings of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences include papers presented by students from Oral Roberts University, and they stick to the science. We do not want to discourage this sort of participation from students or faculty of Oral Roberts. But we cannot extend the recognition of the scientific community to cult preaching by allowing it to occur at meetings sponsored by scientific societies. Such a guideline would have made it clear in advance that Halsmer should have made no such statement, and would have been the basis of a formal complaint to his sponsoring institution.

A couple of days after the symposium, a bill promoting the teaching of alternatives to evolution and global warming failed to emerge from the Education Committee of the Oklahoma State Senate. This bill clearly had the objective of injecting fundamentalist doctrine into science classrooms. The next day, however, the wording of the bill came back to life as an amendment stuck to an unrelated bill. It is clear that state lawmakers are on a crusade to claim scientific validity for any and all of their religious and political viewpoints. You can read all about the ongoing events at the website for Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education. This is the background against which the SWARM meetings were occurring this week.

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Creationism is the Official Religion of Oklahoma

Let’s not pretend that Oklahoma is actually a part of the United States. In Oklahoma, Christianity is the official religion. And not just general Christianity, but Southern Baptist Creationism. The Constitution of the United States prohibits Congress from establishing a religion. But it does not prohibit states from doing so. However, any state that does so may have to forfeit federal funds. A couple of years ago, Texas governor Rick Perry reminded America that Texas had the right to secede from the United States. Is Oklahoma ready to declare its independence from the United States? If it came to a choice between having Southern Baptist Creationism established as the official, state-supported religion of Oklahoma, and remaining a part of the United States, I would not be surprised if the Oklahoma House and Senate voted for secession.

In Oklahoma, there is a tradition of having an Oklahoma pastor open sessions of the House with an invocation. In March, 2012, pastor Bill Ledbetter of Fairview Baptist Church in Durant, Oklahoma, the city in which I work (the home of Southeastern Oklahoma State University), was supposed to give an invocation for the Oklahoma House. But he preceded it with a long sermon in which he claimed that God was passing judgment on the United States because evolution is taught in colleges and universities and because homosexuality is not forbidden by law. He told the House that God required them to pass laws that were in accordance with the Southern Baptist interpretation of the Bible. He claimed that Thomas Jefferson had intended the United States to be a Christian nation. He received applause for his speech. Here is a link to a YouTube video of his entire presentation.

You will notice that the pastor has never studied what he denounces. He claims that evolution is the belief that humans evolved from baboons, which no scientist has ever said. But, why should he bother to get it right? God has already made his brain infallible, and made him personally inerrant. This sounds like blasphemy to me, but it is blasphemy that got applause from the leaders of Oklahoma. Even back when I was a fundamentalist myself, I would have been aghast that a man could present himself as personally inerrant.

This is the same pastor who has put up church signs that declare that anyone who disagrees with him about evolution is calling God a liar. This pastor has equated himself with God. And it is not hard for me to imagine that I was the one he had in mind when he posted his anti-evolution statements on the first week of classes in Fall 2011 (see this YouTube video).

What the pastor insisted on was his Republican interpretation of the Bible. He would not permit the United States or Oklahoma to establish an economic system based upon what Jesus said about the responsibility of the rich and powerful to help the poor and weak. He would certainly reject the Old Testament practices of the Sabbath of the Fields, in which God commanded the Israelites to let their fields lie fallow every seventh year, and of Jubilee, in which all land was to revert to the original owners, and all debts forgiven, every fifty years. Biblical government would be more radically socialistic than anything that has ever been tried in the world. Of course, the pastor would not tolerate this. He does not want the Bible, but his own views, to be established as the official religion of Oklahoma.

Right after this speech, the Oklahoma House passed a bill declaring that students in Oklahoma must be required to consider alternatives to evolution and global warming in the classroom.

The legislators of Oklahoma appear ready to lead us into a Dark Age in which they suppress science and attempt to establish a religion-based government. They will fail, but may damage the Oklahoma economy in the attempt.