Whence it comes, prithee?

Al Denelsbeck

I’m skipping a lot of backstory here, because after a lot of typing I realized it doesn’t add anything useful. So, short version: at a recent science-versus-religion debate, some triumphant creationists were invited to pose questions to all those who believe in evolution. I have long ago blocked the site that posted them for a puerile editorial that demonstrated pretty much no standards at all, and have found the questions reprinted on another site that consists solely of reposted content without attribution – they’re not getting any links either. If you like, however, Jerry Coyne (or is it Professor Ceiling Cat? I’m never quite sure) at Why Evolution Is True has featured a few of the images and a link to the originator. I say images because, somehow, it has become internet vogue to take photos of someone holding their handwritten message on a pad, perhaps the most inefficient use of bandwidth ever conceived.

I’m just going to re-type a few of the questions, sparing you the experience of seeing the self-assured visages of the people repeating them. And I say “repeat” because they’re the same damn questions issued ad nauseum from religious folk [spelling and punctuation as in the original, as far as I can reproduce by typing]:

Does not the Second law of thermodynamics disprove Evolution?

If the Big Bang Theory is true and taught as science along with evolution, why do the laws of thermodynamics debunk said theories?

There is no inbetween… the only one found has been Lucy and there are only a few pieces of the hundreds neccessary for an “official proof”

If evolution is a Theory (like creationism or the Bible) why then is Evolution taught as fact.

Because science by definition is a “theory” – not testable, obsevvable, nor repeatable’ Why do you object to creationism or intelligent design being taught in school?

What mechanism has science discovered that evidences an increase of genetic information seen in any genetic mutation or evolutionary process?

Why have we found only 1 “Lucy”, when we have found more than 1 of everything else?

Relating to the big bang theory…. Where did the exploding Star come from?

And of course:

If we come from monkeys then why are there still monkeys?

I’m not going to bother answering these – there is such a thing as an exercise in futility. That’s part of my point, really – these have been answered millions of times over the years. What I want to know is, where, exactly, do religious folk keep getting them?

The same vapid ‘zingers,’ over and over again. Do preachers stand up on Sundays and send these out to their flock? Is it some facet of homeschooling? Do they come from religious tracts? Are they from little word-of-mouth discussions going around during church picnics? Seriously, how do these keep getting hammered into the minds of creationists?

I’m not asking how they stay there – creationists have to cherish and nurture their self-indulgent belief systems, and a sound bite, however inaccurate or nonsensical, is clearly enough. But there’s a concerted effort to introduce these sound bites, and I’ve never seen it happening, I only see the results.

It’s an interesting thing, you must admit. With the internet these days, a lot of total nonsense gets quashed quickly – make a Facebook post about Mars being the size of a full moon in the sky and see what happens. How long does it take to find out a celebrity death rumor is false? No, this isn’t the normal kind of disinformation that goes around.

Which of course raises the question of whether those promoting it know it’s horseshit. I can’t believe that the same questions could keep going around for decades, never being corrected, always avoiding an intelligent response. So, is it a matter of abject denial, the purposeful ignoring of the corrections to coddle ideas that creationists like better? This seems bizarre, because these aren’t just ideas, but consistently used as debate points – they’re intended to wield against others. Wouldn’t you think that getting trounced in an argument would make someone at least a bit hesitant to keep forwarding that particular point to anyone else?

The other option is even more interesting, because it means that whoever keeps promoting this shit to creationists knows that it’s ignorant, and yet keeps repeating it – playing religious folk for utter fools. Speculation as to why they might do this is left as an exercise, but I think it’s safe to say that it has little to do with being “good,” or at least any functional definition of such.

Now, a couple of observations. First, so many religious folk think these are powerful arguments – as if, in the decades that the laws of thermodynamics and natural selection have existed, no one working in the fields has ever heard such arguments, much less thought of them on their own. To them, it seems plausible that we could actually have departments in universities, research labs, biological firms – I mean, seriously, vast areas of education and study – that operate despite these flaws, knowingly or unknowingly… but some little local church has tumbled to the Truth™. Of course, anyone that knows what the Second Law actually says, that has even a cursory education in evolution, easily sees where the flaws actually lie, and knows that whoever is using these arguments has no idea what they really mean (especially since the First Law trashes all gods.) This means that they’re just a fantastic way of making religion look stupid.

And that’s observation two. Regardless of whether any religious person actually uses these arguments personally or not, the bare fact that they’re still out there, still being perpetuated, makes all members of that religion look ignorant. Sure, this sounds like I’m being unfair, painting everyone with the same brush and all that, but let’s back up a second. First off, we’re not talking about just me, but anyone who might hear these arguments – expecting perfect objectivity from everyone is too naïve to even bother with (not to mention rather two-faced when the subject is religion.) More to the point, though, is that in most fields, great pains are taken to distance the reputable areas from the fringe elements, or even between fundamental disagreements. New classifications come up routinely to distinguish differences in approach or schools of thought.

Not so with religious folk, who like big umbrellas to make their numbers sound impressive. You will rarely hear any religious person openly denigrating such idiotic arguments, or even making the effort to correct them politely, since this implies a lack of solidarity – all religious people must be right (you think I’m overstating the case, but such arguments are used constantly.) While any atheistic or even secular article will provoke a shitstorm of religious responses (always including at least one of the arguments quoted above,) not even a tiny fraction of such effort is expended to correct a “fellow christian.” Obviously, the important point is that no one criticizes religion – but it’s quite all right to make it look ignorant.

So, for all the religious folk out there who wonder why they’re not getting respect, well, look to your spokespeople – the dividing lines are where you decide to place them.

Everything’s shiny

Al Denelsbeck

Came across this, courtesy of artist Otis Frampton, and had to share. He has more, but this is clearly the best.


C Is For Canceled by OtisFrampton on deviantART

If you don’t get it, then you’re… how shall I say this politely? Your kind don’t belong around here.

Ah, who am I trying to kid? I came late to the whole thing myself, regrettably, since television networks are notoriously bad about doing good science fiction, and the one time they get it right it gets cancelled without making it through the first season. It was years afterward that I watched Serenity, afterward purchasing the Firefly boxed set. The amusing bit is, even The Girlfriend likes the series, and she doesn’t like science fiction at all. Come to think of it, I haven’t asked her what she thinks of westerns…

A lot of the credit must, naturally, go to the writers*, the ones responsible for the dialogue that makes it what it is:

You may not think much of the series, and that’s fine, really. You have to live with your inadequacies, not me.

* They would be Cheryl Cain, Ben Edlund, Jane Espenson, Drew Z. Greenberg, Brett Matthews, Tim Minear, Jose Molina, and Joss Whedon.

Book review: How the Mind Works

Al Denelsbeck

If there is one book that I recommend to everybody, regardless, it’s Demon Haunted World, the most efficient, readable, and interesting book to promote critical thinking that I’ve ever come across. But underneath this pursuit lies a curious question: why there is an apparent deficit in critical thinking in the first place.

How the Mind Works book coverHow the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker, goes a long way towards answering this question, and has been added to my list of recommended books. I will happily admit that, in part, this is because it deals directly with topics I’ve posted so much about before: how we’ve been shaped over the millennia to think, react, and act in certain ways. It does not hurt that Pinker has confirmed many suspicions and idle theories that I’ve had, even though he also trashed a few. But far more in support of recommending it is that the information therein is often not only startling, correcting common misconceptions about ourselves, it all fits together remarkably well. It presents a tremendous amount of information, broken up by subtopics, and I found nearly every one of these subtopics imparted something new and, quite often, completely against former understanding – even when I was already convinced of how much this approach could explain.

This is not exactly a book on evolution, and will not help much in understanding how the process works – nevertheless, in order to understand what goes in in the human mind, one cannot help but see the evolutionary path, and the influences that selection has had. Up until quite recently, it was believed that biology could explain what the brain was made of, but that psychology, sociology, and anthropology was necessary to explain what we did and why – basically, that we were influenced almost entirely by culture, the “nature vs nurture” idea that has ever after been misconstrued, sometimes wildly. What Pinker (and all of his sources) demonstrates is that biology has a hell of a lot more say in the matter than was previously believed, and that many of the perceptions of our minds were dead wrong, sometimes egregiously so. While he does not bother with fingering culprits, there are still places when the clash with the humanities is hinted at. Most times, the information is presented as-is, without editorializing, without comparison against previous ideas, without judgment.

This is good, in that many of the concepts related within range from somewhat surprising to outright contentious, depending on how open the reader is; I imagine the number of angry letters Pinker has received has not been trivial. Some of the ideas might seem radical, when viewed against the ‘common knowledge’ that many people have held all of their lives, but this is largely the point; for a long time, we really didn’t recognize how we should have been looking at the topic of The Mind. Yet this book is not speculative in nature – it does not present radical ideas that it then looks to find support for, like ‘The Secret’ and all that jazz; it is a collection of solid scientific studies, sometimes ingenious in approach, that have examined and tested numerous aspects of our thought processes. For example, in Chapter 5, Pinker relates studies that tested infants from the age of 3 months and up for what they expected to happen with different objects – this is long before they could have built a database of experience to guide expectations, much less receive any parental guidance on the matter. One could skeptically ask how anyone could determine what an infant could tell us (“one gurgle for yes, two for no, spit up if you want the experiment repeated”,) and Pinker answers that: infants can express both interest and surprise by how they paid attention. If they soon looked away, what they had seen wasn’t new or unique in any way, while if they paid sharp attention, what had happened was unexpected. In this manner, it was determined that from very early ages, humans develop strong distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, with different expectations of behavior for each – infants get upset when a face becomes still, but not when a dot does. People and animals can move independently, but objects require some outside force like a push, or collision with another moving object. Infants also had an immediate recognition of small numbers of objects, able to be distinguished long before the red and blue fishes have come along. Parents do not teach the concept of “three” to their children, only what word to use for it.

Pinker covers a tremendous amount of territory in this book, from artificial intelligence to the concept of modeling three dimensions, from our peculiar half-grasp of logic to why we have violent tendencies. Some of these have been grappled with by philosophy for centuries, but become startling clear (and perfectly sensible, if not necessarily pleasing) when examined as artifacts of evolved organisms. While we like to believe that humans are higher beings and quite rational, there’s a lot of evidence that our behavior is much, much closer to the ‘instinctual’ actions of many other species than products of careful consideration. These instincts, provoking feelings of importance with certain behaviors, can even lead to elaborate cultural constructs. The tendency for an organism to perpetuate its own genes is not only a given trait anymore, it’s fairly obvious how it could be developed through selection, leading to behavior that favors family and kin, and by extension the small tribe of kin-group. Some of this behavior, however, is rather esoteric:

In any group, the younger, poorer, and disenfranchised member may be tempted to defect to other groups. The powerful, especially parents, have an interest in keeping them in. People everywhere form alliances by eating together, from potlatches and feasts to business lunches and dates. If I can’t eat with you, I can’t become your friend. Food taboos often prohibit a favorite food of a neighboring tribe; that is true, for example, of many of the Jewish dietary laws. That suggests that they are weapons to keep potential defectors in. First, they make the merest prelude to cooperation with outsiders – breaking bread together – an unmistakeable act of defiance. Even better, they exploit the psychology of disgust.

The chapters dealing with violence and gender differences are very likely to draw a lot of resistance, which is a telling effect all by itself. A bar fight between two males, often over the stupidest of reasons, is more about sexual status (how capable and virile the participants appear, not just to any females watching, but within the ‘tribe’ as a whole) than it is about the importance of discouraging such rude behavior by whaling on someone who issued an insult – though the idea of sexual posturing isn’t likely to occur to the participants at the time. And despite the protests of a large percentage of the population, women and men really do behave entirely differently, and have entirely different outlooks and approaches, especially regarding each other.

Pinker is careful to note the misconceptions that arise from these established results, as well. While evolution shaped us in a manner that worked efficiently, our modern societies are a far cry from 99.99% of our previous history – things have changed too quickly to develop adaptations to our lives now, so much of this behavior doesn’t provide the benefit it once did. Also noted is that there is no intent or goal anywhere in the process; we cannot say that because natural selection produced these effects, this is how we should behave. The curious, and perhaps heartening, effect mentioned above is that we often feel distaste over many of these aspects – evidence, perhaps, that evolution is on the case and has produced some counteracting influence. But what is more important is the conscious recognition that these simplistic behaviors exist; if we believe that we are always rational or ‘in control,’ then we’re far more likely to consider these ancient artifacts as reasoned actions – but if we accept that we have some old instincts that still prompt unthinking responses, we’re better able to quash them when they appear. All too often, unfortunately, the efforts to recognize where such things came from are considered “excusing” them, or worse, are simply ignored wholesale because the entire idea is unsavory and counter to previous beliefs.

I feel obligated to mention that this is a dense book; Pinker broke How the Mind Works up into eight chapters when it could easily have been thirty, and at 673 pages it is half-again as long as Demon Haunted World (extensive notes, references, and index temper this just a little.) And he does not skimp on the detail, sometimes getting a little too involved in explaining certain aspects, like others’ attempts to compare (inadequately) cognition with computing. It took me longer than expected to get through it, even with my interest in the subject matter, yet I encourage the perseverance that might be necessary; it’s a complicated subject and he treats it seriously, and the understanding that it can evoke is, dare I say, something that will change the way you see people. It’s even worth it just for the numerous examples of research that demonstrate how often our impressions were dead wrong. Among many other things, the book does a number on pop psychology, which can only help – there are still far too many people who wield it with utterly misplaced confidence.

Right at the end, there’s a curious departure from the style used throughout, as Pinker allows for how some burning philosophical questions are so far unanswered. I found this seriously dissatisfying, not just from the lack of the critical approach established earlier, but because I can see numerous issues with the message. Essentially, he admits that some aspects are still not understood, like consciousness and morality, and even concedes that the mind may not be adequate to fully comprehend itself – not surprising in an adaptive organism shaped over millennia, really. I have no argument with the latter approach, but have found that large swaths of philosophy suffer from the same kind of misconceptions that Pinker has addressed elsewhere in the book, and aren’t very hard to understand when viewed within the same framework. This bit at the very end offered little more than a sop to the humanities, and I am suspicious that Pinker intentionally threw this in to allay the protests that he sees from the demystifying of the mind – he is, after all, an academic with colleagues in those fields – but to me it was almost as if written by someone else. It’s brief, though, so no biggie.

To say that this book is going to lead to some other posts is probably putting it mildly – two have crept in while I was in the middle of it, and I’ve been marking other passages as I review it, something I wished I’d done from the start. It’s remarkably thought-provoking, and assumption-challenging, and above all, smoothly fits together pieces that we may not even have been aware were part of a puzzle. Because of its style and density, I have to consider it at an ‘adult’ reading level, lacking some of the earnest appeal that Sagan and Singh bring to the table, but it is no less fascinating for that. Dig in, and keep a notepad handy.

Just because, part 15

Al Denelsbeck

red nandina leavesIn abject denial of the actual readership of this blog, I must apologize for being away as long as I have. What with the Grammys, and the Superbowl, and Groundhog’s Day, and then all the celebrity activity, well, you know how it goes. The up side of all this is, of course, that I have so much to post about now!

Yeah right. When you see me posting about anything of the sort, that’s the time to assume crash positions or go deeply into debt buying that new helicopter, because the end times have arrived. Or perhaps that I’ve suffered some kind of traumatic head injury – I wear a medical alert bracelet that advises everyone, in the event that I give the slightest shit about sports or current music, to immediately unsuscitate. Spellcheck doesn’t believe that’s a word…

Even so, a couple of major posts (at least I think so) are coming up – in the meantime, I’ll fill in with a few photos and some light music. Say, shouldn’t pretty photos be called, “light music”?

Both of these were taken while out with students – this one, in fact, is the same type of plant as seen in the previous post, only a few meters away though not the same actual organism. I missed the narrow window of capturing it while snow was present, but that would not have been ideal in conditions like this – the light is too bright to handle the high-contrast subject of colors and pure white snow well, and something likely would have suffered. You can be excused if you think the background greenery is a different species; nandina really can get this diverse in color on the same plant, though I suspect it takes a hard shock of cold weather to pull it off.

The other is just an interesting effect of heavy bubbles throughout thick ice, exaggerated by a wide-angle lens. I could have done without the pine needles, which ground it from being completely abstract, but they were frozen into the ice and not going anywhere soon. Don’t get the impression it got that cold here – this was a small raised pond in the botanical garden, able to get far colder than any typical body of water. But yeah, I found it pretty cool either way.

ice bubble hyperspeed

Even for North Carolina

Al Denelsbeck

branches and thin ice
turkey vulture trioLike most of the country, we’ve been having some longer spells of cold weather, a bit lower temperatures than normal for this time of year, but Monday popped up clear, sunny, and shockingly warm, hitting about 20°c (68°f) – a new student who had been aiming for a day with good conditions to meet contacted me at the last minute, and I headed out. We met near a pond, where the last vestiges of ice lent a curious texture to the water, while we wandered around without even jackets. A few turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) wheeled overhead, seeking thermals, as we talked about composition, framing, and contrast. I typically don’t take a lot of images while working with students, partially because I prefer to concentrate when shooting, but mostly because this is their time, not mine. There’s also a balance point, because when someone is after an image, they’re usually tuned out to anything being said and not absorbing too much; it’s better to sit down and talk theory for a bit before going out to apply it in practice. Some, however, tend to take their cue from me, and will seek out more shots if I’m doing my own, perhaps because it reduces the idea that I’m watching them and judging their approach. I’m pretty easygoing about it all; I’ll talk about what makes a subject stand out and how to use the surroundings to good effect, but not how they should approach their photography. Tastes and styles differ; I encourage students to embrace their own, and just help them achieve it.

Nandina berries from belowI will talk about creative approaches, however, such as going in behind these nandina (Nandina domestica) berries for an uncommon perspective. Aside from the curious view, there’s a sneaky little advantage to doing this: the conditions were bright and contrasty, and brilliant red subjects often go oversaturated in digital images with such light. When there’s no chance of a handy cloud or haze, you can find the shady side and prevent the color from becoming too vivid, giving a hidden, secretive air to the image at the same time.

Though the day was lovely, there was the promise of change, since a winter storm was due to roll in within the next two days, perhaps dumping ten centimeters of snow on us. That’s an abrupt change even for this state; I listen with but half an ear to weather reports, since they’re notoriously unreliable in the area, and have been on the phone with people only a few kilometers away, comparing radically different conditions. A few years back a coworker questioned me as to why I was late for work, since the office had received a bare dusting of snow; I had to take her out and show her the 12 cm of accumulation in the back of the pickup bed, indicating the conditions found in the northern part of the county (I was polite, and did not tattle on another coworker, who had called this transplanted New Yorker for a ride since she couldn’t drive in the white stuff, but way later than she should’ve called me – we would have been late regardless.)

Yet, this time the report was pretty accurate. In the early evening (yesterday, now,) the snow started, fitfully, then getting into its stride, and a few centimeters have already coated everything. The nandina would be very fetching with a nice layer of snow, but we’ll have to wait and see if the roads are going to be acceptable – I’m not into risking my neck for a shot, no matter how scenic. This didn’t mean I couldn’t start off with some local shots, and I’ve been after decent snowflake images for a while now. What’s necessary are nice low temperatures, for one – the surfaces that the flakes gather on have to have gotten cold enough not to melt them on contact. And it also takes a few flakes that have settled distinctly separate and at a useful angle, especially one where the lighting can be managed.

The temperature we’ve got – it’s -5°c (22°f) as I type this, and potentially dropping even lower. And the rosemary bush provided some nice support, especially with the help of some web strands courtesy of the green lynx spiderlings (Peucetia viridans) that still inhabit the bush. The spiders were nowhere to be seen, unsurprisingly, but the evidence of their presence was highlighted by the snow.

Snow and webstrands
If you look close, you can just seen the web line coming in from the top of the image, supporting the snow in a curious sculpture. The vast majority of the accumulation were these linear ice crystals, often called ice needles or columns, with just a few flakes peeking out here and there, making it even harder to find a decent subject. At this magnification, depth-of-field is minuscule, only a few millimeters at best, so you choose your focal point judiciously; naturally I went for the classic flake hiding back there, which (solely by chance) captured the web strand as well. But it’s the next one that I’m most pleased with.

snowflakes and snow needles
Sure, I would have liked a nice, singular snowflake to make a distinctive composition, but you know what? I’ll take this for the time being, since it’s the best I’ve done so far. The web line is also just barely visible in this image, center top, but whether you can see it or not, you have to admit it helped display the snowflakes quite well. If I can keep raising the bar on my winter pics in this manner, I might even be able to stand the snow for a few days.

A few. Then get out of here. Did the long-term snow cover thing when I lived in New York for 17 years – that was quite enough.

Photos without sight

Al Denelsbeck

The other day I began thinking about a subject that has been in the back of my mind for a long time: blindness. My eyes aren’t all that great, needing strong corrective lenses, and they’re gradually getting worse – one day, at some point in the future, the photography will halt, though this is likely to be far enough away that I’ll have retired from everything else as well.

But there have been plenty of times, long before I was serious about photography, that I’ve wondered about blindness, and how it affects certain perceptions of the world. Some time back, I ran across the challenge to describe color to a blind person, which I like to think I could manage, but the real test isn’t what I think of it, it’s whether a blind person seems to understand the concept, which isn’t an opportunity that has arisen. But I often walk around the place in the dark or with my eyes closed, comfortable with where things are and, if I’m any judge, with a pretty solid concept of spatial relations – I can put my hand directly on most doorknobs, know how many steps it is between the bathroom and bedroom, and so on.

I haven’t made a huge effort to make the site disabled-friendly, partially because I really don’t know what’s optimum, but largely because, as a photography-related site, much of the content is lost without the visual. I have toyed with the idea of images produced as etchings or bas-reliefs, but I suspect this really wouldn’t be much good; a scenic shot represents a visual field, subjects at varying distances that are entirely outside of the experience a sightless person would have.

Which led, herewith, to an exercise. I randomly selected an image from my ‘Scenic/Abstract’ stock folder to attempt to describe in the terms that a blind person might experience. Since you have never seen the image, you can play along.

It’s outdoors. The air is exceptionally still and quiet – no bird noise or barking dogs, no lawnmowers or yard noises, few traffic sounds. The air is also slightly chilly, with a faint hint of humidity, like immediately after a rain. The grass underfoot, however, feels dry and solid, not sodden.

A car approaches, from behind and to the left. It’s going slower than normal, clearly traveling on asphalt. It passes by on the left, but as it recedes into the distance it crosses over towards the right. The sound seems slightly muted – less echo than has been experienced elsewhere. After it passes, the faint turbulence of its passage follows behind, weak enough to indicate, along with the sound, being a small distance from the road. The sound of the car disappears into the distance without distinctive changes in pitch; the car did not turn or stop within hearing distance. No other car passes.

There is no warmth from the sun, and only the faintest of breezes. Close to the right, tiny rustles from both near your feet and high above indicate close trees, and occasionally one creaks slightly in the middle distance – there seems to be a treeline alongside. Identical sounds, fewer and fainter, come from the opposite direction – the trees are either fewer there, or farther away. Given the road sound and the turbulence from the car, they are likely on the far side of the road.

What this highlights, hopefully, is that the non-visual representation has to produce the same ‘sense of place’ that our visual cues provide – but some of the things that strike us visually will not produce the same reaction when described. The interplay of light on the snow of the distant mountain peak, a classic scenic image, has no effect on the blind; the awe that they feel comes from other senses. This is not to say that they cannot get the full effect from being in certain locales; aside from the impossibility to know just what anyone else feels, those with sight have a tendency to rely on it strongly, while those without get more information from their other senses. A blind person on a mountain overlook can feel the cool wind coming out of the valley below, hear the air tearing through the trees in the distance coming from very atypical angles (both above and below,) smell the incredible mix of scents produced by thousands of plants and snow, might even get a sense of unease from the rough rock surfaces underfoot. All of these can be rare or unique, and thus provoke a strong response when encountered.

Shall we try another? Remember, this is just as much an exercise for me as for anyone reading.

The air is cool but not cold, noticeably humid, largely still. No sunlight can be felt. The sound of running, splashing water comes from directly ahead, at least twenty paces off; more sounds of water, these very minor, comes from just off to the right at your feet. There is the sound of the wind in the trees, but it’s moderately distant, well above your head, in marked contrast to the stillness of the surrounding air. There is a faint smell of vegetation, but a sharper smell of wet rocks, with a hint of lichen or fungi. The ground underfoot is rock, mostly smooth, but not finished in any way, faintly uneven and studded with the occasional pebble.

The sound from the splashing water has an echo to it, coming most strongly from the left side, extending almost overhead; the effect is perhaps slightly noticeable to the right, but without distinctive direction. The sound of the wind and the echos do not overlap in the slightest. The occasional birdsong can be heard, but always to the right.

Crouching to feel around your feet, you quickly find water lapping against the rock you’re standing on, in the direction of the splashing sound, but the water itself is smooth and undisturbed, a pool. It becomes clear this is the source of the trickling sound to the right. Behind you, the wind noise is more distinct, no longer over your head but even extending down below your level; birdsong can be heard in all directions that way.

Behind you, above and to the left, voices can be heard approaching, and the odd scuffs of feet on uneven surfaces – perhaps ten or so paces away. The sounds descend as they come closer and the people pass behind, giving you some space; the scuffing continues and the position varies in height, sometimes lower than you are, sometimes higher. Their unevenly spaced footfalls and the widely varying time between steps makes it clear that the surroundings are very uneven. The echo from the left and above is very pronounced with the voices, becoming sharp every time someone speaks a bit louder. They never pass in front of you, and barely even get alongside, moving away to the right.

Now, I cheated a little bit here, perhaps – I didn’t stick with what was immediately apparent in the image, but extended it to the surroundings not visible, trying to replicate the entire sense of place that someone without sight would have. They also would have had more of an idea of terrain from having to get to that location, but now we’re going outside of the immediate impact of the ‘scene’ and into the entire experience of the trip. Should that count?

I’m not going to come this far without including the images for comparison, but I’m not going to insert them in the post to be seen easily; instead, I’ll provide a link. Go ahead and revisit the descriptions again to fix the ideas in your mind, then click here for the image from the first description, and here for the second. Or don’t, if you want the full experience, some of the mystery that remains for those without sight. [I’ll note that I actually rejected one of my random selections from the folder, because it was an abstract of a very close subject and could easily have been determined by feel.]

How close was your impression? Was time of day evident from the cues in the description? Did you notice how much of certain portions were never described, because they would have produced no impact to someone without sight?

And of course, how much did I actually miss? I wasn’t paying particular attention to all of the aspects when taking either of these images, so I attempted to reconstruct what I believe I could have sensed when there. Fog and snow mute sounds in curious ways, but the lack of wind noises during fog is actually indicative of the conditions, since it’s rare otherwise. The cue about the echoes I have indeed experienced, as has nearly everyone; we can tell when a recording is made in a small room with hard walls or floor, and can often tell when someone we’re speaking with on the phone walks into a bathroom or outdoors.

[I have a distinctive memory of horsing around with friends in our barn when I was younger, at night without lights – this was a place I knew intimately, but not quite well enough to know exact distances to certain features. I stepped back, and abruptly my voice echoed directly into my ear on one side; I was only centimeters away from a wooden support column, just shy of smacking my head against it. It was a great reminder that we can pick up more of our surroundings without vision than we often realize.

Now something else I’ll note, while on the subject. Sound travels at roughly 340 meters per second, meaning it takes 0.002938 seconds to travel a meter. When we hear the echo from a small room, it is the sound repeating perhaps just 0.01 seconds after the origin; when I heard the echo from the column, it was an echo well less than 0.0014 seconds later – we can actually distinguish time frames this short by ear. The old style monitors with cathode ray tubes (the bulky ones) and non-flat TVs would redraw their images 60 times a second, with black areas in between. This meant each individual image would last roughly 0.01 seconds (counting black redraw buffers) and few people would notice any flicker or delay at all – our ears are better at timing small delays than our eyes.]

But anyway, all of this is simply an exercise in perspective and assumptions. I will never know what being blind from birth is like – even if I lose my sight entirely, I will always build a visual representation in my mind. And a sightless person will never know what vision is like, and what is drawn from it. This isn’t about limitations, however – it’s about changing a frame of reference, and contemplating how much all of our senses contribute to our perception of environment. There are dramatic landscapes for all of us, but some are very different in nature.

Tim Minchin’s Storm

Al Denelsbeck

Tim Minchin is an Australian née British musician/composer/songwriter/comedian, particularly known for his outspoken skepticism. All the best humor can be found overseas; here we think Saturday Night Live is humorous, apparently since not very many people learned in school what “humor” actually means. It’s not fair.

Anyway, one of his most popular works is the beat-poem, Storm, later animated. I usually can’t stand beat-poetry, but this isn’t a bad example at all, and of course, I’m easily swayed by the subject matter. The scenario is all-too-familiar to those who promote critical thinking: some flaming nitwit drones on in public from a state of self-impressed ignorance, but it’s considered impolite to inject an empirical perspective. We have weird standards in our cultures, and Tim, among others, would prefer to see these become a bit different. That’s enough setup; watch the video.

It’s not just the act of contradicting someone publicly – skepticism itself is often considered to be mean, taking cherished beliefs away from people who, it seems, are emotionally delicate. The argument that such beliefs “don’t harm anyone” is heard pretty often, as if that’s the only standard that matters.

Or as if it’s even been established in the first place. Actually, many forms of ‘cherished beliefs’ have been demonstrated to be harmful in numerous ways – we cannot hide behind the shield of ‘opinion,’ since opinion informs our decisions. There’s a difference between what color we might paint our walls, and what we decide to do when our child is sick. It’s not opinion that’s the key factor, but consequence.

Here’s a portion of the difference between an outspoken skeptic and the hypothetical ‘polite’ person. Not speaking up, not correcting misapprehensions, not daring to create the cracks of doubt in the façade of self-assurance, has consequences too. The potential for real harm weighs rather heavily against the possibility, or even guarantee, that someone might get upset. What kind of person places the pleasant nature of their dinner party higher in importance than effectively treating a future illness, or guiding legislature towards useful purposes, or even just the hint that expecting some ‘spiritual purpose’ to guide one’s life is a waste of both time and intelligence? At best, it’s someone who pretends the correction, the better information, will occur someplace down the road before harm can be done. Mostly, however, it’s cowards – afraid of confrontation and believing that if no one gets upset, everything is just fine.

But, here’s an important bit: the skeptic does not have to be confrontational when providing their input, and this is where Storm is seriously misleading. Minchin goes off on a rant, clearly frustrated over seeing too much of this, and openly derogatory. But this is self-indulgent itself, alleviating frustration in a way virtually guaranteed not to have much of an effect; he even notes this himself in the poem yet, to all appearances, credits this to the intransigence of Storm rather than his own approach. While his overall points have plenty of well-grounded facts behind them, the delivery is as emotional as those who revel in ‘spiritual’ and ‘holistic,’ and such an approach is more a contest of wills than a discussion of relative merits. In most cases, a matter-of-fact approach is incredibly disarming; non-confrontational, non-judgmental, non-emotional – just, “this is how it is,” with supporting details as needed. This won’t work for everybody, but imagine those others at the party, listening to the discussion between a calm, lucid person and a dramatic, emotional one – who do you think they’re likely to pay more attention to? Who will provoke the consideration that perhaps there’s more to be learned? Who, to be blunt, seems to be working from solid info rather than a dogged commitment to what they want to believe?

Let’s not forget that no one ever concedes defeat in an argument, except dismissively or sarcastically. The goal cannot be to win, only to start the process of examination – the change will take time. Make your point and let it go.

The title of the poem has a secondary meaning – not just the name of the antagonist, but Minchin’s own thunderhead building to a climax. Storms often make people cower, however – the goal is to slide in under their umbrella, like a… damn, I can’t close this metaphor thematically. But you know what I mean anyway.

Goes down smooth

Al Denelsbeck

I just happened to glance out the back door today to find a visitor to the yard, about as close to the door as she could get. After a couple of quick and low-quality shots through two panes of glass on the doors, I slipped out the front door to circle around and approach as unobtrusively as I could, which was sufficient.

Red-shouldered hawk
She pretty clearly knew I was there, but I was in shadow and shooting along the edge of the house, so this red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) wasn’t too concerned with my presence, about 20 meters away. I took whatever opportunity she gave me (I’m fairly certain this is a female, and in fact, the same one seen here,) to creep closer, at times using a hoe as a makeshift monopod because I hadn’t grabbed one, or the tripod, figuring they were more likely to spook the bird. She switched position, and as I moved slowly to stay with her, she spotted something down by the fence and popped down there for just a moment.

SnakeHunter2I’ve seen before the kind of dancing she did while grounded, and knew as she returned to another branch that she’d caught something. In this case it was a small brown snake (Storeria dekayi,) about the diameter of a pencil and not a whole lot longer, which provides a little bit of scale – the hawk probably stands about 30cm (12″) tall. Since I’d already alerted The Girlfriend to the presence of the hawk, she got to see the whole show through the window, easily noting that the snake seemed none too happy. Hawks only worry about immobilizing their food; it can be alive as they eat it, if necessary, so the snake was writhing in an attempt to get away.

I was shooting lots of frames as she perched with the snake, looking around curiously to see if everyone noticed her remarkable feat; she was, after all, totally unscathed, hard as that may be to believe. Actually, I’ve seen this behavior before too, and I don’t know what the purpose is; I would think that hawks would want to get their meals down as quickly as possible, to prevent escapes, attracting attention, or even losing the meal to a rival. But instead they pause for no apparent reason, without doing anything useful, and my only speculation is that they ensure that their perch is safe before getting involved in consuming the meal.

SnakeHunter3
Now, this makes sense for the larger meals that have to be reduced into bits that can be swallowed easily, since hawks aren’t going to be chewing anything. But not exactly for something like this, which doesn’t take a whole lot of effort. Still, it might just be habit. Unfortunately, digital cameras have a small handicap in that they have to process the images as they go, able to handle ‘bursts’ of several frames but requiring pauses in between, and it was during one of these pauses that the hawk chose to hork her capture down, taking all of two seconds to do so. Thus I only got one frame of this taking place.

SnakeHunter4
Notice the nictitating third eyelid, often closed as birds swallow, presumably to protect the eye from the flailing that might take place from their food. It’s semi-transparent, so the hawk can still see danger approaching.

I can’t complain about the conditions – I couldn’t have asked for either a better light angle, or a better position from the hawk. We’re so used to seeing wildlife images of this nature that we often don’t realize how difficult it is to accomplish; the hawk could easily have been elsewhere, facing differently, or this could have taken place under overcast skies. But I still could have done without that tiny twig right there.

SnakeHunter5
She loitered around for a bit, clearly looking for more of a meal than that, the glutton. She still wasn’t very worried about my presence, even though she had flown away not two weeks previously when I was three times farther off and far below her. I’m guessing the prospect of more snakes on this warm day made her tolerate creepy little nature photographers a little better.

Fair’s fair

Al Denelsbeck

In a recent discussion about religion, someone told me that I had to be fair and consider all the good that religion does along with the bad, far from the first time I’ve heard this directive. It sounds innocent, and in fact, praiseworthy on the face of it, but it’s almost offensive in its nature; it all depends on the circumstances, and is a great example of the kind of manipulation that often takes place in such discussions.

If my doctor cures me of an illness, that’s good, right? If my auto mechanic fixes my car, that’s a point in his favor, correct? Well, yes and no – this is what they’re both supposed to do, and in fact, carefully certified and charging money to accomplish, so it’s not exactly a moral thing, but a contractual exchange, and an expression of competence in a chosen field. One must ask what a minimum standard is in such circumstances, and if someone should be considered noteworthy for simply meeting this.

But okay. Let’s say my doctor gives a great deal of money to charity, and donates a lot of her services to underdeveloped countries. That’s good, I think we can agree. But then it’s discovered that she has been dismembering orphans in her basement, without even a permit, and selling the bones for voodoo rituals. That’s… not so good. So if she is nominated for the Humanitarian of the Year award, it’s predictable that a lot of people are going to get upset. The distinctive difference, one that many people cannot grasp, is that actions can be beneficial or detrimental by themselves, but if we want to pass judgment on an individual, organization, or ideology, we consider the collected actions as a whole.

Now, ostensibly, this is exactly what I was asked to do – but again, the context comes into play, and the context was not for the objective evaluation of religion, but that religion was actually a beneficial thing, a force for good. If the Red Cross was found to be setting puppies on fire during each meeting, it would pretty much cease to exist; their donations would dry up overnight, even if the puppy ritual did not negatively impact their aid services in the slightest. People would reason that their donations were, even peripherally, lending some kind of support or approval to the barbecue, and that they could certainly find some method of providing aid that did not involve animal abuse. They see the value in supporting the beneficial actions, not the organization, recognizing that it is trivially easy to have the good stuff without any bad stuff.

Every country has laws, and to the best of my knowledge, not one has any form of law that requires considering how many good things a person does to determine whether a law was actually broken. When a drunk driver kills a child, the judge does not ask if the driver is a dog-lover, or used to be in the Peace Corps. Priests do not get one free murder. While it’s true that, on occasion, the sentence reflects some effort on the part of the convicted to offset their crime (e.g., community service or ‘good behavior,’) this is, by and large, an aspect of appropriate punishment, not an admission that what they did was not bad. In the true sense of the ‘scales of justice,’ the crime and the sentence are intended to balance out, leaving a neutral result. Anyone can argue that juries may be swayed by the good actions of the accused, and this is true – they’re also swayed by the bad actions such as criminal history, and typically use the information to determine not the nature of the crime, but the intent and/or social fitness of the accused. It is also worth noting that very few people think so much of our legal system that they actually consider former criminals to be ‘neutral’ after the sentence is completed; the laws regarding registered sex offenders make this starkly clear. Life sentences and the death penalty assume by their nature that there is no method that the accused can possibly balance back to neutral.

But even if one were to believe that religion should be judged on how the scales actually tip, we’re faced with the question of how, exactly, one should measure this. Let’s take a simple thing like the catholic church’s disinformation campaign against condoms, provoking an AIDS epidemic in several African countries. What is an effective offset to this, just to bring the scales back to zero (much less gain a positive weight)? Day care centers? Food drives? Couples counseling? Ignoring that all of these are often cheap ploys to preach to a captive and vulnerable audience, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that killing people in the name of arbitrary interpretations of scripture is going to require more than all of those combined.

Even this is misdirection, however. The direct answer to this whole fairness issue is, don’t fucking do the bad shit in the first place. It’s really that simple, and it’s incredible that I would have to point this out. The vast majority of nonprofit organizations devoted to providing assistance are hugely ahead of any religion because they follow this minor dictum, having nothing that needs to be offset in the first place. If you want to be fair.

And then there’s some of the considerations that spring up with just a little more objective examination. The bare fact that ideologies which routinely promote the ‘life is sacred’ concept have so frequently been found causing death is nothing short of enormous hypocrisy. It is well known that the Spanish Inquisitors tortured their victims with bludgeoning, crushing, and burning because they were forbidden to draw blood. Instead of guidance by the moral compass of the church, we see the avoidance of damnation with loopholes – god should have thought that one through better…

[It does not matter whether any proposed god accepts the dodge or not – religion is what people do in the name of god, its entire point of existence, and the priests themselves obviously weren’t too motivated towards charity and upstanding character.]

Let’s consider the argument that most of the actions to be weighed were undertaken with the belief that they were good in the first place – regardless of who was killed, tortured, beaten, robbed, banished, vanquished, persecuted, or otherwise disadvantaged. I’m silly; I tend to define ‘good’ as being beneficial to all involved, and not just a new way of describing self-importance and arrogance, so I’m not going to allow this defense in the slightest – ignorance of basic moral standards is no excuse from anyone, but especially not to specifically qualify religion as ‘good.’ It’s worth noting that every person who demanded that I consider the good with the bad had to have understood this perspective as well, otherwise the demand makes no sense, so using this argument to excuse those actions is self-contradictory.

Authority is not synonymous with good – there are millions of events throughout history that attest to this. This distinction is lost far too often, however, as people believe that following the strictures of their chosen authority is good, solely because not following them is bad – a peculiar binary approach ignorant of the idea that this is a minimum standard; if anyone was good for obeying traffic laws, that’s setting the bar rather low on judging value, isn’t it? It becomes even lower when someone chooses their own authority, not just from the religion they prefer to follow from among several to hundreds, but also in the selectivity of what scripture they have decided to embrace. While millions of people in this country crusade for adherence to god’s proclamations regarding homosexuality, campaigning for laws restricting marriage, they remain blissfully unconcerned about the proclamations against trimming hair, tattoos, coveting, and so on. What we see is not concern over actions of benefit, or even the bare recognition that laws are for protection and not discrimination, but just going with the flow; someone told them this was good and important, and away they are swept. The scripture serves only to justify it, not providing any real guidance. This is, in fact, the primary way that religion has been practiced throughout the vast majority of its recorded existence.

What results is the exact opposite of a moral compass, the abdication of any standard or even definition of ‘good’ in lieu of wielding divine authority, or just listening to the majority, which appears in abundance outside of religion as well. Unfortunately, the fact that western cultures no longer participate in witch hunts is probably not because we determined that witchcraft was never demonstrated; it is likely only because no religious authority has insisted recently that it needs to be done. The bombing of abortion clinics and the murder of doctors working therein does not come from any scriptural guidance, since the only relevant passages prohibit such actions (not to mention the underlying penance structure would make such actions pointless anyway.) People can easily be provoked towards extreme actions, however, when they abandon their own judgment in the belief that they shouldn’t be using it in the first place.

And finally, there’s the idea that without religion, we would all be horribly bad anyway. While this idea is promoted by religions the world over in such a modest and self-effacing way (imagine that,) it is incredibly naïve, bordering on the irredeemably ignorant. We hardly need religions to tell us what’s bad, any more than we need someone telling us not to eat decayed animals, or that we should take care of our babies. I have yet to come across any scriptural prohibitions against pouring acid in my eyes, so that’s okay, right? Seriously, how fucking stupid are humans assumed to be with this idea? But even without the conclusion that can be reached through twelve whole seconds of thought, we still have extensive studies in sociology, psychology, and even biology that show not only the inherent nature of our moral drive, they demonstrate that several other species possess their own versions of these, despite the fact that scripture has yet to be translated into chimpanzee or rat. You’ll pardon me if, every time someone tells me we can’t be good without religion, I strongly recommend that they be safely housed in a padded cell, solely on the basis of terminal gullibility. Naturally, their access to infomercials should be completely restricted…

I like to think that I make the effort to be fair. I don’t judge people as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ knowing that everyone is capable of both kinds of actions; by extension, this means that violence is far better linked to human nature than any one underlying cause. But religions are widely, repeatedly claimed to temper this – it is, in fact, the most prominent trait named for any of them, the biggest reason why everyone is supposed to hold faith in esteem. Yet the religious, by a vast margin, cannot recognize nor account for the countless reprehensible acts fostered solely by their faiths throughout history; I would have thought fairness would involve that as well, rather than perpetually trumpeting their piety to one and all.

But if religion really is a force for good, then there should be little, if anything, to weigh against this, much less a laundry list of persecution and murder. And if a supreme beneficent being really is the inspiration or guiding force, then bad acts just simply should not ever be able to happen, period. Any and every excuse wielded to try and explain why these still occur only serves to reinforce how little religion really is tied to any superior power, despite the vast philosophical efforts that have been expended to try and rescue this paradox. The most common answer to this is, “We can’t know the mind of god,” which logically means that no actions can or should be taken in service to such. No religious person ever manages to get that out of it, however. Isn’t that odd.

More to the point, it’s ridiculous to weigh good against bad to try and salvage a belief system, or to force it into a binary good/bad state – that’s doing a huge disservice to our intelligence in the first place. There is no reason to bring religion into it at all. Do good; don’t do bad. No other baggage is necessary. Anyone that is concerned about how their religion is viewed is trying to gain a ‘good’ status without actually bothering to do anything good… and what should we conclude from that?

You’re doing that deliberately!

Al Denelsbeck

There’s a method of presenting information that I see way too much of, from writers and educators that really should know better, and I can’t help but believe it’s doing more harm than good. I’ve probably used it a few too many times myself, but now I’m going to be aware of it and try never to use it, at least in circumstances where it is misleading. I refer to “language of intent or deliberation,” which is kind of a vague way of putting it that makes academics happy but doesn’t really explain anything. To put it more casually, it’s assigning thinking processes to things that do not possess them.

Blameless red wolfRichard Dawkins used it extensively in The Selfish Gene, and now I see Steven Pinker doing it, both of them in relation to evolution, one of the most misunderstood concepts in science. Sure, quantum physics rates higher on the nonplussed scale, but quantum physics really is complicated and counter-intuitive; natural selection is far simpler – this simplicity is what makes it work, and what should be assisting the understanding of it.

One common example is seen often, even though this is a minor example compared to some. We are frequently told that wolves weed out the old and the sick members of a herd of deer or elk, thereby increasing the strength of the herd overall. Bluntly, this is nonsense; wolves capture whatever they can, and quite often it’s the young members of the herd, the ones that serve as the genetic future. One could as easily say that the herd on average outruns the wolves, and this is slightly more accurate, though still misleading if it is presented in the way that either species chooses to make certain actions. Wolves eat; deer/elk try not to be eaten – even the young, the old, and the sick. There’s nothing more to it than that, and none of them think about what would work best.

People might say that this is where natural selection works, that the wolves serve as ‘selectors’ for the prime members of the herds – the ones that survive are the ones that are better. This is true to a small extent, but far less than is implied by the example. If we take it at face value, the wolves would be preventing genes that allowed deer to get old or sick – and also allowed them to be young and helpless. Obviously this is nonsense; every species starts young, every species has the ability to get sick, every species dies. Wolves do not act on these factors any more than any other survival hurdle does. We could just as easily say that hard winters ‘act’ to strengthen the herd. In such a case it’s considered poetic license, since we don’t believe climate does anything intentionally. But we do believe animals act with consideration, so the deliberate action language can serve to muddy the waters. More on this in a moment.

The biggest issue is that genes are propagated only by reproduction; whatever genes the species was born with, it passes on to its offspring. In truth, slightly less than 50% of the genes from either parent get passed on, for all two-parent systems – roughly half of the genes lose the lottery of random selection between the two parents as their contributions combine into the fertilized egg, while a tiny percentage of others spontaneously mutate into something else. But what this means is that wolves ‘weeding out’ the old or the sick are doing nothing at all genetically. The older members of the herd have already passed along their genes if they were going to – the wolves are too late. And any sick ones of reproductive age are only affected if the sickness occurred because of a genetic trait, and was not sufficient to prevent reproduction on its own. The newborns that fall prey are a facet of selection – they are caught before they reach reproductive age, so their genetic legacy is interrupted by predation – but the impact on genes is fairly low; some gene may appear that encourages faster development, so they’re not as helpless when the wolves appear, but there’s a limit as to how much this could accomplish. They’re already born with the ability to stand and walk within hours of birth, and this certainly was an aspect of selection. They’re not, however, going to develop in the mother’s womb to the point of being able to outrun all predators before the amniotic fluid dries. If they could get that big and developed, the mother would start seeing the disadvantage of carting around that loaf in the oven, and lose the selection process in that manner. Note that this option also requires more than one trait: the tendency to develop longer in the womb, and the mother’s change in physiology to accommodate this. This involves at least two genes to accomplish, but probably dozens more, so it would take a lot longer to occur.

InnocentElkProtective herds are, of course, a behavior that has been selected for, as are the protective instincts of the parents – these evolved right alongside all other traits, and each one has an impact. What this means is that survival of the genes relies on many points of convergence, so any one selective factor – predators, food sources, climate, etc. – has only a partial effect on the process. What selection produces is not an ideal organism, but one that balances both environmental influences and the random genetic changes that occur into something that, on average, works better than before. It’s actually pretty haphazard and slow, which is what’s fascinating about it, because the species we see now had to be shaped by millions of causes over long periods of time.

Mind you, the wolves are not only selectors themselves – they are also selectees, guided by the development of deer and elk to run faster and hunt more efficiently. It would serve in their best interests not to get the inadequate sources of protein, but to get the prime examples from the herd; nailing the biggest, healthiest member is a far more efficient use of their effort than getting some stringy old cancer victim. The deliberate language so often used seems to present wolves as a fixed trait, while the ungulates can be shaped; naturally, both can change according to the traits of the other, and many more traits besides. It’s much more like some of our competitive sports, where manufacturers try to come up with clothing, for instance, that allows a tiny bit more freedom of movement, that provides a tiny advantage over other competitors that lack it – which lasts only until the others either get the same clothes, or obtain another tiny advantage of their own. Gradually these advantages accumulate and shape the way the sport is played.

In the middle of all this sits the environmental factor. Conditions change, often much more rapidly than a species can adapt to them. Every species not only copes with the other species around it than may prey upon it, or provide food, or simply eat the same food, it also deals with how the climate has changed, or if a food source becomes scarcer, or if a river or land bridge has changed the area they live within. They cannot choose what changes are made by natural selection, or decide that going north is a good idea – they are all beholden to whether a beneficial trait may arise in time. Often enough it doesn’t, and extinction occurs. But this also means that perfect adaptation is next to impossible – each advantage over conditions lasts only so long, and new ones must appear in the gene pool and be selected for all of the time. The language may not be to blame for this, but often the impression is that natural selection has led up to the current state and stopped, as if this is an end result, when in reality it is ongoing – it’s just slow enough that we can rarely see examples of selection taking place. Any species may have traits that don’t work very well in current conditions, and eventually these may change for the better.

But the deliberate language does work in another way that’s extremely detrimental. The idea that wolves are purposefully picking out the old and the sick implies a long-abandoned selection concept known as Lamarckism: that what the species does in their life affects the nature or effect of the genes that are passed along, as if these can be altered during the lifespan of the animal. This is perhaps the biggest misconception of evolution, still extant after all these years, and I really do believe this is helped along by such language. With a few tiny exceptions that have recently been discovered (and are not very well researched yet,) the genes that a species is born with are the ones passed along to the offspring. The only way that they have an effect as a selective trait is if a) they provide a change in behavior or ability, and b) this change is sufficient to affect the reproductive chances of the possessor. A wolf, deer, elk, or even human that reasons out something cannot pass this onto its offspring in any way, unless the ability to make such mental connections was provided by genes in the first place. No matter how much anyone learns, or how physically fit they’ve become, they’re not passing this on to their kids genetically; the offspring can only obtain it through their own efforts after birth. The only thing that someone might be passing on is a genetic tendency to believe that education in this manner is a good idea, or a faint trend towards tougher muscles, that they were born with – a gene mutation that produced these effects. Herd animals are not inclined to protect the elderly or the infirm, because that behavior is a liability to the entire herd; some members may trend towards this behavior through the genetic lottery at any time, but since it doesn’t provide any survival or reproductive advantage to those still capable of passing along their genes, it doesn’t propagate more than any other behavioral variation that may arise.

Clover sprouting within discarded bottleWhich brings us to the gene level, where deliberate language is a major factor of confusion. Genes do not do anything except spark the development of proteins under certain conditions; they are far less active than a grass seed that germinates when surrounded by adequate moisture and nutrition, and are much more like an alarm clock that rings at certain times. Their propagation in any species relies on the survival of the individual that possesses them, and the lottery that may just drop them out in favor of the gene from the other parent, or the rare mutation that occurs. When a new gene mutation provides some slight advantage in survival or reproduction, it stands a better chance of getting to offspring, and in multiple generations of this process, it can become more prevalent in the gene pool of the species, first in a local group, and eventually in time throughout the entire population. The gene does not try to survive; it does not survive at the expense of others; it does not compete. Natural selection sees that tiny advantages can add up over time – again, on average. Note that it is not just the singular gene that propagates from any advantage it might provide to an organism – every gene that the organism possesses at that time, including the detrimental ones, gets selected and is along for the ride. The detrimental ones may also prevent the beneficial ones from propagating as well; it all depends on what the nature of each trait is, and whether it has a significant effect on the reproduction of the individual.

As a species, we have a lot of traits that spring up in old age – drying and discolored skin, grey and thinning hair, lots of organ failures, and so on. These are obviously not advantages, and should have been selected out – and likely were, every time they occurred within the reproductive timeframe. But the tendency to appear after reproductive age never gets any chance to be selected; those genes have already been passed on before they have a detrimental effect. If we were to try and interpret a message from nature, it’s that we have no purpose beyond reproductive age (I personally have never had a purpose, since my genes went nowhere.) But there’s no message, and no purpose (whew!) – this is just the way that the conditions available on this planet produce a pattern. We might think it could be better or worse, but that’s just our tendency to see things with intent, a survival trait that, on average, worked for us. Nature, however, just is.

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