Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
It sounds like some obscure country line dance, but the real story is more interesting, and it comes with a connection to a curious Native legend that turns out to refer to a real historical event.
The Klickitat People have lived for centuries on both sides of the Columbia River, up into what is now Skamania and Klickitat Counties, Washington, and down into Multnomah and Clackamas Counties, Oregon. They tell the tale of Pahto and Wy'east, the two sons of the chief of all the gods, Tyhee Saghalie. The two young men did not get along, and fought over who would rule over which parcel of land. Their father shot one arrow south and the other north; Pahto was given the lands around where the northern arrow landed, and Wy'east the territory surrounding where the southern arrow fell to the ground. Tyhee Saghalie then shook the Earth and created a great bridge across the Columbia River so the two could visit each other.
But soon trouble broke out again. Pahto and Wy'east both fell in love with the same young woman, the beautiful Loowit, and began to fight, burning villages and destroying forests and crops. Tyhee Saghalie tried to reason with them, but to no avail. In the end he grew angry himself and shook the Earth again, destroying the bridge; the cataclysm created a flood that washed away whole forests. He turned all three into mountains -- Wy'east became Mount Hood, Pahto Mount Adams, and the lovely Loowit Mount Saint Helens. But even in mountain form they never forgot either their anger or their burning love, and all three still rumble and fume to this day.
What is fascinating is that this odd story actually appears to have some basis in fact.
In around 1450 C.E., an earthquake knocked loose about a cubic kilometer of rock, soil, and debris from Table Mountain and Greenleaf Peak. The resulting landslide -- the Bonneville Slide -- roared down the Columbia Gorge, creating a dam and what amounted to a natural bridge something like sixty meters high across one of the biggest rivers in the world.
The dam couldn't last, however. The Columbia River has a huge watershed, and the lake that built up behind the dam eventually overtopped the natural "Bridge of the Gods." The whole thing collapsed -- probably during a second earthquake -- releasing all that pent-up river water in a giant flood. It left behind geological evidence, both in the form of a layer of flood-damaged strata west of the slide, and the remains of drowned forests to the east, where trees had died as the dammed lake rose to fill the gorge.
Despite the reminder we got in 1980 -- with the eruption of Mount Saint Helens -- it's easy to forget how geologically active the Pacific Northwest is. Not only is there the terrifying Cascadia Subduction Zone just offshore (about which I wrote two years ago), the other Cascade volcanoes, from Silverthrone Caldera (British Columbia) in the north to Lassen Peak (California) in the south, are still very much active. Right in the middle is the massive Mount Rainier, visible from Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia on clear days, which is one of the most potentially destructive volcanoes in the world. Not only is it capable of producing lava and pyroclastic flows, it's capped by huge glaciers that would melt during an eruption and generate the catastrophic mudflows called lahars. The remnants of two historical flows from Rainier -- the Osceola and Electron Lahars -- underlie the towns of Kent, Orting, Enumclaw, Puyallup, Auburn, Buckley, and Sumner, and in some places are twenty to thirty meters deep.
The Earth can be a scary, violent place, but somehow, humans manage to survive even catastrophic natural disasters. And, in the case of the Bridge of the Gods, to incorporate them into our stories and legends. Our determination to live in geologically-active areas is due to two things; volcanic soils tend to be highly fertile, and we have short memories. Fortunately, though, we couple what seems like a foolhardy willingness to take risks with a deep resilience -- allowing us to live in places like the Cascades, which are bountiful, and filled with a perilous beauty.
There are at least two differences between me and your typical woo-woo.
One is that I at least try to apply the principles of scientific induction to what I see around me. Insofar as I'm able, given the limitations I have as a non-specialist, I base what I believe, say, and do on evidence and logic.
The second is that when I do say something egregiously wrong, I apologize and back down.
As far as the second goes, there seems to be an unwritten rule in all different disciplines of woo-woodom that goes something like "death before recision." Even confronted by incontrovertible evidence that they're in error -- or worse, that they've cheated and lied -- they never change their stance. The most they do -- such as the hilarious snafu "Psychic Sally Morgan" got herself into when she used her mediumistic skills to get in contact with the spirit of someone who turned out to be fictional -- is to remain silent for a while and hope everyone forgets what happened.
But before long, they're back at it, undaunted, and once again raking in accolades and money from the gullible.
No one is a better example of this than the redoubtable Uri Geller. Geller, you probably know, is the Israeli "psychic and telekinetic" who claimed to be able not only to "see with his mind," but to manipulate objects remotely. Geller has been called a fraud by many, most notably James Randi, whose book The Truth about Uri Geller resulted in a fifteen million dollar lawsuit against Randi and his publisher.
Geller lost.
But nothing was quite as humiliating as his 1973 appearance on The Tonight Show, where he was asked to demonstrate his most common claim, which was that he could bend spoons with his mind. The problem is, Carson himself was a trained stage magician, so he -- literally -- knew all the tricks. He suspected that Geller was pre-preparing his props (specifically, bending the spoons repeatedly ahead of time so they had a weak point), and refused to let Geller handle them before the show. As a result, Geller couldn't do... well, anything. Even if I'm completely on Carson's side, watching the sequence is profoundly cringe-inducing.
Geller, obviously humiliated by his (very) public failure, stammered out a lame "I'm not feeling very strong tonight," along with telling Carson that the host's doubt was interfering with Geller's ability to concentrate.
Which is mighty convenient.
What's most remarkable is that after this, Geller didn't do what I'd have done, which is to join a Trappist monastery and spend the rest of my life in total silence. After a (brief) period to regain his footing, he just went right on claiming he could perform telekinesis...
... and people kept right on believing him.
What is truly extraordinary, though, is that over fifty years later, he's still at it. An article in The Jerusalem Post two days ago describes his claim that Greta Thunberg's ship Madleen, which is on the way to Gaza to provide relief for the embattled region, had mechanical problems because he remotely damaged their equipment.
"I stopped the navigation systems of the ship," Geller said. "I will use my psychic powers to stop [her] ship... Remote viewing is sending your mind through space and time. If I attach my psychokinetic energy through remote viewing, I can locate exactly where the navigational instruments are on her boat... It's like a laser, like the IDF's new weapon, the Iron Beam. That's how powerful the mind is for some people... I can navigate my mind into whatever I want to."
Convenient, too, that he said all this after the Madleen was already having equipment problems.
So Geller is very far from giving up, despite a fifty-year track record of chicanery. What's even more appalling, though, is that The Jerusalem Post is giving this guy free publicity. They're not exactly an unbiased source -- the fact that Thunberg's flotilla is trying to get support to Gaza didn't make her any friends in Israel, and the Israeli defense minister Israel Katz came right out and called her an antisemite -- but the fact that they're even printing something like this without appending, "... but of course, keep in mind that he's a proven fraud" is reprehensible.
I did find it heartening that in the comments section, while a number of people criticized Thunberg for trying to help out Gaza, more than one of them made remarks like, "What's Geller gonna do? Bend all their spoons so Greta can't eat her corn flakes in the morning?"
Anyhow, this is a further demonstration that Uri Geller apparently agrees with the Thermians of the Klaatu Nebula on their motto "Never give up, never surrender." I still don't quite understand how shame-faced silence hasn't kicked in for him, but at this point it probably never will.
I guess it's kind of like a liars' version of the Sunk-Cost Fallacy. Once you've lied long enough, may as well keep going, and just make the lies bigger and bolder. Explains not only Uri Geller, but Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth Kegbreath, and the Bullshit Barbie Twins Karoline Leavitt and Pam Bondi, doesn't it?
In his book Nothing's Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, media scholar Douglas Rushkoff discusses his concept of "open-source religion," which he contrasts to the more traditional, handed-down-from-on-high types:
An open-source religion would work the same way as open-source software development: it is not kept secret or mysterious at all. Everyone contributes to the codes we use to comprehend our place in the universe. We allow our religion to evolve based on the active participation of its people... An open-source relationship to religion would likewise take advantage of the individual points of view of its many active participants to develop its more resolved picture of the world and our place within it... [R]eligion is not a pre-existing truth but an ongoing project. It may be divinely inspired, but it is a creation of human beings working together. A collaboration.
Which all sounds lovely and democratic and ecumenical, but it brings up the problem of how exactly you can tell if the "codes" contributed by people are correct or not. In science, there's a standard protocol -- alignment of a model with the known data, and the use of the model to make predictions that then agree with subsequent observations -- but here, I'm not sure how you could apply anything like that. The fact that religion seems, at its heart, to be an intensely individual experience, varying greatly from one person to another, suggests that reconciling each person's contributions may not be so easy. Wars have been fought and lives lost over people's notions about the nature of God; saying "let's all collaborate" is a little disingenuous.
This is problematic not only between the world's major religions, but within them. How, for example, could you bring together my Unitarian Universalist friend, who is more or less a pantheist; another friend who is a devout and very traditional Roman Catholic; and someone who is an evangelical biblical literalist who thinks everyone who doesn't believe that way is headed to the Fiery Furnace for all eternity? All three call themselves Christian, but they all mean something very different by it.
The Discordians' clever labeling of their own founding doctrine as "All Rights Reversed" -- quote, reprint, or jigger around anything you want, it's all yours to do with as you please -- sounds good, but in practice, it relies on an undeserved trust in the minds of fallible humans of varying backgrounds and educational levels, who sometimes can't even agree on what the evidence itself means.
It's not that I'm certain that my own "there's probably no all-powerful deity in charge" is correct, mind you. It's more that -- as eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it -- "humans are rife with all sorts of ways of getting it wrong," and that assessment very much includes me. I'm wary of other people's biases, and far more wary of my own. Physicist Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." Even C. S. Lewis saw the danger in the "everyone's voice counts" approach. He wrote, "A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true."
George Carlin put it another way. He said, "Think of a guy you know who has 'average intelligence.' Then keep in mind that half of humanity is stupider than that guy."
The problem is that just about every religious person in the world (1) believes what they do because they were told about it by someone else, and (2) believes they've got it one hundred percent right and everyone else is wrong. And, as Richard Dawkins troublingly points out, what people do believe is often a matter of nothing more than geography. I was raised Roman Catholic because I grew up in a French-speaking part of southern Louisiana. If I'd been born to Saudi parents in Riyadh I'd have been Muslim; to Thai parents in Bangkok, I'd likely be Buddhist; to Israeli parents in Tel Aviv, I'd be Jewish; and so on. I'm suspicious of the whole enterprise because, even given the same universe to look at, people all come up with different answers.
And not only are there the ones with lots of adherents, there are countless fringe groups that have spun their own wild takes on how the world works. Some, like the guy in Tennessee who believed that God told him to build the world's biggest treehouse church, are more amusing than dangerous. (For what it's worth, the treehouse church was shut down because it was a poorly-constructed safety hazard, and a month later burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances.) Others, like Jim Jones's People's Temple and the mystical cult that grew up around Carlos Castaneda, are downright deadly. I have to admit the "open-source religion" idea is good at least from the standpoint of throwing the question back on your own intellect rather than saying, "Just believe what the priest/minister/imam/holy man is telling you," but it does leave the possibility open of getting it very, very wrong.
As Susan B. Anthony put it, "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
Again, as I said earlier, it's not that I'm sure myself. Part of my hesitancy is because I'm so aware of my own capacity for error. Even though I left Catholicism in my twenties and, for the most part, haven't looked back, I have to admit that there's still an attraction there, something about the mystery and ritual of the church of my childhood that keeps me fascinated.
All the baggage that comes with it -- the patriarchalism and sectarianism and misogyny and homophobia -- not so much.
So right now I'll remain a de facto atheist, although in some ways a reluctant one. The idea that the universe has some deeper meaning, that things happen because there's a Grand Plan (even if it is, in Aziraphale's words, "Ineffable"), has undeniable appeal. But if there's one thing I've learned in my sixty-four years, it's that the universe is under no compulsion to arrange itself so as to make me happy.
Or, as my beloved grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."
Of all of the sciences, geology is the one where deep understanding of the underlying processes eluded us the longest. Even the two other contenders -- genetics and astronomy -- were at least partially unraveled sooner. Plate tectonics, the model that provides a framework for comprehending just about every other geological process, wasn't elucidated until Frederick Vine, Drummond Matthews, and Harry Hess came along in the early 1960s. Until then, geology texts fell back on hand-waving explanations like synclines and anticlines, and pretty much ignored questions like why most of the world's volcanoes and major earthquakes fall along a tracery of curves that encircle the Earth like the stitching on a baseball (the most famous of which is the Pacific Ring of Fire).
Part of the reason it took us so long to figure all this out is because geological processes are, for the most part, slow, so it's easy to look around and conclude that the Earth has pretty much always looked like it does today. Then... they discovered anomalies like marine fossils in the Himalayas, Kansas, the Rockies, and right here in my own neck of the woods in upstate New York. It took the brilliant Scottish geologist Charles Lyell to recognize that if rates of sedimentation are fairly constant, then big sedimentary rock layers like the White Cliffs of Dover must have taken tens of millions, rather than thousands, of years to form. The recognition of how slow most geological phenomena were meant the Earth was a great deal older than the six-thousand-year estimate by Archbishop Ussher -- setting up the first of many clashes between geologists and the church establishment.
But "usually slow" doesn't mean "always slow." Sometimes major geological processes can occur, literally, overnight. Take, for example, the appearance in 1943 of a new volcano, dubbed ParÃcutin after the nearest town, in a Mexican farmer's cornfield.
The locals did at least have a little bit of warning. For weeks prior to the initial eruption, they had heard sounds "like thunder but with no clouds in the sky," now thought to be the rumblings of magma moving beneath the surface. There were over twenty small earthquakes over 3.2 on the Richter Scale, and hundreds of smaller ones -- the day before the eruption, there were more than three hundred small earthquakes.
What happened next is best said in the words of Dionisio Pulido, the farmer who witnessed it first-hand:
At 4 p.m., I left my wife to set fire to a pile of branches when I noticed that a crack, which was situated on one of the knolls of my farm, had opened... and I saw that it was a kind of fissure that had a depth of only half a meter. I set about to ignite the branches again when I felt a thunder, the trees trembled, and I turned to speak to Paula; and it was then I saw how, in the hole, the ground swelled and raised itself two or two and a half meters high, and a kind of smoke or fine dust – grey, like ashes – began to rise up in a portion of the crack that I had not previously seen... Immediately more smoke began to rise with a hiss or whistle, loud and continuous; and there was a smell of sulfur.
By the next morning, where Pulido's cornfield had been was a scoria cone fifty meters high; a week later, it was double that. It was continuously erupting volcanic bombs and small pyroclastic flows, and Pulido decided that his home and land were done for, so he got the hell out. Before leaving, he put up a sign saying "This volcano is owned and operated by Dionisio Pulido" -- indicating that even in dire circumstances, you can still hang on to your sense of humor.
ParÃcutin in 1943 [Image is in the Public Domain]
The entire eruption cycle went on for two years, and by the end, there was a massive conical mountain, over four hundred meters tall, where before there'd only been a flat valley. Only three people died during the eruption, and oddly, none of them were from the lava or pyroclastic surges; the three died when they were struck by lightning during an ash eruption. (The tiny particles of volcanic ash are often electrically charged; lightning strikes in ash columns are common.)
It did, however, render much of the (former) valley uninhabitable. Here's a photograph of the ruins of the old church of San Juan Parangaricutiro, which was destroyed by lava and ash along with the rest of the village of the same name:
But at the time, the appearance of a volcano was a source of mystification both to the locals and the scientists. To be sure, some geological phenomena are sudden; earthquakes, for example, often happen without much in the way of warning (and accurate earthquake prediction is still a dicey affair). But we're used to things pretty much staying in the shapes and positions they were in before. It takes a huge earthquake -- the 9.2-magnitude Anchorage megathrust quake comes to mind -- to radically reshape the land, in this case raising a long stretch of coastline by as much as nine meters. And while big volcanic eruptions, such as the current one from Mount Etna, are spectacular and can be deadly, most of the time they're from volcanoes we already knew about.
ParÃcutin, though, kind of came out of nowhere, at least by the scientific understanding of the time. And that's one of the benefits of science, isn't it? It allows us to understand the processes involved, not just name them after they've happened. While we're still not at the point where we can predict with much lead time when something like this will happen, at least now we can say with some assurance that we understand why it happened where it did.
Little consolation to Dionisio Pulido, of course. I'm guessing that "owning and operating" a volcano was nowhere near as lucrative as his cornfield had been. But that's life in a geologically active area. However much we understand about the science behind such events, it's good to keep in mind there's always a human cost.
Me, I've always wondered what the attraction is. I guess for some people the proximity to power -- and thus, obtaining some measure of power themselves -- is enough. There's usually money to be had as well. But... the risk! When allegiances shift, which they inevitably do, someone in the inner circle can find themselves on the outside mighty quick. (Sometimes all the way out, if you get my drift.) Factional jockeying and backstabbing kind of come with the territory.
The problem with selling your soul is that it usually doesn't stay bought.
Surprisingly enough, I'm not talking about Donald Trump here, although this certainly applies to him and his cadre. The topic comes up because I just finished reading the excellent Henry VIII: The King and His Court by Alison Weir. Henry VIII, especially toward the end of his life, had a lot in common with Trump -- the egotism, the touchiness, the deflection of blame for... well, for everything. Weir writes:
[H]e was given to such unpredictable and terrifying explosions of rage that those about him concluded they had to deal with "the most dangerous and cruel man in the world." On days when he was in an irritable mood, his courtiers had to keep their wits about them, for "when he came to his chamber he would look [around] angrily, and after fall to fighting." Few dared contradict him, since his egotism was such that he was unable to conceive that he might be in the wrong.
No one at court ever felt truly safe, for the King had amply demonstrated that he "never made a man but he destroyeth him again, either with displeasure or with the sword." Even his outward bonhomie could be sinister, for he often showed a smiling face to those whom he meant to destroy. Abroad, he was known as "the English Nero," and it was said that "in England, death has snatched everyone of worth away, or fear has shrunk them up."... [A] man arrested in Kent for slandering him was not exaggerating when he said, "If the King knew every man's thought, it would make his heart quake."
I find it baffling that anyone would choose to associate with someone like that. I'm not talking about his wives here; of the six of them, two were divorced and two beheaded, but back then women didn't have much choice in marriage, and if the king wanted you, well... you just sort of had to go along with it. (Of the two who were executed, it seems like Anne Boleyn was herself a bit of an arrogant power-grubber who made herself some dangerous enemies, and Katherine Howard appears to have been simply young, naïve, and boy-crazy.)
But Henry was surrounded by nobles (both of the to-the-manner-born and the up-and-coming nouveau-riche types) who were desperately elbowing each other out of the way to capture the king's approval. Even though one after the other, they ended up paying for it.
Here are a few examples:
Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham -- made the twin mistakes of being too close a cousin to Henry for comfort, and being outspoken in criticizing him. He was accused of plotting to kill the king and was executed.
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey -- rose to the position of Lord Chancellor, but became powerful enough that he was destined to fall. He was recalled to London to face capital charges of high treason, but (luckily?) died of natural causes on the way there.
George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford -- brother of Anne Boleyn, he was caught up in her downfall, and accused (almost certainly falsely) of having incest with her. He was beheaded.
Jane (Parker) Boleyn, Lady Rochford -- George's wife, who was a dedicated gossip of the "let's see how many people I can get in trouble" type. She probably didn't rat out her husband, as has been claimed, but had no scruples about telling tales on anyone and everyone else. She finally got caught in her own web during the downfall of Henry's fifth wife, Katherine Howard, and was five minutes behind the queen in stepping up to the executioner's block.
Thomas Cromwell -- Lord Chamberlain and Lord Privy Seal, and one of Henry's closest confidants, Cromwell is another one who grew too powerful and made enemies. He also ended up losing his head on Tower Hill. Henry later said he regretted Cromwell's death, but blamed it on being "misled by others," on the strength of whose statements he "had put to death the most faithful servant he ever had."
Sir Thomas More -- the eminent theologian and philosopher refused to accept the annulment of Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and (worse) take the Oath of Supremacy recognizing Henry as the head of the Church in England. More was beheaded, ending his life with his characteristic humor -- the story is he said to the guard, "See me safely up to the scaffold, sir -- on the voyage downwards I'll fend for myself."
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey -- a quarrelsome hothead who made the mistake of angering the powerful Seymour family, he pissed off enough people that he was accused of treason on trumped-up charges and was beheaded only nine days before the king himself died. His father, the Duke of Norfolk, was also condemned to death, but managed to escape the axe for a few more days and was pardoned after Henry shuffled off this mortal coil.
What strikes me about all this is that all these people must have known what Henry was like. How could they not? And yet one after another, they pushed further and further into court intrigue, and one after another paid for it with their lives.
Henry VIII in 1537. Is this a face you would trust? (Portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger) [Image is in the Public Domain]
It reminds me of the incident a few years ago where some people were at an inspirational weekend seminar by motivational speaker Tony Robbins, and the culmination was walking barefoot across a fire pit. Dozens of people ended up in the hospital with severely blistered feet. I (sort of) get how the first couple were injured; you're told, "Okay, if you do this right and just believe in yourself, you won't get hurt." For them, it's just a matter of having trusted the wrong person. But after the first five or six people are obviously getting their feet scorched, wouldn't you think the rest of the participants would say, "No, thank you?" Thirty people ended up injured, which led me to speculate that they'd lined up in reverse order of IQ or something.
But reading the biography of King Henry VIII makes me question that assessment. Because these noblemen (and even a few women) who were part of Henry's ongoing royal court row of dominoes weren't fools. They were arrogant, a lot of them, and power-hungry, but they were very far from stupid.
So why, after seeing what happened to some of the early victims -- men like Buckingham, Rochford, and More -- did people not say, "Nope, I'll pass on an appointment to the Privy Council. If you need me, I'll be in my manor house in a remote part of the Lakes District."
That's sure as hell what I'd have done.
But that isn't what happened. However many of the dominoes fell, there never seemed to be a shortage of people stepping up to be next. Up to the very end, the nobles were still jockeying for Henry's approval. At the time of his death the Seymours, relatives of Henry's third wife Jane, were in ascendancy, but they too didn't last long. During Henry's son Edward VI's short reign, Edward's uncles -- the brothers Edward and Thomas Seymour -- both ended up losing their heads to the executioner's axe as well.
I mean, how strong can a belief in "it won't happen to me" get?
I said I wasn't going to focus on Trump, but I have to wonder the same about his loyalists. Do they really think he has any loyalty to them? People like Michael Cohen and Anthony Scaramucci found out how quickly Trump will throw his devotees under the bus when it serves him. Trump is scarily similar in personality to Henry VIII -- not nearly as smart, but as ruthless, humorless, egotistical, and self-serving.
If I were at all inclined to be in politics, I would not want to bet my career on an association with a man who has no fealty to anyone but himself. But like King Henry, Trump seems to be surrounded by people clamoring to be part of his inner circle. (At the time of this writing, Elon Musk seems to be in a rapidly-escalating feud with Trump -- just illustrating that even erstwhile kingmakers can find themselves in royal disfavor more or less overnight.)
I guess this is just further evidence that I don't understand my fellow humans very well. Hardly the first time I've made this observation. I guess that's one thing that keeps me fascinated with history -- it leaves me saying, over and over, "People are so weird."
But more to the point, this is a beautiful illustration of Mark Twain's comment that "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."
One of the most fascinating features of biological evolution -- particularly as it applies to the possibility of life on other planets -- has to do with the concept of constraint.
Which features of life on Earth are, in some sense, inevitable? Are there characteristics of terrestrial organisms that we might expect to find on any inhabitable world? Stephen Jay Gould looked at this question in his essay "Replaying the Tape," from his brilliant book on the Cambrian Explosion, Wonderful Life:
You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past -– say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale. Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original. If each replay strongly resembles life’s actual pathway, then we must conclude that what really happened pretty much had to occur. But suppose that the experimental versions all yield sensible results strikingly different from the actual history of life? What could we then say about the predictability of self-conscious intelligence? or of mammals?
Some features that have been suggested as evolutionarily constrained, with arguments of varying levels of persuasiveness, are:
a genetic code based on some kind of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA, or some chemical analogue)
internal cell membranes made of phospholipids, to segregate competing chemical reactions from each other
multicellularity, with some level of tissue specialization
in more complex organisms, some form of symmetry, with symmetrically-placed organs
some kind of rapid-transit system for messages, analogous to our nervous system (but perhaps not structured the same way)
cephalization -- concentration of the central processing centers and sensory organs near the head end
It's interesting when science fiction tackles this issue -- and sometimes comes up with possible pathways for evolution that don't result in humanoids with strangely-shaped ears and odd facial protuberances. A few that come to mind are Star Trek's silicon-based Horta from the episode"Devil in the Dark," the blood-drinking fog creature from "Obsession," the giant single-celled neural parasites from "Operation Annihilate," and Doctor Who's Vashta Nerada, Not-Things, Gelth, and Midnight Entity.
So the search for extraterrestrial life requires we consider looking not only for "life as we know it, Jim," but life as we don't know it. Or, more accurately, to consider to what extent our terrestrial biases might be blinding us to the possibility of what evolution could create.
It's worth considering, however, how often evolution here on Earth ends up landing on the same solutions to the problems of survival and reproduction over and over again, a phenomenon called convergent evolution. Eyes, or analogous light receptor organs, have evolved multiple times -- some biologists have suggested as many as fifty different independent lineages that evolved some form of eye. Wings occurred separately in four groups of animals -- birds, pterosaurs, insects, and bats. (If you include structures for gliding, add flying squirrels, sugar gliders, colugos, flying fish, and flying lizards.)
Even biochemical pathways can reappear, something I find astonishing. Take, for example, the research that came out this week in Nature Chemical Biology, which found that two only distantly-related plants -- ipecac (Carapichea ipecacuanha), in the gentian family, and sage-leaved alangium (Alangium salviifolium), in the dogwood family, have both come up with complex biochemical pathways to generate the same set of bitter, emetic compounds -- ipecacuanha alkaloids.
The last common ancestor of these two species was over a hundred million years ago, so there's a strong argument that they evolved this capacity independently. And indeed, when the biochemists looked at the enzymatic pathways, they're different -- they found entirely different chemical synthesis methods for producing the same set of end products. Weirdest of all, they both evolved an enzyme that cleaves a sugar molecule from the alkaloid precursor, and that's what activates it (i.e., makes it toxic). In the living plant's tissues, the enzyme and the precursor are segregated from each other. It's only when they're brought together -- such as when a herbivore chomps on the leaves -- that the sugar is split away from the precursor, the alkaloid is activated, and the herbivore starts puking its guts up.
Clever strategy. So clever, in fact, that it was stumbled upon by two entirely separate lineages of plants. The rules organisms play by are the same, so perhaps not surprising there are similar outcomes sometimes.
The whole thing highlights the fact that there is a limited range of solutions for the fundamental difficulties of existence. It has to make you wonder if, when we do find life elsewhere in the universe, it might look a lot more familiar that we're expecting. I don't think it's likely we'll bump into Romulans or Ice Warriors or Krillitane, but maybe there are features of life on Earth that will re-evolve in just about any conceivable habitable planet.
But hopefully there won't be any Vashta Nerada. Those things are terrifying.
As someone who considers himself a de facto atheist -- I'm not certain there's no God, but the facts as I know them seem to strongly support that contention -- one question I've been asked rather frequently is where my moral compass comes from.
The answer for me is that I like being kind. Treating other people well makes them feel good, and in general makes my own life better. Times that I've been mean or uncharitable, on the other hand, leave me feeling sick inside. I still remember with great shame times I've been nasty to people. It didn't, then or now, make me happier to be unpleasant, even when on some level I felt (at the time, at least) the person might have deserved it.
I agree with the wise words of the Twelfth Doctor:
Being asked why I'm moral if I don't think there's a deity watching has always brought to mind the riposte -- although I've never said it to someone directly -- that if the only reason you're moral is because you think some powerful entity is going to punish you if you're not, then maybe you are the one whose ethics are suspect. As Penn Jillette put it:
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.
This is why I was intrigued by a study that came out this week in the Journal of the American Psychiatrical Association, by Jessie Sun, Wen Wu, and Geoffrey Goodwin, called, "Are Moral People Happier?" And this -- finally -- provides an exception to Betteridge's Law: an article title in the form of a question where the answer appears to be a resounding "Yes."
The authors write:
Philosophers have long debated whether moral virtue contributes to happiness or whether morality and happiness are in conflict. Yet, little empirical research directly addresses this question. Here, we examined the association between reputation-based measures of everyday moral character (operationalized as a composite of widely accepted moral virtues such as compassion, honesty, and fairness) and self-reported well-being across two cultures. In Study 1, close others reported on U.S. undergraduate students’ moral character. In Study 2, Chinese employees reported on their coworkers’ moral character and their own well-being. To better sample the moral extremes, in Study 3, U.S. participants nominated “targets” who were among the most moral, least moral, and morally average people they personally knew. Targets self-reported their well-being and nominated informants who provided a second, continuous measure of the targets’ moral character. These studies showed that those who are more moral in the eyes of close others, coworkers, and acquaintances generally experience a greater sense of subjective well-being and meaning in life. These associations were generally robust when controlling for key demographic variables (including religiosity) and informant-reported liking. There were no significant differences in the strength of the associations between moral character and well-being across two major subdimensions of both moral character (kindness and integrity) and well-being (subjective well-being and meaning in life). Together, these studies provide the most comprehensive evidence to date of a positive and general association between everyday moral character and well-being.
What I find fascinating about this -- and relevant to the question about religion's role in morality -- is that these findings were robust with regards to such factors as religiosity. The sense of well-being that comes from acting ethically doesn't appear to come from the belief that God approves that sort of behavior. (At least not across the board; clearly different people could experience different sources of well-being from moral behavior.) The fact that just about everyone is happier when they behave with kindness and integrity indicates there's something inherent about good moral character that fosters a positive experience of life.
For me personally, I think it's a combination. As I said earlier, being nice to people and behaving fairly means the people around me are more likely to be pleasant and fair in return. But there's also an internal component, which I can sum up as "liking who I see in the mirror." Shame has to be one of the most deeply unpleasant emotions I can think of, and realizing I've been awful to someone -- even remembering those times years later -- leaves me feeling ugly. Perhaps I'm not motivated by the idea of some deity watching me, but I know that I'm watching me.
And that's enough.
Or, it usually is. I'm certainly far from perfect. I can act uncharitably sometimes, just like all of us. But I try like hell to treat people well -- even those who seem not to deserve it. I guess I'm aware that all of us are big messy morasses of competing motivations, emotions, and drives, and all of us have years of experiences that have shaped who we are in good ways and bad. It's usually best to give people the benefit of the doubt, and not to judge others too harshly.
After all, who knows who I'd be if I had their past and lived in their present situation? I might not even handle it that well.
It reminds me of something a dear family friend named Garnett told me when I was something like six years old. I had my knickers in a twist over something that had happened at school, and I was complaining about a classmate to Garnett. What she said flattened me completely, and I've never forgotten it.
"Always be kinder than you think you need to be, because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."
