Science, intuition and the "strange inversion of reasoning"

A few days ago I wrote about scientific thinking as an antidote to intuition. Not just an alternative to it, but something like the opposite of intuition. The intentional, energy-consuming move to a systematic deliberative mode of thought is utterly different from the easy and instantaneous nature of intuition.

Some of our intuitions are clearly built-in. Many of the famous failings of our intuitive System 1, described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow, seem to be hard-wired. Some are perhaps the unavoidable result of trade-offs that buy speed and decisiveness at the expense of accuracy and completeness. Others might be adaptive despite being occasionally delusional: I'm thinking here of optimism bias. Some days we just need some good old optimism bias!

But some of our most famous intuitions are more complex and a bit harder to attribute to brain wiring or adaptive tricks. These are intuitions that seem to affect how we see the whole world, all of existence, all day. I think it's intuition (and nothing else) that makes us feel that something complex, that shows design, must have come from a designer. That a universe has to have a beginning, and therefore a "beginner." That a mind like ours must somehow come from a bigger mind somewhere else. That seemingly uncaused events must have had a cause. Which are all probably related to a sense that the universe is haunted.

I'm not sure that these intuitions are all universally human—some are likely to be deeply cultural. But the point is that well beyond our intution that the sun moves through the sky or that the earth can't be a spinning ball, there are intuitions about the very fabric of existence.

Scientific thinking as the antidote to intuition

As I work on a book that will claim that evolution is easy, I have a parallel task of exploring the reasons we sense that it is hard or even impossible. Some of those influences are the result of efforts by religions to maintain dependence on supernaturalism or to defend ancient sacred writings. Some are the result of antipathy to science itself, framed in terms of culture war. But others are less clearly related—at least directly—to religions or tribes. Our brains are wondrous indeed but are known to be prone to various kinds of error. To be brutally frank: there are things that can seem obvious to us but that are false.

Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a life-changer for me. As soon as I read it in 2013, I urged colleagues to read it, even convening a book club at work. (The job of a journal editor is fundamentally about making decisions and judgments, and that's what the book is about.) One of the key messages of the book is that our fast thinking system (Kahneman calls it System 1) is both speedy and utterly important for survival. It's not about reflexes—it's still a kind of thought. But it's quick and dirty, often making guesses or approximations, and is prone to error. "Intuition" is a function of System 1.

What I learned about me when I started reading novels again

A few years ago, I somehow realized that I wanted to read more stories.

My work as a journal editor involved hours of intense scientific reading every day, and my insatiable interest in biology meant that my recreational reading was almost exclusively about science. But I could remember how much I loved stories as a kid: Tom Sawyer, The Black Stallion, all the Roald Dahl things. I read almost no fiction at all as a high schooler, then as a young Christian adult I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy and (urp) the Chronicles of Narnia. As a dad, I read (aloud with the family) all of the Harry Potter books, and that was great memorable fun. Somehow about 15 years ago I decided to read The Poisonwood Bible. (Unforgettable.) But my extensive reading habits were largely focused on science and Shakespeare.

To be sure, I derive both enjoyment and inspiration from science and from Shakespeare, but in retrospect it seems I needed to feed a part of me that finds inspiration in stories. In novels. And so I started collecting novels, specifically from female authors. I put a few on my Christmas list, and my loved ones obliged, and there they were on my shelves. Unread.

Then for some reason, not even two years ago, I decided to do it. I had a trip coming up: my annual journey to New York to co-lead the Scientific Writing Retreat at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. We had moved to Arizona, so the journey had evolved from a 4-hour ride on Amtrak to an all-day trip across the continent. I don't remember why, but I picked The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow, and started reading on the plane.

The known unknowns of biology: welcome to the unknome

'Genome' is now a pretty standard word in our social vocabulary. We have to put up with overloaded metaphors like "blueprint" and reverent talk like "language of god" but it does seem to me that the word is reasonably well understood by laypeople—not as jargony as "gene expression" or as inscrutable as "chromatin." The word was born in 1920 when someone blended 'gene' with 'chromosome'. (The -some in 'chromosome' is from a root that means 'body' as in 'somatic' or 'psychosomatic'.)

So, a genome is a "body" of genetic material, and specifically the whole body of genetic material in an organism (or a cell or a species). For decades now, science has been regularly adding more -omes. The proteome is the full body of proteins. The transcriptome the full body of transcripts. It gets a bit weirder: the phenome is the full body of phenotypes. There's even the spliceome, the full body of splice variants. Many of those are pretty jargony; the point is that -ome is a suffix that's being used a lot like -gate is used in political news (to indicate a kind of scandal, as in Watergate or Gamergate). Among the -omes (let's call it the omeome, ha ha!), the best by far is the unknome: the set of all genes of unknown function.

How big is the unknome? In other words, how many of the 20,000 or so genes in the human genome are unknown (in function)? Is there a gradient of unknown-ness? A new paper in PLOS Biology by Rocha and colleagues introduces us to the unknome and then adds some good stuff, which is the least the authors can do after telling us how little we know about human gene function.

Rebel scum

This week in the Blaugust 2023 blogging festival, the broad theme is "Introduce yourself." Yesterday I alluded to my bardolatry and its place in the cornerstone of Quintessence of Dust, but that's not really an introduction. So here is a bit more about me: I love the Star Wars universe and I'm into evolution, and both of those things are deeply connected to my main tendency—I'm a rebel.

That might sound romantic and all, but I'm actually being somewhat precise and referring to some useful counsel I got in the past few years as I considered Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies. The Rebel tendency describes me all too well. I hate being told what to do. I hate being controlled. I hate even suspecting that I'm being controlled. Here's how Rubin captures much of my life: "Telling a Rebel what to do makes them less likely to do it, even if it’s something they want to do."

There are advantages to being a Rebel but big weaknesses as well. Another tagline of the Rebel tendency is this LOLsob-inducing truism: "You can’t make me, and neither can I." So, the perhaps obvious disadvantage is that it can be extra difficult to get tasks done whenever there is a sense that someone or something is ordering it to be done. I'm not lazy; in fact, I work too much. But whenever I sense that someone is telling me what to do, I have to work around my natural instinct to resist their brazen attempt to control me. (Heh.) Otherwise, I'll find ways to not do the task (or meet the obligation, or whatever).

What are the advantages of that tendency? Are there any?

Thoughts on quintessence, mutation, and evolution

This blog's name captures my longstanding interest in human nature: humans are apes, and animals, and yet somehow able to create music and gods, and sometimes plays like Hamlet. But what's that strange word at the beginning, 'quintessence'? Here's the context from Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals — and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

—Hamlet, Act II, Scene II (Arden Shakespeare)

The word's history suggests that Shakespeare was (as usual) playing games with words and his audience (all quotes from the OED):

a quintessence can be a pure or perfect example of something and/or "The most essential part or feature of some non-material thing" as in "This seems to us the very quintessence of penny wisdom and pound folly in management"

and quintessence used to refer to a "In classical and medieval philosophy: a fifth essence existing in addition to the four elements, supposed to be the substance of which the celestial bodies were composed and to be latent in all things."

So, it seems Hamlet is saying that a human is a pure example of a blob of dust, but perhaps stardust. Either way (or both), he is commenting on what a human is at their core. Not just essence, but quintessence.

I don't know if this is a Western thing (I suspect it is), but essentialism like Hamlet's, in which we assume that a thing (a person, a gender, a gene, a protein, a species) has a definable essence, is a big hindrance to thinking about evolution.

Sky Islands: one of Earth's great evolution laboratories

Let's think of places on Earth where scientists have done great big natural "experiments" on evolution.

Looking east from near the top
of Mount Lemmon, January 2021

Here are some that ought to come to mind (in no particular order other than the first):

1. The Galapagos Islands, with their famous finches and their less-famous tomatoes and all their otherworldly animals, probably belong at the top of the list. Mr. Darwin found inspiration there, but the greatest experiments began more than a century later. I can think of few more inspiring stories of great science done by great people than the lifetime-long work of Rosemary and Peter Grant. If you haven't yet read The Beak of the Finch, get thee to a library or a bookstore.

2. The Caribbean islands, and especially the Bahamas, are a fruitful laboratory for the study of the (rapid) evolution of lizards called anoles. Jonathan Losos was a major figure in launching and leading that subfield, and his 2017 book Improbable Destinies is a great lay-level exploration of evolution and a resounding rebuttal to the random/luck/contingency views associated with Stephen Jay Gould.

3. The Hawaiian Islands are home to hundreds of species of fruit fly (many of them are biology's adored Drosophila) and zero species of ant. These hundreds of species have all evolved in the last 25 million years! Check out the laboratory of Cassandra Extavour at Harvard for a glimpse into the latest research on the evolution of Hawaiian fruit flies.

4. The Great Lakes of East Africa (including Victoria and Tanganyika) hosted one of the most rapid and spectacular adaptive radiations known to humans. Hundreds (likely thousands) of species of cichlid fish live in these lakes, and all of them were "born" in a blink of evolutionary time.

5. The streams of Trinidad are home to guppies, an unremarkable fact until you learn about one of the best-known experiments in the history of evolutionary biology. Over many years, research teams led by John Endler and David Reznick used this natural laboratory to study natural selection (and other topics) in the wild.

There are surely more. But I'm here to tell you about the one that literally surrounds us here in Tucson.

Contemplating libraries in biology. Not that kind. Not that one either.

What is a library? If you ask a biologist (especially a molecular biologist) this question, they are likely to ask for clarification. In their work, they are likely to make regular use of two very different kinds of libraries.

The first is the kind that we've had for millenia: a collection of books, journals, and media that is ordered and curated by people. These are the OG libraries, with 'book' at the very root of the word. They're rapidly evolving in our digital world, but I think they are still essentially what they've always been. Your friend the molecular biologist may not regularly go to a separate room or building to find materials, but they will use the library often.

The second is an extension of the OG concept of a library, but is still called a 'library' by your friend. It contains information, perhaps in vast amounts, but is not ordered or curated. Crucially, it is a specific collection of a particular type of information: genetic information. And while it's neither ordered nor curated, it is physical, and is designed to be searched. The contents of the library might be DNA sequences (genes or even just chunks of some interesting genome) or protein sequences. Unlike your favorite public library, this one doesn't come with a search feature: you have to do that yourself. The process of searching a library is called screening. Your molecular biologist friend can go to the institutional library to read about these kinds of libraries, and find techniques on how to screen one, then perhaps go to a colleague or a vendor to obtain a library. Or she will obtain tools to make one herself.

In my previous post, I talked of an even more radical extension of the concept of a library: a collection of all the versions of any kind of text (a book, a genome, a set of proteins).

The library of possible proteins is beyond vast. Does this cause us to view evolution as harder than it is?

Bates Hall at the Boston Public Library

One of the most effective metaphors for evolutionary change is the image of an exploration of a space, perhaps a map that shows "fitness peaks" or, better, a library of possibilities. The philosopher Daniel Dennett, writing in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, suggested The Library of Mendel as a way of thinking about the total set of possible gene sequences. He was adapting an idea famously employed in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called "The Library of Babel," which consists of the total set of possible books of a particular length. (This "library" exists on a website designed for creators and researchers.)

Contemplating a space of possibilities—whether that space consists of books written in English (26 letters), or "books" written in the language of DNA (four letters), or "books" written in the language of protein (20 letters)—is both fun and dizzying. The dizziness is induced (for me, at least) by the vastness of these libraries (Babel or Mendel, doesn't matter). How vast? Here is how Dennett describes the Library of Babel's size (italics are his):

No actual astronomical quantity (such as the number of elementary particles in the universe, or the amount of time since the Big Bang, measured in nanoseconds) is even visible against the backdrop of these huge-but-finite numbers. If a readable volume in the Library were as easy to find as a particular drop in the ocean, we'd be in business!

—Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 109

Dennett then uses Vast to indicate "Very-much-more-than-astronomically" large and Vanishingly small to indicate the likelihood of something like discovering a "volume with so much as a grammatical sentence in it" in the Library. In other words, we lack words to adequately describe the size of the Library and the improbability of randomly discovering anything coherent inside it.

An extrovert's response to the nightmare of remote work

March of 2020 seems a very long time ago. The coronavirus pandemic was roaring to life in the US, and it had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I lived and worked. I was leading an international team of editors, half of whom worked in the Cell Press office in Cambridge near the MIT campus. That month, the goal was to flatten the curve, so that our great hospitals and their heroic staffs would not be overwhelmed by COVID patients. There were no vaccines, and we were still wiping down grocery bags because we knew so little about the transmission of the virus. What we knew was that if we stayed away from each other, we would give the virus fewer opportunities to spread. So, early that month, I asked the team to start working from home. About a week later, the whole company moved to working from home.

My bike at Deer Island in Boston

Long before March 2020, I knew I was something of a unicorn in the world of professional editorial work. My colleagues were (and are) generous and committed and brilliant. I think we all had those things in common. But one thing I didn't share with them was my extroversion. I'm a true extrovert, and as near as I can tell I am one of less than a dozen extroverts in the world who work as a journal editor. I'm joking, but I'm serious when I say that when I became a journal editor more than 10 years ago, I stood out immediately among scores of serious introverts. (True story: our open-concept office had "zones" based on noise level, and I was banned from the quiet area. Not just discouraged. Banned.) And so in March 2020, when there were cute jokes going around about how we could be "heroes" by working from the sofa (Google "couch potatriotism"), I was unamused. Working from home meant that I lost my daily bike ride through Cambridge to a bustling workplace full of my friends and colleagues.

Change is hard. Evolution is Easy. Episode 1 of many.

ARIEL: Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
—The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2

I do apologize for this dull cliche, but I know I'm right about this: change is hard. I don't mean that it's hard to adapt after someone or something forces a change on you. That's true too, but it's not my topic here. I'm talking about this: you want to change, or you need to change, or both. You know what the change has to be. Maybe you know what the first step has to be. It's change, and it's hard.

Call it personal growth or self-improvement, or maybe it's habit-breaking or demon-wrestling. Whole libraries could be stocked with materials on how to change. Even when we know we're loved, and believe we're okay, we can see opportunities and challenges that require us to change.

I won't claim to have deep knowledge of the technical literature on how people manage to change. But I do have several decades of experience in the practice of personal growth and change. I have repeatedly faced my need to change, and one of the first lessons I had to learn was the fact that effecting change is a lot harder than it sounds. It's not that easy to face one's need to change but it's vastly more difficult to make it happen. Change is hard.

But evolution is easy.

A blogging festival! I'm in for Blaugust 2023

The messy smelly death of social media is causing a few meaningful losses — most notably damage to or destruction of some online communities that really were valuable. There are some things to lament. Black Twitter, for example, was and is a vibrant and important community. In the Fediverse (aka Mastodon, which is just one part of the Fediverse, but whatever) where I have been camping for several months, I'm listening to and boosting voices that discourage the careless judgment and disparagement of people who want or need to stay with communities in the corrupt plutocrat's broken toy.

But I think the world will be much, much better off without social media as we know it, and much better off without anything that is controlled by uberwealthy unreflective talentless techbros. We'll be better off not just because we'll be free of the immense toxicity created by these rapacious dipshits. We'll also have the chance to create — and recreate — ways of conversing and creating and sharing online. Like... blogging!

Today (almost too late) I learned about Blaugust 2023, a delightfully outfitted and long-running (since 2013!) blogging festival, the major goal of which is to motivate people to create. There's a Blaugchievement list, an extensive prompt list, a Discord server, a dedicated Mastodon account, and a directory. I just signed up for everything! I suggest starting at the media kit.

The basic goal is to post 31 times in August. I'm already at two! I have some topics lined up but I'll dip into the prompt list as needed, and point to interesting work by other participants. See you tomorrow.

What I'm reading in August

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.

---

Fiction

Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

I bought this book in March at the Tucson Festival of Books after a fascinating event called "She persisted". Even got my copy signed! WBUR loved it. I asked the author whether it would matter that I (unlike, I think, everyone else at the event) have never read The Scarlet Letter and was assured that it would not. I'm a little more than halfway through and I love the book. I think I've read actual accounts of the Salem Witch Delusions (I haven't looked up the history to compare with the book's narrative), and I like the cadence of switching between centuries. A recurring theme is synesthesia, which the central character refers to as "the colors," and there are detailed descriptions of needlework that are a bit challenging.

 

---

Non-fiction

Complicit by Max Bazerman

I wrote about this book and my experiment (before and after reading). The first chapter was harrowing and introduced me to the term "complicitor" and outlines Bazerman's approach, which is case-based and more "practical" than what philosophers do. I should have known that Aquinas was an original source of instruction on complicity, but I didn't. I'm about halfway through.

A Humanist Path: Confucius and Lao Zi for Today by Wei Djao

This book was strongly recommended to me by a friend here in Tucson. My friend has studied with the author, who was partly Tucson-based (and perhaps still is). I'm excited to finally experience the wisdom of these ancient teachers. The publisher's page has a little more information.

You know the ancient struggle between chance and contingency vs. design/structuralism (aka necessity) in evolutionary explanation? How's this for a provocative title of a research paper: "Contingency and chance erase necessity in the experimental evolution of ancestral proteins."

What I'm reading in July

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.

---

Fiction

Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

I bought this book in March at the Tucson Festival of Books after a fascinating event called "She persisted". Even got my copy signed! WBUR loved it. I asked the author whether it would matter that I (unlike, I think, everyone else at the event) have never read The Scarlet Letter and was assured that it would not. Just started (finally).

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Continued from June. I only recently read American Gods (I know, I know!) and of course loved it. (I was late to the party but at least I read the "author's preferred text.") My brother's favorite book by Gaiman is Neverwhere, and I'll get there, but I grabbed this nice collection of stories and poems at Bookmans and am almost through.

---

Non-fiction

Complicit by Max Bazerman

I wrote about this book and my experiment (before and after reading). The first chapter was harrowing and introduced me to the term "complicitor" and outlines Bazerman's approach, which is case-based and more "practical" than what philosophers do. I should have known that Aquinas was an original source of instruction on complicity, but I didn't.

Design without a designer: explaining and answering some questions

I've been writing and thinking about design in biology since I started Quintessence of Dust. I want to write and think about it a lot more, so in my last post I introduced my view of the concept and pointed ahead to this post, which consists of edited excerpts from some conversations at a discussion forum at the Peaceful Science site. You will find links to those conversations in the previous post. I have removed people's names and lightly edited for clarity. Other people’s words are indented; the rest are mine.

---

I would like to understand better how you think about it because it seems quite different from the way I normally think about it. I would really like learn more about how you see it and expand my understanding of "design".

This is a potentially big interesting deep conversation that is worthy of a dedicated thread with some clear goals. Someday I’ll propose that, since I believe that we can improve the quality and tone of conversations about biological design by getting at least some unbelievers to agree that design in biology is an interesting and worthy question that need not and should not have inherent religious overtones.

I guess my first question for you as you compare your conception of 'design' to mine is this: do you think design is something that is done (by a designer) or do you think it is something that exists and can be detected by humans? Obviously both can be true, but as long as a person believes that 'design' necessitates a 'designer', then they won’t see design the way I do. Because my view is that design exists whether or not it is linked to a designer. To me, it is axiomatic that a mindless process can generate design, not only because we have seen it happen but because there is no good argument to the contrary. It is instructive, IMO, that the "argument" offered to the contrary is something like "all of our examples of design can be traced back to a mind." This is not even an argument.

But what do we mean by 'design'? Here I think we can look at some of the definitions and conceptions offered by the ID movement. I think Behe’s "purposeful arrangement of parts" is a nice start, because it captures something that we all detect when we consider (for example) a molecular machine. Was a bacterial flagellum designed by a designer? I don’t know. Does a bacterial flagellum evince design? To me, the answer is obviously yes.

Design without a designer: the "British tendency" and introduction

One of the most interesting books I've read in the last few years was The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution by J. Arvid Ågren. The author explains the gene's-eye view both scientifically and historically, and I hope to write about the book sometime soon. But for now there's one point he makes that I found fascinating. Citing Kim Sterelny (an Australian philosopher of science who has written on personalities in evolutionary biology, esp. Gould vs. Dawkins), he identifies two major emphases (Sterelny calls them "tendencies") in evolutionary biology: the American interest in diversity and the British interest in design. These are pretty crude distinctions, at least because examplars of the "British tendency" include Americans like Dan Dennett. But the point is that one of two major streams of thought in evolutionary science is the challenge Paley made famous and that inspired Darwin—the one that inspired The Blind Watchmaker and its author. It's the challenge of explaining design in the biological world, and the most notable characters in that story are Brits from three very different generations.

Schematic representations of the type IV filament superfamily of nanomachines, from Figure 1 of Denise et al. 2019

I'm not British (I'm just a wannabe) but I'm drawn to that question too. My interest is probably partly due to my time served as a Christian believer, since the Christian god is a common unworthy beneficiary of the curiosity and wonder that nature inspires in humans. I have always objected to the whole construction: we see cool and extraordinary stuff in nature, we don't seem to have an explanation, so we turn to a god as an "answer." Nothing about those stories appealed to me, not when I was a committed believer and not now that I am an emancipated apostate. One problem, that I've mentioned before, is that I am apparently of the British tendency: I see the design, and I want to explain it. Design is the question, and not the answer to any interesting question. Design is what I see. I don't need a religious apologist to convince me that it exists.

What I'm reading in June

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.

---

Fiction

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Recommended by colleagues on our PLOS Slack channel and in a great review at NPR. Plus, as a bardolator I am doctrinally obligated to read a book with a title like that. I'm deliberately reading the last few chapters slowly; this is something I do when I love a book so much that I don't want it to end.

Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

I bought this book in March at the Tucson Festival of Books after a fascinating event called "She persisted". Even got my copy signed! WBUR loved it. I asked the author whether it would matter that I (unlike, I think, everyone else at the event) have never read The Scarlet Letter and was assured that it would not. I'll start as soon as I finish Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Continued from May. I only recently read American Gods (I know, I know!) and of course loved it. (I was late to the party but at least I read the "author's preferred text.") My brother's favorite book by Gaiman is Neverwhere, and I'll get there, but I grabbed this nice collection of stories and poems at Bookmans and am almost through.

---

Non-fiction

Complicit by Max Bazerman

I wrote about this book and my experiment (before and after reading). The first chapter was harrowing and introduced me to the term "complicitor."

A Humanist Path: Confucius and Lao Zi for Today by Wei Djao

This book was strongly recommended to me by a friend here in Tucson. My friend has studied with the author, who was partly Tucson-based (and perhaps still is). I'm excited to finally experience the wisdom of these ancient teachers. The publisher's page has a little more information.

Beshrew my heart but I pity the man. Final reflections on From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris

I've reviewed a few books over the years here at Quintessence of Dust, but From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris was the first book I blogged through that I was genuinely excited about reading. I bought it sight unseen, new and in hardcover, from a publisher of dubious reputation, because I was beguiled by the author and the title and what I mistakenly believed that title to mean. I have already written that I regretted paying money for the book once I read the first couple of chapters and realized I'd been had. From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds isn't about myths, nor is it about interesting controversies, and its ideas/claims are mostly recycled from previous works by the author. In retrospect, the book didn't merit the attention I gave it, and it doesn't merit yours.

David Strathairn and Sophie Marceau as Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)

But that doesn't mean I regret the exercise as a whole. Writing my way through the book helped me clarify some of my own thoughts and ideas. So this post is as much about me and my ideas as it is about the book.

Reviewing From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris: Full series

Full series on From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris.

Introduction and overview

Chapter 1: The Myth of No Limits — Part 1 — Part 2

Chapter 2: The Myth of Randomness

Chapter 3: The Myth of Mass Extinctions

Chapter 4: The Myth of Missing Links

Chapter 5: The Myth of Animal Minds — Part 1 — Part 2

Chapter 6: The Myth of Extraterrestrials

Final comments and reflections

Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business. Chapter 6 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

ALONSO: This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of. Some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.

—The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1 

That's one of two epigraphs at the beginning of Chapter 6 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Extraterrestrials," by Simon Conway Morris. It seemed odd to me when I started reading the book, but it makes some sense now that I've made it to the end. Conway Morris wants (or needs) there to be more to this business than nature "was ever conduct of." This final chapter makes that clear, and by that I mean that it makes the author's desire/need clear. It is, sadly, a fitting end to the book.

Recall that Life's Solution, the author's 2003 book that made convergence a household word, is subtitled Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. The notion that our species (or something very much like it) is "inevitable" is (in my view) a reasonable conjecture once one is faced with the pervasiveness of evolutionary convergence. I enjoyed that book when I read it all those years ago, and became convinced that evolution was not merely blundering around finding the weird and wonderful—it was algorithmically churning toward design, and then toward better design. I was then in a Christian world where it seemed that "adaptationism" was a Bad Thing embraced by extremists and (oh god) atheists, but here was a rock-star Christian paleontologist who was all in on adaptation. I loved that rebel vibe, then and now. But then, and also now, I was baffled by his apparent desire to be alone. Not alone in his office, but alone in the universe.

A gruesome autopsy of Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

Before I explain the rot at the heart of this chapter (Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Animal Minds," by Simon Conway Morris), I'd like to show you my workspace as I sullenly trudge toward the end of this task.

That's my fun little Chromebook 2-in-1, and the barely-visible tartan mouse pad is from my dad. You'll see my toolkit of sticky notes and a stack of (some of) my books on consciousness and human cognition. Conway Morris' book is open to the pages (155-157, in a section called "An unbridgeable gulf?") that stopped me in my tracks.

The author doth protest too much, methinks. The disastrous Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

It's one of the most famous misquoted lines in the English language, spoken by Lady Gertrude (Hamlet's mom) during the intense scene featuring a play ("The Mousetrap" aka The Murder of Gonzago) within a play, intended by Hamlet to be "the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King." The character in "The Mousetrap" has delivered some sappy lines about commitment and widowhood, designed to flush out the King and Gertrude. But you know all that. The frequently-mangled line is "The lady protests too much, methinks." It's a great line and it works out to something like "she's overdoing it" spoken by a person who is literally the subject being portrayed. When we say "the lady doth protest too much" we usually mean "they're overacting so much that now it seems even they don't believe what they're saying."

That's how Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Animal Minds," felt to me. Simon Conway Morris is hellbent on digging a conceptual moat around human cognition, desperate to isolate it from non-human cognition so that it can receive metaphysical shipments from on high. If that sounds harsh, it is—and it is exactly what the chapter is about.

Missing links are a myth, but whose? Chapter 4 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

There are some truly vexing and annoying myths of evolution. They are almost exclusively recited and embellished by religious propagandists, some of whom actually know what they're doing. Rarely but notably, there are myths that are gleefully repeated by creationists while being amplified by scientists who should know better. The clearest example of this is the mythology and nonsense surrounding "junk DNA."

Missing links are not an example of this.

The phrase "missing link" is so dated and so scientifically laughable that it could only be seriously discussed in a book about myths that circulate among laypeople who watch YouTube videos about Sasquatch, refuse vaccines to own the libs, and go to church. What is it doing in a book by Simon Conway Morris, a book that claims to address "areas of received wisdom that are long overdue for careful reexamination"? It's the subject of the fourth chapter of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Missing Links."

The Mórrígan. A myth.

This question summarizes one source of my deep disappointment in this book, a work that has lowered my opinion of its author. I have no right to blame my disappointment on the author, and I know that my feelings betray an expectation on my part that the professor has no obligation to even consider. That expectation: that Christian scientists acknowledge and consider resisting the mountains of lies that their fellow believers dump into the world.

Mass extinction as acceleration: Chapter 3 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

If you read about natural history, even just popular accounts, you know about the epic mass extinctions visited on the living world throughout life's tenure on Earth. Words like 'devastating' and 'catastrophic' barely capture their scale—the most thorough purge is called The Great Dying and extinguished at least 95% of the species on the planet. And this isn't just animals dying. It's whole lineages dying. As our host writes, these things are "extremely nasty and most definitely to be avoided."

It's tempting to picture these epochs as the erasure of worlds, with new worlds taking their place. Lots of death means lots of vacant niches means lots of opportunity, for animal lineages to expand and diversify, and for humans to weave gripping tales of fortune and fate. Or even myths. If, like me, you read this book to learn about myths of evolution, you had to slog through two chapters of chaos and blather to get to something that finally resembles one.

The third myth in From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris, the subject of Chapter 3, is "The Myth of Mass Extinctions." The chapter is long and detailed, clogged with taxonomic jargon in places, sparkling with typical mischief in others. (Page 76: "Not for a moment am I suggesting that the early Triassic is a preferred destination for the time traveler. Your tour group would be greeted by shocking scenes, but the cognoscenti would see which way the wind was blowing.") By now we know we have to ask: what exactly is the myth? Conway Morris isn't questioning the occurrence of mass extinctions, nor does he doubt their apocalyptic power. He's attacking a somewhat specific view of their effects on the biosphere.

Confusion and convergence, but no "myth of randomness." Chapter 2 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

The concept of randomness is caught up in evolution, in two broad ways. The first and most famous aspect is the oft-misunderstood randomness of mutation. The second aspect is the role of chance in the trajectory of evolution. It is this question—is evolution predictable, or is it a random "drunkard's walk"—that Conway Morris tackles in the second chapter of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution. The chapter is called "The Myth of Randomness."

The chapter is a chaotic mess and ends without a clear argument, much less a convincing one. Conway Morris wants to tip the scales away from "randomness" and toward "cyclicity." From the second paragraph of the chapter (page 43):

Although through geological time increasing degrees of biological complexity and integration are undeniably the case, superimposed on this is an intriguing cyclicity: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. It transpires that evolutionary history is very far from random.

Rincon Mountain Wilderness

Like he did in Chapter 1, Conway Morris takes a profoundly interesting, long-standing question in science, a question that currently inspires brilliant writing and experimentation by evolutionary biologists, and paints one of the possibilities as a "myth." Like he did in Chapter 1, he erects a strawperson. Unlike in Chapter 1, the strawperson is not a laughable nonexistent entity but instead a fuzzy caricature of a major factor in evolutionary history—the combination of chance and contingency. Fortunately, unlike in Chapter 1, Conway Morris provides a poorly integrated amalgam that few laypeople will understand. Thus, even those inclined to cheer the immolation of the strawperson will find little more than stuff like this (p. 56): "The clear implication is that beneath these entirely plausible factors there are deeper organizational principles at work and of which we know very little at present." That sentence is typical of the chapter, which reaches its nadir at an invocation of "particle physics or the periodic table" as evidence that physicists embrace the notion of "a deeper order of the world" while biologists struggle to do the same. In his ardor to preach on these "deeper" things, Conway Morris obscures the grandness of the question and at times distorts what working scientists know and do. It was on finishing this chapter, a few weeks ago, that I regretted buying and reading the book.

What I'm reading in May

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is the second (late) entry in my new series, What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.

---

Fiction

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Continued from April. I only recently read American Gods (I know, I know!) and of course loved it. (I was late to the party but at least I read the "author's preferred text.") My brother's favorite book by Gaiman is Neverwhere, and I'll get there, but I grabbed this nice collection of stories and poems at Bookmans and am almost through.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Recommended by colleagues on our PLOS Slack channel and in a great review at NPR. Plus, as a bardolator I am doctrinally obligated to read a book with a title like that. I'm a little more than halfway through, and LOVE the book.

Superheroes and limits: more on Chapter 1 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

Warning: this post includes spoilers for Black Widow, Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Seems a small price to pay to understand the biophysical limits of the biosphere, but it's your call.

So, are you sure you want that superpower? Have you noticed that superheroes usually have difficult lives and crushing responsibilities? And have you noticed that even the most potent superheroes and their coveted superpowers come up against explicit limitations?

I haven't yet seen Avengers: Endgame (I know! I'll get to it!) but I know this: Black Widow ends with Natasha riding away to the events that end with her sacrifice, events portrayed in Avengers: Endgame. She has some cool superpowers but she ultimately contributed most to the world's salvation by dying.

For me, the hardest MCU movie to watch was Spider-Man: No Way Home. Peter Parker has superhuman strength and dexterity, and arthropod-like agility et cetera, but couldn't protect the person he loved the most. At the end of the movie he arranges to have himself erased from the memory of his dearest friends. I wept through it, not merely because it's sad but because this impossible burden falls on a teenager. The proverb now forever associated with Spider-Man is "with great power comes great responsibility," and this credo angers me every time I hear it. I don't hear the acknowledgement that no kid should ever have to carry that. And certainly not alone.

Superhero stories are never about life without limitations. Indeed the opposite. They are about what happens inside a world/universe that has different boundaries than our own. It's not the boundaries that matter, whether you're a superhero like Natasha, or a "normal" person like me, or a metaphorical agent like evolution.

Superheroes and the (nonexistent) Myth of No Limits: Chapter 1 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

Which superpower would you choose and why?

This seems a somewhat common "get to know you" question. Sometimes you're forced to choose between two (invisibility or teleportation?), perhaps to reveal particular features of your psyche. My choice is teleportation — I want to see my kids and grandkids but I want to live in Edinburgh. My frustration with such limitations is real, and contemplating teleportation doesn't help.

My fanboy heart has always belonged to the Rebel Alliance, but I do love the X-Men and the MCU and I count Black Widow and Black Panther among my favorite films (and soundtracks). All of the main characters are superheroes and all claim some kind of superpower. Most of these superpowers arise from usually-nefarious use/misuse of technology by humans: directed genetic enhancement, carelessness with radiation, crafting or mining of superpowered materials, unsupervised development of military hardware, stuff like that. The X-Men have superpowers that are great fun but also outlandish (even for the genre), and all are said to have arisen via mutation.

I would love to be able to teleport. And yet I never considered the possibility that I could do it, via genetic manipulation or vibranium or a fancy suit made by a rogue military contractor. I've never met an adult who wonders whether the right mutations (an extra chromosome, according to canon) could give them the glorious superpowers enjoyed by Mystique or Wolverine. Such a person would have to be ignorant, or mad, or seven.

Reviewing From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris: introduction and overview

It was the subtitle of this book (From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris) that reeled me in, combined with my inability to resist reading the thoughts of Conway Morris on what that subtitle advertises: "Six Myths of Evolution." I'm about halfway through the book, and through three of the six myths. It was my intention to start writing about the book when I'd finished it, but now I think it will be more fun to write about it chapter by chapter. Each chapter can stand mostly alone, which helps. But the main reason to do it stepwise is this: although the book is aiming at some larger goal, the fact that this goal is unrelated (so far) to anything resembling a myth means that it will be interesting and/or instructive to see how it plays out.

The first place one might look for the author's intention in discussing "myths" would be the Introduction. Hahaha nope. It's three pages of a bizarre conversation with someone named Mortimer*, in Venice. Mortimer does most of the talking, as one might expect from a sock puppet. Three pages of indulgence about "going off the rails" (but you see, that's good), a fond reference to Teilhard ("a much neglected figure"), a classless swipe at "our materialist chums" (they "never wanted to know what the universe was really like"), and the expected wink at the divine: "...to fool ourselves that the mental world of a chimpanzee is just a dilute version of our minds, or rather a Mind."

Yeah yeah yeah but what are these myths? Mortimer comes close to defining what he means by a myth: "...not fairy tales but areas of received wisdom that are long overdue for careful reexamination."

And that's our first clue — blink and you miss it — that this is not a book about myths of evolution.

What I'm reading in April

One of my motivations for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is a new series, pretty basic: What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.

---

Fiction

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

I only recently read American Gods (I know, I know!) and of course loved it. (I was late to the party but at least I read the "author's preferred text.") My brother's favorite book by Gaiman is Neverwhere, and I'll get there, but I grabbed this nice collection of stories and poems at Bookmans and am about halfway through.

Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

This is the third in the Locked Tomb Series. The trilogy was recommended by my oldest kid and by my favorite author, Alix Harrow. I've just started and am confused, which is completely normal and exactly what the author intends. As a colleague at PLOS wrote on our scifi/fantasy Slack channel, "the books are emotionally and cognitively demanding." I finished the second book, Harrow The Ninth, a couple weeks ago but one reason I started reading Fragile Things was to give myself a break before diving into Nona. Harrow was intense.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Recommended by colleagues on the aforementioned Slack channel and in a great review at NPR. Plus, as a bardolator I am doctrinally obligated to read a book with a title like that. I'll start this after Nona (and after a suitable recovery period), probably late in April.

Thoughts on complicity before reading Complicit by Max Bazerman

I have been thinking regularly about complicity for the last several years. It became a central ethical theme of mine in 2016 and it has occupied my thoughts and ideas since. And yet, it recently occurred to me that I seem to be using it as a folk remedy, a kind of folk science in which I use the concept in my thought and sometimes in my conversations as a kind of prop without careful definition of what I mean when I say it. So I decided to work on that, and came home from last month's Tucson Festival of Books with a stack of treasures that includes Complicit by Max Bazerman.

I haven't started it yet (I'm currently slogging through the Six Myths of Evolution mess by Simon Conway Morris). And this means I have an opportunity to do a little experiment. In the spirit of pre- and post-instruction assessments in education, I thought I'd write about what I think now about complicity. Then after I've read the book, I'll write about what I've learned and what has changed.

First, why 2016? It's not that the concept was new to me then. It's that a particular kind of evil was erupting, coincident with my own reflection as a secular humanist (aka atheist) on my many years as a Christian. It was the year of the public emergence of the hate-based cult of Donald Trump, a cult that relies almost entirely on conservative Christianity. Then, as now, I pointed out that Trump is not the cause of the sickness of the right — he's a symptom. The causes include nationalism, racism, ignorance, dishonesty, and fear-based hate. All of those things have deep roots in American conservative Christianity. And for more than 25 years, I had been a part of American conservative Christianity, which I'll call evangelicalism.

On Jane Anger, Shakespeare, apostasy, and blasphemy

Bardolatry has been a cornerstone of Quintessence of Dust since I conceived it. I love the plays, sure, but there's always been something else going on.

"Jane Anger"

Shakespeare is one of those extraordinary phenomena that tempts us to seek extraordinary explanations. Like Harold Bloom, I think of the mystery as essentially unsolvable — Shakespeare is impossible. Complex conspiracy theories about Shakespeare's identity are to me mere acknowledgements that the mystery can't be solved. For me, to attribute Shakespeare to (say) Francis Bacon is to simply rename the mystery. I don't need an answer to "Who was Shakespeare?" It doesn't actually matter to me, because my Bardolatry was never based on facts about the Bard's life.

For a few decades of my life, I was also a Christian. I was comfortable with mystery — about the metaphysical nature of the god I was confessing, stuff like that. Most of my fellow travelers were worried about how to "reconcile" their religious story (about sin and "the fall" and the bible all that) with plain facts about the natural world. I wasn't. One key example: I didn't need an answer to "Who was Adam?" It didn't matter to me, because my willingness to believe in the Christian god had nothing to do with facts about his "life" or about Adam's life. What I did care about was my mistaken belief that this god is worthy of my admiration and worthy of my attention. When I realized he is an insecure loudmouth bully with no capacity for moral responsibility, I ended the toxic relationship almost ten years ago. I won't explore deconversion here; suffice it to say that I concluded that the Christian god is a deviously complex and largely harmful human creation. In religious parlance, this is called apostasy.

The Day Without Yesterday by John Farrell: How did Lemaitre do it?

My first post on John Farrell's The Day Without Yesterday identified two themes the book raises for me: the intellectual milieu into which modern cosmology came to be, and the reasons why Georges Lemaître was able to "lead Einstein and the rest of his generation into a new, truly dynamic model of the universe." (p. 53) The second post looked at the intellectual environment and ended like this:

Some of the greatest minds in human history were overtly resistant to a new model of the universe, a model that was (at least in retrospect) clear from math and physics known at the time. If it could happen to them, it could happen to anyone, and of course it has happened constantly through intellectual history. I think we owe it to Lemaître to reflect on how it will happen again. It has to. Data doesn't wait for minds to be ready.

And yet somehow Lemaître's mind was ready. How? Why?

This question is really interesting to me, and John sets it up brilliantly throughout the book before asking it explicitly in the penultimate chapter (pp. 186-7):

... Lemaître's insights were in fact key in almost all the important milestones of early modern cosmology... He was the first to see how the Einstein and de Sitter models were but two limited cases of a larger body of expanding universe models; he was the first to see that such models had to evolve from a super-dense state; and perhaps most importantly—from the very beginning—he was the first to tie the predictions of relativity about cosmology to actual astronomical observations. How did he do it?

I wrote previously that Lemaître is a scientific hero. It's not enough to point to his scientific accomplishments, which are historic by any account. I think his greatness is magnified by the fact that he stood apart, clear-eyed, amongst a cadre of brilliant minds who were somehow unable to see what he could see. I don't think you can read The Day Without Yesterday without feeling admiration and even awe toward the priest-scientist.