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.

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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.

The Day Without Yesterday by John Farrell: "conservatism and hesitation"

In my first post on John Farrell's The Day Without Yesterday, I 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) Let's look at that milieu.

The first chapter of the book describes the first time Lemaître and Einstein met in person. Lemaître had published a paper suggesting that the universe was dynamic, indeed that it could be expanding. On meeting Lemaître, Einstein brushed the priest off, even referring to the idea as "abominable." Wow.

Now, John suggests that Einstein was not being a jerk but was instead expressing his personal distaste (revulsion even) to the very notion that the universe was expanding. And this matters because:

The modern world's comprehension of the universe is one of the most fascinating subjects in the history of science. But the history of modern cosmology is one of constant doubt, second-guessing, obstinacy, missed opportunities, distraction, and outright denial. (p. 13, emphasis mine)

To me, that list starts like a normal recitation of human imperfection, hardly remarkable to anyone who has worked in science. Until the end. Obstinacy is bad enough (if fully human) but outright denial? That sounds a bit more serious. And it is.

The Day Without Yesterday by John Farrell: introductory comments

Let's start with full disclosure. John Farrell is a good friend, and we met here at Quintessence of Dust more than 15 years ago. John was one of the first people to read and comment on (and link to) the blog. We share many passions: science, faith/science interactions, writing, the Boston Red Sox, Shakespeare, and Harvard Square. John plays pickup hockey (that's something we don't have in common) and more than once has reminded me (in pubs in Harvard Square) that we are both lucky to have all our hair.

And yet it was not until the last few months that I bought and read his (so far) masterpiece, The Day Without Yesterday. I don't know why it took so long. Surely one reason is that I've only in the last year and a half been reading more books—I've worked as an editor for more than a decade and that means many hours of intensive reading with attendant reading fatigue. But I think another reason—and this is embarrassing to admit—is that I thought I knew the story. Father of the Big Bang, Catholic priest, yeah okay I got it.

I was wrong. And if you think you know the story without reading this book, then you're probably wrong too. The tale is inspiring and exciting, frequently frustrating, and ultimately awe-inspiring, not because of the Big Bang itself (ooooh aaaah) but because the long-overlooked main character, Georges Lemaître, is a hero of science. As I read John's book, I came to think that "Father of the Big Bang" (cutesy double entendre notwithstanding) partially obscures this man's stature as a scientist.

Quintessence of Dust 2023 restart: the what

So, Quintessence of Dust is back in business. (A few days ago, I wrote about why.) Yay! Here are some soon-coming attractions. A couple are book-length projects at various stages of embryogenesis, but the rest are posts and series that represent ideas to dissect/develop and thoughts to get out in the world.

1. My main book project is yet untitled but is well defined enough (barely) to warrant some posts in which I can try out the ideas. The book is about the so-called animal toolkit and the related theme of deep homology. I'll explore those topics then suggest that they tell us something important about the design and evolution of animals. I aim to cause some trouble. And yes, I wrote 'design'.

2. Another less well-developed book idea is tentatively titled "Evolution Is Easy" and that's all you get for now.

3. I just finished The Day Without Yesterday by my friend John Farrell, about the not-well-enough-known cosmologist and priest, Georges Lemaître. I'll write about my impressions of the book and of Lemaître, and I'll try to get John to join in. Maybe an interview of some kind?

4. Other books I've read recently and would like to write about: The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution by J. Arvid Ågren; From Darwin to Derrida by David Haig; and two novels by my current favorite author, Alix Harrow. I just bought (with some hesitation) the new book by Simon Conway Morris, From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution. If the book doesn't piss me off too much,  I'll write about it.