Derek K. Miller - Penmachine words music comment - Vancouver, Canada

There's long been speculation that as humans moved into Arctic territories (as well as into North America), we were primarily responsible for the extinction of the woolly mammoth about 12,000 years ago. Other researchers have favoured climate change at the end of the Pleistocene era as the main reason they disappeared.

New research indicates that, in Eurasia at least, the answer is probably both. Mammoth populations fluctuated hugely throughout the Pleistocene, dropping to levels even lower than their pre–human contact point as much as 125,000 years ago, during a warming period.

But when humans entered the picture millennia after that, as the Ice Age glaciers were melting, mammoth populations were again low, and our hunting activity likely slowly picked the big pachyderms off.

The last woolly mammoths to die off were amazingly recent: a dwarf variety survived until less than 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean off the desolate far northeast coast of Siberia. That human hunting had a role in their demise is no surprise: quite often, when our species has moved into new areas (especially isolated ones), we exterminate species that live there, especially large yummy ones.

Maoris eliminated moas from New Zealand not long after arriving between 800 and 1300 A.D. (moas were gone by 1500, a couple of hundred years before Europeans started showing up). Similarly, dodos disappeared in the late 1600s after humans arrived on their home island of Mauritus. And we're doing an effective job of bringing a variety of big species, from blue whales to Siberian tigers—and many other organisms too—close to the vanishing point today. Only rarely, as in the case of the smallpox virus, do we do it on purpose.

It's possible that woolly mammoths might have disappeared even without us as the Ice Age ended. But we very likely speeded their extinction along.

Labels: environment, evolution, history, science

A friend of asked me today:

How does evolution explain something like DNA and how it's decoded? Natural selection/chance-change over billions of years doesnt seem adequate to explain it. Are there other evolutionary mechanisms that might explain it?

Also, DNA seems very clearly to be instructions/information. From an evolutionary standpoint, would that be an illusion because [we humans interpret] what turns out to be chance results as something more meaningful and organized because the result kind of works?

Now, beware, since IANAEBOP (I Am Not An Evolutionary Biologist Or Philosopher). I do have pretty decent background in biology generally, it being my degree and all, and that means I need to understand natural selection well. So here goes my take.

What's chance, what isn't?

One of the issues here is that too often people talk about natural selection, including the initial appearance of DNA, as a random process. It's actually much the opposite: yes, mutations (i.e. the source material or "seeds" for evolutionary change) occur randomly, but the ones that persist because they lead to greater reproductive success are completely non-random. Non-random rules arising from natural processes filter out almost all the random stuff, leading to evolutionary processes that build upon themselves to generate new things.

But non-randomness doesn't have to imply conscious agency (at least I don't think so). Nor does it imply inevitability, or even directionality, really. If you rolled back the clock and started things over again with the first simple microorganisms, or at any later stage, even with essentially the same conditions, the result might very well have turned out very differently.

Evolution is a historical process, and like human history, there are so many inter-related, contingent influences going on that if we, say, started over again 75 million years ago with dinosaurs, even if an asteroid still wiped them out, there's no guarantee a human-like intelligence would arise later. Or if it did, that primates would necessarily be what did it.

Similarly, roll back farther, and would insects end up as the dominant multicellular animals again? Might woody flowering plants once more come to dominate over ferns and other now less common forms? Maybe not.

You can think of an analogy in something like the pattern of a streambed. Yes, the movement of individual water molecules or sand grains may be essentially random, but gravity and friction and a variety of other simple laws of nature, interacting in a very complex way, make it so that the result—the tree-like form of a drainage basin—has a very non-random structure. (If you drop something on earth, it falls down. If things were random, you'd have no way to predict which direction it would go.)

But, yet again, if you rolled back the clock and started the erosion process all over again, the stream's course might run in a very different direction. There would still be a tree-like structure constrained by natural laws, but the details of it would be totally different, so you couldn't plan to build a house or waterwheel or hydro dam in a particular location in advance.

The vastness of time

Another issue is time. Our brains really aren't well equipped to handle the kinds of time scales this stuff happens on. Something like DNA seems irredeemably complicated to have arisen by the hit-and-miss processes we're talking about. It's too well built. (Of course, the process also has its flaws, which is why people like me get cancer.) But we're used to watching stuff happen over the course of minutes or hours or days or weeks or months or years or maybe decades. The rise and fall of civilizations may take centuries. To us that seems like a long time.

Evidence seems to indicate that DNA first appeared pretty early on in earth's history. But it still took something like 600 million years, or maybe closer to a billion. Even if it were completely random (rather than a rule-driven process with random "seeds"), a lot of amazing things could happen totally by chance in 600 million years. And a lot of amazing things have happened in the 4 billion years since, some random, some not.

Humans have never witnessed a large asteroid impact on earth. As far as our actual experience (even on an evolutionary time scale) is concerned, it has never happened. But given enough time, tens or hundreds of millions of years, it pretty much must happen again, and it hashappened several times before. So we can consider things impossible when, in the long run, they are inevitable, or at least probable.

Would DNA, or something like it, inevitably have arisen on earth, given enough time? We don't know, and can't know yet. That's why looking for unrelated life elsewhere is important: even if it's non-intelligent life, finding something that arose separately from life on earth would tell us that life-driving processes are at least reasonably likely in this universe.

Or maybe it really is nearly (but not quite) impossible, and it only happened here, once in all these billions of years there have been stars and planets. I hope not, but it could be.

Saving a step

Now, if you step back and ask why natural laws are structured in such a way that contingent, historical evolution can happen even once (or even why atoms and molecules can form at all in the first place, rather than just creating a universe that's nothing but a soup of plasma), that enters into realms of philosophy that I don't think we may ever be able to answer.

Many will answer that God must have made those rules. But if I think like that, I always have to ask: then what made the God (or gods) that could make those rules, and by what meta-rules? In my mind, it's the same problem, just one step further, so it isn't really an answer at all.

I'm comfortable enough thinking that life and the DNA that lets it propagate "just happened" (perhaps the greatest oversimplification it would ever be possible to make in any circumstance). And with observation and intelligence, we're able to understand very much about how things have happened since, without having to resort to supernatural explanations that, by definition, we cannot analyze because their rules must be inscrutable to us.

Labels: biology, evolution, history, intelligentdesign, naturalselection, religion, science, time

• "You call this traveling? Twenty-one days, 15 countries, 45,000 miles—without setting foot outdoors."
  
  
• "The more affluent a country gets, the more things parents come to see as essential for raising children [so] as long as the world keeps creeping out of poverty, families will continue to shrink."
  
  
• jamNOW lets you jam online with other musicians, interact with fans, and listen to live streams from nightclubs all over the place. Haven't tried it, so I'm not sure how well it works.
  
  
• Looks like the iMac DV in our kitchen is finally officially obsolete. It's slow, but it still works pretty well.
  
  
• Are things really this bad for biology teachers in significant portions of the U.S.A.?
  
  
• "If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound."
  
  
• "I rejoice in this life that I have, and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me, and an earth that will abide without me."
  
  
• "Studies have shown that abstinence-only education does virtually nothing to prevent kids from having sex [and that] abstinence-only group[s] used birth control less frequently."
  
  
• "When I get a resume, the first thing I do is type the person's name into Google.  If nothing comes up, I trash the resume without reading it."
  
  
• "I don't want my ISP looking at how I use the Internet to target ads to me, period, any more than I want the phone company listening in on my conversations in order to sell me stuff."
  
  
• TripIt looks like one of the best online travel resources out there, though I haven't tried it.
  
  
• How to make your website or blog faster.
  
  
• The Universe is 13.73 billion years old, give or take only about 120 million years. Now that is a cool finding.

Labels: apple, astronomy, evolution, family, google, linksofinterest, music, school, science, sex, space, travel, web

Abstinence-Only Driver's Ed is almost as good as the old Onion article about Intelligent Falling.

Labels: controversy, education, evolution, intelligentdesign, science, sex

There's a ton of neat stuff over at ResearchBlogging.org, a site that aggregates blog posts about peer-reviewed research in the social and natural sciences. You can subscribe to an RSS feed for new posts, including citations. The blog from ResearchBlogging is also interesting, especially when it talks about controversies concerning what counts as legitimate research.

Some posts I've really enjoyed based on my biology degree background have been those at Pharyngula about how vertebrate eyes evolved (which, incidentally, firmly debunks the claim creationists frequently make that eyes are too complex to have evolved biologically) and how plant and animal development differ (and why the differences support the indications that our last common ancestor with plants was most likely a single-celled organism living more than 1.6 billion years ago).

And check out this lovely map of the human impact on marine ecosystems, which includes these nasty new marine dead zones off the west coast of North America, not far from where I live.

On a totally unrelated topic, my album Penmachine Sessions, which has been sold out in physical CD form since the middle of last year, is available in a whole bunch of digital forms, with the latest being the Amazon MP3 Store. It might be the best place to buy the album of all, since you get unrestricted, high-quality (256 kbps) MP3 files (that's better than the MP3 files I made for myself!) for only 99 cents each, or $8.99 for the whole album. I think it may only be available to U.S. customers for now, unfortunately.

No, I have no idea at all why Amazon labels my album as "explicit"—particularly because it is almost entirely instrumental music with no words!

Labels: biology, blog, controversy, creationism, evolution, music, science

When I read Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (buy at Amazon Canada or Amazon U.S.), I wasn't angry, but I was uncomfortable—and not because one of the authors of this brand-new volume has been dead for almost five years. The book is a summary of the new field of evolutionary psychology, which shows that our evolutionary past strongly influences how humans think and behave today.

UPDATE March 2008: It looks like the main author if this book, Satoshi Kanazawa, is a bit of a wingnut, and also may not be analyzing many of his statistics correctly. I stand by my review of the book here, but my reservations listed in it (especially that there is very little information about what many of the mechanisms of evolutionary psychology are) have become stronger with new evidence. Overall, I'm likely to look at his work more skeptically from now on.

You can see why that might be discomfiting: most of us like to think that we're independent actors, making decisions based on thought, and maybe influenced by our upbringing and our environment. Sometimes we are. But Alan S. Miller (the dead one, who got the project started) and Satoshi Kanazawa (the living one, who finished it) show how often we're not. If you're a creationist or think that all evil derives from patriarchal traditions and corporate media, this book will bug the hell out of you.

Publisher Peguin sent me the book to review at the suggestion of Darren Barefoot. Although my biology degree is a couple of decades old now, I find nothing in the fundamental premises of evolutionary psychology shocking. It only makes sense that, like those of all other animals (more so, since we depend so much on it), our human brain has evolved along with the rest of our body, adapting through natural selection to our environment.

Or, as Miller and Kanazawa point out, to what used to be our environment. We behave, make decisions, and organize ourselves the way we do today largely because it helped our ancestors survive and reproduce in Africa tens of thousands of years ago.

That's where things get interesting, and where the discomfort and controversy arise. Take this, from page 95:

Of course, diamonds and flowers are beautiful, but they are beautiful precisely because they are expensive and lack intrinsic value, which is why it is mostly women who think that diamonds and flowers are beautiful. Their beauty lies in their inherent uselessness; this is why Volvos and potatoes are not beautiful.

A major foundation of evolutionary psychology is that sex drives everything. Or, more accurately, that the differences between how men's and women's genes propagate to our descendants drives much of our behaviour, from the obvious (mating rituals) to the puzzling (wars, jobs, when we choose to travel, what we like to buy). We're just like dogs bred to be aggressive or good at herding sheep, or like birds and fish adapted to flocking and schooling, or predators that survive because natural selection molded their brains to know how to stalk and pounce and kill.

The result is many provocative statements about human beings:

• Divorced parents with children are playing a game of chicken, and it is usually the mother who swerves.
• Men do everything they do in order to get laid.
• Any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power as does the (male) ruler of the world.
• Clear evidence of women's promiscuity [...] is the size and shape of men's genitals and what men do with them.
• We believe in God for the same reason that men constantly think that women are coming on to them.
• It is the wife's age, not the husband's, that prompts [a man's] "midlife crisis."
• Religion is not an adaptation in itself but a byproduct of other adaptations. [...] The human brain [...] is biased to perceive intentional forces behind a wide range of natural physical phenomena [and thus] to see the hand of God at work.
• Humans are [...] born racist and ethnocentric, and learn through socialization and education not to act on such innate tendencies.
• Sometimes [a woman saying] "no" [to sex] really does mean "try a little harder."

Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters makes a reasonable case, with lots of reputable research backing it up, that much of the conventional wisdom of psychology and sociology is wrong. The authors and their evolutionary psychologist colleagues argue that many of the improper, cruel, unfair, and evil things (or, for that matter, altruistic, pleasant, equitable, and good things) that people do are not the result of childhood environments, cultural traditions, or power structures.

Rather, our behaviours today—whether our current ethics and morals judge them good or bad—are the same behaviours that helped our ancestors' genes propagate, and thus are the reason we're here now.

Men killing their wives, other men, and their stepchildren. Women wanting, and men liking, long lustrous blonde hair. Religiously motivated suicide bombers being almost exclusively young male Muslims. People of both sexes preferring blue eyes to brown. Women choosing older and more powerful men as mates, but more attractive men as lovers. Essentially all human societies permitting either polygyny (men with multiple wives or mistresses) or serial polygyny (men who marry, divorce, and remarry, usually to younger women). Young single women often traveling abroad to experience the world while their male cohorts tend to stay home and hate foreigners. All have explanations in evolutionary psychology, some more solid than others.

The writing in the book is sometimes a bit manic, as if the authors were yanking me as a reader from example to example, saying, "Look! Look! We're right again!" Some of their conclusions come with lots of convincing scientific evidence, not to mention theoretical predictions about human behaviour that turn out to be true. But others are apparently pure speculation. I also think many of their explanations would have been clearer using the past tense, rather than the present, to keep the role of our ancestral environment clear.

They do show that beautiful people tend to have more daughters, and why that makes sense, but the physiological mechanism of how it happens wasn't clear to me. And neither the authors nor their editors seem to know what "begs the question" is actually supposed to mean.

To be fair, Miller and Kanazawa take pains to note that many of the things we do make little sense in the modern world (meaning the fast-changing one we've been in for the past 10,000 years or so, since the invention of agriculture). But because those behaviours evolved over hundreds of thousands or millions of years before that, we can't help ourselves. And the authors also highlight some areas—homosexuality, declining birthrates in industrialized countries, the willingness to become a soldier—that their field can't explain very well.

We still love sweet and fatty foods, which were once rare and precious but are now overabundant and giving us health problems. Similarly, we behave in ways that begat us more children when living in small groups of hunter-gatherers in a sub-tropical savannah, but which may not be of similar benefit in a world of fast cars, 80-year lifespans, high explosives, supermarkets, birth control, jet travel, antibiotics, and Internet dating.

What made me uncomfortable about the book is that, as a bleeding-heart leftie, of course I want to believe that we are not so driven and constrained by our evolutionary history. But I'm also trained in biology and—even more after reading Miller and Kanazawa—it's clear to me that, like other animals, we must be.

But what we do is not always what we ought to do: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters reinforces repeatedly that facts (what is) do not determine morals (what should be). As a parallel, knowing that fleas spread bubonic plague doesn't make the plague desirable, and knowing that is key to combating the disease. But, conversely, the way we think things should be isn't necessarily the way they are either. Wanting human nature to compel us to treat each other fairly and well doesn't make that true. We have to find different reasons to make it happen, to overcome much of what is innate in us.

That is yet another lesson of the modern world that my brain, prehistoric as it is, has trouble handling.

Labels: biology, books, controversy, evolution, naturalselection, psychology

In a comment on one of my photos of the first real snowstorm of the season yesterday (it's almost all melted now, by the way), an Australian reader noted that he had never seen snow first-hand in his life.

That's a strange concept for any Canadian, but I started thinking about it and realized that not only did our hominid predecessors evolve in parts of Africa where it never snows, even today the great centres of human population—some of the most densely inhabited parts of China, the vast majority of India, Indonesia, almost all of Africa, the supercities of South America, and elsewhere—are also largely snow-free zones.

In other words, it has probably always been true that a big proportion, and likely the majority, of the human species has never experienced snow. And despite much easier travel, that is becoming more true as populations and climate shift. It's amazing that any number of us, from the Inuit, to the mountain dwellers of Peru and Afghanistan, to the bureaucrats in Ottawa, Vienna, and Ulan Bator, can handle the white stuff at all.

Does anyone have any data to back up my theory?

Labels: australia, environment, evolution, snow, travel, weather

UPDATE: I think Angela Gunn of USA Today (whom I think I met briefly back in 2005) has the best followup on Watson this week, and as a bonus she's actually read his new book right through. The Daily Telegraph has also termed his comments a symptom of "Nobel Syndrome."

The photo here is of James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA and winner of the Nobel Prize for it. He also appears to be quite the bigot, stating this week that he is:

...inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.

In other words, he thinks black people are just inevitably dumber than white people. He's wrong, quite wrong, in ways that many people have demonstrated over many decades.

His comments have set off quite a storm, as you would expect, and they are also far from his first controversial statements. I find his remarks both ignorant of the science on the subject (odd, given his supposed expertise) and morally repugnant, regardless of his esteemed achievements. I hope you do too.

Labels: biology, controversy, evolution, jameswatson, racism, science

It's not all that likely that any of the long-term side effects of chemotherapy (fatigue, hair loss, numbness, etc.) will show up on the first day, so it's no big surprise that I feel fine tonight after a few hours of medication at the Cancer Agency, and now a slow-infusing "baby bottle" hookup for the next two days. Here's the bottle:

Here's me wearing it:

I did have a bit of reaction at the Agency, but rather than the worst-case diarrhea, I merely developed a slightly runny nose and clammy, sweaty skin, which Lisa the nurse quickly handled with some atropine injections. Oddly, my blood pressure was also quite low (105 over 50 at one point). The systolic value isn't strange for me, but my diastolic is usually more like 70 or 75.

I'm also not sure whether I felt nausea. I was a little bleah a couple of hours after dinner, so I took an extra anti-nauseant just in case, but so far I feel much as I did yesterday. We'll keep an eye on that stuff.

For today's wacky links, we have:

• Vintage colour TVs (in the mid-1950s, a 19" colour television would set you back about $1100 USD—in 1950s dollars!)
• How to identify your iPod model (Apple has released between 32 and 34 in six years—the exact number depends on whether you count the latest Shuffles as new, and if the iPhone is an iPod or not)
• Colorectal cancer death rates are dropping (good news for me)
• Aquisition 2 is out
• Good quote: "Teaching biology without mentioning evolution is like teaching astronomy without mentioning gravity."

Labels: apple, astronomy, cancer, chemotherapy, evolution, fatigue, iphone, ipod, pain, science, television

This is an excellent written debate between American pundits Andrew Sullivan (iconoclastic gay right-winger and moderate Christian) and Sam Harris (well-known atheism activist and proponent of meditation) on the nature of religion and fundamentalism. It happened last spring, but I only just stumbled on it.

They continue to disagree at the end, but manage to spar more politely and interestingly than the usual shouting matches on the subject.

Labels: andrewsullivan, creationism, debate, evolution, religion, samharris

One of my recurring themes here recently has been the ways our Old World primate brains make it difficult for us humans to understand many basic things, including probability and risk, geological time, contingency, extremly large- or small-scale events, and so forth.

Here's another one, an excellent psychology article about why we resist some scientific ideas more than others (via Pharyngula). Coincidentally, Harvard history of science professor Steven Shapin addresses a similar topic on the CBC Ideas podcast this week called "Testing Science" (MP3 file). Essentially, research shows that...

...even one year-olds possess a rich understanding of both the physical world (a "naive physics") and the social world (a "naive psychology"). [...] These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. But these intuitions also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn.

However, some concepts don't work that way, even when they are far from obvious. For example:

[The existence of germs and electricity] is generally assumed in day-to-day conversation and is not marked as uncertain; nobody says that they "believe in electricity." Hence even children and adults with little scientific background believe that these invisible entities really exist.

That's interesting, because our evidence for those things is pretty indirect, however pervasive: light switches and televisions and computers work, and washing your hands helps prevent infection. But most people have never seen a germ, never mind an electron. It would seem, purely objectively, that being able to look at rock strata in a highway cut, or watch the patterns of a coin flipped over and over, or observe the similarities and differences between chimpanzees and humans at the zoo, or hummingbirds and dragonflies in the garden, would make concepts like deep time and randomness and biological evolution easier to understand than electricity or germ theory.

Yet they are not. Our brains are remarkable things, and one of the most remarkable things about them is that we can, if we work at it as we grow up and throughout our lives, help ourselves get around our own cognitive limitations.

Labels: biology, evolution, psychology, science

This is both scary looking and too awesome...

...but I think most people, like me, never thought that Pac-Man had teeth. (Via Bidi.)

Labels: biology, evolution, games, geekery, pacman, science, videogames

Via netdud, I read once again another highly sensible article from Bruce Schneier about how badly we as a society usually react to security threats. It's a strange contrast to, and yet also a perfect demonstration of, my post yesterday about the Air India bombing, where it seems that direct, credible, likely threats didn't receive the attention they deserved—while today we confiscate nail clippers and remove shoes at airport security in a way that is likely totally ineffective.

I've written repeatedly about this stuff over the years here on my blog: about how our African savannah brains are poorly equipped to deal with the risks we face in the modern world.

But in another essay, Schneier also makes the point that "security theatre," as he terms it, isn't always wasteful, because sometimes it makes our perception of our security more closely match the statistical reality. That is rare—most of the time it throws money away and skews our perceptions further from reality—but we do also have to take into account how safe we feel, as well as how safe we are.

Labels: biology, evolution, probability, psychology, security, terrorism

It's really long, but this court transcript (no really!) (via Pharyngula) provides a remarkably clear explanation, early on, of the processes the scientific community has developed over the past several hundred years to get better at figuring what's going on in the universe.

Later on, Dr. Kevin Padian, the paleontologist witness in question, goes into more detail about fossils, evolutionary biology, problems with proposals about intelligent design, and so on, with similar verve. I recommend you read the whole thing, but if you're short on time, just the Qualifications section will do.

Some quotes from that part:

I think the term "theory" [...] has to be looked at the way scientists consider it. A theory is not just something that we think of in the middle of the night after too much coffee and not enough sleep. That's an idea. And if you have a hypothesis, it's something that's a testable proposition, you can actually find some evidence that will help you to weigh it one way or the other.

A theory, in science [...] means a very large body of information that's withstood a lot of testing. It probably consists of a number of different hypotheses, many different lines of evidence. And it's something that is very difficult to slay with an ugly fact, as Huxley once put it, because it's just a complex body of work that's been worked on through time.

Gravitation is a theory that's unlikely to be falsified even if we saw something fall up. It would make us wonder, but we'd try to figure out what was going on there rather than just immediately dismiss gravitation.

[...]

For all the world, it looks like, you know, to us normal people, that the sun goes around the Earth. And for most people, it wouldn't make a difference whether the sun went around the Earth or it went around the moon, as Sherlock Holmes famously said to Watson. But when the renaissance scholars understood, found out that, in fact, the sun does not go around the Earth but the Earth and the planets go around the sun, it changed the way we look at the whole natural world in a very important and fundamental way.

And so part of the process of science is to discover things that will make a difference to our understanding of the natural world and not simply to reinforce appearances that are very difficult to test in an objective or testable sense.

And I really like this one:

If you are looking for direct ancestors, if you insist on an unbroken stream of intermediate fossils to document a case, I'm afraid that that's going to be difficult to get under any circumstances, but it's also equally impossible for the historical record of humans.

If we had to come up with evidence of every one of our direct linear or collateral ancestors and know everything about them, it would be impossible, yet we don't question the parentage of our friends and neighbors because they can't do that.

[...]

That seems like a very difficult standard of evidence to live up to. We can't do that with humans most of the time, and I'd be surprised if we could do it with animals that are 350, 400 million years old.

I just stayed up till almost three in the morning reading the whole thing, even in my chemo-sozzled state (it helps that I slept six hours earlier this evening). I do have to say that his slides could have used some work, but the strength of the words and ideas did their job, which was the point. Overall, it's a remarkable piece of written work—even more remarkable for being a transcript of courtroom speech.

Labels: biology, creationism, evolution, intelligentdesign, naturalselection, paleontology, science