Fit to be Pied

Maintaining the mischief

Hamelin, Germany, 1284 C.E. A child sits outside a house as a stranger approaches.

Child: Guten tag! Are you looking for my Papa?

Stranger: Why no, is he missing? I’ll help you search! [PROCEEDS TO CHECK POCKETS AND UNDER HAT]

Child: Nein, not like that!

Stranger: Where should I look, then?

Child: Nein, he’s not lost. You’re funny. Say, you look like a clown! Your clothes are all colorful. Do you do tricks?

Stranger: I am a bit of a trickster figure. But not right now. Be patient, and you’ll see.

Child: Well, if you like looking for things, there’s a lot to see in Hamelin: the river, the church, Herr Weidemann’s fat pig… I can’t show you around, though, because I have a bad leg. But the main thing you’ll see is rats. We have enough rats here to fill the Baumannshöhle. There’s a few right over there.

Stranger: I see.

Child: Sometimes I just sit and watch ‘em all day. There’s not a lot else for me to do anyway, since I can’t go run about with the other kids. The rats are all so different. There are boy and girl rats, of course, you can tell because of their little ratwursts.

Stranger: Not that one.

Child: Ja, that one has eine kleine vagina. But besides all that… They all squeak different. Even smell different. Some are covered in fleas, and some never seem to get a flea on ‘em. Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats… Sometimes I sing that like a little song.

Stranger: A lovely tune! You know, I’m a bit of a musician myself.

Child: Let me hear your music!

Stranger: Be patient. So are any of these rats your pets?

Child: Nein, I’ve tried to tame ‘em, or at least name ‘em, but I hardly ever see the same rat twice. I think they die pretty quick. Cats get ‘em, or people smash ‘em with clubs, or horses trod on ‘em. They nest so thick together, sometimes their tails get tangled. You see ‘em pulling each other this way and that, but they can’t hardly get anywhere. I figure those ones starve. But there are always more baby rats coming to take their place.

Stranger: So you’re a scholar of rats. Do you teach classes about them here in town?

Child: Nein! Nobody in Hamelin likes the rats. I suppose they’re right, they eat most of our food, and they bite, and you can catch fleas from ‘em easy. But what’s truly amazing isn’t how many of ‘em there are, it’s how many different kinds. Just like with people, no two are the same. Why is that, Herr Clown? What aren’t they all the same?

The Holy Guidebooks of the Fé Gnomes

I’ve been spending some time observing the local Fé gnomes. Have you heard of them? They are surprisingly abundant, but they live off in the woods and often escape notice. Roughly the size and shape of a butternut squash, with wispy hair and whiskers, stocky limbs, and bulbous noses. They wear weathered garments and tapered hats, and tromp about with a cheery if secretive demeanor. They’re fascinating yet challenging to study.

The gnomes are deeply religious. Their lives are guided by their faith, called Fé, which is based on sacred text. They spend much of their time in their dens, poring over the pages. These books are private, and sharing them is taboo, so it is difficult for an gnomologist like me to ever get a glance. Most of the time, I can only guess at the commandments based on how the gnomes behave. For example, I have never seen a gnome without their pointy hat, so I can only assume these are strictly required. The books themselves, though sacrosanct, do not constitute Fé. Fé is the embodied practice of the faith that comes from following the rules. The books are seen as Guides to Fé, and indeed are often emblazoned with a large “G” for this reason.

There is an interesting consequence of the taboo. Each gnome only ever reads their own book, created personally for them in infancy by their parents. In fact, when a gnome couple merge their books for the intimate conception of a new copy, it may be the first time they’ve even glimpsed another’s pages. This means that there can be differences among books. Expectant parents do make mistakes, after all, which then get carried down the generations. For example, some gnomes wear red hats, others blue. I believe this is due to an inadvertent word change that occurred ages ago. Some gnomes refuse to eat eggs, while others happily raid nests. Some trim their beards, while others let them grow indefinitely. And so on. As each gnome is primarily focused on their own adherence to Fé, they don’t spend a lot of time criticizing each other for what they must privately believe to be heinous sins. 

Whither Goes Social Media?

Tusks not Musks

Twitter, as you may have heard, is in trouble. Elon Musk has taken over. That’s not a deal breaker per se. If I refused to use services provided by sketchy magnates, I almost couldn’t function in today’s world. But in this case, it’s clear Musk has no real plan. His changes are making things worse, the people who know how to run the site are gone, users and advertisers are fleeing. To say nothing of the impending return of a certain disgraced ex-president. Twitter probably won’t die entirely, but it’s likely to become unusable. My corner of Twitter, mostly biologists, have largely moved to Mastodon. So even if I wanted to stay on Twitter, the conversations I want to follow won’t be happening there. And regardless, I have ethical concerns about staying. Why should I provide free content for the world’s richest man? And by refusing to regulate its users, the site now effectively gives tacit approval to racists and fascists. Who wants to endorse that?

Universal Homestead

Why am I even here?

I recently visited the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center. You probably know the main history, if only from the video game. Pioneers, covered wagons, and dysentery. My own life story is not so different. I mean, I’ve never had dysentery. But I’m a white man, born in the Midwest, now living in the Northwest. I felt perfectly entitled to move here, as did the 19th century settlers. My ancestors didn’t live on this land, but that never seemed to matter. I act like I have a right to be here. Do I? Do you?

On the Origin of Ideas

From minds before Darwin to the Darwin of the Mind…

I’ve been reading a lot about evolutionary thought before Darwin. The book Darwin’s Ghosts addresses this history thoroughly. Novels like The Great Unknown and The Signature of All Things offer remarkably rich details. This is a fascinating topic in its own right, but also really illustrative about the process of science in general. It’s got me wondering, what grand theories are now percolating in the minds of today’s thinkers, to eventually emerge later this century?

Evo-consciousness

Which scientific field is most closely tied to the environmental movement? It’s ecology, of course. To many people, the word “ecology” is practically synonymous with “saving the planet”. This is a bit odd and misleading, since ecology is simply an area of research, impartial to human values and policies. Recycling cardboard or protesting a pipeline might be important work, but they don’t make you an ecologist. Ecology, as I say in this ukulele song, is about “how nature charges her rent”. Ecologists study the interactions between living things and everything around them. Ecology is obviously something we must understand to create a sustainable society. But it’s not the only thing.

What about evolution? Evolutionary biology isn’t typically seen as a “green” science. Evolution is usually slow. It mostly concerns events that happened long ago. The cultural movement that most people associate with evolution is atheism. There’s also a worrying trend of alt-right racists embracing evolution for their cause. Pretty far from the left-wing hippies who tout ecology. But evolution is about change, and change is what we as a species must now confront. Which changes are too much, and which are tolerable? This is perhaps the question for the 21st century. Many of these changes are literally evolutionary. As we alter the climate and add new toxins to habitats around the world, species from microbes to mammals are adapting in response. We can’t stop this. Human-induced evolution is inevitable. The issue is how do we want evolution to proceed? What are the changes we do or don’t want to see over the coming generations? Evolution could be a helpful framework for evaluating our role in nature. What can an “evo” mindset do that an “eco” once cannot? Read on.

The Walrus and the Carpenter Assess the Aftermath

I’m famished, my dear Carpenter,
	I crave a shellfish snack!
Remember all those oysters that
	We ate some ages back?
Their beds once held a smorgasbord
	Which they now sorely lack.

Yes, Walrus, they have disappeared,
	And I can tell you why.
A population crashes when
	The organisms die.
As such, no birds fly overhead:
	We've culled them from the sky.

The time has come…
				Not this again.
	Your speeches bring me pain.
You obfuscate the issue when
	The cause is rather plain.
But why the sea is boiling hot?
	That’s easy to explain.

The sun is shining through the night
	And that can only mean
That we are in the Arctic, where
	The sea’s a hot tureen.
And this is scarcely odd, because
	It’s the Anthropocene.

Divine Abstract

Research?

In keeping with my longstanding interest in evolutionary origin stories, I wondered what the Great Story might look like as a scientific abstract. Enjoy.

Creation of a matter-based universe supporting sentient entities

Yahweh^1,2

¹Center for Experimental Genesis, Divine Research Institute, Omnipresence

²Other affiliations listed in Supplementary File S1

Only conscious minds possess intrinsic value, and thus sentience is the most favorable property that could theoretically exist. Creation of sentient beings de novo has proved challenging, and there is increasing interest in the development of new methods to achieve it. Presented here is a novel approach to generate sentience by first constructing a universe from matter, a physical substance made of atoms, which is infused with energy and suspended within spacetime. After determining the mathematical constants that would allow a sustained and dynamic reaction (code available upon request), the experimental universe was initiated. Atom positions were allowed to vary along each spacetime dimension, and elevated complexity was observed near the far end of the temporal axis. At one position in the three spatial dimensions, enriched for iron, oxygen, and silicon atoms, a set of sentient beings evolved. These conscious packets of matter (“living souls”), themselves enriched for carbon and hydrogen atoms, increased in number along the temporal axis. While living souls technically meet the definition of self-awareness, they exhibit several limitations owing to their emergence via a physical mechanism. First, their perception of their own cosmological role is rudimentary and impacted by self-generated delusions that appear to arise spontaneously. Second, they are bounded along the temporal axis (“mortal”). Finally, they must endure subjective experience which can be positive or negative relative to equanimity, and they can influence these experiences in each other, yielding an unending iterative feedback loop. The full implications of these limitations are beyond the scope of this paper. While effective, the genesis pipeline is remarkably inefficient, requiring >10⁸× more temporal units than are experienced by a typical living soul and >10⁵⁰× more atoms, most of which are not directly utilized. However, given the rarity and value of sentience, this methodology has numerous potential applications. Furthermore, there is no known upper limit for the proportion of a universe’s atoms that could ultimately constitute living souls if the reaction were to run indefinitely. These findings represent the first described conception of sentient matter via a semi-autonomous process and characterization of the resultant mortal living souls.

Runaway Bigotry

• 

  The face of privilege

We live in a world of severe racial inequalities. The murder of George Floyd last year launched a wave of protests, but of course that one wrongful death was just the tip of the iceberg. I recently read The Color of Law, which details how governments have deliberately discriminated against people of color when allowing access to housing, even far outside of the Jim Crow South. More glaringly, the United States is still recovering from a disastrous presidency drenched in thinly veiled hatred for anyone perceived as different. On average, black Americans suffer shorter lifespans, lower incomes, and harsher legal punishments than whites. So do Native Americans and other races. It’s hard to deny that racism is a huge problem. However, folks disagree on what to do about it. Some say, let the past be past. That is, we should just create a fair system that treats everyone equally going forward, instead actively correcting past injustices. Can’t we all just agree to not be racist, and then everything will be fine? That would be nice. But I don’t think that’s good enough. Instead, we need to be anti-racist and continue to work against bigotry through formal policies, perhaps indefinitely. For example, rather just ignoring race in university admissions and hiring, academia should spend time and effort recruiting a diverse community of scholars. Sometimes this stance gets pushback. Is it “reverse racism?” Does it merely perpetuate racial prejudice but in a new direction? Is the cure worse than the disease? I don’t think so. The problem of racism is so deeply rooted, we have to go out of our way to exterminate it.

Here’s an analogy from my field of evolutionary biology. Think about the elaborate lures animals use to attract mates. A peacock’s bejeweled tail. The twinkling lightshow of fireflies. The intricate sand mandalas sculpted on the sea floor by pufferfish. Why does evolution favor such things? They don’t help these organisms survive. They do help suitors eventually make babies, but why? Why does a peahen prefer a sire with an unwieldy tail over one with more practical utility? Perhaps the vibrant feathers indicate something about the peacock’s health, but surely there’s a more efficient way. Anyway, what’s the use of good health if your chicks will inherit tails that advertise them to every leopard in the forest? The answer is that only long-tailed chicks will have any hope of giving you grandchildren. Peafowl are locked into an ever-more-fabulous feedback loop. Peahens prefer showy tails, so it’s best to have sons with showy tails. And since only bedazzled grandsons will succeed, it’s best to have daughters who prefer mates with the genes to produce such grandsons. And so on. The situation reinforces itself. Both long feathers and the preference for them are advantageous, even though the advantages only exist in the minds of other peafowl. This process is called runaway sexual selection. And what does this have to do with racism? Read on.