An evolutionary cul-de-sac

SUBHEAD: Disappointments to my inner Neanderthal, who, wrinkling his jutting brow, mutters, What’s next?

By Brian Miller on 23 July 2017 for Winged Elm Farm -
(http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2017/07/23/on-becoming-an-evolutionary-cul-de-sac/)


Image above: Chain drum lifter rated for 2,000pound loads available from Amazon.com available for under $100. From (https://www.amazon.com/Vestil-CDL-2000-Chain-Lifter-Capacity/dp/B002KLJUSK).

I was 16 when I put brand new brakes on my car. It took most of an afternoon, and it was a task that finally completed gave me a real sense of accomplishment. True, I had a couple of small parts left over. But I was young and I operated under the assumption that the auto parts store had given me either spares or parts that didn’t go with my model.

Once finished, I climbed in the driver’s seat, turned the ignition, and took off down the road. Wow! It was a smooth ride and I felt great. That is, until I came up fast to my first stop sign and applied the brakes.

Odd feeling, pushing down on the brake pedal at 50 miles an hour and encountering no resistance. It’s a memory I can still summon readily to this day. Fortunate for me, the auto engineers had built in a backup breaking mechanism called the emergency brake, a handy invention that I deduced might be best to deploy … quickly.

I give you this preamble as evidence that even though a person comes from solid civil engineering stock, basic mechanical skill is not an inherited gene. We all have the friend, often on speed dial, who is great at teasing out the workings of ‘most any thingamajig.

But my solutions to mechanical failures are victories hard won. The puzzles that five-year-olds routinely solve on Facebook in a cute two minutes elude me — sometimes for hours, and sometimes for many years.

The Neanderthals who lurk in my ancestry were a smartish but conservative group of bipeds. They developed a reliable tool kit over the millennia to make their lives run smoother. But then they apparently had a community meeting and said,

Enough is enough, and they settled in for the next 100,000 years and made no new improvements. I kind of admire that about them; perhaps we could learn a thing or two from that approach to technology.

But then there is my H. sapiens DNA. It allows me, eventually, to not only see a solution but also want to implement it.

Yesterday, for instance, we were unloading 55-gallon-drum feed barrels. Cindy backed up the tractor and boom pole to the bed of the truck. Dangling from the boom pole was a nifty contraption called a barrel lifter.

This simple invention is the best $40 we ever spent. It has two metal “hands” at the end of a chain that grab the edge of the barrel. Once the boom pole is raised, the barrel lifter and barrel in tow swing up and out of the truck bed. No muscling required.

The first barrel was a breeze. The second barrel presented a slight problem. It didn’t completely clear the bed of the truck. Taking on my finest Thinker pose, I struggled for a solution. After some minutes, the little gray cells began to sing: It’s the weight, I deduced triumphantly!

Each 300-pound feed barrel removed took more weight off the truck suspension, thereby raising the bed of the truck a couple of inches and causing each subsequent barrel to drag along the tailgate when hoisted. But voilà!

A few adjustments to the tractor’s three-point hitch, which in turn shortened the top link’s angle after each barrel, gave the boom pole a higher lift. Problem solved.

This Eureka moment may not mean much to you engineering types. But small successes like this one are huge to my sapiens self. Victories for H. sapiens, yet disappointments to my inner Neanderthal, who, wrinkling his jutting brow, mutters, What’s next? Will he be wanting to invent block and tackle?

Perhaps. But I must leave that astonishing accomplishment for later. I’ve just had a brain flash that there just might be a better way to knap flint! Stay tuned.

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The Way

SUBHEAD: Patterns of regenerative thinking augur regenerative patterns of living and the reverse is also true.

By Albert Bates on 4 June 2017 for The Great Transition -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-way.html)


Image above: A stone Garden Moongate. From (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/90212798755255527/).

Ten years ago, Brian Eno suggested a word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. The word he came up with is “scenius.” Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes.

In a Wired interview  in 2011, Kevin Kelly described the idea this way:

"Really, we should think of ideas as connections,in our brains and among people. Ideas aren’t self-contained things; they’re more like ecologies and networks. They travel in clusters."

Historical examples are the Yosemite rock climbers Camp 4 in the 1930s, Building 20 at MIT, the Algonquin Round Table, Silicon Valley, Soho, Burning Man, the North Beach of the Big Island in the 1950s, Greenwich Village, the Panhandle flats in the Haight in the 1960s, Glastonbury, Akwesasne, the affinity groups at Seabrook, the bioregional congresses, the World Social Fora, the UN climate summits, and the Amazonian Shamanism conferences.

We have been lucky to stumble into a number of those scenes; so many we sometimes wonder if we are Forrest Gump.

Lucky stars have led us to be present at the birth of the Noho loft art and music scene, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the Winter Soldier hearings, a blithering Nixon at sunrise on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the first Earth Day in Central Park, the Longest Walk, the conspiratorial Leningrad public baths on Saturday nights, the bioregional Consejos de Visiones at Meztitla and Condor, sundry Earth Summits, the ecovillager gatherings at Findhorn in 1995 and Istanbul in 1996, Viridian design, the post-millennium peak oil conferences, and the Kinsale College birthing of Transition.

The scenius we are most familiar with, although it encompasses and interpenetrates many of these others, is of course The Farm.

 As one of the longest floating crap games of the past century, it remains a dynamically evolving scene: a creative hub for the world midwives’ conspiracy, the cabal of alternative education advocacy, an incubator for progenitors of cool tech, and lately, a climate-reversal counterdevelopment seeding group, including, but not limited to, we ecovillage, regrarian, permaculture and alt.fuels evangelists.

The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors that Kelly described:

• Mutual appreciation — risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — as soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success — when a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties — the local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.

What Brian Eno called scenius, Stephen Gaskin used to call “the juice.” In a paper we delivered to a history conference in Illinois in 1987, we attempted to describe a series of intellectual and technological steps that guided the first 16 years of The Farm, but cautioned that we could not try to fathom how it came into being.

“How juice moves from place to place and time to time would be an interesting exploration,” we said.

Lao Tsu (literally the “Old Boy” because he was born with a small white beard), put these ideas into poetry. We think it silly when we have to take off shoes and give up our toothpaste at the airport, but when Lao Tsu tried to leave China they told him he couldn’t leave until he had written down all he knew.

In the Tao Te Ching, the 72 gems of wisdom left with a border guard, Lao Tsu summarized his findings in order that he be allowed to leave.

The first verse is the Old Boy’s disclaimer: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
Alan Watts observed that this famous opening line also showed Lao Tsu to be a punster, but you have to understand a bit of Chinese to get it.

“Tao” means the way, or course, of nature, but it also means to speak. So in Chinese, the first character is this:

The first character is “the way.” The next is “can” or “can be.”

The third is again “the way,” but it could also be “spoken”

What Lao Tsu says in one entendre is that he can’t really describe the way, because it is ineffable; if he could describe it then it would not be true. The way that can be spoken is not the way.
In the other entendre Lao Tsu says it cannot be taken as a way. The way that can be “way-ed,” or traveled, is not the way.

"Do you think you can make the world a better place? I do not think you can. It is already perfect."

— Lao Tsu

This is also the point Kelly labored to underscore, which is that scenes, and hence scenius, cannot be created. The best we can hope for is to recognize them when, for whatever extraordinary confluence of good fortune, they seem to arise. And when that happens, the best we can do is to not step on them.

That may be so, but maybe not. Scenius with the grand historicity of a Yosemite Camp 4 cannot be stamped into existence. But the conditions to potentialize scenius can be laid by design. Daniel Wahl, in Designing Regenerative Cultures, provides these basic ingredients:

• Transformative Innovation
• Biologically Inspired
• Living Systems Thinking
• Health and Resilience

In his forward to Wahl’s book, David Orr offers a nuanced challenge. It is Patricia Scotland’s “And, so?” question.  We have developed an ecosystem of solutions. How do you get this to scale? Holistic design is akin to the core nature of religion, Orr says, “a discipline binding us all together in our stewardship of the Earth as a shared habitat and the underlying assumption to be shared is that we are more worthy together than apart.”

Orr then takes it a step farther. He says the five billion poor, soon to be 7 or 9 billion, must be empowered with free energy, free clean water, free pressed-brick shelters, and free Internet access. In return they will innovate and create infinite wealth with a regenerative aspect. We hear this, and we shudder a bit.

This is also what Bucky Fuller used to say, and many others before and after him. It’s become kind of holy grail   in Silicon Valley or at Burning Man — liberating ideas will liberate masses. It philosophically underpins the UN Sustainable Development Goals — the essence of neoliberalism. But….

If I am worthy then show me the way.

— A Fed board member’s prayer.  

First, the whole modern amusement park ride is scaffolded on cheap, available, abundant energy, soon to be a bygone. Sooner than you imagine, those Microsoft server farms that are allowing you to read this will brown out, flicker, and die. Kevin Kelly again:

A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without LEDs or cathode ray tubes, without solid state computer chips, without telephone lines, without long-distance signal repeaters, without electrical generators, without high-speed turbines, without stainless steel, iron smelters, and control of fire. None of these concrete inventions would exist without the elemental inventions of writing, of an alphabet, of hypertext links, of indexes, catalogs, archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recapitulate a web page you have to recreate all these other functions. You might as well remake modern society.

Second, imagining seven billion hominids empowered with free everything opens the gates of Hell unless they are restrained from reliving the patterns of their collective past, only worse.

Historically, when provided abundant food and energy the hairless two-leggeds have been as locusts.

Without some countervailing ethic of restraint, should Orr’s wish comes true, this fragile blue orb becomes Easter Island.

Wahl says that which must change is more mental than physical, and in this we are agreed. Lately with the climate march for science, Paul Hawken’s Drawdown tour, and the debate over fake news and science suppression we have been hearing, over and over, people we respect make pledges of allegiance to the gods of science as if they were saying a rosary.

But we know that scientists — and even more-so academics —  are inherently conservative defenders of the rote and two or more steps behind the vanguard.

Who are the vanguard?

Artists like Brian Eno, or the cabal that gathers in a scenius to thrash out the hard truth. Moreover, they then endeavor to actually make the change they've lived go viral.

Patterns of regenerative thinking augur regenerative patterns of living and the reverse is also true: living together or coming together can change your mind or open new frontiers. We have witnessed this phenomenon in ecovillage communities all over the world.

Designing the future — any future beyond mid-century  — requires redesigning a collective consciousness, our psychodemographic. We are already doing this with the hardware gateways to cyberamphibian transits, and with permaculture, ecosystem restoration camps and ecovillages in the non-virtual world.

Ecovillages do it with eco-covenants; social contracts that build all eight forms of capital,  externalizing nothing.

Our travels to Marrakech and Zhejiang last year made clear to us that the role of ecovillages is key. They are a viral carrier — patient zero.

 Don’t be put off by the hippy or elitist veneers of many of the prototypes; those were leading wedge experiments by the fringe-dwelling creatives.  Any change for humanity arrives only after extreme vetting. At that point they become nearly inevitable.

To quote Wahl,

“Sustainability is not a fixed state to reach and then maintain, it is a community-based learning process aimed at increasing the health and resilience of our communities, our bioregional economies, ecosystems, and of the planetary life-support system as a whole.”

We say “nearly inevitable” because there are still countercurrents and eddies that can drown us. There are no guarantees. The odds against success are high.

Feeling the wind at our back, we edge the kite closer to the power zone.

"If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up."

— Lao Tsu

This post is the last of a series we dubbed The Power Zone Manifesto. It is a series of building blocks that describe our existential climate dilemma and the only possible way to escape it. We’ll continue to post to The Great Change and Medium on Sunday mornings and 24 to 48 hours earlier for the benefit of donors to our Patreon page. If Power Zone makes it to print, our Power-Up Patreon donors will receive an autographed copy..

The missing ocean plastic

SUBHEAD: Newly-evolved microbes may be breaking down ocean plastics more than we know.

By Michael LePage on 25 May 2017 for new Scientist -
(https://www.newscientist.com/article/2132650-newly-evolved-microbes-may-be-breaking-down-ocean-plastics/)


Image above: Plastic simply continues to evolve into new ecosystems. From (http://www.techtimes.com/articles/9538/20140702/plastic-debris-covers-88-percent-of-worlds-oceans-much-lower-than-expected-say-scientists.htm).

Plastic. There should be hundreds of thousands of tonnes of the stuff floating around in our oceans. But we are finding less than expected – perhaps because living organisms are evolving the ability to break it down.

Plastic production is rising exponentially, so ever more of it should be ending up in the oceans, says Ricard Sole, who studies complex systems at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

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But surveys of areas where floating plastic accumulates, such as the North Atlantic gyre, are not finding nearly as much plastic as expected.

Mystery of the missing plastics

In fact, there’s only a tenth to a hundredth as much plastic as expected – and the amount of floating plastic does not appear to be increasing. “The trend should be there,” Sole says.

This lack of trend cannot be explained by physical processes, according to his team’s mathematical models. Instead, they propose that there has been a population boom in microbes that have evolved the ability to biodegrade plastic.

Other researchers agree that surveys are finding far less plastic in the oceans than expected. However, they say there are several other possible explanations for this “missing plastic”.

Surprisingly, even if ocean plastic is being degraded much faster than thought, it is not clear that this is a good thing. “It is difficult to say,” says Matthew Cole of Exeter University in the UK.

For instance, biodegradation could be speeding up the breakdown of large pieces of plastic into lots of very tiny pieces, which might have a greater overall impact.

Plastic also contains various additives that could get released and enter the food chain if the plastic part biodegrades, says environmental chemist Alexandra Ter Halle of the Laboratoire des IMRCP in France.

“To really tackle the plastic problem, we need to stop it getting into the oceans in the first place,” Cole says.

The ‘platisphere’

In theory it is possible that some microbes have evolved the ability to break down plastics. Studies by Linda Amaral-Zettler of the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research show that the microbes colonizing floating plastic are quite distinct from those in the surrounding water, and suggest some are feeding on pollutants.

In effect, the plastic is creating a whole new ecosystem that Amaral-Zettler and colleagues call “the plastisphere”.

But when Ter Halle looked at the DNA of the organisms on floating plastic in the North Atlantic, she didn’t find any microbes known to be capable of breaking down plastic. That could be because they have not yet been discovered of course – there could be millions of unknown microbes still.

Amaral-Zettler and Ter Halle think it is more likely that floating plastic is simply sinking to the seafloor as colonising organisms weigh it down, or breaking into such microscopic pieces that it is not being caught in the nets of research vessels. It could also be being swallowed by living organisms, or carried by currents to unexpected parts of the ocean.

The sinking explanation might also be compatible with his findings, says Sole. His study does not prove that microbes are metabolising plastic, but the lack of an upward trend can only be explained by a biological response that can increase in proportion to the amount of plastic.

If a physical process was responsible, there would still be an upward trend, he says.

It is possible that some plastic is being biodegraded, Amaral-Zettler says, but it could be over too long time-scale – a hundred years, say – to explain the missing plastic. And even if it is happening much faster, there would still be a problem.

Plastics are polluting every part of the ocean, from the beaches of remote islands to the deepest parts of the sea. Large pieces of plastic can accumulate in the stomach of animals such as turtles, which then starve to death.

While there may be less than expected, large amounts of floating plastic are found in the subtropical gyres where surface waters circle.

While terms such as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” conjure up visions of litter-covered seas, much of the floating plastic in the ocean consists of tiny pieces just a few millimetres wide or smaller, which are not obvious to the naked eye at all. Its impact on marine life is not clear, either.

Various schemes have been proposed to remove this plastic from the oceans, but trying to clean up the oceans is impractical, says Amaral-Zettler. “We need to look at prevention and reduction at the start.”

Journal reference: Biorxiv, DOI: 10.1101/135582

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Human lineage from Greece?

SUBHEAD: Fossils cast doubt on early human lineage originating in Africa.

By Will Dunham on 23 May 2017 for Ekathimerini.com -
(http://www.ekathimerini.com/218639/article/ekathimerini/news/fossils-cast-doubt-on-human-lineage-originating-in-africa)


Image above: Graecopithecus freybergi lived 7.2 million years ago in the dust-laden savannah of the Athens Basin. This view from Graecopithecus freybergi’ place of discovery, Pyrgos Vassilissis, to the southeast over the plain of Athens and under a reddish cloud of Sahara dust; in the background: Mount Hymettos and Mount Lykabettos. Illustration by Velizar Simeonovski. From (http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/graecopithecus-freybergi-hominin-04888.html).

Fossils from Greece and Bulgaria of an ape-like creature that lived 7.2 million years ago may fundamentally alter the understanding of human origins, casting doubt on the view that the evolutionary lineage that led to people arose in Africa.

Scientists said on Monday the creature, known as Graecopithecus freybergi and known only from a lower jawbone and an isolated tooth, may be the oldest-known member of the human lineage that began after an evolutionary split from the line that led to chimpanzees, our closest cousins.

The jawbone, which included teeth, was unearthed in 1944 in Athens. The premolar was found in south-central Bulgaria in 2009. The researchers examined them using sophisticated new techniques including CT scans and established their age by dating the sedimentary rock in which they were found.

They found dental root development that possessed telltale human characteristics not seen in chimps and their ancestors, placing Graecopithecus within the human lineage, known as hominins. Until now, the oldest-known hominin was Sahelanthropus, which lived 6-7 million years ago in Chad.

The scientific consensus long has been that hominins originated in Africa. Considering the Graecopithecus fossils hail from the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean may have given rise to the human lineage, the researchers said.

The findings in no way call into question that our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago and later migrated to other parts of the world, the researchers said.

"Our species evolved in Africa. Our lineage may not have," said paleoanthropologist Madelaine Böhme of Germany's University of Tübingen, adding that the findings "may change radically our understanding of early human/hominin origin."

Homo sapiens is only the latest in a long evolutionary hominin line that began with overwhelmingly ape-like species, followed by a succession of species acquiring more and more human traits over time.

University of Toronto paleoanthropologist David Begun said the possibility that the evolutionary split occurred outside Africa is not incongruent with later hominin species arising there.

"We know that many of the mammals of Africa did in fact originate in Eurasia and dispersed into Africa at around the time Graecopithecus lived," Begun said. "So why not Graecopithecus as well?"

Graecopithecus is a mysterious species because its fossils are so sparse. It was roughly the size of a female chimp and dwelled in a relatively dry mixed woodland-grassland environment, similar to today's African savanna, alongside antelopes, giraffes, rhinos, elephants, hyenas and warthogs.

The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Evolution becomes Conscious 1/5/13
Ea O Ka Aina: One time Through the Bottleneck 7/21/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Hobbits and Menehunes 5/9/09

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Evolution in the Fast Lane

SUBHEAD: Some species are evolving far more quickly than Darwin ever imagined. Is it fast enough?

By Jane Braxton on 22 January 2015 for Discover Magazine-
(http://discovermagazine.com/2015/march/19-life-in-the-fast-lane)


Image above: Reznick’s study of Trinidad guppies revealed that the fish can evolve rapidly. Photo by Paul Bentzen. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: This article is a bit dated. Unfortunately, we don't have 20 generations to adapt to climate change caused by global warming. I doubt if we have 2 generations. Adapt now and avoid the crush at the bottleneck up ahead.]

As a graduate student in the late 1970s, David Reznick set out on a modest quest to test a key part of the theory of evolution. Reznick wanted to examine Charles Darwin’s concept of the struggle for existence — specifically, how predator-prey interactions shape the evolution of new species.

Enthusiastic and ambitious, he intended to do it in the wild. “I wanted to watch evolution happen,” says Reznick, now an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside.

So in 1978, he flew to Trinidad in search of guppies. Armed with a topographic map traced onto a piece of notebook paper, he headed into the Caribbean island’s rugged Northern Range.

Working under a canopy of tropical trees amid squawking birds, multicolored butterflies and boas, he collected 1,600 guppies, a colorful fish species so prolific that the females can produce dozens of babies every three to four weeks. Reznick was curious to see if predators could affect genetic adaptation in guppies over a short time.

It was not considered a promising experiment. A century earlier, Darwin had assumed that evolution takes tens to hundreds of thousands of generations to produce new species — a plodding path so slow it is essentially invisible.

That theory still held sway when Reznick began grad school in 1974. Scientists had studied evolution in controlled laboratory experiments, but watching it happen in a natural setting in a human lifetime was considered improbable at best, more likely impossible.

“I was hanging my career on the idea that you could change the environment and see things evolve significantly in time to get tenure,” Reznick says. “People thought my thesis was cute, but doubted I would live long enough to see the results.”

Undaunted, in 1981 Reznick returned to Trinidad’s swift streams to test his theory. He transplanted guppies from a site where they had to fend off cichlids, an aggressive, wide-mouthed fish, to a new site with no predators and no other guppies. Reznick also introduced cichlids to guppy sites without predators.

He found that within four years — a mere six to eight generations — male guppies had significantly changed their reproductive patterns. Those transplanted from a high-predation site to a stream without predators were larger, matured later and reproduced more slowly. Where Reznick had introduced predators, the guppies adapted by maturing at an earlier age. Survival became a race to produce more babies.

“The risk of death alters the ways organisms allocate resources for survival,” Reznick says.

The results of his federally funded study prompted what he calls one of his proudest moments in science: a National Enquirer story with the headline, “Uncle Sam wastes $97,000 to learn how old guppies are when they die.”

Actually, Reznick chuckles, “I learned a great deal more than that.”

His work with the guppies changed his thinking about how quickly species can evolve. And it helped launch a paradigm shift in scientists’ thinking about evolution.

In the decades since Reznick’s first trip to Trinidad, other studies have demonstrated a fast drive toward adaptation that scientists have come to call “rapid evolution.” Researchers who once assumed evolution required millennia are documenting species adapting in mere decades, or even shorter time frames.

Mosquitoes that colonized the London Underground in 1863 are now so different they can no longer mate with their above-ground relatives.

Chinook salmon from Alaska to California needed just a human generation to become smaller and shorter-lived after an increase in commercial fishing in the 1920s. Adaptation is happening right under our noses, in our lifetimes.


Image above: Green anole gecko lizards have adapedt to the invasion of brown anoles in only 20 generations. Photo by Seth Patterson. From original article.

Most recently, evolutionary biologist Yoel Stuart found that green anole lizards on islands in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon needed just 20 generations to adapt to an invasion of brown anoles.

Driven to higher perches by the invaders, the green anoles became better at clinging to branches by developing larger toepads with more scales — in just 15 years. It’s more evidence of “evolutionary change on observable time scales,” says Stuart, now at the University of Texas at Austin.

Many of the extraordinary adaptations happening around us may be because of us. As human activity disrupts climate patterns and modifies habitats, rapid evolution appears to be an increasingly common strategy for survival.

The effect of warming temperatures on tawny owls is one of the first documented examples of adaptation to climate change in a wild population. Finnish ornithologist Patrik Karell and others found in a 2011 study that the coloration of the owls morphed in response to warming winters in Finland.

Tawny owls come in two colors, pale gray and reddish brown. Until recently, natural selection favored the pale shade, which gave owls a better chance at survival in a snowy landscape. As winters became milder, Karell noticed a steady increase in the proportion of reddish-brown owls.

“Even subtle alterations shape how organisms evolve,” Reznick says.

Species are evolving at speeds that Darwin could not have imagined. But not all species can adapt quickly enough to evade harm. When a non-native species arrives in an ecosystem, the native species often are ill-equipped to defend against the foreign invader.

Ash trees in North America, for example, lacked “evolutionary accommodations” to protect against the emerald ash borer when it arrived from Asia, Reznick says. As a result, tens of millions of ash trees across the continent are threatened by the green beetle, which is thought to have hitchhiked to the U.S. in wood crating or pallets.

Today’s evolutionary biologists have the analytic power to track species adaptation like never before. Advances in molecular biology allow them to identify the very genes that help individuals move away from their ancestors as they adapt to new conditions.

For example, a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School and Princeton identified BMP4 as the key gene that sculpts the beaks of the Galapagos finches that gave Darwin his first inklings of the theory of evolution.

“We are no longer forced to infer evolution from its historical footprints in the fossil record or from dusty collections of moths,” Reznick says.

Reznick and his team continue to transplant guppies in the tropical streams of Trinidad.

Along with other new tools of evolutionary biology, such as DNA analysis, they are using a technique Reznick developed to mark individual guppies so they can more easily recapture them later. This marking method allows his team to reconstruct the pedigree of individual guppies and measure their reproductive success.

The research is answering questions about how predator-prey interactions shape evolving species, but it has also generated new questions: If environmental forces can change guppies, could the guppies themselves also change their ecosystems? Intrigued, Reznick has turned his attention to how ecological and evolutionary processes interact.

Now he’s not only monitoring guppies; he’s also watching their predators to see how the interaction changes the ecosystem. His team wants to know how guppies adapt to predators as well as how predators evolve in response to guppies — the ecological cause-and-effect relationships.

“What hardly anyone’s thinking about is that the animals and plants left behind may have evolved and are different from what they were before predators were eliminated,” Reznick says. This raises fundamental questions about ecological restoration, invasive species, natural selection and what else changes when the fittest actually survive.

Documenting the rapid evolution of species in natural settings turns Darwin’s “mystery of mysteries” into a real-time scientific adventure.

And while Reznick has succeeded in watching evolution happen, he’s beginning to think his earlier calculations underestimated how quickly species actually adapt in nature. “What’s exciting,” says Reznick, “is that it is now feasible to incorporate evolution into our thinking about how the world is changing.”
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Introducing the Coywolf

SUBHEAD: The coywolf is a new animal species is evolving right before our eyes in America.

By Travis Gettys on 30 OCtober 2015 in alterNet -
(http://www.alternet.org/culture/new-species-evolving-right-our-eyes-ultra-successful-mix-wolves-coyotes-and-dogs-0)


Image above: A coywolf in the wild. From PBS trailer below.

A new species combining wolves, coyotes and dogs is evolving before scientists’ eyes in the eastern United States. The coywolf now numbers in the millions, according to research.

Wolves faced with a diminishing number of potential mates are lowering their standards and mating with other, similar species, reported The Economist.

The interbreeding began up to 200 years ago, as European settlers pushed into southern Ontario, clearing the wolf's habitat for farming and killing a large number of the wolf families who lived there. This also allowed coyotes to spread from the prairies, and the farmers brought dogs into the region.

Over time, wolves began mating with their new, genetically similar neighbors. The resulting offspring — which has been called the eastern coyote, or to some, the coywolf — now number in the millions, according to researchers at North Carolina State University.

Interspecies-bred animals are typically less vigorous than their parents, the Economist reported, if the offspring survive at all. That’s not the case with the wolf-coyote-dog hybrid, which has developed into a sum greater than the whole of its parts.

At about 55 pounds, the hybrid animal is about twice as heavy as a standard coyote, and its larger jaws, faster legs and muscular body allows it to take down small deer and even hunt moose in packs in both open terrain and dense woodland.

An analysis of 437 hybrid animals found that coyote DNA dominates its genetic makeup, with about one-tenth of its DNA from dogs, usually larger dogs such as Doberman pinschers and German shepherds, and a quarter from wolves.

The animal’s cry starts out as a deep-pitched wolf howl that morphs into higher-pitched yipping, like a coyote.


Image above: Trailer from PBS video about coywolf at (http://kcpt.org/science/meet-the-coywolf-on-nature/).

The coywolf's dog DNA may carry an additional advantage. Some scientists think the hybrid animal is able to adapt to city life — which neither coyotes or wolves have managed to do — because its dog ancestry allows it to tolerate people and noise. Coywolves have spread into some of the nation’s largest cities, including New York, Boston and Washington.

The interbreeding allows the animal to diversify its diet and eat discarded food, along with rodents and smaller mammals, including cats, and they have evolved to become nocturnal to avoid humans.
Some of the animals are also smart enough to learn to look both ways before crossing roads.

Not all researchers agree the coywolf is a distinct species, arguing that one species does not
interbreed with another, although the hybrid’s existence raises the question of whether wolves and coyotes are distinct species in the first place.

But scientists who have studied the animal say the mixing of genes has been much faster, extensive and transformational than anyone had noticed until fairly recently.

“[This] amazing contemporary evolution story [is] happening right underneath our nose,” said Roland Kays, a researcher at North Carolina State.


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Steady State - Is it a miracle?

SUBHEAD: Would a living in a steady-state economy constitute a real miracle?

By Herman Daly on 6 August 2015 for the Daly News -
(http://steadystate.org/would-the-steady-state-economy-be-a-miracle/)


Image above: An illustration for the Mars One program. In 2013 the Mars One organization named 1058 potential colonists for its program. In 2014 they expected the final colonists selection will be through a Reality Show. Wouldn't you rather use the money this program would goble up to make life livable on Earth. From (http://wordlesstech.com/mars-one-astronaut-selection-will-be-a-reality-show).

Many people think that advocating a steady-state economy is like wishing for a miracle. I understand their reasoning and take their point—in the present era of growthism it does seem rather like advocating a miracle. But that raises the question: exactly what is a miracle? And how many other miracles are we wishing for these days?

Of course science, by definition of its method, rules out the existence of miracles, if by miracle we mean either something not explainable physically in terms of efficient causation, or else overwhelmingly improbable. Consequently, if a miracle did exist science could not see it. Looking for a miracle with science is like looking for darkness in the narrow beam of a flashlight.

Consciousness, reason, and good and evil are undeniably real, yet we have no convincing explanation for them in terms of efficient causation or biophysical evolution. And the origin of first life (as opposed to its subsequent evolution into different forms) also qualifies as a miracle by the above definition.

Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, thinks the origin of life on earth is so physically improbable (miraculous) that it must have arrived here from space—”directed panspermia” is the elegant name for this miraculous sidereal ejaculation. Science considers the whole amazing experience of life on earth as just a cosmic accident.

Given that life on earth is, according to science, eventually going to end, why make extraordinary efforts to prolong it, especially if, as the modern intelligentsia assures us, the universe and all life are just temporary accidents? We, as non-miraculous random events, can have no objective idea of what a good life is. Therefore we cannot know how much per capita consumption is sufficient for a good life.

Instead of a steady-state economy the default economic rule of scientific materialism seems to be, “more and more (especially for me) while things last.” Yes, I know that most scientific materialists are good people, but I am suggesting that their goodness must have origins other than their professed materialism.

For some of us materialism is just a methodology, not an ultimate worldview in which divine purpose might replace cosmic random. For Christians, for example, hope in the promise of New Creation (Rom. 8; 1 Cor.15) substitutes for despair over the ultimate impossibility of preserving this Creation forever, as well as over our repeated failures to protect it while it lasts. Like this Creation, New Creation would be a miracle—a generalized resurrection of this mortal Creation.¹ 

 It is a grace-based hope that flies in the face of the hard facts of evil, entropy, and finitude. It is a religious belief that death, decay, and oblivion are not the last words, and therefore it is classed as superstition in the modern secular academy, along with other religions.

Belief that the end of the world will occur soon, with lots of life-support capacity left unused (wasted), is a tenet both of some scientific catastrophists, as well as some religious fundamentalists, who consequently consider themselves exempt from the responsibility of Creation stewardship. Why sacrifice for a non-existent beneficiary, they logically ask?

However, Pope Francis, for one, in his Laudato Si strongly affirms the value of this Creation, however transitory, and in this regard he speaks for most Christians and many other religious people, as well as for some thoughtful atheists.

Most scientists (and some theologians) will not be happy with talk about miracles, or with hope in New Creation. They fear that such hope will undercut efforts to prolong the present Creation, which they believe is all there is or ever will be.

Yet when faced with the ultimate heat death of the universe, plus the increasing likelihood of self-destruction well before then, and with the meaninglessness implicit (and increasingly explicit) in their materialist cosmology, they sometimes flinch.

They look for optimism (if not hope) somewhere within their materialism. They invent the hypothesis of infinitely many (unobservable) universes in which life may outlive our universe.

They were led to this extraordinary idea in order to escape the implications of the anthropic principle—which argues that for life to have come about by chance in our single universe would require far too many just-so coincidences among the magnitudes of basic physical constants.

To preserve the idea of chance as reasonable cause, and thereby escape any notion of Creator or Telos, they argue that although these coincidences are indeed miraculously improbable in a single universe, they would surely happen if there were infinitely many universes. And of course our universe is obviously the one in which the improbable events all happened.

If you don’t believe that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, you can claim that infinitely many monkeys pecking away at infinitely many typewriters had to hit upon it someday. That such a deification of random would take the meaning and pleasure out of reading Hamlet—or studying anything in “creation” at all—is a carefully repressed thought.

The idea of infinitely many universes, or monkeys for that matter, is speculative—at least as speculative as the idea of New Creation. The only evidence that could be offered to support hope for the future miracle of New Creation would be the occurrence of a similar miracle in the past, namely the present Creation.

Science understandably tries to account for this Creation, as far as reasonable, in its own materialistic terms, and of course from the beginning rejects “miracle” or God as an explanatory category. I am not objecting to that self-imposed, defining limitation of science.

I am just saying that New Creation is not a scientific concept rooted in efficient and material causation. It is a religious hope rooted in the idea of final causation and ultimate purpose. As such it is neither contradictory to nor dependent upon science.

Whether ad hoc postulation of infinitely many unobservable universes violates the self-imposed limitation of science, and belongs more to the category of miracle, I will leave to the reader’s judgment. But the working hypothesis of scientific materialism, however fruitful it has been, should not be sanctified as the Ultimate Metaphysics of Chance.

Nor does adding Darwinian natural selection to Mendelian random mutation alter the picture, since the selecting criteria of environmental conditions (other organisms and geophysical surroundings) are also considered to be a product of chance.

Mutations provide random change in the genetic menu from which natural selection picks according to the survival value determined by a randomly changing environment.

Such a Metaphysics of Chance precludes explanation of some basic facts, pushing them into the category of miracle:

• First, that there is something rather than nothing;
  
• Second, the just-right physical “coincidences” recognized in the anthropic principle;
  
• Third, the “spontaneous generation” of first life from inanimate matter (which has apparently never happened again);
  
• Fourth, the creation of an incredible amount of specified information in the genome of all the irreducibly complex living creatures that evolved from the relatively simple information in the first living thing (in spite of the fact that random change destroys rather than creates information);
  
  Fifth, the emergence of self-consciousness and rational thought itself (if my thoughts are ultimately the product of random, why believe any of them, including this one?);|
  
• Sixth, the amazing correspondence between abstract mathematical thought and empirical natural order; and
  
• Seventh, the innate human perception of right and wrong, of good and bad, which would be meaningless in a purely material world.

 Explaining these facts “by chance” strains credulity at least as much as “by miracle.”

Metaphysical humility remains a virtue for both science and religion. The longevity of a steady-state economy is a metaphysically humble goal appropriate for limited creatures in the face of ignorance and mystery.

Christianity and science both recognize the fundamental finitude and frailties of this Creation. Christianity offers ultimate hope in New Creation; science necessarily remains mute about that.  

Scientism, however, seeing no limits to this Creation, offers, instead of hope, the campaigning optimism of, for example, the Coming Singularity of the digital “new creation” with immortal silicon-based consciousness, or IBM’s new creation of “building a smarter planet,” or NASA’s new creation of colonizing Mars.

A moment’s reflection, however, shows that a spaceship, and a space colony, as well as a population of infinitely long-lived silicon “people,” must all operate as the strictest of steady-state economies.

If we cannot manage a steady-state economy on the large and forgiving earth out of which we evolved and to which we are evolutionarily well adapted, then how likely are we to manage it on a barren rock under alien conditions, including extreme cold and intense radiation?

Yet large amounts of taxpayer’s money is wasted in pursuit of the unnecessary miracle of colonizing Mars, while nothing is invested in the necessary and smaller miracle of attaining a steady-state economy on our finite earth. The pseudo-religion of scientism leads those who reject a steady-state economy on earth as a “miracle” to imagine even bigger miracles to escape it.

Notes:
1. For more on the theology of New Creation, see, Jürgen Moltmann, Ethics of Hope. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. 2012; John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2003; and N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope. New York: Harper Collins. 2008.


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Time for The Last Guardian

SUBHEAD: Can a video game character become a real friend? Should you care?

By Laura Hudson on 21 June 2015 for Boing Boing -
(http://boingboing.net/2015/06/22/e3-2015-best-games.html)


Image above: A young boy meets who is to become his companion - Trico - a dog, cat, chicken beast the size of a dragon. Click to embiggen. From (http://www.gamesradar.com/last-guardian-believe-games/).

The annual video game onslaught of E3 is finally over, and as expected, it served up plenty of big-budget sequels, like Halo 5, Fallout 4, Dishonored 2, Uncharted 4, and of course, the Final Fantasy VII remake that made everyone lose their collective minds.

But a lot of other cool things happened at E3, like yarn, robot dinosaurs, and a giant, awesome dog, not to mention a comparatively remarkable number of titles with female protagonists. Join me now on a whirlwind tour of all the exciting new games that weren't popular franchise names followed by numbers!

The moment I saw the beginning of The Last Guardian trailer I said aloud, "oh man, please let this entire game be about this giant dog." Great news: it is. People have been waiting for The Last Guardian since 2007, largely because it's the newest title from Fumito Ueda, the guy who made super beloved puzzle-ish action games like Ico and Shadow of Colossus.

You play as a young boy who befriends a giant dog-cat-bird and has to help guide him across a lot of precarious platforms, and if the trailer is any indication it will simultaneously trigger both your "oh god, don't kill the dog!" and "oh god, don't kill the kid!" anxieties near constantly.

Where: PlayStation 4

When: 2016


Video above: Recent trailer for The Last Guardian. From (https://youtu.be/zXLZvsSmBIs).


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Chicken Odyssey

SUBHEAD: It seems chickens didn't cross the Pacific to reach South America.

By Scott Neuman on 18 March 2014 for NPR News -
(http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/03/18/291182073/study-the-chicken-didnt-cross-the-pacific-to-south-america)


Image above: Kauai chicken (moi) with mariachi hat. Mashup by Juan Wilson.

An analysis of DNA from chicken bones collected in the South Pacific that the ubiquitous bird first arrived in South America aboard an ancient Polynesian seafarer's ocean-going outrigger.

Instead, researchers who sequenced mitochondrial DNA from modern and ancient chicken specimens collected from Polynesia and the islands of Southeast Asian found those populations are genetically distinct from chickens found in South America.

"[The] lack of the Polynesian sequences [of DNA] in modern South American chickens ... would argue against any trading contact as far as chickens go," says Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, who is a co-author in the study published this week in

(For a treatise on the origins of the domesticated chicken, and how the bird came to play such a key role in the human diet, )

The finding may shed light on one of the most vexing questions in modern anthropology: Did South Pacific seafarers, who evidence shows settled island chains separated by vast stretches of ocean, reach the coast of South America before the time of Christopher Columbus?

The evidence is contradictory.

In , researchers looked at chicken bones found at an archeological site in Chile that were radiocarbon dated to pre-Columbian times (between 1321 and 1407). DNA analysis of those specimens found what scientists thought was a genetic mutation unique to Polynesian chickens — which would point to a Pacific origin for the birds — only to discover later that the mutation is common in all chickens.

Alice Storey, an archeologist who led the 2007 study, is skeptical of the latest results. She says the new study focuses too much on modern DNA.

"Using modern DNA to understand what people were doing in the past is like sampling a group of commuters at a London Tube station at rush hour," Storey is . "The DNA you get is unlikely to provide much useful information on the pre-Roman population of London."

Nat Geo writes:

"As humans moved around the world, they brought chickens along with them. So modern chicken populations aren't necessarily representative of past populations, Storey said. "We know from his journals [that] Cook moved chickens all over the Pacific, as did other Europeans, so DNA from chickens living on Pacific islands today has little to tell us about what people were doing in Polynesia, the Pacific, and in Southeast Asia before A.D. 1600."

The South American sweet potato, common in modern times in the Pacific islands, has long been viewed as a key piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that Polynesians made contact with the Americas in pre-Columbian times.

(Incidentally, Thor Heyerdahl, who built and to bolster his now discredited hypothesis that it was South Americans who settled the South Pacific, and not the other way around, used the sweet potato evidence to support his claim, too).

But the absence in South America of Pacific rats, known to have accompanied Polynesians on their island-hopping voyages of colonization, is a strike against the theory.

So, where did the Pacific islands chicken come from?

"We can show that the trail heads back into the Philippines," Cooper tells Nat Geo. "We're currently working on tracing it farther northward from there. However, we're following a proxy, rather than the actual humans themselves."

As for the South American bird, that's still a mystery.
.

The pit of my stomach

SUBHEAD: Avocados, papayas, mangoes and yucca should have gone extinct millions of years ago.

By Natashia Hakimi on 9 December 2013 for TruthDig.org -
(http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/avocados_shouldve_gone_extinct_millions_of_years_ago_20131209)


Image above: Painting of a family of ambelodon, a gomphothere proboscidean in midground, by Sam Matternes, 1964. From (http://rhamphotheca.tumblr.com/post/11197204477/the-gomphotheres-and-the-avocado-most-plants-bear).

The Gomphotheres and the Avocado
Most plants bear fruit so that animals can eat them and then disperse their seeds. Avocados, and a few other fruits, are too large (or rather have seeds too large) to be eaten and be dispersed by any animals that are extant (currently in existence). These large seeded fruits, that are found throughout the Americas, evolved along with the large mammals of the Pleistocene epoch (the “Pleistocene Megafauna”), like Gomphotheres, other proboscideans, and Giant Ground Sloths. These animals went extinct around 10,000 years ago, and the Avocados lost their chief dispersers. Many plants went extinct along with the megafauna, but some, like avocados, found new dispersers (like humans and slightly smaller mammals). The geographic range of many of the fruits that survived decreased greatly, but they managed to hold on. (From source of image above.)

Many don’t know that if it weren’t for homo sapiens’ avocado fetish, their favorite fruit would have been wiped off the face of the planet by now. It’s common knowledge that fruits spread their seed through animals’ digestive tracts, and avocados are no exception. In order for their seeds to be planted far enough from their “parent” tree, fruits depend on animals to eat them, and then leave their seeds elsewhere. 

However, avocados’ huge, lethal pits present a modern day problem for most animals since most can’t reach, chew or digest the massive brown seeds at the core of the creamy fruit. So how is it the delicious green fruits are still found in dishes all over the world?

According to writer Maria Popova on her blog Brain Pickings:

...apparently, avocados coevolved with ground sloths and were originally eaten by gomophotheres — elephant-like creatures that lived during the Miocene and Pliocene, between 12 million and 1.6 million years ago, who happily reaped the fruit with their hefty trunks, crunched them with their massive teeth, and passed the seeds comfortably through their oversized digestive tract.

The problem, of course, is that gomophotheres no longer roam the Earth — and yet avocados still exist.

 Popular science writer and evolutionary biology champion Connie Barlow writes:

Avocado’s strategy for propagation made a great deal of sense throughout the long life of its lineage — until the present moment. Even after thirteen thousand years, avocado is clueless that the great mammals are gone.

For the avocado, gomophotheres and ground sloths are still real possibilities. Pulp thieves like us reap the benefits. Homo Sapiens will continue to mold the traits of the few species of genus Persea it prefers.

Ultimately, however, wild breeds will devolve less grandiose fruits, or else follow their animal partners into extinction.

And avocados aren’t the only vegetation that have been around past their due date.

Apparently, mangoes, papayas and yucca are also evolutionary anachronisms that have survived natural selection thanks to humans’ hankering for them.

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A peculiar absence of bellybones

SUBHEAD: Intelligent beings descended from five-eyed, single-tentacled Opabinia were possible, but they didn’t happen.

By John Michael Greer on 3 July 2013 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-peculiar-absence-of-bellybones.html)


Image above: Rendering of an Opabinia, a single tentacled, five eyed arthropod species from the Cambrian period - a half a billion years ago. From (http://greenanswers.com/question/what-most-interesting-animal-you-have-seen-picture/).

The fixation on imaginary “perfect storms” critiqued in last week’s post is only one expression of a habit of thinking that pervades contemporary American culture and, to a lesser extent, most other industrial societies. I’ve referred to this habit in a couple of posts in this series already, but it deserves closer attention, if only to help make sense of the way that individuals, institutions, and whole societies so often get blindsided these days by utterly predictable events.

Like several of the other themes already explored in this sequence, the habit of thinking I have in mind was explored by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. His way of discussing it, though, relies on turns of phrase that don’t translate well into English, and philosophical concepts that were familiar to every reader in 1918 Germany and completely opaque to most readers in 2013 America.

To make sense of it, I’ll need to reframe the discussion by way of an excursion into deep time, so we can talk about the difference between what can happen and what does happen.

Unlike the Marcellus shale, the Barnett shale, and some of its other distant geological cousins, the Burgess shale doesn’t contain any appreciable amounts of oil or natural gas. What it does contain is a vast number of delicate fossils from the Cambrian period. It’s been argued that your ancestors and mine are there in the Burgess shale, in the form of a tiny, wriggling whatsit called Pikaia with a little strip of cartilage running down its back, the first very rough draft of what eventually turned into your backbone.

There are plenty of other critters there that are unlike anything else since that time, and it’s perfectly plausible to imagine that they, rather than Pikaia, might have left descendants who evolved into the readers of this blog, but that’s not what happened.

Intelligent beings descended from five-eyed, single-tentacled Opabinia were possible; they could have happened, but they didn’t, and once that was settled, a whole world of possibilities went away forever. There was no rational reason for that exclusion; it just happened that way.

Let’s take a closer look at Pikaia, though. Study it closely, and you can just about see the fish that its distant descendants will become. The strip of cartilage runs along the upper edge of its body, where fish and all other vertebrates have their backbones. It didn’t have to be there; if Pikaia happened to have cartilage along its lower edge, then fish and all the other vertebrates to come would have done just as well with a bellybone in place of a backbone, and you and I would have the knobbly bumps of vertebrae running up our abdomens and chests.

Once Pikaia came out ahead in the struggle for survival, that possibility went wherever might-have-beens spend their time. There’s no logical reason why we don’t have bellybones; it simply turned out that way, and the consequences of that event still constrain us today.

Fast forward 200 million years or so, and a few of Pikaia’s putative descendants were learning to deal with the challenges and possibilities of muddy Devonian swamps by wriggling up out of the water, and gulping air into their swim bladders to give them a bit of extra oxygen. It so happens that these fish had four large fins toward the underside of their bodies.

Many other fish at the time had other fin patterns instead, and if the successful proto-lungfish had happened to come from a lineage with six fins underneath, then amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals would have six limbs today instead of four.

A six-limbed body plan is perfectly viable—ask any insect—but the vertebrates that ventured onto land had four, and once that happened, the question was settled. Nothing makes six-legged mammals impossible, but there aren’t any and never will be. In an abstract sense, they can happen, but in the real world, they don’t, and it’s only history that explains why.

Today, another 400 million years later, most of the possible variables shaping life in this planet’s biosphere are very tightly constrained by an intricate network of ecological pressures rooted in the long history of the planet.

Those constraints, among other things, drive convergent evolution—the process by which living things from completely different evolutionary lineages end up looking and behaving like each other. 100 million years ago, when the Earth had its normal hothouse climate and reptiles were the dominant vertebrates, the icthyosaurs, a large and successful family of seagoing reptiles, evolved what we now think of as the basic dolphin look; when they went extinct and a cooling planet gave mammals the edge, seagoing mammals competing for the same ecological niche gave us today’s dolphins and porpoises.

Their ancestors, by the way, looked like furry crocodiles, and for good reason; if you’re going to fill a crocodile’s niche, as the protocetaceans did, the pressures that the rest of the biosphere brings to bear on that niche pretty much require you to look and act like a crocodile.

The lesson to be drawn from these examples, and countless others, is that evolution isn’t free to do everything that, in some abstract sense, it could possibly do. Between the limits imposed by the genetics of the organism struggling to adapt, and the even stronger limits imposed by the pressures of the environment within which that struggle is taking place, there are only so many options available, and on a planet that’s had living things evolving on it for two billion years or so, most of those options will have already been tried out at least once.

Even when something new emerges, as happens from time to time, that doesn’t mean that all bets are off; it simply means that familiar genetic and environmental constraints are going to apply in slightly different ways. That means that there are plenty of things that theoretically could happen that never will happen, because the constraints pressing on living things don’t have room for them.

That much is uncontroversial, at least among students of evolutionary ecology. Apply the same point of view to human history, though, and you can count on a firestorm of protest.

Nonetheless, that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do in this blog over the last seven years—to point out that historical change is subject to limits imposed by the historical trajectories of societies struggling to adapt, and the even stronger limits imposed by the pressures of the environment within which that struggle is taking place; worse still, to point out that societies have an equivalent of convergent evolution, which can be studied by putting different societies side by side and comparing their historical trajectories, and that this reveals otherwise untraceable constraints and thus allows meaningful predictions to be made about the future of our own civilization.

Each of those proposals offends several of the most basic assumptions with which most people nowadays approach the future; put them all together—well, let’s just say that it’s no surprise that each weekly post here can count on fielding its quota of spit-slinging denunciations.

As regular readers of this blog know, a great many of these quarrels arrange themselves around the distinction I’ve just drawn. Whether we’re talking about 2012 or near-term human extinction or the latest claim that some piece of other of energy-related vaporware will solve the world’s increasingly intractable energy and resource shortages, my critics say, “It could happen!” and I reply, “But it won’t.”

They proceed to come up with elaborate scenarios and arguments showing that, in fact, whatever it is could possibly happen, and get the imperturbable answer, “Yes, I know all that, but it still won’t happen.”

Then it doesn’t happen, and the normal human irritation at being wrong gets thrown in the blender with a powerful sense of the unfairness of things—after all, that arrogant so-and-so of an archdruid didn’t offer a single solitary reason why whatever it was couldn’t possibly happen!—to make a cocktail that’s uncommonly hard to swallow.

There’s a reason, though, why these days the purveyors of repeatedly disproved predictions, from economists through fusion-power proponents to believers in the current end of the world du jour, so constantly use arguments about what can happen and so consistently ignore what does happen. It’s a historical reason, and it brings us a big step closer to the heart of this sequence of posts.

When Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God to a mostly uninterested 19th century, as I mentioned in an earlier post in this sequence, he was convinced that he was doing something utterly unprecedented—and he was wrong. If he’d been a little more careful about checking his claims against what he’d learned as a classical philologist, he would have remembered that the gods also died in ancient Greece in the fourth century BCE, and that the rationalist revolt against established religion in the Greek world followed the same general course as its equivalent in western Europe and the European diaspora two millennia or so later.

Put the materialist philosophers of the Greek Enlightenment side by side with the corresponding figures in its European equivalent, or line up the skeptical barbs aimed at Homer’s portrayal of the gods and goddesses of Greece with those shot at the Bible’s portrayal of the god of Christianity—by Nietzsche among others!—and the similarities are hard to miss.

What’s more, the same thing has happened elsewhere. India went through its rationalist period beginning in the sixth century BCE, giving rise to full-blown atomist and materialist philosophies as well as an important school of logic, the Nyaya; it’s indicative of the tone of that period that the two great religious movements founded then, Buddhism and Jainism, in their earliest documented forms were wholly uninterested in gods.

The equivalent period in ancient China began about a century later, with its own achievements in logic and natural science and its own dismissal of formal religion—sacrifices and rites are important for social reasons, Confucius argues, but to busy oneself excessively with them shows that one is ignorant and unreasonable.

It’s a standard element of the trajectory of literate civilizations through time. Every human society comes out of the shadows of its origins well equipped with a set of beliefs about what does happen. Since most human societies in their early phases are either wholly innocent of writing, or have lost most of a former tradition of literacy in the collapse of some previous civilization, those beliefs are normally passed down by way of the oldest and most thoroughly proven system of information storage and transfer our species has invented—that is to say, mythology: a collection of vivid, colorful stories, usually in verse, that can be learned starting in early childhood and remembered letter-perfect into advanced old age.

Since the information storage capacity of myths is large but not limitless, each myth in a mature mythology is meant to be understood and interpreted on several levels, and learning how to unpack the stories is an essential part of education as an adult in these societies.

For human societies that rely on hunter-gatherer, nomadic pastoral, or village horticultural economies, mythology is amply suited to their information storage and transfer needs, and it’s rare for these to go looking for other options. Those societies that take to field agriculture and build urban centers, though, need detailed records, and that usually means writing or some close equivalent, such as the knotted cords of the old Incas. Widespread public literacy seems to be the trigger that sets off the collapse of mythic thinking.

Where literacy remains the specialty of a priesthood jealous of its privileges, among the ancient Maya or in Egypt before the New Kingdom, writing is simply a tool for record-keeping and ceremonial proclamations, but once it gets into general circulation, rationalism of one kind or another follows in short order; an age of faith gives way to an age of reason.

That transformation has many dimensions, but one of the more important is a refocusing from what does happen to what can happen. At the time, that refocusing is a very good thing.

Literacy in an age of faith tends to drive what might be called the rationalization of religion; myths get written down, scribes quarrel over which versions are authentic and what interpretations are valid, until what had been a fluid and flexible oral tradition stiffens into scripture, while folk religion—for the time being, we can define that messy category “religion” in purely functional terms as the collection of customary rites and beliefs that go with a particular set of mythic narratives—goes through a similar hardening into an organized religion with its own creed and commandments.

That process of rigidification robs oral tradition of the flexibility and openness to reinterpretation that gives it much of its strength, and helps feed the building pressures that will eventually tear the traditional religion to shreds.

It’s the rise of rational philosophy that allows people in a literate civilization to get out from under the weight of a mummified version of what does happen and start exploring alternative ideas about what can happen. That’s liberating, and it’s also a source of major practical advantages, as life in a maturing urban civilization rarely fits a set of mythic narratives assembled in an older and, usually, much simpler time. It becomes possible to ask new questions and speculate about the answers, and to explore a giddy range of previously unexamined options.

That much of the story is hardwired into the historical vision of contemporary Western culture. It’s the next part of the story, though, that leads to our present predicament. The wild freedom of the early days of the rationalist rebellion never lasts for long. Some of the new ideas that unfold from that rebellion turn out to be more popular and more enduring than others, and become the foundations on which later rationalists build their own ideas.

With the collapse of traditional religions, in turn, people commonly turn to civil religions as a source of values and meaning, and popular civil religions that embrace some form of rationalist thought, as most do, end up imbuing it with their own aura of secondhand holiness. The end result of the rationalist rebellion is thus a society as heavily committed to the supposed truth of some set of secular dogmas as the religion it replaced was to its theological dogmas.

You know that this point has arrived when the rebellion starts running in reverse, and people who want to think ideas outside the box start phrasing them, not in terms of rational philosophy, but in terms of some new or revived religion.

The rebellion of rationalism thus eventually gives rise to a rebellion against rationalism, and this latter rebellion packs a great deal more punch than its predecessor, because the rationalist pursuit of what can happen has a potent downside: it can’t make accurate predictions of the phenomena that matter most to human beings, because it fixates on what can happen rather than paying attention to what does happen.

It’s only in the fantasies of extreme rationalists, after all, that the human capacity for reason has no hard limits. The human brain did not evolve for the purpose of understanding the universe and everything in it; it evolved to handle the considerably less demanding tasks of finding food, finding mates, managing relations with fellow hominids, and driving off the occasional leopard.

We’ve done some remarkable things with a brain adapted for those very simple purposes, to be sure, but the limits imposed by our ancestry are still very much in place.

Those limits show most clearly when we attempt to understand processes at work in the world. There are some processes in the world that are simple enough, and sufficiently insulated from confounding variables, that a mathematical model that can be understood by the human mind is a close enough fit to allow the outcome of the process to be predicted. 

That’s what physics is about, and chemistry, and the other “hard” sciences: the construction of models that copy, more or less, the behavior of parts of the world that are simple enough for us to understand. The fact that some processes in the world lend themselves to that kind of modeling is what gives rationalism its appeal.

The difficulty creeps in, though, when those same approaches are used to try to predict the behavior of phenomena that are too complex to conform to any such model. You can make such predictions with fairly good results if you pay attention to history, because history is the product of the full range of causes at work in comparable situations, and if A leads to B over and over again in a sufficiently broad range of contexts, it’s usually safe to assume that if A shows up again, B won’t be far behind.

Ignore history, though, and you throw away your one useful source of relevant data; ignore history, come up with a mental model that says that A will be followed by Z, and insist that since this can happen it will happen, and you’re doomed.

Human behavior, individual as well as collective, is sufficiently complex that it falls into the category of things that rational models divorced from historical testing regularly fail to predict. So do many other things that are part of everyday life, but it’s usually the failure of rational philosophies to provide a useful understanding of human behavior that drives the revolt against rationalism.

Over and over again, rational philosophies have proclaimed the arrival of a better world defined by some abstract model of how human beings ought to behave, some notion or other of what can happen, and the actions people have taken to achieve that better world have resulted in misery and disaster; the appeal of rationalism is potent enough that it normally takes a few centuries of repeated failures for the point to be made, but once it sinks in, the age of reason is effectively over.

That doesn’t mean that the intellectual tools of rationalism go away—quite the contrary; the rise of what Spengler called the Second Religiosity involves sweeping transformations of religion and rational philosophy alike. More precisely, it demands the abandonment of extreme claims on both sides, and the recognition of what it is that each does better than the other. What comes after the age of reason isn’t a new age of faith—not right away, at least; that’s further down the road—but an age in which the claims of both contenders are illuminated by the lessons of history: an age of memory.

That’s why, a few centuries after the rationalists of Greece, India, and China had denounced or dismissed the gods, their heirs quietly accepted a truce with the new religious movements of their time, and a few centuries further on, the heirs of those heirs wove the values taught by the accepted religion into their own philosophical systems. That’s also why, over that same time, the major religions of those cultures quietly discarded claimsthat couldn’t stand up to reasonable criticism.

Where the Greeks of the Archaic period believed in the literal truth of the Greek myths, and their descendants of the time of Socrates and Plato were caught up in savage debates over whether the old myths had any value at all, the Greeks of a later age accepted Symmachus’ neat summary—“Myths are things that never happened, but always are”—and saw no conflict at all between pouring a libation to Zeus the Thunderer and taking in a lecture on physics in which thunderbolts were explained by wholly physical causes.

That state of mind is very far from the way that most people in the contemporary industrial world, whether or not they consider themselves to be religious, approach religious beliefs, narratives, and practices.

The absurd lengths to which today’s Christian fundamentalists take their insistence on the historical reality of the Noah’s ark story, for example, in the face of conclusive geological evidence that nothing of the sort happened in the time frame the Biblical narrative provides for it, is equaled if not exceeded by the lengths to which their equal and opposite numbers in the atheist camp take their insistence that all religions everywhere can be reduced to these terms.

Still, I’d like to suggest that this rapprochement is the most likely shape for the religious future of a declining industrial world, and that it also offers the best hope we’ve got for getting at least some of the achievements of the last three centuries or so through the difficult years ahead. How that process might play out is a complex matter; we’ll begin discussing it next week.
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Hawaiian Oopu climb waterfalls

SUBHEAD: Native Hawaiian gobies use mouth sucker to climb waterfalls to get to upper stream habitats.

By Jan TenBruggencate on 4 January 2013 for Raising Islands -
(http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2013/01/hawaiian-gobies-suck-to-climb-waterfalls.html)


Image above: A male oopu nopili in a Hawaiian stream. From (http://fishhabitat.org/partnership/hawaii-fish-habitat-partnership).

Young Hawaiian goby fish are able to climb waterfalls using a remarkable adaptation related to their feeding mechanism.

A new study on the `o`opu nōpili, one of Hawai`i’s five freshwater gobies, reviews the adaptation under the impenetrable title, “Evolutionary Novelty versus Exaptation: Oral Kinematics in Feeding versus Climbing in the Waterfall-Climbing Hawaiian Goby Sicyopterus stimpsoni.”

The authors are Heiko Schoenfuss of Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota and Joshua Cullen, Takashe Maie and Richard Blob of Clemson University in South Carolina.

They note that species that live in extreme habitats—like the steep, rugged, rocky Hawaiian streams with their tendency to flash flooding—often develop specialized traits to handle those conditions.

In the case of the nōpili, also called the rockclimbing goby, they adapted existing physical features to new uses. An oral sucker used to scrape algae off rocks for food, in the nopili’s case, is also used to help them “inch” up waterfalls.

Like other gobies, fused ventral fins provide them with a belly-side sucker that helps them cling to rocks. But the nōpili has something more. Instead of having a mouth that faces forward like many fish, the nōpili mouth faces down, and when traveling, it uses that mouth to hold on to the surface.

Is it a feeding mechanism adapted for climbing waterfalls, or a waterfall climbing feature that also happens to help the animal feed? That’s not clear, but it is clear that the downward-facing, sucking mouth gives the nōpili a nice advantage. And it is different from the other Hawaiian gobies.

While the others tend to suck their food off the rocks, the nōpili’s unique mouth allows it to scrape the algae. That means it eats a somewhat different diet from the others—that it has its own ecological niche.

It also lets it get to unique places:

“The oral sucker facilitates use of a novel mechanism for accessing upstream habitats above waterfalls. This form of locomotion has been termed ‘inching’ and requires alternate attachment of oral and pelvic discs to the rocky substrate, providing a slow, but steady, method of climbing that, in the Hawaiian species S. stimpsoni, allows individual fish to scale waterfalls up to 100 m tall,” the authors write.

For more on the `o`opu nōpili, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources has a page on the anatomy of the nōpili here.

Here is a University of Hawai`i website with some images of the Hawaiian gobies.

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Evolution Becomes Conscious

SUBHEAD: It has been said that we are going to be the first species that is able to scientifically monitor our own extinction.

By Molly Scott Cato on 5 January 2013 for Gaian Economics-
(http://gaianeconomics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/evolution-become-conscious.html)


Image above: Print of illustration by Ernst Haekel (1867) titled "The Modern Theory of the Descent of Man" From (http://www.etsy.com/listing/86407125/the-modern-theory-of-the-descent-of-man).

I’m going to start by saying something about science. On Monday I listened to Evan Davies interviewing fisheries minister Richard Benyon about his decision to oppose the latest EU fisheries proposal which Benyon claimed he was doing ‘on scientific grounds’. Davies brought in the top fisheries scientist from Defra, who argued for the EU proposal. Evan Davies seemed genuinely perplexed by the inability of the scientists to agree. He was seeking a ‘right’ answer, that was scientifically proved and unassailable.

Years ago I put together a report called ‘I Don’t Know Much About Science But I Know What I Like’. It’s Martin Amis’s joke but I’ve always enjoyed it. The reason I enjoy it is that it achieves with wit and brevity the task of challenging the right of science, usually in this context meaning statistical evidence, to trump other forms of thought.

Caroline Lucas has said that we are going to be the first species that is able to scientifically monitor our own extinction. Consecutive reports from the IPCC suggest that she is right about this, but I am a bit more optimistic. My optimism organises itself under my latest personal mantra: ‘Join the Evolution’ and it works like this.

We are unique in being a self-conscious animal. When other animals receive indications that they are reaching the limits of their evolutionary niche they respond to these by finding a new niche, or by failing to reproduce, or otherwise by ensuring that their numbers decline. As humans we are too clever for that. We can use our clever minds and our technology to keep pushing the boundary outwards, ignoring and filtering out the clear evidence that the ecological safety-limits have been exceeded.

So as a self-conscious animal we need to evolve self-consciously. We need to find a way to get a collective grip on ourselves, to stop believing our own fantasies, to get back down to earth. This is what I mean by ‘joining the evolution’, and I would argue that it is a desire to do something like this that has brought you here today.

So I have nothing against science, and I think being able to prove that resources are not limitless and have some idea of the scope of the problem we are facing is vitally important in convincing those trapped in the scientistic mind-set. But it is not going to save us. We need much more human solutions to do that.

[IB Editor's note: I recently read a chapter 3, "Darwin's Dilemma: The Odyssey of Evolution", in Stephen Jay Gould's book "Ever Since Darwin" (1973)  - In it he discusses how the word "evolution" came to describe Darwin's theory of the natural change and differentiation among living species and how it has been mistakenly interpreted by many since.-

 "Ironically, however, the father of evolutionary theory stood almost alone in insisting that organic change led only to increasing adaptation between organisms and their own environment and not to an abstract ideal of progress defined by structural complexity or increasing heterogeneity-never say higher or lower. Had we heeded Darwin's warning, we would have been spared much of the confusion and misund­erstanding that exists between scientists and laymen today. For Darwin's view has triumphed among scientists who long ago abandoned the concept of necessary links between evo­lution and progress as the worst kind of anthropocentric bias. Yet most laymen still equate evolution with progress and define human evolution not simply as change, but as increas­ing intelligence, increasing height, or some other measure of assumed improvement."]

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