Distancing

“After prolonged suffering the eyes become dull and lack expression, and are often slightly suffused with tears. The eyebrows not rarely are rendered oblique, which is due to their inner ends being raised. This produces peculiarly-formed wrinkles on the forehead, which are very different from those of a simple frown; though in some cases a frown alone may be present. The corners of the mouth are drawn downwards, which is so universally recognized as a sign of being out of spirits, that it is almost proverbial.” (Charles Darwin, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals)

When we read about disasters across the world, there is often a distancing effects. These do not happen to us or to people whom we know; indeed, were it not for the news stories, we would barely know about them at all.

Every so often there are images, as in the past, which reach out to us in the pain of those individuals, whether caught in natural disasters, or suffering from the results of human atrocities – caught in the crossfire of warfare, or trying to flee dictatorial regimes.

There is a strong appeal in the face of an individual, a child, scared and crying, those of fugees worn down and weary, or battle scarred and full of despair.

A lot of people know Charles Darwin for his seminal work “Origen of Species”. But just as important was his ground breaking work “T he Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” published in 1871. In this book, he traces the commonality of expressions, and how our range of expressions have developed from our evolutionary past.

It is the result of the collation of vast amounts of material, including responses across the world, to a set of photographs which Darwin had taken depicting human facial expressions. It as probably the largest study of its type. And what Darwin found was that most human facial expressions are universal and not cultural. It was also a milestone in the history of photography, the first time that it had been used in a scientific study like this.

Darwin also found that facial expressions are part of a whole behavioural response, which may include vocalisation, posture, gesture, skeletal and muscular movements, as well as physiological responses. That, incidentally, is how a fake smile from a politican or salesman betrays itself. It mimics part of the expression, but not the whole emotion, so lacks the range of changes in the facial phisionamy.

The dominant position is psychology was that facial expressions were culture-specific, which, of course, fitted in well with the slave owning which was still prevalent elsewhere after its abolition in the United Kingdom.

The “Abolition of the Slave Trade Act”, making it illegal to trade in slaves within the British Empire was only passed in 1805. In 1815, Britain pays Portugal £750,000 to cease their trade north of the Equator. Abolition in France lingers until 1818. The actual abolution of the ownership of slaves in the British empire does not come until 1834 which legally frees 700,000 in West Indies, 20,000 in Mauritius, and 40,000 in South Africa.

But in 1850, in the United States, the Fugitive Slave Law requires the return of escaped slaves to their owners! Abolition does not finally come until the end of the Civil War (1861–65) with the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In South America, visited by Darwin on his voyage on the Beagle, slavery was still rife, and he encountered slave owners. He was, even then, a committed abolitionist. In 1839, he noted the following:

“While staying at this estate, I was very nearly being an eye-witness to one of those atrocious acts which can only take place in a slave country. Owing to a quarrel and a lawsuit, the owner was on the point of taking all the women and children from the male slaves, and selling them separately at the public auction at Rio. Interest, and not any feeling of compassion, prevented this act.”

“Indeed, I do not believe the inhumanity of separating thirty families, who had lived together for many years, even occurred to the owner. Yet I will pledge myself, that in humanity and good feeling he was superior to the common run of men. It may be said there exists no limit to the blindness of interest and selfish habit.”

And he also commented:

“Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children – those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own – being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder!” “

“And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin.”

The culture of the times, which believed that slaves were somehow not human, who didn’t feel like the rest of humanity, was one which educated people against their natural response, which is to recognise those emotions in the faces of others. And of course, a subject people, those fearful of bringing down punishments will also conceal their emotions.

But those expressions which we see in the faces on the news – “Low Spirits, Anxiety, Grief, Dejection, Despair” are universals, shared by all of us, calling on us for fellow-feeling, to reach out to other people. The refugees who stare out from the newspapers, and the television screens, are faces calling for a response.

We can learn to turn the other way, and try not to see, or we can respond. The choice is ours. We can leave the distance between us and our fellow human beings, or we can reach out to them, and look at those faces, and begin to listen to their stories.

Ever Since Darwin

"Ever Since Darwin" by Stephen Jay Gould: A Review
 
This book contains a series of essays on the theme of "reflections in natural history"; it is an exciting book, extremely well written, and will undoubtedly confound anyone who imagines that natural history is not much more than numbering, listing and cataloguing. On the contrary, Stephen Gould demonstrates how evolutionary theory can unify and make sense of masses of disparate data.
 
I found one of the essays particularly fascinating because it shows how blind intellectuals - even scientists - can be to their own prejudices, and how uncritical speculation, in the absence of evidence, tends to follow the guidelines laid down by prejudice, and not portray what it fondly imagines to be "objectivity".
 
Consider the problem: how did man come to walk upright? In the traditional view, he learnt to walk upright just as a child develops from crawling to learning to walk; in this scenario, "upright posture is only the consequence of the higher development of the brain". So wrote von Baer, the great 19th century embryologist. Von Baer went on to remark that "all differences between men and other animals depend upon construction of the brain". Thus we emerge with a story of man's evolution from an ape-like ancestor in which the development of upright posture, tools, skills and speech are all a consequence of an increase in brain size. As he became more intelligent, man began to walk upright, to use his hands to fashioning tools, to develop skills and cunning in hunting, and later farming, and, on the way, developed language into the articulate form it takes today.
 
Unfortunately for this presentation, it is not actually based upon anything more than "intelligent speculation". When the facts began to be discovered they were in plain contradiction to this story. Our African ancestors, or near cousins, were small brained ape-like creatures (Australopithecus) whose anatomy (from skeletal remains) indicate a clear upright posture, no different from our own. Why did this come first, before increased brain size? Gould argues that it was the movement from tree-dwellers to ground animals that initiated the subsequent evolution of our ancestors to an upright posture. Walking upright left the hands free for using tools - the beginnings of our mastery of material surroundings. In turn this initiated the development of the larger brain required for more complex tasks.

However, the idealist tradition, of which Plato was the most eloquent spokesman, "encouraged an emphasis on thought as primary, dominating, and altogether more noble or important that the labour it supervised." It was the subtle and pervasive
influence of this idea that was simply accepted as axiomatic by scientists such as von Baer when presenting the traditional picture.
 
Other essays in this book cover equally interesting and instructive problems. Why did the Irish Elk become extinct? - not, as was claimed, because its antlers were so large that they stuck in the trees! Who was the naturalist on the Beagle when Darwin made his epoch making journey? - it was not Darwin!
 
Stephen Gould also assesses the popular portrait of past thinkers, such as catastrophists, and shows how they have often been misrepresented as cranks in a manner more reminiscent of caricature than proper history. This is indeed a thought-provoking book!

 

http://www.amazon.com/Ever-Since-Darwin-Reflections-Natural/dp/0393308189

 

The Importance of Philosophy

Watching the final episode of Richard Dawkins "The Genius of Charles Darwin", I was struck by the way in which he and his opponents both bandied the word "evidence" about without considering the philosophy of evidence, that branch of thinking called epistemology. They kept on at each other, the creationist Wendy Wright saying "We want to teach the evidence", and Dawkins saying "no that's not what evidence is", and producing lots of examples of what he considered evidence, indeed evidence so obvious to him that he just could not understand why they didn't understand what scientific evidence is.

Personally, to state my own position, I do believe there are good evidential grounds for believing that evolution is true, and that the earth is 4.6 billion years old. On evidential grounds, that is, on grounds of well-attested historical evidence, I do believe that there may be grounds for believing that what are today called "miracles", but which the ancients termed "signs and wonders" have occurred. I will not rule out something in a narrative source on the philosophical principle "'If miraculous, then unhistorical" as an a priori rule, on the grounds of my own scientific omniscience. I keep an open mind on dowsing, despite Dawkins' experiments, because experimental designs can be flawed. Like a doctor testing hypotheses for an illness, experiments often are restricted to a narrow range, and the blood sample on the way to the Pathology Lab has a specific focus. A world of blind men would find it difficult to understand the nature of light, of day and night, but patches of darkness in trees, caves, and houses, where the rare sightedness of a few failed, in each case for different reasons. Tests in the dark would produce futile results. But this is to digress.

Philosophy matters because it exposes assumptions, and considers the different means by which we evaluate what we call "evidence". Historical evidence for unique events is obviously of a different order for the repeatability of scientific experiments. Dawkins mentioned the existence of Napoleon as something backed up by evidence, but did not go into any detail, or show how this was a different kind of evidence. But how we understand the different nature of evidence is important, and avoiding that kind of question leads to all the slippery conflicts between Dawkins and his opponents. But there is a parable of G.K. Chesterton which illustrates all this far better:

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good-" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

The Genius of Charles Darwin: A Review of Part Two

Another chance to see Richard Dawkins confronting an African bishop, and posing the deliberately provocative question: "I am an ape. Are you an ape?"

The presentation of apes to humans via skulls suggested that brain size was the deciding factor in our evolution. In fact we know that this is again a simplification, and not a good one. If Dawkin's had taken some time to look at Alfred Russell Wallace's work, rather than merely considering it the same as Darwin's, he would find this problem. Another biologist, Professor Ramachandran, states it succinctly:

The hominid brain reached almost its present size - and perhaps even its present intellectual capacity about 250,000 years ago . Yet many of the attributes we regard as uniquely human appeared only much later. Why? What was the brain doing during the long "incubation "period? Why did it have all this latent potential for tool use, fire, art music and perhaps even language- that blossomed only considerably later? How did these latent abilities emerge, given that natural selection can only select expressed abilities, not latent ones? I shall call this "Wallace's problem", after the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace who first proposed it.

To consider this problem when looking at human evolution would have been more interesting that suggesting that brain size alone was the contributory factor, which is what Dawkins tended to do with his presentation of skulls. Skulls are all very well, but they are rather unformative in showing what was going on within them. That is where the cutting edge of work on human evolution is becoming focused, and that was entirely missing from the programme.

There was the usual muddle about self-genes, which according to Dawkins may contribute to acts of altruism towards members of one's own family, but only do so with humans towards the wider world because they "misfire". When he says that genes strive to make more copies of themselves, he means: "selection has operated to favour genes that, by chance, varied in such a way that more copies survived in subsequent generations." But when he says we can overcome our selfish genes, and considers selfish behaviour to be the outcome of the selfish gene, he is perpetuating the same muddle over the use of the word "selfish" that an animal specialist accused him of earlier in the programme. He stated that most biologists now accepted his notion of the selfish gene, which from a brief survey of the academic literature, looks more like wishful thinking than anything else.

In fact, to promote his idea of the selfish gene is not to celebrate the genius of Charles Darwin, because for Darwin, natural selection had to act on individuals. The reason for this Stephen Jay Gould makes very apparent:

No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing that he cannot give them-direct visibility to natural selection. Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary. A gene is a bit of DNA hidden within a cell. Selection views bodies. It favours some bodies because they are stronger, better insulated, earlier in their sexual maturation, fiercer in combat, or more beautiful to behold.

If, in favouring a stronger body, selection acted directly upon a gene for strength, then Dawkins might be vindicated. If bodies were unambiguous maps of their genes, then battling bits of DNA would display their colours externally and selection might act upon them directly. But bodies are no such thing. There is no gene "for" such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. Bodies cannot be atomized into parts, each constructed by an individual gene. Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channelled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts. It accepts or rejects entire organisms because suites of parts, interacting in complex ways, confer advantages. The image of individual genes, plotting the course of their own survival, bears little relationship to developmental genetics as we understand it.

The philosopher David Stove showed just how deficient the "selfish gene" argument actually is with his witty and erudite demotion job on the concept:

The truth is, 'the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances', genes. This is a thumbnail-sketch, and an accurate one, of the contents of The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins. It was not written by Dawkins, but he quoted it with manifest enthusiasm in a defence of The Selfish Gene.... His admirers even include some philosophers who have carried their airs and graces to the length of writing good books on such rarefied subjects as universals, or induction, or the mind. Dawkins can scarcely have gratified these admirers by telling them that, even when engaged in writing those books, they were 'totally prostituted to the blind purposiveness of their genes Still, you 'have to hand it' to genes which can write, even if only through their slaves, a good book on subjects like universals or induction. Those genes must have brains all right, as well as purposes. At least, they must, if genes can have brains and purposes. But in fact, of course, DNA molecules no more have such things than H20 molecules do.


Moreover, to suggest that genes alone are responsible for wider altruism is to completely ignore matters like "mirror neurons", which Armand Leroi, himself an evolutionary biologist, has explored, looking at the neurology of altruism, imitation and empathy.

Mirror neurons were so named because, by firing both when an animal acts and when it simply watches the same action, they were thought to "mirror" movement, as though the observer itself were acting. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and in some birds. As Professor V.S. Ramachandran observes:

Mirror neurons can also enable you to imitate the movements of others thereby setting the stage for the complex Lamarckian or cultural inheritance that characterizes our species and liberates us from the constraints of a purely gene based evolution

Dawkins cannot find a place easily for altruism alongside his selfish gene hypothesis, so he postulates that altruism is because of "misfiring selfish genes". Genes would have been capable of promoting kin selection, but on a global scale kin selection cannot differentiate between close kin and strangers, hence altruism, acts of generosity to complete strangers. Why this occurs in some case, such as the kindly Professor Dawkins, who is clearly a caring man, but does not occur in other people, such as Robert Mugabe, is not satisfactorily explained; instead it seems more like an "explaining away" difficulties with the theory, or what Karl Popper called "immunising the theory" against any possibly falsification.

But to return to the Bishop, who said "I am a human being" and asked why monkeys were still around if evolution was true, Dawkins then went on to explain that in evolutionary terms, we shared a common ancestor, and we both had evolved. He also went on to comment that with the number of shared genes, it might be possible for human and genetically close ape relative to breed. In fact, this has occurred, but not in Oxford, so that is why Dawkins probably did not know about it.

The Soviet Union, in its effort to stamp out religion, was determined to prove that men were descended from apes. In 1926, a Soviet scientist named Ilya Ivanov decided the most compelling way to do this would be to breed a "humanzee" - a human-chimpanzee hybrid. Ivanov set off for a French research station in West Africa. There he inseminated three female chimpanzees with human sperm. Not his own, for he shared the colonial-era belief that the local people were more closely related to apes than he was. He stayed long enough to learn that his experiment had failed.

With regard to "social Darwinism", in a fascinating section, Dawkins concentrated on "big men", the Rockefellers etc, as promoting "the business survival of the fittest", which led to cases like Enron where a blanket policy of firing employees who were not ruthless enough led to people with no business ethics at all running the company to financial disaster. But he overlooked in his interview with a businessman, the idea that companies diversify and then see where the consumer buys, and expand on that, and cut back on other areas of their business. This kind of "corporate Darwinism" fits an evolutionary paradigm rather well, but it was just ignored, and not explored at all with Dawkin's focus on the Herbert Spencer school of Social Darwinism.

Lastly, apart from the incessant tinkly music (from a glockenspiel?), what also seemed most odd was Dawkin's anthropomorphisms. Repeatedly, again and again, he thrust at the viewer - alongside footage of predators catching and eating prey - the idea that nature was "brutal" "savage" "cruel". Perhaps he should read some Mary Midgley - in "The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal Behaviour". She notes:

We have thought of a wolf always as he appears to the shepherd at the moment of seizing a lamb from the fold. But this is like judging the shepherd by the impression he makes on the lamb, at the moment when he finally decides to turn it into mutton. Lately, ethologists have taken the trouble to watch wolves systematically, between meal-times, and have found them to be, by human standards, paragons of regularity and virtue. They pair for life, they are faithful and affectionate spouses and parents, they show great loyalty to their pack, great courage and persistence in the face of difficulties, they carefully respect each other's territories, keep their dens clean, and extremely seldom kill anything that they do not need for dinner. If they fight with another wolf, the fight ends with his submission; there is normally a complete inhibition on killing the suppliant and on attacking females and cubs. They have also, like all social animals, a fairly elaborate etiquette, including subtly varied ceremonies of greeting and reassurance, by which friendship is strengthened, co-operation achieved and the wheels of social life generally oiled. All this is not the romantic impressions of casual travellers; it rests on long and careful investigations by trained zoologists, backed up by miles of film, graphs, maps, population surveys, droppings analysis and all the rest of the contemporary toolbag.

She comments on the trap which Dawkins, alongside others, is falling into:

Actual wolves, then, are not much like the folk-figure of the wolf, and the same goes for apes and other creatures. But it is the folk-figure that has been popular with philosophers. They have usually taken over the popular notion of lawless cruelty which underlies such terms as "brutal," "bestial," "beastly," "animal desires," etc., and have used it, uncriticized, as a contrast to illuminate the nature of man. Man has been mapped by reference to a landmark which is largely mythical.

In the old days, Disney used to put on supporting items to the main feature, which were a kind of nature documentary which false attributed all kinds of human like motivation to animals. Although Dawkins is very selective in his examples of predators, it is not apparent whether he is not indulging in little more than a Film Noire version of Disney. He doesn't show how cruel and savage pandas are, or how brutal the average cow is, or indeed any one of a dozen herbivores who are present only as illustrations of carnivores at work.

If only in his contempt for theology, Dawkins had not been so dismissive of the notion of anthropomorphism when it has occurred - and been rejected - with respect to ideas of God, perhaps he would be more aware of it occurring in his own work.

And if I had to answer the question ""I am an ape. Are you an ape?" I would be inclined to say that I was a perpendicular hairless tree shrew. If you are defining lineage by past speciation, why stop - arbitrarily - with the ape? Why not go back to when we were common cousins with the vole?

Links:

The Genes That Make Us Human by Dr Armand Leroi

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/563/

The Nature of Normal Human Variety by Armand Leroi

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/leroi05/leroi05_index.html

The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal Behaviour by Mary Midgley

http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/midgley02.htm

Human Evolution: From Tree Shrew to Ape

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/anthro/bioanth/ch10/chap10.htm

Human Evolution

http://www.dorak.info/evolution/human.html

The Genius of Charles Darwin: A Review

I watched Richard Dawkins' latest offering, "The Genius of Charles Darwin", which was a high speed whistle-stop tour of Darwinism - as understood by Richard Dawkins; at times, I did wonder if "The Genius of Richard Dawkins" might not be a better description. According to Dawkins, you would be forgiven for thinking that Darwin's theory of evolution explained all there is to know about how life came to be on earth. He neatly avoided Darwin's own significant omission - the beginning of life from inanimate matter. Darwin knew full well the limits of his theory, and avoided areas where there was insufficient evidence. Indeed, he wrote in the last (1872) edition of The Origin of Species:

As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position-namely at the close of the Introduction-the following words: "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification." This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

Dawkins, alas, was not so modest. Evolution, he proclaimed, was the greatest scientific idea of all time, as if one could somehow take scientific ideas and weigh them in some kind of balance for brilliance. Newton and Einstein were somehow sidelined, as well as the plethora of times we have "Days the universe changed" that James Burke is always so fond of reminding us. Inventions such a printing, which enabled ideas to spread, or advances in optics, which enabled Dawkins to see clearly were not important. It was that James Burke kind of connectivity that was somehow missing from his picture of Darwinism, that for instance ideas about evolution - in terms of change and progress - had become so part of the word itself, that Darwin deliberately chose to write Origin of Species without once using the term that has become synonymous with his ideas. Alfred Russell Wallace also had short shift, just as someone "who had similar ideas".

"Nature red in tooth and claw" quoted Dawkins from Tennyson's "In Memoriam", after which we were treated to night shots and sounds of hunts on the African plains, punctuated by a rather ghoulish green visage of Dawkins himself. In fact, Tennyson was drawing not upon Darwin, but upon Robert Chambers "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" (1844) which had quite different ideas about evolutionary mechanisms, although it did propose - before Darwin - the transmutation of species over time by what its author called evolution. But as I noted, ideas about "evolution" were everywhere at the time. Dawkins mentions Darwin's book selling out at once but in fact Vestiges outsold The Origin of Species up until the early 20th century.

This was one of the weaknesses of the presentation, explaining exactly what Darwin understood by "natural selection". An average viewer would assume it was a fight for survival against competition for limited food resources, and it is true that this element, drawing on the economic ideas of Malthus, plays a significant part, but it is not always such an individualistic struggle as Dawkins makes out. David Attenborough, in "The Living Planet", observes numbers of cases when groups of predators work together co-operatively to hunt their prey. Group selection was not mentioned, and most of the focus was on carnivores hunting ""The total amount of suffering in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation" - herbivores and plant life barely got a mention. Moreover, the random element, as with the Cambrian extinction, or the end of the dinosaurs, in which the changing environment plays a hugely significant part, barely got a mention. Symbiosis had not mention, and yet we (and all mammals) are colonized by multitudes of symbiotic bacteria

Along with the presentation of predation, was mention of "escalation", where predator and prey both evolve in an "arms race". This is a local predictability, and Stephen Jay Gould notes that this is "documented in increasing strength of both crab claws and shells of their gastropod prey through time). But laws of nature do not tell us why we have crabs and snails at all, why insects rule the multicellular world and why vertebrates rather than persistent algal mats exist as the most complex forms of life on the earth." The way in which historical accident plays a role was minimised, and instead evolution was presented as a universal explanation far beyond its capacity.

Dawkins, on the beach with schoolchildren mentioned invertebrates evolving from bacteria, fish evolving from lesser creatures, land animals evolving from them, and human beings evolving from them. This was the worst part of the presentation, giving the impression of a progressive sequence of change, and while Dawkins noted that mankind was like the last string on a piano, in terms of the age of the earth, he did little to alter this image.

Yet, as Gould points out, when this is presented in this way, as a series of pictures: "We never stop to recognize the almost absurd biases coded into this.. No scene ever shows another invertebrate after fishes evolved but invertebrates did not go away or stop evolving! After terrestrial reptiles emerge, no subsequent scene ever shows a fish (later oceanic tableaux depict only such returning reptiles as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs)". The differences are striking: Dawkins in this programme, presents life as a branching tree - Stephen Jay Gould, as a low bush, because as he notes: "The most salient feature of life has been the stability of its bacterial mode from the beginning of the fossil record until today and, with little doubt, into all future time so long as the earth endures. This is truly the "age of bacteria" - as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be."

Dawkins's story on the survival of an HIV woman in Africa, and others like her, is an outcome of evolutionary forces. Her offspring carry the gene, and survive, so over time, those Africans who succumb to HIV will die out, and given long enough (around 1,000 years), mostly the genetic population with the survival gene will predominate. He compares this with survival genes for the Black Death. This was extremely weak - a kind of evolutionary fairy story, which does not take into account either the random factor or the time it takes to breed. For instance those who survived the Black Death may have had a gene which helped their survival, or equally, it could have been luck (a word he is not too keen on), because it had swept through Europe like a bush fire, and those behind the fire zone were simply too few in number and number of contacts for it to continue. What he does not consider is that the HIV population may happily breed before they die, or that the HIV virus may mutate. Historical contingency is not high on his agenda, and yet if he was looking for viral infections, he might note that the influenza outbreak of 1919 did not confer much immunity on those who survived. As Gould notes: "The history of life is not necessarily progressive; it is certainly not predictable. The earth's creatures have evolved through a series of contingent and fortuitous events."

When Dawkins was talking to the school children - and where did he find such a devout lot, because there are
none like that at any schools my sons have attended in Jersey - he noted with amazement that four out of 10 Britons still believe, in some form or another, that God created the world. That (and where is that survey, I've not found it?) is the Dawkins method of "pulling a fast one", and by presenting first people who believe in a literal rendering of Genesis - which Augustine and Jerome did not, for example - he then presents this statistic as a way of saying that this is what the people surveyed thought, which may or may not be true.

As a way of looking at "God created the world", which does not involve any conflict with cosmology or evolution, consider this presentation by C.S. Lewis

"Looking for God -- or Heaven -- by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff or Lady Macbeth, nor is he diffused through the play like a gas. If there were someone who thought plays exist on their own, without an author..., our belief in Shakespeare would not be much affected by his saying, quite truly, that he had studied all the plays and never found Shakespeare in them.....To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find him on earth are unlikely to find him in space. (Hang it all, we're in space already; every year we go a huge circular tour in space.) But send up a saint in a spaceship and he'll find God in space as he found God on earth. Much depends on the seeing eye."

How Dawkins fits committed evolutionists and theists like Kenneth Miller (author of "Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution") who have fought against creationists and proponents of intelligent design in debates and in the law courts of America into his picture is unclear; I suspect he hopes they would go away because they don't fit his very literal ideas about what belief should be. But then Miller (like Lewis and Augustine) operates with a very different idea of "creation" than the literalists who are Dawkins' bête noire. "Can a Darwinian be a Christian" asked the philosopher and atheist Michael Ruse, and concluded that while some aspects of Christianity - looking at it in all its diversity - caused problems, these need not always be insuperable.

My main gripe is that Dawkins presents evolution as (a) all embracing, which Darwin said it was not (b) extremely simplistically, which may lead people to reject it because it is presented in a flawed manner.

In my opinion, Stephen Jay Gould have a much more nuanced presentation of evolution, and its limits, when he wrote these words:

Natural selection is an immensely powerful yet beautifully simple theory that has held up remarkably well, under intense and unrelenting scrutiny and testing, for 135 years. In essence, natural selection locates the mechanism of evolutionary change in a "struggle" among organisms for reproductive success, leading to improved fit of populations to changing environments. ( Struggle is often a metaphorical description and need not be viewed as overt combat, guns blazing. Tactics for reproductive success include a variety of non-martial activities such as earlier and more frequent mating or better cooperation with partners in raising offspring.) Natural selection is therefore a principle of local adaptation, not of general advance or progress.

Yet powerful though the principle may be, natural selection is not the only cause of evolutionary change (and may, in many cases, be overshadowed by other forces). This point needs emphasis because the standard misapplication of evolutionary theory assumes that biological explanation may be equated with devising accounts, often speculative and conjectural in practice, about the adaptive value of any given feature in its original environment (human aggression as good for hunting, music and religion as good for tribal cohesion, for example). Darwin himself strongly emphasized the multifactorial nature of evolutionary change and warned against too exclusive a reliance on natural selection, by placing the following statement in a maximally conspicuous place at the very end of his introduction: "I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification."


References:

"The Seeing Eye" , C.S. Lewis (1963)

Can a Darwinian be a Christian, Michael Ruse
http://www.amazon.com/Can-Darwinian-Christian-Relationship-Religion/dp/0521631440

Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, Kenneth Miller
http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Darwins-God-Scientists-Evolution/dp/0060930497

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/3079/Default.aspx
A review of Finding Darwin's God by Michael Ruse

A gut issue: Bacterial symbiosis shapes a healthy immune response
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7195/edsumm/e080529-01.html


The Evolution of Life, Stephen Jay Gould
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/2948/gould.html
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1151

Not so obvious

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."

Stephen Jay Gould
US author, naturalist, paleontologist, & popularizer of science (1941 - 2002)

I like this quote very much, as it sums up much of Stephen's own popular work, looking at all kinds of misconceptions, ranging from the naturalist on the Beagle (not Darwin) to Huxley's bold claim against Samuel Wilberforce about preferring to be descended from an ape than someone who misused his powers of rhetoric (which seems to only appear in Huxley's much later write up; the minutes of the debate show nothing of this) to the flat earth (concocted late in the 17th century as an enlightment "straw man" to shoot down religion on). Most of all I like his essay on Darwin's last work (20 years in completion) which was a study on earthworms, and how they enrich and change the soil in which they move. The person who asked Darwin wanted a grand theory, but all Darwin's theories came from a study of minutae, of little things, and Stephen Jay Gould always brought to light little things, of great interest, but neglected by those evolutionists who want a large grand all encompassing picture (that often loses sight of those humble roots).

I think too of the Goddess myth, and Gimbutas seeing the statuettes as a goddess, whereas that is something read back into the artefact.

Adam Curtis' The Trap, too, also showed how "taking something for granted" is something we often do.

I am sure I have my own presuppositions, some of which are invisible to me. I think I do have a somewhat different outlook on contemporary assumptions (mind body spirit type stuff) because I come at it from a different tradition, which can be used to highlight the weaknesses of that kind of approach. That is not to say that there may not be a place for introspection, but given that modern culture (and reality tv shows especially) have gone overboard on that, I think (being a perverse person) I'd like to go in another direction!

Darwin on Tears

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Just been re-reading Darwin on emotions

http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin3/expression/expression06.htm

which is very interesting. As ever, he looked at observing what is happening first, and is ingenuous in his use of existing technology to do this (photos are on the attached site).

Here I shall almost confine myself to weeping or crying, more especially in children. Infants, when suffering even slight pain, moderate hunger, or discomfort, utter violent and prolonged screams. Whilst thus screaming their eyes are firmly closed, so that the skin round them is wrinkled, and the forehead contracted into a frown. The mouth is widely opened with the lips retracted in a peculiar manner, which causes it to assume a squarish form; the gums or teeth being more or less exposed. The breath is inhaled almost spasmodically. It is easy to observe infants whilst screaming; but I have found photographs made by the instantaneous process the best means for observation, as allowing more deliberation. I have collected twelve, most of them made purposely for me; and they all exhibit the same general characteristics. I have, therefore, had six of them1 (Plate I.) reproduced by the heliotype process.

He also made the observation, which he then tested that very young infants in fact do not shed tears or weep; which he says is "well known", although I had not come across it in any modern baby books; but then Darwin is both observing, and looking at the evolutionary background. From this he deduces that weeping and crying is an acquired or learned technique; it is something done rather than something automatic (which is not, of course, to say that it cannot become automatic like other habits).

Infants whilst young do not shed tears or weep, as is well known to nurses and medical men. This circumstance is not exclusively due to the lacrymal glands being as yet incapable of secreting tears. I first noticed this fact from having accidentally brushed with the cuff of my coat the open eye of one of my infants, when seventy-seven days old, causing this eye to water freely; and though the child screamed violently, the other eye remained dry, or was only slightly suffused with tears. A similar slight effusion occurred ten days previously in both eyes during a screaming-fit. The tears did not run over the eyelids and roll down the cheeks of this child, whilst screaming badly, when 122 days old. This first happened 17 days later, at the age of 139 days. A few other children have been observed for me, and the period of free weeping appears to be very variable. In one case, the eyes became slightly suffused at the age of only 20 days; in another, at 62 days. With two other children, the tears did not run down the face at the ages of 84 and 110 days; but in a third child they did run down at the age of 104 days. In one instance, as I was positively assured, tears ran down at the unusually early age of 42 days. It would appear as if the lacrymal glands required some practice in the individual before they are easily excited into action, in somewhat the same manner as various inherited consensual movements and tastes require some exercise before they are fixed and perfected. This is all the more likely with a habit like weeping, which must have been acquired since the period when man branched off from the common progenitor of the genus Homo and of the non-weeping anthropomorphous apes.

The fact of tears not being shed at a very early age from pain or any mental emotion is remarkable, as, later in life, no expression is more general or more strongly marked than weeping. When the habit has once been acquired by an infant, it expresses in the clearest manner suffering of all kinds, both bodily pain and mental distress, even though accompanied by other emotions, such as fear or rage. The character of the crying, however, changes at a very early age, as I noticed in my own infants,—the passionate cry differing from that of grief. A lady informs me that her child, nine months old, when in a passion screams loudly, but does not weep; tears, however, are shed when she is punished by her chair being turned with its back to the table. This difference may perhaps be attributed to weeping being restrained, as we shall immediately see, at a more advanced age, under most circumstances excepting grief; and to the influence of such restraint being transmitted to an earlier period of life, than that at which it was first practised.

Next, he looks at adults, with a very broad outlook, i.e not restricting himself to Victorian London. Would that Freud had done the same when creating his ideas rather than just !

With adults, especially of the male sex, weeping soon ceases to be caused by, or to express, bodily pain. This may be accounted for by its being thought weak and unmanly by men, both of civilized and barbarous races, to exhibit bodily pain by any outward sign. With this exception, savages weep copiously from very slight causes, of which fact Sir J. Lubbock has collected instances. A New Zealand chief "cried like a child because the sailors spoilt his favourite cloak by powdering it with flour." I saw in Tierra del Fuego a native who had lately lost a brother, and who alternately cried with hysterical violence, and laughed heartily at anything which amused him. With the civilized nations of Europe there is also much difference in the frequency of weeping. Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.

After this, his examination looks at the pathological cases, to see what sort of crying is going on there. He notices that crying is far more common, and sometimes for almost no visible cause, or for the oddest causes (e.g. the case of the eyebrows). He is of course using the terminology of his day (insane etc), but also notes that certain physiological conditions can also cause or promote crying; in other words, it can be an involuntary effect.

The insane notoriously give way to all their emotions with little or no restraint; and I am informed by Dr. J. Crichton Browne, that nothing is more characteristic of simple melancholia, even in the male sex, than a tendency to weep on the slightest occasions, or from no cause. They also weep disproportionately on the occurrence of any real cause of grief. The length of time during which some patients weep is astonishing, as well as the amount of tears which they shed. One melancholic girl wept for a whole day, and afterwards confessed to Dr. Browne, that it was because she remembered that she had once shaved off her eyebrows to promote their growth. Many patients in the asylum sit for a long time rocking themselves backwards and forwards; "and if spoken to, they stop their movements, purse up their eyes, depress the corners of the mouth, and burst out crying." In some of these cases, the being spoken to or kindly greeted appears to suggest some fanciful and sorrowful notion; but in other cases an effort of any kind excites weeping, independently of any sorrowful idea. Patients suffering from acute mania likewise have paroxysms of violent crying or blubbering, in the midst of their incoherent ravings. We must not, however, lay too much stress on the copious shedding of tears by the insane, as being due to the lack of all restraint; for certain brain-diseases, as hemiplegia, brain-wasting, and senile decay, have a special tendency to induce weeping. Weeping is common in the insane, even after a complete state of fatuity has been reached and the power of speech lost.

Darwin then sums up what he perceives weeping to be the expression of, but also notes that the degree to which people weep can be altered by themselves, either with restraint, or by learning to increase tears; the weeping for the dead, is in fact, something which is not just seen in his case study; it was well known in past cultures where professional mourners could weep "on demand", but convincingly.

Weeping seems to be the primary and natural expression, as we see in children, of suffering of any kind, whether bodily pain short of extreme agony, or mental distress. But the foregoing facts and common experience show us that a frequently repeated effort to restrain weeping, in association with certain states of the mind, does much in checking the habit. On the other hand, it appears that the power of weeping can be increased through habit; thus the Rev. R. Taylor, who long resided in New Zealand, asserts that the women can voluntarily shed tears in abundance; they meet for this purpose to mourn for the dead, and they take pride in crying "in the most affecting manner."

So - having examined a wide variety of different evidence (and I have only cited some) - now he comes to look at how to construct a theory for understanding weeping, and he starts from the physiological, seeing tears resulting from distress, or laughter (which he notes is also common to all human beings), or even a coughing fit:

Cause of the secretion of tears.—It is an important fact which must be considered in any theory of the secretion of tears from the mind being affected, that whenever the muscles round the eyes are strongly and involuntarily contracted in order to compress the blood-vessels and thus to protect the eyes, tears are secreted, often in sufficient abundance to roll down the cheeks. This occurs under the most opposite emotions, and under no emotion at all. The sole exception, and this is only a partial one, to the existence of a relation between the involuntary and strong contraction of these muscles and the secretion of tears, is that of young infants, who, whilst screaming violently with their eyelids firmly closed, do not commonly weep until they have attained the age of from two to three or four months. Their eyes, however, become suffused with tears at a much earlier age. It would appear, as already remarked, that the lacrymal glands do not, from the want of practice or some other cause, come to full functional activity at a very early period of life. With children at a somewhat later age, crying out or wailing from any distress is so regularly accompanied by the shedding of tears, that weeping and crying are synonymous terms.

Under the opposite emotion of great joy or amusement, as long as laughter is moderate there is hardly any contraction of the muscles round the eyes, so that there is no frowning; but when peals of loud laughter are uttered, with rapid and violent spasmodic expirations, tears stream down the face. I have more than once noticed the face of a person, after a paroxysm of violent laughter, and I could see that the orbicular muscles and those running to the upper lip were still partially contracted, which together with the tear-stained cheeks gave to the upper half of the face an expression not to be distinguished from that of a child still blubbering from grief. The fact of tears streaming down the face during violent laughter is common to all the races of mankind, as we shall see in a future chapter.

In violent coughing especially when a person is half-choked, the face becomes purple, the veins distended, the orbicular muscles strongly contracted, and tears run down the cheeks. Even after a fit of ordinary coughing, almost every one has to wipe his eyes. In violent vomiting or retching, as I have myself experienced and seen in others, the orbicular muscles are strongly contracted, and tears sometimes flow freely down the cheeks.

Now he broadens his scope further to look at other animals, but finds extremely few cases:

I was anxious to ascertain whether there existed in any of the lower animals a similar relation between the contraction of the orbicular muscles during violent expiration and the secretion of tears; but there are very few animals which contract these muscles in a prolonged manner, or which shed tears.

So now he comes to the evolutionary and biological background of tears. Why did crying and tears develop? What was their main function?

It is difficult to conjecture how many reflex actions have originated, but, in relation to the present case of the affection of the lacrymal glands through irritation of the surface of the eye, it may be worth remarking that, as soon as some primordial form became semi-terrestrial in its habits, and was liable to get particles of dust into its eyes, if these were not washed out they would cause much irritation; and on the principle of the radiation of nerve-force to adjoining nerve-cells, the lacrymal glands would be stimulated to secretion. As this would often recur, and as nerve-force readily passes along accustomed channels, a slight irritation would ultimately suffice to cause a free secretion of tears.

So Darwin sees tears and crying as a development which has evolved from the physiology of crying out (for a variety of reasons, e.g. suffering, calling parents, and relieving pain by bodily movements - which is part of the same evolutionary heritage which we share with other animals. Our biological makeup, however, causes the use of tears as an eye-cleaning mechanism to be incidentally triggered by these physiological changes, and this incidental use of tears (an exaption, in evolutionary biology) as a means of relieving suffering is not purely an involutantary act (although it remains that as well in addition to new uses, which we should not forget), but can also be controlled (either to stop tears, or to cry on demand).

To sum up this chapter, weeping is probably the result of some such chain of events as follows. Children, when wanting food or suffering in any way, cry out loudly, like the young of most other animals, partly as a call to their parents for aid, and partly from any great exertion serving relief. Prolonged screaming inevitably leads to the gorging of the blood-vessels of the eye; and this will have led, at first consciously and at last habitually, to the contraction of the muscles round the eyes in order to protect them. At the same time the spasmodic pressure on the surface of the eye, and the distension of the vessels within the eye, without necessarily entailing any conscious sensation, will have affected, through reflex action, the lacrymal glands. Finally, through the three principles of nerve-force readily passing along accustomed channels—of association, which is so widely extended in its power—and of certain actions, being more under the control of the will than others—it has come to pass that suffering readily causes the secretion of tears, without being necessarily accompanied by any other action.

Although in accordance with this view we must look at weeping as an incidental result, as purposeless as the secretion of tears from a blow outside the eye, or as a sneeze from the retina being affected by a bright light, yet this does not present any difficulty in our understanding how the secretion of tears serves as a relief to suffering. And by as much as the weeping is more violent or hysterical, by so much will the relief be greater,—on the same principle that the writhing of the whole body, the grinding of the teeth, and the uttering of piercing shrieks, all give relief under an agony of pain.

He also cautions about seeing the use of a means of expression as static. What derived from one circumstance can be deliberately used in another, so that what may seem as a pattern relating to distress can be used for other intent; an example would be children deliberately using a trantrum to elicit a desired response, because they are learning to play on the reaction of their parents, rather than being genuinely distressed:

Every true or inherited movement of expression seems to have had some natural and independent origin. But when once acquired, such movements may be voluntarily and consciously employed as a means of communication.