Science Musings Blog

Spuds

2009-07-05T06:14:00.000Z

I'm not much of a cook, but I like messing about in the kitchen, slicing, dicing, piling one thing on another. Here in Ireland my favorite cookbook is devoted entirely to potatoes. Potato, spinach and pine nut gratin. Gratin dauphinois. Potato and courgette tortilla. Hash browns. Pan haggerty. Bubble and squeak. The Great Famine be damned, the Irish still love their potatoes. At our village shop you can get local spuds right out of the ground. Nothin' better than day-old new potatoes slathered in Kerry butter.

The problem, as noted yesterday, is that insidious pest, Phytophthora infestans.

The potato blight and the potato have long been locked in an evolutionary battle to infest and to resist infestation. Nothing conscious about this arms race -- mutation and selection, trial and error, the potato trying to stay one step ahead of the parasite, the parasite trying to keep up. The game changed significantly when biologists and chemists entered the fight on the side of the potato.

Fungicides are still the main line of defense. Selective breeding and genetic jiggering for blight-resistance are other strategies. Is the world ready for GM taters? We'll see.

Meanwhile, the fungus is not sitting idly by.

Phytophthora reproduces asexually and sexually. There are two mating types, called A1 and A2. For sexual reproduction to occur, both mating types must participate. Until recently, the A2 mating type was restricted to Mexico, the fungus' place of origin. Now A2 has spread through the United States and Europe, and landed on Irish shores. Biologists worry that the sexually-reproducing fungus will be quicker to develop resistance to fungicides, through a greater reassortment of genes. Apparently, in Mexico, where the A2 mating type is common, many new and virulent strains of blight have appeared.

It's all in the hands of the scientists. Can human intelligence outrun fungal sex? Will my neighbors keep putting firm, white, unblemished spuds on my plate? Will the Irish love affair with the potato continue to blossom? And will my darling spouse keep making her irresistible potato and leek soup, with that dollop of Irish cream and sprinkling of her very own chives?

And while you're here, does anyone have a suggestion for a nontoxic way to keep insects from eating my young spinachs, collards and lettuces?

Getting connected

2009-07-04T06:17:00.000Z

This summer, as every summer, my neighbors do battle with Phytophthora infestans, the potato blight fungus. I see them walking their ridges, a tank of fungicide on their backs, sprayers in hand. It's touch-and-go as to who will win -- the gardener or the invisible invader.

In the 19th century, Phytophthora infestans directly or indirectly caused the death of a million Irish people and sent millions more on a great diaspora to Britain, Australia, New Zealand and America. How did it happen?

The potato originated in the Andes highlands of South America, and was introduced into Ireland by the English. It flourished in the cool, moist Irish air, and adapted readily to the poor soils of Western Ireland where a large part of the native population had been driven by English colonizers. The potato required no more than a spade for its cultivation and a pot for its consumption, and was therefore eminently suitable for a people rendered abjectly poor by British conquest and perfidy.

The fungus that caused the Great Irish Famine, like the potato itself, was a New World import. It is believed to have originated in Mexico, and somehow made its way to the United States, where it found an ideal host -- the domesticated potato. It crossed the Atlantic in a ship's stores, arriving in June 1845 in southern Britain. By August, blight had destroyed crops in every European country.

The effects of the fungus were more severe in parts of Ireland than elsewhere because of the almost exclusive dependence upon the potato as food, and because crowding and impoverishment made Irish people easy victims of cholera, typhus, and other diseases that followed in the wake of famine.

It was not until the 1920s that the invention of effective fungicides finally brought Phytophthora infestans under control. So why did massive famine not recur in Ireland during the long decades between the mid-1800s and the invention of fungicides?

Part of the answer is visible from my window, out there across Dingle Bay. In 1858, the first Atlantic telegraph cable was brought ashore at Valentia Island, and suddenly the world became a smaller place. News crossed the oceans in seconds, not weeks, and the consequences of British policy in Ireland would henceforth be monitored by the world, and particularly by the increasingly influential Irish diaspora. The situation was not unlike the way FaceBook and YouTube changed the dynamic of the recent upheavals in Iran.

Free lunch

2009-07-03T07:43:00.002Z

I have a friend here in Ireland who is commendably committed to the environment. He is professionally involved in such things as energy-efficient houses and pollution-free waste management. He powers his car with recycled cooking oil. And he chases the oldest dream of humankind -- perpetual motion.

Well, perhaps it's not the oldest dream, but it is certainly durable. At least since the Renaissance there has been an endless stream of proposed gizmos that put out more energy than they take in. My friend has been keen on two current projects, one in Australia and one here in Ireland. As is often the case, the machines use magnets in one way or another. I can't tell you exactly how, because -- well, those are trade secrets.

The Irish company is Steorn Ltd., their device is called Orbo, and to hear them tell it, Orbo is the answer to our energy woes. When scientists scoffed, the company convened an international panel of experts to vet their claim. More than two years have passed and the verdict is in: Orbo is a pipedream.

Will that stop Steorn? Not if my friend's unflagging enthusiasm is any indication. The dream lives on, the ratchets click, the magnets spin, and all of Orbo's big and little brothers huff and wheeze and try to squeeze free energy out of thin air.

It is probably useful here to distinguish between scientific eccentrics and scientific cranks. Scientific eccentrics, like my Irish friend, are a cheerful lot, who don't give a hoot about prevailing views. They are convinced that no law of physics is carved in stone. The right tension on the spring, the right frequency on the oscillator and -- voila! -- our energy problems are solved! Scientific cranks, on the other hand, are gloomy sorts who feel put upon by the world, and who are convinced that the only thing standing between themselves and revolutionary success is the close- mindedness of the scientific establishment.

Scientific cranks we can do without. Scientific eccentrics may not do much to advance scientific learning, but they are having fun and they are motivated by a selfless humanitarianism -- qualities that a healthy society can hardly do without.

A new Creation oratorio -- Part two

2009-07-02T05:18:00.000Z

Knots of matter, with masses many times greater than the sun, are squeezed by gravity. When the temperature at the cores of the protostars reaches 10 million degrees, nuclear fusion begins, matter is transformed into energy, and the first stars are born. The music blazes out again, not in a single fortissimo chord, but in thrust after thrust of forte brilliance.

These massive first-generation stars burn fast and furiously, living for but a few million years before blowing themselves apart in colossal supernova explosions, seeding the universe with heavy elements. Galaxies form, and millions of stars, dust and gas coalesce to form massive black holes at their centers. The music representing the universe at this tender age of a billion years is wild and lively, booming timpani, soaring violins.

Now things slow down, become less violent. Star birth and star death continues, but at a more stately pace, moderato. A tender theme is heard in the background, in the flutes, perhaps, as carbon and oxygen, created in violence, unite with hydrogen to make the first organic molecules.

Over billions of years, these grow in complexity, eventually becoming alive. The organic theme is taken up by woodwinds, until, as the music draws to its climax, life and intelligence come to the fore. The music becomes more melodic, thrusting notes give way to a lively dance, and...

And? Well, the best available evidence suggests that the universe will expand forever, using up all available energy, until eventually, hundreds of billions of years from now, light, life and intelligence are extinguished. The music winds slowly down into inaudibility. I suppose the lights in the concert hall should be extinguished too, so that the new "The Creation" ends with a long coda of utter silence and darkness.

A new Creation oratorio -- Part one

2009-07-01T05:27:00.001Z

Two centuries have elapsed since Joseph Haydn composed his magnificent "The Creation" oratorio. In all that time, no other musician has given us a better evocation of how the universe began.

The famous C-major fortissimo chord of Haydn's oratorio -- the glorious sunburst of sound that comes in response to the whispered words, "And there was light" -- is an apt evocation of the modern astronomer's Big Bang.

Still, we have learned a lot since Herschel's time about the universe's beginning and probable end. Maybe it's time for a musical update.

For example, Haydn's triumphant C-major chord comes five minutes into the oratorio, after a prelude of shadowy notes representing the unformed flux out of which God created the world. We are nudged by whispered voices to the edge of our seats. Then, and only then, a universe blazes into existence. Troppo! Perfection!

But modern cosmologists don't have a clue what went before the Big Bang. Their equations start at time t=0. Words like "darkness," "chaos," or "unformed flux" have no meaning. The fortissimo chord in any new composition will have to come right at the beginning.

Not a terribly satisfying way to begin -- musically, dramatically, or even scientifically. The question will always be "What went before?" But, for the time being, we must resign ourselves to ignorance. We sit down in the concert hall, open our programs, and BOOM, we are knocked out of our seats.

At the first instant, the universe is infinitely hot, infinitely bright. The Big Bang doesn't happen somewhere, like a firecracker in a dark room, but everywhere. Not like an alarm going off on a clock that's been ticking all night; the clock starts running as the universe begins. Space and time swell from nothing. The first matter -- hydrogen and helium, with traces of lithium -- condenses from pure energy. The universe expands and cools. The music, which began in thunder, begins a slow decline toward silence, diminuendo.

We ease back into our chairs. After about a half-million years, the temperature of the expanding universe falls below 3,000 degrees Kelvin, and the blaze of creation has weakened and shifted into the infrared, invisible to a human eye. The young, gassy universe becomes completely dark.

But the music doesn't lapse into total silence, for the universe is not empty, nor has time stopped. In the darkness, gravity gathers the cooling gases into clumps and streamers. The music suggests this thickening of matter. Legato becomes staccato, although barely audible. And in the darkness, on those lingering notes, we wait.

(Intermission.)

Kum-bi-ya, pooh-pooh

2009-06-30T06:09:00.000Z

I've been a big fan of Richard Dawkins ever since I read The Selfish Gene all those many years ago. Since then I've read virtually everything the man has written. He's very smart, very clever and a terrific writer. The only thing I have against Richard Dawkins is that he married Lalla instead of Leela (a remark that Tom, a Dr. Who fan, will understand).

But lately -- well, I don't know. His Darwin-tumping evangelism is taking on the aspect of a Bible Belt tent revival. He's the Elmer Gantry of atheism. If there's such a thing as fundamentalist disbelief, Dawkins has it.

Now, mind you, in Dawkins' hands even that can be fun. I liked The God Delusion as much as the next guy. Lord knows, the Almighty had it coming, and who better to give the the Big Guy a poke in the eye than Richard. But I had to laugh out loud when I saw in the London Sunday Times that Dawkins is helping to finance an atheist summer camp for kids.

I mean, really. Keeping religious indoctrination out of the public schools is one thing; a boot camp for little scoffers is another.

As freethinkers, will they be allowed to get up in the morning at whatever time they choose, except on Sunday when sleeping to noon is mandatory? In campcraft, will they braid plastic bookmarks for their little gray copies of Origin of Species? Relieved of fear of eternal punishment, will they go on a binge of short-sheeting the counselors? Will they sit around the campfire at night singing "Faith of our fathers -- fiddlesticks and fie"? Will the great man himself make an appearance at Saturday assembly to urge the pint-sized scampers to ever greater heights of dubiosity?

How about if adults just leave the kids alone and let them have some summer fun.

And --

A gift from Anne

2009-06-30T05:58:00.002Z

(Click to enlarge.)

The call of the wild -- Part 2

2009-06-29T05:46:00.000Z

Writing about cuckoos and global warming yesterday, reminds me of some cuckoo research I once read about. But first, a bit more background.

In Britain and Ireland, four species of birds are victimized by cuckoos -- reed warblers, meadow pipits, dunnocks, and pied wagtails -- all of them much smaller birds than the cuckoo. There seem to be four genetically distinct strains of female cuckoos, each specializing in one host species. Except for the cuckoo that lays her egg in the dunnock's nest, each female's egg closely resembles the eggs of the selected host.

Nicholas Davies and Michael Brooke are (were?) two Cambridge University ornithologists who specialize in cuckoos. They described their work some years ago in Scientific American. You'd have to be a little cuckoo to do what these guys do, but their research elegantly demonstrates the power of evolutionary theory to explain natural curiosities.

Our intrepid researchers armed themselves with phony cuckoo eggs, made of resin, the exact size and weight of real cuckoo eggs, and painted to resemble the different eggs laid by the four strains of female cuckoos.

Then they played cuckoo.

They snitched real eggs from reed warbler nests and replaced them with phony cuckoo eggs. The warblers accepted eggs that resembled their own and rejected most of the others, pushing them out of the nests.

Clearly, reed warblers aren't without some powers of discrimination, and natural selection would favor a cuckoo egg that closely resembles the host's. The evolved similarity of eggs is a classic example of mimicry.

But this was just the beginning. Davies and Brooke systematically replaced eggs in the nests of all four species of host birds, with phony eggs of every type, at different times of the day, removing different numbers of host eggs, and every other combination of thieving and confounding they could think of. They even went to Iceland to try their surreptitious switches on meadow pipits and wagtails that have long lived in isolation from cuckoos.

Every response of the cuckoos and their hosts to phony eggs was consistent with natural selection. For example, Icelandic birds were more easily fooled by phony eggs than their British cousins; they have not needed to evolve defenses against cuckoo trickery. And the cuckoo that lays its eggs in the dunnock's nest has no need of egg mimicry; the dunnock accepts almost any egg as its own, regardless of color or pattern, perhaps because it has only recently been parasitized by cuckoos.

What we have here appears to be a case of coevolution: Cuckoos have responded to the host's defenses by evolving eggs that closely resemble host eggs. Hosts, in turn, have adapted to cuckoo parasitism by becoming ever more discriminating and less likely to be fooled. And all of this inscribed in the "four-letter" code of the DNA.

The most delightful thing about this story is the thought of the two cuckoo-ologists, their pockets full of phony cuckoo eggs, skulking around in marsh and moor trying to unravel the ways of evolution. Such behavior on the part of humans is a natural curiosity as worthy of investigation as the egg-laying habits of birds.

The call of the wild

2009-06-28T05:51:00.001Z

So what's happening to the cuckoo?

The call of the cuckoo -- that speaks its name -- used to be a familiar part of the spring and early summer here in Ireland. The letters column in the Irish Times invariably announced the first cuckoo, arriving, usually in April, after a long flight from South Africa. You heard it before you saw it -- cuc-coo -- and your heart made a little leap towards summer.

We don't hear the cuckoo any more. One more sad deletion from nature's prodigiality.

The cuckoo, of course, is a parasite. It disdains to build a nest or incubate a brood. Instead, the female cuckoo lays her egg in the nest of another species, removing an egg that belongs there. The unsuspecting mother bird, who went to all the trouble of building the nest, sits on the impostor egg along with her own. When the young cuckoo hatches, it tosses its "sibling" eggs or hatchlings out of the nest, thereby receiving the full attention of its foster parent.

Ah, isn't evolution grand. Imagine that cuckoo hatching being born with murder on its mind. It was all there in a "four-letter" code on the DNA, which makes proteins, which makes a bird brain intent on instant mayhem. TCCGAATGGGGATT=felony, so to speak. And if that doesn't make your head spin, nothing will.

So where are they? The cuckoos, I mean. Apparently, one problem is global warming. The parasitized species migrate from the Mediterranean basin. Because of changing climate, they are arriving in Northern Europe earlier and earlier, and starting families. By the time the cuckoos arrive all the way from the southern hemisphere -- unawares of the quickening tempo in northern climes -- the young of the usual surrogate parents have hatched and fledged. No nests in which to infiltrate an egg. No short-hop mothers to bamboozle.

Are we wrong to feel sorry for the felonious cuckoo? Or was a little intraspecies malfeasance an acceptable price to pay for that wonderful cuc-coo resounding over the gorsy moor, and the graceful shape of the long-haul trickster sculling the misty air?

How not to love the world -- Part 2

2009-06-27T07:11:00.002Z

A few more words on John Cornwell's Seminary Boy.

In the epilogue, Cornwell tells us briefly of his life after leaving the minor seminary at age eighteen. He briefly continued his priestly formation at one of England's major seminaries, but became disillusioned by the stultifying and infantilizng regimen. He left to continue his education at Oxford and Cambridge. There the contrast he had glimpsed earlier between "make-believe and reality" became more apparent.

One world picture involved the supernatural realm beyond the veil of appearances where resided the Holy Trinity, the angels and the saints, and the dead from the beginning of time -- in hell with the Devil and all his demons, or suffering in purgatory, or enjoying celestial happiness in the presence of God...

The other world picture, admittedly skewed by my youthful Cambridge optimism and sense of certitude, acknowledged the wonder and mystery of the vast material universe, and the emergence, through blind evolution, of the stupendous fertility of life on the planet. It paid homage to the dignity, genius and resourcefulness of humankind...

The one world, he writes, was entirely subject to belief and imagination. The other could be constructed and perceived by direct knowledge, underpinned by the natural sciences and unaided reason. Recognizing that the two world pictures could not be reconciled, he left the Church and put his faith behind him.

Twenty years later, he tells us, he returned to the fold (and here our paths diverge). He does not tell us why, except to say that he married a Catholic woman who raised their children Catholic. It would be interesting to know if and how he presently reconciles what he previously called make-believe and reality. I do know from what I have read of his writing that his newfound faith is skeptical ("doubt of doubt"), measured, and more metaphoric than literal. It is fun to watch him scrummaging with Dawkins in the British press.

How not to love the world

2009-06-26T05:18:00.002Z

I've been reading John Cornwell's fine memoir of his life as a young seminarian in England in the mid-1950s -- roughly the same time as my own religious education.

Cornwell is a prolific journalist who has written a number of books on matters Roman Catholic. Perhaps the best known (to me at least) is Hitler's Pope, about Pius XII's silence in the face of German atrocities. I also know his work from the London Sunday Times.

In Seminary Boy, he give us an account of his escape, in 1953, at age 13 from a dysfunctional and impoverished East London family to the diocesan minor seminary of Cotton in the rural countryside. What ensues is a struggle between piety and hormones that will be familiar to anyone who came of age as a Roman Catholic at mid-century.

I have read a similar account of seminary life in my friend Frank Phelan's novelistic memoir, Four Ways of Computing Midnight. Those of us raised in Catholic schools got the same stuff as the seminarians, secondhand, so to speak -- the same mix of Jansenistic piety, although without the isolation and imposed harsh discipline.

There was something, for example, called "custody of the eyes," to which we were encouraged by our teachers and confessors, which meant that we should avoid looking at anything that might be an "occasion of sin." A glimpse of angelic Angela's budding breasts beneath her tight cashmere sweater might be enough to cause an "irregular motion of the flesh" -- and, possibly, barring a quick confession or Act of Contrition, an eternity in hell.

The seminarians of the time -- and presumably also novice nuns? -- were enjoined to avoid "particular friendships," which meant any attachment to another human being that might divert one's attention from Almighty God and his mother Mary. Cornwell tells the story of attraction and scruple with tenderness and poignancy. Deprived of anything like normal crushes and friendships, is it any wonder that the products of such a system sometimes went off the rails into perversity?

Today's boys and girls seem to have no interest in custody of the eyes, or of avoiding occasions of sin. The "houses of formation" for priests, brothers and nuns are effectively empty (Cotton is a closed ruin). Perhaps the whole system of celibate vocations only could sustain itself by tapping into the driving force of adolescent sexuality and sublimating it into a devotional rubric of sin and salvation. At one point about halfway through his memoir, young John Cornwell has a glimmer of doubt about the exhortations of his spiritual advisors to repress his inclinations toward "impurity" -- including spontaneous erections and wet dreams -- in an ever greater devotion to Our Lady. "[I]t began to dawn on me," he writes, "in a niggling, insistent scruple, that our spiritual lives involved not real feelings for real persons, but invented feelings for imaginary persons. The reflection disturbed me so much that I wondered whether it was not a whispered suggestion of the Devil himself, the Father of Lies. For if we were inventing our relationships with Jesus and Mary, were we not therefore dwelling in a world of make-believe?"

He put his scruple aside -- for the moment. More on his subsequent evolution tomorrow.

Cultivating amazement

2009-06-25T05:11:00.000Z

There is only one question, says the poet Mary Oliver: "How to love this world."

So here I am scanning a recent copy of the journal Nature, with articles titled "Parvalbumin neurons and gamma rhythms enhance cortical circuit performance" and "F-box protein FBX031 mediates cyclin D1 degradation to induce G1 arrest after DNA damage."

What is this stuff to me, and how does it help me love the world?

In her poetry, Oliver brilliantly evokes the sensate stimuli of love: the "lapped light" of pond lilies in the black pond, the goldfinch hatchlings "in the swaying branches, in the silver baskets," the dead snake in the road "as cool and gleaming as a braided whip."

Who can walk in the world that Oliver describes and not be blown over by love, made stammering and speechless?

And here I am wading through articles with titles like "Kinematic variables and water transport control the formation and location of arc volcanoes." What is here, among this technical language, to pluck the heartstrings?

I'll tell you.

What we glimpse in these technical reports -- some of which I understand and some of which I don't -- is the invisible machinery of the world, the magic of the elements, the sizzling fuse that burns in every atom, every molecule, every cell -- igniting, creating, animating.

We glimpse what Mary Oliver calls "the white fire of a great mystery."

Yes, there is only one question: How to love this world? That's why I read poets. And why I read Science and Nature, too. When it's over, I want to say with Oliver:

...all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Hermitage

2009-06-24T05:12:00.003Z

Yesterday my friend Maurice and I drove to remote Gougane Barra in West County Cork to walk the mountain ridge that surrounds the valley. This is a holy place in Irish lore. Saint Finbar, who founded Cork City at the mouth of the River Lee in the 6th century, had a hermitage here, on an island in the lake that lies flat and smooth on the valley floor. A tiny modern church now sits on the island, and "rounds" (a kind of mini pilgrimage) are made here on the saint's feast day. It is a stunningly romantic setting, and it's no wonder that many brides choose the venue for their wedding. It would have to be a small wedding; the wee chapel would not seat more than thirty people.

The lake is the source of the River Lee.

Our purpose in coming to Gougane Barra was not religious, but physical; we had our eyes on the peaks and ridges that cradle the lake and mossy forest. But I was not oblivious to the spiritual significance of the place. It is no coincidence that so many of the earliest Irish Christians sought out these remote places of hermitage. They were still very much in thrall to the nature worship of their druidic predecessors -- as I discuss at length in my book Climbing Brandon: Science and Faith on Ireland's Holy Mountain.

"If you wish to know the Creator, understand the creature," said Saint Columbanus, a contemporary of Finbar. The historical tension between transcendence and immanence (at work in every religious tradition) was decided in continental Christianity in favor of transcendence, and with it came the troublesome dualisms of natural/supernatural, matter/spirit, body/soul. By contrast, the early Irish texts suggest a God who is immanent in every part of creation -- in Sun, Moon, stars, wind and wave -- indeed , inseparable from the creation, even as the unutterable mystery of the universe confounds our understanding and perception. It is a kind of faith that rests more conformably with the spirit of modern science.

Continental Christianity developed as a faith of cities, of social hierarchies, of popes and emperors -- legalistic, authoritarian, rooted in sacred texts and miracles. Early Irish Christianity, like the druidic faith before it, was grounded in the natural world. There were no miracles except the inexhaustible miracle of nature itself. The spirit of the early Irish saints and scholars still haunts the enchanted valley of Gougane Barra.

Bunny

2009-06-23T05:20:00.000Z

In one of his always delightful essays, Stephen Jay Gould traced the "evolution" of Mickey Mouse from the time of his creation by Disney, in 1928, to the mouse we know today. The early Mickey was a bit of a rascal -- mischievous, occasionally cruel. And he looked more or less like a real adult mouse: small head in proportion to body, pointy nose compared to cranial vault, beady eyes, spindly legs. As time passed, Mickey's personality softened and his appearance changed. Head and cranial vault became enlarged, eyes grew to half the size of the face, limbs got pudgier. Gould elucidated the evolutionary principle behind Mickey's transformation: It is called neoteny, or progressive juvenilization.

Mickey became a national symbol, and Americans like their national symbols cute and cuddly. Mickey's chronological age did not change, but he developed babyish features. To explain these perhaps unconscious developments on the part of Disney's artists, Gould referred to the work of animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz, who believed that juvenile facial and body features release "innate triggering mechanisms" for affection and nurturing in adult humans. The adaptive value of this response is obvious, since the nurturing of young is necessary for survival of the species. According to Lorenz, evolution has provided us with a caring response to juvenile features, a genetically-programmed reaction that apparently overflows onto other species.

If Lorenz is right, teddy bears, Andy Pandas, and the young rabbit in the grass just now outside my window are beneficiaries of our innate nurturing response to big eyes, round craniums, and pudgy limbs. Even Mickey Mouse evolved juvenile features in response to our evolved preference for all things cute and cuddly.

The meaning of life?

2009-06-22T05:08:00.000Z

And speaking of pseudoscience, allow me to reprise a few paragraphs from something I wrote in the early days of this blog.

I had heard from a high-school student in the midwest who had read my book Skeptics and True Believers, in which, as you may know, I take to task all forms of faith that lack an empirical basis, including astrology and supernaturalist religion. He writes: "Are we just meaningless beasts roaming a meaningless Earth with the sole purpose of popping out babies so we can raise them to live longer, more meaningless lives?

A good question, the best question.

What we have learned about our place on Earth does indeed suggest that we are beasts, related even in our DNA and molecular chemistry to other animals. And, yes, the driving purpose of all animal life would seem to be "popping out babies."

But our uniquely complex human brains allow us to be more than beasts, more than baby-poppers. As far as we know, humans are the most complex thing in the universe, and in our desire to gain reliable knowledge of the universe the universe becomes conscious of itself.

As for myself, I don't need stars or gods to give my life meaning. I work at meaning every day, in the love of family and friends, in caring for my own little pieces of the Earth, in art, in science, and in making myself conscious of the mystery and beauty -- and terror -- of the cosmos.

"Or is there a possibility that there may be more?" asks my midwestern correspondent. Yes, there is almost certainly more to existence than what we have yet learned. Just think how much more we know than did our pre-scientific ancestors.

But that still greater knowledge will have to wait for minds other than my own. My children and grandchildren will know far more than I, and in that growing human storehouse of reliable knowledge I hope they will find some greater measure of meaning.

In the meantime, I attend to the fox that sometimes walks across my windowsill, the morning glory seedlings that reach achingly for the sun, and the moon that hangs like a great milky eye in the sky. Francis Bacon said that what a man would like to be true, he preferentially believes. That's a mistake I try to avoid. I choose instead to believe what my senses tell me to be palpably true.

Down in dim woods the diamond delves -- again

2009-06-21T06:14:00.001Z

Is there really such a person as Shelley von Strunckel? Well, there must be, because there's her photograph at the top of her "In The Stars" astrology page in the Style section of the London Sunday Times. And, my goodness, she looks both starry-eyed and wise. I better see what she has to say about Virgos:

Few things are more disheartening than seeing things you've worked hard to make happen fall apart. Tempting as it is to try to breathe new life into these -- and there could be several such situations -- if they're floundering, let them. In distancing yourself, you'll get a clearer perspective on their potential. However, with the Sun brilliantly aspecting both Neptune and the expansive Jupiter during the week, unexpected developments and sudden and glorious offers could completely alter the landscape of your personal, romantic or working life. Once you have these to think about, you'll be relieved you wasted no time on those pursuits that, with every passing day, are becoming less interesting.

Ah, yes, now that makes a lot of sense, and I'm sure it applies just to me, especially the part about a sudden and glorious offer that will alter my romantic life. I'm waiting, I'm waiting.

A few years ago, I compared here the advice offered in four separate astrology columns, all on the same day, all mutually contradictory. It is hard to resist the idea that this stuff is made up out of whole cloth, perhaps even by a computer that randomly juggles pat phrases. And yet, I'm confident Ms. von Strunkel is a wealthy lady. "The most common of all follies," wrote that old curmudgeon H. L. Mencken, "is to believe passionately in the palpably not true."

Now, here is my own stellar advice for the coming days, which I offer entirely free of charge:

Tossing and turning? Can't sleep? Get up before the Sun and step outside. Brilliant Jupiter dominates the southern sky, blazing majestically. The Milky Way streams overhead -- there is no Moon to shed obscuring light. In the southwest the gorgeous center of the galaxy slips below the horizon, the Teapot of Sagittarius pouring its steaming contents onto the Earth. Now wait. Turn toward the east. The sky brightens, and -- voila! -- Venus and Mars rise together into the dawn. Put aside your cares and woes, lie back in a lawn chair, and enjoy the spectacle of a sunrise. Ask your sweetie to join you and -- who knows? --something sudden and glorious may happen in your romantic life.

There. Now wasn't that fun. And it didn't matter when you were born (although where you are will make a difference).

Polls show that half of Americans are open to astrological influences in their lives. I could never quite grasp why folks find astrology so compelling when the real sky is so full of wonder. The science writer Isaac Asimov had an explanation: "Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold,"

The written word

2009-06-20T06:14:00.002Z

When we think of the written word we think of literature, or newspapers. We think of little children in one-room school houses learning their alphabet with chalks and slates. We think of universal literacy. But the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss said that the main function of early writing was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings."

Certainly, the use of writing helped white European colonists overwhelm illiterate Native Americans, displacing them from their lands and obliterating their traditions. This was true for the Cherokees as for other tribes. As Jared Diamond has pointed out, words on paper were as important as guns, germs and steel in the colonialist's advantage.

The illiterate Cherokee metalsmith Sequoyah "got it." He didn't have a clue what those scribbles on the white man's paper were all about, or how they worked, but he knew a good thing when he saw it. In 1820, he set about doing the same thing for the Cherokee language.

He started by inventing a pictographic sort of writing, with a different representational image for each word, but gave it up as hopelessly complicated. Then he tried devising a separate arbitrary sign for each word, but again was overwhelmed with thousands of signs.

Now, a light-bulb moment. Sequoyah realized that the many thousands of words in the Cherokee language were made up of a smaller number of sounds, what we call syllables. He whittled these down to 85 -- a few vowels, mostly combinations of a consonant and a vowel. He assigned a simple sign for each syllable, borrowing some signs at random (letters and one number) from an English book, inventing others of his own. Bingo! He had an easily-mastered written language, not an alphabet but a syllabary, something the Minoans of Crete had devised thousands of years earlier.

By 1825, the Cherokees had almost universal literacy in their own language and their own newspapers.

Sequoyah had before him the example of written English, but he knew nothing of its structure or meaning. The analysis of his own language and the invention of the syllabary was entirely his own -- one of the few known examples of the invention of a written language by a single individual.

Sequoyah was not quite a Chattanooga native, but he came from the neighborhood, and Chattanoogans take pride in him today. His most conspicuous monument: The TVA's Sequoyah Nuclear Generating Station just north of the city.

The tending of conscience

2009-06-19T05:40:00.001Z

I was born and raised on land in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that once belonged to the Cherokee Nation. Beginning in 1838, the Cherokees were rounded up, herded into camps, then forcibly removed from their ancestral lands to new territories in Oklahoma. Their homes were burned, their farms distributed to whites.

Their transport west is known among the Cherokees and other removed tribes as "The Trail of Tears." Hunger, cold and disease took a heavy toll (nearly a third died along the way). This shameful episode was allowed, organized, and enforced by such American heroes as Justice John Marshall, President Andrew Jackson, and General Winfield Scott. White voices raised in protest were few and far between.

We learned about Marshall, Jackson and Scott in school, but nary a word about the forced expulsions that took place within a few miles of the classroom. The incident had been pretty much erased from the collective memory of the inheritors of Cherokee land. Nothing unusual about any of this. The Trail of Tears was a typical incident in the long colonial history of guns, germs and steel. The Cherokee were relatively fortunate compared, say, to the exterminated native peoples of Tasmania.

One assumes that the perpetuators of these colossal crimes knew in their heart of hearts that what they were doing was wrong. A justification was required, and as usual that meant defining the Cherokees as an inferior race having inferior rights. It was God, after all, who gave peoples of European extraction superior intelligence and moral dignity. The savages were blighted by divine approbation; it might even be debated whether or not they possessed immortal souls. Science too was often enlisted in the effort to show the subjugated peoples inferior.

Greed and injustice will no doubt always be with us, but science at least has been self-correcting. The anthropologist Jared Diamond, who traces the fates of human societies in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel, cites advances in genetics, molecular biology, biogeography, epidemiology, linguistics, geology, and climatology, among other sciences, to account for the successes of the colonizers. No reliable evidence has emerged from science to suggest intrinsic differences of intelligence or moral worth among the human peoples of the Earth. Tomorrow I will cite one extraordinary example of creative genius among the Cherokees, that of the self-taught linguist Sequoyah.

Several years ago I sat in the grass of a new park that was being opened on the banks of the Tennessee River at the place in Chattanooga where the Cherokees were herded aboard boats to begin their forced journey west. We were entertained with wonderful music by Cherokee musicians who had come from Oklahoma. On the rise above us was the stunning new Tennessee Aquarium, with its surrounding terraces and fountains dedicated to the memory of the Trail of Tears and Cherokee culture. The place is called Ross's Landing. John Ross was a Cherokee.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

2009-06-18T05:51:00.001Z

My writing studio here in Kerry is an earth-covered structure, buried in the hill. We wanted it to be virtually invisible from the village below, so as to intrude upon the landscape as little as possible. We call it the Hobbit Hole.

The front is a wall of windows looking out to sea, twenty feet of sloping glass with a wide sill inside. It is a natural greenhouse, and every summer I give it over to plants. My usual company is tomatoes and morning glories. There are a couple of papyrus plants that survive outside during the winter that I bring in for the summer. And this year, for the first time, I am starting greens from seeds in dozens of little peat pots -- Bloomsdale Longstanding, Georgia Southern, and Spinach Mustard. They have germinated, If and when they start to burst their pots I will move them to the garden.

I'm not a gardener; I leave that to my wife. And it's not really food I'm after. I just need to feel the rush and throb of the universe at my elbow as I work. I piece syllables into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs. Meanwhile, the plants on the sill piece atoms into molecules, little molecules into big ones, big molecules into stem and leaf. Together we do our building. I'm under no illusion as to who is the better builder.

Consider the spinach mustard seed. It is not much bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. I had a hellava time picking them up one by one to put in the soil. Tiny, hard and brown, a hundred of them in their little paper packet, every one a Brassica rapa. Put one in soil, water it, give it a bit of sunshine, and in a few days two little leaves appear, splayed, like supplicant hands. Gimme, gimme. It's atoms they're after. They need a lot to build a plant. All that leaf and green to make another seed.

I once walked through Darwin's greenhouses at his home in Downe, Kent. He spent long hours there, observing plants, intensely curious as to how they behaved -- yes, behaved! -- in response to their environment. He wrote two books on the subject: The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants, and The Power of Movement in Plants. He tells us that it "always pleased him to exalt members of the botanical world in the scale of organized beings," plants generally being consigned to a lower status than creatures that get up and go. If you read Darwin, you sometimes feel he preferred the company of his climbers and twiners to the company of people.

Be that as it may, to watch a tiny seed turn itself into a spinach mustard is no small thing. All that wonderful molecular machinery, the DNA winding and unwinding, spinning and weaving, crafting proteins, artfully arranging. No matter how often I have watched it happen, it still cheers and inspires me to have it happening at my elbow.

Out of the dark -- Part 2

2009-06-17T05:37:00.000Z

A few more thoughts on coming of age. Yesterday I mentioned falling in love with a bright-spirited young woman and the study of science as formative influences of my early adulthood. Last evening at table I thought of two more influences that must be acknowledged. Kindly indulge my reverie.

I was at UCLA at the time (the University of California at Los Angeles, 1959-60), a grad student in physics, just married, and still in the throes of a Jansenistic Catholicism. One day I wandered into the university's art galley, which had been given over to the work of Sister Mary Corita Kent and her students at LA's Immaculate Heart College -- a joyous explosion of colorful words and images such as I had never seen, Catholic in their essence, but not explicitly so. Well, wait, I had seen something like this before, at St. Mary's College at Notre Dame, in the work of Norman Laliberte and his students, including our sometime contributor Anne (see pic above). But here were rooms spilling over with art proclaiming that the point of religion is joy and love. I was deeply moved, and returned again and again to the gallery until the end of show.

Meanwhile, I ate my brown-bag lunch each day in the university's botanical garden with new friend and fellow grad student in physics Moises Levy, a Panamanian secular Jew (as I recall), who indulged my naive religious certainty with a kindly, bemused generosity. In the course of those lunches, surrounded by a wonderful variety of exotic plants - - Darwin's tangled bank? -- I imbibed from Levy a suspicion that the dualisms that had been so much a part of my early education -- natural/supernatural. body/soul, matter/spirit -- were not only without empirical foundation, but that modern science had rendered the distinctions superfluous. It was as if I had received permission to take pleasure in the world of the here and now.

Sister Corita left her order in 1968 and plied her radically-innovative art in opposition to war and in praise of ecumenical joy. She died in 1986 at age 68. It was she who turned the huge Dorchester gas tank in Boston into a much beloved work of art.

I have no idea what became of Moises Levy, but owe him -- and our common love of physics -- a debt of gratitude. I find more to celebrate in the tiny red spider mite that is at this moment crawling across my computer screen than in all the theological paraphernalia of my youth.

Out of the dark

2009-06-16T05:58:00.001Z

Here in Ireland the news is all of the Ryan report, the devastating summary of a government-instituted investigation of decades of child abuse -- physical, emotional and sexual -- in institutions run by eighteen orders of Roman Catholic priests, brothers and nuns. Thousands of children were victimized, from toddlers to late-teens. It is a grim picture of what when on in Catholic Ireland before the Celtic Tiger of economic success brought secular Enlightenment values -- including democratic openness -- to the fore.

There is plenty of responsibility to go around. Throughout most of the 20th century, the government took a hands-off attitude to the doings of the Church. The hierarchy shifted perpetrators unpunished from place to place. The police deferred to the bishops. The Ryan report makes clear that the abuse was not just the work of a few bad apples, but systemic and pervasive. If you've seen the movie The Magdelene Sisters, you will have some idea of what transpired.

A few days, ago, the Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Reverend Diarmuid Martin, said, "There are questions to be asked regarding how much Irish devotional practice in general had drifted away from the fundamental fact that God is love...We have to ask to what extent the punitive and humiliating culture which seems to have developed in some such institutions was due to the fact that we had drifted away from the God who is love into one inspired by a punitive, judgmental God; a God whose love was the love of harsh parents, where punishment became the primary instrument of love."

I was raised in a Roman Catholic culture of a primarily Irish flavor, with its emphasis on sin -- mostly sexual -- and punishment. As a college student I went through a period of intense intellectual religiosity of a thoroughly Jansenistic sort -- Leon Bloy, Georges Bernanos, Francois Mauriac -- sex, sin and punishment all wound up together. I subjected my body to harsh disciplines in the misguided notion that the flesh was evil and needed chastisement. I can imagine how easy it might have been for priests, brothers and nuns, confined to grim institutions filled with morbid religious imagery, dressed in stiff and colorless clothes, deprived of most of the bright and joyous pleasures of life, most especially including normal sexual and emotional relationships, and steeped in a theology of efficacious physical punishment, to take their frustrations and repressed sexuality out on their young charges.

This is not to excuse the terrible actions of the perpetrators, or to dismiss the good work done by the majority of religious men and women who kept their moral bearings in unselfish service. But I know from experience that the prevailing ambiance of mid-century Catholicism was a potent and unhealthy mix of perverted religion and sexuality.

I had the good fortune to fall in love with a sensible, even-tempered, skeptical woman who had somehow escaped the Jansenist curse. I also had the good fortune to study science, from which I learned to love the natural world, to see it as neither intrinsically good nor evil except by human volition. From science too I learned to use Ockham's razor to pare away the supernaturalist excrescences that so often bind the human soul in service to a punitive, judgmental God. I have spent my adult life celebrating the beauty and wonder of the here and now.

It's almost like being in love

2009-06-15T05:24:00.000Z

When a man loves a woman,
can't keep his mind on somethin' else.

Language. Everyone agrees that language is a defining -- maybe the defining -- attribute of our species. No one knows how language evolved, or exactly when. In The Descent of Man, Darwin made the bold suggestion that language could have started with love songs, reinforced by sexual selection. Maybe brain and sweet talk grew together.

Love me tender, love me sweet,
never let me go.

Could it be true? Did we learn to speak on the boulevard of broken dreams? Was it that old devil moon that caused our chimplike tongues to shrink in size and retreat to the back of the mouth, our larynx to flex and bend? Neanderthals, presumably, could only grunt. Did they grunt their desire? Did the more alluring grunts win sexual favor?

Does she love me
with all her heart?
Should I worry
when we're apart?
It's a lover's question...

Mice have sex. Mice make babies. We read recently about researchers in Germany who modified a mouse gene -- Foxp2, I think it was -- to make it more like the human version of the gene, a gene considered essential to the human capacity for speech. The modified pups had a different call than normal mouse pups. A substitution of only two amino acids in the relevant protein made the difference. We haven't heard yet if the modified mice score more often with the opposite sex.

Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you.
Embrace me, my irreplaceable you.

Darwin was much interested in sexual selection -- males competing for mates, females choosing the males they like best -- as a driving engine of evolution. Lots of creatures pitch vocal woo. Could a slightly more attractive song confer as much selective advantage as, say, brighter feathers or longer antlers?

Who's sorry now?
Who's heart is aching
for breaking each vow?

No one knows, of course, whether sexual selection, much less love songs, had anything to do with the origin of speech, but is the idea really so far fetched? How many base substitutions in the DNA are required to go from a grunt rolled seductively at the back of the throat to "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliette is the sun."

They asked me how I knew
my true love was true...
Something here inside
cannot be denied...

Pitching woo. Woo, oh, woo, woo, woo. Sweet nothings. Woo, I woo you. Bill and coo. Woo, woo, I, oh, oh, oh, woo. Woo, oh woo! Oh God, OH GOD!

You've got to give a little, take a little,
and let your poor heart break a little.
That's the story of, that's the glory of love.

Contingency

2009-06-14T06:23:00.003Z

Two years ago, on April 1, I re-posted here a Boston Globe column from April 1, 1991. At the time, I couldn't find the drawing I had made to accompany the column, but recently I came across it in a pile of old papers (click to enlarge).

The column, of course was a spoof -- although not every reader got it. But what I had to say about Stenonychosaurus was true. Stenonychosaurus (Troodon) was a smallish, relatively big-brained dinosaur that lived near the end of the Cretaceous period of geologic history, just before the dinosaur extinctions. The paleontologist Dale Russell and others have suggested that if the dinosaurs had not become extinct (or almost so, excepting the ancestors of modern birds), then Stenonychosaurus or its ilk might have fairly quickly evolved humanlike intelligence and perhaps even civilization. After all, the several millions years of human evolution from similar ancestors are but a blink in geologic time.

Pockets? Just think of the selective advantages! A place to keep a jack knife. Loose change. Billets-doux. OK. OK. Just kidding. But the contingency of evolution is not a joke. We like to think of ourselves as the inevitable culmination of natural selection, as if the entire universe of galaxies labored and groaned to bring us forth. It ain't necessarily so. Just ask the pocket-lizard.

Loon star state

2009-06-13T06:15:00.003Z

The creationists in Texas and elsewhere continue their efforts to dumb down science education standards in the U. S. so as to allow the teaching of religion-based pseudoscience. (The graph above shows acceptance of evolution by the citizens of 34 developed nations. Click to enlarge.) The new strategy is to "teach all sides of the issue" so as to develop "critical thinking" among the students. I mean, who could object to that?

Well, no one really, except that it will allow an opening for poorly informed and religiously-motivated teachers to use the science classroom to indoctrinate students who themselves do not have the training or the knowledge to evaluate evidence.

Who has the superior ability to evaluate evidence? Eighth grade students, or the international professional scientific community?

Before we start changing the curriculm and textbooks, school committee members should be required to do this simple exercise. Take a year's worth of Science and Nature, say, the two most respected and comprehensive international journals of science. Count every article or research report that invokes evolution. Then count every article or research report that invokes creationism or intelligent design.

When the first glimmer of creationism or intelligent design appears in the peer-reviewed, professional scientific literature, that will be the time to teach all sides of the issue.

Fifth anniversary

2009-06-12T05:43:00.000Z

Tom tells me that we have reached the fifth anniversary of this blog. Millions of words, more words perhaps here in retirement than in all of my books together, more words than during those twenty years with the Boston Globe. To what end?

Not to entertain, surely, although those of you who visit here have been a blessing and a treasure.

Nor because I am flattered by the sound of my own voice; it is too late in the game for that.

Then why?

I mentioned here a few weeks ago playing ,as a young man, Ariel in Shakespeare's The Tempest. At my present age, it is lines by Caliban I think of:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after a long sleep,
Will make me sleep again.

Now, in my nodding retirement, I have time to attend the sounds and sweet airs that fill this wondrous isle we call Earth, the glimmerings and whisperings that give delight and hurt not, the strange noises -- the chirping of crickets and the cosmic microwave background radiation, the language of Shakespeare and the rumble of distant thunder. And out of those glimmerings and whisperings and strange noises to compose, such as it is, a soul.

Yes, that's what I have been doing here: soul building. In his third sonnet to Opheus, Rilke uses the phrase Gesang ist Dasein, singing is being. And so I sing. Not to entertain, or for applause, or for lucre; those days are past. I sing to be.

And say with Yeats:

Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it it study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come --
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath --
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades;
Or a bird's sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.