Gleam in My Eyes

Gleam in My Eyes (from Vox, by Christina Dalcher)

It's been so long since I've used my laptop, I'm worried it might not power up, that a year of nonuse will have sent it into the same dormant silence I fell into. But it's obedient, like an old friend waiting for a phone call, or a pet sitting patiently at the door until its owner comes home. I trace a ginger over its smooth keys, wipe a smudge from the screen, and collect myself.

A year is a long time. Hell, when the FIOS in our house went down for two hours, it seemed like the end of the world.

Eight thousand seven hundred ans sixty hours is a lifetime longer than two, which is why I need a moment before I walk out of this house, start the Honda, and follow Morgan to the lab where I'll be spending three days a week from now until I finish fixing the president's brother.

Also, I need a moment to sift through my files, the ones I copied and kept at home so I didn't have to lug the same shit back and forth to my campus office. There are reports I don't want Morgan to see, not until I can speak to Lin.

The bottom folder is the one I want, the folder with the red X on its front flap. Patrick has already gone to work, and Morgan is out in his Mercedes making phone calls, likely gloating to Reverend Carl about what a fantastic team he's put together, which leaves me here in the paneled room with its humming window air-conditioning unit and – I don't know – about five million pounds of books. They don't weigh that much, but the teetering piles of texts and journals are like academic mesas littering the rec room.

We havent't used the sleeper sofa in a year and a half, not since the last houseguest came to visit. No one really visits anymore. There's no point. We tried it once, a dinner party for some old friends I'd met when Steven was still in diapers, but after an hour of the men talking and the women staring into their plates of salmon, everyone decided to go home.

I pry up the corduroy-covered cushion next to me and slip my red-X folder in among a few cracker crumbs, a stray piece of popcorn, and some spare change.

This “it”, encased in a dull manila folder rubbed shiny by my own hands, is the work that will, when I'm ready, reverse Wernicke's aphasia. I've thought about finding a more permanent hiding place for it, but given the year's worth of crap I find beneath the sofa cushions, I don't see the need.

No one, not even Patrick, knows we had passed the brink from “close” to “finished”, although I believe  Lin and Lorenzo suspected.

The day before Thomas and his Taser-carrying men came for me the first time, I had even been winding down a lecture on linguistic processing in the posterior left hemisphere – the area of the brain where temporal and parietal lobes meet. Wernicke's area, and the language loss that accompanies damage to this complex cluster of gray matter, was the reason most of my students signed on for this seminar, and on that day the room was packed with colleagues of colleagues, the dean, and a few out-of-town researches intrigued by our group's latest breakthrough. Lin and Lorenzo sat in the back row as I talked.

They must have seen the gleam in my eyes... Illustration by Elena.

Evolutionists and Creationists

Evolutionists vs. Creationists

In 1830 the Englishman Charles Lyell published the first volume of his epoch-making Principles of Geology, in which he showed that the force that had shaped Earth in the past were the same as those at work today. By then it was becoming clear that man had coexisted with many animals long vanished, and in w836, the Dane Christian Thomsen laid the foundations of modem archaeology by his scheme of successive Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, with the Stone Age reaching extremely far back in time.

Public as well as scientific interest in prehistory grew apace. More and more fossils were collected, in the Old and New Worlds alike, and reconstructions were made. When the Crystal Palace exposition opened in London in 1856, it included several life-sized statues of dinosaurs. Since they were not labeled, many visitors were puzzled by them. One man guessed that they were intended as an object lesson in temperance, to show what drunkard might expect to see.

In the same year, remains of Neanderthal man first came to light, in Germany. Initially, most biologists denied that this could be an extinct form of human, and various fanciful stories were devised to account for it. Yet evidence continued to accumulate, while the growth of geological knowledge made it less and less easy to believe that such creatures as the dinosaurs had perished in the Biblical flood – that they were, in the phrase of that day, antediluvian.

In 1859 Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This stunning demonstration of evolution as an understandable, natural set of processes – a hypothesis which had occurred independently, in less detail, to Alfred Russel Wallace – was followed four years later by another intellectual bombshell, Lyell's book The Antiquity of Man Proved by Geology. At the same time, field workers such as the Frenchmen Boucher de Perthes and Edouard Lartet were turning up ever more traces of archaic humanity. When Darwin issued The Descent of Man 1871, he did not “prove we are descended from apes”. What he did was describe how humans and simians could have stemmed from a common ancestor; the idea that this had happened was, by then, current.

Humans and simians stemmed from a common ancestor. Illustration by Elena.

Of course, it had met with much opposition, both popular and scholarly. Southerners during the American Civil War were fond of saying that maybe Yankees came from monkeys all right, but Mar'se Robert E. Lee couldn't be related to anything with a tail. Most clergymen combated every suggestion that the Book of Genesis was not a straightforward piece of reporting.

In fairness we must add that not all did : indeed, some made important contributions to knowledge in this field, especially in France. For that matter, Thomas Henry Huxley's debating opponent, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, was by no means a bigoted ignoramus, but a cultivated and philanthropic gentleman.

Nonetheless, the data were accumulation remorselessly. In a paper read in 1865 the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel established the basis of genetics. His work went almost unnoticed for a generation, but came back to light after the Dutchman Hugo de Vries had identified the phenomenon of mutation, about 1895. Here was the decisive last factor that Darwin had not known of, the material on which his principles of natural selection and sexual selection operated. Meanwhile, in 1891, another Dutcham, Eugene Dubois, had found in Java the relics of a being that was unequivocally related to man yet far too primitive, too apelike, to be Homo Sapiens.

Meanwhile, too, knowledge was rapidly growing of the world as it had been long before anything like us existed. A clear-cut example in the evolutionary lineage of the horse, established through fossil find by the American O.C. Marsh.

Out of all this, an understanding developed of much more than fossils. Evolution could be seen in action: that is, the principle of evolution made sense out of observations in science and even everyday life. As obvious case is that of industrial melanism. The peppered moth of England darkened, for better disguise against predators, as trees grew coal-sooty during the Industrial Revolution. In our own lifetimes, with decreasing air pollution, the same species is growing lighter again.

Creationists object that this is not a valid example, but represents mere variability. Nobody, the say, has ever seen a whole new species come into existence. That is true enough, as far as it goes – with some possible exceptions among microscopic organisms. However, evolution takes thousands and millions of years to bring about most of the unmistakable changes that evolutionists describe. The evidence is necessarily indirect. But so, just as necessarily, is the evidence for the reality of events chronicled in the Bible.

(By Poul Anderson).

Nobody, the say, has ever seen a whole new species come into existence. Illustration by Elena.

Gold

Gold

From The final Science Fiction collection by Isaac Asimov

The plants and animals? Well, we control them. We supervise their breeding and we consume any excess. Maintaining the human population at a reasonable level is more difficult. We cannot allow human births to outstrip human deaths, and we keep the number of deaths as low as possible, of course. This makes our culture a nonyouthful one compared to Earth's. There are few youngsters and a large percentage of those mature and postmature. This produces psychological strains, but there is the general feeling among Settlers that those strains are worth it, since with a carefully controlled population, there are no poor, no homeless, and no helpless.

Again, the water, air, and food must be carefully recycled, and much of our technology is devoted to the distillation of used water, and to the treatment of solid bodily wastes and their conversion to clean fertilizer. We cannot afford to have anything go wrong with our recycling technology, for there is little room for slack. And, of course, even when all goes well, the feeling that we eat and drink recycled materials is a bit unpalatable. All is recycled on Earth, too, but Earth is so large and the natural cycling system so unnoticeable, that Earthpeople tend to be unaware of the matter.

Then, too, there is always the feat that a sizable meteor may strike and damage the outer shell of a Settlement. A bit of matter no larger than a piece of gravel might do damage, and one a foot across would surely destroy and Settlement. Fortunately, the chances for such a misadventure are small and we will eventually learn to detect and divert such objects before they reach us. Still, these dangers weigh upon us, and help mitigate the feeling of over-security that some of us complain about.

With an effort, however, with close attention and unremitting care, we can maintain our ecology, were it not for the matter of trade and travel.

Each Settlement produces something that other Settlements would like to have, in the matter of food, or art, of ingenious devices. What's more, we must trade with Earth as well, and many Settlers want to visit Earth and see some of the things we don't have in the Settlements. Earthpeople can't realize how exciting it is for us to see a vast blue horizon, or to look out upon a true ocean, or to see in ice-capped mountain.

Therefore, there is a constant coming and going among the Settlements and Earth. But each Settlement has its own ecological balance; and, of course, Earth has, even these days, an ecology that is enormously and impossibly rich by Settlement standards.

We have our insects that are acclimated and under control, but what if strange insects are casually and unintentionally introduced from another Settlement or from Earth?

A strange insect, a strange worm, even a strange rodent might totally upset our ecology, inflict damage on our native plants and animals. On numerous occasions, in fact, a Settlement has had to take extraordinary measures to eliminate an unwanted life-form. For months every effort had to be taken to track down every last insect of some species that, in its own Settlement, is harmless, or that, on earth, can keep its depredations local.

Earth Ecology. Photograph by Elena.

Change is Continual and Transactional

Change is Continual and Transactional

Third, a dialectical perspective holds that, if you look deeply, change is continual even though it may be so incremental it is hard to notice. A seed place in the ground is in constant change – swelling, germinating, growing into a flower and decaying to become the nutrients that nourish the next seed. Despite this continual change, our predominant experience is of continuity. We experience the continuity of our physical bodies, when in fact all the molecules in our bodies have changed. These incremental changes at times coalesce in sudden change. A concrete overpass freezes and thaws, infinitesimally changing with each truck and car until suddenly it fails and collapses. The assumption here is that the whole of nature is in motion: you can never step in the same river twice (Heraclitus). Our minds see mostly unchanging continuity, but from a dialectical perspective, continual change is more primary. The impression of static continuity is an artifact or misperception.

Identity, too, is seen as relational and in continuous change. The only reason he looks old is because she looks younger; the only reason I look rigid is because you are flexible. If a new, more rigid person joins our team then, suddenly, I look quite flexible by comparison. Taking a dialectical perspective means that words like “good” or “bad: or “dysfunctional” are snapshots of the person in context, not qualities inherent in the person. My favorite examples come from watching consultation teams or skills training groups over time. Someone is always “a problem”. Whoever happens to be the most (pick your adjective: negative/positive, task-focused/ process-focused) drives the rest of us crazy. Yet, if people are forced to stay in the situation, something always happens and they change, sometimes radically. Once in a skills training group a client was “a problem” offering constant negative comments and harsh but whip-smart criticism. By contrast, the lead skills trainer looked like a defensive Pollyanna. When a new co-trainer rotated into the skills group, he shared the same style of sarcastic humor as “the problem client”, but instead of being harsh, he had a delightful wry smile. He admired and was found of the lead skills trainer.

The group chemistry turned criticism into banter and created a lighter but still pointed feedback loop. Released from the siege mentality and genuinely seeing the humor in it all now, the group leader became more creative and likable herself. The “problem client” has less to criticize and could learn more easily. Things settled down (until the next “problem” person arose!)

Continual Change. Photo by Elena.

Evolution is a Basic Principle

Evolution is a Basic Principle

Creationists generally talk of the “theory of evolution”. Many who disagree with creationism reply that evolution is no such thing, but a fact. Thereby they fall into the same dogmatism as certain of their opponents, and become subject to the same refutation. After all, what is a fact? Nobody alive has ever met an Australopithecus or watched prokaryotic cells develop in the pre-Cambrian seas. It is a rather feeble retort that nobody has met Adam and Eve either, or watched the world coming into being by fiat.

In the last analysis, those of us who accept the idea of evolution do so because it is an inference, based on many different accumulated observations, which enables us to account for those data, fit them into a scheme that makes sense. The creationist can quite legitimately reply that this is what his beliefs do for him.

However, at this point in the history of science, it is a mistake to agree that evolution is a mere “theory”. That concedes more to the creationist than he deserves.

What is a theory, anyway? To answer that question, we must take a look at the scientific method itself.

Now, a number of distinguished scientists have denied that there is any such thing, and I rather agree with them. That, though, would take us too fat afield now. Let us just glance at the traditional paradigm, oversimplified though it is, the purpose will only be to make clear what we mean by certain words.

In this paradigm, scientists begin by making observations of nature, as exact as possible. Then somebody formulates a scheme which summarizes those observations, preferably in mathematical terms. That is because mathematics is the language par excellence of precision. Somebody else takes such a description and tries to explain it by a hypothesis. That is, this person proposes the existence of a mechanism or a relationship which would logically produce the observations themselves. A good hypothesis also yields predictions; it tells us what further observations we should try to make. If we make them, and the results fit the scheme well enough, then in due course the hypothesis gains the status of a theory. That is, we accept it as depicting, more or less correctly, some aspect of reality.

Evolution is no longer a mere theory. Illustration by Elena.

Later discoveries may prove irreconcilable with the theory. In that case, we have to discard it – or, at least, drastically modify it – and look for another.

The standard example comes from planetary astronomy. For untold millenia, observers had been gathering data about the motions of the heavenly bodies across the sky. This effort culminated, for the time being, in the magnificent work of Tycho Brahe in the 16th century. Meanwhile, of course, there had been many attempts to account for the data. The idea that everything revolves around Earth grew increasingly unlikely as information accumulated; the picture had to be made too complicated, with epicycles. As early as the 13th century, Alfonso X, king of Leon and Castile, remarked that if he had been present at the Creation, he could have given the Creator some good advice.

Eventually Nicholas Copernicus offered a much more satisfactory description, in which the sun was at the center. Galileo Galilei and others refined this system and added to it. Finally Johannes Kepler put it into elegant mathematical form, in his three laws of planetary motion.

Isaac Newton then accounted for those laws by his hypothesis of universal gravitation (even though he himself denied making hypothesis) together with his own three laws of the motion of all bodies, not just planets. Soon observation confirmed this so well that it became a basic theory in physics. By means of it, later generations discovered new planets and explained the behavior of distant stars.

There remained a few loose ends, such as a slow change in the orbit of Mercury. Early in the 20th century, Albert Einstein proposed a whole new theory, general relativity, which included Newtonian mechanics as a special case, and which accounted for those anomalous phenomena.

Thus far the usual description of science in action. As said, it is much oversimplified, and in many instances is scarcely true at all. Still, if nothing else, it does help us give clear meaning to our words.

The important point here, though, is that even taken as face value it is incomplete. It omits a further stage of thought which is of primary importance.

Before going on to that, let us very sketchily review the history of the evolutionary concept. That way we can compare it to the development of astronomy. If nothing else, we will be reminding ourselves that the idea of evolution was not invented by a few subversives in the 19th century, but has a long and honorable pas of its own.

By 1800 the concept was already in the air. There had been some speculation along those lines as far back as Classical times, if not before. During the Renaissance and after, men gradually realized that they were coming upon the petrified bones of beasts which no longer existed. Early in the 19th century, the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier advanced the hypothesis that more than one creation had occurred in the past: that life had appeared several times, to be wiped out by worldwide catastrophes, and that the account in the Bible refers only to the latest of these eras. Regardless of this deferral to religion, Cuvier was considered blasphemous by many. Once some of his students decided to throw a healthy scare into him. One of them costumed himself like the traditional Satan, entered the professor's home at night, woke him, and roared, “ I am the Devil, and for your impiety I have come to eat you!” Cuvier looked him up and down and replied scornfully, :Hmf! Horns and hoofs. You can't. You're graminivorous.”

His catastrophism was denied by a contemporary compatriot, Jean Baptiste Lamarck. A war here at age sixteen, Lamarck later boldly maintained that living species, had developed from less specialized ancestors. However, he thought that the causes lay in environment and the actions of individual organisms. This was so unconvincing that few accepted it until the 20th century, when for a time a version of it became official dogma in the Soviet Union.

(By Poul Anderson).

Evolution has become just such a basic principle. It is as much a fundamental of the universe, as we conceive the universe to be, as are the laws of thermodynamics or relativity. There is no scientific argument against it, only antiscientific one. Illustration by Elena.