Category Archives: science

Monkey see, monkey do?

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Turns out, the primate best described by that old chestnut is none other than Homo sapiens. A new study in Science reports that, in a comparative study of human toddlers, chimpanzees, and orangutans, the human kids only exceeded their cousins in one area: what the authors call “social intelligence.” Human toddlers were better able to guess the intentions of a researcher, and to repeat complex actions they’d seen demonstrated.

Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis. Science, 317(5843): 1360-6.

Essay: Biology and morality

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My new favorite podcast is Radio Lab, from New York Public Radio. It’s sort of Nova plus This American Life, with a heavy dose of the Douglas Adams sensibilities that I’ve come to associate with co-host Robert Krulwich. And it’s awesome.

What’s on my mind right now is the episode of 28 April 2006, “Morality”. It delves into emerging studies of the biology of human morals – what parts of the brain are involved in moral decision-making, and how evolutionary history shaped them. A key point is that there are two kinds of moral thinking, rules-based decision-making (“Thou shalt not kill”) and calculating (“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”). And these two kinds of moral thinking take place in different parts of the brain. When they come into conflict, maybe because you’re thinking about killing someone in order to save several other people, a third area of the brain kicks in to decide between the two. This third area is (apparently) entirely unique to humans – not even chimpanzees have it.

But chimpanzees (and other apes) do have the rules-based moral thinking area. It helps them get along with other chimps. Which means that rules-based morality is evolutionarily primitive. If they could write, chimps could probably come up with most of the Ten Commandments! Where does that leave Christian morality? Is it all just pre-programmed behavior wrapped up in unnecessary mysticism?

No. As it happens, I’ve just finished reading Michael Ruse’s excellent book Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (Cambridge University Press, 2001), which addresses exactly this question. And, as Ruse points out, Christ’s teachings call us to live beyond the Ten Commandments – those moral principles that seem to crop up in every human belief system.

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet those who greet you, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as you heavenly Father is perfect.
—Matthew 5:46-8 (NIV)

In other words, Christians are to exceed the dictates of morality that everyone already follows. We’re to transcend our biology, using that part of our brain that sets us above the rest of the animal kingdom.

Encyclopaedia Biologica?

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From news @ nature.com: work has begun on what is to be a comprehensive Encyclopedia of Life. Estimated “final” contents: multimedia presentations on 2 million species. Estimated time to completion: 10 years. The web portal is online now.

The sample pages are intriguing, particularly the weird slider on the sidebar that runs from “novice” to “expert” – apparently it filters the information presented depending on how deep the user wants to go. It looks as though it will be possible to browse through the tree of life, which is essential.

Hard to say how valuable this will actually be – certainly it looks like a good source for elementary science term papers, but will it actually be useful for basic research? What I would want (and what is maybe there but not visible in the sample interface) is easy connections to the primary literature (Google Scholar?) and public gene or protein sequence data.

More on flagellum evolution

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So an anonymous comment to my last post on Liu and Ochman’s paper “Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system” directed me to comments by Nick Matzke over on the Panda’s Thumb, which suggest that the L&O results could be an artifact of their methods. I don’t have much experience with the methods at the heart of the issue, but it looks like Matzke could have a point. That’s what I get for being all triumphalist.

That said, for publication at PNAS, L&O did pass peer review by people who know this sort of work. If Matzke feels he has a solid case, he ought to publish a response (he’s previously published on flagellum evolution [subscription], so he should get a hearing), and let the peer review process sort things out. It’s also worth noting that L&O are building on a lot of previous work on the evolution of the flagellum (their introduction section sums it up), which has given scientists good reason to think that the flagellum (1) did evolve in a stepwise fashion and (2) was assembled in part from pre-existing components with other functions.

Well, that about wraps it up for Michael Behe

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Open access article in last week’s PNAS: Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system. Of course, the Intelligent Design crowd will continue saying the same things they’ve always said without blinking, but it’s always nice to have a citation ready at hand for refutation.

The authors look at the relationships of the genes involved in building a flagellum, and are able to deduce that they arose through duplication – mutation and natural selection copied pre-existing components and exapted them to put together more and more advanced structures. It’s possible that all the intricately interdependent components of the flagellum originated from one ancestral protein.

Collins versus Dawkins

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NPR’s Fresh Air ran two major interviews on faith and science last week: Richard Dawkins (last Wednesday) followed by Francis Collins (Thursday). Dawkins, of course, made his name as an evolutionary biologist and has recently published The God Delusion, an atheist’s manifesto for the 21st century. Collins is an evangelical Christian who headed the Human Genome Project, now working with the NIH, who has himself just released a defense of scientific Christianity titled The Language of God. The contrasts between the two are informative.

Dawkins comes across as more moderate than I’ve heard him in other interviews; his argument is basically that science explains the physical world better than religion, religion comes with a built-in danger of extremism, and we can find all the meaning we need in science’s explanations of the world. Quoting Douglas Adams, he says that his teenage discovery of evolutionary theory “about wrapped it up for God.”

Collins makes a (to me) highly familiar defense of a theistic scientist’s worldview, making much of his awe before the wonder of the human genome. He points out that science is not necessarily equipped to prove (or disprove) the existence of God, but also persists in talking about “evidence” for the Divine. Citing C. S. Lewis, he argues that faith and evidence are not only compatible, but actually pretty close to the same thing.

My conclusion, after listening to them back to back: they’re both wrong. In this exchange, Dawkins is the more lucid of the two, but his argument founders on his absurd insistence that science’s explanations of the physical world are also adequate to provide that world with meaning. Just because I know why the world is the way it is doesn’t tell me how it should be, especially as regards the best ways for human beings to live together.

Although I’m more in agreement with Collins, his argument feels mushy to me. I can’t agree with his (and Lewis’s) assertion that faith is somehow ultimately based on reasoning from scientific evidence. My judgments of what is (and is not) in accordance with the example of Jesus Christ are far more aesthetic than logical. I can’t quantify why a given behavior is Christly – but I trust that, with prayer, I can make that decision. Likewise, my “evidence” for belief in the Divine is so different from scientific evidence that it probably doesn’t deserve the name. What I have are feelings that are evoked by my experience of Creation and the people in it – this, not scientific fact, is the substance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things unseen.

Have you heard about B flat?

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I’m officially a fan of Morning Edition’s Friday science report, “Krulwich on Science”. It’s a lighthearted look at current and past science that manages to communicate a real sense of wonder about the world around us. Today’s piece, “Have you heard about B flat?” is a delightfully wonky exploration of a completely inexplicable pattern, the recurrence of a particular musical note throughout nature, that recalls Douglas Adams at his weirdest. Another favorite of mine is “Charles Darwin and the racing asparagus”, in which David Quammen helps Krulwich build a playful picture of the gentleman scientist at work.

Essay: Explicable, and sacred

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Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not a miracle.
— Terry Pratchett

I’m building a career in explaining things. It’s what scientists do: we poke at the incredible spinning mechanism of the universe around us, trying to figure out how it works. And, perhaps not surprisingly, this makes some people (religious people, usually) angry.

This is puzzling to me in part because I’m religious, and I don’t think I’m doing religion a disservice by figuring out how Creation works. As far as I can tell, though, religious people who don’t appreciate science are chiefly upset because scientists try to explain things, things that they (the religious people) firmly believe are God’s doing.

Where did we get the idea that what God does must be humanly inexplicable? Or, rather, how did the term “miraculous” come to mean “beyond any eventual human understanding”? (Maybe it always has) The difficulty, of course, is that if we assume that (1) miracles are evidence of God’s existence and involvement with our universe and (2) miraculous = inexplicable, then we’re naturally going to be hostile to folks who try to figure out how miraculous things like the beauty, diversity, and complexity of life on Earth came to be, because they’re chipping away at our evidence for God.

2006.03.12 - desert sun
2006.03.12 – desert sun,
originally uploaded by Jeremy B. Yoder.

What I know is this: I can explain (or look up explanations for) much of the history of Joshua trees, citing the history of the genus Yucca in general, and how it has been shaped over millions of years by yuccas’ dependence on a group of small, drab pollinating moths; but when I look out over a Mojave desert landscape, with the sun shining through the strange, spiky branches of a Joshua tree forest, I feel something that has nothing to do with natural selection.

Science ultimately aims to explain everything in human experience – it’s actually not possible for scientists to define areas of experience that we cannot now and will never explain. There are two ways that religious people can respond to this: they can choose to reject the scientific worldview altogether, or they can embrace it and seek the spirituality of the explicable.

An extreme example of this might be Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist/philosopher. He posited a universe that was evolving toward union with God, in which any gain in understanding of the physical world’s workings was a step toward greater spiritual perfection, too. Teilhard is a bit too optimistic for my taste – the history of humanity doesn’t seem, to me, to bear out the hypothesis that greater scientific knowledge is correlated with greater moral/spiritual understanding.

I see a better option represented in an action most Christians perform every day: saying grace over food. But why do we do this? Recall the episode of “The Simpsons” when, asked to bless a meal, Bart once prays, “Dear God, we paid for all this ourselves, so thanks for nothing.” And technically, Bart has a point.

Why do we thank God for a meal we’ve bought and prepared ourselves? Turn the question on its head for an answer: does God have to make food appear our our plates in a flash of light for us to give Him credit? The answer, of course, is no. Even after preparing my own dinner, I bow my head over it for a moment before I eat. Under this view of the world, everything in human experience is sacred, a cause for gratitude infused with spiritual meaning in spite of (or even as a result of) our understanding of its mechanics. So, when I see a beautiful sunset, knowing as I do that it’s the light from a ball of fusing gases 93 million miles away, my soul fills with gratitude.

Followup: edible clones

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A reading of the executive summary of the FDA report on the safety of cloned livestock confirms my earlier thoughts: there are no risks of consuming cloned meat per se. All of the identified “risks” have to do with the initial health of cloned livestock (such phrases as “the process of normalizing their [ie, cloned animals’] physiological functions”), which could, I suppose, pose a risk to human consumption inasmuch as it’s never best practice to put sickly animals into the food chain. But the report doesn’t even identify any potential risks of cloned meat as cloned meat.

A potential risk I don’t see identified is the impact of reproductive livestock cloning on the genetic variation in U.S. food animals. With the widespread use of artificial insemination and selective breeding, our meat animals’ gene pools are already pretty shallow, which makes them less able to resist disease outbreaks and gives breeders less raw material to adapt our agriculture to a changing world. If the genetic contribution of a single prize bull is now measured not just by how much sperm he can produce, but by how many times he can be cloned, we could be looking at even more dramatic reductions in livestock genetic variation in the future.

Say what?

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From the New York Times (via the AP), “F.D.A. Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe:

After more than five years of study, the Food and Drug Administration concluded that cloned livestock is “virtually indistinguishable” from conventional livestock.

What I want to know is, where do they get the “virtually”? A cloned animal is (supposed to be) genetically identical to its “parent,” so the FDA isn’t telling them apart that way. Perhaps there’s some developmental signature that arises when you create an embryo from an adult cell, like telomere length? Whatever it is, I can’t think of any difference between a clone and a “natural” animal that would have an adverse effect on whoever eats the steak – and neither, apparently, could the FDA.