Our Creation, Our Selves.

I've been listening to Newt Gingrich talking about his book, "Rediscovering God in America". It's an interesting exercise in revisionist history but that's another story. But again, as always is the case when the fundamentalists try to talk about science and evolution, he got it wrong.

He said, "But if you are simply protoplasm, randomly protected by this week's decision of lawyers and politicians..." Don't take my word for it. Listen to him here.

Gingrich is a consummate politician and speaker who knows exactly what he says when he says it. He is speaking to an audience of conservative fundamentalists in the megachurch of Dr. Charles Stanley. Stanley himself equates bathtub gin and Darwin as an indictment of the roaring twenties. Gingrich is not putting the words "simply protoplasm" and "randomly" together by accident. It's an indirect reference to evolution.

And it brings up one of the great fallacies of the fundamentalist view of evolution, that evolution is random.

let's say I take a bunch of cockroaches, some white and some black, and I put them in the blistering sun on a hot day and deny them shade. For our thought experiment, let's presume that the cockroaches are equally strong regardless of color. The black cockroaches absorb heat; the white cockroaches reflect it. At the end of the day it's a fair bet the white cockroaches will outnumber the black ones. If we breed what is left, there being more white cockroaches than black cockroaches, it's likely there will be more white cockroaches in the next generation.

Where's the randomness? Well, the white and black cockroaches, you might say.

True: but that has nothing to do with evolution. Evolution and natural selection intrinsically says nothing about how variation occurs; only what happens when variation presents itself. Even so, inheritance subtracts a lot of randomness out of the equation. After all, what survived isn't random. Therefore, after that first mythical generation the results weren't random anymore.

There are two things about evolution that make fundamentalists insecure. One is saying humans aren't special enough-- we share with other animals the stamp of our origin. Personally, I find it a comfort to say we're not alone on this planet. That we share it with animals towards which we are not only sympathetic but who are distant relatives.

The other is this randomness. I don't think people like the prospect we might live in a world where some deity isn't turning the gears. They want to see purpose in the natural world-- causes in things causeless. Maybe humans have never become completely comfortable in a Copernican universe and still want to be at it's center.

Well, as far as humans are concerned, we are. But not in any religious sense.

Sure, it's nice to be smart enough to bring down a mastodon but the brain big enough to figure out how was already in place when those spears were thrown. Evolution cannot look ahead. It plays the hand it has, not the hand it might have somewhere down the line. You can't explain how a big brain happens with how well the hunt went when it was the brain that enabled the hunting in the first place. The brain came first. Therefore, whatever favored the growth of the brain occurred before the use of the brain was favorable.

So, what makes a big brain? What could immediately favor brain size plasticity?

My guess is sexual selection. Our brains are the moral equivalent to the male peacock's feathers. Smarter guys impressed the gals. Smarter gals picked smarter guys.

What would make intelligence sexy? I have no idea. But we know some pretty strange sexual selection mechanisms in the world-- bower birds, for instance. Many bower birds have taken all the color and pomp associated with bird displays and put it in the arrangement and presentation of inanimate objects. Maybe primitive smart guys gave primitive smart girls jewelry. Maybe primitive smart girls figured out how to wear it.

Given the nature of human beings, maybe it wasn't so much sexual selection as sex selection. Smarter guys made better lovers-- she might prefer the lad who figured out how to give her multiple orgasms over the big guy over there that looked pretty. He might have preferred the inventive lover that seemed to have a rollicking good time over the one that didn't do much.

Who knows?

Regardless, these were the kinds of decisions our ancestors made. There was nothing random about them. The result, us, is the combined incarnation of their choices.

It didn't take a deity to create us.

We did it ourselves.

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Links of Interest

Ancient Humans in Paris
Still More on Mercury and here.
The Heart of Neolithic Orkney: Say that one fast. And here. And here.
Fishing for Fireflies
Decline of the Orangutan