The Rosse Leviathan and the acceptance of evolution

It is well-known that the 19th century realization by Darwin and others that life evolved through historical processes rather than divine creation and intervention dealt a staggering blow to many religious believers at the time.  It still does.  Divine creation was a complex idea, before evolutionary theory allowed the text to be seen as a metaphorical idea, at least for biblical literalists rather than deists, who could accept that God started everything and then let it roll on by itself.

Pre-evolutionary thought
The idea of evolution can be seen in early writings in ancient classical times and in the Islamic glory years.  But these were rather speculative and not what we now would call 'scientific'.  Instead, it was far more obvious and natural to think of creation as static.  That is, one of the important concepts of pre-evolutionary thought was permanence.

Permanence didn't mean that nothing ever changes.  After all, planets move.  But motion isn't the same as coming into existence anew.  The problem was that God has purportedly created 'the' universe, as such, reflecting His glory in our lives.  Likewise, animals and plants move and are produced, but not out of thin air, only as offspring of existing members of their kind.  What was seen as not changing were the types of animals and plants--species, and the specific objects in the cosmos. These were permanent, it was widely believed, because God made it so.

Evolution suggested that basic things came into existence on their own, as it were.  If that were so, then God's work would be harder to understand, or so it would seem given the biblical literalist view of things before the age of science, even into the 19th century.

The point is that 'evolution' was a threatening idea not just to the world of biology in relation to Darwin's and Wallace's work, but more generally.  Or, more generally, Darwin's and Wallace's ideas flopped down amidst what was already a controversial area.  This can be seen in an interesting way in an area of science that otherwise might not seem to be threatening in this way......except that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth".

19th century astronomy
Astronomy is more than just star-gazing in awe of Nature's wonders.  It is about the cosmos, existence itself.  It was long comforting, and pretty well consistent with known facts, to think of the cosmos as centered around the Earth, with the revolving Sun to warm us, and the Music of the Spheres, the stars painted onto crystal spheres, rotating more distantly around the skies.

Galileo's use of the telescope, and work of others tracking planets (mainly, Copernicus), had started to cast doubt on some of these ideas.  The moon and planets weren't perfect spheres, and orbits weren't perfect circles and the Sun was the center of the solar system.  Uncomfortable facts like these did shake religious orthodoxy (in the West, at least), but they really were mainly mathematical re-ordering of the same objects.  More to the point, perhaps, and vital for Isaac Newton, was that the cosmos was orderly--specified by mathematic laws laid down by God (Galileo had had similar ideas). There was absolute location and time, in space, with things moving like clockwork, following the Laws.

One exciting way to study God's work was through telescopes, which had been getting better and better, by far, than what Galileo had to work with.  A famous example is what became the largest telescope in the world in 1854 for nearly a century, in Ireland, affectionately called the Rosse Leviathan. (Rosse was one of the supporters and developers)  A good discussion of this subject is the BBC Radio4 program, Science Stories, July 8, 2015 edition.

Here is an image of the Leviathan:

The Rosse Leviathan, finished 1845

This was a 6-foot reflecting telescope.  Among the amazing things that had been seen in the prior days of astronomy, with weaker instruments, were vague, smeary 'things'.  They were called, appropriately, nebulae.  What were they?

Here are two images from modern telescopy, not the mid-1800s.  Let's look at the top one first.

It was indeed a big smear in earlier telescopes, as if it were a cloud of gas.  If that were the case, perhaps it was condensing into a star with the aid of gravity.  And if that were the case, then the stars in the heavens were not fixed at all, but could come (and perhaps go)!  And in turn, that would mean that the heavens themselves were not permanent: they evolved!  And then what of Genesis and its like?

But what if it's just too far away, and only looks like a smeared cloud of gas?  The new telescopes began to resolve some of these objects, and to show that, in fact, they were points of light--stars--so that, whew!, the Universe was static after all!  Still other nebulae were too far to resolve in that way and the debate was about whether they were, in fact, even more distant stars, or were star-forming clouds.

Spiral formations, now known as galaxies, like the bottom image, were also thought perhaps to be swirls of gas that might be condensing, until they, too were resolved as stars.  But this still left others too far to resolve, or truly gaseous condensations.  Only in the 20th century did light spectrographs show that some of these were, indeed, gas clouds.

We now have a consistent understanding of these various phenomena, and no longer debate whether the universe is constant in the ways religious doctrine had taught.  Nobody was exactly wrong. Swirling spirals can be galaxies, but dust can swirl in as gravity pulls it together in the formation of stars.  The original appearances were ambiguous and the questions about what the clouds were were legitimate.  The interesting aspect is the way in which the interpretation filtered through, and affected, the broader world-views about the nature of existence.  And the relevance of this to biology is (and was) clear.

When all is ready
Exobiologists muse about life elsewhere in space and to date it's no more than musing, really.  But real biologists, who study actual known life on earth, were discovering many facts about life in the mid-19th century that dovetailed with issues about cosmic constancy.

Even as far back as Aristotle's time, fossils of plants and animals were known.  The knowledge was fragmentary and largely ignored rather than studied scientifically, but by Darwin's time two major aspects of change had become very clear.  First was geological change, on land and regarding island chains.  Erosion and mountain building were becoming clear as true phenomena.  This may not really have changed religious feelings if the time periods were consistent with biblical events, like the great flood.  But time was becoming more and more obviously far longer than what Genesis implied.

Fossils had more ominous import.  Species that used to exist, had disappeared, and new species including modern ones appeared here and there.  Georges Cuvier, a believer, suggested, reasonably, that these were events of catastrophic loss but new creation, as part of the Divine plan.

However ideas about biological change and evolution were beginning to swirl.  It was one thing to know that agricultural species had changed (cows gave more milk, sheep had woolier wool, grain yields rose) because of active selection by breeders.  It was not clear up unil then that new species had arisen (agricultural breeding never really produced new species).  But the complex of worldwide data on plants and animals and their distribution, along with fossils and the idea (from agriculture and hobby breeding) that change could be brought about by selection, were forcing a realization that the living world, like the cosmos, might not be as static as dogma held it to be.

In a sense, 'evolution' was 'ready' to be discovered, here, there, and as a more general theme. Ideas about the evolution of society (e.g., Marxism, social Darwinism) were right there with the times, too. This intellectual foment in the new sciences undoubtedly contributed to the discoveries, eventually of the vastness of space and truly gaseous precursors of stars, and of biological evolution.  The discussions 'in the air' set the stage.  But at the same time, the ready resistance was also primed.  That is why, I think, Darwinism hit such a brick wall of resistance from so many intellectuals at the time, and why so many found these ideas so deeply disturbing.

The context of history is important to the development of new ideas, but also to the reaction to them.  Often, ideas in one area of life have impact, or perceived impact, on many others, including deep beliefs about the nature of things.

I think we've now mainly settled into complete comfort with the idea of biological evolution, with no longer any rational arguments against, even if peering into the microscopic nature of genomics still yields a picture as blurry in many ways as the Rosse scope's images.  This is because many aspects of genetic causation remain subtle and elusive, because life seems not as rigidly law-like as physics.  As to cosmology, visual telescopes were only the beginning of a technological odyssey that has shed light onto the origins and development of the universe and has led to general acceptance of the fact of change.  But this hardly diminishes the truly mind-blowing matters, light and dark, that we are learning about, or now know that we still don't know about, regarding the size and scope of the universe(s).

My complexity is more complex than your complexity!

Scientists often talk about how complex their field is, and of course often they are right.  But a word like 'complexity' may be used confer a sense of importance and gravitas to the subject, and often the description--even if true--seems used in an advertising sort of way.  After all, who wants to be working in an area that's 'simple'?  If it's simple, why haven't we solved its problems, unless we're simpletons!

Describing our field as 'complex' usually doesn't just mean there are things in our field that we can't measure or don't know about.  That's always true in any science.  Instead, the term usually means that our phenomena of interest involve a host of causal factors that make the relationship between those factors and the outcomes we're interested in imprecise.  If science is about understanding cause and effect, then what we mean is that the effects we observe aren't easily predictable from the purported or known causes that we assess.

So, in chemistry the folding of proteins is complex.  The structure of galaxies in the cosmos is complex.  And the genetic and other factors causing our traits, like disease, are usually complex.

When we defend our inability to explain everything in our field by saying it’s complex and we’re working hard on it, we are in some senses seeking justification for lots more funding, and exculpating ourselves from being guilty of being too dense to see.  But to a great extent the reason we can’t see the forest for the trees is that we are embedded in the trees, or, there are so many trees that we simply can’t yet figure out the forest.  It is a perfectly legitimate state to be in, because, again, once a problem is solved it’s no longer a science problem—it may be an engineering problem to figure out how to use it and so on, of course.

But your complex isn't the same as my complex!

Every field is different of course, but to me there is a major, I think basically qualitative difference between the enormous complexity of fields like physics and that of biology.  I think this is not yet well recognized by biologists (especially perhaps in biomedical areas), who, as has been widely suggested, often live a life of physics envy and try to present their work with the flavor of and as if it had the rigor of physical science.

To me, the difference is not that biology should be free of physical laws, nor that biological phenomena are not, in deeply profound ways, constrained by those laws.  Living organisms are bags of interacting molecules that so far as we know entirely obey the normal laws of chemistry and those are in essence the laws of physics.  Unless we're into the mind/body duality debate (about, say, the nature of consciousness)--which we're not--our bodies are molecular phenomena.

The difference is the degree to which those kinds of laws are useful in predicting our kind of phenomena.  I think we can see the point, whether or not you'll agree with it, by taking an example from cosmology.

The numbers vary, but there are said to be something on the order of hundreds of billions of stars in a galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe.  The number of atoms or their components within each star is essentially countless.  Yet, stars move within galaxies in regular patterns, and galaxies move around each other in regular patterns.  These patterns are complex by anybody's standards, but it is important to try to understand them if we want to understand the cosmos.

NGC 4414, a typical spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, is about 55,000 light-years in diameter and approximately 60 million light-years away from Earth; Wikipedia

Cosmologists are faced with what is called a multibody problem.  To predict the velocity and position of even a small number of bodies in space is beyond a formal or 'closed' (or 'analytic') solution.  In a sense, this is because every instant every object is changing and since every object affects every other object via gravity, they're all changing all the time.  One can simulate this, and an interesting recent discussion by Brian Hayes of how to do that is in the Feb-Mar 2015 issue of American Scientist, if you're interested, and our presentation here uses that to illustrate our point.

The gist of this approach takes advantage of the assumption that Newton's law of gravitation is perfectly true everywhere (if general relativity or other things change this, it's irrelevant to our point here).  Gravitational attraction of an object can be modeled as if all its mass were concentrated at a point located in space.  Between two objects, of mass M1 and M2, that are some distance r apart, the force of gravitational attraction is given by F12=G*M1*M2/r12-squared, where G is a universal gravitational constant that is known and simply a part of the nature of matter.  There's a separate Fxy for any two objects x and y, and the multibody problem is that for these four bodies, 1, 2, x, and y, there must be an F1x, F2x, F1y, F2y each with their own 'F' equation, but also since gravity is a force that causes motion, all the bodies are always moving.  So the equations are always changing (the distances, or r's are changing).

The point here is that every object interacts with every other object all the time, so that any change in the location of any one object affects the motion of every other object. The trick of simulating this for a great many bodies like the billions of stars in galaxies and of galaxies among each other, is to iterate one tiny time interval at a time, then compute these many forces, then apply them to each object to alter its motion, and then do the same for the next small time interval.  With super computers cosmologists can achieve a lot by simulating even whole galaxies (see the above reference on how they do it).

Surely the physicist is justified in calling this complex!

Genetics and evolution are complex in an additional way
Genomes work strictly by interacting with other things, because DNA is essentially inert by itself. There are billions of nucleotides in genomes, and each has its own electromagnetic effects in the nucleus.  Generally this is very small but the genome is organized into modules consisting of multiple adjacent nucleotides (or depending on how you count, these segments can be separated by some nucleotides not part of a given module); these modules may overlap in that the same nucleotide may be involved in more than one module.  The modules are identified by their function, because they have no a priori function.

Genomes do their business by holding codes for molecules that are copied from the DNA (e.g., functional RNA or  proteins decoded from mRNA), or are recognized by proteins and other molecules for gene regulatory, packaging, and other functions.  These interactions take place because of electromagnetic charges and similar properties of each interacting molecule and the local DNA. Many functional entities involve large networks of these kinds of interactions to produce an effect. Andreas Wagner describes this complexity, showing it is of hyper-astronomical scale, in his recent book Arrival of the Fittest.

If you think about genomes in this way, you might think of each interaction as, say, the relationship between two stars, and the resulting collaborations as forming physiological functions ('galaxies') and the whole you (galaxy clusters).  Complex, yes, but can it be broken down piece by piece and simulated or understood that way, as cosmological simulations do?  I think the answer is a heavily qualified, 'partly'.  The reason is that there is a big, or huge, difference between galaxies of biological function, and galaxies made of mere stars.

The pairwise, and hence multi-way interactions in biological systems do not follow a uniform law of chemical attraction, in the sense that each molecule has its own unique charge.  Further, interactions between two molecules depend on the presence of other molecules (e.g., cofactors) and the conditions (e.g., pH) of the cell at the time.  There is no comparable uniform law of chemical attraction, even if the laws of chemical attraction are uniform for particular cases (e.g., specific ions or isomers of elements).  Since I'm not a chemist, I'm doubtlessly not expressing this properly, but hopefully I have the basic point correct.

This means that parsing the interactions down one by one, and iterating over some short time interval, as can be done in cosmology, is far less possible in biology.  And here we have to consider millions of interactions between proteins, proteins and DNA, proteins and RNA, RNA and RNA, RNA and DNA, other types of molecules and those just listed (e.g., sugars or other molecules that modify protein molecules).

Cosmology creates stars and galaxies by the same principles with essentially the same ingredients, and has done almost since (literally) the beginning of time (conditions at the Big Bang itself seem to have been somewhat different).  Stars and galaxies come and go, each with different specific details, but each produce by the same few principles--or so it seems at present.

Evolution also began at a biological 'big bang', somewhere on earth.  But its consequences are different specifically because evolution works by generating differences.  Mutation and chance and selection within individuals and among individuals and species, has led to the biosphere's ad hoc diversity. The same basic physical and chemical laws apply, but at the level of interaction, we don't have the tools to generalize a priori and simulate complex organisms.

Systems biologists certainly do this for metabolic networks of various sorts, but they only touch the surface of what is possible, and this is true of simulations as well (again, see Wagner's book for discussion both of the networks of biology and efforts to simulate them).

In that sense, physicists, our complexity is bigger than your complexity!  So there!

Water, water everywhere, and then some drops to drink: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and the Life-Dust rationale

This week comes the news that a European spacecraft probe called Rosetta has gotten into an interesting triangular orbit around a comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, that itself is in orbit around our sun.  This is quite a technical and engineering feat that's interesting in its own right, because getting there required about 10 years, over 6 billions of miles of travel, orbiting around the sun to use solar and planetary gravity to give it a sling so it didn't have to use its on-board power.  And there are still technical challenges yet to come.

From the European Space Agency Rosetta project

Rosetta will orbit 67P and take all sorts of pictures and measurements, and then, remarkably, will send down a landing craft to probe even deeper.  It will find out how much ice is on the comet and what other material it may contain, presumably including carbon.  That's been a primary part of the news releases.  But why carbon, and what's so important about carbon as opposed to some other sorts of compounds? Herein lies the hype and at least an apparent major rationale for doing this since, after all, we know from various sources what comets are basically made of.  As put today by the BBC's report, "The mission aims to add to knowledge of comets and their role in ferrying the building blocks of life around the early Solar System."

This sounds interesting and like a nice justification for a many-billion Euro adventure.  Astrophysicists will learn at least some new things about the structure and composition of this particular rock.  But will 67P tell us much about anything other than itself, that we don't know already directly and indirectly about the trillions of other comets in the cosmos?  I say this because the idea that we'll be discovering the origin of Earth-life's materials seems a rationale as flimsy as, say, a clump of damp dust.  

I know very little cosmology, but one thing I think I do know, if current science is at all correct, is that the "building blocks of life" did indeed come from comets and other space-dusty rocks and detritus.   What we have long known is that water, carbon, and all the other complex molecules of life (and, for that matter, of rocks, seas, weather and the Earth entire) came from 'outer space'.  Where else could they have come from?  

These molecules are formed in processes called nucleosynthesis, that occur inside stars.  The cosmos had none of it at the time of the Big Bang.  Only when stars form, exist for a while, then explode in death, does this material get scattered into space.  Then, due to gravity and possibly other factors such as molecular adherence these molecules, essentially space dust, coalesce into larger and larger clumps, rocks that become captured in orbit around new-forming or existing stars.  All that you're made of was in turn made in some former, no-longer-existing star, long before our Sun came into existence.

The Earth, and everything on it that life is made of, got here by collapsing and accretion from space-blown material.  The stuff of 67P is just like what we already think we know was the source of similar molecules on earth.  Whether they got here during the original accretion, or by space-fall thereafter, it's the same kind of process.  We know the Earth is hit from time to time by such space missiles. The bottom line is that everything that's here got here from space.  The only somewhat relevant, but in that sense not so very important question is how much carbon and water came after the Earth existed as a big rock, and how much was part of Earth's formation.

We know with reasonable certainty that life didn't arise until there was enough water and carbon etc. here for biomolecules to form. We know roughly when that was (3-4 billion years ago, in a 4.5 billion-year old Earth).  If these vital molecules were here at Earth's beginning, than life arose only when things had cooled down enough, and perhaps water had eroded enough minerals and carbon and so on from solid rock, etc.  If the cosmic rain was responsible for some or even most of the water here (which seems very unlikely, given how prominent water is all over the universe), that tells us little that's different.

Pro-science or a science spoil-sport?
So is such a mission worth its cost when there are things to do with public funds other than to develop sky toys for scientists to play with?   We are in favor of science--good science, properly represented.  But science should tell less puffed-up stories, and the public should be better-informed.  

In this case, better-informed would be to be told that (unless cosmological theory is missing something important today, which is not what the press releases suggest) all Rosetta is doing is poking around in one sample of the stuff we were made by, that all came from space, as did the Earth itself.  If even knowing that, we still want to spend the funds on what are really little more than costly real-life video games, great!  

For those of us without a major disease and who have shelter, security, and enough to eat, this is interesting stuff to watch, not more costly than cable TV subscriptions (maybe less, depending on your channel line-up).  But to hype this as is being done, gives the impression that Earth got here by some other means than gravitational accretion of former star detritus.  That's misleading, bad science. Why is such need felt by the scientists (or the institution's PR office) to give it such spin?  Is it that they realize that without the spin they'd have no funding?  If so, then the public is being bilked.  If not, then let's have real science from these experts.

Here's something much more interesting
To be fair, some of what we get from our space cadets really is interesting for more than a "Wow, how did you manage that?" factor.  Yesterday also, NASA (perhaps not wanting to be upstaged by the Europeans?) released this image of a near-perfect hexagonal pattern, referred to as a 'storm', on Saturn's north pole region:

Photographed from the top of Saturn.  From NASA

The NYTimes has a wonderful video narrated by Dennis Overbye showing this formation along with other features of Saturn.  It's a curious formation, a fluid aspect of the north pole's weather. 

As a former meteorologist myself, I find this very interesting.  Spacecraft first found this many years ago, but we only get an occasional direct look.  The curious aspect of the pattern, is that it's a hexagon rather than more sinuous wave such as we get here in Earth's weather (and seas, for that matter).  How can fluid dynamics generate such a rigid-appearing, angular form on a basically spherical surface? Is something on Saturn alien to our own planet?  Different physics?

In fact, the report says that physicists have now generated similar patterns in the lab, identifying the conditions that are responsible and showing that nothing strangely unearthly is going on in our sister planet.  Still, seeing these far-off things close-up for the first time has lead to learning, and is captivating--even if, as in 67P, it doesn't show us anything alien to our experience here at home.

These images from far away evoke an emotional awe: there truly is, way out there and so far beyond, more of what we see right here.  It exists, all alone and cold and dark, perhaps known to other creatures, yet the same as what we have here.  Little ice crystals, rock dust, shapes we recognize that we might find in our own back yard.

These thoughts reinforce the amazing, remarkable fact that there really do seem to be laws of Nature, that what we can see nearby applies way out there where we can hardly catch glimpses--a point Isaac Newton stressed. Very much to think about.  Good science really does tell us about the nature of the world, in ways no other means has yet been able to do.  We puny humans, blobs of stuff that evolved from space-stuff, have figured this out!  That's a thought of cosmic proportions.  

On the mythology of natural selection. Part X: Finally: Traveling evolution's geodesics

Science recognizes Charles Darwin's contributions to knowledge because he was a deep thinker who largely transformed a whole area of human knowledge in ways that seem likely to be permanent.   One often refers to such inspirational figures by coining terms to acknowledge their views.  'Darwinism' is one.  To name a concept after him is entirely deserved (even his co-recognizer of the salient facts of life as an evolving history, Alfred Wallace, in 1889 referred to the idea with the very title of a book summarizing the field: Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with Some of Its Applications).

By greatly honoring his name, science and history recognize his contributions.  But his work is not to be read exegetically as a source of The Word.  He's respected, but not sanctified.  No scientist we know of  checks what Darwin said as a means of testing whether something is true or not. This is science; exegesis is for historians.

Charles Darwin would not want a halo!

Darwin would want it that way ("And get that halo off me, please!").  He was a brilliant, doggedly thorough and persistent gentleman scholar.  His works are a wonder to read, because he was a keen and incredibly patient observer and a master synthesizer of reams of data from various fields.  But he was human and lived in the times in which he lived and with the knowledge and technologies then available.  Even he, the developer of the selectionist 'law' of nature, mainly offered hand-waving assertion and circumstantial evidence, but definitely did not in the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection show that the origin of species was by means of natural selection.  If you doubt this, read the Origin yourself, especially Chapter IV.  But that's a topic for another day.

Nonetheless, we think that Darwin's view of natural selection as a universal determinative law to account for the evolution of the traits of organisms has become widely and without deep thought adopted as a given rather than a matter of science to be examined in the real world.  This is in many ways taken almost directly from Darwin's personal view, though most who use the term have done little if any actual reading of Darwin's voluminous works.  Such a worldview becomes dogma, or the assumption of a belief system, an ideology, rather than science, as we have tried to show in this series. That is the sense in which we discuss its mythology--the tales told and assumptions made about it that don't reflect what we actually know, and don't know.

The public and professional literature are awash in 'gene for' or 'evolved for' assertions that go largely unquestioned (thoughtful, pointed reviews of this season's recent pulp eugenics book excepted).  Such stories about genomic causation or reconstructions of evolutionary history are often expressed as if they explain traits in question, but by equating plausibility with truth in fact verge on tautology, and serve preconceptions rather than testing how the living world actually works.  The pervasive explanatory 'ether' that is invoked, is natural selection.  Most biologists probably don't quite realize how close they come to explanations that would be the same if God's will were used instead.  That universal acid or Darwin's 'dangerous idea', as one philosopher referred to it, is indeed dangerous both to human society and to science.

In this series, we have discussed various ways in which purely historical processes of proliferation and divergence from common ancestry can potentially account for aspects of the origin of complex traits within organisms, and by extension among organisms, that are not due, or not just due, to natural selection.

Our objective has not been to denigrate the idea of natural selection, but to show that there are other entirely natural processes that can lead to the evolution of complex traits.  Evolution and genomics are not just one-trick ponies.  As we have noted, how and when (or even whether) these processes are at work is a matter that can be studied by clever designs or choice of material--they are testable ideas.  In fact one of them suggests that natural evolutionary historical processes could generate complex traits without any involvement of force-like natural selection at all.  However, if one clings to a selectionist ideology, selection as an axiom rather than a scientific assertion, then of course one will never even ask the questions as to whether such ideas might be correct, much less test them.

We can, however, ask a far more fundamental question, which is how selection works when it does occur.  For this, and as elsewhere in this series, we suspend skepticism for the moment and take universal, Newtonian force-like natural selection as a given.  To try to make our point, an analogy to astrophysics might be instructive.

The 'spacetime geodesics' of evolution by natural selection
In cosmology--the real thing--travel in the universe is governed by relativistic spacetime.  An object at any time moves in a way that is determined by its motion at the time and the gravitation field--one might say the gravitational 'ecology' due to the physical objects in the area.  The bigger or closer another object, the more spacetime is curved.  But the net curvature is the total of these effects in this location in spacetime.  We use the term because on the cosmic scale, space and time are inseparably part of the nature of existence.  We can say that the past has existed and, from our vantage point, we can get a glimpse of it from the distribution of matter and energy at the present time.  In real cosmology, we can also 'see' the future to the extent that we can know and (in principle, at least) predict the state and location of the objects towards which our object is moving.  Any object in motion essentially integrates all of the forces acting upon it, and moves through spacetime accordingly.  Unless driven by some separate impulsive force, the path it follows is determined by these local spacetime properties, and is known as a geodesic, which one can think of as the shortest path between points spacetime.

SpaceTime trajectory real and imaginary (modified from GoogleImages)

If the object of our interest is affected by several small local objects in the area, it meanders geodesically past them.  If or when there is a large nearby object, it follows a more greatly affected curvature around it (blue inset).  At the end of a period of interest (which we call now), and if we knew the location of the point at our chosen starting time (then), and we're oblivious to what happened between then and now, we can always assert that what happened was that the object of our desire was shot by a specific force directly along that path (shown as dotted arrow).  

But that assertion is a fiction, and science is supposed to be about fact.  That fact is that our object got to now through a path that essentially had nothing to do with now--it was not aiming toward now, its movement at any time was locally determined, sometimes by major (one might say clear-cut) factors, often by a host of minor even seemingly trivially small ones, collectively setting up the position at the next major influence.  Note that in our cosmic analogy all of our object's meanderings are considered to be totally determined by the shape of gravitational spacetime--we assumed that no probabilities were involved.

This should be enough about spacetime geodesics in astrophysics.  The point of the analogy should hopefully be clear.   Even if the implicit complete determinism of Darwinian assumptions were true, the complex dynamic nature of earthly ecologies means that an evolutionary geodesic need not follow a retrospectively reconstructable path from then to now.  A species or trait need not have evolved 'for' its current use, not even in stages aimed in a particular direction, not with its various components evolving synchronously or even sympatrically.  Indeed, if and where ecologies are complex and dynamic, the meanderings of our object--a trait or species--may be essentially indistinguishable from random movement relative to any long-term 'purpose'.  

An organism is a collection of traits, often correlated by shared genomic mechanisms, that are continually being pulled every which-way by selection of various intensities for various reasons (the nearby gravitational objects).  These pulls are based on the local context, and that context (the 'stars' etc. in the area) change over time and space--over evolutionary 'spacetime'.  The position in the future may not be predictable from its local conditions at any given time: evolution has no 'momentum' by which the past actively propels species through the present--or if it does, we need a much-revised theory of its causal dynamics.

The shape of the head (something I've worked on with collaborators for years) is measurable in its many dimensions, and we can look at fossils and comparative species, some of whose evolutionary past history we shared through common ancestry.  But the head is not a unitary trait, perhaps not a very meaningful trait to ask about its evolutionary trajectory in selectionist terms. The length of the face, say, need not have evolved 'for' language, or reduced smell, or balance in upright posture, or change in diet, or forward-looking stereo vision, or.....  

These factors and their importance for 'fitness' need only be synchronized if they share genomic pathways, and otherwise need not be synchronous in time or space, and the 'same' trait can serve multiple or even changing functions.

As one zooms one's lens closer and closer, the picture dissolves into every more graininess. No two individuals have the identical trait or genotype. We don't see 'spandrels' or other states that set the stage for the trait as we see it today. We don't see a ladder of discrete improvements towards today. No punctuated equilibrium, saltations, and the like except as we choose to impose them on our observations. To the extent the picture given here is apt, each local point in evolutionary spacetime is so local, so dependent on its context at that instant in time, that it need not suggest the kind of longterm arrow from then to now that is so commonly explicit or explicit in our texts, papers, and so much of the rhetoric even in professional biology.

Realizing in this way how things are--or at least might be--under deterministic assumptions, it is now time to re-introduce the other complications discussed in this series, including chance in its many manifestations, at the scales of change that are relevant.  The 'geodesic' path of evolution meanders in no one direction, by no one cause.  Even if it is 'driven' by selection at every instant, it is a path whose determinants are problematic to identify in practice. Whatever is the truth, selection is not obviously simple in a force-like way. 

And here's something to think about:   Scientists often say that the simplest--the most 'parsimonious' explanation is the preferred one most likely to be true.   In the case of our cosmological analogy, I think it's right to say that the straight-arrow path from then to now is not the simplest explanation of the change!   In fact, it may be among the least simple explanations.  That's because the geodesic path is actually the simplest: it only involves the explanation that the path follows spacetime curvature (e.g., gravity). In that sense, that is the 'straight' path.  Given the complexity of space, you'd need a host of ad hoc reasons to try to account for the usual notion of a 'straight' path (like our dashed arrow).  

The same can be said of evolution.  The straightest path is that which follows the dynamic local 'pulls' of selection; to avoid following that path, as if somehow 'insisting' on a direct rather than geodesic path from then to now, it would have to resist the myriad local conditions to keep on that path--and that then becomes teleological!  Is that a suitable 'simpler' explanation?

As we navigate our search for truth, if we are not careful in our thinking we, like Odysseus, face the twin threats of Scylla and Charybdis:  the mesmerizing sirens of examples of strong recent or artificial selection that can lead us onto rocks of extrapolation to events on a slow, long time-scale, and there is a danger of being sucked into a whirlpool of complacency by taking criteria like DNA sequence conservation too casually.

Between Scylla and Charybdis; Wikimedia

Darwin's magnificent legacy

Darwin's realization that life today is the legacy of processes of descent with modification and differential proliferation, was profound and correct as far as anything we know.  (Somewhat separate from, but related to the effectiveness of selection, is that branching from common ancestry into distinct entities such as species that are isolated from each other was also part of the theory in Darwin's view, as it is of ours today.)  But none of this implies there is only one manner of differential proliferation nor that we cannot find and flesh out the basic concepts--even if there are no fundamentally different phenomena yet to be discovered.  For example, with organismal selection, genetic variation and its effects can be sorted out by the organisms in their various local areas, with no competitive differential reproduction required, and in that sense no nasty competition to the death, necessary.

There has been nothing spooky in our use of the analogy of an imaginary odyssey through evolutionary 'spacetime'.  We are not invoking heresies, that Darwin himself would not recognize. Indeed, what we have said may be imperfectly stated but is perfectly consistent with the long-standing insistence that evolution is locally contingent and not teleological.   But that in fact is inconsistent with the ubiquitous simplistic 'evolved for' and 'gene for' tales in the public as well as professional literature.

Just to be clear, with all of its nuances, including chance effects, evolution can be accounted for by historical, material processes; there is nothing that we know that requires any external force (as in religious arguments) to guide evolution. 

Just because a story is plausible does not make it either probable nor true.  Think of it this way:  The dashed arrow in our geodesic figure is the direct then-to-now path.  We can note that by comparing a fossil to its descendants we can always construct the usual simple, direct here's-how adaptation story. But not only is plausibility not the same as truth, but considering what we've tried to say in this series, perhaps such stories are least likely to be the truth!  Perhaps it's very naive to think, much less to assert, that such simplicity is what we should expect in our evolutionary tales.  Indeed, Darwin himself tacitly was led by temptation to make some similar assumptions, basically if implicitly and unintentionally teleological ones, in his books describing barnacle evolution.

What is important to us is the difference between a nuanced view, and the way people act and speak in practice (despite perhaps their being clever enough to include briefly-stated caveats).  One can always defend business-as-usual, the direct then-to-now Just-So story, by asserting that, "Yes, yes, all the details you mention are true, but they don't really matter in my example." But one should ask whether that's sincere rather than a dismissive acknowledgement-in-passing, a lazy excuse for clinging to a comfortable ideology--especially, but not only, when it comes to explaining human variation.  If so, the invocation of 'natural selection' is an exercise in mythology, in ideology.

Ideology assumes, science asks.

The Big Bu(r)st! Cosmic Microwave Inflation....deflates

If a WorldView commentary by Paul Steinhardt, a Princeton physicist, in the June 5 issue of Nature is more reliable than much of what we find in Nature, the Big Story of the Big Bang was a Big Bust.  Remember the piece in the March 17 issue reporting that "Astronomers have peered back to nearly the dawn of time and found what seems to be the long-sought ‘smoking gun’ for the theory that the Universe underwent a spurt of wrenching, exponential growth called inflation during the first tiny fraction of a second of its existence"? Well, it turns out that this may not be true after all.  Or at least it's still being debated, as another Nature commentary in the same issue describes. The announced result, which Steinhardt writes influenced academic appointments and decisions on paper publications, funding, and the like, was apparently, he says, just a misinterpretation of the data, but forthcoming papers will carry on the discussion.

We personally know as little about cosmological physics as some people think we know about genetics, but even so we venture to say that (as the Commentary author pointed out) the treatment of the original report by the news media, and hence also by the reporting scientists, shows a lot about the (sorry) state of an important aspect of science today:  it is too much about advertising and too little about science.

In essence, if we look in all directions at the cosmic radiation we can detect reaching our area of space, it is very even--not very clumpy.  In a generic big bang theory, the space splatter that happened at the very beginning will eventually be brought by gravity back to its origin, with lots of clumps of matter (galaxies and the like) in the process.  But while there are on the order of 100 billion galaxies with about 100 billion stars each, plus lots of other rocks and matter and energy out there, and lots more dark matter and energy, everything is distributed far more uniformly throughout space than one might have expected.

But if, as Alan Guth suggested in the 1980s with his cosmic inflation theory, there was a burst of very rapid expansion way back just after the Big Bang itself, then this 'inflation' should have generated ripples in space-time, which we should detect as irregularities in what is now the cosmic microwave radiation reaching the earth which was reported to reflect, as we understand it, ripples in gravity due to this initial inflation 14 billion years ago.

History of the Universe - gravitational waves are hypothesized to arise from cosmic inflation, a faster-than-lightexpansion just after the Big Bang (17 March 2014). Wikipedia

The report of this finding of cosmic microwave ripples lent support to various aspects of cosmological theory and when breathlessly announced and picked up equally breathlessly by the media, talk of Nobel prizes, astounding discovery about the nature of everything, and so on were trumpeted from the media-tops.  Only a little skepticism or reserve was expressed by pundits and other cosmologists, who gushed with praise over this long-awaited report.

The problem is, apparently, that other sources of twisty microwave radiation exist that are unrelated to any early expansion and are more likely to account for the ripples that were reported.  There may be nothing inflationary there after all, or if there is something that survives scrutiny it may only be slightly more likely to be due to inflation than to other things.

Forgiving any errors in our above account, which aren't important to our objective, this is how things stand today. We note yet again the role that the media and hype-machinery are playing in today's science. The more important the claim, the more rigorous and extensive should be the evidence for the claim. In this case, the inflation-finding study was not even published when it was announced and picked up with great melodrama by the media.

Suppose one claimed that, after millennia of searching for more than just faith as evidence, s/he had definitive proof of God's existence.  For example, claiming that God had five fingers on each of two hands (we are, after all, said to be in his likeness and image) was proved because of how He enumerated the ten commandments.  For this claim to be accepted and reported as real, the evidence should be overwhelming, because if true the claim would fundamentally change how many of us view existence itself, and our place in it.  Such a truth would merit the most serious reception, as it would replace the less than satisfying "sure and certain hope" with something a bit more reassuring!  That someone reports some sort of evidence should not be given a splash, or even much if any mention, in public media.  It should be reported in a technical science journal, leading to focused and deliberate consideration, confirmation or elaboration, and so on, before it is accepted and reported as fact that fundamentally changes our worldview.

That might happen had we a more responsibly run, less self-promoting, environment. The inflation-evidence claim would have properly appeared, quietly, in a technical cosmology journal, peer-reviewed, where it could be scrutinized and built into more elaborate theoretical and empirical understanding.  It should be given measured acceptance that leads to focused attempts to test, refute, or elaborate it.  No big-splash press headlines, no drooling over obvious Nobel prizes, no advertising are merited at this stage. Indeed, the author of the Nature commentary notes the role of hype in the premature inflation announcement, and that, in his view, at least the theory that was supposedly confirmed by the gravitational ripples is untestable, even in principle, whether or not it's consistent  with any kind of data one could collect.  Nonetheless, the cosmology industry will not tuck its tail between its legs and go on to more effective, even if less expensive, questions that can actually yield believable answers, quietly, and not give them public blare until they are solidly established and really deserve the attention.

Large amounts of funding are manipulated by the current way of doing science.   It is hard not to believe that this is intentional on the part of all parties--the proverbial mutual reinforcement society.  We know from personal experience that it is this way, quite consciously, in genomics and other biomedical sciences.  Grand claims trump quiet, focused research on problems that might help peoples' lives but are not cosmic in scale--there are many such genetic problems that should be solvable.  As it is now, rather than careful guardians of the public purse, the funders themselves are part of the hype game, to make sure their portfolios stay full (or are subject to inflation!), an attitude which should not be tolerated. Investigators hungry for funds to support their work sing the song that will get them their supper. Claims and papers are put out, structured, and timed so they can be cited as justification for further funds.  We all know we are doing this--'all' except, perhaps, the public who's paying for it.  But science should avoid this sort of secret hypocrisy.

A million multiverses don't exist, nor does a cure for cancer, just because some hasty press release says so.  Major findings, when really real, deserve all the praise one can give them.  Science, actual real results rather than advertising, is interesting enough in itself without needing hype and can be made so to the public, without all the candy wrappers it comes in these days.  The world can wait until the evidence is really sufficient.  It isn't exactly urgent that we know whether there was cosmic inflation 14 billion years ago.  We don't urgently need to identify all genes contributing a fraction of a percent to diabetes risk (far less than the risk reduction by eating better).

Not even the Republican budget-cutters have yet caught on, but if we're lucky, the public will demand it.  Funding agencies should be threatened with deep cuts if they don't do their jobs properly, and that would at least possibly frighten scientists into doing more work and less boasting, even if it takes time and major results are more elusive.  A more modest way of doing, and reporting, science would be more responsible, and would make our careers more satisfying, especially for new entrants to look forward to.  As things are done now, we've built a system in which too many glittering Big Bursts turn into the ashes of Big Busts.

The (lawless) laws of (human) nature

This week on The Forum, a BBC radio program, Bridget Kendall presented a show on translation -- specifically, the translation of Chinese poetry into English, the translation of science for the public, and the translation of the fall of the Berlin Wall -- what is gained and what is lost in translation. One of her guests was British Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, who has written a number of popular books about cosmology and astronomy.

Kendall asked Rees how scientists benefit from interpreting their science for popular consumption. He said that scientists often have a difficult time thinking beyond the details and remembering the larger picture, so that having to explain the big ideas is good for them. Kendall said that it must be particularly difficult for a cosmologist because people tend to feel that everyday phenomena should be easy to understand, but grander things like the cosmos are much harder. Rees says that's not true, that everyday things that people really care about, like diet or child rearing, are in fact much harder to understand than the stars; even experts don't understand them. If they did, ideas about what's healthy to eat or how to bring up a child wouldn't be changing all the time.

Now, we can't say whether or not cosmologists really have deciphered the stars. But, in some senses it doesn't really matter how much they've got wrong, because what we do with what we know about stars isn't nearly as relevant to everyday life as what we make of advice about what to eat and the like. Rees's point is reminiscent of things we write about all the time.

Why don't we know these things? We aren't stupid (well, 'we' here refers to science generally!). What is it about complex phenomena that's so hard to deconstruct? How on earth can a measly human be more problematic than zillions of stars, galaxies, and even voracious Black Holes!?

Why can't science even tell us what to eat? Here's our explanation -- we think it's because organisms have evolved to survive in a wide range of environments, and environmental changes can have from no to little to crippling to fatal effects, and their effects can vary along that continuum, even within a given species. This makes prediction nearly impossible, and the effects of change nearly undecipherable, due to the confounding effects of other, unnoticed, unmeasured changes, or to the fact that most changes don't happen in isolation.

Just as genes don't function in isolation, but in networks of genes, all of which are taking the measure of their environment all the time, via signaling, and responding by emitting signals of their own, to which other genes respond. And even when the information is false, in our current society, as soon as the latest Now-Eat-This story appears in the media, we modify what we eat, what kind of exercise we do, and so on, which then can change gene function and interaction, and down the road, disease risk. Stars, so far as we know, don't change their orbits just because some astronomer announces a different equation!

Which all, in a convoluted way, brings us back to Freud. Freud's explanation for behaviors was that they were the result of early childhood. One's upbringing. As opposed to the genetic determinism that's so prevalent today (though, in either case, mothers still get the blame). Well, we wouldn't go all the way with Uncle Sigmund, but there is clear evidence that even things happening in utero affect later life -- behavior, language, and even the late-onset disease risks. And add to this the way we meander according to our cultural fads and self-help advice, much less our exposures to chemicals, diets, lifestyles, and so on.

What's built in is our ability to assess our environment and act as we think is best, and that starts right at the beginning. What we're wired 'for' is not to be too wired, but to be responsive. That's a claim Betelgeuse can't match, and why the stars are condemned to circle obediently while our fault is in ourselves, not in our stars.