And there will be humans no more? A review-ish of Greg Graffin's "Population Wars"

Perhaps best known as the leader of Bad Religion, Greg Graffin is also an evolution scholar. His latest book, Population Wars, is out today. 

I was hooked by the description that this is a "paradigm-shifting" book about human behavior, particularly for readers of Dawkins, Diamond, and Wilson. I was surprised at how heavily autobiographical it is throughout. But memoirs do make a lot of sense, given the many fans who are bound to read it, and given how the argument takes shape by the end. 

Graffin is appealing to our inner humans, but without appealing to our inner saps. If I had to sum up the book in one phrase, I'd say it's the least sentimental argument for saving humankind from extinction that you'll ever read. 

That's meant to be entirely neutral, but I don't think I can convey this next thing neutrally: 

I wouldn't have finished reading my advance copy of Population Wars if the publisher hadn't offered me a Q&A with the rockstar.

It wasn't because of his voice. I was thrilled when the first few pages beat just like Bad Religion when the volume's right. 

It was because of the content. I'm not one to throw many punches, let alone at members of my own tribe of evolutionary scientists-slash-authors. But I share this awkward fact (that the only thing that kept me reading this book was my eventual interview with a rockstar) for two reasons: 

Graffin can handle it. And, my experience taught me an important lesson. Because I stuck it out and read through the many pages of cyanobacteria, and the many, many pages of Iroquois history, I was reminded of the importance of learning what we're not necessarily very interested in learning--ever, or at a given moment, or from a particular human's perspective, or whatever. 

Population Wars didn't just teach me new things about natural history,history, and environmentalism, it incidentally taught me something bigger that I think I lost my grip on. It reminded me why we read books.

**

Books. Neatly stacked and bound piles of paper. This is where so many humans pour our hearts and souls. Whatever one thinks of Graffin's book, it's his blood and guts expertly smeared into teeny tiny perfectly discernible shapes. And you can feel how he honestly believes that humans can figure out a way to prevent our future extinction. That's utterly beautiful even if you don't see things that way. It's there for readers if they stick it out, turn each of those pages, and make it to the end where they can meditate over this human's heart and soul at once. 

When we're finished reading even the best books, the books that light us up from head to toe, we merely shut them and shelve them. CDs of music too. 

We've been married for over seven years and just last week I hear Kevin's "Rockers Galore" for the very first time. It's like a dream mix-tape of The Clash with interviews and it's my new favorite album. It's got Joe Strummer explaining what he was trying to say in Rock the Casbah: "There's no tenderness or humanity in fanaticism." 

That fleck of gold was just crammed into a cabinet this whole fucking time? That one sentence that elevates an already great song into the outer dimensions of the rock'n'roll-sphere was hiding in plain sight inside my own fucking house? 

CDs. Books. Even when they're not earth-moving, they contain more human creative and emotional energy than we deserve. But the ones who write them believe that we deserve it, which makes them even more magical. When we leave CDs and books sitting there, unexplored, we're failing humanity.

Population Wars charges us to find the humanity within ourselves to collaborate, globally, as a species to clean up and preserve our planet. Graffin describes how someone can see all of history through an evolutionary lens. His aim is to spread this worldview because it's this perspective, over common ancestry and deep time, that literally unites us as a species, even if we are divided culturally. Unfortunately, saving the planet is too big a job for anything less than all of us. Graffin's book is one voice toward our unification in the face of all the fanaticism.  

**

This is the first but won’t be the last time I write about the dinner I had with an astronaut. One of the small group of us, one of us who hadn’t walked on the moon, seemed desperate to get an inspired nugget of Truth out of the one man who had. He certainly was a remarkable human, but he clearly wasn’t supernatural. His body language and his seamless diversions showed he was as skilled at avoiding sentimentality as he was oxygen depletion.

In the presence of astronauts and other rockstars people want to have their hearts melted or their minds blown. They want to transcend. To quote Twitter: they want all the feels. When they’re not preoccupied with selfies, they’re begging rockstars for God and they expect to get it. Even in someone’s kitchen, over a casserole and some beers.  Even when they’re hardly fans of Bad Religion and they read its leader’s evolution book? I hope not. I think no one who picks up Population Wars, especially Bad Religion fans, is going to expect kumbaya. Yet, tree-hugging is something for Grateful Dead shows, not punk ones.

Graffin's argument isn't to save the planet for our babies or the polar bears', it's to save the planet because we can. Let's make it our moonshot. Let's boldly go, together, globally, here on Earth. 

That thing that we don't have that could unite us while give us purpose as individuals? That thing that Eggers' protagonist desperately wants? That thing Jon Stewart always talked about? That thing that binds us together with a goal? That thing is saving the species by saving the planet.

And if you're going to save the planet, you've got to learn about things that might not rock you to your core, things that might require more stubbornness than anything to hold your attention. I didn't want to read about Graffin's cyanobacteria. I even got angry about it, but if we're to make a dent in saving the planet, we should be reading about such tedious things. 

Point blank: We humans should be reading as much as we can, whatever we can get our hands on, and without a carrot dangling at the end of the book, without the promise of an interview with a rockstar. 

Because sharing our unique human experiences with one another unites us as humans. 

And also because rockstars go on tour. When you're all done reading and you write to the publicist to say, This is an important book, thank you for sending it to me. I want to write about it. Please set up a Q&A and please send the music that accompanies the book... She is likely to respond with an apology (and without the music too).  

So lessons learned! I read Population Wars and all I got was one brilliant human's heart and soul, one human's bold and hopeful vision for our species.  

**

Questions for Dr. Graffin

1. Is Population Wars punk rock?
2. Both perpetual mutation as well as genetic drift are fundamental to how I have come to understand natural selection as being much weaker than many still believe it to be. However, you have come to this seemingly same conclusion about natural selection without genetic drift and without much consideration of perpetual mutation. Can you help us understand how you did this? And can you explain why you left genetic drift out of your book?
3. I am drawn to discussions of free will, but it's hard for me to reconcile your argument that it does not exist with the goal of your book urging humankind to save the planet and ourselves. If there is no free will, how will your book's will be done?
4. What do you want readers to do after reading your book? I'm thinking specifically of the readers who cannot afford to emulate you by building an eco-friendly home and turning down big financial offers from natural gas companies. The book demonstrates your evolutionary worldview, but does not contain many directives. What can we do toward your goal of saving the planet and the species?
5. How do we join together as a species to accomplish anything together when there's such massive inequality?

Genetic reductionism, part I -- the path from broad to narrow?

What geneticists used to know
We've been reading the writings of some of the early geneticists, and have been struck by how many of the original concepts and how much of the jargon are still in use even after a century of major discoveries. Even many of the names TH Morgan gave to fruit fly genes in the 1910s and 20s, without knowing anything about the structure of genes and how they work, are still in use today. Their names, in fact, are a major reflection of the way that science actually works.

The figure to the left, a map of the four fruit fly chromosomes, with gene names, is from Morgan's book, The Theory of the Gene, published in 1926. In that book, he outlined his theory as follows:

The theory states that the characters of the individual are referable to paired elements (genes) in the germinal material that are held together in a definite number of linkage groups; it states that the members of each pair of genes separate when the germ-cells mature in accordance with Mendel's first law, and in consequence each germ-cell comes to contain one set only; it states that the members belonging to different linkage groups assort independently in accordance with Mendel's second law; it states that an orderly interchange--crossing-over--also takes place, at times, between the elements in corresponding linkage groups; and it states that the frequency of crossing-over furnishes evidence of the linear order of the elements in each linkage group and of the relative position of the elements with respect to each other.

Note that his theory of the gene rests almost entirely on the work of Mendel, fifty years before. By good luck (given what was known at the time), Mendel studied traits that were not closely located ('linked') on the same chromosome, so that Morgan's group was working with and expanding on rather then testing or challenging Mendel's theory.

Mendel knew that systematic hybridization experiments would elucidate patterns of transmission of the 'elements' that were responsible for traits. But only some traits; others were too complicated, and didn't follow the same patterns. Mendel tried the same approach in other plants and found that some did not follow his rules, in fact; but the doubts that led to were overlooked given his overall success. We now know that traits he avoided did not 'segregate' in the way the traits he chose did, because they are due to the joint contribution of many different genes, known today as polygenes.

Morgan presents his theory of the gene, and then adds the following, and this is important with respect to how they could know as much as they did without understanding much at all about genes:

These principles, which, taken together, I have ventured to call the theory of the gene, enable us to handle problems of genetics on a strictly numerical basis, and allow us to predict, with a great deal of precision, what will occur in any given situation.

By 'strictly numerical', he meant that one need not understand what the genes were, in chemical terms, or how they worked. The rules of inheritance were made manifest through the relative numbers of different types of offspring of a given set of parents -- which Mendel first showed, and others built upon.

But Morgan didn't suppose that all traits were due to single genes. He was aware that most were due to many genes, and that it was likely that most genes do more than one thing.

A man may be tall because he has long legs, or because he has a long body, or both. Some of the genes may affect all parts, but other genes may affect one region more than another. The result is that the genetic situation is complex and, as yet, not unraveled. (The Theory of the Gene, p 294).

And, these early geneticists also knew about the fundamental contribution of the environment. Morgan ends the paragraph above with this sentence: "Added to this is the probability that the environment may also to some extent affect the end-product."

A student of Morgan's, A.H. Sturtevant, in his A History of Genetics (1965), says:

With Johannsen [who introduced the words "gene", "genotype" and "phenotype" in the early 1900's] it became evident that inherited variations could be slight and environmentally produced ones could be large, and that only experiments could distinguish them.

And:

In 1902 Bateson pointed out that it should be expected that many genes would influence such a character as stature, since it is so obviously dependent on many diverse and separately varying elements. This point of view was implied by Morgan in 1903 (Evolution and Adaptation, p. 277), and by Pearson in 1904.

This is among other early examples he offers. Even the most widely used genetics textbook in the 20s and 30s, a book in fact that helped school the Nazis (and a chilling read today), described variation in traits that were due to environmental factors. That book was Human Heredity, by Baur, Fischer and Lenz, first published in Germany in 1921, and revised a number of times. Two of their examples of traits with environmental contributions, are pictured to the left. The pigs in the top photo to the left are from the same litter. The smaller one was poorly nourished, while the larger one was well-fed. As for the rabbits:

Among rabbits, for instance, there are two somewhat similar races, one of which is pure white with pink eyes, while the other (the "Himalayan" rabbit) though mainly white and whit pink eyes, has very dark fur on the ears, paws, tail, and nose. The colour of the fur in this latter race is modifiable by temperature. If an area of its skin be kept cool, which can easily be effected simply by shaving a part, all the new hairs that grown upon the cooled area have a dark tint. Fig. 6 shows how a patch which had been thus shaved has been covered with dark hair. But as soon as the fur has regrown, so that the area of skin is now protected by it from the cold, all the new hairs which subsequently grow in the area are white, as before, so that the dark tint of the shaved area gradually disappears. It would be easy enough, by shaving the whole surface of the body, to provide one of thees rabbits temporarily with a dark-tinted fur throughout... P 33-34.

So, how did this broad view of genetics become so much narrower as the field matured, so that genetic reductionism that now predominates to a great extent? Indeed, the Human Genome Project and its ongoing sequels epitomize this approach, as its supporters promised that knowing our genes would lead directly to disease prediction (and prevention, and even dramatically increased longevity as a result). Whether this was truly believed, or was cynical spin to get funding -- in fact, it was a mixture of both -- even the intellectual forebears of today's geneticists knew it was wrong.  Or was the early view never as broad as it seems?

In our next couple of posts we'll have some ideas on this. You may disagree, or have other ideas, and if so, we'd love to hear them.

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This post was stimulated by work on a paper about the developmental genetics of complex traits like the mammalian skull, and by interactions Ken had on his recent trip to the University of Minnesota, with two philosophers of science Ken Waters and Alan Love.