Science Musings Blog

The title of this post is another phrase from the poet Pat Boran. It struck me, I suppose, because of the way readers sometimes refer to this blog as "the porch." (I forget who first suggested the image; was it you, Theresa?) A lovely image, evoking friends in rocking chairs sipping ice tea or gin-and-tonics on a drowsy summer night. Out there in the darkness lightnin' bugs flash their sleepy semaphores. Somewhere afar off heat lightnin' illuminates the horizon. Our language drifts into the dark. We have words too for stars, for black holes and quasars, for the cosmic microwave background radiation. Our words leak off the porch into the summer darkness, bringing some small part of the darkness into our circle of light. And so we sit and sip and talk, and our language eases back the darkness, hallows an interval, makes "a dwelling in the evening air,/ In which being there together is enough."

We sit and we sip and we are content to let the darkness embrace us. No, we are more than content. The darkness is a positive presence, a soft and fragrant backdrop for our conversations. Without the darkness there would be no lightnin' bugs, no heat lightnin', no stars. We rock and sip and the darkness enfolds us like a shawl.

There are a those who are less comfortable with the darkness. They want language to light up the darkness to the farthest horizon, to the beginning and end of space and time, turn night to day. They shout into the dark -- "God," "Father," "Person," "Friend." The miracle of language becomes the language of miracles. "I am the Light of the World, I expel the dark."

Well, fair enough. But here on the porch, in our circle of friendship and faint light, we rock and sip and talk. And the lightnin' bugs flash, and the stars come on one by one, and now and then, afar off, the horizon shimmers with a soundless light. And we talk, with measured voices. And our words drift off into the darkness. And sometimes they never come back.

I say it again: the spirit loves
the flesh, as the hand the glove.

A few lines from the Irish poet Pat Boran. A great truth we have always known but work so hard to deny.

Let us admit that the spirit is flesh, but more than flesh.

The spirit is the brain, of course, that neuronal web of almost infinite complexity. We could explore those tangled corridors for a thousand years and not exhaust their contents. For one thing, the contents change, more quickly than we could possible complete an inventory. The spirit is fleet, a master of metamorphosis.

The spirit is more than flesh. The spirit is flesh in interaction with a universe of even greater complexity. The windows of the flesh are thrown open to the world. The spirit is a wind of awareness, a pool stirred by angels.

The spirit is all this and more.

And some part of the spirit will linger after the flesh is gone, as memories in other flesh, as words, music, science, art -- a fleshless hand that retains the shape of the glove.

But this is the great truth: A self is hand and glove. Spirit and flesh. There is no self without the glove. "We are biological and our souls cannot fly free," writes Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, summarizing what science has taught us about ourselves. He adds: "This is the essential first hypothesis for any consideration of the human condition."

So let us begin there, hand in glove. Let us learn to think ourselves good, flesh and all. Skin, teeth, tongues, genitals, the soles of the feet -- that supple kidskin glove, the body. And let us learn to love this world, the world outside the windows of the flesh. For in truth there is no other world, no other world for us except the world we inhale like a deep, deep breath and seal into our soul.

I mentioned yesterday that the average cloud cover for New England is about 60 percent. Although the percentage varies widely depending on location and season, 60 percent is about average for the entire globe.

But what if the number were 100 percent? How would the intellectual history of humans have been different on a cloud-covered planet? No part of the natural environment is so clearly marked by regular periodic phenomena as the heavens. Anthropologist Alexander Marshack argued that certain regular markings on bone artifacts of Ice Age humans record the changing phases of the moon, and that these are the earliest examples of symbolic notation. Historians of science Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend contend (in a book called Hamlet's Mill) that all of the great myths of the world have their origin in the regular behavior of celestial bodies. Other commentators have stressed the connection between the heavens and the development of scientific thought.

As Jacob Bronowski pointed out, the stars might seem improbable objects to have aroused such curiosity. The human body is closer at hand and a more obvious candidate for systematic investigation. But astronomy advanced as a science before medicine, and early medicine turned to the stars for signs and omens. The reason is clear: The regular motions of the heavens lent themselves to mathematical description. Behind the apparent chaos of terrestrial experience, the stars proclaim the rule of law.

On a cloud-shrouded Earth the rise of the human species to civilization would almost certainly have been delayed. Delayed, but not forestalled forever. The survival value of science and technology is such that sooner or later the inhabitants of the White Planet would have developed vehicles to lift themselves above the clouds. We can imagine their first view of the universe beyond the clouds -- the beckoning stars, the Milky Way, the luminous orb of the Sun, the changing Moon, planets and comets, solar and lunar eclipses -- celestial rhythms at last laid bare, the rule of mathematical law, so laboriously learned in the terrestrial environment, in the heavens made crystal clear.

I have now been here on the Dingle Peninsula in the west of Ireland for over a month, and we have had but one starry night. Mind you, it was cloudy when I went to bed, and cloudy when I got up in the morning, but when I rose in the middle of the night for a glass of water -- there they were, blazing in all their glory against a backdrop of inky darkness. I stepped out into the garden and feasted. Jupiter chasing the Teapot across the southern horizon. Arcturus scraping the top of Mount Eagle. The Milky Way pouring out its riches overhead.

It is hard to imagine that for three-quarters of a century the largest telescope in the world was in Ireland. During the 1840's, William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse and master of Birr Castle in the center of Ireland, constructed an iron-hooped monster more than six feet in diameter, hoisted between massive Gothic walls, with ladders and viewing galleries. Visitors to the castle liked to have their pictures taken (by the earl's wife Mary, a pioneer amateur photographer) standing in the gaping maw of the great tube. Astronomers from as far afield as the United States, Australia and Russia came to Birr to see Lord Rosse's leviathan of the cosmic deeps. One wonders how many of them managed to get a look at the stars -- or went away cursing the Irish weather.

"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "how men would believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown. But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile." Every night? Not quite. In Emerson's New England the average cloud cover is about 60 percent. Here in the west of Ireland we are grateful for one cloudless night in ten. Or twenty. Still, our rare glimpses of the heavens have something of the effect Emerson was talking about. I step out into the midnight dark, stand in my bare feet in the dewy grass, and gape. Gawk. Bowled over. Dazzled. A city of God made all the more spectacular by its rarity.

I had to think about what I was going to write here. I don't have to think about breathing. I can think about not breathing -- for a few seconds. Sometimes unwanted thinking interferes with what should happen on automatic pilot, like falling asleep when I'm tired. And sometimes... Oh, never mind. See this week's Musing.

Click to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, we tripped over the hill to the annual races on Beal Ban Strand, an afternoon of thundering excitement up and down the tide-washed sand, sleek and powerful horses ridden by young jockeys in gaily-colored silks. A good time was had by all, but I couldn't help but think of the events that occurred on those cliffs you see in the background of the photograph, just above the head of the jockey in white.

In the year 1580, six-hundred Catholics -- Spaniards, Italians and Irish, including women and children -- were besieged on a fortified promontory called Dun an Oir, the Fort of Gold, by Protestant troops of Queen Elizabeth I, under the command of Lord Grey of Wilton, assisted by Walter Raleigh. Recognizing that they had no chance of escape or relief, the Catholic forces agreed to surrender their arms, with a promise of mercy. They placed their weapons beyond the outer breastworks. Raleigh called the Irish out, and marched them away to where gallows had been erected to hang the lot. Then, he sent his swordsmen onto the crowded promontory. Blades flashed among the defenseless Spaniards and Italians. When it was over, five hundred severed heads were piled high in a field outside the fort, and in the English camp a hundred Irish men and women hung from beams in a long terrible row. These grisly spectacles would be left to rot when Grey and Raleigh departed, as a salutary lesson to the Papist rebels who would challenge the authority of the English Queen.

When word of the massacre at Dun an Oir reached London, Elizabeth wrote to Lord Grey, "I joy that you have been chosen the instrument of His glory."

There was, of course, more going on at Dun an Oir than religious antagonism, but religion was the armature on which hung the various political rivalries and alliances of late-16th-century Europe. Ireland has had a long and bloody history of religious strife. Only now, as an increasingly secular populace realizes that they have more in common to unite them than to divide them, do they turn their competitive instincts to such entertaining amusements as the headlong horse races on Beal Ban Strand.

It has been a cold, rainy summer so far, which is about par for the west of Ireland. Which means lots of fires in the fireplace -- Irish peat, Polish coal, and furze from the field -- and lots of hours gazing into the companionable flames.

Humans would appear to be the only fire-using animal. I've heard that cheetahs and hawks will sometimes position themselves to attack animals fleeing from naturally-occurring fires, but this hardly qualifies as "the discovery of fire." Exactly when humans figured out how to retrieve fire ignited by volcanoes or lightning and keep it alive is unknown. The earliest evidence I recall is charred animal bones from the Swartkrans cave in South Africa, dating from about 1.5 million years ago. Perhaps the deliberate use of fire is as good a criteria as any other for defining that moment when hominids can be said to be human. Certainly, as I sit staring dreamily into the dancing flames I am intensely conscious of being conscious.

Once campfires were common for warmth, light and protection it would not have been long before our ancestors discovered that cooked meat tasted good and took less effort to chew. Anthropologists ascribe all sorts of cultural significance to fire. The requirements of tending a fire presumably led to a more settled lifestyle. The hearth was a place for communal life, and therefore for new kinds of communication -- dance, storytelling, and decorative and symbolic arts. In the most imaginative of these flame-lit scenarios, happy bands of early humans sat next to a fire, swapping yarns, cooing to infants, sharpening spears, sharing tidbits of roasted meat, and taking from the hissing, crackling flame, and from the smoke curling heavenward, new ideas about life, death and immortality.

As I sit here musing in front of the hearth, I have a grim little fantasy, for which (as far as I know) not a shred of evidence exists: A little band of hunters of the species Homo erectus come to the cooking cavern where their fire, tended by the weaker members of the band, is protected from wind and rain. On the menu at one time or another is antelope, zebra, warthog, baboon, and -- depending on availability -- an occasional Australopithecus robustus, from whom Homo may have diverged only a million years earlier, roasted to perfection, thereby hastening our smaller, less erect, tool-making cousins toward eventual extinction.

I haven't noticed the same phenomenon in the States, but here in Britain/Ireland there has been a roaring spate of books recently with "wild" in the title: Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, Roger Deakin's Wildwood, Jay Griffith's Wild, Richard Preston's Wild Trees, Christopher Somerville's Britain and Ireland's Best Wild Places, Kate Rew's Wild Swim, and Daniel Start's Wild Swimming, to name just a few of the most popular.

What's up? Why the headlong rush to wilderness? What is this hankering for wild places, and in these British Isles, where you would think wildness has been long extinct. "Rural," yes. "Countryside," of course. The Brits, especially, have always had a place in their hearts for the leafy lane and windswept fell. But this new gush of books seems to go a step beyond.

I can't say what's at work here. Are we fed up with being connected? Has the mobile phone (as they call it here) chased the wild into the farthest corners of the landscape? Is it a breath of privacy we're after, a moment of repose? Thoreau said, "It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves." Maybe what we are looking for is an opportunity to turn inward and explore the last remaining shreds of wildness in our souls.

Maybe. I have this vision of Kate Rew, say, stripping to dip in a wild Highland loch. The moment she sinks blissfully into the icy water a ring-tone chimes from within a pocket of the piled clothes on the bank. Does she scamper out to answer? Or does she dive deeper into the silent water?

I venture a new definition of wildness: Any place near or far beyond the reach of a mobile call.

Creationists in America carry on their battle against Darwin in the classroom. Biblical literalism was struck down by the courts. Intelligent design, with an unnamed designer, was the next ploy to be deemed unconstitutional. The latest trick to sneak God into the science curriculum is "critical thinking."

The Louisiana state legislature has passed overwhelmingly a law that gives teachers license to supplement the existing science curriculum with material that they feel "promotes critical thinking skills." The language seems innocuous, even praiseworthy, but no one doubts the law's real intent. Teachers are free to introduce "creation science" along side of evolution and give it any spin they want. A new stealth attack on scientific biology.

You want critical thinking? Here's what I would do. I'd bring into the Louisiana state legislature a year's worth of Science and Nature, the two most widely read and respected weekly international science journals. I'd pass them out and ask the lawmakers to count the number of articles that evoke evolution or natural selection and the number that refer to creationism or intelligent design, then divide up curriculum time accordingly.

Put on your critical thinking caps, honorable ladies and gentlemen of the assembly, and tell us why our children should learn as science ideas that count not a single appearance in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Stuart Kauffman is at it again. He is the great champion of emergent evolution, implacable opponent of the reductionism that has reigned in science since the 17th century, and currently the director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary. He does not doubt the Darwinian paradigm; he would agree that biology without natural selection is unthinkable. But Darwinism is not enough, he says. Nature does not just unfold from the bottom up; it is also constrained from the top down. Context is as important as components.

Kauffman has written on these matters before, beginning with The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution in 1993, and I have been a cheerleader from the beginning. Back then he wrote: "Almost 140 years after Darwin's seminal book, we do not understand the powers and limitations of natural selection, we do not know what kinds of complex systems can be assembled by an evolutionary process, and we do not even begin to understand how selection and self-organization work together to create the splendor of a summer afternoon in an Alpine meadow flooded with flowers, insects, worms, soil, other animals, and humans, making our worlds together." To the task of explaining the Alpine meadow he has applied brilliant mathematics and computer simulations -- and more power to him. Alas, fifteen years later, it has to be said that reductionism remains far and away the most fruitful way of doing science.

In his newest book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, Kauffman gives the science of emergent evolution a religious imperative. The present cannot be anticipated in the past, he again insists; there is a "ceaseless novelty" in nature which he is willing to call God. Certainly, Kauffman's God is not the intrusive God of the Abrahamic faiths, nor even the God of the deists who sets things going, then steps aside. Kauffman feels he must use the G-word, "for my hope is to honorably steal its aura to authorize the sacredness of the creativity in nature."

To my mind, Kauffman's does valuable work in asking us to question reductionism, and I have no doubt that increasingly powerful computers will illuminate the nature of emergence. But if and when emergence becomes a scientifically fruitful paradigm, it will have zero theological implications. Kauffman finds God in the "ceaseless novelty" of emergent evolution. I would prefer to use the G-word for "the splendor of a summer afternoon in an Alpine meadow flooded with flowers, insects, worms, soil, other animals, and humans, making our worlds together." Access to the God of mystery has been there all along. What a successful science of emergence will do is extend the shoreline between the known and the unknown where we encounter whatever unnamable mystery is worthy of being called divine.

Henry David Thoreau was an exacting observer and prolific journal keeper. For 6 years, he tracked the life histories of more than 400 plant species in a 67-square-kilometer area around Concord, Massachusetts. Now, a group of plant ecologists at Boston and Harvard Universities have surveyed the same area, comparing notes -- abundances, habitats, and flowering times -- with Thoreau. They claim to have substantiated the stress on plant communities caused by global warming (Science, July 4, 2008).

I don't doubt the warming, but I wonder whether a study of plants in so highly developed an area can yield any meaningful data vis-a-vis climate change. My wife has been recording the flowering time of the montbretia on our hill for 17 years. It varies a week or more from the average, with no discernible secular trend. As for abundances of plants and animals, changes have been dramatic. The montbretia has prospered, running riot in the ditches. Some of the more delicate wildflowers of the hedgerows, such as herb robert, have become rarer. Slugs have faded from the scene (except the garden). Badgers are gone. Foxes rarer. Corncrakes and cuckoos kaput. Before I would attribute any of this to climate change I would consider the massive transformation in agriculture -- the use of heavily fertilized monocrops and grubbing out of hedgerows -- and the domestication of the landscape for holiday homes. Looking for the signal of a degree or two of global warming in the midst of so much human-inflicted trauma seems to me a bit of a stretch.

Mind you, I'm not knocking the ecologists. Here on the Dingle Peninsula they have come to the rescue of one of our rarest and most mysterious species, the Natterjack toad. This little animal inhabits one tiny patch of Ireland near the head of Dingle Bay. Whether this is the last remnant of a once wider population, or a relatively recent introduction has been a matter of considerable debate. Now the government is offering farmers subsidies to provide shallow ponds for the toads. A cooperating farmer can earn up to $6000 annually, no small inducement. Will it help the Natterjack survive?

I mentioned here the other day the fox on my window sill, the first fox I had seen on our property in several years. Two days later a friend saw a dead fox in the road nearby and I feared it was my visitor. But no, my wife saw our fox again yesterday, waltzing along the wall in front of the cottage. The threat of climate change is surely of less consequence to the foxes of our area than the huge increase in automotive traffic. On the main road below the house recently I saw what appeared to be a black mink scampering from ditch to ditch, dodging traffic, no doubt descended from escaped importees as minks are not indigenous to Ireland. Where in the midst of so much direct and local environmental disruption are we to spot the elusive signature of global warming?

A remembrance and a message in this week's Musing.

Click to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination. I believe that's yours truly in short pants under Umbrella Rock on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga.

I have been reading L. T. C. Rolt's now outdated and excessively reverential biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the greatest of a generation of audacious engineers who dragged the world into the Age of Steam and Iron. I read the book before, as I recall, back in the late 1960s when I was studying the history of science and technology in London. Then I traveled about England, Wales and Scotland visiting the railways, bridges, tunnels, canals, and buildings of iron and glass of Marc and Isambard Brunel, Thomas Telford, George and Robert Stephenson, John Rennie, Joseph Paxton, and others of that intrepid band of engineers. Within a lifetime they transformed Britain from a mostly rural, agricultural nation into a thriving industrial colossus that ruled a mighty empire.

Steam and iron. And human muscle. Armies of laborers, often toiling under almost inhuman conditions, high above precipitous gorges, deep in the bowels of the earth, or beside a hissing boiler in the belly of a leviathan ship, dying in industrial accidents with a frequency that would not be tolerated today. The engineers were not adverse to sharing the dangers; Brunel nearly lost his life on several occasions. And, Lordy, what awesome projects, conceived and executed by the force of a single brain. I remember standing by the Menai Strait in Wales and seeing Thomas Telford's suspension bridge and Robert Stephenson's tubular railway bridge still usefully spanning the race. These were the pioneers who showed what was possible, and their names are indelibly attached to their works.

We are, of course, in the midst of another technological revolution, no less significant that the one of steam and iron. For the engineers of the Industrial Revolution, the direction of imagination was to bigger and faster. Today the thrust is to smaller and faster. What would Brunel have thought of this little box on which I type, linked by a web of wires and waves to hundreds of millions of other boxes girding the globe, an electronic snowstorm of ones and zeros distributed at nearly the speed of light. The new commodity is not coal, or iron, or the products of smoky factories, but information. This is a revolution of mind, not muscle. No sweating navies wreck their health or lose their lives in the cushy corporate precincts of Google. The names of a few techno-entrepreneurs are familiar -- Bill Gates and Steve Jobs come to mind -- but the engineers who drive the electronic revolution are mostly nameless.

Here is one of the most beautiful artifacts from pre-Columbian America, the life-sized Hopewell hand, cut from a thin sheet of natural mica by a craftsman who lived a thousand years ago in southern Ohio. I saw the hand almost half-a-century ago in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. For years, I had a colored transparency of the hand taped to the window of my office, aglow in the sunlight. Something about those long, graceful fingers, the delicate crook in the thumb. The universal symbol of the raised hand, palm turned outward, weaponless. "I come in peace."

The people of the mica hand were ancestors of the Algonquins, Iroquois, Cherokees, and other native American peoples. They lived in river valleys of central North America from 200 BC to 1000 AD, and left behind impressive complexes of burial mounds, temple mounds, hilltop ramparts, and earthen walls. They are generally called the Mound Builders.

Many of the ancient sites were excavated by archeologists a century ago to provide an archeological exhibit for the 1893 Chicago world's fair. One of the richest sites was on the farm of M. C. Hopewell in Ross County, Ohio, and the Hopewell name has come to signify the culture of the people who built the mounds.

The mica hand was found in a burial mound on Hopewell's farm. It is flaky-thin and subtly tinged with color. That it survived unbroken in the earth for a thousand years seems little short of miraculous.

"Peace," the appropriately-named Hopewell hand seems to say, and that is a part of its beauty.