Evolution & Climate Change

As I meander through life one of my goals is to find that elusive thing called "reality." The polar opposite of this is a term called "availability heuristics," where people just plug in a preconceived notion rather than applying critical thinking. In other words, people take mental "shortcuts" and say what they believe, or draw from their own personal experiences, whether it's factually accurate or not. This is often done to defend their pre-installed belief system.

Now, rewind to 1967 and my uncle had just given my family a set of books called the Time-Life Nature Library. The books, published from 1961 to 1965, covered the universe, oceans, plants, and more. What an amazing gift! On rainy days or times when I couldn't find a playmate, I would dive into the books and learn. One book that I found particularly interesting was called "Evolution." Growing up in a super religious household I was already taught that evolution was bad, yet the Evolution book stayed in the bookshelf throughout my childhood and teen years. It was from this book that I first learned about Charles Darwin and the Galapagos Islands.

In my junior high school years I was told by church leaders that Carbon-14 dating wasn't accurate and that all this talk about the Earth being old was BS.  I later learned that this was simply a lie. A religious leader may slant or twist facts to defend the faith, but in the end they are simply liars, and the Bible clearly states that lying is a sin. That was quite confusing for a pre-adolescent youngster like myself.

Then, fast forward 7 years and I'm a college sophomore and it's the first day of class in Biology II. In his opening statements the professor says, "Now, we are going to be discussing evolution in this course. I want everyone to know that evolution doesn't replace God, and, in fact, God may have used evolution to create us." It was an 8 a.m. class and everyone was half asleep. No one seemed to care. We just wanted to dissect those poor frogs, get our grade, and get the heck out of there.

The HMS Beagle

Charles Darwin, a little known naturalist and biologist, started a major shit storm in 1859 when he published, "On the Origin of the Species, By Means of Natural Selection." Suddenly, the traditional religions and the conventional ways of thinking were seriously challenged. Poor Darwin was just doing his job. At every stop his ship made he collected plants, animals, rocks, and fossils, and took notes. His observations were brilliant and detailed, and even by today's standards his book is a fascinating read. Yet, all my life traditional Christians have framed him as a "bad guy." I would have thought that Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in 1966, would have been the target of Christian angst, but he hardly gets a mention.

Evolution Defined

Evolution is both simple and complex. By definition, it is the adaption of lifeforms to their environments through mutations. Or, put another way, it's all about having some beneficial mutation that increases an organism's chances of reproducing. In more complex organisms, such as humans, the goal is not only to reproduce but to also get your young to reproduction age, and even their young, which, as a grandparent, gives me another reason to live.

Many mutations create catastrophic results in an animal and they go quickly out of the gene stream. Other mutations are neutral. But every once in a while a mutation gives a creature a slight advantage, and over generations animals with that favorable mutation will multiply. In harsh, rapidly changing environments the mutations matter more to help creatures survive. In static environments, there's no need to change and Natural Selection is less relevant. So, alligators have hardly changed at all in 8 million years, but in 10 million years we went from ape-like creatures to modern humans, mainly because of the challenging life in the African savanna.

At this point, if you are a Young Earth Creationist, your conformation bias and availability heuristics will kick in and you will tell me that everything I've said is hogwash. But, let me continue.

So, evolution is taking place all around us all the time. There is social and technological evolution, and even religious evolution. We now have these hipster "contemporary style" churches everywhere that have rock music bands. Yet, even as late as the 1980s I was told by religious people that rock was "devil music" and that the drumbeat created sexual desires.

Furthermore, I have three dogs and I know that they came from wolves. Human breeders forced evolution along by picking desirable traits for various tasks. I know that my Labrador Retriever is a bird dog and that my hound-mix dogs were once and still are used for hunting. The hounds were used by nomadic people 10,000 years ago to hunt giant buffalo and other bovine-like creatures, but these animals were evolved into cows and herded, so the hounds had less work to do. And as for your broccoli, cauliflower, and kale, they were all bred by farmers from a weed. In the case of dogs and cows, people found animals with slightly more desirable traits and bred them, to create what we have now. In farming, farmers used the seeds of the more desirable plants for the next crop and over generations better vegetables were cultivated.

Even when you look at geological history you find fossils of the most primitive lifeforms at the lowest levels and life becomes increasingly more complex the higher up you go. Over the centuries shifting plate tectonics does twist and scramble the geological record some, which Creationists have gleefully used to make their cases.

Common Defenses

Now, I'm not sure how much of the anti-evolution movement is about protecting religious fundamentalism or simply built-in availability heuristics, but I do know that some of the favorite tactics of apologists are to twist information and use old facts. In addition to the "radio carbon dating isn't accurate" myth, here are some other creationism defenses I've heard recently:

• The Theory of Evolution is just that, a theory.
  Response: I keep hearing this line and it really annoys me. A "theory" in science is completely different from the common language use of the word "theory." I won't bother responding to this line any more other than to say it's disingenuous. I mean, did everyone sleep through science class growing up, or did all the Christian apologists simply "zone out" when these things were being taught? The fact is that evolution is one of the most well established and tested areas of science and is the foundation to many other scientific disciplines, like genetics, geology, etc.
• There's no transitional creatures in the fossil record.
  Response: Please allow me to step outside and scream. The entire fossil record is about transition. Dinosaurs are now birds. If you want a fish with feet, yeah, I can come up with that. The most famous transitional fossil, which is shown in most textbooks, is the Archaeopteryx, which is a transition between a dinosaur and bird. So, as Gomer Pyle would say, "Surprise, surprise, surprise."
• The odds of evolution creating a human are the same as a tornado going over a junkyard and creating a B-747.
  Response: Yes, but a million tornados going over a million junk yards a million times may create the basics needed for flight. Come on, the evolution of flight is right under your nose. A couple of hobbyists in North Carolina invented the first aircraft in 1903 and hundreds of engineers around the world contributed small improvements, and, in 1970 the first B-747 rolled off the production line. The fact is that evolution goes from the very primitive to the complex, and nature has millions of years to get things right. 
• If monkeys evolved into humans, why are monkeys still around?
  Response: I can't take this much more. We did not descend from monkeys. We are cousins that share a common ancestor. At 25 millions ago we were all cute little ape-like creatures.

Conclusion

I've learned that people who deny evolution also always deny climate change, and I find this troubling. What's more, in my discussions with these folks they use the same types of arguments. I am told things like "the science of climate change is unproven." False. Or, "it's part of a natural warming trend." False. "No one really knows what will happen." False. The amount of computer modeling and the number of climate scientists studying this issue is massive. To educate yourself on the real facts of climate change, and the disinformation campaign against it, I recommend you visit the website of The Union of Concerned Scientists. They do a great job of presenting information in simple, plain English terms. Please educate yourself.

I wish that schools, families, and everyone would place a greater emphasis on science education for young people. However, I understand that science challenges many religious traditions and that capitalist oligarchs would prefer dumbed-down and unquestioning consumers. I'd also love to see more religious education in schools. By that I mean there should be courses where students are objectively taught about the world's major religions. Opening kids up to different belief systems would be a big step forward in addressing intentional ignorance.

There are a lot of cool religions in the world. If I had to pick one I would follow Janism, which is a non-theistic religion that comes from India. The religion teaches salvation by perfection through successive lives and non injury to living creatures. It's pretty cool.

Source:
How Does Evolution Actually Work?, Arvin Ash

  Photo: Johannes Plenio

Can Other Planets Be Our Lifeboats?

As we melt our polar caps and turn our oceans acidic, some people might be thinking, "Maybe we can just migrate to another planet." Space travel is not an easy task because, among other things, the universe is incredibly large. In fact, it is mind-blowing large.

Now, imagine our sun was the size of a basketball and someone was shooting the hoop in New York City. To reach the next closest star, which is Proxima Centauri, we'd have to travel to Moscow. The star is a mere 4 lightyears away, and we'll talk about lightyears in a moment.

So how many stars are in the universe? I'd hate to be the poor assistant who has to count them, but his name is Wiggins and he comes up with a figure of 10 sextillion, which is a 10 followed by 22 zeroes. Just in our own galaxy, known as the Milky Way, there are about 400 billion stars. Our galaxy is 106,000 lightyears across and is considered a larger, but still average, galaxy. Our sister galaxy, Andromeda, is even larger with 1 trillion stars. Both of our galaxies, along with about 100 smaller galaxies, are in a group known as the Virgo Supercluster. I recently learned that some of the smaller galaxies actually orbit around our own, which is amazing. The size of our supercluster is 110,000,000 lightyears. It is estimated that there are 10 million superclusters in the universe.

Now, we can only see what could be a tiny part of our universe because the universe is expanding faster than light can travel. So, all we can view is a part of the universe that's 93 billion lightyears across. In 1998 we learned that the universe is not only expanding but that the expansion is accelerating, and the space between galaxies is expanding faster than the speed of light. Some people believe the universe will expand to a certain point and then contract. Or, each galaxy may spin out into the vast nothingness to the point where we can't see any other galaxy.

For the most part, scientists believe the universe is flat, but some researchers have detected a slight curve of 0.4 percent. If that is true, then the universe is a giant sphere and it would take 250 visible universes to complete the round circle. In other words, if the universe is a big ball it would have a radius of 11.6 trillion lightyears. If, however, the universe is flat it could go on for infinity.

Lightspeed

Now, in middle school, you probably remember the teacher telling you that light travels at 186,000 miles per second, which is really fast. Our spaceships are getting faster and the recent Juno probe travels at an impressive 46 miles a second, but that's only .0002 times the speed of light. At that speed it would take 20,000 years to reach the nearest star, which is 4 lightyears away.

Einstein said it's impossible to travel faster than the speed of light but it may be possible. After all, galaxies are somehow separating faster than the speed of light. Whoever came up with the idea of warp drive engines on Star Trek was amazingly prophetic because such an engine is theoretically feasible. In fact, in 1994 Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican physicist, actually came up with a theoretical model on how a warp drive could work. In basic terms, the warp drive, also known as the Alcubierre Drive, would stretch the fabric of space-time in a wave, causing the space ahead to contract while the space behind expands.

There are also theories for spaceships that use wormholes or jump drives. The whole idea is that space itself is manipulated for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel. Right now these theories are highly speculative. I believe that when we figure out dark matter, dark energy, and gravity we will be a step closer to FTL travel.

Conclusion

When I talk to people about climate change I find it deeply troubling how they react to it. I hear comments like, "India and China are creating more emissions." But isn't the United States supposed to be a world leader? Or "We don't really know the effects of carbon emissions." The body of research is vast, yet this is an issue that is nebulous and distant to most people. By our evolutionary nature, we can't seem to react to danger until it's in our face.

It's possible that our grandchildren won't ever experience eating seafood because our oceans are becoming fouled, overfished, and the alkaline level is increasing. Every day I grieve over the slow death of our beautiful planet. As the Earth dies, I die. The dominant species that has exploded in numbers and is consuming our planet is only behaving like any other species. We will simply reproduce to the limit of our food supply or until a competing species, like a virus, outperforms us. Or until our ecosystem is too harsh and unstable to sustain us.

I thought a virus would be too smart to kill its host because, after all, then it dies as well. But it appears that a virus is no smarter than a human. Why a species destroys its own habitat is confusing to me, but the bottom line is that lifeforms just eat and grow with little regard for the future.


Sources:
Visualizing infinity. Is the Universe Infinite? The Largest Scales, Arvin Ash
Alcubierre Drive: Warp Speed - Star Trek fantasy or plausible?, Arvin Ash
How Long Would It Take To Travel To the Nearest Star, Universe Today
Scientists Are Starting To Take Warp Drive Seriously, Science Alert

Photo: Leon Rohrwild

Maybe Outside Reality Is Where We'll Be Saved

When things get real big or real small they get weird. Let's take a dive to the quantum level. I always believed that everything had to be made out of something, but this is only partly true.

As early at 400 B.C. Greek physicists had figured out the atom, but they thought it was a small ball. In 1897 electrons were discovered and 15 years later scientists learned about protons and neutrons. But what are atom parts made of? Researchers figured this out in the 1960s with the discovery of quarks.

But as the quintessential nerd, I have to ask the question, "What are quarks made of?" For some strange reason I keep hoping that diving to either the quantum or universal level may give me new insight on humanity's current poor predicament. So, let's keep going. More recently, scientists have discovered both up-quarks and down-quarks, and these are the little buggers that make up atom parts. To figure out what a quark is we must leave the world we know and enter the mysterious world of quantum mechanics.

The Big M

Theoretical physicists have been trying to come up with a Theory of Everything, but the mathematicians can't get all the math to work. For instance, String Theory was a good stab at trying to solve the mysteries of the universe and although useful, it doesn't explain everything. According to this theory the smallest particles are actually tiny vibrating strings, which come in and out of reality. For string theory to work mathematically the universe must have 10 dimensions. Most of these dimensions are believed to be small and "rolled up." Superstring theory includes an 11th dimension, and is nicknamed "M-Theory" because it's the "mother of all theories."

A variant of String Theory is another theory called Quantum Field Theory. I like this theory because it appears to explain more but I'm still trying to get my arms around it. According to the Quantum Field hypothesis, matter is made of fields and particles are waves in the field. As I had long believed, there is no such thing as "nothing," and this theory supports my idea. Rather, "nothing" can contain light, electrons, up-quarks, down-quarks, and vibrations. All together there are 17 fields, including a space-time field.

When you call Aunt Ellie on your cell phone you are bending a field in space and creating ripples. The signals you make eventually get to Aunt Ellie's ear, and she's delighted that you liked her apple pie. Putting it another way, particles are excitations in the field. Apparently, we all share the same fields, but that doesn't mean we can communicate telepathically.

While both String and Quantum Field theories may provide a piece of the puzzle, they still don't fully explain dark matter, dark energy, and the cause of the Big Bang. Or why do the fields have the properties that they do, and what made the fields. Is it possible to know everything? To learn more sometimes we have to know what questions to ask, and sometimes the evidence escapes us. For instance, the universe is not only expanding but the expansion is accelerating. Future astronomers won't be able to learn much about the universe because the sky will be dark — we'll be too far away from everything. And if the universe is expanding where are we going? One belief is that there are multiple universes and they are all like giant bubbles, and maybe our universe bubble will expand until it pops, causing another Big Bang.

Consciousness

In addition to the mysteries of dark energy, dark matter, and quantum mechanics, the other great mystery in the universe is consciousness. Physics explains chemistry, which then explains biology, but how in the hell do you explain consciousness? Some scientists say that consciousness is simply mechanical and lives in our brain. Others say there some type of emergence intelligence going on, which ants have brilliantly mastered. This is where intelligence functions collectively, where each of us holds on to one part of the overall consciousness, and is known as Emergentism. A third idea is that EVERYTHING has a consciousness, and perhaps this can be tied into String or Quantum Field theories. This line of thought fits in with those quantum particle experiments when a particle behaves differently when a consciousness is present. So, perhaps everything, even the universe itself and trees and plants, have a consciousness, or an awareness. I believe that all animals definitely have a consciousness — even simple lifeforms are "aware" and can make decisions based on their surroundings, rather than going with a pre-recorded script. What makes my dog sit in a certain spot or behave a certain way? She is conscious and making decisions, just like humans.

Conclusion

I know the current political climate in the U.S. is horrible, but we've gone through far worse. At one point we even ripped our nation in two and had a four-year bloody civil war, so at least now we're not killing each other yet. What hurts me most is that the continual partisan bickering simply distracts us from the things that matter, like climate change. As for religion, studies show that the more educated a person is the less religious a person is. Yet, in one study 7 percent of PhD scientists were still religious. This shows me that some people are simply incapable of changing their beliefs even when presented with hard facts. Thus, I need to show more understanding and compassion for people who are unable to change their belief structures. But my hope is that enough people will change before our oceans become too acidic and fouled to support life, and our atmosphere becomes too hot and unstable to support us.


Sources

Why Is Our Universe Fine-Tuned For Life, Brian Greene, TED Talk

Where Are Those Extra Dimensions in the String Theory?, Rob Knoops, TedXAUBG


Photo: Josh Gordon