Communing with your inner fish

Continuing (and concluding) my series entitled “Books I Bought in Seattle,” I will now regale the reader with my impressions of Neil Shubin’s recent book, Your Inner Fish.

The book is an exploration of the history of human evolution, in the only place available to us: the bodies of other animals, extand and ancient. Shubin points out the one-to-one correspondence between the bones in our limbs, and the limbs of all other tetrapods, to those of the Devonian fish he helped discover, Tiktaalik. He describes how the general body plan of vertebrates was in place 550 million years ago in the Cambrian, and perhaps even in the Precambrian, as evidenced by the famous Ediacaran fossils. He similarly explores the evolution of vision, of hearing, of the sense of smell, and points out how all our wonderfully complex sense organs have analogues in far more (seemingly) humble creatures.

Shubin’s lively and playful writing captures the breathless excitement that surrounds each new scientific discovery, and I delighted in his accounts of the findings that shaped our knowledge of evolution. He succeeds in portraying scientists as ordinary people, whose job happens to be probing the underlying nature of the universe. I have to thank him also for his clear explanation of the gene Sonic hedgehog. The only complaint I would level against it is that I fear he sometimes dumbs down his accounts too much; there was more than one place in the book that I felt would benefit from the actual terminology, rather than a more general explanation by analogy. But this is a minor complaint, as evidenced by the fact that I did not provide an example.

The fundamental theme of the book is that, as remarkable as we are, we are an inextricable part of the tapestry of life, no more and no less remarkable than anything else that lives. Everything that makes us what we are is derived from something that ran or flew or swam upon the Earth before. Within each of us is an inner fish, and an inner ape, and an inner reptile, and an inner bacterium (trillions of these, actually); reading Shubin’s book is an excellent way to gain acquaintance with them. (Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale is another.)

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Why Darwin Matters

On a shopping trip with my girlfriend south of the border (a common excursion for Canadians, given the recent relative strength of their dollar), I picked up two books I’ve been anxious to read: Why Darwin Matters, by Skeptic Magazine publisher Michael Shermer, and Your Inner Fish, by paleontologist Neil Shubin. I finished the former in less than 24 hours, and though I’m a couple years behind the game, I’ll be writing my impressions here.

Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design is at its heart a book of persuasion. shermer divides the world into three types of people:

True Believers, Fence Sitters, and skeptics. Religious True Believers will never change their minds no matter what evidence is presented to them, and science-embracing skeptics already accept evolution. The battleground is for the Fence Sitters – those who have heard something about a claim or controversy and wonder what the explanation for it might be.

Thus, from the start, the book is not really directed at me, as I whole-heartedly accept evolution. However, I quite enjoyed reading it, as evidenced by the fact that I could hardly put it down. Here’s why.

First, Shermer presents an entertaining history of intelligent design and creationism in the United States, and why they persist in the face of overwhelming evidence for evolution. In so doing, he provides riveting accounts of William Jennings Bryan’s boisterous prosecution of the Scopes trial, and most memorably of all a debate between he and the namesake of the Hovind Scale, the fast-talking creationist and current jailbird Kent Hovind. His account of this debate can also be found on the website of Skeptic Magazine.

In the meat of the book, Shermer systematically dismantles the arguments for Intelligent Design, finding them all unequal to rigorous standards of science. He then exposes the real agenda behind the ID movement, most memorably by recounting the words of Discovery Institute fellow William Dembski at the annual conference of the National Religious Broadcasters:

…intelligent design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God… The job of apologetics is to clear the ground, to clear obstacles that prevent people from coming to the knowledge of Christ… And if there’s anything that I think has blocked the growth of Christ as the free reign of the Spirit and people accepting the Scripture and Jesus Christ, it is the Darwinian naturalistic view.

To close as Shermer does throughout the book, Q. E. D.

Finally, and most challengingly for me, Shermer devotes a large portion of the book to explaining why evolution is perfectly compatible with both Christianity and conservativism. The reason for the first is obvious: most Americans and virtually all American creationists are Christian, and to sell evolution to doubtful Christians is to convince them that it does not contradict their faith. The need for the second is less obvious. What reason would a conservative have for doubting evolution, except that most conseratives in the United States are Christian? Still, Shermer cites poll data showing that some 60 percent of Republicans are creationists. Clearly something is at work here. To woo conservatives to the side of evolution, Shermer cites 19th century economist Adam Smith, whose posited “invisible hand” works in precisely the same way as Darwin’s natural selection. (In his review of Expelled for Scientific American, he recounts memorably his reminder of this fact to Ben Stein, during his interview for the film.)

I say that this part of the book was challenging for me because I have difficulty with the arguments for the compatibility of religion and evolution. It is certainly true that there is nothing in evolution, or in science in general, that precludes the existence of a god, but this is because nothing in science could do so; God is by definition not a part of the natural universe, and so not amenable to empirical observation. God is therefore superfluous, unnecessary, a cheap rhinestone pasted on the scientific edifice to increase its appeal to the religiously-minded. Still, as long as God is technically compatible with science, and as long as most humans believe in one god or another, the smartest tactic may be to stress the compatibility point, and confront creationists on their so-far successful ploy of equating evolution with atheism.

Having said all this, by far the most entertaining part of the book for a scientific True Believer like me is its coda, Genesis Revisited, in which Shermer rewrites the book of Genesis to fit in with creationists’ insistence on its literal truth. Here’s a representative excerpt:

And God saw that the land was barren, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the rocks, fossils that appeared older than 4004 BC that were similar to but different from living creatures. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Q. E. D.

I recommend the book heartily, whether you are a skeptic or a Fence Sitter; it will entertain either variety. Hell, I recommend it to the creationist True Believers as well. Shermer was such at one point, and you never know when a tendril of truth will sneak through a crack in the stone wall of denial.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

If you are interested in science at all, you’ve probably heard of this book by Bill Bryson. I was finally persuaded to read it last week. (Well, I didn’t so much read it as listen to it, in my car, while driving for fourteen freakin’ hours. But I swear that won’t color my opinion!)

If they give you lined paper, write sideways

Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael rocked my world when I first read it as an undergrad student, seven years ago. In it, Quinn challenges the bedrock assumptions of our culture, overturns our unpoken received wisdom, and leaves us with a broad outline of how we must change our thinking if we are to continue to survive here. Two insights in particular have stuck with me over the years:

1. We are not humanity. Many people in our culture seem unconsciously to attribute our systematic dismantling of the biosphere to “human nature.” Therefore, none of it is our fault; we simply can’t help but be destructive. This flies in the face of the evidence. Humans with every bit the cranial capacity we brag of lived perfectly sustainably for tens of thousands of years, and they continue to live that way where they are allowed to do so. It is no more human nature to be destructive than it is human nature to eat Pop Tarts.
2. It is not possible to “live outside of nature.” The word “nature” comes close to being meaningless. Whether we live in a wigwam in the forest or in a skyscraper of steel, concrete and glass, we are utterly dependent on the exact same ecological processes. It is no more possible for us to live away from “nature” than it is for us to abstain from breathing.

But this post isn’t about Ishmael. It’s about Quinn’s newest book: If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways. This is not a novel, like Ishmael and its follow-ups. Instead, it’s little more than a transcript of a conversation between Quinn and a reader. The reader in question pursued the conversation in the hopes of getting Quinn’s ideas straight in her head, and Quinn agreed in the hope of answering a question often put to him: “Where do your ideas come from?”

The book is not long, and perhaps not deep, but it is nonetheless fascinating. In exploring questions like, “Should human rights be extended to apes?” Quinn demonstrates how he steps back from the unspoken assumptions that shape our thinking. For the question of apes, such an assumption may be that “human rights” are something we have simply by virtue of being human, when in fact they only exist because of government contracts to that effect. Many people in history and in the world today have no concept of having “rights.”

I recommend the book enthusiastically. It is a quick, entertaining read, and it will leave you questioning everything you hear when you’ve finished. (Of course, that holds only if you’re not already in the habit of questioning everything you hear. I confess that I fall into lazy thinking only too easily.) Give it a read, and let me know what you think!