Accidents and Evolution

One of the arguments made by theists¹ against the philosophical position of atheists is that they would not want to live in a universe governed by accident and chance. They hate the idea that the world and its beauty, the human body and its intricacy, the human mind with its incredible understanding, and everything else we can see and know are all the result of a set of flukes, a once-in-a-trillion roll of the dice, and just as likely—no, even more likely—to have resulted in some horrible, unrecognizable, broken muddle.

I cannot speak for the laws of physics and chemistry, which govern the galaxies, stars, and formation of the planets. And yes, some of the galaxies do seem to be misshapen. Most stars eventually explode. And a number of the planets we’ve found so far are a horrible, broken muddle, not fit for habitation by any creature we know. But I do have some understanding of biology and evolution, having spent 15 years of my professional life in the biotech business, including a decade with the foremost manufacturer of genetic analysis equipment.²

People who distrust evolution and consider its products to be a mere accident are suffering from a misconstruction of the real nature of evolution. Accidents, chance, mistakes, or rolls of the dice do not govern evolution. They merely set the process in motion. After that, the process is strictly controlled.

The commonest of these accidents is a genetic mutation: a bit of stray radiation, a random chemical interaction, or just a kink in a chromosome can cause one of the four letters used in the genetic code³ to swap with one of the others, or to drop out entirely. Sometimes a chromosome breaks off and swaps a piece of itself with a neighboring chromosome, scrambling the code even further.⁴

But the genetic code itself is fairly redundant. Except for the X and Y chromosomes, we human beings all have two copies of each chromosome, giving us a completely redundant set of genes. And many people may also have more than one copy of a gene on any chromosome. And then again, the protein-coding genes themselves are partially redundant. That is, they use the four letters of the genetic code in sets of three, which are called a codon or the “reading frame.” Reading the code in triplets produces 64 possible combinations,⁵ but all of those combinations are used for calling out only 21 different amino acids needed to make proteins. The result is that many of those combinations are used for calling the same amino acid. And even then, the first two letters of the triplet are generally more meaningful than the third letter that the ribosome encounters as it builds the amino acid string for a new protein from the messenger RNA’s coding.⁶

So while the genetic material is relatively fragile, susceptible to radiation bombardment, chemical assaults, and chromosomal kinks and breaks, the genes themselves and their coding are also hardy enough that any single random change has little chance of causing lethal damage in the production of a necessary protein. Often it takes a couple of mutations coming close together in space and time to effect a significant change.

But once one or more random mutations has set the evolutionary process in motion, “accident” has done its job and goes back into its box. From there on, the process applies strict criteria governing how the change in protein structure is received.

Some proteins are grossly overbuilt, and changing one or another of its amino acids does not change the protein’s function at all. Some are lean and mean, and a small change can affect the way the protein folds and how it mediates a chemical reaction inside the cell or conducts signals between two cells. If the change is damaging and the protein no longer functions properly, the cell or the body suffers. If the change happens in a critical protein needed for embryonic development, the whole organism might die right there. More likely, the defect will only show up only in certain cells, or create susceptibility only to certain diseases, or cause a malfunction only in certain environments. Perhaps the change has no immediate effect and is carried forward through one cell division to the next, until it meets up with a second mutation, another changed amino acid, and now the protein functions differently—probably for the worse, but just possibly it will function better, especially if the organism’s environment has changed in the meantime.

The criterion that evolution applies to any change is: “fitness for purpose in the current environment.” That’s it. That’s the whole secret. Evolution and its mandate are no more complex than this. And the mandate is an ironclad rule.

If the change is damaging, the individual and its offspring suffer in proportion and will eventually fail to prosper. The change may be carried forward from one generation to the next for a while, but sooner or later the line will fail to compete with other, unchanged individuals in the current environment and so will die out, taking the mutation out of the gene pool.

If the change has no immediate effect, the individual neither suffers nor benefits. The change will be carried forward—or not, because hundreds and thousands of other mutations and their effects are all at work at the same time—until this particular change meets up with a second nearby mutation and then produces an effect for either good or ill. Or the environment may change, and individuals with this particular mutation already in place will then either prosper or suffer under the new conditions.

If the change is beneficial, the individual will prosper, the line will grow strong, and the mutation will spread in succeeding generations, perhaps throughout the gene pool. The individuals that result will either gather further beneficial mutations and prosper even more, or they will suffer other, damaging mutations and die out. All we can say for sure is that you, sitting there reading this, and I, sitting here writing it, are the inheritors of a long line of beneficial mutations that built on other mutations going back to the first primitive, single-celled microorganisms on Earth.

Mutations are random. Changes in the environment—anything from pH level to arrival of a new predator, from soil composition to available sunlight—may also be random. But the laws governing ultimate effect are ironclad: if it damages, it hurts and kills; if it improves, its saves and promotes.

This is not a process of conscious design but of gradual adaptation. Evolution makes no inspired leaps. No great mind is pulling out a fresh sheet of paper and imagining a completely new form or function. But would you really prefer it were done that way? Would you want your children, the next generation, to be suddenly different from you and everyone you know, with strange looks, strange desires, strange behaviors, and strange smells?⁷ Or would you want the human organism—or any animal or plant, for that matter—to be a complete one-off, a fully realized design, intricate in every part, fixed and immutable in its function, thrown into its current environment, and there left to sink or swim? Think of the success that this inspired approach has had in terms of human engineering and design when it encounters a variable marketplace: Edsel, Betamax, New Coke … any number of new and fully formed ideas that were launched with confidence and subsequently foundered through a misreading of public interests and tastes.

The one thing we’ve learned by studying our planet is that environmental change is inevitable. Seas rise and fall, glaciers and ice ages come and go, the atmosphere’s composition drifts over the millennia, asteroids strike and volcanoes erupt. Life started in the sea, but it didn’t stay there. Mutation and evolutionary criteria allowed some animals and plants to change and adapt to living on the dry land. And then they allowed land-evolved mammals like otters, seals, dolphins, and whales to change again and go back into the water. The Earth would be a much less interesting place if every animal were stuck in its niche, never experienced change, and then simply died out when local conditions drifted away from the individual ideal.

The world is beautiful to our senses because those senses were gradually adapted to appreciate what they encountered. We love bright colors because they generally signal good things: ripe fruit, healthy plants, fresh meat. We love birdsong because it generally signals a place of safety without large predators moving nearby. We love the trilling of a brook because moving water is fresher and sweeter than a stagnant pond. This is the world in which we humans grew up. This is the world for which the ironclad criteria of evolution—fitness for purpose in the current environment—designed us. And a million years from now, when the surface of the Earth has changed again, it will be the world that we will have been adapted to enjoy through evolutionary changes in our DNA/RNA/protein domain. Either that, or we will adapt the world to our needs through our big brains, conceptualizing intelligence, and restless imaginations—which are themselves the products of DNA/RNA/protein evolution.

The early microbes which started life on Earth eventually transformed this planet’s sea, its soil, and its atmosphere into the biome we love today. If those same bacteria were to be placed on any other planet within the habitable zone around any distant star, with enough water to hold their fragile membranes and chemistries together, then they would create a world which their far-future offspring could love as well as we humans love the Earth. Such a world might have flowers that bloom in the ultraviolet, background radiation that would fry an Earthly egg, and soil laced with arsenic and sulfur compounds. But it would be the perfect home for the residents who had evolved there.

People who believe in an omnipotent, omniscient god—who created this world in one stupendous act of imagination and created every creature and plant as the perfect fixture for its intended environmental niche—hate the idea of evolution because it is cruel, inefficient, and wasteful of individual lives. Bad mutations are painful and generally lead to death. No amount of spiritual or moral perfection, nor meritorious service, nor correct belief can stand up to one bad gene and its effects. Evolution is personally unjust, unfair, and unseemly. It is nothing that a wise and loving god would support.

But it works. Precisely. All the time. On every likely world.

1. This is as good a word as any for people who believe in an omnipotent, omniscient god or supreme being, who has the power to create the universe and everything in it—as well as to unmake it, if that deity so chooses. The term “theist” has a nice complementarity with “atheist.”

2. For some other interpretations of that understanding, see also Evolution and Intelligent Design from February 24, 2013, and The Point of Evolution from April 27, 2014.

3. That is, the purine and pyrimidine bases which differentiate connection points along the DNA single strand: A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), and T (thymine)—the last of which becomes U (uracil) when DNA is transcribed into RNA.

4. Most chromosomes have long stretches of simple repeating sequences, called microsatellites, that seem designed to shear randomly and facilitate this kind of breaking off and swapping out. It’s as if the structure were designed to occasionally roll the dice.

5. That is, four possible letters to start with, times four possible combinations with the second letter, times another four possible combinations with the third letter (4 x 4 x 4 = 64).

6. So, for example, when the ribosome encounters either the triplet “CAU” or “CAC,” it adds a histidine, while if the triplet is “CAA” or “CAG,” it adds glutamine. See The Genetic Code at Clinical Tools, Inc.

7. I mean, other than any parent’s normal reaction to his or her teenager.

Writers and Alienation

Writers tend to be a solitary lot. Even in an informal gathering, such as at a ballgame, a cocktail party, or just relaxing among family and friends, the writer radiates and maintains a state of semi-isolation. The writer is different: he or she acts and reacts to the event and the conversation sometimes in strange ways, and other people treat her or him with a certain distance and element of suspicion. It’s not completely blatant, not like they are shaming or a shunning the writer, and not like the writer has withdrawn into a cocoon of silence. There’s just … a difference.

Everyone knows something’s going on inside that head, and they are not party to it. They believe the writer is sitting there feeling secretly superior. After all, why does he think the world should care about whatever it is he’s thinking and imagining and will eventually grace us all by bothering to write down? They believe—because they’ve been jokingly told—that she is sitting there plotting our fictitious deaths, or conjuring some horrific humiliation, or simply imagining us all in our underwear. And then, every once in a while, the writer will pull out a pen and pocket notebook and jot down a line or two. That can’t be good for the rest of us.

The fact is, the writer at the party does have a kind of double-think in operation. Every writer with a story or novel under way is actually renting out half of his or her brain to a cross between an amateur theatrical company and a traveling circus. The members of this troupe pop into the writer’s conscious mind at odd moments—sometimes at two o’clock in the morning—and try out a line of dialogue, a bit of stage business, or a tumbling act. Or they have suggestions about a new plot twist. Or criticism about something that lingers in memory which recently went through the forebrain’s story machine. And they want to see it changed now!

It’s no good asking a writer what she’s thinking, because the one thing every writer learns quickly is not to talk about a work in progress. Ideas have to remain private. It’s all right to make notes, enter the idea into a folder of background material or the document where the outline is building. It’s necessary, sometimes, to capture it away from the active story line. But talking about the idea with another person—unless it’s an editor or collaborator—is always a bad choice. An idea that’s been explained to a mundane—to someone outside the business who is not prepared to act on it or contribute to it—goes flat, loses its juice, dies right there in the air. It’s as if pen and paper or screen text create a nurturing mental soil, while the breath of the spoken word expels a poisonous gas.

And then, writers are just plain weird. They have to be. The writer must be prepared to follow the story wherever it goes, as the threads, chunks, and bloody catastrophes surface in the dark well of the imagination.¹ If a story is going to mean something, if it’s going to be important to the reader, then it must deal with dangerous ideas, life and death, pain and loss, strong feelings, scandalous actions, the scent of evil, the whiff of heresy. Nice stories about proper people taking kind and decorous action are boring.

Even as a child, with the only barest urges toward being a writer, I knew I had to accept that nothing is unthinkable or unknowable. True, some thoughts may not be spoken aloud in polite company, and a whole spectrum of potential actions must never be attempted or performed. But nothing is too raw, too vulgar, too scandalous or blasphemous to be contemplated or, eventually, to be committed to paper. These thoughts are the seeds of great villains and the suffering of great protagonists. To censor one’s own imagination as a writer is to exile oneself from the landscape where great stories can take place.

Most family members and friends mutely understand this, and it makes them shy—if not actually nervous. How can someone who could think that be right in the head, or even be a good person? Henry James made this point with a story called “The Author of Beltraffio,” where the wife of a famous novelist has grown estranged and fearful because she believes his stories are heathenish and corrupt. Even if the writer at the point of creation is simply wearing a mask from one of his characters, giving the mental and emotional reins over to one of the players in that theatrical troupe, isn’t there just a bit of the crazy, of psychosis or sociopathy, of danger, in a mind which could create such a thing?

It’s for this reason that a writer can seldom count close family members among his or her greatest fans. The family has to live with the actual mind, with the smiling, apparently happy and contented man sitting across the dinner table, and wonder about all the masks he’s worn and the kind of person who would even want to wear them in the first place.

The act of writing sets one apart from society and polite conversation. It may be the same way with artists and sculptors whose works must touch something deep in the human mind and heart. Writers must necessarily touch that deep place, in a way that a painter of landscapes and sunsets can usually avoid. Stories by their nature must bear the burdens of conflict, tension, and moral judgment if they are to mean anything. Characters must reveal their inner natures through viewpoint, word choice, and action—and they are not always smiling and contented people. The best stories are always a bit disturbing, which means that the best writers must skate close to the edge of malice, crime, and madness.

Does this alienate the writer from family, friends, and society? Oh, a bit. From time to time. And only if we let it bother us. For the rest, we’re just doing our job, which is telling the stories that other people cannot tell for themselves.

1. See Where Do Stories Originate? from August 3, 2014.

Where Do Stories Originate?

I don’t know how other fiction writers create their characters and plots. I’ve never taken a creative writing class or attended a workshop or writers conference.¹ Maybe there you can learn how to assemble characters from bits of description and personal traits, like dressing a Barbie doll, or assemble plots like putting together Legos or an Erector set. Maybe the business of creating stories and people can be automated and streamlined like that. But it’s not the way I work.

For me, characters and their stories grow slowly. Something about an imaginary person captures my imagination, and then I begin collecting situations and story fragments around him or her, creating a virtual life. Most of the character’s traits, potential entanglements, and intended actions come out of my subconscious. And in order for that to work, I need to have filled my mind and my dreams over the years with bits and pieces of actual life experience and with notions and understandings borrowed from the books I’ve read. The story is then supported by the framework of a society, a world, or a universe built out of my work as a technical writer and corporate communicator in various industries, as well as from my reading selectively and voraciously in science and history.

I think of the subconscious as a deep well located in the darkened chambers at the bottom of my mind. The well is filled with dark liquid to hidden depths. Once I have that core character or ensemble and a hint of action in mind, I then begin assembling the story out of the bits and pieces that float up to the surface of that dark liquid, like answers in a Magic 8 Ball. This is not a fast process, and it is not under my conscious control.

Right now, as I wait for my beta readers respond to my book about cellular regeneration and extended life, tentatively titled Coming of Age, I’m using my time to begin preparing notes on the next novel I will write. At this point, it’s a horse race between a sequel to my earlier novel ME: A Novel of Self-Discovery, about a self-aware computer virus, and a sequel to the more recent time-travel book, The Children of Possibility. I can’t say which book will come next, but at the moment the weight of material favors the new ME story.

Before I can write, I need to collect notes as they occur to me through this subconscious process. Sometimes they come while I’m driving or in the shower, sometimes while doing chores. Almost never when I’m sitting at the computer, ready to write. That’s why I keep a pen and pocket notebook with me at all times, and stock notepads and pens around the apartment. I can scribble a few words to capture the random idea, and then at my leisure expand on it in the file that I use for collecting, correlating, and commenting on these thoughts. Only when that document reaches a stage of critical mass, am I ready to start a second document, which begins outlining the story.

I never have the whole plot structure in mind, complete and fulfilled, at the beginning of this outlining process. I might know where the story starts in space, time, and particulars, but have only a vague and general notion of how and where it will end. In between, all I’ll have is the 30,000-foot view of the terrain and the route between the opening and the ending. But neither I nor the characters will have walked the route at ground level and know exactly what to expect.²

Indeed, much of what comes later in the book depends on the exact nature of each character’s perceptions, insights, and motivations as he or she goes through the story and develops knowledge of it. Sometimes an intended ending just doesn’t work out as the story develops. Usually, this is because my first thoughts are generally less complete—less subtle, less developed, less real—than the thoughts that occur as I put my mind into envisioning mode and write the actual words on the page. Only at that point do I see the story clearly as it happens. And what comes from my fingers at this stage, which I call “production writing,” is almost a direct line from the subconscious, casting up the summation of the bits and pieces I’ve been ruminating over—or “noodling,” as I call it—for months and often for years.

Sometimes, in the middle of the story, I will stumble on a plot or character problem. It’s usually in the nature of “How did she know that?” or “What did he find when he went there?” Two parts of the story—one extending forward from the place where production writing has currently stopped, the other extending backward from the parts of the story I can imagine but not yet see clearly—have reached a disjunction. I need an idea, a bridge, a device, or a bit of action to connect the two. And the only thing I can do then is petition the dark gods who operate that inner well. I toss the problem into the pit and must wait for an answer to float up to the surface.

My great good fortune is that something always comes back. The subconscious, like the dark gods or the Magic 8 Ball, produces its bit of flotsam, usually in a day or two, and it always fits, fixes the problem, and advances the story.

I don’t know what “writer’s block” is for other writers, but for me it is the wait beside the well. Either I don’t have critical mass behind the characters and their stories to begin the processes of outlining and production writing, or I’ve reached a disjunction in the story or character and must wait for the subconscious to do it’s magic. This is not a matter of inspiration—which implies getting into the mood, feeling a spark, or gaining some kind spiritual energy—so much as it is a process of materialization. I cannot sit down and force the process by simply determining to write. I’ve tried that and what it produces is words but not story. Forced writing, sitting down and pounding the keys looking for the story, generally disgorges huge amounts of peripheral description, such as three thousand words describing the bricks in the path or the leaves on the tree growing beside it: stuff, not story. And that stuff just has to be revised, cut back, or ripped out when the actual story arrives in my brain.

Writer’s block for me is not laziness or stupidity or not feeling like writing. It is sitting down at the keyboard, ready in all other respects, with the time and energy and intention to write, but the well is empty. I drop in a stone, and nothing comes back but a dry rattle.

People who write nonfiction for a living, as I did for many years as a technical writer and corporate communicator, may not be familiar with this kind of writer’s block. They will have completed their interviews with contributors who have the knowledge and viewpoints they need. Or they will have watched the process to be described as it is performed out on the factory floor or in the laboratory. They have their notes before them, and they have a deadline. When I’ve been in that position, all I had to do was select a starting point—a question, a viewpoint, or an observation that would frame the issue at hand for the reader—and the writing process would begin. Words would come, the structure develop, and the article move forward at a speed of about 1,000 words an hour.³

Fiction writing is different. If I’m is stuck with a plot problem or a character issue, it’s like having incomplete notes. But I can’t just call up the contributor to clarify the point, or go back to the factory to watch the machine run again. I must petition the dark gods to put something in the well. Again, materialization rather than inspiration.

So why do I write in the first place? Heaven knows, it’s not to get rich or even to make money. If it were, I would find a way to trick the subconscious or discard it entirely. I would study the marketplace and current reader demand, then devise a character, a plot structure, and a “franchise” framework for serialization under which I could ring the changes and produce a string of popular heroes in bestsellers. But I don’t know how to do that. I can’t order the dark gods to produce like that.⁴

Instead, an idea or a character or a story fragment has come to mind that seems so compelling, so real, so vital, or so interesting that I can’t just let it sit there in an undefined state, as a bit of unformed probability. My mind plays with it, walks away and comes back, teased by the thought that it would be so cool to have this notion become a definite story, a string of words that starts in one place, travels to another, and ends up somewhere else. The urge to make it real and accessible—a formulation in words that will play like a movie inside the reader’s head and lead him or her to thoughts never before considered and emotions never before felt—is so strong that I will freely spend hours, days, months, and sometimes years to make that story and the book containing it come to life.

I write for the same reason that people paint pictures, carve statues, work physics problems, or build model railroads—because I can’t live with such an attractive idea left in a half-formed state, and the result would be so cool for someone else to come upon it and say, “Ah!”

1. But I did major in English literature at the university, and that used to count for a lot.

2. See On Outlining a Novel from May 13, 2012.

3. When I know what I want to say, I write fast.

4. I tried it once, to consciously create a thriller that would have potential as a bestseller. That produced the novel Trojan Horse. But the dark gods who guard the well are jealous and worked to create something strange and different—not a bad book in itself, but one with no more bestseller potential than any other that I might write.

The Triumph of Intelligence

A friend posted on Facebook recently an article about how Habitable exoplanets are bad news for humanity. The general argument is that, if we don’t find life on rocky planets in the habitable zone around stars capable of supporting life, the lack of it implies the existence of something called the “Great Filter.” This filter, supposedly, is a crisis stage in the development of any intelligent species which creates a barrier to continued existence: nuclear war, unsustainable growth rate, biotechnological experimentation—take your pick.

The article states, “For 200,000 years humanity has survived supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, and naturally occurring pandemics. But our track record of survival is limited to just a few decades in the presence of nuclear weaponry. And we have no track record at all of surviving many of the radically novel technologies that are likely to arrive this century.”

As I pointed out in a recent posting, Where Are They? from July 6 of this year, we ourselves may have been around for about 200,000 years, but only during the last hundred years or so have we had the means of communicating by radio waves or traveling above our own atmosphere. And any broadcast radio signals we have sent—as opposed to beamcast, which is hardier—would be subject to the inverse-square law anyway, which means they diminish to a mere whisper at a distance of a few lightyears.¹ The universe is quiet because the rise from replicating molecules to space-traveling organisms is difficult and takes a long time—four billion years in our case. So please give humanity a break!

I really hate this implied argument that intelligence is somehow deadly and that intelligent societies are bound to destroy themselves through nuclear war or biotechnology or some other supposedly forbidden technology. The fact that we've had nuclear weapons combined with global tensions for seventy years,² that we only used these weapons once in anger—and that was right at the start, with two of the first such bombs ever made—and that we have since developed agreements and protocols about their use in the face of worldwide proliferation, has to indicate some sort of triumph for intelligence.

The argument about the “Great Filter” is anti-humanist and feeds into the notion that humanity is some kind of pest or virus on our planet. According to the people who hold this view, our species is an unnatural and uncontrolled expression of life which is inimical to all other life on Earth and should therefore be contained, controlled, or preferably eliminated.

In this view, the more technologically oriented humankind becomes, the more dangerous we become. We might have been all right as bands of hunter-gatherers, who made their living by picking berries, knocking over rabbits with small stones, and sucking the marrow out of antelope bones—and only after those delicate creatures had already been killed by more efficient hunters such as wolves. But let humans develop spear points, throwing sticks, bows and arrows, or drums and fire to stampede the prey into our traps, and we become a blight on the landscape.

This is luddite thinking that clings to the past. Humans in the natural state—naked and alone against the elements—are supposedly good. Humans with their inventive intelligence and its natural byproducts—meaning our weapons, our machines, our busy cities, and our noisy toys—are bad. Cloth made on a hand loom in cottage industry is good. Cloth made on a steam loom in a factory, bad. Riding in a carriage pulled by a horse at eight to ten miles per hour, good. Riding in an air-conditioned automobile with crumple zones and airbags at sixty miles per hour, bad. And so on.

This is worse than luddite. It’s a thinly veiled resurrection of the biblical concept of original sin. With the technologies resulting from human intelligence, our species has eaten the apples of the tree of good and evil. We now know and can do great harm, perhaps even eliminate ourselves and the other creatures on the planet. It then becomes imperative, in the primitive justice system of the 12th century BC, that humans do not also eat of the tree of life through biotechnology and so live forever, becoming as gods. Our imminent destruction through nuclear holocaust or biotechnical plague would appear to be the antidote in this case. This is an embarrassingly primitive position for supposedly advanced thinkers who pride themselves on having given up their religion.

Are there dangers in technology? Of course. Madmen, anarchists, and perpetrators on the political fringe have used dynamite—and now plastique—to blow up cityscapes and their infrastructure since Alfred Nobel invented the stuff. Technology creates perils and wastes as well as benefits and riches. It will take time and practice to apply the principles of engineering efficiency, least cost, lowest energy, and best use to its products and processes. And finally, all war is a terrible thing, whether pursued with nuclear or conventional weapons.³ But the world is full of dangers and has been since the first naked humans stepped out on the savannah and encountered lions and tigers, poison oak and prairie fires—along with those supervolcanoes and asteroids the article mentions.

In my book, the only solution to the perils of technology is more thinking, discussion, negotiation and, usually, a better, more refined technology. Trying to uninvent any technology—whether nuclear bombs or dynamite or the repeating rifle—for the safety of future generations is a hopeless fantasy. What has existed once will be discovered again, or superseded by an even more clever invention. Intelligence is tricky that way. Like life itself, which is the reversal of entropy implied by the information stored in the DNA/RNA/protein domain, human-scale intelligence and its byproducts build on the past, evolve their uses and designs, and develop ever more subtle, sophisticated, perfected forms.

To wish the creative power of human intelligence back into the box, like Pandora, is a romantic and fruitless emotional exercise. To hope, or fear, that it will remove itself from the universe is a denial of everything that makes us human.

1. The inverse-square law states that the flux emanating radially from a point source—like a light bulb or a broadcast radio or television signal—loses intensity in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the source. For example, if you’re standing one mile away from a lighthouse, you see the light at intensity x. If you move two miles away, the apparent intensity is not 1/2x but 1/4x, as four is the square of the distance two miles. At three miles, the intensity is 1/9x, as nine is the square of three.

2. The article’s point about our only having survived a few decades with nuclear weapons is ingenuous. Of course we’ve only survived a few decades, because that’s our entire history with such weapons. The argument would suggest that nuclear holocaust is some kind of probabilistic event. That is, if we don’t blow ourselves up this year, then it becomes even more probable that we’ll do it next year, or the year after, or a decade from now. Such thinking totally ignores the fact that intelligence possesses the capacity for learning and growing. If we survived the first decades with nuclear weapons held on both sides of a conflict—as they were in the 1950s and ’60s—and if we grant that humans generally see nuclear holocaust as a bad thing, then with each year that passes we learn more about the weapons and their destructive power, become better at negotiating with people who have them, and improve our chances for survival. This is the intelligent course.

3. The only good thing to be said for war is its finality. When two societies, or nations, or hegemonies are in irreconcilable conflict, the only resolution may be through total commitment of one or the other’s people in sacrificing their blood and treasure. For years, science fiction writers have imagined polite replacements for brutal, bloody war: chess games, coin tosses, computer simulations, and so on. But the question still remains: when your life, your society, your future, your freedom, your honor, or whatever else you hold dear is at stake in a chess game or a coin toss—and you lose—what then? Do you submit tamely to domination, enslavement, second-class status, tribute paying, or whatever else the winner will impose? Or do you pick up a weapon, join the militia, and fight to the death, or to the point at which your courage or your nerve break and you raise your hands in final surrender? War is not the best way to resolve a conflict, but it’s the last way and the only one that really counts.

Knowing and Believing

As noted elsewhere, I am an atheist, not a believer in any god. This is not because I’m too smart to be taken in by organized religion, but because I lack some mental apparatus, maybe genetically related, that would allow me to see or hear beyond the limits of human senses. When I’m very quiet and trying to listen, I simply don’t perceive any presence that might reflect a superior being that exists outside my own imagination.

And I do have an imagination, as well as a sense of proportion. The god as advertised in most religions is a mass of superlatives: omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, standing outside of space and time. None is bigger, smarter, and stronger than he/she/it. I try to imagine a presence with a recognizable intelligence and a personality—that is, a set of traits, preferences, affections, and skills, as well as all their negative aspects of dislikes, disaffections, and failings—on such an immeasurable scale … and I come up empty. Any discrete being so vast and complicated would not be recognizable as a fellow intelligence. It would be more like a galaxy-sized black hole with a maelstrom of an accretion disk that devours suns and expels jets of white-hot plasma that span lightyears. I can’t imagine such an intelligence taking much interest in the workings of a single planet, let alone the daily business, affections, and destiny of a single human on that planet, such as I am.¹

In the same way, I try to fathom an eternity of the sort promised in most religions … and I draw a blank. I can imagine living a few hundred more years, being allowed to continue my journey, to grow and learn, but I know that human life and its attention span are shaped by death. It is the prospect of an end that gives intensity and urgency to life in the present. In a universe that humankind’s most subtle probings now suggest is physically and temporarily bounded, that thirteen billion years ago endured a phase transition which was very like a beginning and will one day endure another transition which will seem very like an ending, I find it vastly improbable that any inhabitant of this universe can confidently expect to endure for the stated eternity.

That genetic defect—plus the fault of having had a mechanical engineer for a father and a landscape architect for a mother, both of them grounded in practical science—makes me approach questions of omnipotence and infinity in a cold, rational, measuring way. I tend to favor postulates over beliefs, proof over hope, and questions over answers.

I do love science, although I’m not qualified to practice it professionally, having been trained in literature as a writer, a creature of imagination, and a dreamer of things as yet unseen. But with that genetic and parental background, my imagination and my dreams run toward structure, mechanics, and the ordering of the universe. My fantasies are made up of artificial intelligences and working engineers, rather than wood sprites and wizards. I do not hold with any kind of abracadabra magic, although I believe with Arthur C. Clarke that any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic in the eyes of a human being from the here and now.

But science as the province of observing, testing, recording, and knowing does not preclude the need for faith. To be sure, science is a promising enterprise. In the past two thousand years—and even more so in the past two hundred—science has vastly increased our understanding of nature and the universe. But so many questions and mysteries which we don't understand (e.g., the fundamental workings of gravity, space, and time²) still remain that the dimension allotted in human endeavors to faith—the expectation that answers will be found and that meaning exists where none can be proved—must also be great.

I believe that science will eventually tell us all about the nature of the universe as far as detection allows.³ Science will eventually describe and enable us to control all of the chemistries and their reactions that create and define this improbable reversal of entropy that we call life. Science will even probe the nature of our own brains and the minds which arise from their chemical and electrical interplay. But it has become clear that the more we know, the farther the edge of knowledge recedes before us.

To take a simple example, consider the sequencing of the human genome. When this task was started in the mid-1990s and its end state was only imagined, researchers believed that all of the DNA in a cell was used to produce the proteins required by the living organism. That was part of the “central dogma” of molecular biology: DNA transcribes to RNA, which translates to proteins. So any DNA that didn’t directly code for an active protein was just old junk, carried over from our evolutionary past, and slowly becoming mutated into nonsense, like a shipwreck sinking into a sea of chaos. But after the entire genome was sequenced, the protein-coding genes were found to be only about ten percent of the genome’s three billion base pairs.

Scientists at the time⁴ were skeptical that the cell would contain, replicate through each division, and carry forward so much junk. But then, in the last ten years or so, we have opened up new fields of study into microRNAs, RNA interference, epigenetics, and proteomics.⁵ The chemistry of life and cellular development and differentiation is now much more complex than we imagined just twenty years ago, when the central dogma was considered basic science.

But as fast as the enterprise of science proceeds in staking out the map of human knowledge and pushing back the frontiers marking the as yet unknown, some things will remain beyond its reach. Science can tell us how life came about, how we exist as organized beings, and even how our minds work. But it cannot tell us why we exist. Science cannot give us a purpose.

If I have a faith, as an atheist, it is that there is nothing that is unknowable, indescribable, or unintelligible. Yes, I understand that the universe is not all Newtonian clockwork, that some of its functions and results must be described only by probabilities rather than by exact measurement. That is one of the discoveries of the last hundred years or so. But I don’t believe in any forbidden and hidden mysteries.

And still the question of why, of the purpose behind the universe and the human experience, remains. One of the most damning notions to arise in the last hundred years is that science, in undermining and abolishing religion, has removed the purpose of human life. The idea that life is absurd and without meaning has greatly damaged—if not destroyed—intellectual discourse in our time. It gives rise to the untested hypothesis that humans are simply blind animals, creatures of chance, foolish and doomed, more akin to microbes and worms than to angels and gods—those powerful beings which are imaginary anyway and don’t really exist.

In my scientific fantasy, humans create their own purpose and meaning. With our huge brains, our subtle understanding and complex reactions, and with the tool of communication—not just from mind to mind through articulate speech, but from group to group and generation to generation through the mechanics of writing and mathematics—we are able to choose, to seek, to determine, to decide, to build, and to admire.

If humans don’t create meaning and purpose in their lives and for the world, then no one else will do it for them.

1. And then, I can sense all too clearly the origins of the human yearning for a loving, benevolent, and caring god. As mammals—especially as the helpless, big-brained offspring of narrow-hipped primates—we depend on our parents for our very lives during early development. And later, when we discover in adolescence that mother and father are just human beings and fallible after all, we still yearn for that sense of a protective parent. And so we come to believe in a sky father and an earth mother to watch over us and guide our actions. I sometimes imagine that sea turtles, who break out of their shells and race across the sand toward the water, never having any sense of a guarding and guiding parent, might choose to worship as a god. Perhaps they would venerate a luminous presence in the sky, like the full moon that pulls the tide close to the nest and guides them to the sea. See One True Religion from April 15, 2011.

2. See Three Things We Don’t Know About Physics (I) and (II) from December 30, 2012, and January 6, 2013.

3. Up to the limits of quantum mechanics, where probabilities and statistics take over from direct, impactful observation.

4. This was when I worked at Applied Biosystems as a technical writer. The company made the genetic analyzers used in the Human Genome Project and other applications, and I was in daily contact with scientists and engineers working on these issues.

5. Essentially, that other ninety percent of human DNA is involved with the timing and cuing of cellular development and the differentiation of cell and tissue types. Think of the protein-coding genes as the body’s parts list, and the rest of the genome as the assembly manual. When we have finally mapped out all these relationships, I believe we will be looking at the most elegant piece of natural art in the universe.

Self-Defense and the Rape Culture

When I was growing up, my parents never gave me a lot of support when I didn’t like the way the world worked. In fact, they were pretty scornful. “Get used to it,” my mother would say. And “Those who feel sorry for themselves, should,” was one of my father’s favored sayings. Now, they were good parents, supporting me and my brother both physically and emotionally, patient to teach, and eager to see us learn and grow. But they simply had no time for whiners and children who wished for a different world.¹ Later, when I was in high school and college in the ’60s, that hard-headed teaching set me apart from my own generation, where everyone’s personal mantra and the dream of personal fulfillment became to “change the world.”²

Recently, a member of a beauty pageant who also held a black belt in the martial arts publicly advocated self-defense for women. This remark drew a torrent of scorn on the grounds that a woman should not have to defend herself against stronger, rapacious, power-seeking males. Remaining free of attack was not a woman’s responsibility. Instead—presumably—society should change so that men did not, or would not, or could not attack women, or even wish to attack them. In the same vein, a woman should not be responsible for drawing an attack or even attention because of the way she dressed or acted. In such a world, a woman should be free to wear anything—or nothing—and still walk down the street without fear.

I agree. A woman should not have to put up with attempted rape, no matter how she dresses or acts.³ But that “should” belongs to the 99 percent of space and time over which the individual has no control. It would be better if society and human sexuality were structured differently, but they’re not. So, in this situation, that “should” is a fantasy on the order of “How I wish things were arranged” and feeds into the “change the world” meme. But since the world has not yet changed and perhaps never will, the individual must control what she can, which is her own behavior and her response to her physical surroundings.

Let’s be brutally honest here. Some clothing and most makeup styles, as well as some modes of behavior, are designed to draw attention by emphasizing some physical or emotional features, revealing others directly, and so create a state of desire in the male. This is part of how the species propagates. In the human species and in the society that has developed its mating rituals out of those ingrained sexual cues, it is not the female who initiates sexual contact. The male makes the approach to the female and does the asking. The female then takes control of the situation by making her breeding decision and either accepting or rejecting his approach. But that would leave most plain-featured females unattended as virtual wallflowers, while the majority of males flocked to those few women with obvious natural attractions. This would skew the distribution of genes disastrously and create great unhappiness on both sides of the sexual selection. So, over time, women as a culture have adopted bits of dress, coloring, scent, and modes of behavior intended to arouse the male into making that approach.⁴

Unfortunately, such arousal signals are not targeted to the intended object of affection, like a laser beam or poisoned dart. Instead, they broadcast to all males within range, like tear gas. Unwanted and unacceptable males are also aroused, and therein lies the problem. With the human male’s superior weight and strength, rejecting his unwanted advances is not always a matter of speaking skillfully, forcefully, or scornfully—regardless of what a young girl’s mother or an aunt may have told her.

Similarly, people tend to drink in any social setting in order to loosen the bonds of inhibition and make the joining of prickly, conflicted, self-conscious individuals more likely. This is another way in which the species propagates. Since drinking lowers a woman’s self-awareness and determination, it becomes important for her to choose her friends and the situation carefully, avoid drinking too much in public or among strangers, such as at a large party, and watch her glass and its contents to avoid ingesting a stealthily placed drug. To do otherwise is to engage in foolish and reckless behavior.

As it is a fantasy to wish that society or its impulses toward propagation operated differently, so it is a fantasy to wish that foolish behavior did not sometimes occasion bad results. This, too, is among the sphere of things the individual cannot control. All she can control is her own behavior, her actions, and her expectations.

A woman might wish that the sexual machinery were structured differently. She might wish that the society in which it operates and the human nature which it has created were structured differently.⁵ Women may even work together to structure their society differently for their own protection and advantage without any dependence on the male response. I’m not sure about the long-term functioning of such a society, nor about its short-term prospects during the transition period. But again, all of this is in the realm of things beyond the individual’s control.

Most questions in the debate about self-defense for women seem to revolve around issues of means and weapons. Which is handier, more effective, or more certain—a gun, knife, or knee to the groin? But that is like debating which of the five forks to the left of the dinner plate should be used for spearing the asparagus. The first principle at dinner generally is, “Do we eat?” So the first principle of self-defense is, “Do we protect?” The “why” comes first; the “how” comes later.

Self-defense actually goes beyond issues of women and rape. It goes beyond the physical method, whether gun, knife, or knee. It goes beyond the immediate point of conflict and resolution. It goes beyond a moment’s mental application to a specific situation or threat. Self-defense is a total mindset. It should be taught to both boys and girls. It should be part of any mother’s, father’s, teacher’s, or family friend’s training of the young.

That mindset says: “I am a whole person, with rights and obligations, with boundaries, and with a life purpose. I am not to be victimized, subjugated, abused, toyed with, taken advantage of, conned, cheated, or cast aside. I know the difference between right and wrong, between fairness and unfairness, between life and death. I stand here, and this is my ground. The air in my lungs and the space around me are mine. Anyone who would harm me must step back now.”

That mindset applies to every relationship, every commercial transaction, every job interview, every expectation of service for fee, and every acceptance of fee for service. It requires the individual to examine his or her actions and choices, approach the world with heightened awareness, and evaluate every situation for potential danger and traps. It requires the individual to decide for her- or himself the limits of personal power, the dimensions of personal vulnerability, and the scope of her or his own personhood. It impresses upon the mind the existence of margins and probabilities, advantage and disadvantage, friends and foes.

Is this a paranoid view of the world? Is it oppressively pessimistic? Is it too bleak to be considered? Very possibly. But every thinking, trained, self-aware individual knows or has been taught that the universe offers about a thousand and one ways to trap you and kill you—but only about six or seven acceptable ways to stay alive. This is not the world as you would wish it, but rather the world as it presents itself to you.

So yes, I agree: No woman should be required to mind how she dresses and acts, or be required to take responsibility for defending herself and her honor, against the aggressiveness of uncouth, untrained, unpredictable males with no code of honor they can call their own. But that “should” is still in the realm of space and time beyond individual control, of wishing for things to be as they might, rather than the way they are.

1. They would have thoroughly appreciated the “Serenity Prayer” as adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

2. Curiously, at this time of militant peace and mellow yellowness, I also became interested in Buddhism and Zen as part of my karate studies. I never was much for practicing meditation, and I never learned to appreciate the thematic complexity of the sutras, but I did pick up a few of the concepts. Among them was the notion that the only thing a person can control is him- or herself. In a world that makes you angry or sad, crushes your expectations, or tries to kill you, the only defense you actually have is to adjust your attitude, change your expectations, and increase your watchfulness.

3. I will go farther. I believe the penalty for attempted rape, as for attempted murder, should be death. But not after months of evidence taking, plea bargaining, jury selection, and trial, followed by years or even decades of judicial appeal. The issue should be decided at the point of contest by the intended victim. Snap! Bang! Finito!

4. By contrast, in other species the roles are reversed. The male bird evolves colorful plumage in order to attract the female, making her receptive to his intended approach. If nothing else, evolution shows the thousand wondrous ways of getting the job done.
       The human sexual dance comprises more steps than those of birds. Actually, three steps: First, the woman signals wordlessly, “I’m attractive and available, if you want me.” Second, the man senses her receptivity, feels desire, and signals directly—usually in so many words—“I want you. Will you accept me?” Third, she makes her actual decision and signals, wordlessly or otherwise, her consent or rejection. In creatures with so many layers of thinking and interpretation to their highly evolved brains, and so many taboos and social consequences to their sexuality, it would be surprising if the matter were made any less complex. I believe that social engineers will interfere with the steps of this dance at their peril.

5. And in fact, male codes of honor and chivalry are part of a societal response designed to protect women from the male’s superior strength and weight.

Where Are They?

That’s the question everyone seems to be asking about the extraterrestrials that supposedly flourish throughout the galaxy. Why aren’t they dropping by Earth all the time, like the alien travelers in the Men in Black series? To this I have a counter question: Well, where are we?

Human beings are pretty smart—not exactly worms, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson seems to think, waiting for some smarter species to come along and study us.¹ In fact, we’re the smartest creatures on this planet, probably in this solar system, and maybe for a couple of parsecs in any direction around here. So why aren’t we out there, going on a worm hunt?

Consider: On a planet that is now four billion years old, our own Earth, it is only in the last:

• Million years that any animal has possessed both the brainpower and the physical numbers to form any kind of civilization.

• Ten thousand years that human beings have had the technology—herding skills and agriculture—to settle down in river valleys and build that civilization.

• Five thousand years that we’ve had writing systems to carry our words and ideas beyond the next generation.

• Hundred years since we started using radio waves to carry those words and ideas. Every means of communication that came before radio remained dark to anyone above our atmosphere.

• Sixty-odd years since we had rockets to reach above our own atmosphere.

• Forty-odd years since we put a human footprint on another world, our own Moon.

• Year or so that the Voyager probes broke away from the Sun’s immediate environment.

Aside from a few camping trips on the edge of space, we haven’t gone back to the Moon or established any serious physical presence above our atmosphere. We’ve sent a number of robot probes to examine the other planets in our system and explore its environs. But we haven’t gone in person and it may be years before we go out again.

We’re the hot stuff of this solar neighborhood, and yet we aren’t out there looking for worms, or for our equals, or even our superiors.

I believe the universe teems with life. Any planet that can harbor some form of this entropy-reversing energy flux will probably do so. And yet I think most habitable planets probably resemble ours of the past four billion years: quietly cooking up life in all its variations and slowly developing its potential, but still dark to anyone who happens to pass through this solar system and take a brief look or a scan while on their way to some other star that seems more promising.

Life is abundant. But the kind of life that has the brains, the organization, the technology, and not least the time and money to go out among the stars and look for more life—that is probably pretty rare.

And while it may be nice to think that we’re just worms—or an abhorrent species of primitive, violent, dangerous creatures, like a monkey troop afflicted with scabies—and that a greater, wiser, more peaceful, benevolent, and powerful civilization is waiting out there, ready to become humanity’s foster parent, teacher, and guide to a better state of grace … I’m not holding my breath. The human yearning for a parent figure lasts far into adulthood. The notion that we can relax our grip, step back into the crèche of childhood, and let some godlike creatures plan and define our next steps … is a fantasy.

For one thing, there may be a limit to the intelligence of any single creature or even a hive mind. Our brains have on average 100 billion neurons, each with multiple synapses making connection to other neurons. That’s a far more powerful and versatile computer than any engineer has been able to build by cramming transistors on a chip, although computers will probably overtake us meats soon enough. There may be a limit to how much raw computing power our kind of life chemistry can coordinate. I’m not saying there is a limit, just that there may be one.

If you believe that evolution is a reliable principle and that it probably operates on other planets as well as ours, the nature of evolution may define such a limit. Humans are very smart. We are much smarter than the animals we hunt or herd for food, such as deer, cows, and goats, and smarter even than the animals that would hunt us, such as lions and bears. We may be an order of magnitude too smart for the hunter-gatherer existence that we left behind when we settled on the banks of the Indus, the Euphrates, and the Nile rivers. But while that excess intelligence has brought us a long way, the process of building societies, governments, industries, and marketplaces has sopped up much of that excess intelligence and then created new, even more complex challenges.

But evolution suggests that we probably won’t develop more intelligence and problem-solving capability than we need on average. Yes, here and there we produce a Goethe or an Einstein. But most of us are just smart enough to get along and pay our taxes. So the bet is that, unless there’s a planet out there with conditions so bizarre or a society so complex that children are required to invent their own form of calculus right out of the cradle just in order to survive, there’s probably an upward limit to the brain power that any extraterrestrial species will develop, too.

We still might meet our masters out among the stars. But I would bet on that differential intelligence being on a recognizable scale. They probably won’t be gods, and we probably won’t be worms on their sidewalk.

All by ourselves, we humans had to stand up to the other primates, learn to dig the soil to manage the useful plants, learn to tame and care for the useful animals and build fences against the rest, make meaning out of scratches in clay, build interfamilial trust, organize societies that stretched from one end of the river to the other, and create a destiny for ourselves. No gods from beyond the stars were needed for that. We’re smart enough, now, to figure out the rest on our own.

1. See There’s a worm in the street …. I find this an incredibly demeaning view of humanity and its achievements. We are not worms! Not even close!