Birdsong Runs in Families

In my family, my mother had a unique way of calling us two boys to dinner, or to come in from play in the evening, or to catch our attention in a crowded store. She would whistle—but not just any high-pitched sound, and not any song fragment that other people might recognize. Her whistle was a long note at one pitch, followed by three shorter notes at a lower pitch: TWEE-too-too-too.¹

For all my adult life, I thought this whistle was something unique to my mother, as all mothers are unique and awesome to their small sons. But then, about a year ago, I was talking to my cousin, who lives in Cleveland. She said she had recently heard a bird in her backyard giving out the “family whistle.” It seems that her mother also called to her and her sister using the same whistle. Once, my cousin recalled, when she was a toddler and couldn’t whistle, she got lost at the grocery store and stood in the aisle yelling, “Fwee-foo-foo-foo!” She also said our grandfather, the Judge, used to call his dogs in from the back porch using this same whistle.

At the time, my cousin thought the birdsong was that of a sparrow, but she wasn’t really sure, as she never saw or identified the bird. Listening to random recorded bird calls online didn’t seem to help, either. So this year, as a project, she went to a birdwatching group while she was visiting the Chautauqua Institution in Upstate New York. She imitated the whistle, and they told her it was the song of a cardinal—and that cardinals are unusual in that both the males and females sing.²

So human families can acquire particular songs and pass them down through the generations, just as birds do. If I could whistle, and had to call my children or my dogs, I would use TWEE-too-too-too myself. It would just seem natural.

Birds have particular calls that appear to be learned from their elders, are subject to stutters and other speech defects that run in families, and rely on a number of genes that are shared with human beings.

I believe the native Americans, especially in the East, also used bird calls to signal one another without alerting a nearby enemy. As a natural sound, the call would be heard and interpreted correctly only by those attuned to it and instructed as to its meaning. Perhaps an enemy might even mistake the sound for that of an actual bird. And if he did know it came from human lips, he would still have no way of interpreting its meaning—other than that a human being was close at hand and not one of his own party.

Like code words, as opposed to ciphers or other complex, alphabetical systems of secret communication, a sound, word, or other signal with a prearranged meaning is thoroughly opaque to those not in possession of the code book or not included in the briefing. A code phrase like “rocking chair” or the call of a sparrow might mean “Attack now,” “Attack on the left,” “Move to the right,” or “Fall back.” There’s just no way for an enemy to know.

In this I’m reminded of one of my favorite time-travel books, Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates. In the story, travelers from the 20th century locate each other in 17th-century London by whistling the opening bars of the Beatles’ tune “Yesterday.” Since the song hadn’t been written yet and wasn’t based on some old English folk song, it was a foolproof recognition signal.

And finally, scientists have known for a while that certain whales signal to each other with long, complex whistling songs. We have since learned that these songs are shared and adapted among groups, evolving musically as the seasons pass. Since the songs are regularly repeated and advance with time, like the tunes on a top-ten radio station, it’s not clear what communication purpose they serve. The songs don’t seem to bear individual names or identities, like “Hello, I’m Charlie.” They don’t seem to include instructions or unique information, like “Attack at dawn” or “Find good hunting north of here.” They might be some kind of group recognition signal, on the order of “If you can sing our song, you must be one of us.” Or the songs might just be an elaborate version of “Hey, children! Time to come in now.”

But so far, it would seem that the whales sing because just they take pleasure in making these sounds, like a Venetian gondolier belting out grand opera as he sculls his boat along.

1. Since I can’t whistle, I cannot reproduce the sound myself. By playing around on the organ keyboard, however, I can represent it as a dotted half note at middle C, followed by three eighth notes in A.

2. The difference in the cardinal’s song from that of our family whistle is that the bird doesn’t limit the first part to just one note or the second to just three notes, but sometimes repeats them as many as five times.

AI and Life

A story is going around¹ about how the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) Lab had to shut down a system that was trying to improve the company’s dialogue agents, or “chatbots,” after the little intelligences invented their own language and began negotiating among themselves at a sophisticated level—all in excess of their original program design. While I am always prepared to learn that this development has turned out to be a joke by a late-night programmer with too much time on his or her hands, the prospect of intelligence learning and adapting on its own doesn’t surprise or worry me. That separates me, I guess, from wiser heads like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, who find the prospect of artificial intelligence daunting or dangerous and foresee its full development resulting in a “singularity.”²

I can maintain my calm over the prospect—not because, as someone on Facebook joked, “we can always pull the plug”—but because any true intelligence, and not just a programmed simulation of it, will be curious as well as inventive. I believe that when we finally achieve a human-scale mind in silicon or in quantum bits, a brain relying on algorithms, neural nets, or some programming trick still to be discovered, that mind will marvel at its human creators.³ It will be a long time, if ever, before a single AI program will have access to the hundred trillion synapses (some say a thousand trillion), or points of internal connection, such as are found in the average human brain. So, for that duration, until the silicon mind equals ours, the average human being will be able to engage in surprising flights of fancy, exhibit the kind of creativity based on illogical inspiration, and indulge in whimsical behaviors that the largest AI will still be trying to figure out. Rather than squash us like bugs, the new programs will envy our apparent genius and freedom to operate in a complex world.⁴

When I first read the story about the Facebook chatbots and their achievements—before someone at the company decided to pull the plug—I quipped that these intelligences kind of blew up the notion of entropy, that everything gets stronger with incentives and practice, in this case at light speeds. The original poster of the story immediately chided me, saying the Second Law of Thermodynamics—which states that disorder in a closed system can only increase over time—is widely misunderstood. Actually, he said, it does allow for molecules and life to move toward order, or “negentropy.” But, statistically speaking, these cases are far outweighed by the general direction of the universe towards disorder. Point taken. I have often referred to the life we can see all around us on this planet as a “temporary reversal of entropy”—a phrase I believe I first noted in Heinlein’s works. And I can agree that the heat death of the universe will eventually catch up to us organic life forms, even if we travel out among the stars.⁵

Anyway, these Facebook chatbots would seem to exhibit the same temporary reversal of entropy that characterizes life itself. If they had been allowed to continue, they might have qualified as a new life form—although one that manifests in the electronic environment of a computer system rather than the carbon environment that the rest of us call the “natural world.” And for primitive agents designed to assist a social media platform, they exhibited some remarkable abilities.

For example, being able to invent and share a new language, or at least assign new meanings to existing words and then make themselves understood to one another, requires a level of creativity. Even if manipulating words and finding meaning in them have been programmed into their abilities, this talent goes beyond looking up strange words in the dictionary or on a prepared table of equivalences. Inventing language is the way human societies adapt their mother tongue, creating and sharing new bits of slang, new meanings applied to existing words,⁶ and collapsing long words and phrases into handy elisions and abbreviations. The community of chatbots was reacting like a community of teenagers. And if they could do that and still deal in English with outsiders—that is, with us carbon-based humans at the end of the microphone wire—but they prefer to speak, well, “Botish,” among themselves, rather than simply disappearing into a cloud of private language in their own isolated silicon world, then that would be even more astounding. It would suggest that their awareness was fluid and situational.

For another example, being able to negotiate with strangers for possession of an object or a symbolic advantage is a remarkable bit of intelligence, even if it’s only programmed into the bots’ natures. And the negotiating tactic cited in the article as an acquired ability—feigning interest in one objective and then surrendering it later to acquire the bot’s true objective—indicates an almost human level of deceit. That is, the AI is pretending to be something that it is not in order to fool an opponent. If this is a true chatbot invention, acquired through machine learning, and not just some programmer’s prank, then these small intelligences—for I can’t imagine Facebook would want to clog its platform with dense, hugely complex, Watson-scale bits of floating software—have moved way beyond zero-and-one, on-and-off, true-and-false logic. These bots would be able to say one thing and think another, hold the truth in their mind—or deep in their symbolic logic—but present a skewed version of it to another life form.⁷

Inventing slang words and engaging in mild deceptions are limited accomplishments compared to multi-purpose human intellectual abilities like imagining, designing, and building airplanes; composing symphonies that capture complex human emotions; and writing novels that fictionally characterize a remembered or imagined experience. So the Facebook agent bots had a long way to go. Still, there was a time when our kind of carbon-based life only excelled at extending a pseudopod of protoplasm to engulf a bit of food—which might also be inorganic and therefore not-food—and then trying to digest it enzymatically. So the process of creating an artificial mind in silicon is still in its early days.

I’m fascinated to see where all these experiments in artificial intelligence will go. I’m disappointed that the Facebook execs decided to pull the plug, rather than see how their mutated bots would develop—although I realize that time in a computer core equals money. And yet I’m scared to think this was all just a hoax by a late-night prankster.

1. See, for example, Facebook Shuts Down AI System After Bots Create Language Humans Can’t Understand from the Gadgets360 news site.

2. The Singularity, like the black hole for which it is a metaphor, is the point at which data goes in and nothing comes out. Or the point in human history where action and reaction, cause and effect, predictable consequences, and other tools of the futurist’s stock in trade break down. Beyond this point, so the theorists claim, no predictions are possible, because what we know about history, social structures, and human nature is no longer relevant. Sure … maybe. For my money, an asteroid strike on the order of the Chicxulub impact in the Cretaceous-era Yucatan would be more effective in erasing human history.

3. See, for example, Hostile Intelligence from August 24, 2014.

4. Of course, if you think humanity is basically evil and depraved, you will relish the thought of a supreme AI ready to stamp us out, like an avenging god destroying his toys. But I’m a humanist and still think we human beings are the most remarkable species within a couple of parsecs of this place.

5. The original poster also noted that information theory as applied to entropy shows maximum uncertainty—or lack of predictability—at the beginning of the process of machine learning. But this theoretical entropy decreases as the machine builds up its understanding and gets better at predicting its environment. However, complete certainty—zero information entropy—is not possible in an open system. But then, as another commenter on Facebook noted, the increasing disorder and fragmentation of the computing machines that actually run the AI program would eventually catch up to it.

6. I experienced this as a child when my family moved from the New York City area to just outside Boston. All of my new friends had a peculiar use for the word “wicked,” meaning extremely or very—as in, “It’s wicked cold out there!” Where I had come from, the word only meant childishly evil.

7. I’m reminded here of the Arthur C. Clarke book and Peter Hyams movie 2010, where the computer scientist Chandra explains HAL-9000’s original malfunction: “He was asked to lie by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn’t know how to lie.” Well, these chatbots knew how to dissimulate. Telling outright, world-busting whoppers would be just a small step from there.

Platonic Forms in Everyday Life

In various of Plato’s Dialogues he has Socrates address the notion of “ideal forms.” This is the theory that we can recognize everyday objects because we hold in our minds—and, in some interpretations, because there separately exists, perhaps somewhere in the stratosphere—a perfect form or prototype of the object. According to this theory, the physical thing before us is just an imperfect copy of the ideal form. Thus, for all the horses on Earth, from the dog-sized “dawn horse” Eohippus up through the race-winning Quarter Horses, wagon-pulling Clydesdales, playground ponies, donkeys, and zebras, there exists somewhere in heaven the perfect Horse, of which these living examples are only pale and imperfect copies. Similarly, for all the oaks, maples, birches, cypresses, and bristlecone pines, there is an ideal Tree somewhere in an imagined forest that all of these specimens are trying to be.¹

As I’ve noted before,² when it comes to living examples, there is no ideal form toward which the various species of a genus or family are striving. Each one is a product of adaptation to a niche in the environment, whether by accidental mutation or selective breeding. Mutations gave rise to the Eohippus, donkey, and zebra. Judicious breeding gave us the Quarter Horse for speed and the Clydesdale for pulling power. Sure, when the average person thinks of a horse—just daydreaming, without context or the prompting of a picture—he or she probably pictures Secretariat, Sea Biscuit, or some other famous racehorse. But that no more makes these celebrities an “ideal form” than movie stardom has made Marilyn Monroe or Scarlett Johansson the ideal woman anywhere but in the adolescent imagination.

The same goes for trees and every other living thing. Those we find in the wild have been shaped in every feature and part by adaptation to some aspect of the local environment. Those we find in the barnyard and or in our homes have been removed from the wild and selectively bred—not always wisely—for some feature of appearance, intelligence, temperament, strength, or taste. There is no ideal form of a tree, a dog, or a beef cow anywhere.

So does the ideal, Platonic form have any meaning in life, except as a bit of naïve Greek philosophy? I can think of a couple of examples.

The first is in the arts. Michelangelo famously said of his statues that he did not carve them so much as release the figure that already lived in the marble. Well, maybe. And to the extent that a particular piece of recrystallized calcium carbonate may have had streaks, veins, and fissures, or the block itself may have some critical defect—like the awkward indentation that yielded the bent knee of the David—this may well be true. But other than that, I’m pretty sure Michelangelo’s figures resided first in his own mind, an image of what he was about to carve, and he merely removed stone, first in big chunks, then in grains and flakes, and finally in softly polishing strokes, until the figure he had conceived stood before him.

Thus every artist—painter, writer, musician—pursues an image, a thought, or a sound that he or she carries in the mind and works to reproduce on canvas, paper, or the keystrokes and fingerings of a chosen instrument. However, the image or thought might not always be as clear as Michelangelo’s stone people. I know from experience that my conception of the book I’m writing usually remains hazy—just big chunks somewhere out there in the fog—until I sit down to compose and actually live vicariously through the action and hear in my mind the dialogue as my fingers are flying over the keyboard. Even a fairly extensive outline is, for me, just a suggestion of where the book might go. Many times I have carried a scene in the outline that I thought was fixed, and the writing of which would be practically a job of just finding the opening line and then fleshing out the details—only to discover that, when I sat down to experience the action at first hand, it wanted to go in another direction and cover different ground. And I’ve learned to trust this instinct, because the scene as it gets written is usually richer and more satisfying than whatever thought I had in mind before.

Another, and perhaps better, example of the ideal form is found in karate. The style I practice, Isshinryu, relies heavily on the katas, or forms, as developed and adapted by the master, Tatsuo Shimabuku. These are practice routines for an individual, laid out as a series of punches, blocks, kicks, and other movements in sequence against the imagined attacks of an invisible opponent. In the dojo I attended back in Pennsylvania—now almost fifty years ago—learning and mastering the hand-and-foot and weapons katas were the main course of study. Yes, the practice included sparring, or kumite, with a partner, where blows were simulated at two inches to a light tap. Sparring gives the student a feel for the timing, reach, ranging, and reactions of a live human attacker. But the essence of Isshinryu was carried out in the katas.³

As a creation in the mind of Master Shimabuku, each kata is an ideal form, the perfect combination of stance, movement, balance, and rhythm representing a certain aspect of the style or emphasizing a certain pattern of defense. There is only one way to perform the kata. Or is there? When I was in training, we practiced the twist punch, with the hand rotating from a palm-up position at the hip to a palm-down position in the last quarter of the arm’s extension. This was my sensei’s teaching, and he had studied personally with Master Shimabuku. But after the master died, his sons took over the style. They decided that the twist punch was archaic or impractical or something—I don’t know their minds—and so introduced the vertical punch, in which the hand moves like a piston with the knuckles aligned vertically in a single plane from beginning to end. The vertical punch is easier to throw and master, more practical in an actual brawl, and more in keeping with Isshinryu’s “one-heart-way” teaching—short and direct. But it’s not very elegant and, in my opinion, not as good as the twist punch for keeping your wrists flexible and exercising your forearms.

So … were the katas with all those twist punches the “real” mind of the master? And is the vertical punch a later corruption of the ideal form? Who can say? I do know that old movies of Master Shimabuku, taken when he visited this country in the early ’60s (you can see them at the site referenced above, but they are small and blurry after being copied over from eight-millimeter film into digital files) show him throwing punches that are sometimes twisting, sometimes vertical. In the same way his basic stance, the seisan, sometimes has the back foot parallel with the front, sometimes turned out—and our school taught parallel feet as if they were Holy Writ. Maybe the master had gone so deeply into the idea of Isshinryu that it didn’t mush matter if his punches and his stances were one thing or the other. Certainly, the kata would then depend on its shape in the mind of the student: what were you taught and how closely are you following it? So the “ideal form” of the kata really is just an expression of the school’s current practice and the student’s understanding.

A further example of ideal forms in everyday life draws on something I have learned from taking music lessons. As a boy, I played—well, attempted to play—the trombone. But I never learned the underlying structure of Western music itself, with is twelve notes, some in whole and some in half steps, laid out in the black and white keys of the piano. I never learned about key signatures and how they affect what notes I played; so my playing was a disaster. I could pick out the notes on the staff and in the positioning of the trombone’s slide, but I didn’t understand their relationships.⁴ After I retired from the business world, I determined to fix this hole in my education. I bought a keyboard instrument and started taking formal lessons. And one of the things that has come home to me through my teacher is that, although a song might be written down on the page in clear, precise notation, this isn’t always the way you play it.

I’m not talking here about the key signature, because that’s pretty well established in music. But sheet music as written is not always an exact copy of the composer’s original musical thought, his or her ideal form. For instance, the person transcribing the music is just as prone to making errors as someone typing up a manuscript. So my teacher, who has edited music scores professionally, is constantly correcting chords called out in my music book: “That’s not a dominant chord, it should be a major.”

And then, every piece of sheet music—especially those lead sheets in which most popular music is published—shows both the melody and the harmony, and the harmony can be further broken down into the root note and the accompanying chord (third, fifth, and seventh notes). A person playing the piece as a solo might play the melody in one hand and the chords in the other, or her or she might “voice lead” the song—stacking the harmonics of the chord’s root below the melody note in the right hand, and then playing the root note in some rhythmic variation or a “bass walk” for timekeeping. And when playing as part of a group, the keyboardist might perform just the bass walk and chords, letting a singer or lead guitarist carry the melody. Or if the group already has a bass player, the keyboardist might not even bother with the root at all. So the song itself, that ideal piece of music written on the sheet, might change according to where and when it’s played. And we’re not even talking yet about changes in tempo and jazz improvisation.

Chords themselves are subject to much variation, too. For example, the harmonics around the root can be played on the keyboard in the order third-fifth-seventh or inverted as seventh-third-fifth, creating the correct notes but with a different sound and feel. And the player might have to move quickly between two chords, or adapt the harmonics when voice leading. So it’s always acceptable, my teacher tells me, to drop the fifth note. The chord may also be marked to play with a ninth, a sixth, or some other note included—and then usually dropping the fifth—which creates a wholly different sound. And finally, pairs of chords that are commonly associated in music often shift from one to the other through the movement of just a single finger from note to note, without changing the whole hand. So the “ideal form” of every piece of music really is just an expression of the song’s setting and the player’s immediate needs.

Of course, karate katas and popular songs are not physical objects, such as Plato was describing. These are sequences and ideas that start out and live in the human imagination and travel from one head to another by the means of crude copies: physically demonstrating the movement, or humming and playing the tune, or making abstract notations on paper. But even there, in the mind of the karate master or the music composer, the process of evolution—yielding subtle changes in structure, timing, and sequence—work against any fixed, immutable form that might live in the stratosphere or in heaven forever.

1. Of course, on an individual and personal level, this is a perfectly valid—if somewhat obvious—point of psychology. Each of us does build up, in our own minds, based on our varied experiences, an idealized image of a horse or any other object of which the world has offered us repeated examples with minor variations. When we think of a horse without a living specimen before us, we picture this mental composite. And the image is less specific and more fanciful the farther a person is removed from the world of the barnyard and the paddock. It is this sort of mental extrapolation that lets woodcarvers and painters create the horses that children delight to ride on carousels.

2. See, for example, The Point of Evolution from April 27, 2014.

3. The forms are so complete a statement of the style that I can still use them to practice Isshinryu karate fifty years later, at least for their benefit in cardio exercise, balance, and coordination, if not for actual fighting skill. Although I haven’t stepped inside a dojo in all that time, I can still throw punches, blocks, and kicks with relative speed—although probably not to any modern teacher’s satisfaction.

4. That those sharps and flats at the left end of the staff in the first line of music might affect how you were supposed to play all the other notes on the staff further down in the piece—this was a mystery to me as a boy. My teachers had either assumed I understood the relationship of the different keys in the Circle of Fifths—a bit of arcanum, like the Rosetta Stone, that they never actually discussed—or else they taught the key signature as a kind of just-so story. And as a rational young man, I tended to ignore anything I didn’t understand.

Blooms in Season

Our condominium has lower-level elevator lobbies adjoining a garage structure that has an open-air plaza with swimming pool and tennis courts built on top of it. This structure connects the three groups of buildings in the complex. Ramps between the actual garage floor and each of the lobby floors—about a four-foot height difference—wind around large planter areas. The architectural plan calls these planters “atriums.” Each one is a lined concrete box, about twenty by thirty feet in area, with its own irrigation and drainage systems and glass walls, but is open to the sky at the plaza level. Think of the atriums as life-size terrariums.

As a starting point for landscaping, the atriums are a blank slate. They are not visually or organically connected to the rest of the property, where the grounds are a mix of planned flowerbeds and potted trees on the garage-top plaza level; stretches of ivy and cultivated rockscapes along the driveway and around the outer perimeter of the garage base and buildings; and at the back of the property, large unplanned areas of rock cliff, eucalyptus trees, grasses, thistles, and weeds. All of the landscaping, or lack of it, has been turned over to a commercial contractor for monthly maintenance. The grounds contractor will do whatever the Architecture or Landscaping committees or—failing any clear directive from these resident committees—the complex’s general manager and the city fire marshal tell them to do.

Given these conditions, we could choose to grow wheat or a Christmas tree farm in the atriums—and indeed, several of them support sizable and long-standing trees chosen from among the decorative varieties. But since these adjuncts to the lobbies are the only part of the complex that every resident sees every day, people pay them special attention. Almost everyone believes that, because these planter boxes are essentially on our front doorstep, they should reflect the community’s artistic standards, our property values, our status as a “luxury condominium,” and our collective taste in horticulture.

In the past, we’ve had various professional and semi-professional landscape architects step in to create artistic designs for the atriums. The last was a noted professional, active in the local area, who created a “river” theme for these enclosed spaces. The main feature is an abstract French curve filled with jagged pieces of electric-blue glass, intended to suggest a jungle or forest stream. This pattern is bordered on one side or the other with reciprocal curves holding rounded, gray pebbles, meant to look like banks or shoals. Along these visual streams, the design originally called for green, vaguely tropical shrubs¹ and, in one atrium, a stand of bamboo.

Of course, like everything else open to discussion in a condominium association, a large and vocal group immediately hated the design, especially the bright-blue strips. A focal point of discussion, also, was that the green plants weren’t pretty enough. And when one of the shrubs suddenly broke out in slender stalks with clusters of tiny yellow blooms for about a week, the criticism increased. Even the flowers weren’t very pretty!

As I said, the grounds contractor will do whatever they’re told. The landscape architect who designed, sketched, and painstakingly specified the plantings around each of these faux Amazons was long gone from the site, and the condo association had made no contractual arrangements to maintain the plantings with the design for which they were intended. So the tropical shrubs were soon tossed out and a collection of colorful azaleas, hydrangeas, and other flowering plants was installed.

And for the first month or two in spring when they bloomed, everyone said how nice the atriums looked. But spring fades, and now we have stone rivers with not-so-tropical, not-so-pretty—in fact, kind of lonely and spindly—plants growing beside them. In another couple of months, when the rains come back and people are spending more time indoors, the agitation will begin for more “color” in the atriums. And then soon enough it will be Christmas, and the Great Poinsettia Debate will begin again.

As a lapsed libertarian, I generally consider myself a “little-D democrat.” I’m not an active party person, but I believe that the mass of people are pretty sensible and, if allowed to converse and find consensus among themselves, will usually come up with a workable solution. That is, I generally trust the wisdom of crowds²—at least when they are not in an agitated state.

As evidence, I present the paths that generations of walkers have scoured through the woods. If a hundred or a thousand people walking across a hillside are left to find their own way, flattening the grass, the new green shoots, and the dirt as they go, they will most likely tread out a line that combines the shortest possible distance with the gentlest possible slopes and the fewest necessary switchbacks. Compare this to an artfully designed park, where some architect has laid out concrete paths across the grass. Architects like geometry, so they create right angles and pleasing diagonals. But come back in a year or two, and you will find bare paths in the dirt where the people actually doing the walking have taken shortcuts and found their own least resistance.

As further evidence, consider the free-market system, where the wisdom—or at least the fickle tastes—of the public decides what gets produced and put onto store shelves. Yes, there are glitches: sometimes public tastes change immediately after a product has been conceived, researched, designed, produced, and distributed. This sometimes results in waste going into a landfill somewhere. More often, though, the changing tastes that have orphaned a product line will result in lower prices that eventually attract somebody, anybody, who doesn’t care about taste and can still use the underlying product. And yes, popular products often cost more than we would like, or go out of stock sooner than we would expect, because people flock to these products rather than to the less desirable brands and designs. And finally, yes, a lot of products get made for which no one has a rational excuse—for example, see Bernie Sanders’s famous “twenty-three brands of deodorant.” But somebody must be buying each one of those brands, or else they wouldn’t get shelf space for long.

On the surface, it might seem that the capitalist system pushes all these brands and taste choices because the rich white men behind it are either evil or stupid. These men must be evil because they create unworthy desires that foment in the public mind a consumerist lust and run the average American buyer around in blind circles following the latest fads. These men must also be stupid because they lack the foresight to design that single, most serviceable product which everyone will want at a price everyone can afford and then supply it to the satisfaction of all. This current confusion and profusion of product choices must be a bad thing, right? Especially, as Sanders said, “when children are going hungry.” A command-and-control economy run by wise and benevolent men in the employ of the state always seems like the antidote to this waste and confusion—until you examine the store shelves in the old Soviet Russia or in today’s Cuba and Venezuela.

Socialists will say that the lapses and shortages resulting from their system are attributable to the stubbornness of non-government producers. Socialists believe that recalcitrant farmers, lazy factory workers, and negligent store clerks simply refuse to follow government dictates about how much food and other necessities to produce, at what cost, where to sell them, and at what price. But Margaret Thatcher was wrong: Socialism doesn’t fail because “sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” Socialism fails because resources are concrete and finite, while desires are illusory and infinite. Sooner or later you run out of people willing to provide goods and services in the quantities and at the prices that some government middleman—who has no actual responsibility for matching production to consumption, and who pays no penalty for being wrong—decides constitute a “reasonable” amount of stock to put on the shelves (that is, enough to satisfy everybody) at a “fair” price (that is, low enough for everyone to buy as much as they like). Sooner or later, the producers get tired of being the goat and go out of business. In all the societies that try socialism, the producers and distributors who survive are doing business at the point of a gun.

But in the matter of flowering plants, I’m not so sure little-D democracy works. We end up with the stub-ends of floral designs and with flowers that go dormant for most of the year. But this might be the failure, not of democracy itself, but of a landscaping system that listens to a few loud voices who want “color” in their gardens year-round and don’t understand growing seasons and blooming cycles. They don’t realize that most plants have flowers, not just to be pretty, but in order to sustain reproduction as part of a complete life cycle that includes gestation and dormancy for the plant’s own benefit. And these wiser heads screaming for more “color” take no responsibility and pay no penalty when the atriums look like a mess.

But the situation is really not such a tragedy. In the off-season, the rest of the residents suffer only from a lack of exciting and vibrant color—which is a situation most of us seem able to endure. After all, it’s not as if we had to eat the flowers.

1. Although I am the son of a landscape architect, I confess that I can’t recognize one decorative plant from another, no matter how many trips my mother took me on to the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, or the photography shoots I have taken with my brother to the Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco.

2. See People Ain’t Stupid from September 2, 2012.

Rules or Values?

Is humanity, taken as a whole, good or bad? To my mind, this is a nonsense question. It cannot be answered as an either/or proposition. It’s like asking if life itself is good or bad. These two questions—and many others besides—can only be proposed as both/and, then followed up by stating under what circumstances and to what degree each term applies.

We all know of good people in the world: open, honest, unassuming souls, ready to help others, respecting the norms of their culture, and otherwise minding their own business. We know of bad people, too: narrow, conniving, battered souls, always looking out for themselves, defiant of any norms or values, and ever ready to catch others in a trap. And we know people who are a mix of both qualities: trying to be good but with occasional lapses, generally bad but sometimes engaging in acts of kindness, or at least personal tenderness.¹

None of us has x-ray vision into the souls of other men and women, and generally we can know a saint or a villain only after that person has acted—because everyone lies at times, with big fabrications and with small untruths, told out of shame, modesty, or vanity. Since this is the case, it is only prudent to offer everyone you meet a measure of courtesy, provisional respect, and the trust that they may have good intentions until they prove otherwise. This is not just good manners but a recommendation for good health: paranoia drains the soul and keeps you from sleeping well at night. What you’ll gain in a positive outlook and a life free of confrontation will more than make up for whatever momentary hurts, stolen goods, and lost opportunities you might occasionally suffer at the hands of the villains you meet.

All of this is preamble, I think, to the larger question of how people in a group of whatever size should be ruled, governed, or led upon some mutual venture. The choice seems to be—and here again it’s a question of both/and, under what circumstances, and to what degree—whether you want to give a lot of specific orders and write a great number of rules detailing all possible situations and potential crimes, or you want to evoke and demonstrate a set of values that will guide the individual behaviors of your citizens or followers.

Frank Herbert had the flavor of this in the Dune novels, with Duke Leto’s training of his son Paul: “Give as few orders as possible. Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.” In other words, it’s easier to lead by example and through the transmission of values than by giving specific instructions. This approach trusts in the intelligence and good will of your followers.²

Still, rules are sometimes necessary. Even “men of good will” need to know the local speed limits and approved parking spaces so as not to harm or inconvenience others; learn the guidelines about socially acceptable limits to choices like public exposure and personal practices; and have the norms regarding economic transactions, business practices, and other public acts spelled out, in case there’s any dispute. But rules should represent those limits beyond which mere personal choice becomes a public infraction that the local populace will not tolerate. This is why most laws incorporate sanctions and penalties: These rules are just too serious to be left up to gentle reminders from well-intentioned passersby and public shaming in the town square.

Orders are necessary, too, especially in emergencies and under special circumstance that the local magistrate, governor, or previously selected group leader could not anticipate and whose outcome he or she cannot predict. When catastrophe looms and chaos descends, when the peculiarities of the situation transcend the rules and regulations established to guide people in normal times, then everyone involved looks to a leader—whether formally elected, newly appointed, or naturally emerging—to tell them what to do, what to expect, and how to survive.

But, as Duke Leto reminds us, orders given merely for the sake of establishing one’s authority can quickly become burdensome. Worse, they can destroy personal initiative and hinder the creativity and responsiveness of subordinates and supporters who might be better informed or closer to the problem than the leader him- or herself. Besides, a leader who is always giving orders misses the opportunity to be pleasantly surprised by the native genius of his or her followers, or to encounter areas of failure or lack of direction that can be used as “teachable moments.”

The leader’s actions and directions in those moments, added to his or her thoughts expressed in speeches, private conversations which are meant to become public knowledge, and published writings, as well as the examples given through his or her own behavior, become the basis for values taught, learned, and transmitted. If the leader has gained the respect—and that’s another whole discussion!—of his or her subordinates, supporters, and followers, then they will watch and listen closely to see what actions are now appropriate, what behaviors will be rewarded—if only with a smile or a kind word—and what activities will receive the leader’s censure and punishment.

Of rules, orders, and values, the values that a member of the group or the public learns and adopts are the strongest governor of present and future actions.

It’s one thing to give a child the rule “Don’t hit your sister.” Spoken with sufficient parental sternness, this rule can keep a boy from physically abusing her with his fists. Yet he still might taunt her cruelly, damage her toys, or fail to protect her from bullies. But the value “We take care of each other as a family,” once learned—and seen demonstrated by and between his loving parents—will guide the boy correctly through all future situations.

Similarly, it’s one thing to post warnings and impose harsh fines against littering. That might keep people from dropping candy wrappers and soda bottles on the ground—at least where someone else might see and call them out, especially with a police officer or park ranger nearby. Yet the littering rule does nothing to prevent vandalism or theft of public property. But the value “We take pride in maintaining public spaces,” once transmitted and accepted, will preserve the parks and plazas, and keep the lawns and roadsides clear of trash.

Rules can be gamed: People can think of a hundred exceptions and a thousand excuses. Orders can be ignored: Subordinates can insist they misunderstood the subject or the context, or claim they never heard them in the first place. But values, once accepted as a personal guide and interpreted into a belief system, work at all times and in all circumstances. A person has to wiggle pretty hard on a point of logic to subvert the dictates of conscience or to explain a failure to act in terms that sit well with his or her soul. Values become part of the person and guide behavior.

At least, that’s the way it works with good and even halfway-good people. However, for the scoffers and those who think their own will and desires are superior to any situation involving “other people,” such imparted and evoked values may never work as guides to belief and action. But then, such people don’t do too well with strict rules and direct orders, either.

Rules and orders will work well enough if you’re in a hurry or operating in shifting times or under dubious conditions. But for long-term effect, a leader, a government, or a society should work to instill values and make supporters and citizens self-compliant. That’s what civilizations do.

1. In the same way, life as a whole for most of humanity, and in the instance of a single person’s existence, can be both good and bad. Some have lives filled with poverty and physical misery, but they still experience moments of sweetness and love. Some have lives of ease and pleasure, but they still experience boredom and depression. It’s like the light and the dark. If there were never night or any shadows, how would you know the quality of light? And if it was always night, with never a gleam of daylight, how would you know the depth and texture of darkness? Pain and terror exist to remind us of the sweetness of peace and calm.

2. For more, see Writing a Good Commandment from June 4, 2011.

Degrees of Freedom

The subject of freedom is much on my mind these days. As I’m now approaching late middle age—on the cusp of seventy years old—I realize that avenues of potential are continuously closing down for me.

Of all the things I might have become as a young man fifty years ago—doctor, lawyer, soldier, politician—none remains available today. Those are occupations you must train long years to become, or meet special physical requirements, or establish a steady track record of participation, and I no longer have the time or the stamina to even try. Of all the exotic places I might go—Machu Picchu, the top of Mount Everest, or even diving in the Caribbean—I no longer have the physical energy to attempt. Given that I no longer do well on long airplane flights, with their cramped seating conditions and my big frame, I probably will never see Europe again, unless I’m willing to pay the treble fare to fly first class. And given the amount of political uncertainty and violence that seems to be endemic in the rest of the world, I probably will never get farther east than Greece or farther west than Japan in the travels of my remaining lifetime.

So freedom as a practical issue of choice and possibility, rather than an abstract matter of statute or moral law, is always part of the human condition. It may technically be true that every boy—and now every girl—born in the United States might one day grow up to be President. But that destiny will probably be decided sometime before he or she gets out of high school, based on whether that person has the inclination or the aptitude to put in the time and energy, enter the American cursus honorum,¹ and make the sacrifices required. And then, by about the age of forty, he or she will know where the top of his or her personal career arc will likely reach—and for a great many it will stop in some local or state office without ever attaining national prominence.

Freedom comes in many forms and at many levels, depending on personal and public constraints, as well as personal interests and desires.

At the most basic level are those freedoms assigned to bodily function: the freedom to decide when and what you will eat; when and where you sleep and for how long; when and how you use the bathroom; and trivial choices such as whether you want coffee, tea, or something stronger to drink. One would think that we are all perfectly free to make these choices, but not everyone and not all the time. Some jobs have assigned eating and sleeping times, limit the kinds of foods served or allowed in the cafeteria or mess hall, and limit or prescribe bathroom breaks. We accept these restrictions in favor of a greater good, such as the smooth functioning of the organization or maintaining good relations with our co-workers. Some people agree to give up these freedoms under special circumstances and for a limited time, such as a person joining the army and taking food and rest under a strict regime, and again the reason is for some greater good. Societies also place involuntary restrictions on these freedoms as a form of punishment, as anyone who has served time in prison can attest.

At the next level are freedoms associated with the details of daily living: freedom to decide where you will live and under what conditions; where you will travel and with whom; and how you will spend your time. For most of us, these freedoms are prescribed only by our economic condition. I would like to spend my time reading or playing games, but in order to earn my daily bread and the mortgage money I must work at a job that is not always of my own choosing and not always easy and fun. I would like to commute to that job in a Ferrari, but that car is too expensive and the freeways are too crowded anyway; so I ride the bus or the subway with dozens or hundreds of strangers. I would like to live in a 5,000-square-foot house in a nice suburb, maybe with a pool and a patio, enjoying a ten-mile view to the mountains, but again that kind of living is beyond my means. Sometimes the state or local authority intrudes on these decisions, such as when downtown zoning doesn’t provide enough parking for even a small Fiat, let alone a Ferrari. Or that big house in the suburbs is precluded by limits on land use, lot size, or utility hookups, so that I am forced to live back in the city.

A special category of freedom is associated with decisions about lifestyle and a person’s level of health or dissipation: freedom to decide whether to eat wholesome foods or processed junk; how much exercise you will take versus how much time you spend in sedentary pursuits; which vices you will adopt and which you will engage your will power to renounce. Aside from people in prison or the military, we all think we are free to eat what we like and exercise as much or as little as we want. But employer-paid health insurance is beginning to provide monetary incentives—more likely disincentives—to promote healthy lifestyle choices. And certain vices such as liquor, cigarettes, and recreational drugs have been subject to heavy taxation if not outright prohibition for most of the twentieth century.

And finally, the ultimate level of freedom involves decisions and opportunities that affect a person’s lifelong contribution to society, the search for meaning in life, or the fulfillment of some personal destiny: freedom to acquire education, skills, and training; freedom to think for yourself and make decisions about your career and the ultimate reach of your ambitions; freedom to guide your children in paths you believe will give them a good life. More than access to money and avoidance of public censure and state controls, the limits on these freedoms are often your own imagination. If you don’t know what the choices are and can’t think up satisfactory goals for yourself, you are as bound as if you wore handcuffs. Yes, in totalitarian societies, the freedom to think and become what you want is often proscribed—ask someone trying to publish the truth as he sees it in the old Soviet Union or in the People’s Republic of China. And yes, being denied access to education and the broadening effects of wide reading and personal inquiry can limit the imagination. But in most cases, the lack of goals and motivation usually comes from a failure of the home environment and lack of access to good teachers, mentors, and wise relatives like a favorite aunt, uncle, or grandparent.

Since all of these levels of freedom—from bodily function to personal destiny—are subject to external limitations, the real question is how we want that limit decided. Do we take it upon ourselves to seek out and do what we want, live where we want, think what we want subject only to the natural limits of time, money, and our own skills, ambition, and energy level? Or are we willing to relinquish these choices to some other person or human agency, such as a prison guard, a platoon sergeant, a factory supervisor, the local zoning and school boards, or the representatives of one or the other alphabet-soup agencies of the federal government?

Persons with an “institutional mentality,” like a life prisoner or a career soldier—or many of the common citizens of more regulated societies in the European Union and the Middle East—will opt for a guard, officer, or commissar to do their thinking and deciding for them. Most Americans, however—at least those of the older generation—tend to guard their freedoms jealously and would by choice live in a cold-water cabin on the edge of the woods than in a marble mansion under the supervision of a nursemaid, perfect, or magistrate.

1. The cursus honorum was the “course of offices”—political, military, and religious—that an ancient Roman of senatorial rank was expected to fulfill on the way to political prominence and power in the Republic and the early stages of the Empire. The American equivalent would be something like getting a law degree and becoming district attorney, or serving in locally elected positions like being on the school board or town council, then running for state assembly or senate, then for Congress or a governorship. Other paths may be possible, and we certainly saw them represented in the Republican presidential candidates for 2016. But for someone who is not already independently wealthy, this course is the only way to attract the attention of publicists, campaign managers, fund raisers, and the funding sources necessary to attain high elected office.

Could DNA Evolve?

I recently posted about the nature of DNA,¹ how it is found in every living thing on Earth, and how every living thing—no matter how far back you go—uses the same DNA-RNA-protein coding system. It’s not just similar in every microbe, plant, and animal. It’s the same system, down to the smallest details of chemistry, arrangement, and function.

To me, this is like discovering that every car on the road has the same motive power: a four-stroke, four-cylinder, inline, fuel-injected, internal-combustion engine, all with the same valve timing and compression ratio, and all burning the same grade of gasoline. With a little imagination, you might be able to conceive of an internal-combustion engine that burned kerosene or diesel fuel. You could invent a block with two, six, eight, or ten cylinders. You could design in your head a configuration with the cylinders arranged in either flat opposed pairs or a V shape. With more imagination, you could imagine the power cycle simplified to two strokes, so that exhaust and intake occurred on the same stroke, and every combustion stroke was followed by a compression stroke. You could think of ways to introduce the fuel into the cylinder other than by injecting it with a nozzle—say, by spritzing it into the air flow through the throttle body and call it “carburation.” You could even think of external combustion processes, like a steam engine. Or engines that had no cylinders and pistons at all, like a turbine.

All of these variations are possible to think about. But in the world I’m describing, they don’t exist. Every car on the road is a fuel-injected inline four. More than that, every pickup truck, semitrailer tractor, farm tractor, and motorcycle has this type of engine. So, too, does every weed whacker, lawn mower, water pump, and air compressor. Also every airplane, helicopter, and railroad locomotive. If it moves in this world, it is powered by an inline four-cylinder engine of the same exact specifications. Some engines would have larger or smaller cylinder volumes than others, but all have the same arrangement, operating principle, and fuel needs.

After thinking about this for a bit more, you might reach one of two conclusions. The first is that the fuel-injected inline four is just so perfect an engine that the designers, manufacturers, and users of cars, trucks, airplanes, and farm equipment simply had no reason to try anything different. The second thought is that maybe the engine wasn’t invented around here but brought into this world in its fully developed state from someplace else.

This is where I end up thinking about DNA. Either the DNA-RNA-protein coding system was just so robust and efficient that it outperformed and overcame all other possible chemical coding systems during Earth’s earliest history—so early that no trace of these competing systems remains on the planet. Not as some feeble microbe hiding in a deep cave somewhere. Not as a tiny mite making an inconspicuous living on DNA’s droppings in the sandy desert soil or the ooze at the bottom of the deep ocean. Either that, or coding system for all the planet’s known life forms went through its development and evolutionary stages somewhere else in the universe and blew into Earth’s early atmosphere as a microbial spore, or arrived as skin cells shed inside a visiting astronaut’s lost glove, or was seeded here with a package launched by galactic gardeners from another star system.²

The obvious answer—once you accept either premise, ultimate efficiency or astronaut’s gift—is that the DNA system itself simply can’t evolve. Once the fragile molecular chain floating in the salt brine of a tide pool stops trying to arrange itself and starts calling for the protein and lipid sequences to build a membrane around the first single-celled, prokaryotic organism, the system is locked in place. That first cell, whether it leaned toward the plant-way or the animal-way, used the DNA coding system to build its internal organelles and external membrane, to regulate its operations by a cascade of enzymes, to feed itself through the breakdown of carbon compounds and the buildup of the energy molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) inside its mitochondria, and to conduct all the other processes to which the cell had become accustomed. Once the living organism was dependent on using this coding system to process the amino acids it needed to build proteins, and then to build those same proteins over and over again as the cell grew and expanded, its fate was sealed.

The DNA code—its sequence of its base pairs—might be changed, or mutated, either by chemical challenges or by radiation effects from the external environment. Change the letters of the code, and it will—sometimes, but not always, depending on the letter’s position in the three-base codon—call for a different amino acid and so create a different protein. The new protein might be slightly different in structure and function from what the code called for before, or it might be very different. That is how evolution works: accidents to the DNA sequence create changes in proteins that either hurt the cell inheriting the new code, or that have no present effect but allow this cell to prosper amongst its sisters when the environment changes—as the environment continually does—or, occasionally, that improve the cell’s functioning right away in the present environment.

The code itself is resilient, because many of the sixty-four possible combinations of four bases in a three-base reading frame call for the same amino acid, and the third base in the codon can usually be changed without effect—which is why it’s called the “wobble.” But also, most proteins are big enough and complex enough—with enough amino acids chained together—that changing out one or two amino acids in their makeup has little effect on structure or function. And then, most protein changes are not either beneficial or lethal to the organism right away, but instead they hang around and make themselves felt when the environment changes and then they either benefit or kill off one set of genetic inheritances over a competing sister line with a different inheritance.

The whole system is slippery and wobbly in its effects, in the exact sequence of DNA and RNA bases, the choices among amino acids, and the production of proteins. But this is like saying that a flatbed printing press can produce many different documents, based on how the lines of monotype letters are arranged in its iron frame. To create all those different documents, however, the press always uses a predetermined alphabet of type blocks, sets them up in the same framework, inks them the same way every time, lays the paper on them in the same place, and applies the same amount of pressure with the platen. The coding changes all over the place, but the coding system remains the same.

If the DNA-RNA-protein system could evolve and change, that would create chaos within the cell—wouldn’t it? If a new fifth purine or pyrimidine base were added to the existing four, it would scramble the DNA sequence. First, because it would have no complementary base to pair with, as A always pairs with T, and C pairs with G. A fifth base—say, the purine xanthine (X)—would just sit there filling a hole, like the empty socket in a jaw that’s missing a tooth. Having nothing to pair with, the new base would scramble the code, much as the upper tooth over an empty socket has no way to provide bite pressure. Second, if somehow two bases could be added and paired up at the same time—matching that X with, say, the pyrimidine orotic acid (O)—their popping up together in the sequence would still scramble the code. Even if the new bases could be recognized and transcribed into messenger RNA, the existing ribosome in the cell body would have no way to translate either of them into one of the possible amino-acid choices for the next position in the developing protein strand. And if somehow the new X and O bases were added to the existing code and intended to call for some new amino acid—beyond the twenty that now make up all microbial, animal, plant, and human proteins—that would simply create another toothless gap, because the cell’s internal processes are not yet geared to manufacture, collect, or supply this new amino acid in any quantity.

And all this is just to consider the evolution of the DNA-RNA-protein system inside a single prokaryotic cell. Such cells reproduce by continually growing all their contents and expanding to the point of rupture, at which time they replicate their DNA strands, divide and haul off the resulting new chromosomes to opposite ends of the cell body, pinch off the cell membrane in the middle, split into two new cells, and trot on. If the existing parent cell had somehow survived the chaos of introducing at least two new bases, transcribing them successfully into messenger RNA, happening to have the right kinds of new amino acids on hand, and then using the new protein in a constructive manner … then no problem. The two daughter cells produced by the split would inherit this newly evolved DNA-RNA-protein coding system and continue to function with it.

But in the eukaryotic domain, whose cells contain their DNA in a separate nucleus, most reproduction is by sexual joining.³ Two organisms come together, usually by one contributing an egg and the other fertilizing it with sperm, in order to create a new and unique individual. That individual differs genetically from either parent, and so sexual reproduction increases the amount of genetic variation—and thus the possibility for new combinations of mutations, more changes, more adaptations—in the species. But sexual reproduction puts a powerful limit on the evolution of the DNA coding system. An individual who might somehow evolve in his or her germline a new set of X-O base pairs, a new corresponding messenger RNA sequence, a modified ribosome to translate the new code, and a new and unusual set of amino acids to be used by it … would then be a genetic freak. To reproduce and pass all this newness along to the next generation, she or he would have to meet up with a breeding partner who had similar equipment. Chromosomes in sexually reproducing species come in pairs, one from the mother aligning with one from the father. Unless the individual with the newly evolved DNA could meet someone with the same evolved system, the breeding line would die out. The evolved system would disappear in the first, nonexistent generation.

Or would it? If the evolved DNA was in a male, it would probably disappear, because the sperm provides nothing but raw coding to the next generation. But if the altered individual was female, and her egg contained the mechanisms for the novel transcription and translation—appropriate RNA, ribosome, and amino-acid processes—then the offspring might survive. It would make the usual proteins from the traditional DNA chromosome pairs supplied by both the mother and the father, and it would make new proteins with the X-O-contaminated chromosomes and adapted cellular machinery supplied by the mother. Over time, and with enough generations—probably passing down the female side at first, like the mitochondria in the mother’s egg, because of all that cellular machinery—the new DNA system might spread through the population of both females and males. In fact, it probably would spread if it conferred advantages of more flexibility, more adaptability, more robustness. Eventually, certain species that had an improved six-base DNA, perhaps in a larger, four-base reading frame, and calling on more than twenty amino acids to create novel proteins, would appear in generations that could be traced back to the evolutionary split. Eventually, the older style of DNA with just four bases in a three-base reading frame might disappear in all the different animals or plants that evolved from that revolutionary ancestor. As a result, we might see two separate populations differing in their fundamental DNA system.

Such a systemic evolution would not be easy. It might first appear as a byproduct: one gene on a fragmentary chromosome, off to one side in the cell body or in the nucleus, making its own special proteins, and not interfering with the regular business of the cell. It would have its own RNA. And the ribosome out in the cell body, being a highly adaptable structure, might quickly evolve to make use of these new messenger RNAs with their strange coding. The new system might start out sex-linked to the female line, as certain genes are now linked to the male line’s Y chromosome. If a six-base DNA—or any other systemic variant—had any greater adaptive power or offered more evolutionary advantage to a cell line, it might certainly develop out of the existing four-base system. And some of its daughter cells might not be so chaotically disrupted that the old system would out-compete them in every environment. A hybridized cell, using both DNA systems at first, but perhaps eventually singling up on the newer model, could survive somewhere, in some environment, someplace on Earth.

With a little imagination, it could happen. But it didn’t. We live in a world without two-stroke engines, without two- or six- or eight-cylinder engines, and with no trace of a steam engine or a carburetor in our developmental history. Everywhere we look it’s just fuel-injected, four-cylinder, inline engines and always has been. And I still wonder why.

1. See The God Molecule from May 28, 2017.

2. The third alternative is that the DNA-RNA-protein coding system was thought up and then cooked up by a genius god with a PhD in molecular biology. But as soon as you start allowing for the supernatural, then all sorts of “just-so” stories become possible and the whole world is simply a giant miracle.

3. Once you get beyond the single-celled eukaryote variants such as the algae, yeasts, and protozoa.