Umbrage and the Cunning Fennec Fox

8 October 2013

1231 hrs

       Thank you, Patient Reader, for coming back after your long wait. I have been pretty busy at school, but I have a paper here I thought I would share with you.  I wrote it last weekend and it is all my personal opinion, but it is a posting as promised.  Stay tuned for a soon-to-be-posted post, for I have met da da DAAA... a lady!  We'll see how it goes, but I should have something on that for you in a couple of days or so...

     Beware this paper, though...  'Tis long.  Just take your time and savor The Mind of The Cunning Fennec Fox...  Just kidding.  I do hope you enjoy.  Gimme some feedback will ya?

3 October 2013

1129 hrs

Umbrage

 

            A comment was made by a fellow student in class that went (and I paraphrase):  “Science is okay, but I don't think we need to learn biology or chemistry...”

            Though I respect the opinions of others and their right to express their opinions freely, this is a statement with which I strongly disagree.  Not to put too fine a tip on it, it positively rankles.

            First of all, it is imperative that every human being understands biology, just as it is to learn our own names and telephone numbers and our own addresses once we enter preschool.  Whether or not he or she is looking into a career that uses biology or chemistry extensively, one must know what life is, and how it, as we know it to be, perpetuates, as we know it to do.

            We as human beings have a responsibility as stewards of the planet to understand how life works, and yes, evolves, by the way nature ratchets up that which works and discards that which does not. 

            Secondly, even if, (or perhaps especially if), you believe in god, an old man in the sky that grants wishes or whomever you perceive Him to be, understanding life is fundamental to understanding human beings, and therefore understanding the Human Condition.  Understanding how we evolved.

            Too many people misunderstand the sciences, therefore we all must learn more about them, not less.  Though mine is the less popular stance, I have formed a multi-part question I like to ask, posing it especially to those for whom science is irrelevant, or worse, witchcraft…

            “So, you're telling me,” I usually say, “that you sit here in your massaging recliner, watching your plasma screen TV, surfing the Internet on your smartphone while texting your mother in another country, under these LCD lights, coffee brewing in the kitchen, and on the TV you are watching a Discovery Channel show about science and calling out “Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, HorsePoop!?”

            Well, the same biologies and chemistries and physics and mathematics that make your toaster toast and your lights enlighten, well, they are the same sciences that make atoms shatter and time slow down and they explain how life evolves.

            Then I get the inevitable parry of, “Well, if we descended from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys around?”  Or, in an even more sarcastic tone, “Look, that rock is my Uncle Frank...”  Which, now that I think about it, says more about the veracity of my statements than it does about their argument.

            Now sure, I could sit here and explain to someone how DNA works.  How we are constantly being bombarded by radiation in the form of X rays, cosmic rays, background microwave radiation, etc., and how those energies, on occasion, will come in contact with, interact with, and slice a DNA molecule into pieces, forcing that molecule to piece itself together again, because, well, that's how amino acids, via their attractive bonds (chemistry), work.

            Sometimes, because nature is not perfect (like an inerrant god would be), DNA will piece itself together but in a different fashion than it was before the... event. ATGC is now GTAC as it reinserts itself into its place in the helical strand.   This is known in biology as a “genetic mutation.”

            I could explain to her that, should this mutation manage to survive long enough to reproduce, that is to say, insert its mutated gene into the genetic code of the next generation, then it has a much greater chance of “sticking.”  If the mutation is a bad one, then we have cancer.  Not a great mutation, really, but does it happen?  Most assuredly.

            Now imagine, I could and probably would continue, this genetic mutation turns out to be beneficial to the organism, that it say, allows its back to become more upright as it reaches for fruit, or a handhold in a tree or a rock face.  Now suppose this mutation was not passed on to his siblings from his mom or dad, that he’s the only one who can reach the branches and, as he reaches for a pear (or an apple?) one dusky evening on the veldt, something catches his eye.  But his eye only, because his siblings could not see what he saw.  His siblings could not reach, could not be above eye level with the grass like he could, could not see the tawny lion’s tale flickering in hunger and in signal and in anticipation.   So instead of reaching for the fruit to share with his brother and sister, he grabbed the handhold in the tree instead, having now a perfect vantage point from which to eat his pears and watch his brother evolve into lion feces.

            I could explain all of these things to my friend.  I could explain that if it’s really a one-in-a-million-thing, and if there are billions of genes across thousands of members of some proto-hominid species well then…  Hey, I am a scientist…  You do the math.

            It is perfectly logical in number games alone that any mutation that has occurred once has done so repeatedly.  For example, nature loves the number five: Five projections from a central torso across life on earth.  Five fingers and five toes.  Not just on humans.  Most mammals have a dew claw.  The sea star has five, all amphibians and the reptiles who are not snakes.  Nature also loves flight, having brought it back again and again with insects, then some dinosaurs, birds, bats, and even The Big Brain on Brett has figured out lift and the co-efficient of drag.

Then those pesky vestigial organs.  Humans have vestigial organs.  We have an appendix, a rudimentary post-enteral sac that is routinely removed without trauma.  We have the remnants of a tail, our own tailbones so similar to those of monkeys and prosimians that the ones we had were probably prehensile. 

Fossilized skeletons of hominids that predate Modern Man, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, is what I mean to say, sport opposable thumbs.

            We have tails and gills early in our gestation.  Our blood is exactly as salty as the sea.

Now let us say this organism mated with another like organism and increased the chances that this mutation carried over into a third generation.  Sure enough, one of its three spawn had it and, as fate would have it, could see over the tall grass and escape the predators (hyenas, this time) his brothers could not.

            Do you see, I would say, where it goes from here?  Pretty soon we have a species of hominids no longer able to breed with the Australopithecines because only so many chromosomes can be passed on, and that's even if the Australopithecines survive.  For the record, we know that they did not.

            Perhaps this is why, specifically, Australopithecus Afarensis et al are extinct, but its now-very-distant cousin, Man, thrives.  Because again, Nature ratchets up what works and discards what does not.  A man can breed dogs from the wolf into holy crap look at what we have now’s. 

            “But dogs are all the same species, O Wise Sage,” I can hear you all about to protest.

Yes, but man did all that in a few thousand years.  Man also figured out that you can take two related species, though distantly so, and create a sterile hybrid third.  Witness the Horse/Donkey to Mule, and the Lion/Tiger to Liger… or Tigon, if you are so inclined.  We figured that mule thing out in the last couple thousand years, the liger came much later.  Just think what we could do with the four and a half billion years Nature had with which to experiment!  We would never have come this far, or even close to it, without Science and the understanding of it.

            I could sit there and tell my friend all of this, but I doubt my narrative would go uninterrupted, and I doubt it would not turn into something resembling more Heated Argument than Discussion of Viewpoints.

            I could give this friend dozens of books, or show her dozens of peer-reviewed papers on evolution but you know what she really needs?  A good solid base of Biology.  Otherwise the rest of everything I can say or show or let her read just won't stick.  Turn American Idol off and read a book.

            She should have taken more science classes, and learned over a period of months and years what I cannot explain in an hour or two.

            We owe it to ourselves as human beings to understand how life, no matter what was done to our planet over 4.5 billion years, struggles to assert and reassert itself.  Life, somehow and against all odds, thrives.  Is it a miracle?  Could be, but doesn't Occam's Razor serve better? 

We owe it to that short hairy ape that stood upright and fashioned tools with a dexterity of hand heretofore unseen so that we, millennia later, could text while driving.

            And if we begin to know biology, perhaps we can better understand Chemistry, especially Organic Chemistry.  We introduce Element Number 6 on the Periodic Table, and voila', that carbon turns inorganic into organic.  The reason Life Is in the first place. 

            What can be more important than knowing how we function, or why we do or say or metabolize or convert gases or whatever it is we do that allows our homeostasis to keep us steadfastly alive?

            Do I need to know that, as electrolytes pass through neuronal membranes, electrons are stripped away and become the electro-chemical current that tells our hearts to keep beating, if all I want to do is change the sheets on the bed?  Of course not.  But as I lie in that bed at night, listening to the whooshing of my heart in the darkness, waiting for Sleep to pull me aside- for a few hours anyway- it is something I am glad I know and can think about.  I marvel at us.

            Personally, I think it’s sad that the last President we had that was even close to being a scientist was Thomas Jefferson, and he had the foresight to create the University of Virginia, donating his own personal library because he knew it would be years before Congress would even think of having their own library.  Or maybe Bill Clinton- he is an economist after all, and at least they hand out Nobel Prizes for extraordinary advancements in that field...

            I feel we cannot be fully human until we know what being human means.  How do we explain, in our biology, the primitive needs; what we in the field call the “Four F's”- Fight, Flight, Feed, and Reproduction, without chemistry, specifically neurochemistry, which also explains why you and I love and fear and expect and hope and cry and strive.  Well, we now know that the hypothalamus and its structure and chemical functions stimulate these needs, necessary to continue the species.  Just a bulb of neuronal tissue sitting atop our brainstems like a cap on a mushroom.  Interestingly, the hypothalamus is something that all vertebrate creatures on Earth have in common.  Think about that.  We and crocodiles, deep within our skulls, have the same brains.  We even have a name for it: Lissencephaly, or “lizard brain.”

            Chemistry explains why hydrogen and oxygen bind so well together, these two gases explosive on their own, transubstantiating into life-giving water.  Life-giving to all biological specimens of which we so far know.

            We began studying these disciplines because we wanted to know, as it should be, why does that do that?  Maybe most people think that science is boring.  It is true that science progresses less by shouts of “Eureka!” than it is by moments of, “hmm… that’s weird…”

Science moves relatively slowly and in boring fashion because true science, pure science, is hypothesized observations, a sort of “If this… then that,” and then upon which experiments are conducted.  A series of conclusions which net results is then scrutinized, picked apart by minds that ask, “Are you sure?” and then your experiments are repeated over and over by a jury of your peers, and the skeptics are eagle-eyeing your project, that paper you’ve raised from its infancy, wiping it’s nose over the last few years like your own baby (which is what it is), looking for one crack in the porcelain, one flaw that doesn’t repeat in the four thousand six hundred and seventy-sixth attempt at it.

            If it passes this sado-masochistic muster, then it becomes one more theory that supports all of the facts.  And we will use it thusly until a better theory comes along to support those very same facts.  Science, like Nature, ratchets up that which works and discards that which does not.

            We owe it to Fleming to know why penicillin saves lives.  We owe it to Copernicus to know and to ensure that the generations to come also know, that the solar system is indeed heliocentric. 

We owe it to Hypatia, curator of the Library at Alexandria who turned away no one who wanted to study there.  She would borrow books brought into port from other countries, have her scribes copy them, and return the originals.  She would lend the library’s books out in the same fashion.

            One morning on her way to the library, Christian zealots and followers of Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, having stirred themselves up in a frenzy, pulled Hypatia out of her carriage and flayed the flesh from her bones with clamshells.  With her free dispensation of knowledge, she was guilty of subverting the Church, and of Heresy.  Plus she was a woman who did not know her place.  It is not too much to respect knowledge as Hypatia did.  It’s the least we can do.

            Hypatia is largely forgotten.  Cyril is now a saint.

            We owe it to ourselves to understand in more than a theological sense, or even in a visceral way, why our internal temperature stays around 99 degrees Fahrenheit when we are healthy, and whether or not fish sleep (they do). 

            We need to quit sitting under our fluorescent lighting, surfing on our tablets, and all the while calling science a bunch of nonsense.  Even if you are a Believer, with an Upper Case B, you should strive to understand why it is that god made the world this way.  If we are created in His image, then do we not owe it to Him to get to know him better?

            Biology and chemistry are two sciences upon which our knowledge of ourselves and who we are ourselves are inextricably entwined.  For the first time in our history as carbon-based bipedal hominids, we have in our power the ability to begin to explain Us, and we owe it to ourselves and to our children and to theirs that we never forget what makes our humanity so divine.

You Patient Readers are awesome!

C.F. Fox