Life's Solution: Specific Notes and Quotes

Here I'm just going to make a record of my dog-eared pages from Life's Solution for future reference for myself. Feel free to look over my shoulder:

p.120-126 "Play It Again!" section.If anything, the role of convergent paths in evolution of E.Coli has been enhanced since this book same out in 2003. I'd like to do some of this myself ... How is it that Figure 6.3 can separate out adaptation from chance from history?

p.230 "Interstellar Nervous Systems?" section. Sodium pumps are found all over the place. This has been pinned down for the electrical eel recently. I wonder if there's more to see with this particular molecule's convergence.

p.266 Conway Morris directly addresses the point of qualia that Douglas Hofstadter mentions as well. It's worth noting that Hofstadter and Conway Morris (ahem) converge on this point. What do similarities in neural structure say about the question of "the redness of red" for philosophy?

p.288 Oxygen transport proteins convergence: I didn't know hemoglobin/myoglobin was found in so many places. Could that be a convergent structure? How would we know?

p.295 The Molecules Converge: Basically a 2003-era list of what I'm really interested in: convergent proteins. So many references, so little time!

p.297 "If convergent evolution is an 'eternal return' to the 'attractors' of functionality, then we cannot be surprised that history repeats itself." Then the fact that the hammerhead ribozyme is convergent.

p.307 "Yet, when within the animals we see the emergence of larger and more complex brains, sophisticated vocalizations, echolocation, electrical perception, advanced social systems including eusociality, viviparity, warm-bloodedness, and agriculture -- all of which are convergent -- then to me that sounds like progress."

p.313 A GK Chesterton sighting! "Reason and justice grip the remotest and loneliest star." (From Father Brown's first story.) The following description of planets made of gems sounds like a passage from Doctor Who! My "anglophilia" brain area is lighting up.

p.325 Eugenics and the morally ambiguous nature of progress, again in line with GK Chesterton. I'm going to have to keep assigning his book in Biochemistry ...
quotes John Green: "To the very end, [Darwin] failed to appreciate the morally ambiguous character of human progress. He failed because, like many social scientists today, he had no adequate conception of Man." I think Gould and Dawkins are keen to decry "progress" in evolution because they can only accept an unambiguously progressive formulation of progress. If progress is seen as ambiguous, then yes, you can say you see it in the natural world and the evolution of man.

For more on progress and anti-Gould rhetoric I should look up McKinney, Science, vol. 237, p. 575, 1987.

p.329 The six-point outline of "what salient facts of evolution are congruent with a Creation." Let me try my hand at summarizing them:

1.) Biochemical simplicity (building blocks)
2.) A method of navigating the vast possibilities (a mechanism like protein folding)
3.) The sensitivity of the process
4.) How life rearranges and adapts the old rather than building something brand new
5.) Many paths/branches but converging again and again on certain characteristics/structures
6.) The inevitable (and broad occurence) of intelligence, coming from complete sensing of the world.

Book Review: Life's Solution

Life's Solution is a rarity for me: a book I knew I had to own before I read it. I couldn't wait for it from the Library book sale, and I couldn't just check it out from the library. I've read several articles by Simon Conway Morris in different formats (for example, see the previous review of Real Scientists, Real Faith on this blog), but this is the book in which he takes 332 pages to write about what he sees in evolution as a scientist who discovered big parts of it (the Cambrian explosion) and an Anglican Christian who is friends with Richard Dawkins but doesn't agree with him on the question of God. For one thing, Conway Morris thinks there is a question in the first place! I was about to say this is a big, sprawling book, but in truth, my only quibble is that I wish it would've sprawled a little bit more. The last few chapters in which he tackles theology have nice turns of phrase but don't really seem to fully flesh out the theological implications of the convergent patterns that Conway Morris sees in evolution.

As a catalog of a bewildering array of convergences, this book is entertaining. Again, it left me wanting a little more, especially in the frequently repeated "This feature evolved at least 31 times," because this is such a central thesis of the book I'd like to know how we know that. But honestly, that's what the footnotes are for. Conway Morris focuses on the organism rather than its molecules for the most part.

The fundamental question this raises for me may sound a bit strange, but here it is: If indeed all these features, from bipedality to camera eyes, have evolved repeatedly and in a converging pattern, does this mean sin emerged in multiple ways, but convergently? That it happens in every young life with a different path but it ends up looking the same? I think this point can be a platform on which we can understand a theology of the fall of man in light of this science. But, of course, however we define the origins of sin, the important thing is that we agree on its destiny: summed up and healed by the cross of Christ.

This is what I mean when I say I want more theology at the end! But that's not really the purpose of this book. Even at the end, Conway Morris chooses a subtle turn of phrase when he could be more direct, and I think there's a method to his madness there. Ultimately, I think everyone who's interested in the deep structure of biology should find a way to read this book, it is a fascinating catalogue of a new way to look at the world that fits both science and faith. It's the biologist's counterpart to R.J.P. Williams's The Chemistry of Evolution, and anyone who knows me knows I don't say that lightly!

PS: I know there's tons of arguments out there about "evolution or not" and "what does it mean", and to those who don't have time to parse every argument, I say to just pick up a copy of this book or Williams's and flip through it. Then flip through The Signature of the Cell, the flagship Intelligent Design book. The books are about the same length but even a cursory glance at the content will show that Conway Morris and Williams are interested in looking at the world in truth, in all its glory. That kind of specificity is, I'm sorry to say, absent from Meyer's Signature of the Cell. You don't need to read the whole thing -- you just need to flip through a few pages. If Intelligent Design was a viable theory, this is the kind of book it would produce. I'm still waiting.

Book Review: When You Reach Me

This is children's literature, which I read aloud to Sam. It's very good children's literature, and all along I was hoping it would be more, but in the end, I have to put it on the children's shelf. There's a lot to like here: a time travel puzzle, a late-70's setting, tons of L'Engle references, the $20,000 Pyramid, and some nice sixth-grade emotional politics. It all has a purpose, even Dick Clark, and comes together in a really nice way. The climactic scene is very well written, for one. And the title character learns important stuff in a subtle way, so there's a moral but you can ignore it easily enough, which is important. Still, for all the intricacies of the plot, it was just a hair on the side of condescending (do children really need to be told how you can be in two places at once with time travel THAT many times?), and as an adult I was able to pick up on what was going on rather early. It was good for Sam to be forced to read through a book that looks at the world the way a girl looks at the world -- he got a little antsy sometimes but the nice plot convergence at the end made it worth it for him. Some people have overrated this book. I still think A Wrinkle in Time was better.

Book Review: Hannah Coulter

I listened to this book, by Wendell Berry, on my commute (got it as a free audio book through a promotion). It's the life story of a woman born in the 30's who lives on farms through World War II and up through the turn of the century. It sneaks up on you eventually that this isn't just a story: Berry is really saying something here. I've been aware for a while that he is a sort of Christian radical of a sort, as radical as you can get being an intense proponent of the small-farm way of life. His characters are beautifully nuanced, the voice of the narrator is consistent, simple, and profound, and there are lots of implications for science and technology-minded folks like me. I actually considered assigning this for Biochemistry reading but it's just a little too far. But it is as thought-provoking as the G.K. Chesterton I do assign about how to live life. I don't read many novels but this one may change my mind.

HIV as music

The video at this blog post from the Scientific American site has a sample of the HIV genome translated to music. But instead of just random-sounding four-tone melodies, the composer went a step further and included the amino acids that the genes represent, with a separate scale for those 20. It actually all comes together to sound like music -- sad music, which is appropriate, but definitely music.

LUCA Was Complex

I'm said I'm going to start collecting examples of complex ancient life, and here's another one: a study of particular structures in archaea (a branch of microbes) suggests that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) was more complex than previously thought.

This is the article, and this is the science news story about it.

If J.R.R. Tolkien's ideas are right (and Owen Barfield's, whom he got them from), then we'll be seeing more and more of this. I'll be collecting them here for my memory and yours.

Lots of implications: from the simple "life is not an easy thing!" to the complex concept of "have we assumed too much about what constitutes 'progress' in biology?".

Great quote from the news article:

"You can't assume that the whole story of life is just building and assembling things," Whitfield said. "Some have argued that the reason that bacteria are so simple is because they have to live in extreme environments and they have to reproduce extremely quickly. So they may actually be reduced versions of what was there originally. According to this view, they've become streamlined genetically and structurally from what they originally were like. We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was."

File this with Brain Proteins Before Brains and the thioredoxin urzyme (coming soon, to a Day of Common Learning Lecture near you).

Historic Photographs in Legos

Would this be a good way to teach the boys history? Probably not, but they are pretty cool, and most of the photos are instantly recognizable:

http://www.mikestimpson.com/photography/index-classics.html

HT: Paste Magazine