Book Review: The Silver Trumpet by Owen Barfield

This was a fine read-aloud with the kids, but like Owen Barfield's later philosophy, it's entirely quirkly. Oddly paced and with some anachronistic characterizations that remind you that it's almost a century old now, it nonetheless has a bit of charm, novel characters that are both stock and not at the same time, and enough timeless fairy-tale detail to draw you in. It's fun to note the frequent references to dancing if you know that Barfield was part of a dance troupe, of all things. The story hints at depth but I don't think there's that much there. There's also a few shocking deaths partway through the story, which might disturb some children, but I thought it added a bit of heft to the feeling, and some of it is made right in the end. I'm not sure what to think of this, but it surprised me and kept me interested in a unique way -- much like Barfield's philosophy. Hard to find but worth waiting for from library loan.

A World From Dust (Plus): This is Water, Part 2: Water Swims Around Worms

 

Ever looked in the wrong place for something? It happens to scientists all the time.

It happened in a previous post, where it was noted that very different animals swim with the same motion through water, because they have evolved to converge on an identical, efficient movement through the fluid. The eye is drawn to the animal, but the common denominator and the explanation is found in the water surrounding the animal. The properties of the water shape the movement of the animal, and evolution is just the method of search for the movement of greatest efficiency.

This flips what you expect on its head. If you want to understand how an animal swims through water, you look at the animal, not the water, right? Wrong. It's more accurate to say the water is swimming around the animal, as it guides the animal and shapes its movements.

This is shown even more clearly in another paper, a recent PNAS study titled "Propensity of undulatory swimmers, such as worms, to go against the flow." Worms swimming near a surface turn against the flow, and the question is why and how they do this.

The eye is drawn to the worm. Maybe it has a sensor, "sees" the wall, and turns, right? Wrong. The flow field in the water turns the worm. In the sense, the worm is as passive as a leaf flowing in the river -- an undulating leaf, perhaps, but the water is the active agent and the cause here. Because the water causes the turning, this turning happens in widely different organisms. As the study puts it, there is no involvement of the worm's nervous system, and the turning of the worm "results from purely mechanical interactions."

As Adrian Bejan puts it when describing the similarities among flying animals, where the fluid that shapes the movements is the air, but the idea is the same:

"It is the inanimate fluid in the wake of the leading body that organizes itself. It does so using no brain power whatsoever, so that it may travel and spread itself the fastest through the stationary fluid." p. 240, Shape and Structure

This is air, and this is water. Each flows where it wills. Even when you don't see it, it shapes complex behavior into an efficient and predictable biology.

Book Review: The Figure of Beatrice by Charles Williams

One story recounted in The Fellowship is that Dorothy Sayers was inspired to translate the Divine Comedy (into a really good translation) by the enthusiasm of Charles Williams, the weirdest Inkling. I was intrigued by this and looked up Williams's The Figure of Beatrice -- and I sensed the same inspiration.

Before, I was a typical Dante reader: I made it through the Inferno easily, then gave up on the first terrace of Purgatorio. I didn't get it, and I'd heard that Paradiso was even more obscure. In The Figure of Beatrice, Williams is able to lose himself so much in Dante that through him I saw the beauty and practicality of Dante's final two volumes. To get there, Williams takes you through Dante's works in order. I still don't get Convivio or De Monarchia the same way that I "get" Vita or the Divine Comedy, so a few parts of Williams' book were hard going (and a few passages are ethically knotty), but the reward is enormous. There is treasure laid up in heaven here.

The other thing that surprised me about this book is how personally practical is was to me. This was a healing book that I've needed for more than a year now. It allowed Dante to speak through the centuries, and what he has to say is intensely relevant, especially as translated by Williams. I actually found myself thinking when reading social media that Dante's perspective would help bring "peace and direction," in Williams' words.

The point of this book is not just to be able to read this book, but to be able to read all the books from one of the greatest writers in history. So you can see that in the next few months there will be posted reviews for Purgatorio and Paradiso!

A World From Dust talk highlighted on Emerging Scholars Blog

My recent talk in Grand Rapids got highlighted in IV's Emerging Scholars blog! I like the author's summary and the first adjective made my day:

"Ben McFarland of Seattle Pacific University gave a cool talk about how chemistry makes life possible, and perhaps even inevitable. In a sense, biology and life are contained in the period table in the way that a whole range of geometry theorems are contained in Euclid’s postulates, or the way that American society is encoded in the Constitution."

Hadn't even thought about the political analogy. I'll have to keep that metaphor.

The blog, including linked audio, can be found here.

"On Being Wrong in Science" posted at the BioLogos Blog

I just posted a guest blog at the BioLogos blog about my scientific and theological journeys titled "On Being Wrong in Science." Check it out, and also check out the post from John Walton that inspired it (referred to in the first sentence).

A World From Dust (Plus): The Higher the Level, the More Repeatable the Evolution

I'm not very good at using microscopes. Maybe that's one of the reasons I'm a chemist, not a biologist. The first problem is getting my eye to line up with that pesky small hole. The second problem is finding the right level of focus. If I'm focused in too much or out too much I don't see anything in the microscope at all. When I finally hit that magic level, everything comes crystal clear  and I feel like a veil has been removed.

 

The same thing happens when looking at how evolution works. There are different "levels" to the world, and what you see differs depending on which level you're focused on. If you're focused on the level of nucleotides and genes, not much appears repeatable. But if you move your focus up, to the level of organism and environment, repeatable parallels suddenly come into sharp focus.

 

A paper that just measured this is titled "The Effect of Selection Environment on the Probability of Parallel Evolution". Here's a quote:

 

"Briefly, we find that parallel evolution is very common at the highest level of biological organization we can study, fitness, and becomes less and less common as one descends down the hierarchy to phenotypes, genes, and nucleotides."

 

This paper repeated evolution of a bacterium through about 1000 generations 15 times, varying the type of sugar and the location of the sugar. The most interesting finding was that evolution was more parallel when three sugars were located in distinct places than when they were mixed throughout the environment. This suggests that evolution is more predictable if the environment is more varied (and therefore more "natural," like the real Earth is, with diverse nooks, crannies, and caves). As we learn more about the heterogeneity of the early Earth environment, it's worth keeping in mind that any such heterogeneity may have made evolution more predictable, not less.

 

Evolution does have a random component, especially at the lowest levels. But it becomes more ordered the higher you go, until when you look at all of Earth's history, in the context of the complex Earth environment, the result becomes more and more predictable. And always remember, if you can't see anything, try twisting that focus knob on the side of the microscope.

 

Book Review: Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon

It's been half a decade since I read a science book that inspired me this much. (The previous one was The Chemistry of Evolution by Williams and da Silva, and I've just written a full book inspired by that one.)* Deacon has built a dynamical theory of how things happen. By itself, that sounds kind of abstract, but he applies it to two mysteries that preoccupy my time: the origin of life and the workings of consciousness, or in short, evolution and mind.

The theory does appear to offer a possible ways forward on the first front, although I'm not as sure about the second, but that's not my primary area and I'm fascinated by the chemical possibilities. Deacon's take on physical chemistry and the nature of energy is solid enough and unique enough that I'm considering how to teach it in my physical chemistry course. Much better than I could do on neuroscience (Deacon's primary area), that's for sure.

As Deacon admits, this book is only a sketch, albeit a 545-page sketch. I could have used more. Since dynamical processes have particular structures, I could have used more figures to clarify some of Deacon's terms and "levels" of dynamics. Although the evolution and mind subjects are interrelated, I think we could have gotten one book on evolution and a second book on mind, and that would have left room to explore more side roads and give more examples. But I'm intrigued enough to come up with examples on my own.

The biggest ally left unenlisted may be theology. Apophatic theology involves double negatives and absential qualities like Deacon's work. Again, this is an open door for others to walk through. I think there's fruitful progress to be made in taking Deacon's ideas seriously and then using those as a basis for natural theology (a la McGrath, not a la Paley, of course!).

In sum, this is a book that I've only begun to soak in. It already makes the short list of "10 most influential books" in my life.


* Deacon and RJP Williams do both emphasize constraints, so much so that I'm already seeing new things by juxtaposing the two. My first public reflection on Williams was a lecture titled "The Chemical Constraints on Creation" no less!