A World from Dust (Plus): Neanderthal Chemists

In Chapter 11 of A World from Dust, I mention the evidence of chemistry at Pinnacle Point, where early humans used fire to cook food and make paint. Now there's evidence that Neanderthals were chemists, too. This recent study analyzes the black manganese oxide rocks found in France where Neanderthals once lived. Earlier scientists assumed these were used for their color as something like body paint. Heyes et al. point out that it's a lot easier to find other black rocks for this purpose, so the Neanderthals must have had another reason for collecting this special mineral.

Heyes et al. show that manganese oxide can spark flames (as mentioned in Chapter 7), and find evidence of combusted manganese in the Neanderthal fire pits. The Neanderthals collected this for its chemistry as a firestarter, not as a mere pigment. Personally, I didn't know that manganese had this use before researching A World from Dust, which means that I didn't know as much about this element as my Neanderthal ancestors. Guess there's always something to learn.

Book Review: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

This was in my queue a long time before I listened to it, because I knew it would be hard to hear. O'Brien's book must be one of the classic texts about the Vietnam War, and hearing it read aloud by Brian Cranston is the right way to experience it. Not only does this narrative (if I can call it that) transfer the chaos and maddening threat of that conflict into your experience, but it also jumps around in time and diverges into meditations on the nature of writing, experience, life, and death. Despite the harrowing, unfinished, nakedly evil depiction of war, there is life, which makes the evil more painful, if anything. The way the book ends surprised me with what I can only call its dark innocence or winter light. So it was a hard book to read but also, clearly, a necessary book to understand the war that warped our country. 

Book Review: Black Earth by Timothy Snyder

Since I often show the movie Mr. Death, which is about Holocaust denial and science, in my biochemistry seminar, I have an interest in the history of this dark wound on the middle of the 20th century. From that interest, I stumbled into Black Earth, and didn't really know what I was in for. It was hard to read. Not only is it outside my discipline (written by a historian about Eastern European history when I hardly know Eastern European geography, to my own detriment), it is also simply difficult to read what happened. Civilization spiraled -- scratch that, was PUSHED -- into anarchy and death. But climbing this mountain of a book gives a perspective that is unequalled, because Snyder explains how we are pretty much missing the point in our common knowledge about how the Holocaust happened. Everybody knows and everybody's wrong.

The cliché is that Germany forced the Holocaust on Eastern Europe with its efficient organization, Blitzkrieging its way across an unwilling populace. The fact is that most of the bureaucracy and organization was in Germany itself, and there the Jews were actually safer than they were in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. Outside German borders, the Nazis destroyed the state structures and in the absence of those, perverse incentives were set up which twisted ordinary people into mass murderers. To use a bunch of -isms, National Socialism killed more by its libertarianism than by its totalitarianism, and a large majority of the deaths took place outside the walls of Auschwitz.

Just when you think you can't take another chapter of these horrors, Snyder expands on his thesis in a different direction and shows how the unsung heroes who saved Jews were not who you may expect either, but rather the brave diplomats who extended state power to the powerless, and the people sometimes called heretics, who were used to being outcasts, so they took in other outcasts from some hidden strength of spirit. The most prominent churchman who saved the most Jews was from the Greek Catholic Church. I didn't even know there WAS a Greek Catholic Church, but something in that situation gave him the strength to save others when no one else would.

At the end, Snyder discusses how the Holocaust could happen again today. This section is particularly chilling, yet I feel as if this section, because it is so important, should be expanded and nuanced. Snyder argues that scarcity sets up the people to be servants of atrocity, but leaves it for granted early in the book that the Depression set up a level of scarcity that led to the Holocaust. Once I finished the book, I wished there had been more about specifically how the people felt the fear of scarcity, because if Snyder's thesis is right, those conditions are the ones we should be monitoring if we really mean "Never Again." Yet this area seems de-emphasized in the early chapters.

Part of the problem is that I don't know much about Stalin's famines, which illustrate this point exactly and which Snyder mentions but does not explain. But this leads to another problem. Stalin's famines killed a lot of people, and that seems to fit the mold of the common knowledge about an organized state causing mass death that we unthinkingly apply to the Holocaust. Snyder's analysis at the end focuses only on the dangers of another Hitler -- what are the dangers of another Stalin? And why didn't the scarcity in the Soviet Union lead to the pure horror that is the Holocaust? Or are they more equivalent than I think?

More questions than answers here, but that shows how good of a book this is. For a different take on history that is horrifying precisely because it's so different from what you learned in school (yet so well-supported), read this book. Just make sure you set some time aside, because sometimes you can only take a page at a time.

Book Review: Dante's Purgatory translated by Dorothy Sayers

I don't feel it's my place to review this book in the normal way. But I can say, as someone mid-way through life, I found that Dante's mid-way through life story to be what I needed to hear. Dante's poetry as translated by Sayers is surprisingly vivid and affecting. After reading Charles Williams' The Figure of Beatrice, I could see how the poem works on four levels at once (which Sayers sometimes spells out in her commentary, because she was inspired by Williams too). I still find the history somewhat dry but there seems to be less of it in Purgatory than in Hell, while the philosophical discourses on free will and love are timeless. Dante makes abstract concepts concrete in a way that every teacher can learn from. The medieval science is not as disconcerting as I thought it would be -- really only one passage was different enough that it threw me out of the narrative with its inaccuracies. But on the whole, those tempted to stereotype the Middle Ages as anti-science and pro-blind faith need to read Dante. He assumes that the reader can keep track of complicated astronomy, for instance, which he reproduces accurately. He also castigates the Church for not fulfilling its role in terms that might give Richard Dawkins a few ideas for new invective. I heard Dante's voice across the centuries -- and I found out that I genuinely LIKE him. His path resonates with my path. I found this book fresh and lively, and worth plowing through the occasional thicket for the overall journey.

Does a Contingent Foundation Imply an Unpredictable House?

Fascinating new paper in Nature by Joseph Thornton's lab titled "Historical contingency and its biophysical basis in glucocorticoid receptor evolution." In my opinion, Thornton's one of the best scientists out there and this paper shows why. It looks at the history of evolution with a biochemist's eye for detail and also speaks to the big-picture questions. This paper is going to require some repeat reading and digestion, and for now, I'll start at the end, with big-picture thoughts. I find the experiments illuminating and important -- but I disagree with some of the interpretations of the experiments.

The experiments leave no doubt that, for this hormone binding this receptor, there are only a few small roads through the forest of possibilities that led from the original, less-picky receptor to the later, more-picky receptor. Also, there were no signs leading to those roads, that is, no evolutionary pressure that could have helped pick these rare mutations out of the crowd of possible mutations. This is similar to how DNA can change randomly if a water molecule hits it the wrong way. The specific hormone-receptor interaction we have is shaped by randomness and it very well may have a different shape if the tape of life was run again. (The surprise for me is the tight relationship between overall protein structure and the specific hormone structure, which is more intense than I thought it would be -- in other words, I expected proteins to be able to do more with the multitude of shapes they could adopt.)

But, as Simon Conway Morris might say, so what?

The key to the interpretation of this study is that the evolution we're talking about is the specific arrangement of oxygens around a constant, central 4-carbon-ring sterol core. What separates cortisol from the other hormones is the placement of an oxygen over here and not over there. In a dance of co-evolution, this specific arrangement of cortisol's oxygens was chosen out of a welter of possible arrangements and the protein changed alongside, taking a very limited number of roads to do so.

But if those improbable permissive mutations for our cortisol system never happened, then a different arrangement of oxygens on the same carbon core could easily send the same cortisol signal. The specific molecular structures may be unpredictable and contingent, but the fact that some specific arrangment of oxygens will send a specific signal like cortisol can be predicted and repeated. Presumably that's why we have so many signals built around 4-carbon-ring cores decorated with oxygens at different places. The variation in the oxygens isn't as interesting as the constancy in the carbon core, and the fact that all these hormones sending very different signals follow this same, predictable pattern.

Also, the fact that there are only a few roads (2 out of thousands or even millions) that can develop into this specific system doesn't account for the variable speed with which the system can develop to explore those roads. If mutations can be accelerated by stress, could they be accelerated enough to make this improbable path probable? After all, there are only a handful of mutations that are required to change the specificity, and if the rate of mutation for this receptor gene speeds up, the improbable becomes more probable.

Other carbon-based, water-loving organisms on other planets therefore probably have a very different cortisol shape. But although the oxygens may be differently placed in their cortisol, I would predict that there would still be oxygens placed around a carbon-ring core.

The oxygens can flit around the central carbon core and the receptors can mold themselves to those oxygens in many different ways, reshaping the circuitry of the hormone system. But from a more distant perspective, where the exact placement of oxygens can't be seen, the system would adopt much the same shape, using oxygen and carbon in much the same way to send much the same signal. The shape of the foundation is contingent, but the overall style of the house is predictable.

What this paper does is that it clearly places hormone-receptor interactions (within the sterol class of hormones) in the "contingent" category, but I maintain that the chemistry of the signaling system would remain much the same, whichever path the hormone-receptor interactions took. The hormone may be contingent, but the overall shape and chemistry of hormone system is predictable.

Book Review: Infinity and Perspective by Karsten Harries

Reading this book I kept thinking of Owen Barfield.  Like Barfield, Karsten Harries combines history, science, philosophy, and theology into a coherent whole. Like Barfield, Harries is critical of modernism and postmodernism. But unlike Barfield, Harries finds a place for technology and even modern objectivity, and in my opinion more clearly points to what it might mean to "put things back together." Not only does this book remind me of Owen Barfield, I think in some ways it's actually better than Barfield. It's a challenging but rewarding read, like a steep Alpine trail (another metaphor used in the book itself for the process of knowing).

Harries starts with the theological/scientific speculations of Nicholas of Cusa, showing how a theology of the infinity of God led to the hypothesis of the infinity of the universe. (Bruno gets his own showing showing how derivative his ideas were from his predecessors like Nicholas ... and Harries depicts Bruno as a general irresponsible hack of an academic, not exactly the same picture as the 20-minute cartoon hagiography of Bruno on Cosmos). It was theology that inexorably led to a view of the universe that knocked down the old Aristotelian understanding. The theological speculations of the nominalists paving the way for Descartes, Copernicus, and Galileo. (Similar again to the 20th-century story told in Naming Infinity.)

Barfield's problem is that he stays in the middle ages. In his book Saving the Appearances, Barfield (if I recall correctly) attributes the preface to Copernicus's book to Copernicus himself, and takes the theme that all science is doing is "saving the appearances" as the theme of his book, drawing a line back to Copernicus for validation. This always bothered me. I like some of what Barfield does with this but it has always seemed too extreme. Harries points out that the preface was written by Osiander, not Copernicus, as a sort of fig leaf or olive branch, and Copernicus himself wrote as if the scientific observations were reality, not just appearances, like I assume a scientist would (as did Descartes, as did Galileo). Harries finds the right balance between expressing the incompleteness of our knowledge (the ways in which hypotheses indeed only "save the appearances") but also noting that some hypotheses are better than others, a distinction I don't remember finding in Barfield.

At the end of the book, Harries argues that modern objectivity allows us to step outside our own perspectives and worlds for a bit, but that if continued this motion will lead to nihilism (this sounds almost exactly like Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos). Harries instead proposes that we return to earth as our special, unique home -- something I've found that my own writing has tried to do. Harries calls this a "postpostmodern geocentrism" and a new Copernican revolution or recentering of the universe. What Barfield calls "putting things together," Harries identifies as a homecoming. In the end, the story of the history of theology and science is that, after a long journey, the prodigal returns.

Language Map of Europe

This map shows the languages of Europe, scaled by number of speakers and placed on the map by the "lexical distance" between each. English is close to German but it's actually closer to French, although from the way these clusters line up you can see at a glance why, despite that, English is still considered a Germanic language.

Notice how the language relationships fit the geography of Europe (or were made to fit, but hey, it works).

Genes can be clustered in the same way, and they tell similar stories. It's words all the way down.

I got the picture from here, and the original data is from K. Tyshchenko (1999), Metatheory of Linguistics.

When the Scriptures of Science Fail

Sometimes the best part of the book comes out after it's published. Rebecca Skloot's book on Henrietta Lacks led to many fascinating developments after it came out, including a remarkable agreement on her genome publication with Lacks's family, something that would never have been possible without the book. Into the Wild by John Krakauer is now another example. Why did Chris McCandless starve in a bus walking distance from a highway? Krakauer originally had a biochemical explanation for this, but recent evidence has come out that refocuses and implicates a different biochemical cause. Read about it here.

What strikes me about the story now is that McCandless trusted his field guide. He had to. He was right to. It represented centuries of experience. But that field guide did not include the fact that, in a weakened state, eating this one plant would have enough of a neurotoxin to take out the nerves, moving your legs in a slow, weakening erosion of your ability to keep yourself alive. The field guide was flawed. (I'm even leaving out the part about how he could have crossed the river to safety if he had a good enough map ... )

McCandless trusted his book, and his book let him down. This can happen with any book -- all knowledge is incomplete. Scientific summaries of experience may be more reliable but they are still incomplete.

This is true with the Hebrew Scriptures, too. When Israel trusted their rituals and the presence of the temple in Jerusalem, trusting that this would protect the nation from invaders, they were shown to be wrong. (Well, right with Assyria, wrong with Babylon, it's complicated.) Both stories show that books can let you down.

But the story with Israel is more complicated. Israel was ignoring the book as it trusted in the building. Particularly brushed under the rug were passages in the Torah against idolatry and worship with the heart. Prophets pointed this out; false prophets reassured that it was OK ("The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord"). Then judgement came, and the unique place on earth where the Lord of the cosmos was worshipped was leveled. Even now, that feels wrong, unfair, disproportionate. The sheer cry of lament in Lamentations shows just how horrible it was. My heart takes Israel's side in this, probably as a defensive maneuver for my own coverups.

Yet, in the face of a cataclysm, embers survived, waiting for breath to glow again. The Jewish faith survived the destruction of the temple, rising from the ashes. And then the second temple was destroyed -- and Israel survived, and Christianity rose as well. The second destruction led to two religions where before there had been one. Who could predict that?

Faith is not faith that nothing bad will ever happen. Faith is faith that when the bad things happen that God remains faithful. Even when death happens, times thousands.

I don't know how it all adds up. There are always false prophets and idols in every person's own mind. There are times of adundance and times of abundance. A time to be born and a time to die.

When you're going out by yourself, a science field guide is the only community you have. It, like any community, can let you down, and may be more likely to let you down than a living, breathing community, as messed up as that community may be.

In the middle of all this "letting down" -- books letting us down, friends letting us down, ourselves letting us down every hour -- faith says, despite what it looks like right now, I know God holds us in his hand. It's a simple point, but it's a point I hear in the story of McCandless as it's now told. Rest in peace, Chris.

Indiana Jones Biochemistry: The Prevenge of the Black Death

The Black Plague had a prequel.

It's clear that Yersinia pestis was the microbe behind the Black Plague in the 14th century, and there was a worldwide sequel pandemic in the 19th/20th century. But in the 6th-8th centuries a plague swept the Byzantine empire, called Justinian's plague. Now a DNA analysis of the remains of plague victims shows that this plague was caused by Yersinia pestis as well -- and it originated in Asia like the other two pandemics.

This biochemical archaelogy isn't exactly like the Indiana Jones movies, but I find it pretty exciting to see the recurrence of this insidious enemy throughout human history. (Maybe it's more like Doctor Who?) Read the paper here.

A Map of Physics-Land, Circa 1939

Three-quarters of a century ago, this map of physics was published, its "rivers" leading from ancient Greek philosophers through to nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists. You can find Faraday where the Electricity river joins with the Magnetism river to become Electomagnetic, because he's the prime figure in realizing those two forces are actually one and the same. Maxwell is at the junction of Light, Electromagnetic, and Mechanical into a sound labeled "Energy." Out there at the edge, Einstein and Dirac gaze out into the past future of physics.

Standing now this much farther down the river, we can see that the "Weak Force" river must have joined with "Electromagnetic" in the 70's to form the "Electroweak" river, with Salam, Glashow and Weinberg nearby.

Past that it's hard to plot history on the map. Grand unification of strong with electroweak, and of gravity with the other three, is somewhere out there, if theories check out. But they haven't, not yet.

How do we tell when we've passed from a river into a directionless swamp? Is that what String Theory is? All we have is a very nice map, but I haven't heard of any experiments yet that would confirm the reality of String Theory's extreme elegance. Multiverse theory seems to have broadened into more of a sea without direction than a river.

Apparently we found the Higgs, right where it should be. Because it was where it should be it looks like our maps have no problems with them. I can see why many physicists seem slightly disappointed with this. Where do we go next? Onward and upward to higher energies. What do we do with ourselves if our theories are perfectly right?

It's fascinating how different the physics world looks in 2013 as opposed to 1939. The first half of the twentieth century may end up being a time of discovery like no other, with a discoverer (Einstein) like no other.

Book Review: The Secrets of Alchemy

Is it a paradox to say that a book titled The Secrets of Alchemy is open and brisk? Treatments of alchemy to this point have been either rationalist dismissals of the practice and all it represented, or dense historical works that get as lost in the details as the alchemists themselves did. In this book, Lawrence M. Principe lays out a targeted and clear (at least, as much as is possible!) history of the subject. He actually tried to carry out the described experiments, and when he encountered frustration, he persevered (sounds like normal lab work) and eventually it worked like they said in many cases. Not Philsopher's Stone cases ... but he did make a "Philsopher's Tree", which is quite wondrous in itself. If you want to really know about alchemy and what it was, read this book. I can't recommend it highly enough for answering that question.

Because the alchemists were always not quite trusted, and because they did much work in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as the Enlightenment was emerging and drawing its lines, they have been caught on the wrong side of those lines for a long time. Some deservedly so, but Principe's experiments show that there was some surprisingly sophisticated experimental chemistry going on.

Principe bridges the gap between modern and premodern worlds expertly, and in doing so says some things that align with Owen Barfield about how people literally see differently now than they used to. My favorite part about how premodern or early modern eyes can benefit the scientist comes from this passage about the chymist Paracelsus -- imagine this, the chemist as a co-redeemer, a high calling indeed:

p.128 -129“Paracelsus endeavored to generate an entire world system, embracing the whole of theology and natural philosophy … For him, chymical processes provided the fundamental model for explaining natural processes in the physical universe as well as within the human body. For example, the cycle of rain through sea, air, and land was for Paracelsus the great cosmic distillation. [Long list] were for him inherently chymical processes. God Himself is the Master Chymist; his creation of an ordered world out of primordial chaos was akin to the chymist’s extraction, purification, and elaboration of common materials into chymical products, and His final judgment of the world by fire like the chymist using fire to purge impurities from precious metals. Paracelsus’s system has been called a ‘chemical worldview’ … “

"Some Paracelsians even held that all poison and toxicity entered the world only with original sin. Therefore, by using chymistry to purify now-poisonous substances into medicines, the chymist returned them to their wholesome, pristine, prelapsarian state as they were created by God in the beginning. In effect, the chymical process was thus redemptive, and the chymist participated as a co-redeemer of a fallen world.”

Book Review: History in English Words

I wish I had read this book earlier. Throughout all my reading of Owen Barfield, I wanted to know more about the philology that shaped his thoughts. I got a taste of that in Poetic Diction, but that was more about how poets use words than the words themselves. He always asserted that we could trace history through words but I only got glimpses of exactly how. History in English Words, then, shows how. It is a story of how words have changed, sometimes even flipping their meanings, and Barfield has an idea or two as to why they changed in that way.

Like most of Barfield, it has its pedantic or frustratingly obtuse moments but is at least five-sixths brilliant. This may be the best book to start on for someone looking to get into his work (perhaps this is for the historians, while Poetic Diction is for the poets?). There's one chapter in which he goes on about the stifling early church authorities in a manner that shows why C.S. Lewis and Barfield had their tiffs. Lewis would never take the Gnostic gospels as seriously as Barfield. Then there's the last chapter which sounds almost exactly like Tolkien's famous Fairy Stories writings at points. Tolkien fans, make sure to stick around for that last chapter.

If nothing else, this shows what you can do with an Oxford English Dictionary and a passion for words. Now that we have the technology to test some of these assertions about how, when, and why words changed to a degree unthinkable in Barfield's time, I think this little book could provide several theses's worth of hypotheses that Google lit searches could illuminate. I would like to see where Barfield's wrong, mostly because I have a hunch that more often than not he's right, and if so, then he's onto something. I'd like to trust but verify, and this book is about the original data Barfield's working from, so this has inside it a way to reproduce his assertions. Do words really internalize over time, swtiching from us being worked upon to us doing the working? Are Roman words really as external/concrete as Greek words are internal/abstract? What kind of shifts in meaning did the Septuagint's translation of Hebrew scriptures into Greek force upon the Second-Temple thought and theology? So many questions, so little time.

The limiting reagent for me is the time. And the knowledge. And the background. And ... let's stop there before I delete this post in despair.

At any rate, this book will let you see depths and layers of meaning in most every word you see (and choose to use). If sitting in a Philology class taught by Barfield sounds like a good idea to you, don't wait for the MOOC. Read the book.

Book Review: Faith Seeking Understanding (Essays in Memory of Paul Brand and Ralph Winter)

I can only review 16/17 of this book in good conscience, because, after all, I wrote 1/17 of it (Chapter 16, "Trees of Life", to be precise). It was edited and assembled by David Marshall. And you probably won't believe anything I say about it after all. I'm not sure if you should, it's like reviewing your own book on Amazon. If this book was on Amazon. But I digress! If you can get past my own selfish-gene-like involvement here, I'd say this is a good collection of essays. Of course, I personally don't agree with everything here, but I agree with a lot of it, and the combination of viewpoints is synergistic. Like the Church itself. Overall it works.

These other 16 chapters are written by names I recognize: Philip Yancey, Earl Palmer, Rodney Stark, Alvin Plantinga, and Don Richardson. The names I didn't recognize are just as interesting. For example, I found the essay by Yuan Zhiming about faith in China to be fascinating. Historians, missionaries, scientists, and a philosopher, all sharing the perspective of faith and honoring the memory of Brand, Winter, and Anselm.

I would have liked there to be some more conversation among the authors, but I don't know how you do that in book form. I would like to press some of the comments others made about Islam that I think are too harsh, for example. And some more back and forth on the topic of evolution would have been interesting -- it's clear there's some disagreement there but I hope it's obvious that I consider there to be substantial agreement as well.

Because the focus of the conversation could be Anselm, Paul Brand, or Ralph Winter, there's a wide diversity of topics, but David Marshall's arrangement into four sections is helpful. Just realize that this is an anthology album, not a concept album (or a rock opera).

And my favorite part is that Philip Jenkins and Nicholas Wolterstorff -- two scholars whom I admire -- provided complementary blurbs for the back of the book. So I'll let their quotes be the review, and provide the obligatory link to buy the book straight from the publisher for the curious.

“What makes the collection especially fascinating tha valuable is the individuality and particularity of the stories–a concrete testimony to the fact that the Christian intellectual life takes many forms.” — Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Yale University and senior research fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia

“David Marshall has gathered a really distinguished array of contributors, who have all thought deeply about faith in its global context, and the different essays work wonderfully together. The book makes a splendid memorial to two truly great individuals Paul Brand and Ralph Winter.” — Philip Jenkins, Emeritus Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities, Pennsylvania State University

Ambiance and Archaeology

If the nicer restaurants are all dark, then maybe the nicer ancient Roman villas were too. In this archaeological study, scientists created a simulation of an ancient Roman villa and turned down the lights -- more specifically, they put in lights that would flicker with warmth like candles rather than reflect cold blue like electric lights. Check out the result above. Wouldn't you rather live in the house on the left? Everything looks nicer by candlelight, including the tilework and mosaics.

This reminds me of a nighttime tour of the abbey on Mt. St. Michel I took about a decade ago. In the dark it was lit with brightly colored floodlights but the shadows definitely left more to the imagination and made the experience unforgettable. The type of light is important. Looks like the Romans designed for candlelight and didn't anticipate fluorescent bulbs!

Also, this reminds me of what I read about what it must have been like to enter the Jewish tabernacle in the time of the Judges. It would be dark and mysterious and very impressive. Much more like the picture on the left than the one on the right.

And, at home, why clean up after the kids when you can just turn down the lights?

Which MacFarlane's Lantern is Better?

It's fun having a last name that comes from a clan in Scotland. Sure, the MacFarlanes are a small clan, but that's only because they stole cows from the Calhouns and all their men kept getting killed off (or so I'd been told). I found plenty of women's names on gravestones in my trip to Scotland with MacFarlane as their middle name ... not so many men. But I'd always thought that MacFarlane's Lantern referred to the full moon when the MacFarlanes would go cattle raidin'.

Today I found this post on Strange Maps about Scottish tartans and history, of interest to anyone with one of those 16 last names, and I saw immediately that it had a different version of history:

 

(15) Clan MacFarlane

In past, more violent times, the Moon in Scotland was known as MacFarlane’s Lantern, for the clan was famous for its daring night-time raids on the English during Scotland’s Wars of Independence. The last chieftain of this once much-feared clan died in 1886, since which time its chiefship is dormant, although the clan remains armigerous.

So I'm torn -- do I want my ancestors to be brave or rascals? What would you choose? I'll reconcile the two by imagining them raiding British cattle.

When I visited the old clan grounds in my Scotland trip, I was aware of the chiefship vacancy, but I couldn't find out how to apply ... probably involves something horrible like animal sacrifices or caber tosses or, worst of all, eating haggis.

The Vitruvian LEGO

Brothers Brick posted this great illustration of a LEGO minifig as good old Leonardo might have drawn him, actually drawn by Kevin Hinkle:

It seems strangely unnatural ...

The Evil Nazi Plan to Breed Pure Cows

Speaking of evil scars on the landscape: let's talk about Nazis. There's a B-movie somewhere about the evil Nazi plan to mutate cattle and breed a pure, extinct species called the Auroch that used to roam the forests of Europe, and to introduce this Nazi cow, wild and roaming free, in Poland (once those people who were already there were ... removed). Oh, wait, that's not a movie, it actually happened.

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman is how I first encountered this story (the Nazis were interested in the zoo for reasons related to the Auroch breeding program), but it's been covered from another angle here, in "Heavy Breeding" by Michael Wang.

What stands out about this story to me is how good Nazis were as scientists. For example, they understood the critical importance of the relationship between the environment and the organism, something that's become more obvious recently. We can now reconstruct ancestral proteins from the fragments of current genomes, and that's essentially what the Nazis were trying to do with the Aurochs, just with an organism rather than a protein. And they actually did have some measure of success in reshaping cows to become more Auroch-like, a success that can be seen today in the Heck Cattle. Early 20th-century Germany was one of the best places to do science. But that obviously is not enough. It meant that their eventual war machine was that much more formidable in both World Wars.

Some people take this kind of observation and say that because Nazis believed in evolution, therefore Darwin was wrong. That doesn't compute. The problem is deeper. It comes with the use of science, as much as with the science itself. It goes with a willingness to impose one's will on the lives and landscape of all those around you, no matter the cost, in pursuit of your vision of perfection. This vision of biological perfection is actually very intricate and, in some scientific points, correct. But that is precisely what makes the whole package so very wrong. The lie may be closer to the truth ... but all the worst lies are.

To me, it's far more important to note that the Nazis went after the handicapped and weak first than to note that they read Darwin. That's far too narrow. Their reading of Darwin aligned with and contributed to this twisted pristine vision of theirs, definitely (a point I make in third-quarter biochemistry every year, in fact), but if we're looking for the root problem we have to include other data. We have to look at their politics as well as their science, their operas as well as their breeding programs, their relationships as well as their experiments, their hearts as well as their minds. And so my ambivalent relationship with Richard Wagner's operas continues.

At the very least this story should give us pause about our own societal blinders. Now that we have more precise genetic means to pursue these ends, but we have essentially the same human will and weaknesses ... what now?

And if you want an unambiguous moral to this story: great research institutes do not a complete society make. It's the highly scientific society that can do the most evil. (GK Chesterton makes exactly this point, and warns about Germany/Prussia, in 1920's Eugenics and Other Evils -- before these horrors really began.)

Standing Stones Before They Stood (In LEGO)

One of my favorite TV documentaries is the History of Britain series hosted by Simon Schama. It's rewarding to watch multiple times, and I hardly think that about anything on TV. But what could make it even better? That's right, LEGO.

Here's a History of Britain series (no direct relation to Schama, I don't think) done entirely in LEGO. Truly eductational toys at multiple levels. Personally, this particular one makes me think of Brave for several reasions:

Thanks once again to the Brothers Brick for the heads up.

How Death Changed

I've watched a lot of operas and read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe (minor fact: my first publication was about him), so in my mental landscape there are a lot of deaths by tuberculosis. But of course, TB is not high on my list of worries for my kids. Ever wondered how these worries changed from 1900 to 2000? Here's a nice graph that spells it out by causes of death over time, edited by the Washington Post with original data from The New England Journal of Medicine. No wonder so many climactic arias involve TB.

For the more data-inclined, the NEJM has an interactive chart that shows how things changed decade by decade. (Notice the huge 1918 flu spike.) Can we project from this? Accidents may be going up, and the disease I first find that's increasing is Alzheimer's, which involves protein folding and is somewhat close to my current research. Also, chronic airways diseases, still going up. This chart contains the other point that cancer is actually going down, although barely, and heart disease has a steeper downward slope. There's lots more to find, and that interactive chart is a nice way to look at the data: I'd say have fun with the data, but that seems kind of weird when you're talking about causes of death.

Darwin is Not Dawkins

I just found this article by Denis Lamoureux in the latest issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, titled "Darwinian Theological Insights: Toward an Intellectually Fulfilled Christian Theism—Part I: Divine Creative Action and Intelligent Design in Nature."

It wins the triple crown: it makes a provocative point, it makes a useful point, and it does it with panache. Oh, and I think it's full-on right. I tried to come up with a one-sentence summary but instead I have three (a haiku?):

Charles Darwin was ambivalent about faith, he was not anti-faith.
Charles Darwin was an agnostic, not an atheist.
Charles Darwin was open to design, and Richard Dawkins' interpretation of Darwin is a cherry-picked portrait that ignores the ambivalence.

I also find it interesting that Lamoureux, in one sense the farthest thing from an Intelligent Design advocate, is insisting on using the word "design" to describe the good organization in nature. It's almost like Lamoureux is saying "This is a song ID Proponents stole from Charles Darwin. We're stealing it back."* I like that.




* A U2 reference. Google it with "Charles Manson" and "the Beatles" instead for the original context. (Guess I'm cherry picking?)

** Yes, three posts on a Saturday night. This is how I choose to use my Saturday nights. That reminds me of an old Bloom County comic that I won't bother making into a fourth post because that would be silly.

*** Lamoureux presented some of this in a talk at an ASA meeting with a similar title. Those itching to read part II might hunt that down in the meantime.