I remember unexpectedly having that conversation with my mother in law while riding in the car recently:

“What do you mean Sagan isn’t going to be raised Christian?” she asked when we accidentally let slip that he wouldn’t be going to a Christian church.

“There’s lots of possible belief systems out there,” Vicky answered, “and we’re going to let him decide for himself.”

“When he’s old enough, he can read the Bible if he wants,” I said.

“Old enough?” Grandma asked.

“Ummm,” I hesitated and decided to just let it out, “Yeah. When he’s old enough to read stories about daughters getting their father drunk to have sex with him, a husband giving his wife to be raped by a mob and then chopping her up into pieces to mail to his allies, a prophet summoning bears to devour children for teasing him about his male-pattern baldness, fathers sacrificing their virgin daughters to god as thanks for victory in war, mothers entering contracts to eat one another’s’ sons, … You know, when he’s old enough to be exposed to those kinds of stories.”

“Ha. Ha,” Grandma chuckled. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”

It’s so strange that in a world where humans can see to the edge of the Universe, live to a century through modern medicine, access unimaginable volumes of information online, and fly all over the world that I am still put in the awkward position from time to time of having to explain to someone that I don’t believe in any of the mythical invisible entities known as “gods.” It’s also awkward because I don’t walk around all day thinking about the fact that I don’t think about such deities. I don’t identify as a non-theist any more than I identify as a non-Mr. Snuffleupagusist. I identify as a Scientist a person who focuses on our shared empirical understanding of the natural world revealed through experimentation and inductive reasoning.

Mr. Snuffleupagus

Technically I’m a non-believer, but technically everyone is atheistic to a degree. There are thousands of gods and everyone on planet Earth doesn’t believe in most of them, and even when two people believe in the same god they often have major discrepancies in their personal understandings of it. Carl Sagan puts it best:

The word god is used to cover so many different points of view… First of all, you can be religious without believing in god. Buddhists, certainly religious without having any notion of god. Secondly, the word god, it’s amazing how diverse the definitions are. Let me give two extremes. One is the sort of god that I gathered by osmosis during my childhood, which is an outsized white male with a long white beard who sits on a throne in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow. Now that kind of anthropocentric god there is, as far as I can tell, no compelling evidence for at all. None.

At the other extreme, there’s the kind of god that Einstein and Spinoza talked about, not too different from the sum total of the laws of nature. Now there are laws of nature, and not only that they apply everywhere, to a quasar ten billion light years away as to the Eastern seaboard of the United States. And it’s a very remarkable fact that the same laws do apply so generally. It could have been a different set laws applies in every county. So that kind of god of course exists. Who would deny that there are laws of nature.

So I claim you learn absolutely nothing about someone’s belief if you ask them “Do you believe in God?” and they say yes or no. You have to specify which of the countless kinds of god you have in mind. I don’t myself like to use the word in that context, because it doesn’t illuminate at all. If I say I believe in god or if I say I don’t believe in god, and I say no more, you’ve learned nothing about what my belief system is.

For the sake of argument, we’ll put this fact aside and pretend that the term “atheist” only applies to people who don’t believe in the supernatural world whatsoever.

The Reason Rally 2012

This last weekend Vicky, our son Sagan, and I made our way out to the Reason Rally to see some of our favorite public intellectuals, like Adam Savage and Richard Dawkins, speak on secularism and rationality. We arrived just in time to witness Adam Savage of the Mythbusters show on Discovery deliver an enlightening and lighthearted speech in support of science and human potential:

Adam Savage

Testable, provable phenomena, and the predictions they allow, big and small, brought me here to in front of you today and they will take me back to my family when I am done. They allowed me to drive to DC on a bus, type my speech on a screen, ride to this rally in a car, walk on shoes that support my feet, and wear clothes and a hat that protects my pale skin from the sun. To fly on a plane home. That plane I will get on exists and stays in the air because of a million million large and tiny tested predictions lift, drag, material performance, physics, electricity, radio waves, wear, tear sheer, checklists, human error, machine error and redundancy. It is a miracle of engineering. It is the result of an ancient and very human drive. A drive that makes us what we are in all of our unique specialization. A drive to solve problems.

Many tens of thousands of people combine their collective genius to make an impossibly fast and efficient, thin, inflated bubble of aluminum so stable and secure that you’d have to fly for several thousand years before the odds gave you an even chance of being in an accident. Everything that we have that makes our lives possible exists because human beings have tested the things they found in their surroundings, made predictions based on those tests, and then improved upon them. This is reason, the human capacity to make sense of the world.

I was also extremely impressed with Nate Phelps the atheist son of Westboro Baptist Church Pastor Fred Phelps, who spoke so eloquently at the rally while his family picketed him at the sidelines. His story and others like it are why I wasn’t comfortable with people at the rally pointing to my son Sagan with a smile and referring to him as “future atheist.” Like most atheist parents, I will expose Sagan to a wide variety of belief systems, most likely through a community such as a Unitarian Church, let him decide for himself what to belief, and respect that choice. Leave the predestination nonsense to the Calvinists.

Secular Coalition

By definition, independent thinkers are an individualistic bunch. Over 20 secular and atheist organizations were present at the rally, each with their own flavor of skepticism, atheism, or Enlightenment values. There was the James Randi Educational Foundation, with its focus on debunking supernatural claims made by new agers and faith healers. There was the Richard Dawkins Foundation which actively promotes atheism, but also promotes the beauty and wonder of scientific ideas. My favorite organization was also making a strong showing, the American Humanist Association whose slogan is “Good Without God” and presents one of the most positive and uplifting secular messages of any organization present that day. One of my heroes, Isaac Asimov took more joy in being president of the AHA than he did in his leadership of Mensa International.

Richard Dawkins gave an overall good speech, where he lamented the absurdity of needing to hold such a rally, “How could anyone rally against reason? How is it necessary to have a rally for reason? Reason means basing your life on evidence and the logic which is how you deduce the consequences of evidence. In a hundred years’ time it seems to me inconceivable that anyone would want to have a rally for reason. By that time we’ll either have blown ourselves up or we’ll have become so civilized that we no longer need it.” I enjoyed the parts where he praised the natural world and our scientific understanding of it, but grew uncomfortable when he called for everyone to “ridicule and show contempt” for religion.

Richard Dawkins straddles, but never crosses, the line between what I love about science and why I get worried when scientists focus too much on religion-bashing. Christopher Hitchens, PZ Meyers, and the other outspoken atheists who argue atheism for the sake of atheism, on the other hand, come across as hostile and belligerent. They ridicule rather than seek to persuade, seeking to stir up feelings of outrage and contempt in their audiences, framing everything in terms of “Us VS Them,” and portraying theists as not just wrong, but oftentimes as evil. You know who else does that? Religious extremists and political pundits. We walked out of PZ Meyer’s speech at the Reason Rally for the same reason I turn the dial when Rush Dimbulb is on the radio, and I fear these “New Atheists” as they call themselves and “Militant Atheists” as they are called by their opponents are doing more damage than good.

The Origins of New Atheism

The New Atheism, the outspoken, in-your-face controversial atheism is a reactionary movement resulting from the perpetual attempts of theists to impose their supernaturally-inspired belief systems on the public. Theists changed the motto of the United States to “In God We Trust” in 1956, replacing E Pluribus Unum which was the nation’s motto since 1782. Over and over and over again they try to force their supernatural explanations into public school science text books, failing to realize in their short-sightedness that allowing alternatives to factual knowledge would open a Pandora’s box of creation stories from religions around the world. They push legislation defining life as beginning before pregnancy and making it a felony for doctors not to tell abortion patients they will have an increased risk of breast cancer for which there is no scientific evidence. On top of all this churches get to keep $100 Billion a year in donations tax-free, enjoying all the taxpayer-funded benefits of our society without having to contribute anything in return.

Westboro Baptist Church Sign

And yet somehow theists have managed to construct an elaborate scary fantasy of religious persecution in America. They falsely claim they are not allowed to pray in public schools, but the law only prevents them from using official school policy to impose prayer on students. They claim that religious groups are being banned from college campuses, but it is groups that practice discrimination that are being banned. Courts have ruled that private religious groups can discriminate against whomever they like, and organizations, like the Boy Scouts of America and religious organizations can and do discriminate on religious grounds.

America was founded on secularism, when you look inside the Library of Congress you see America portrayed as the science nation. The ceiling of the dome of Congress has a painting of Greek Gods giving the Founding Fathers Enlightenment through the sciences. We have led the world in publishing scientific research and have led the world innovatively and economically because of that, but now China is projected to surpass us in the near future. It’s remarkable that in the same country inspired by the heretic Thomas Paine to revolt against Kings appointed by god in favor of popular rule, so many people care less about our power to innovate through science and more about whether the leader of 300 million Americans shows proper reverence to a supernatural deity for which there is absolutely no evidence.

China Projected to Surpass America

When confronted with such an assault American values, it is easy to fall into a rut of outrage. The antidote to outrage is perspective, doing what scientists do best: looking realistically at the big picture.

The percentage of people who identify as “none” on religious surveys grows every year. Among scientists only 1/3 believe in god and that includes the deistic definition of god.

But most telling is the 3/4 of Americans who believe in god. They disparage scientific knowledge while driving in cars designed by our engineers, proselytizing on our televisions, and commenting on our World Wide Web. When they get sick, it is to our doctors they run. They are immersed in the gifts of science every moment of every day, and we don’t begrudge them this wonderful quality of life science provides, but we can allow ourselves a small degree of knowing condescension at their oblivious hypocrisy.

Atheists Have to Keep it Real

The problem I have with New Atheism is that I’m also a secularist. I might not believe in god, but so long as a person doesn’t use their understanding of a personal deity as an excuse to attack anyone’s freedoms then it’s harmless. People can entertain any supernatural fantasy they like if it gives them comfort, but when they participate in the arena of public discourse, they must confine themselves to the reality we all share. Barack Obama once eloquently explained this point:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible.

You can argue whatever position you like in America, but when the only argument you have is because an invisible man in the sky said so, then you don’t have a legitimate argument. Supernaturally revealed knowledge is not universal in a pluralistic, democratic country. As Obama points out in the above speech, if we saw Abraham preparing to murder his son today, we would lock him up and put Isaac in child protective services.

Secular/Atheist Protest Signs

But we atheists have to look in the mirror and see how we are guilty of this very same fallacy when we argue there isn’t a god. Technically we must accept that atheism is not a position that has any bearing on reality any more than saying there is or isn’t extraterrestrial life in the Universe. These are not scientific positions. The distinguished planetary scientist Carolyn Porco best explains why:

If you were to ask me, if I believed in god. Since I am a professional scientist, I would want to give you two answers. In my capacity as a professional scientist I would have to–I would be required to–be agnostic on the subject since I couldn’t cite with scientific certainty say that there is a god and I couldn’t with scientific certainty say that there isn’t.

But if I were allowed to respond as just a regular non-scientist and if you allowed me to take the very same indulgences that all other non-scientists are allowed to take and that is I’m allowed to reject the training I’ve received as a scientist that taught me–that drilled into my head–not to accept anything as fact that can’t be scientifically proven, but instead I’m now allowed to do what many many others do and profess–I’m allowed now to profess to know something and to profess to strongly believe it in the complete absence of facts…then I’m gonna have to say that my very strong faith, my very very strong belief is that there is no god. But on this level, on this level now, my belief is perfectly equivalent to religious belief. We’re both doing the same thing.

Ryan, Technically an Atheist

This is why I don’t define myself as an atheist any more than I would define myself as an a-dittohead, a-flat-earther, or a-astrologer. As American environmental activist Van Jones put it, “Martin Luther King didn’t get famous for giving a speech called ‘I have a complaint.’” There’s a point where you have to say what you stand for. I am an Enlightenment Scholar, like the American Founding Fathers before me, and I’m pretty damn proud of it.

Spiritual and Atheist

Science has expanded our vision, revealing what we could not see before and in such a way that anyone who wants to follow the procedure can see it. Science convinced me to my present worldview because it presents a world that so much more majestic and moral than any theistic philosophy. Science wins mindshare because it successfully improves our quality of life every single day. Is it any wonder so many great minds have mused on the wonders of nature revealed to us through science?

The Magic of Reality

Richard Dawkins expresses it:

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

Carl Sagan articulates it:

In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.

Albert Einstein conveys it:

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

Richard Feynman elucidates it. Chet Raymo enunciates it. Walt Whitman poeticizes it. Ralph Waldo Emerson glorifies it. Teddy Roosevelt appreciates it.

Everyone should sing praise to science!

Spiritual Naturalist

Chet Raymo succinctly explains the dimensions and complexity of my own belief system (minus the last bit):

So this is my Credo. I am an atheist, if by God one means a transcendent Person who acts willfully within the creation. I am an agnostic in that I believe our knowledge of “what is” is partial and tentative-a tiny flickering flame in the overwhelming shadows of our ignorance. I am a pantheist in that I believe empirical knowledge of the sensate world is the surest revelation of whatever is worth being called divine. I am a Catholic by accident of birth.

The Apotheosis of Washington
(Minerva giving Science to the Founding Fathers)

I am an Enlightenment Scholar, like the American Founding Fathers. Experiments are my sacred rights. Quiet attention to the natural world around me is my prayer. Every school, laboratory, and library is my place of worship. My spiritual leaders are physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, doctors, and professors. My scripture is in the ATGC of each link in the chain of a DNA molecule, the 1420.40575177 MHz frequency of a Hydrogen atom, The He, C, Ne, O, Si, and Fe atoms forged in stars, and the galaxy of elements produced from supernovas. My sense of mystery is the dark fog from the beginning of time at visible limits of our Universe, the inadequate metaphors of waves and particles we use to try and conceptualize the behavior of a sunbeam, and the infinite complexity of Pi, Phi, and e.

This is all so very precious. As the Dawkins Foundation magnets handed out at the Reason Rally said, “It took 13.7 billion years to make something this perfect. So don’t mess it up.”

These reasons will work from the general to the specific. I’ve used links to articles in Wikipedia as much as possible because Wiki articles are refined over time with our understanding of the subjectmatter and are less subject to link-rot. This post is licensed Creative Commons and all photos listed here are available under some form of free-to-use licensing. Please feel free to refine this list and repost it, just please preserve the photo credits and links to photographers. Also, suggestions for improvement on any items is welcome as this is a lot of material over a wide range of scientific fields, so I have certainly bungled some things here.

Over time, new evidence will certainly find some of these examples in error, and that’s a good thing because science is about refining our understanding of the truth. The Theory of Evolution is strong enough that nearly half these examples could be disproved and the evidence would still be fairly overwhelming. There is so much in this world that only makes sense in the light of Evolutionary Theory.




Age of the Earth and Its Fossils

We live on a very old Earth.

1. Lithologic Stratigraphy

Looking at Millions and Millions of Years
Credit: cobalt123

The Earth’s crust has layers. Some of these layers are from the decomposition of sediment, others come from chemical precipitation, others from decaying organic matter, and others from volcanic lava. The reason we can see the layers is because they were formed in different ways.

2. Law of Superposition

Geologic strata at bright angel trail

Layers are laid down on top of each other, with the bottom layers laid down first and the top layers laid down last; therefore, the layers on the bottom are the oldest and the ones on the top are the youngest.

3. Fossilized Footprints

Dinosaur trackways
Credit: jacashgone

Dinosaur footprints, slug footprints, Australopithecus footprints and other footprints on top of any layer in the strata means that layer was at the top of the stack long enough for something to walk on top of it before it got covered by subsequent layers and hardened into solid rock.

4. Fossils

Petrified Wood

The process of permineralization, where mineral deposits form internal casts of organisms, provides us with a vast quantity of fossils that give us an idea of the different forms life has taken in the past.

5. Fossils of Extinct Species

A collection of skeletons mounted in museums of various dinosaurs

We have lots and lots and lots of fossils of species that don’t exist anymore. Lots and lots and lots of them in just the superorder Dinsosauria alone.

6. The Law of Faunal Succession

Agate Springs Block
Credit: IslesPunkFan

You will never find a Neanderthal bone in the same stratum as a Tyrannosaurus rex bone. Tyronnosaurus rexes weren’t alive at the same time; therefore, their stratum didn’t get laid down at the same time.

7. Seashell Fossils on Mountaintops

Strata – Lulworth Cove
Credit: mgjefferies

Benjamin Franklin saw that there were fossilized sea shells on top of the mountains of Appalachia, some of them imprinted into solid rock, and concluded, “Tis certainly the Wreck of a World we live on!” The shells were deposited in layers on the Ocean floor over millions of years, layers that would be violently broken up and rippled into a mountain range 480,000,000 years ago by a catastrophic earthquake.

8. Plate Tectonics and Continental Drift

First known illustration of the Opening of the Atlantic Ocean, by Antonio Snider-Pellegrini, 1858.

South America fits into Africa, rocks get younger the closer you get to where the crust is spreading under the ocean, and satellites have observed the drift. The continents drift at a rate of a few centimeters a year and the distance between the Americas and Africa is 455,000,00 centimeters.

9. Same Fossils on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Snider-Pellegrini Wegener fossil map

There are matching fossils on both sides of where the continents appear to have split apart. Cynognathus, a Triassic land reptile, fossils are found in South America and Africa. The Triassic era was between 250,000,000 and 200,000,000 years ago.

10. Radiometric Dating

Uranium Decays to Lead Inside Zircon

Take a quantity of uranium-238 and in 4.5 billion years half of it will have turned into lead-206. When molten rock hardens into a solid, the uranium-238 within it begins to decay. By comparing the ratio of uranium-238 to lead-206, we can estimate how old the rock is. The same thing can be done with Samarium-neodymium, Potassium-argon, Rubidium-strontium, and Uranium-thorium transitions.

11. Radiocarbon Dating

1. Formation of Carbon-14
2. Decay of Carbon-14
3. The “equal” equation is for living organisms, and the unequal one is for non-living ones, in which the C-14 then decays (hence the 2).

Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years. There is a semi-constant ratio of carbon-14 in the air and ocean as it is constantly being created by cosmic rays. Plants take in carbon from the atmosphere and ocean and fix it into themselves. Animals eat plants and fix the carbon into themselves. By measuring the ratio of carbon-14 in a younger fossil, scientists can estimate its age.

12. Dendrochronology

1341 year-old Redwood
Credit: Me

Many trees grow a new ring in their trunk every year, meaning the tree is as many years old as it has rings, meaning trees can be used to calibrate Radiocarbon dating to confirm its accuracy.

13. Stromatolites

Stromatolite
Credit: Me

These fossilized bacterial colonies date back 2.7 billion years and may extend 3.4 billion years. Stromatolites grow at a maximum rate of 5cm every 100 years and a stromatolite 1.5 meters in diameter was found in Virginia and a 500cm high stromatolite was found at the foot of Wutai Mountain in China.




Genetics

How genes and mutations work give us insights and tools into how evolution works.

14. Heredity

Table showing how genes exchange according to segregation or independent assortment during meiosis and how this translates into the Mendel’s Laws.

Offspring inherit the characteristics of their parents, which are controlled by genes.

15. Universal Genetic Material

Chemical structure of DNA

All life on Earth uses a three-letter code to produce 20 standard amino acids. Researchers have artificially expanded the genetic code to produce additional amino acids as tools, but all natural life use the same 20 amino acids from our common descent.

16. Miller–Urey Experiment

Miller-Urey experiment (1953).

In 1952 Stanley Miller and Harold Urey synthesized organic compounds from inorganic precursors found in the Earth’s original atmosphere, producing more than 20 different amino acids using electrical sparks to simulate lightning.

17. Mutations

DNA Covalently Bonded to the Cancer-Causing Mutagen in Tobacco Smoke, benzo[a]pyrene.

The genomic sequence in cells is under constant mutation pressure from radiation, viruses, chemicals, and copying errors.

18. Speciation


Spatial Aspects of Speciation

Speciation is the process by which new species are formed. When a species gets split into two groups by a river, mountain range, island, lake, or ocean via earthquakes, floods, droughts, climate change, or continental drift, the two populations will begin to drift genetically.

19. Natural Selection


Selection Pressures on a Sexually Reproducing Organism

Mutations that reduce an organism’s ability to survive and reproduce will be less likely to end up in offspring. Mutations that give an organism a survival and reproductive advantage will be more likely to show up in offspring.

20. RNA/DNA Codon Table

RNA/DNA Codon Table

Genes that code for proteins are composed of three-nucleotides (U/T, A, G, or C). All the different ways these nucleotides can combine to produce the various amino acids is listed in the above table. Note that the third nucleotide usually makes no difference on the amino acid produced, meaning it can change (mutate) without having any effect on the gene’s expression.

21. Noncoding DNA

Screenshot of tiny portion of the human genom in hdv (n’s are non-coding)
Credit: Markus Kison

A large portion of eukaryotic organisms’ total DNA does not produce amino acids. In humans, more than 98% of the genome is noncoding. Much of this DNA is vestigial–it expressed in our ancestors but not longer serves a purpose. DNA that does not serve a purpose can mutate without having any affect on the organism.

22. Molecular Clock of Mutations

Cytochrome C Protein Sequences Compared to Humans

The number of genetic differences between two species will increase with the time since they originally diverged. Mammals and birds will be equally divergent from fish, and vertebrates will be equally divergent from yeast.

23. Hox Genes

Legs Replacing Antennae on a Fly

These genes provide for the basic blueprint of all segmented life, such as arthropods, insects, and organisms with backbones. They define what, if anything, should grow out of each segment of the body plan. Mutations in hox genes can replace antennae with legs, as in the above photo of a fly, or give humans a sixth finger, but they also make it much easier for species to mutate in useful ways to produce body plans adapted to a wide variety of environments.

24. Sexual Reproduction

The sexual cycle

While asexual reproduction is more efficient in nature because it prevents an organism from having to find a mate to reproduce, it also condemns a species to only produce clones of itself. Sexual reproduction improves a species ability to survive by constantly varying the traits of offspring, making it more likely that some will be able to survive a dramatic environmental change such as drought or famine.

25. Mitochondrial DNA

Human Migrations Across the Earth
Credit: Me

While sexual reproduction mixes up the genes from generation to generation, the mitochondria, energy-factories of the cell, have their own DNA and get passed down directly from the mother to her offspring.

26. Genographic Project

Genographic Map

This DNA survey of human beings has traced our migration out of Africa into Europe and Asia and then over to North America and finally South America.

27. Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam

Early diversification

Because mitochondrial DNA are transferred from the mother to her offspring unchanged, scientists can use the variation in mitochondrial DNA across modern humans to estimate a rate of mutations (one every 3,500 years) and estimate a time back to a common ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago.

Because Y-chromosomes are transferred from father to son unchanged, we can trace our ancestry using this DNA sequence. Using a survey of Y-chromosomes from all over the world and a reconstruction of ancestral Y-chromosome DNA from reversing mutated DNA segments, we can estimate a common ancestor to us all between 60,000 and 142,000 years ago.

28. Neanderthal DNA in Humans

A map depicting the range of the extinct Homo neanderthalensis

Non-African humans have between 1% and 4% Neanderthal DNA from when our ancestors interbred with the extinct species.




Comparative Anatomy

Comparing species traits, their DNA, and their geography are tools for outlining their evolutionary progression and relatedness.

29. Nested Hierarchies

Phylogenetic groups

We don’t just have a list of species, we have a tree logically laid out according to the similarities and dissimilarities among all the different species on Earth now and fossilized in the past.

30. Cladistics

Cladogram

Cladistics is a methodology for classifying species into groups based on their characteristics. While some characteristics like eyes and sexual reproduction have emerged more than once in the history of life on Earth, for the most part we may assume that a organisms sharing a trait such as a jaw, central nervous system, lungs, or mammary glands share a common ancestor.

31. Comparative DNA

16S rRNA secondary structure

Phylogenic trees are built from comparing genomes in addition to comparing anatomical structures.

32. Statistical Probability of Congruent Phylogenetic Trees

Phylogenic and Molecular Cladograms

When comparing the phylogenetic tree to the molecular tree, they match so well that the significance is P <= 0.00077.

33. Thompsonian Transformation Grids

Illustration from On Growth and Form

D’Arcy Thompson in his book On Growth and Form saw that one species could be turned into another through the application of mathematical transformations to alter their proportions.

34. Homology

Homology in vertebrates

The bat’s wing, seal’s flipper, cat’s paw, and human hand all have the same bones and muscles because they all share a common ancestor.

35. Embryonic Recapitulation

Human Embryo (7th week of pregnancy)
Credit: euthman

While the specific hypothesis of Recapitulation, that embryos retrace the evolutionary steps of their ancestors in their growth, has been discredited. Embryos do temporarily take on the characteristics of their ancestral species, such as human embryos having gill arches, a tail, eyes on the sides of the head, a tube-shaped heart, and ear-bones in the jaw during development, all of which vanish in later development. Just as Hox Genes make is possible for species to easily change forms and configurations, the stages of fetal development can change to produce very different characteristics in an organism.

36. Neoteny in Humans

Infant Chimpanzees More Closely Resemble Humans

Chimpanzee infants more closely resemble humans, suggesting an easy route from our ancestors to us would be to simply stop the development of many features earlier, leaving our heads larger in proportion to our bodies and our faces flatter.

37. Atavisms

Atavistic Tail in Human Infant

While a species may no longer express the traits of its ancestors, the DNA for those traits may still exist in the organism’s genome and occasionally come out in individuals. As a result, we see hind legs on whales and snakes, hind fins on dolphins, extra toes on horses, teeth in chickens, humans with extra nipples or a tail, and many other traits.

38. Blood Salinity

Haemoglobin

Terrestrial vertebrates “have body fluids roughly the same osmotic concentration as fresh-water fish, roughly 1/3 the concentration of sea water.”

39. Endosymbiotic Theory

Endosymbiosis

There is strong evidence that Mitochondria and plastids were once bacteria that evolved on their own before being ingested by our cells into a symbiotic relationship. These organelles resemble bacteria that exist in nature and carry similar DNA.

40. Endemic Island Species

Varanus komodoensis

Islands comprise 30% of the world’s biodiversity hotspots and some of the most unusual species, as we would expect from habitats where species are left to evolve in unique ways.

41. Species Not Found on Oceanic Islands

Hawaii

Islands that have never been a part of a continent, but formed from volcanoes do not have terrestrial mammals, amphibians, or fresh water fish, as we would expect if the island could only be populated by seeds and birds over the air or small animals carried on rafts of vegetation.




Transitional Fossils

The fossil record shows endless “in between” forms. The word “to” used in these examples does not mean a direct ancestry between two fossils, but rather refers to the evolving characteristics found in them over millions of years of time.

42. Dinosaurs to Birds

Iberomesornis

Pedopenna to Anchiornis to Scansoriopteryx to Archaeopteryx to Confuciusornis to Sinosauropteryx to Eoalulavis to Ichthyornis

43. Fish to Tetrapods (Life from Sea to Land)

Tiktaalik

Osteolepis to Eusthenopteron to Panderichthys to Tiktaalik to Elginerpeton to Ventastega to Acanthostega to Ichthyostega to Hynerpeton to Tulerpeton to Pederpes to Eryops.

44. Synapsid (“mammal-like reptiles”) to Mammals

Thrinaxodon Lionhinus

Protoclepsydrops to Archaeothyris to Clepsydrops to Dimetrodon to Procynosuchus to Thrinaxodon to Morganucodon to Yanoconodon.

45. Artiodactylans to Whales (Land to Sea)

Ambulocetus

Pakicetus to Ambulocetus to Kutchicetus to Artiocetus to Dorudon to Aetiocetus to Basilosaurus to Eurhinodelphis to Mammalodon.

46. Horse Evolution

Equine evolution

Hyracotherium to Mesohippus to Parahippus to Merychippus to Pliohippus to Equus.

47. Human Evolution

Skulls from Human Evolution
Credit: Me

Apidium to Aegyptopithecus to Proconsul to Pierolapithecus to Ardipithecus to Australopithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to ‘Archaic’ sapiens… and there’s alot more fossils than these.




Convergent Evolution

Different species will evolve similar adaptations to the similar challenges.

48. Placental Mammals and Australian Marsupials

Mammals and Marsupials

Despite evolving in geographic isolation, the marsupials of Australia have evolved many analogous features of placental mammals in the rest of the world.

49. Ichthyosaurs and Dolphins

Ichthyosaurus

The ichthyosaurs, a marine reptile from 250 million years ago, and dolphins are both air-breathing and both descended from land animals. They adapted to life in the ocean with a hydrological design that includes fins and a body shape like that of a fish.

50. Birds and Bats

Bat and Bird Wings

Birds and bats both have wings made out of bones that were arms in their ancestors.

51. The Eye

Eye Evolution

Complex image-forming eyes have evolved some 50 to 100 times, with the first eyes appearing in the fossil record 540 million years ago.

52. Succulents in the Americas and Africa

Succulents from Different Continents

Although they evolved on different contents, the succulents of Africa and the Americas adopted very similar traits to survive in arid climates and soil conditions.

53. Homo floresiensis and Dwarf Elephants

Homo floresiensis – reconstruction

The “hobbit” human of Indonesia and Dwarf elephant both adapted to limited food sources on the island of Indonesia by shrinking in size 840,000 years ago.




Adaptations

Many of the same organs in species are adapted to specific tasks both within a species and across them.

54. Coevolution

Sexually-deceived
Credit: ~Squil~

Flowers bribe insects and hummingbirds with nectar in exchange for acting as their instruments of sexual reproduction by carrying pollen from plant to plant. Orchids use deception by mimicking the pheromones and appearance of insects to trick them into attempting to mate with the flower. The existence of unknown insect species has been predicted by the discovery of orchid flowers.

55. Beaks


Bird Beaks

Birds exhibit a wide variety of beak shapes that are adapted to their feeding habits.

56. Insect Mouthparts

Insect Mouthparts

The primitive mouthparts of grasshoppers have evolved to a wide variety of specialized feeding strategies in other insects.

57. Tall Trees

Coastal Redwood

Trees grow tall in order to get above the competition for access to sunlight. Shorter trees get left in shadow while the tallest trees get to photosynthesize.

58. Human Skin Color

Skin color map

Humans rely on sunlight to generate vitamin D. As humans migrated north, they recieved less sunlight; therefore, natural selection favored lighter skin that produced more vitamin D in response to sunlight.

59. Sickle-Cell Disease

Sickle cells

The gene for this disease is prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria is common. Individuals who carry only a single sickle-cell gene are more tolerate of malarial infection.

60. Lactase Persistence

Modern-day lactose intolerance in humans

Most mammals develop an intolerance to lactose, the sugar found in milk, as they grow older, but humans in some regions are able to continue digesting milk, the result of humans consuming the milk of livestock such as cows, goats, and camels (this is also an example of convergent evolution).

61. The shape of the penis.

Mushroom
Credit: Fluffymuppet

The human male penis has a bulbous end that maximizes its ability to displace the semen of rival males from the vagina.




Vestigial Traits

Various species, including humans, have numerous physical traits that are leftovers from our ancestors.

62. Hip bones in Whales


Baleen whale Pelvis

Baleen whales still have hip bones inside them, serving as anchors for muscles, from when their ancestors had legs.

63. Laryngeal Nerve in Giraffes


Scheme of path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in Giraffa camelopardis

Although the most direct route for this nerve is just a few inches, it may be up to 13 feet long in giraffes as it goes all the way down the neck, loops back, and comes all the way back up again. This nerve takes a similarly crazy route in humans too. The nerve is long because our fish ancestors had no neck, and the nerve looped around a gill arch that would become the dorsal aorta in mammals.

64. Veriform Appendix

Veriform Apendix Connected to Large Intestine

In our ancestors, the appendix is used to digest plant fibers. As humans began cooking our food, we did not need to digest plant cellulose, so this organ shrunk to its current pinky-size. A recent hypothesis suggest the veriform appendix now serves as a reservoir for bacteria to repopulate the large intestine after illness wipes them out.

65. Coccyx

Pelvic girdle, posterior view
Credit: Rob Swatski

The tailbone is the final segment of the vertebral column in tailless primates, all that remains from our ancestors’ tails. Today it serves as an attachment point for muscles and something to sit on.

66. Goose Bumps

Goose Bumps

These bumps on our bare skin occur in cold weather or when experiencing fear. In our ancestors they would cause the fur to rise up, increasing insulation against the cold and increasing the appearance of size against threats.

67. Maxillary Sinuses

maxillary sinuses

These sinus cavities have their drainage hole in the top. This is because, when our ancestors walked on all fours, the drainage hole was positioned in the front.

68. Blind Spot in Vertebrate Eyes

Vertebrate VS Octopus Eye

The optic nerve that carries information from our eyes to our brain actually comes through the eye, creating a spot where there are no photoreceptor cells on the optic disc to recieve light. As a result, our brains fill in the blank spot using surrounding details and information from the other eye. The optic nerve of octopus eyes stays behind the photoreceptor cells, so they experience no blind spot.

69. Blind Cave Fish

cavefish and zebrafish embryos
Credit: wellcome images

Animals that move to a dark environment will quickly lose evolutionary adaptations that are no longer useful. Cave fish embryos begin to develop eyes, but then stop and skin grows over them.

70. Flightless Birds

Ostrich
Credit: Doug Wheller

Similarly to cave fish, the wings of birds that no longer need to fly will grow smaller and the birds will become flightless.

71. Tyrannosaurus rex’s Arms

Tyrannosaurus resting pose

Contrary to popular belief, Tyrannosaurus rex’s arms are not vestigial, but show large areas of muscle attachment. They may have been used in mating or in helping the animal rise from a prone position.

72. Wisdom Teeth

Impacted wisdom teeth

Similar to the appendix, these teeth helped us grind up plant cellulose. As we began cooking our foods, our jaws atrophied, leaving less room for these teeth to come in. As a result, many people have them pulled today.

73. Plica Semilunaris of Conjunctiva

Plica Semilunaris

This fleshy part found in the inner corner of our eyes is what remains of our ancestors’ third eyelid. Today it produces eye-boogers.

74. Palmar Grasp Reflex – Infant grasping reflex

palmar grasp reflex
Credit: Geoffrey Wiseman

From birth until five or six months of age, human infants will instinctually grasp things that brush their palms. This is a vestigial reflex from our primate ancestors who had fur to which infants could cling.

75. Ear Muscles

Ear Muscles

Humans have fairly useless ear muscles from when our ancestors were able to manipulate their ears independent of their head, like in cats.

76. Antarctic icefish

Icefish

This fish has clear blood because it contains only 1% hemoglobin, the metalloprotein that carries oxygen in our blood, because it lives in oxygen-rich cold water but still has the genes to make hemoglobin that it got from its ancestors.

77. The Panda’s Thumb

Panda Hand
Credit: Travis S.

Panda’s, which are related to carnivorous bears, have five clawed fingers and a modified wrist bone that sticks out to function like a primitive thumb, which they used to grab bamboo–which they can barely digest because they are descendent of carnivores.

78. Route of the vas derens

Route of vas deferens from testis to the penis

This tube routes sperm from the testicles to the base of the penis in anticipation of ejaculation in humans. Although the direct route is only a few inches, the vas deferens loops up and over the tubes connecting the kidneys to the bladder and back down again because our ancestors testes were on the inside. Human male embryos start out with their testes on the inside, but they descend to the scrotum during development.




Artificial Selection

For thousands of years humans have bred various species to maximize desirable traits.

79. Wild Silver Foxes into Puppies

young silver fox
Credit: matt knoth

Dimitri Belyaer, by selecting for non-aggressive behavior and non-fearful behavior, was able to turn wild silver foxes into tail-wagging, friendly animals very similar to domesticated dogs in just 10 generations.

80. Dog Breeding

Great Dane and Chihuahua mixed-breed

Humans have produced a wide variety of dogs in many shapes and sizes by selecting for traits in just 10,000 years.

81. Corn

Teosinte, Maize-teosinte hybrid, Maize.

Maize is a domesticated descendent of teosinte, a wild grass. Although they appear very different, two genes control the differences between them.

82. Chickens

Different breeds of domestic chicken in comparison with the wild ancestor, the Red Jungle Fowl
Credit: Staffan Ullström

Farm chickens are descendants of Red Jungle Fowl.

83. Domesticated Turkey

Wild and Domesticated Turkeys

When you look at the domesticated turkey, it’s hard to believe Benjamin Franklin lamented to his daughter that the turkey should be the American mascot rather than the bald eagle, but the wild turkey is a very athletic and rather majestic animal.

84. Brussel Sprouts, Kale, Cauliflower, Turnips, Rutabega, Kohlrabi

Brassica oleracea

Brussel Sprouts, Kale, Cauliflower, Turnips, Rutabega, Kohlrabi are all descendants of Brassica oleracea, a wild cabbage plant.




Evolution in Action

Natural selection has been observed to happen in the real world, with species evolving right before our eyes.

85. Prions

bovine spongiform encephalopathy
Credit: Public Health Image Library, APHIS

Prions, an infectious protein, are protein molecules that fold other proteins into their state, causing diseases like Mad Cow disease. These molecules have been found to evolve under selective pressures, such as medical treatments, despite not having DNA.

86. Peppered Moth

Biston betularia

The most famous example of natural selection, during the Industrial Revolution in England, the lichens on trees died and the bark was stained black with soot. Peppered moths that were light grey and speckled lost their camouflage and black peppered moths were able to hide better, so dark moths became more prevalent whereas grey moths were formerly more prevalent.

87. Antibiotic Resistance


Antibiotic resistance
Credit: Wykis

The widespread use of antibiotics has put selective pressure on bacteria to evolve resistances to drugs, which they rapidly achieve.

88. Pesticide Resistance

Pest resistance
Credit: Delldot

Fruit flies, houseflies, rats, mosquitoes, and Colorado potato beetles are among some of the species observed to evolve a resistance to a variety of pesticides.

89. Nylon-Eating Bacteria

variants nylon 6 and nylon 6,6
Credit: Michael Ströck

In 1975, Japanese scientists discovered bacteria eating the byproducts of nylon 6 manufacture in the wild despite the fact that those substances are thought to not have existed before nylon production in 1935.

90. E. coli Long-Term Evolution Experiment

Lenski’s long-term lines of E. coli
Credit: Brian Baer and Neerja Hajela

For over two decades Richard Lenski has tracked the changes in generations of 12 initially identical populations of asexual Escherichia coli, freezing every 500th generation to track evolutionary changes. The project reached 50,000 generation in 2010 and observed numerous adaptations, most strikingly one strain evolving to consume citric acid–something the species was previously thought incapable of (Experiment website here).

91. Speciation of Fruit Flies

allopatric speciation in the fruit fly
Credit: Diane Dodd

William Rice and G.W. Salt were able to breed a population of fruit flies into two species by selecting them for their food preferences in just 35 generations.

92. Ring Species

Ring species seagull

Seagulls around the North Pole, salamanders around California’s Central Valley, and Warblers around the Himalayas are species that can breed with their neighbors all the way around the circle, but cannot breed with species opposite them in the circle, meaning neighbors are the same species, but those at opposite ends of the circle are different species.

93. Cancer

Brest cancer

One of the reasons cancer is so difficult to treat is because the disease evolves through natural selection to grow more resistant to treatments.




Sexual Selection

Natural selection doesn’t just apply to climate, food, and predators. Members of a species that sexually reproduce must compete with one another for mates.

94. John Endler’s Guppies

Poecilia reticulata
Credit: Silvana Gericke

Endler documented the colors of guppies and the competing forces of predator and sexual selections. Where there were fewer predators, the guppies got more colorful to attract mates.

95. The Peacocks Tail

Indian Peacock Plumage
Credit: Vidhya Narayanan

Peafowls have huge ungainly tail feathers that, while beautiful, seem like more of an encumbrance when dealing with predators; however, peacocks display this plumage to peahens as part of courtship, suggesting the peahen discerns something about the health of the male’s genes in the display.

96. Babirusa Tusks

Babyrousa babyrussa Crane
Credit: Didier Descouens

These canines drive through the skin and curl back towards the forehead, providing a defense for intra-species fighting while the bottom canine-tusks provide an offense.

97. Bowerbird

Bowerbird Sorting His Treasures
Credit: dracophylla

Male bowerbirds construct elaborate bowers, decorating them with colorful objects, berries, piling twigs, stones, and other displays of which female bowerbirds will evaluate several before choosing a mate. After mating, the female then builds a nest elsewhere to raise the young alone.

98. Irish Elk Antlers

Irish Elk
Credit: Franco Atirador

Stephen J. Gould argued that these enormous antlers, which required great mineral resources from plants to support and prevented the elk from navigating through forests, were largely responsible for their extinction. The positioning of the antlers were poor for combat between males, but were great for intimidating rivals and impressing females.

99. Bird-of-Paradise

Bird of Paradise

These birds have evolved a wide variety of plumage displays for the sole purpose of attracting a mate.

100. Duck Penis

Duck genitalia and mechanical barriers
Credit: Patricia L. R. Brennan1,2,*, Christopher J. Clark1,2 and Richard O. Prum

Ducks copulate through rape. As a result, females have evolved mazelike vaginas, complete with dead-ends to prevent insemination. Male ducks have evolved one of the longest penises in relation to body-size of any vertebrate as well has having a penis that takes on a corkscrew shape to better navigate the female’s vagina.

101. Waist-to-Hip Ratio in Human Females

Waist-to-Hip Ratio
Credit: Mikael Häggström

Waist-hip ratio is a significant measure of female attractiveness in humans, which makes sense as the waist is an indicator of fertility while the hips are an indicator of being able to give birth to human infants with their extremely large heads.




And the List Goes On and On…

Aphids go from asexual to sexual in times of stress. Eating Cicadas can trigger a shellfish allergic reaction. Antifreeze proteins and lots and lots of other examples of convergent evolution. The Phylliidae Convention in Japan. Dr. J. Craig Venter engineering the first self-replicating semi-synthetic bacterial cell. Artificial cell membranes. Yeast evolving into multicelluar yeast in two months in a lab. The Triune brain. Radiotrophic fungi. Urban wildlife. Chromosome 2 in humans. Cytochrome c. Examples of mutations that occur in humans when you change just one amino acid. The extensive list of fossil sites from around the Earth. Boa constrictors have hip bones. Domestic Pigs. Domesticated Cows. Alligators and frogs taste like fishy chicken. Male nipples. Tibetan high-altitude genes and the Milano mutation. The science of memetics. Chalk mountains are made from piles of forminifera shells.

And there’s more and more being discovered all the time. Without the theory of evolution, this is just a list of trivia. Through evolution, all of these facts fit together into one incredibly beautiful painting of how we came to be here today.

Further Reading

• Talk Origins has a much more erudite list 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.
• Dr. George Johnson’s Backgrounders has a step by step walkthrough of the evidence in plain English.
• Wikipedia has an extensive page outlining the evidence for common descent.

An important rule of evolution is that species lose adaptations they aren’t using. Cave fish have eyes that do not work because they live in an environment without light. Crocodile icefish blood has lost its hemogloblin because they live in oxygen-rich water where they don’t need the protein to transport oxygen throughout their bodies. Kiwis, chickens, and ostriches have wings but can’t fly. Humans lack the gene to make Vitamin C, forcing us to get our ascorbic acid from dietary sources.

This happens because when a trait isn’t in use, natural selection does not discriminate against mutations that break the trait. For example, when an individual impala is born with a mutation that gives it bad eyes, it gets eaten by a lion, but when a fish in the total darkness of a cave gets bad eyes, they are just as likely to survive as the fish with working vision; in fact, they have a slight advantage for not having to put resources into building and maintaining eyes that provide no advantage.

Crocodile icefish larvae (note the clear blood)
Credit: Unknown Wikipedia User

A question that comes up regularly in popular science media is, Are humans evolving? And the answer depends on what we mean by evolving. If we are talking about the popular public use of the term, which is synonymous with a species getting better (taller, smarter, faster, etc), then the answer is: only in those parts of the world where natural selection is still at work. In Africa, for instance, where famine, disease, and, in some cases, lions are at work there is also natural selection in effect. The inhabitants of famine-stricken areas are being selected for resistance to starvation. Sickle-cell Anemia came out of Africa as an adaptative resistance to Malarial infection by mosquitos; people with the sickle-cell gene survived longer than those without it despite the trait also having a deleterious effect on the carrier.

If we are talking about the scientific definition of evolving, meaning gradual genetic change in a species population over time, then that is occurring in all humans, selected or not; but in First World societies, the change that is occurring is not of the improvement kind, but more of the cavefish kind. Eyeglasses and eye surgery allow people like me to survive. Insulin shots allow type-I diabetes patients and obese people to survive. Immunizations eliminate natural selection for natural immune system resistance to bugs. C-sections have eliminated the need to give birth vaginally. Fertility clinics allow people to reproduce who could not in the past. AIDS drugs allow anyone who is infected to survive rather than select for a natural resistance. Wheelchairs, hearing aids, orthopedic shoes, braces, and a wealth of other medical innovations and modern conveniences have drastically reduced any need for athletic prowess or even most physical abilities in order to survive in modern society.

These are wonderful things. Without them, Vicky and I would not be able to have additional children and our son Sagan might likely have died due to our incompatible blood types (I’m O+, she’s A-), but thanks to a shot of Rh immune-globulin and our pediatrician coaching us, our newborn son overcame his jaundice in his first week of life. Science makes it possible to support 7 billion people on our planet, and keeps most of them in good health and comfort. I am perpetually grateful to scientific progress.

New Zealand Kiwi, Flightless Bird
Credit: The.Rohit

The complication this creates for us is that every lost survival trait in every human being is a survival trait their children will likely not have. When a couple undergoes fertility treatment, then their children will inherit the need to have fertility treatment. As the medical and engineering sciences discover ever new means for us to survive comfortably despite our flaws, they also perpetuate the inventions that keep so many of us alive.

In other words, as our genes fail us, our memes take over.

H. G. Wells wrote that “Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe.” He was right in deeper dimensions than he realized. Consider what would happen if we were somehow magically stripped of all our technology so that tomorrow morning the human race were to wake up to a world without modern medicine, agricultural science, textiles, plastics, electricity, and all the other scientific conveniences we take for granted each day. How many of our planet’s 7 billion people would still be alive after a week? We would quickly be reduced to the tribal population levels of just a few brief centuries ago as only the fittest and healthiest survived.

Our ideas are keeping us alive. That means we must work for a society that keeps our ideas alive. Libraries, public schools, laboratories, and institutions of higher learning aren’t just conveniences, they are crucial to our survival, and the more we depend on them the more we will need to depend on them and that’s a good thing.

One of the great joys of being human is our incredible powers of pattern recognition. Our brain’s ability to manifest meaningful associations out of the complex morass of sensory stimuli perpetually assaulting us is a cognitive expertise into which computers are only just starting to venture successfully. It’s what allows us to recognize faces, raed wrdos wtih smrelcabd ltretes, identify with our fellow humans, and compartmentalize the sounds, tastes, and sights around us.

The number 11 has always been my favorite whole number. Ever since I was a kid, I appreciated the way the first nine multiples of 11 are numbers that mirror the tens and ones places (in a base-10 numbers system): {11, 22, 33, 44 … 77, 88, 99}.

You can figure out the result of eleven times any two-digit number by adding the tens and ones place of the two-digit number and placing it between the two digits. For example, eleven times my second favorite whole number:

You can also do something similar when multiplying eleven against a three-digit number.

Eleven is fun.

This year, the Gregorian Calendar has been filled with 11′s in its dates: 1/1/11, 1/11/11, 11/1/11, 11/11/11. Additionally, If you take the last two digits of the year you were born and add the age you will/have turned on your birthday this year, the result will be 111. For me, this is 73 + 38 = 111.

I previously blogged about eleven focusing on the trivia associated with the number, but I’ve come to understand that eleven is a wonderful number for all the patterns we can find in it, and nowhere do these patters become more clear than in Pascal’s Triangle:

Creating a Pascal’s Triangle
Credit: Hersfold

Each row of Pascal’s Triangle sums to the set of exponents of two {1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024…}, and that’s interesting.

What’s more interesting? The digits of each row represent an exponent of eleven {11, 121, 1331, 14641, 161051, 1771561…}. It takes just a little bit of addition to see how this works for the rows with multiple-digit numbers. You have to think of each number as occupying a place value, like ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. Then you carry the additional digits up to their appropriate place. For example, row six in Pascal’s Triangle is:

So Pascal’s Triangle is a tower of powers of eleven, and the patterns within it continue. We can see the first set of diagonals going down the outsides of the triangle are all ones, and the second set of diagonals just inside this are all the natural numbers {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10…}. The third set of diagonals is Triangular Numbers, the number of building blocks needed to make triangles of increasing size:

Triangles One Through Six

The fourth set of diagonals are Tetrahedral Numbers, the number of building blocks needed to make tetrahedrons of increasing size.

Number Sets: Ones, Natural, Trangular, Tetrahedral, Pentatope

The fifth set of diagonals are Pentatope Numbers, which I don’t understand, but they sound like the number of building blocks needed to make 4-dimensional tetrahedron.

5-Cell (4D Tetrahedron)
Credit: Jason Hise

And the patterns continue! If we align all the numbers in Pascal’s Triangle up on one side, the diagonals add up to the Fibbonacci Set {1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 … 55, 89, etc, etc}, which relates back to my favorite irrational number Phi:

Fibbonacci Set in Pascal’s Triangle
(Diagonals colored, Sums Shaded Gray)

There is something fractaline about the conceptual patterns we are seeing in this numeric construction. There are triangles within triangles in the number sets. In fact, highlighting all the odd numbers within Pascal’s Triangle and zooming out far enough, we find an actual geometric fractal, a Sierpinski Triangle:

Animated Construction of a Sierpinski Triangle
Credit: Dean Moore

Powers of 10 Day celebrates the concept of exponential growth, a meditation on the size of our universe as we zoom in or out from our position within it. Powers of 11 Day seems like a good day to look at the patterns that emerge when we zoom out to look down on the big picture. There are patterns within patterns when we line up the powers of eleven in this way, beautiful symmetry, dimensions beyond our three, and geometry that echoes across the function. Our brains evolved to find patterns everywhere in the world, and this mathematical object is perfect for enjoying the immense potential of this natural cognitive proclivity within us.

Further Reading

The images of Pascals Triangle that I composed myself for this post were put together in Microsoft Excel, and you can download the spreadsheet if you’d like to play with the numbers yourself.

Special thanks to Math Forum for the best, most simplest page on the web exploring Pascal’s Triangle and the powers of 11.

In hacker slang, “Elite” is transformed into “leet” which is transformed into “1337″ which is transformed to “1331″ which is transformed into “leel” which is the highest form of elite. 1331 is 11 to the third power.

I admit it. I knew better when I posted the story about the kraken lair to my Facebook for my less scientifically literate friends to awe and wonder at. I could tell from the scant evidence provided in the press release that there really wasn’t anything there but a collection of bones from 45-foot-long ichthyosaurs mysteriously piled together at a site in Nevada. To infer the bones were gathered together by a gigantic ancient cephalopod whose soft tissues left no trace in the fossil record was an admirably imaginative idea, but I knew this extraordinary claim didn’t pass the Sagan Standard’s “extraordinary evidence” requirement. As Samuel Clemens best expressed it, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact.”

And still I posted it to Facebook, where it got eight Likes, three comments, and one share. That’s eight more Likes than my link to Discovery’s Faces of Our Ancestors gallery, featuring facial reconstructions for 11 ancestors of Homo sapiens and for which there is plenty of direct fossilized evidence to support their stories.

Stories. We only have a few millennias’ worth of stories from the written and oral history of the human race, but the archeological record is brimming with billions of years’ worth of them. Like detectives at the scene of a crime, archeologists have reconstructed events out of the shared story of our origins to tell engaging tales of our ancestors trials and tribulations.

There are tragedies, like the 3-year-old Taung child, whose skull bares the scars of an eagle attack. The Australopithecus africanus child was carried away by a bird of prey 2.8 million years ago. We sense the tragic nature of the story when we consider the horror his parents must have experienced, and at the same time there is the fantastic element of our ancient ancestors having to guard their infants against birds of prey.

Easter Island, Moai Rano raraku
Credit: Aurbina

I’ve listened to New Age believers explain the giant statues of Easter Island as being erected with the help of aliens, who took the island’s inhabitants away with them into the Milky Way, but there is an important lesson in what we know really happened to this treeless island in the Southeastern Pacific ocean. Jared Diamond reconstructs the history Easter Island with the help of painstaking research by paleontologists and archaeologists, telling the tale of a materialist war, where competing inhabitants chopped down all the island’s trees for transportation and scaffolding so they could erect monolithic statues of increasing size to demonstrate their wealth and prestige. After the trees vanished, so did the large game, and the trash sites on the island show the inhabitants resorted to eating rats and eventually human corpses to survive. The Easter Islanders didn’t have magical powers for levitating boulders, they were an ancient mirror of our modern materialism. The archaeology of Easter Island tells the story of a civilization that fell prey to conspicuous consumption and provides a cautionary tale for a modern society that would sacrifice environmental sustainability for short-term greed.

Then there’s the 3.6 million-year-old Laetoli footprints of Austrolopithecus preserved in volcanic ash, large and small, male and female, close together as if they were huddling–perhaps the male had his arm around his mate, and the female’s footprints lopsided as if she were carrying an infant. Imagine what it was like for them, walking fearfully across an ash-covered landscape, a distant bellowing volcano preparing to rain even more ash on them. This story of fear and wonder is reconstructed in this famous diorama:

Australopithecus
Credit: Me

There are also the mysteries. Homo erectus, who spread halfway across the world before mysteriously vanishing. Imagining her environment, we know there were a greater number of large fauna back then, as humans would come along much later to drive the big animals and predators into extinction wherever they migrated across the Earth. She had stone tools, hand axes she used to chop up game, but was primitive enough and intelligent enough that I read one naturalist refer to her as the “velociraptor of our human ancestors,” which is why I love this statue of her at the Smithsonian Hall of Human Origins lugging a rotting ibex carcass across the Serengeti on her back:

Homo erectus
Credit: Me

She was a total badass… and then she was extinct.

Where did she go?

As many stories as humans have written in our few millennia of civilization, imagine the number of stories still waiting to be discovered in 3.5 billion years’ worth of geological strata. Stories of tragedy, wonder, mystery, and profundity are all around us, written into the natural world, just waiting for us to read them.

This post has been submitted for the NESCent Blog Contest for Evolution-Themed posts.

Stages of Fetal Development
Credit: NHS Pregnancy Desktop

One of the first things Vicky and I established when we first became romantically involved is that we both wanted to have children. We share a deep love of science and the natural world and wanted to share our sense of wonder with children of our own. At the same time, in our sharing we were hoping to experience the world vicariously through fresh eyes, reliving the thrill of learning and discovery.

When the pregnancy test finally came up positive, we were launched into a whole new realm of learning: reading up on diet, lifestyle, and fetal development. We were also put into an unanticipated tour of various types and standards of prenatal care. This post covers what we learned and what we are continuing to learn about pregnancy and childcare.

Researching Pregnancy

Medical Science has doubled of our lifespans over the last 200 years, but it has also made some horrible mistakes when it comes to childbirth. When we asked Vicky’s grandmother about her birthing experiences, she described the days when doctors would administer women in labor the Twilight Sleep drug, which prevented the woman from remembering the act of giving birth, but would also make her lose all self-control, so that she had to be strapped to the hospital bed and wear a helmet so she could wail and thrash. When we asked Vicky’s mother about breast feeding, she told us about how the doctors discouraged the practice, saying it was unsanitary and had less nutritional value than formula. Pre-1950s psychology took the position that showing affection for children was unhealthy and discouraged kissing or otherwise cuddling babies lest they have serious issues later in life. These were unfortunate ideas that manifested lifetimes worth of problems for children born during the times they were popular, but science is a self-correcting algorithm, so I made a point of doing some heavy reading in hopes of learning the latest, most refined understanding of what’s best for pregnancy, labor, and child-rearing.

Pregnancy and Baby Care Books

Anne Marie Paul’s Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives made for a good overview of how life in the womb is affected by the pregnant mother’s environment. It explains, in down to Earth terms, what the mother should eat, what she should avoid, and what lifestyle choices, such as exercise and stress, she should engage and avoid for the health of her developing baby. Humans are a highly-adaptable species, and Paul argues that the fetus is taking in information about the environment into which it will be born so that its brain and body will be customized to best survive in that world.

Meredith Small’s Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent is an important part of the attachment parenting philosophy, which stresses being keenly sensitive to the child’s needs to form a strong emotional bond with them. I appreciated the book’s evolutionary perspective on the subject, advocating co-sleeping and breastfeeding because our ancestors adhered to these practices. The book looks at various cultures and their differing parenting styles to help come to its conclusions. This foundation in anthropology and evolutionary psychology really appealed to me.

Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl’s The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind was a fascinating peek into an infant’s cognitive development. I loved the premise that babies are like scientists, testing hypotheses and adjusting their worldview according to the results. The book has an explanation of the “Terrible Twos” that impressed me: infants at that time are learning that your perspective is different from their perspective and they are having a hard time adjusting their understanding of the world accordingly. The book lays out its ideas exquisitely, bringing all the ideas together into a summary at the end that highly intellectually satisfying.

Lise Eliot’s What’s Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life is an exhaustive overview of every single aspect of the fetus and infant’s development and is also my favorite of all the books I read. The book covers the physiological development all five senses and several other senses that I didn’t even know about. It provides exercises for stimulating these senses so that the child’s brain wires up properly to best take advantage of them. The book can also be a bit scary as it goes over all the things that can go wrong in a child’s development, which set me on edge, but they are important things to be aware of so you can recognize them and get your child the help they need should they manifest.

John Medina’s Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five felt like the Cliff Notes version of Lise Eliot’s book, and that’s a good thing. It’s down to Earth and gets right to what you want to know about turning your child into a supersmart superhuman. I really appreciated some of the worldview adjustments Medina gives, such as to avoid praising your child for being smart, instead, praise them for working hard. Smart is out of our control, but failing a test because you didn’t work hard is something you can overcome.

Depending on your personality, there were a series of “easy reading” books that were less scientific and more about commiseration and practically dealing with parenting and childbirth. For nerds I recommend the Baby Owner’s Manual, found on Think Geek, for its clinically humorous way of covering baby care. For regular guys I suggest the The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for Dads-to-Be, which was pretty in-depth and covered a whole lot of territory focused on the male’s role in things. While men’s men should go with Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads, which actually works on a whole lot of levels, is the funniest of the books I picked up, and has great “circuit training” advice for exercising your baby.

Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: 8th Edition was the “Manual” that everyone took when they kidnapped the baby in the film “Raising Arizona.” It’s criticized for using inductive reasoning rather than evidence-based medicine, and I found some glaring errors in an early edition of the book, like advising parents to put their baby to sleep face down, which we now know puts them at a higher risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrom (SIDS); however, later editions of the book correct these errors and overall the book works as a great big encyclopedia of baby care advice. At the same time, while the book is on my shelf, I’m still more likely to hit a search engine to find out why there’s a white fungus growing on my baby’s tongue (It’s called thrush and it’s perfectly normal).

NHS Pregnancy Desktop

Beyond books, I highly recommend parents check out the UK National Health Services’ (NHS) – Pregnancy Desktop application, especially for expectant dads. One problem I had early on during Vicky’s pregnancy was that she was completely on top of what needed to be done at what week in the process, so that I felt like I was just following along under her guidance. The Pregnancy Desktop application sits on your desktop, opening on startup, and serves as a constant reminder of how many weeks and days you have left until your due date, what’s going on with the baby, and what you should be doing to prepare. Some of the information it provides is UK-specific, but there is also a bounty of good information for mothers in any country. Again, highly recommended.

By far, the most beneficial preparation we made was in attending Bradley Method Classes to learn about Husband-Coached Natural Childbirth based on Richard Bradley’s Husband-Coached Childbirth: The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth, where the husband takes a strong supporting role in the wife’s labor, monitoring contractions, tending to her needs and making sure she’s comfortable, and providing emotional support to help her achieve an unmedicated delivery. In addition to practice exercises to prepare for labor, the classes are also fantastic for the way they educate students on the mechanics and physiological aspects of labor. We learned about various medical interventions the doctor’s might use, pregnancy complications we may experience, and lots of information about what’s going on with the baby and mother’s bodies during labor. One factoid I found very interesting had to do with the health effects of cutting the umbilical cord after delivery, which doctors rush to do, but is probably best to hold off on in order to allow the placenta to pump all of its blood into the baby. The classes are important because the books and software are all just theory (in the non-scientific sense of the word) and you need to get active and increase your kinesthetic intelligence to see yourselves through this.

Pregnancy Lifestyle

Vicky had an extremely easy pregnancy, which we attribute to a healthy diet and active lifestyle. Vicky was great at practicing squatting to strengthen her pelvic floor and hit the gym every day, where she found the fetus became very active while she was on the elliptical, but became less active later in the pregnancy to conserve oxygen while Vicky’s consumption went up. She also gave up caffeine, alcohol, and other environmentals that could harm the developing fetus. As a show of support, I gave up caffeine and alcohol too; unfortunately, I couldn’t convince Vicky that this same logic would apply to scooping cat poop.

Here’s the factoids we incorporated into our pregnancy lifestyle:

Diet: As I covered recently, good nutrition is crucial to cognitive development in the developing brain, which is why in our enlightened civilization we have social services like welfare. But what food choices should the pregnant mother make?

Eats lots and lots of fish, which increases infant cognition. Unfortunately, with so much pollution in the environment, this principle has also become a balancing act between good protein and omega 3s and elevated mercury content that gets concentrated in certain species of fish. Vicky and I referred to tilapia and salmon dinners as “IQ points for baby” meals.

Another thing is to make your plate colorful. Our Bradley Method instructor had Vicky turn in a list of all the foods she ate each week, which was first checked to sufficient protein intake, but then turned to variety. One of Vicky’s homework assignment was to eat a yellow or orange vegetable, similar to Michael Pollan’s advice in his excellent book In Defense of Food.

Lifestyle: Avoid the three characteristics of stress: too frequent, too severe, and too much for you. A great way to counter effect stress during pregnancy is exercise, as it reduces stress hormones that can hurt the baby’s development. Exercise also reduces the amount of time spent in the pushing phase of labor compared to women who do not exercise. There is some concern that exercise robs the baby of oxygen and therefore harms cognitive development; however, there is also evidence that exercise improves intelligence and the fetuses show the same benefits of cardiovascular exercise as the mother experiences.

Things to Avoid: Limit caffeine, which appears to have no effect on the child’s IQ but does cause developmental problems in rats when taken in extreme doses. Definitely avoid smoking, which lowers birth weight, increases the child’s chances of neurological impairment, increases the risk of miscarriage, and increases the risk of SIDS after birth. Also avoid alcohol, which is “thought to be responsible for at least 4,000 cases of mental retardation in the United States each year and perhaps ten times that number of children with mild learning or behavioral problems.” Also avoid the chemical Bisphenol A, which is in certain plastics and causes developmental issues in animal embryos. For knowing which plastics are safe a good mnemonic about recycling numbers to use is “Four, five, one, and two/All the rest are bad for you.”

Vicky has a more detailed post about her Nutrition Worksheets and diet during pregnancy as well as her exercise regimen.

Where to Deliver?

My mother has her Doctorate in Obstetrics Nursing with a lifetime of experience working in the field and is a huge advocate for natural childbirth, that is, vaginal childbirth without pain medications. There are numerous health advantages for babies born vaginally as compared to C-section, including their oxygen level rising more rapidly after birth, increased ability to regulate their body temperature, and higher scores on reflex tests. Additionally, pain medications given to the pregnant mother during labor also drug the baby, hindering its ability to adapt to the dramatic environmental changes it experiences going from the womb to the outside world. There is no such thing as a “local” anesthetic.

Northeastern OB-GYN Logo

Vicky started out attending Northeastern OB-GYN in Elizabeth City North Carolina, which was very good at the prenatal care they provided her. In addition to having a very nifty logo (the above is the largest I could find it online), they also gave us our first look at Sagan through ultrasound. The eggsack in the below photo is actually a vestigial trait from when our ancestors developed in an egg with a yolk.

Sagan Ultrasound 14 Weeks into Pregnancy

After moving to Norther Virginia, we first tried attending About Women OBGYN at Potomack Hospital website makes it sound like they have midwives on staff, which they don’t. We learned that it’s a standard practice in prenatal care to rotate the doctors so that every patient gets to meet every doctor so that when it’s time to deliver the patient isn’t stuck with a complete stranger. The only problem with this clinic was that there was no transfer of knowledge. We had to start from scratch with every doctor we met and there was much confusion about where Vicky was in her pregnancy. As a result, appointments for tests were miss-scheduled and prescriptions were mismanaged.

This experience of being on some sort of poorly-managed pregnancy assembly line prompted us to seriously look into midwife-assisted delivery. Usually this means home birthing; however, four dogs, three cats, and four other residents in the house made this option impractical. So we looked into birth centers staffed with midwives.

An question that comes up with delivering outside of a hospital setting is how safe is it? Studies demonstrate home birthing is as safe as hospital birthing, and studies suggesting otherwise tend to be deeply flawed (see also here). I surmise that these equivalent safety numbers have a lot to do with the fact that midwives and birth centers won’t accept high-risk pregnancies and rely on hospitals as a backup option for when labor does not progress.

In our search for certified midwives, we tried out Birth by Design, who was opening a new birth center in Fairfax Virginia. While the midwives there were very nice, there were some things that didn’t grok with me. They were very focused on herbal remedies and said that Vicky would have to agree to drinking an herbal tea every day for a healthy pregnancy. This seemed a little too New Age-y for me and I was further troubled when they said they had herbal solutions to breach pregnancies and other complications.

Sagan Ultrasound 20 Weeks into Pregnancy

Luckily, that same week we got taken off the waiting list for Birth Care in Alexandria Virginia. The midwives at this birthing center were very professional and clinical in their approach to labor and delivery. Their prenatal care was conditional on the patient taking responsibility for their health with prenatal vitamins, filling out their own chart for blood pressure and weight, setting up pediatric visits, proper diet, and, most importantly, taking birth classes to prepare for the experience.

Dr. Bradley believed there were instinctual behaviors animals were engaging to manage the pain and stress of childbirth. Looking to the animal kingdom for how other mammals handle labor we find the mother needs darkness, solitude, quiet, physical comfort and relaxation, controlled breathing, closed eyes, and the appearance of sleep. Our tour of Birth Care revealed an environment catered to providing such an environment, with a homey feel to the place, real beds, baths, and other comforts to allow the laboring mother to relax her body let her uterus do what it needs to do.

The Big Day: Labor and Delivery

(Note: Vicky has posted here birth story here, which is much more detailed than my abbreviated description. I highly recommend it for the detailed version of our birth story and how she prepared for labor.)

The Bradley Method classes were the most important thing we did to prepare for the big day, and that’s taking into consideration the fact that we only got halfway through them since Vicky’s water broke a month early and on July 12, 2011 Sagan Charles Somma was born at 4 pounds 13 ounces. The timing put him two days too early for us to go to the Birth Care Center, and we transferred to Alexandria Inova Hospital, a hospital we had never attended with doctors and nurses we had never met and had never discussed our desires for a natural, unmedicated birth.

We lucked out, however, as the staff was fantastic. Dr. Kenneth Adhoot observed that my wife was progressing through labor well and was admirably willing to step back and allow nature to take its course under the guidance of your nursing staff and midwife. Midwife Donna Greenfield was very professional and attended the actual delivery of our son, taking measures to avoid an episiotomy. Our nurse Heidi was a huge help, offering suggestions and coaching Vicky through her pushing.

We lucked out in another way in that just the night before we had gone shopping for all the supplies we would need for labor; unfortunately, I failed at the “Don’t let the gas tank go below 1/2 mark the last two months” bullet point and had to stop for gas on the way to the Birth Center, which Vicky was much less than thrilled about. Once at the hospital, our Birth Classes were invaluable in understanding all the procedures and anticipating the sequence of events, like when Vicky went into the Transistion Phase of labor and began doubting herself and her ability to go through a natural birth, but this passed within minutes and she focused to get through Active Labor like a champ.

Sagan Newborn

Despite being premature, Sagan was very healthy. He had a perfectly normal problem with his blood sugar dropping, and we got that rising within 24 hours by feeding him colostrum with a teaspoon. He had problems with jaundice for the first few days because Vicky is an A-Negative blood type and I am O Positive, which prompted Vicky’s immune system to attack Sagan’s red blood cells, but this cleared up quickly by putting him in sunlight and Vicky diligently forcing him to eat and flush out the bilirubin from his system. The only minor problem we had at the hospital during our two day stay there was in keeping Sagan’s body temperature up, which the nurses blamed on our inability to keep him properly swaddled; however, I quickly solved the problem by having the hospital turn off the air conditioning to our room, after which the nurses switched to complaining about how hot it was every time they came in. I owe it to the Birth Care midwives and their policy of keeping their center air conditioned during labor, but unairconditioned afterwards to keep the baby warm and healthy for knowing to ask for this.

Our Parenting Choices

Here’s a grab-bag of notes on some of our early parenting choices:

Breast Feeding: There are myriad health advantages to breast feeding over the health problems caused by formula feeding. We intend to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months and continue the practice for a full year. This sparked some controversy as a family member argued that breast feeding will prevent our conceiving another child until Sagan is weaned and we are nearing our 40s, where we start to move into high-risk pregnancy territory. Our ancestors breastfed exclusively for two years and continued to breastfeed for up to four years. This not only had the benefit of providing excellent nutrition to the child, but also prevented the mother from conceiving until the current child was sufficiently developed. There is also the monetary savings to consider, and Vicky demonstrates on her blog, the Medela breast pump has given us an exceptional return on our investment over the cost of formula feeding.

Immunizations: We have been and continue to get Sagan any and all immunizations suggested to us. Children who aren’t immunized result in hotspot breakouts of measles, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, and diphtheria. If you are considering postponing or foregoing vaccinations, please think about Benjamin Franklin’s personal lament about not vaccinating his son against smallpox:

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen. [emphasis mine]

At the time of my writing this in 2011, 738 people have died since 2007 that were vaccine preventable.

Circumcision: Decided against it despite being circumcised myself. The idea that a civilization of people who thought the all the animals in the world lived within walking distance of Noah’s home had better medical science than millions of years of penis evolution through natural selection seems pretty silly. The foreskin has a bundle of sensitive nerves, it keeps the head of the penis lubricated for easier vaginal penetration (this is why we substitute spit so much in modern sex) and allows the penis to move within the shaft during intercourse as nature intended, and a very promiscuous friend once told me uncircumcised men make better lovers. Don’t mutilate your child, let them make their own decision when they get older (You can read a good factsheet on this subject here).

Co-Sleeping: We have been cosleeping with Sagan rather than having him sleep in a separate crib. It makes sense to us from an evolutionary perspective. As Mark Vonnegut puts it, “The truth is, almost all mammals (including humans) sleep with their babies. Indeed, most human babies in most cultures sleep with their parents, and always have.” The breathing reflex is stimulated not directly by the absence of oxygen but rather indirectly by the presence of carbon dioxide, so sleeping next to the baby and sharing their breathing space increases the carbon dioxide levels in the air and should reduce apnea (I don’t have research to support this however, so take it as my opinion, not science). There is also a convenience element. Baby cries, one of us rolls over to feed him, baby goes back to sleep. With breastfeeding, the mother can roll over to offer a breast and go back to sleep while the infant feeds.

This is a controversial ideal in Western cultures, and each parent needs to read up on it and make their own choice about it. The American Academy of Pediatrics will eventually release an advisory on the subject, but until then, definitely do not cosleep if you are a smoker, on medication, or have been drinking, and if you do, research how to make your bed as safe as possible.

Baby Sign Language: This will surely be the subject of a future post, but thanks to a friend of ours with a Ph.D. in Anthropology, we will be trying out Baby Sign Language as a means of communicating with Sagan before he is able to express himself verbally. I’m hoping to experience some of the same insights into how the infant understands concepts as this blogger writes about with her daughter.

What We’ve Learned at 12 Weeks

What’s surprised me most about having a baby is what an ongoing learning experience we have gotten ourselves into. Specifically, it feels like we’ve gone on an anthropology expedition, observing the ethology of the human family. We are seeing how life was like for hundreds of thousands of years for our ancestors on the Serengeti.

The first thing we’ve learned is the importance of grandparents. Evolutionists suspect that menopause in human females is actually an evolutionary adaptation because it frees the woman up to contribute care for the children of her own children; in other words, grandmother’s are a human adaptation, contributing to the care of offspring as well as contributing to the transfer of cultural knowledge. Vicky’s mother has been invaluable in caring for Sagan, happy to play with him while we use the time to get some work done. Both Vicky’s mother and my own mother have been fantastic resources on the knowledge-front as well, leading to many phone calls for questions about childcare and issues that come up, and such cultural transmission from grandmothers is why humans needed increasingly larger brains. Vicky has a great blog post up about the importance of Grandmas in helping with childcare.

Something that has taken me by surprise is the complete helplessness of the human infant. Science has demonstrated that infants are not blank slates; however, they certainly appear to be blank slates. I was blown away by how incredibly discombobulated is a newborn. They cannot focus on anything except bright lights and make no social connections with those around them until they are a few month old.

This again is the result of evolution. Humans have big brains, which make us incredibly adaptable to any environment; unfortunately, those big brains can’t fit through the birth canal without the mother’s hips being too wide to allow them to walk upright. So biology found a compromise, the infant is born with its brain only partially developed with the remainder of the development taking place outside of the womb. After a few months of oftentimes patience-straining nights up with Sagan, he started making eye-contact with us and now returns our smiles, building the social bonds that endear him to us as such behaviors endeared infants to our ancestors so that they would raise them the many years it takes to become autonomous members of the clan.

Watching baby level-up appears to have the effect of leveling us up as well.

Sagan Smiling

Further Reading

You can see the Thank You letter I sent Inova Hospital here.

You can see the still-rough draft of our Birth Plan here.

I highly recommend the opening portion of This American Life’s episode Unconditional Love, which covers the history of psychology, the pre-1950s idea that affection and tenderness were bad for children, and the psychologist who proved the importance of love, who was a callous person himself.

Just this week I started reading Geek Dad’s book of suggestions for parenting with things like RPG Parenting and weekend projects with your kids. Looking forward to trying some of them out in a few years.

Update

A complete oversight, I meant to give a huge Hat Tip and Thanks to An American Expat in Deutschland for lending Vicky and I so many of the great books we read!

On top of Pluto being demoted, the non-existence of Brontosaurus, and whether it’s okay to proposition a woman on an elevator at 4:00 in the morning we can now add a fun new debate for the online scientific community: is Archeopteryx a Bird or Dinosaur?

Analysis of a Xiaotingia zhengi fossil is driving the debate. The animal is “very closely related” to Arhceopteryx according to the researchers, but its characteristics more closely relate it to Velociraptors than birds:

After analysing the traits present in Xiaotingia and its relations, Xu and his colleagues are suggesting that the creatures bear more resemblance to the dinosaurs Velociraptor and Microraptor than to early birds, and so belong in the dinosaur group Deinonychosauria rather than in the bird group, Avialae. Many features led the team to this decision, but the most immediately noticeable are that Xiaotingia, Archaeopteryx and Anchiornis have shallow snouts and expanded regions behind their eye sockets. Microraptor has similar traits, but the early birds in Avialae have very different skulls.

Xiaotingia zhengi
Copyright Xing Lida and Liu Yi

To summarize: Back when Archeopteryx was the only fossil we had that possessed both dinosaur and bird traits, it made sense to consider it the “link” between dinosaurs and birds. Now that we have lots of other bird-dinosaur hybrid fossils from this same period in evolutionary history, we no longer know which of them, if any, is a direct ancestor of modern birds. Therefore, it is no longer accurate to call Archeopteryx the first bird, because there are so many other contenders in the mix now.

The constant refining of our understanding of the Cosmos is science’s greatest strength. The fact that we can change our minds to fit the evidence is the most beautiful and revolutionary idea to come out of the Enlightenment. As Carl Sagan wrote:

One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.

Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it’s accompanied by an error bar – a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It’s a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge. Except in pure mathematics nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

But this isn’t the end of the debate. This is just one research paper.

Feathered Velociraptor mongoliensis
Credit: Matt Martyniuk

This is a tough question that grows tougher all the time as our library of fossils grows and what were once clear transitions between species along the tree of life get smoothed out into slow, gradual changes, just as evolutionary theory predicts. When we have enough fossils to illustrate a clear, smooth transition from one species to another, where do we draw the line between the two? As Richard Dawkins puts it , what individual gets to be the first representative of their species?

As we trace the ancestry of modern Homo sapiens backwards, there must come a time when the difference from living people is sufficiently great to deserve a different specific name, say Homo ergaster. Yet, every step of the way, individuals were presumably sufficiently similar to their parents and their children to be placed in the same species. Now we go back further, tracing the ancestry of Homo ergaster, and there must come a time when we reach individuals who are sufficiently different from ‘mainstream’ ergaster to deserve a different specific name, say Homo habilis. And now we come to the point of this argument. As we go back further still, at some point we must start to hit individuals sufficiently different from modern Homo sapiens to deserve a different genus name: say Australopithecus. The trouble is, ‘sufficiently different from modern Homo sapiens’ is another matter entirely from ‘sufficiently different from the earliest Homo’, here designated Homo habilis. Think about the first specimen of Homo habilis to be born. Her parents were Australopithecus. She belonged to a different genus from her parents? That’s just dopey! Yes it certainly is. But it is not reality that’s at fault, it’s our human insistence on shoving everything into a named category. In reality, there was no such creature as the first specimen of Homo habilis. There was no first specimen of any species or any genus or any order or any class or any phylum. Every creature that has ever been born would have been classified – had there been a zoologist around to do the classifying – as belonging to exactly the same species as its parents and its children. Yet, with the hindsight of modernity, and with the benefit – yes, in this one paradoxical sense benefit – of the fact that most of the links are missing, classification into distinct species, genera, families, orders, classes and phyla becomes possible.

Missing links make classifying species taxonomically possible.

So this whole Archeopteryx downgrade begs the question: What’s the first bird now? Well, let’s look at the branches of the evolutionary tree:

Bird Phylogeny, Drawing the Line Between Birds and Dinosaurs

So congratulations to Confuciusornithidae (“holy Confucius bird”) on becoming the first bird!–At least in some scientists’ minds… until we have more fossils and more debate to work this out.

Of course, this whole Bird Versus Dinosaur debate ignores a larger debate in the realm of taxonomy, whether reptiles belong in the field of Herpetology, with amphibians like frogs and salamanders, or Ornithology, with birds. Richard Dawkins goes so far as to argue that the whole class Reptilia is silly for having some species that are more closely related to amphibians, but others more closely related to birds and yet birds are really just another branch of reptiles.

Or, as xkcd simply puts it:

Ornithology VS Herpetology
Credit: xkcd

References

Xu, X., You, H., Du, K., & Han, F. (2011). An Archaeopteryx-like theropod from China and the origin of Avialae Nature, 475 (7357), 465-470 DOI: 10.1038/nature10288

Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth

Carl Sagan, Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Further Reading:

A great site overviewing the links between dinosaurs and birds.

Yuri’s Night 2011

50 years ago, on April 12th, 1961 cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin piloted the Vostok 1 into space, entering the history books as the first human to achieve space flight. It follows the 50th anniversary of the first artificial satellite in orbit, Sputnik, the first living passenger to make it into space, Laika, and America throwing our hat into the space race. It will be eight long years until we can celebrate the next big semicentennial event, the Apollo Moon landing.

Eastern Standard Time

Yuri’s Night is a world-dance party celebrating human adventures in space and raising consciousnesses concerning space flight with art, music, and costumes. I previously blogged about attending an event in 2008 with the Extropia community in Second Life. This year Vicky and I attended a live event, just outside of Washington DC at the Artisphere in Rosslyn Virginia, and had a blast.

Jedi and Dark Sith Guard the Moon Bounce

The Out of this World Party definitely lived up to its name. Tunes like Muse’s Starlight, Black Hole Sun, and a ska/reggae version of the Dr.Who theme helped set the atmosphere, as did a great performance, in space jumpsuits by the Caribbean-Jazz-Soul-Ska band Eastern Standard Time, who brilliantly got everyone out on the dance floor by handing out Tetris blocks for people to play with. While the band played, projectors ran through scenes from science fiction b-movie cult classics like “War of the Satellites,”Attack of the Crab Monsters,” and “StarCrash.”

Yuri’s Night Costume Party

Lightsaber-weilding jedis and dark sith stood guard over the Moon Bounce, in which Vicky and I had a great time leaping around. Costumes ranged from science fiction classics to beer-dispensing robots and drag queens. The art exhibit on the upper floor was fantastic, covering aliens, robots, space chimps and more, with most of the pieces available for viewing on the event website (Click on “Yuri’s Night” and “C2YN Art Exhibit”). I expect Yuri’s Night to become a yearly todo for my wife and I. We might have to get there early enough for the burlesque shows too. : )

Be sure to check out the documentary “First Orbit,” which will be released for free download on April 12th.

You can also check out my Flickr Set of photos from the party.

Atheist, agnostic, humanist, secularist, skeptic, empiricist, Ockhamist, and Patafarianist are all different flavors of the philosophy of life my wife and I share, but Vicky and I prefer the term “Spiritual Naturalist” to describe the deeply fulfilling sense of wonder we get from engaging the natural world around us. This ionian enchantment, as it’s known, emerges from an understanding that our reality is comprehensible through natural scientific laws, and just as members of the plethora of diverse religions of the world celebrate their spiritualism in sanctifying their marriages, we wanted to celebrate our sense of wonder for the world on our wedding day.

The Virginia Living Museum

It started with finding an appropriate date for the event, something special in the realm of nature. With numerous science holidays to choose from, we quickly found the Vernal Equinox, the first day of spring when there are equal periods of night and day as the seasons progress towards summer, fell on a Saturday and would give us plenty of time to prepare for the event. Part of the fun of choosing one of the equinoxes or solstices for a wedding day is that we celebrate our anniversaries on the reoccurrence of the equinox, so while our Wedding occurred on March 20th, 2010, every so often we will celebrate our anniversary on the 21st of March instead.

The Ceremony

Ceremony in Nature

We chose The Virginia Living Museum as our venue for the ceremony. This gave us the option to bring the wedding inside should the weather prove too cold, but it was a perfect day, and we were able to hold the main event outdoors across from the Coastal Plain Aviary, making birds like the Yellow-Crowned Night-Heron part of the event.

Reverend Launa Byrd did a fantastic job of working with us to craft a ceremony that was secular, but also full of spirituality and awe of nature. Her husband Patrick Byrd was also very accommodating of our unusual music requests, which included classical pieces from Star Trek the Motion Picture and Conan the Barbarian.

Thank You to Parents

Cycad’s and Planting Pot at the Ceremony Table

We skipped this part of the ceremony in rehearsal to surprise our parents in the actual ceremony. Reverend Byrd suggested we thank each other’s parents for raising us to be such a perfect match for one another. As part of this, we would present a gift to each of our parents. In keeping with the nature theme, we intended to give our parents Wollemi Pine’s, a Lazarus taxon, meaning a species once thought extinct but discovered still living in a remote part of the world, but due to complications getting our order filled, we substituted Cycad plants, which, while never having gone extinct, date back 280 million years in the fossil record.

The Rings

Titanium Rings with Meteor Inlay

We ordered our rings from Titanium-Buzz.com, going for simple bands, but with an inlay of meteorite around them. The iron-rich material provides a very nice texture, and, since iron is the heaviest element that can be manufactured in a star’s core, provides the opportunity for some eloquent eulogizing on the rings’ significance both materially and geometrically:

Your rings are circles and a circle is the symbol of the sun, the earth, the universe, of wholeness, perfection, peace and unity. It is forged from elements that were created by a supernova. This means that the metal in these rings has travelled billions of years through time and billions of light-years through space to be here on earth today. And now they will become a part of the both of you.

A perfect circle contains an element of infinite complexity. Like circles, your rings have no beginning and no end and in the sacred tradition of marriage, rings have come to symbolize eternal love and the endless union of body, of mind, and spirit. The circle, like marriage, was created to be forever, and endless. Just like the number “PI” a number that goes on without end. To quote Lisa Hoffman, “Marriage is like PI – natural, irrational, and VERY IMPORTANT.”

The Reading

Wedding Party

I spent some time trying to figure out how to parse Langdon Smith’s epically brilliant and romantic 1909 poem Evolution. A Fantasy down into something that could be read at our ceremony; however, despite the way the poem makes my spine tingle every time I read it, I wasn’t sure it was something a general audience could well appreciate at first exposure. Carl Sagan also has some highly accessible and significantly inspiring passages that could work well as a wedding ceremony reading for their forward-thinking and positive visions of a human future. To fit best with our chosen venue, we went with the discovery Vicky made in Karen I. Shragg’s delightful poem Think Like a Tree, which is perfect in its simplicity, accessibility, and spirituality.

The Unity Ceremony

Planting a Blight-Resistant American Chestnut Seed

In a perfect bit of synchronicity, Vicky came into possession of some blight-resistant American Chestnut seeds, which were sent to her early from the American Chestnut Foundation:

In 2008, I visited one of the research farms of The American Chestnut Foundation and learned about their backcross breeding effort to restore the American chestnut. It’s hard work! Innoculating trees, evaluating blight resistance, pollen collection, flower bagging, meticulous hand pollinations and fall harvests of the spikey burs. After 25 years, all that effort produced the B3F3 generation. Dubbed the “Restoration chestnut”, the trees are 15/16th American and potentially blight resistant

With this seed, we were able to plant the seed of hope for another Lazarus species.

Like this tree, today, you establish the strong roots of your future. A tree is only as strong as it’s roots. The roots are what bring food and water to the rest of it to keep everything alive and working. A tree can’t grow strong if the roots are too shallow. It can’t grow stronger if you only concentrate on the surface of living. If you try to send your roots into dry ground, they will not have much of a chance to grow, no matter how deep they go. They need a constant reliable source of water for steady growth. You both need to be that kind of constant source of nourishment for each other now and always. With that, your marriage will thrive.

Wedding Programs

Wedding Program

With so many science and nature aspects to the wedding ceremony, I couldn’t resist writing up a program that further explained the wonder of it all. From the elements in our rings traveling light years of distance and millions of years in time to be here today, to the Lazarus Taxons and reintroduction of the American chestnut, to the infinite irrational complexity of the number Pi, and the Earth’s position in relation to the Sun for the Vernal Equinox. My hope was to make the ceremony as enlightening as possible.

The Reception

Owl Exhibit

The venue itself was very wondrous, with numerous aquariums providing an enchanting atmosphere. The Virginia Living Museum staff were on hand with living displays like a tiny one-eyed owl that the children we encouraged parents to bring to the event could pet and open pools of water welcoming kids and adults to touch the exhibits. One of Vicky’s Uncles was so inspired by and indoor living bee hive, that he ordered his own honey bees when he got home and started raising them himself.

Centerpiece by Vick

With Pi Day taking place just a week before (3.14), Vicky had the idea to make Pi-shaped chocolates for the guests place settings. For centerpieces, we dropped by Lowes just before the winter months and bought up their entire succulent plant collection, which was on clearance. These plants thrive despite neglect, and the centerpieces we made from them, with the help of the children in our neighborhood, continue to thrive today. This also holds mostly true for the bouquets used in the ceremony, which were made of a combination of succulents, fern fiddleheads, and other assorted plants to make a very unique botanical selection. Many of the succulents from the bouquets continue to thrive today.

Cake and Bouquet

Vicky and Bouquets

We kicked things off with Monty Python’s The Galaxy Song for our first dance, which provides a really nice beat for a waltzing box-step and brings a welcomed levity for taking the pressure off Vicky, myself, and our amateur dance skills. The rest of the night was filled with the standard dancing, children running around, and socializing, only with additional species of mammals, fish, and insects in the mix : )

Aquarium Kiss

Additional Notes

More photos of the ceremony, venue, and reception at the flickr set and at this flickr set, photos courtesy of Liza Franco Photography and Deane Felton respectively. Liza knew so much about where to be and what to stage to get great photos.

You can download a copy of our complete wedding ceremony script here to search for quotes and inspirations to incorporate into your own ceremonies.

You can download a copy of the wedding program here to adapt for your own ceremonies. The formatting works well for making mini books, but you’ll need to figure out the printing orientation yourself with your own printer (print all even pages, then load up those pages back in the printer and print the odd pages, fold, cut and staple in the middle).

If you’re looking to part a fool and their money, psychic readings are a great business*. Through the art of cold reading,by making statements that seem personal, but are true for most people, the psychic creates the illusion of having supernatural intuition about their client. For instance, they may say “I sense that you are sometimes insecure, especially with people you don’t know very well.” Who isn’t? Or, if the client is older, they may say, “Your father passed on due to problems in his chest or abdomen,” which would be true for the majority of causes of death. Psychics also use the rainbow ruse strategy of making a statement that is vague and contradictory about the client, such as “Most of the time you are positive and cheerful, but there has been a time in the past when you were very upset.” It’s probably not hard to find experiences in your life that match this statement to yourself, and if you can’t, the psychic can claim you need to look deeper or that you are suppressing something.

A favorite tool of psychics in performing their readings are tarot cards. These cards come in a wide variety of themes, with fantastic artwork, and generalized symbolism that takes on different meanings depending on where the card appears in a spread. They work because they exploit both the cold reading technique and generate rainbow statements in their symbolism.

Tarot Universal de Dali
Credit: Le.Mat

I occasionally do Tarot readings for myself. Over the years, when confronted with a challenging life issue, I would turn to The Mythic Tarot set for help figuring out what to do. This set portrays four different Greek Myths in the four different suits, and I always have to keep the book open when doing a reading because I find it impossible to remember what the cards mean.

I expect many scientists out there would say that my playing with the tarot harms my credibility as a skeptic, but I am completely aware of what makes the tarot work, and have no delusions that the meanings I appear to find in the cards are self-generated. The cards are like the old Principia Discordia quote about books, “…a mirror, when a monkey looks in, no apostle looks out.”

That doesn’t mean the cards are useless. The tarot meme has survived five centuries, in part for the solace it provides, but also because it serves a useful function. A tarot reading provides an exercise in deep, sustained thought on a subject, each new card challenging the practitioner to look at the subject of inquiry from a different angle. The tarot spread doesn’t answer any questions, but like a Rogerian Psychologist it prompts us to find the correct answers within ourselves.

Science Tarot

With this obligatory, “I am not a flake,” disclaimer out of the way, let me say how incredibly happy I was to discover the recently released Science Tarot set. That’s right, science-themed tarot cards, and they are absolutely delightful. All the traditional cards are here, but instead of wands, pentacles, swords, and cups, we have Bunsen burners, magnifying glasses, scalpels, and beakers. Filling the roles of king, queen, knight, and page in the various suits are science giants like Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Hypatia, Galileo, Herschel, Oppenheimer, Barbara McClintok, Carl Sagan, John Muir, and others. While the concepts surrounding science and academia fill in the major arcana, such as the student playing the Fool, Schrodinger’s Cat as the Wheel of Fortune, Conservation of Energy as Justice, and, most apropos, the Devil being unquestioning behavior. The cards tell a version of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey Monomyth adapted to the natural world, turning science into an epic hero’s quest, complete with discovery, strife, growth, and achievement.

The set also introduces three new spreads for tarot readings: the Chemical Reaction, Periodic Table, and, my new favorite, the Benzene Ring.

The Chemical Reaction Spread

This simple spread is actually pretty standard for most tarot sets. It consists of asking a question and laying out three cards. The leftmost card represents the past, middle the present, and rightmost the future. I’m not too big on this spread, as it isn’t as involved and challenging as others, lacking the deep, meditative immersion in a subject that makes tarot such a useful exercise. It does make for a useful example of a tarot reading, however:

My Chemical Reaction Spread

Here’s the breakdown of my reading, using the book as a reference:

1. Reactants Representing the Past: Seven of Wands (Expansion), a red giant star representing a maturing state, inner creation, “finding your voice.”
2. Transition State of the Present: The World (Grand Unified Theory), a theory of everything, the achievement of a “grand and profound goal,” attaining “wholeness and prosperity.”
3. Product Representing the Future: Eight of Wands (Big Bang), the climactic birth of the Universe, sending ideas out into the public sphere, a growing universe of ideas and influence.

This spread speaks pretty clearly to me. My past has been one of constantly working on my personal growth, my recent years have been filled with a sense of accomplishment as I fell into security with my soul mate and philosophy of science, and my future plans are to promote this worldview and contribute to it as much as possible. The message I get from the spread: keeping working at it. If the cards were reversed, I would probably find a way to read the same message in them. If I was unable to find a message in the cards relating to my life, then, as the authors say, “If a tarot reading seems to make little sense, another reading may speak more clearly instead.”

The Periodic Table Spread

The Periodic Table Spread

With 10 cards, each one prompting the practitioner to focus on a different aspect of the question, this spread provides a great mental tool for deep immersion on a topic. The positions of the cards relate to the elements on the periodic table in terms of being reactive, inert, transitory, and a place for the “undiscovered element.” I’ve found it a challenging spread at times, when a card appears in a position where I cannot find any connection to my own life, but everything up to that point had worked well, but the challenge itself provides deeper insights, even if it cannot be resolved.

The Benzene Ring Spread

Benzene Ring Spread

These six cards fall into place where the hydrogen atoms link on a benzene molecule, running in a full circle from perception of the subject to resolution. In the above spread, I have drawn the following:

1. Personal Perception: Four of Wands (Brown Dwarf), waiting at the threshold to become or fulfill one’s promise
2. Personal Intention: Ace of Swords (Reductionism), a path of discovery and insight, peeling away layers to find knowledge
3. External Perception: Six of Swords (Quantum Sea), immediate perceptions can be misleading, accepting apparent contradictions can provide guidance
4. Complication: Eight of Pentacles (Drift), experiences and knowledge gained in journey may be positive, but often traumatic in their transformative nature
5. Integrating two Perceptions: Seven of Swords (Chaos Theory), trying to maintain total control is futile, go with the flow
6. The Resolution: Eight of Wands (Big Bang), releasing creative energies, expanding the impact one has on the lives of others

Here’s the part I really like about this spread: you can run it again on the same question since the things you learn in the first run of the spread have changed your outlook on the topic, the second run of the spread can be interpreted in the context of these new insights:

Benzen Ring Spread, Second Run

1. Personal Perception: The Sun (Duality of Light), unification of opposing ideas into one reality, appreciating end result
2. Personal Intention: Three of Pentacles (Bonding), introduction of a new influence stimulating new growth and creativity
3. External Perception: The Lovers (Binary Star), balance in a relationship producing radiant energy
4. Complication: Nine of Pentacles (Aurora), brilliant, fleeting display of beauty on a grand scale, casting off of old for a new self
5. Integrating two Perceptions: Four of Cups (Dormancy), waiting at the threshold, rest and preservation that may lead to missed opportunity
6. The Resolution: King of Pentacles (Marie Curie, Visionary), “look into the distance, take command, and do what must be done”

I like how there are some mirror images in these two readings, a symmetry of concepts. The first reading has a personal perception of dormancy and being at a threshold of becoming in the brown dwarf, while the second reading has the same concepts in the integration of perceptions place with the dormancy of the lungfish. The resolution of the first reading is a brilliant burst of expression in the big bang, but this same kind of event is the second reading’s complication in the Aurora. Symmetry

What do these two readings mean? They mean whatever you find in them for yourself.

Being Creative

The book accompanying any tarot set is meant only as a starting point. From it, you can play with crafting your own spreads and semantic connections in the cards. My favorite aspect of Science Tarot is the familiarity of the people and concepts portrayed in the major and minor arcana. I know Carl Sagan far better than I know Odysseus, and will gain insights when he comes up in a reading from my personal experience with the Cosmos series and his many books. Lack of inquisitiveness speaks more to my personal philosophy than a supernatural lord of the underworld, just as the Conservation of Energy principle provides a more concrete concept than the sword and scales of Justice. I can lay these cards out and, based on what I know about the concepts, set the book down and make up my own interpretation of the spread.

* My mother was very into New Age belief when I was growing up, and I was heavily exposed to the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) culture in Virginia Beach, and I can attest, the majority of psychics have the best intentions. They don’t know they are doing cold readings and making rainbow statements, they truly believe they have insights. A great article by a former psychic about how the culture creates these beliefs is Karla McLaren’s Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures. Just as no one consciously designed the tarot to be universal, psychic culture didn’t set out to defraud people. I perceive them the same way I percieve psychiatrists: well-meaning, but no scientific support.

Illustration of a Particle Rising in Potential Energy through Information Alone
Credit: Nature Physics, doi:10.1038/nphys1821

Last week, a paper published in Nature Physics, Experimental demonstration of information-to-energy conversion and validation of the generalized Jarzynski equality, described an experiment where information was converted into energy by exploiting Brownian motion. It involved using the vibrations of an atom and observations of its changing position to let it naturally work its way up a sine wave, increasing its potential energy, which could, theoretically, be used to perform work when it vibrates back down the wave. It was a real-world demonstration of another thought experiment that challenged the Second Law. In 1867 Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell crafted a scenario whereby Brownian motion could be exploited to sort atoms according to their energy states, which later became known as Maxwell’s Demon¹, an apparent violation of the second law:

… if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics….

In other words, something like the following diagram (or you can play the role of Maxwell’s demon in this online simulation):

Maxwell’s Demon
Credit: Htkym

I don’t like this description because it’s too elaborate, sounds as if it’s invoking magic with the fantastical demon, and begs too many questions about the hypothetical mechanism by which the barrier will be opened and closed. How will that work without spending energy?

The answer: fugetabout it. There are lots of possible mechanisms, all of which will cost varying degrees of energy to function², but that’s immaterial to what this situation is illustrating. The gate is not acting on the atoms to sort them, the atoms’ natural Brownian motion is moving them about and the well-timed use of the gate simply captures them in a state of less entropy and prevents them from returning to a state of increased entropy.

Take this much simpler example, where the gate is closed only once at a point when there are no molecules in a portion of a vial:

A Simple Tube Gate Increases the Air Pressure
Credit: Eric H. Neilsen

The entropy of the gas in the vial has been reduced, storing potential energy in the form of air pressure. If the amount of work into which that air pressure can be transformed exceeds the entropy generated in closing the gate, a distinct possibility, then it appears we have violated the second law. So where did the missing entropy go?

According to Leó Szilárd in 1929, and later reaffirmed by Léon Brillouin, the entropy was generated in the creation of information. An observer had to logically recognize the opportunity to strategically drop the gate, which meant they had to generate entropy pinning down the bits, the ones and zeroes, for that information.

How much energy? In Maxwell’s example, the demon has to know the velocity and position of the atoms in the box. That’s a lot of information to quantify. In the simpler example, the demon would still need to know the positions of the atoms to know where to drop the gate, also a lot of information. We need to come up with the simplest scenario where the least amount of information is needed to reduce the entropy in the box:

One Bit of Information Needed to Reduce the Entropy
Credit: Eric H. Neilsen

In this design, we have two trap doors and a chamber between them. We are trying to get the atoms in the right container into the left container to increase the air pressure and potential energy in the system. We have a simple computer program controlling the two gates that goes like this (in pseudocode):


If the number of atoms in the chamber is greater than 0:
Open left gate, Close right gate
Else:
Close left gate, open right gate


In this setup, it only takes one bit of information to decrease the entropy in the system, as simple as it can get, and the energy required to set a single bit is k T ln2, as explained here:

John von Neumann, in a 1949 lecture, set the minimum price of “an elementary act of information” at kT ln 2. In this formula k is Boltzmann’s constant, which is the conversion factor for expressing temperature in energy units; its numerical value is 1.4 x 10-23 joules per kelvin. T is the absolute temperature, and ln 2 is the natural logarithm of 2, a number that appears here because it corresponds to one bit of information—the amount of information needed to distinguish between two equally likely alternatives. At room temperature (300 kelvins), kT ln 2 works out to about 3 x 10-21 joule, or 3 zeptojoules. This is a minuscule amount of energy; Ralph C. Merkle of the Georgia Institute of Technology estimates that it is the average kinetic energy of a single air molecule at room temperature. [emphasis mine]

So the energy necessary to set a bit would be the same as the average energy of an atom at room temperature. So the entropy reduced from the system with each atom sorted is equal to that of the entropy generated in the demon for each bit of memory needed to recognize that the switch should be flipped. Case closed? Not quite. The total entropy must increase in the system for the Second Law to hold; the syntropy (reduction in entropy) and entropy cannot be equal.

So where is the remaining entropy? The answer, it appears, is that it is bound up in the information. At some point we have to release these bits from memory to make space for new bits. Erasing bits also takes energy. According to Landauer’s principle, after Rolf Landauer of IBM in 1961, it costs the same amount of energy as it took to set it. In other words, the set bit has potential entropy stored within it, which gets released when the information is released, a final cost of two times k T ln2, meaning the entropy generated within the demon is twice what it removes from the system it is manipulating.

And there will be a need to free memory. Note that in this example, we are only considering the cost of observing the system once against the gain of increasing the air pressure by one atom. In reality, we would also need to consider the frequency of observations the demon would have to make, checking the system periodically to determine whether there’s an atom to let through or not. The demon will quickly experience diminishing returns, and the amount of entropy generated in memory consumption will outstrip the entropy removed from the observed system.

Demon Entropy vs Entropy Removed
Credit: Eric H. Neilsen

I’ve given this topic a painfully overly simplistic treatment that doesn’t take into account the myriad of other thought experiments on the subject, the possibility of reversible computing, or loads of other deeply philosophical, mathematically-challenging errata, but it should provide deeper insights into what the University of Tokyo researchers accomplished: allowing Brownian motion to give a particle the chance of moving up a sine wave, recognizing when it did so using information, and moving the gate to prevent it from vibrating back down the steps, transforming information into potential energy. While I have covered the most extreme hypothetical means of reducing the entropy generated to do this, they did this at the cost of energy to run the apparatus for observing the particle, the electric field to prevent it from rattling down the wave, and to power the researchers operating it. In comparison to the amount of potential energy added to this single particle, the entropy generated was gargantuan.

Reference:

Toyabe, S., Sagawa, T., Ueda, M., Muneyuki, E., & Sano, M. (2010). Experimental demonstration of information-to-energy conversion and validation of the generalized Jarzynski equality Nature Physics DOI: 10.1038/nphys1821

¹ Note: the term “demon” here is simply meant to indicate an agent performing a service, similar to the way the term is used in Computer Science for certain software processes (Fox News won the stupidest headline award on this one with “Scientists Convert Information into “Demonic” Energy, which led to a few interesting comments by Christians on the article).

² My favorite barrier would be one that uses a pendulum to open and close. When the pendulum is at one of the apexes of its swing, it is caught and a little bit of energy is expended to raise it to the height it was at initially

Further Reading:

10/10/10 is not only an entire power of ten more awesome than the other 99 years’ worth of 10/10 days in this century, 101010 is also the meaning of life in binary! Take a moment of silent reflection at 1010 AM, for yet even two more powers of awesomeness (within your timezone)!

The History of Exploring Powers of 10

Begin with the 1957 book Cosmic View, The Universe in 40 Jumps by Dutch educator Kees Boeke, which used illustrations and text to zoom out from a girl holding a cat, inexplicably sitting next to a blue whale. The linked website has all the illustrations and text for exploration.

Cosmic View

The 1968 Eva Szasz film Cosmic Zoom was an animation contemplating the size of our Universe inspired by Boeke’s work:

The 1977 short film Powers of 10 by Charles and Ray Eames conducted the same exploration as Cosmic Zoom, but began its journey in Chicago and used photography where possible (they also have a Powers of 10 Day Kit for sale for instructors looking for activities):

Narrated by Morgan Freeman, the 1996 IMAX film Cosmic Voyage takes the same exponential path, but with the benefit of computer animation:

My favorite is the intro to the 1997 film Contact based on the book by Carl Sagan, which used radio broadcasts to (inaccurately) illustrate where the viewer was in the Universe:

Today, we don’t just passively consume, we interact. So check out this Scale of the Universe flash demonstration (for a total mind-frak, click on the Wrong Version link after playing with the real one (the Swirly Version is nice too)).

Scale of the Universe

Finally, experience the incredible resolution, detail, scalability, and interactivity of going outside and enjoying life.

Happy Powers of 10 Day!

You can also queue up Carl Sagan’s Cosmos to enjoy, of which the complete series is available on Netflix instant watch and on Hulu.

Carl Sagan Portal

Sunflower
Credit: riandreu

Living things form “pockets of resistance” to the force of entropy. They do this through syntropy, or negentropy, which is the entropy we export to reduce our internal entropy; in other words, it’s the waste energy we generate to keep our soma in an organized working state. We collect the sun’s waste energy and use it to organize ourselves through syntropy.

How Much Information Entropy?
Credit: Moi

In Information Systems, entropy, known as Shannon entropy for Claude Shannon, is the measure of uncertainty in a random variable. A coin toss has one bit of entropy for the 50/50 chance of it turning up heads or tails, 0 or 1. A six-sided dice carries three bits of entropy for the possible outcomes it may produce with each roll (1 (000), 2 (001), 3 (010), 4 (011), 5 (100), 6 (101)). The weather has an amount of entropy difficult to quantify, but it varies from location to location. The weather in New York has more entropy than the weather in Southern California because Southern California has a more consistent climate. Similarly, in our first example, if we were dealing with a rigged coin, one that turned up heads more often than tails, then there would be less than one bit of entropy in each coin toss because we would expect heads more frequently than tails.

On the face of it, the only thing in common with the thermodynamic and information theory definitions is that entropy is a measure of disorder, but the two are analogous in other ways. In our thermodynamic Universe things move toward a state of increasing entropy, and a similar tendency towards a state of total uniformity occurs in an information system, only in reverse.

A living organism in an information system starts out in a world of absolute entropy, nothing is known. As that life interacts with its Universe, the amount of entropy in the Universe decreases for that being, and the amount of its internal entropy increases as what it knows becomes more of a variable to its peers. As the beings living in an information system decrease the entropy of their universe, it tends toward a state of absolute syntropy, absolute predictability.

We exist in a thermodynamic system, and it powers the information systems in our brains, the information systems we construct, and the information system these combine to form in our civilization. The increase of syntropy in an information system comes at the cost of an increase of entropy in the thermodynamic system powering it. Our thermodynamic system is winding down, a bad thing for us, but our information system is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, more syntropic. This brings a deeper insight to H.G. Wells’ prescient observation: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

Notes:

In your recent review of “Extract,” you made the comment about the film “Idiocracy” that “those Idiots had the benefit of a few hundred years during which to refute Darwin by evolving less intelligence.” I know that you are a man who appreciates science, and thought you should know that your statement reflects a common misunderstanding of evolution through natural selection: that species are always evolving to better, more advanced states. In fact, there are many examples of animals “de-evolving” to previous states, such as whales, which are descendent of land mammals, but gave up their legs and returned to the seas. Many species of whale still have the remnants of tiny hip bones floating deep inside them and the remnants of finger bones inside their fins.

Vestigial Hip Bones in Whales
Credit: Moi

The same is true of intelligence. Our big brains have conferred a magnificent survival advantage on us, but they come at a huge cost in energy to fuel them. The Indonesian “hobbit” fossils, homo floresiensis, discovered in recent years tell the story of a species of human that, once geographically isolated on an island with limited resources, adapted by shrinking in stature, including atrophying of the brain. The sea squirt is born with a brain, which it uses to navigate the world until it finds a suitable spot to plant itself, at which point it promptly .

I believe the evidence, in the form of increasing average IQs and other test measures, shows that we are growing more intelligent as a species. The sophisticated cultural environment we have constructed makes increasing demands on our average intelligence in order to survive and be successful; however, the sea squirt and homo floresiensis are cautionary tales that we must remain ever-vigilant. As the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane said, “The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence.”

Sincerely,

Ryan Somma

http://ideonexus.com

PS – Thank you so much for your recent blog-post about trivia. You so eloquently expressed ideas I have been trying to articulate for years on the subject.