Tales from the Lorax

Long ago, it was told to us that the care for the land was intimately connected to the care for the other. How we treat another human can not be divorced with how we treat the environment. Saving the land is saving the poor; ending war is protecting nature itself. We see this in the call to the Year of Jubilee, in which the Israelites were called to depend on God by letting the land lie fallow every 7th year. Incidentally, this allowed the land to rejuvenate, and provided a fuller crop in subsequent years- a practice we now know as sound farming. This was a time connected with a restoration of justice, and a return to equity- a practice we now know as socialism. In other places the prophets command to not

add house to house
and join field to field
until there is no more room
and you alone are left in the land.

There was an awareness that greed can become unbounded, and lead to devastation. In a culture that was intensely corporate, so unlike our modern American individualistic society, the concept of being left alone was horrible indeed. It would come about because some had desired "modernity", cities and human construction, taking over nature, and acquiring more and more for themselves at the expense of the masses of the poor. And this was because, as far as we know, the Year of Jubilee was never applied, save perhaps once, under King Josiah. God's people ignored his teachings on equality, poverty, and the environment. And when people refused to give up their land, those with wealth and power would take by force what was not freely given, as predicted by the prophet Samuel.

Years later, another prophet, and more than a prophet, a leader in the Early Church, James, again tied in the concern for the poor with war and strife, as he pointed out that fighting comes from coveting, in turn coming from desiring with wrong motives- just before he has perhaps the strongest condemnation of the rich to be found in the Bible, whom he argues inherently gain their wealth on the backs of the oppressed, through exploitation and murder.

Now we find studies to back up these basic principles. Conservation International has recently found that most of the world's hotspots directly correlate with the areas of the greatest war and killing. Hotspots are places with extreme biodiversity and extreme endangerment- they have a disproportionate number of unique species, that are disproportionately likely to soon go extinct. 81% of major human conflicts in the last fifty years took place in these hotspots.

An intriguing corollary to this is the suggestion that perhaps we innately prefer the areas with greater diversity, hearkening back to something in our ancient, more natural roots before cities, and thus tend to fight over what we don't have, but all want. There may be an evolutionary mandate to desire these spots, but there is a Biblical warning for why we fight over them. Contrary to groups like the Quiverfull Movement, recently highlighted on NPR, the Biblical mandate is not simply to always have more children. For another aspect of I Isaiah's warning on adding land to land until there is no room left is that we can produce too much for the land to sustain- as has happened in the areas where species are most threatened, and the areas of greatest warfare on the planet. When this happens, we desire more for us, and our offspring, and those in our group, be that nationalism or religious bigotry. The easiest way to achieve this is by manipulating others to give us more, as James warns of. When that doesn't work, force of arms is often very convenient.

And the result of all this is always foremost the death of others: the troops of one's own country, the enemy, and the innocent civilians. This is always by far the greatest tragedy of war. But we now see, what we should have always seen, that warfare and murder also leads to the deaths of countless other species of animals and plants. And since we don't exist in a biological vacuum, but are intimately connected with the rest of the planet for our very emotional and physical survival, the continuation of war could lead directly to our own extermination as a species.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Unintelligent Designer

Scientists have been able to create a model of what our Australopithecine ancestor's heads looked like- and in particular their jaws. They've found that our ancestor-cousins had much stronger jaws than we do.

I know everything is a trade-off. I know that if they had really strong jaws, then there was probably some detriment too. It's not like evolution dictates that things get better and better, but rather that every organism just gets continually adapted to changing environments. I still want those strong jaws that could crush large hard nuts.

I wish I didn't have lower back problems. But I know I must, as all humans do with age, because I walk on two legs. I know my back works better for a four-legged animal, but evolution works with the material it has. If I walked on four legs, then it's unlikely that I would have developed the intelligence I have to post blogs, for it is believed that intelligence was a byproduct of being able to see for greater distances and judge distance when standing on two legs in the savanna- not to mention the ability to use tools because my hands are freed from walking. If I had a narrower stance, then the vertebrate I have would work just fine on two legs, thank you. But then women would have a narrower stance. (Sure, women could have lower back problems only. But 1) that would be sad and unfair, and 2) evolution works with what it gets.) If women had a narrower stance, then they would be unable to fit our rather bulbous heads through the birth canal. If we had smaller heads, they could do it, on two legs, without back troubles. They could even have fewer birth pains, for they could keep us in longer, and allow us to develop further, as our head wouldn't be too large for the birth canal upon emergence. The trade-off of intelligence is so great, that our heads are not only too big to fit through a narrow birth canal, but we have to be born neotenously, born with fewer developed features than most animals, including other primates. That means we are dependent for post-natal development on our parents, to a ridiculous degree not seen in other mammals or primates.

If God is a smart God, could he have created us with all of these features? Could he have found a way to have us walk on two legs, be smart, give birth without pain, have short gestation periods, have short post-natal development, have working back bones without pain, and yes, most importantly, super strong jaws capable of crushing hard nuts? Yes, of this I have no doubt. The God I believe in could have done that all. So why didn't he? Why didn't he make us with bodies that work better than they do now, with cooler add-on features?

I have forced to conclude he is stupid. He made mistakes. If, that is, I believe he created using a snap-your-fingers-with-a-brilliant-flash-of-light style, like Q of Star Trek. And I just have trouble believing that a stupid God rules the cosmos. If however, I believe that God created using the process of evolution, then suddenly everything falls into place. Evolution is an incredibly beautiful and complex theory, and it would take the truly divine- and truly intelligent- to come up with such a process. And evolution doesn't create novel structures and processes; it works with the material it has, using work-arounds, to develop new features that are in truth new ways of using old features. And I have the confidence that one day, we will receive just such a body as here described, when we receive our new, fully physical bodies, made like Jesus' post-resurrection body, able to do far more than we can now imagine, where there will no longer be any pain or suffering.

So, the choice is: A smart God, using evolution, or a Literal Creationist God, who is rather stupid. You decide.

What's a half billion years among friends?

This past week, astronomers found the closest extrasolar planet to the size of Earth. It's only twice as big as us, which is significant, because you need something about our size to develop life, and not simply life on an orbital moon. Unfortunately, it's also so close to it's star that its year is only twenty days, and therefore its surface temperature is a balmy 1000°C- so basically a planet of liquid magma. It doesn't matter at that temperature if you've got lots of water; no life is going to develop there.

But I started to think. It wasn't so long ago that our planet was of a similar temperature and composition. Well, 4.5 bya (billion years ago). I suppose that is a stretch of time. And we were able to cool off because there is such a great distance between us and our star; the planet Co­RoT-Exo-7b doesn't have that option. (Yes, extrasolar astronomers have no imagination.) But if it did- if it were further out- it wouldn't be a planet so different than ours, give or take 4 billion years.

We think we are so special, because we have all this life, and advanced life forms to boot. And we are special. Even if life is found elsewhere, it's not everywhere, as our own solar system shows us. But that doesn't give us the right to symbolically lord it over other planets, anymore than we in America can look down at a fledgling democracy in Iraq, forgetting that our government in our first thirteen years collapsed because it was unworkable. Our planet went through great initial turmoil, with some 500 million years of magma and cooling down, before there could even be the beginnings of an inkling for life.

This is why I never think that life itself is all that amazing. Recently, I looked at some stromatolites so close I could reach and touch them. These are fossils of algal mats from 3.5 bya. That means, it took only half a billion years from molten lava to the first life forms. And since life is notoriously difficult to fossilize, life probably began significantly earlier than 3.5 bya- that's just the earliest date we have for fossils. It took another billion years to get anything with a nucleus in it. It took another 1.3 billion years before we could get anything multicellular. It was another 700 million years after that (500 mya) before we got the diversity of multicellular life and phyla that we have today, and then some. If we're looking at the time it takes, the development of life itself is actually the easiest thing in the world. It is getting something multicellular that's difficult, and even more difficult than that, a cell with a nucleus, guiding all the internal workings. The Intelligent Design advocates are barking up the wrong tree. I need no Designer, Intelligent or otherwise, to make life. That's the easy part. It's the development of a nucleus that's difficult. It's the instant creation of a multicellular organism that would be impressive. That is what I must conclude, in that evolution took so long to form them. Complexity is an inherent function of time and natural selection.