The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the Significance of Diversity

Two things stuck with me most from Thursday's class.

The first is the idea that if there is order being created somewhere, there is messiness being created elsewhere. Professor's Grobstein's illuminating example of this was pollution. While we see human society becoming increasingly advanced, we're ruining our environment and building urban systems at the expense of ecosystems that can often never be recovered. To me, this idea also ties into the idea that Nancy brought up of de-evolution. She explored it as a cyclical idea (we'll evolve to some peak, then begin de-evolving back to where we came from), but is it also possible that these processes are occurring simultaneously? As we evolve more and become more orderly, is there a parallel process somewhere becoming less evolved and messier? Our environment is not an organism, but it is certainly an entity of sorts, and one that is descending into chaos as we fine-tune the inconveniences out of society to try to perfect an ever-broken machine.

The second idea that I kept coming back to was the thought that there are three answers to the question "Why is there such a diversity of living things?" People cite at least three different reasons: God (religion), "it's always been this way," or evolution. People talk about religion versus evolution, but people who believe "it's always been this way" (if people do in fact believe this) rarely enter this debate. History and science aside (those are two big things to throw aside, but oh well), that idea somehow makes sense to me. I can understand how it would be natural to believe that this is the ways things are, and this is the way they always have been. In fact, the simplest ideas are often the most popular, if only because everyone can understand them. Some might say that religion is an "easier" explanation than evolution, but try telling that to a Darwinist, who might find understanding Creationism the most difficult thing s/he's ever tried to do. Or... maybe not.

In an article about the current proposal in Georgia (to strike the word "evolution" from the curriculum and replace it with "biological changes over time" -- supposedly a move that would allow teachers to teach evolution without head-butting Creationists [CNN article]), the writer questions the now painfully familiar conflict between Creationists and "scientists." He says he sees a compromise:

Biblical passages state that man and life came from "the ground" or "dust of the ground" (Genesis 2:6-7). Evolutionary theory teaches that life may have originally come from the ground, and that after millions of years, single cells evolved into multicellular organisms, which evolved into -- among many, many other things -- primitive primates, which evolved into humans... Evolution leaves room for God, but extreme creationism does not leave room for evolution.

(Sorry for the super-long posting, I was having trouble synthesizing my thoughts.)

so, friends, @ least one of the questions you had today
(it was nancy's, i think: "what is the catalyst that MAKES prokaryotes evolve into eukaryotes, eukaryotes into multicellular organisms?" ) got an answer:
all this continuing change and exploration is for the sake of...
nothing.

--just want to be sure that, along w/ what's gotten recorded in paul's green box, we have on the table for thursday's class the rest of the questions you asked (or didn't ask, but were thinking inside) during today's storytelling session....
would you record them here, please?
and thanks for doing so--
a.

Orah wrote, " for some reason i think people will be more "bummed" in a science class if the prof. said, 'just beleive me.'" In a way, I agree with you, Orah. I think that people convince themselves that they need to seek truth by following a set discipline that allows us to repeatedly convince others (prove?) that a scientific proclamation is or is not "TRUE" (at least in the mathematical sense of "true" or "false"). But think about the difference between science and engineering. Whereas scientists test their theories in artificially pure environments in order to be able to repeat their proofs, engineers deal with tolerances, pollutants, and other aspects of being organisms on earth or in this solar system, this universe. They test the efficacy of their products (not theories) where those products must function--under murky, inexact conditions. We learn firsthand when engineering products are "true" or "false", i.e., when they work or fail (the weak bridge, the wrong drug, the haywire spacecraft). Where am I going with this? For engineers, "SEEING IS BELIEVING." They are pragmatists who tinker and revise until they get to a story that works...and then they improve upon it for the next round of products. Scientists, on the other hand, are beginning to look a lot more like believers. Would they believe this? We're back to your question :-)

~this is quite sermon-y i know, but i thought i'd throw a bone to anyone who shares my feelings/ideas/(upbringing).

The story of the inflationary theory claims that the universe originated "as a quantum fluctuation from absolutely nothing." If we came from nothing (our stories also originated from nothing), then are we nothing? If what fuels evolution (proding prokaryotic cells to merge creating a highly organized, complicated structure with numerous compartments, membranes, chromatin, histones etc) is nothing, why then we have exactly those patterns of life? Is it a playful impulse? A quirk of a superior force? If it is, then it is still something...How can we define nothing?

In conclusion, I want to quote a question raised O.B.Hardison: "We are such things dreams are made of (Shakespeare, The Tempest). But who is doing the dreaming?"

I had similar thoughts at the end of Tuesday's session. The rate of change (at the level we discussed change) has not been linear. It has accelerated over time. (We haven't talked about a "molecular clock" that seems to have a constant rate of change for the evolution of a molecule, but even that has different rates for different types of molecules/proteins.) Seems to me that as the quantity of different phenotypes AND the complexity of phenotypes both increase, the opportunity (and probability) for RANDOM Something's to click increases.

What really got me thinking is how this might apply to/effect thought or the "parts" that effect thought in a thinking species. For example, coming from a corporate background I've spent a lot of time dealing with competitiveness among organizations that, in aggregate, could be considered a virtual population in the way we are using that word. "Co-opetition" has been the buzz for quite a while: the entities that compete with each other also cooperate with each other, even merge ("breed"?) to create a new entities in order to better survive in their environment. What others and I have noticed and applied is that, today in many businesses and certainly the entire high-tech industry, the absolute topmost differentiator effecting success is SPEED. The faster an organization (organism) can adapt to accelerate conceiving of, producing, and getting its product or service to its market, the more likely it will thrive. And there are definite organizational characteristics/dynamics that have "evolved" to enable more and more speed. Seems to me that this is germane...still thinking

what are the stories we tell in order to BE ourselves????????????????
and how by being ourselves do we disallow others from being themselves by telling our stories, by allowing ourselves to be?

Long writes, "the invisibility of indians and blacks is matched by a void or a deeper invisibility within the consciousness of white americans. the inordinate fear they have of minoriteis is the expression of the fear they have when they contemplate the possibility of seeing themselves as they really are." the white writers of history have constructed the stories we hear today because of this deep seeded, physical, emptyness within themselves. and they have told the story of american culture in a brutal attempt to comfort themselves. WEB du bois writes in a section of this book 'the souls of the black folk,' "from this must arise a painful self-sonsciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence."

i don't have any more time to talk this out because i have to go to class...but maybe people have responses. though it is not starkly science i think it is relevant. hope you agress.

my main point/question from two hours ago was, "what are the stories we tell in order to BE ourselves? and how by being ourselves do we disallow others from being themselves?"
i think, quite litterally and simply, that the stories of evolution and creationism are two of the stories that we tell in order to explain our existence/justify our existence. and by ingesting one of these two stories into our beings and saying that only one of the two stories is the TRUTH then we disallow others to be themselves/to justify their own existences. by constantly critisizing creationism, mayr is saying that the story of creationsm does not justify our existence. he's going into a creationist's life and saying, 'find something better because with YOUR story your very existence is NOT justified.' but what good does this do except to get mayr off on the idea that his story is better than my story? it is more practical, it is more pragmatic, to LET BOTH BE. the beatles say it, 'let it be.' shakepeare says it (hamlet), 'let be.' it's all about PRAGMATISM. let live. beleive what you want to beleive and let others beleive what they want to beleive. whatever is USEFUL is TRUTH.

so maybe the reason we tell stories is to justify our existence.

and (i'm so sorry for ALWAYS being so long winded...*cringe*) but one more idea from james:
he says that pragmatism is "a mediator and reconciler" and that it "unstiffens our theories." pragmatism gives the label of TRUTH to both religion and science and as a culmination of so so much of my thought processes james writes, "IN SHORT, SHE (pragmatism) WIDENS THE FIELD OF SEARCH FOR GOD."

wow. that blows me away. because james realizes that EVERYTHING is a search for this thing that we call GOD. that's why stories are told. we are all searching DESPERATLY, i mean our whole existence is this godamn desperate search for something. and i think that something is GOD. and please don't get all turned off by this word and yell and scream because i'm saying that everything is religion. I don't have a definition of what God is, but rather i think that our search is what defines God. God is that which aches within humanity, it is what EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US is searching for. and we obviously don't know what that is yet because we haven't and can't ever find it. but it is God.
:)

But back to a more tangible subject...I don't really agree with what I'm about to write, but it's just something to think about: could the perfection that Mayer describes as the goal of evolution be defined by extreme self-sufficiency? In Prof Dalke's discussion section, the example of the mollusk was frequently invoked. Most people probably think of mollusks as "low" organisms, occupying the last rung of the evolutionary ladder, but humans are definitely more dependant and needy beings than the mollusk is. I'm not an expert on the subject, but mollusks definitely have less physical and emotional needs than we do. Does that make them "higher" or more perfect than we are? 'Perfection' is a pretty scary word and I've actually only heard that word seriously used in reference to god, not a mortal organism. So can perfection really exist on this earth?

I've said several times that this class is only one of many sites on campus where stories are being written and revised. One PARTICULARLY relevant other site you are invited to visit/might want to watch on-line is the working group on emergent systems (which you are welcome to drop in on in person, too--though it DOES meet @ 8 a.m.!). In the first two sessions this semester, in which Paul led the discussion, we have sounded a number of the themes of this course. This morning, for instance, I heard in particular three keynotes of this week's class discussion:

• Jen's description of the storyteller who, looking to amuse, stumbled on just the story he happened to need (=the productivity of random exploration);
• Becky's comment on how the pace of change has increased/picked up momentum over time); and
• Fritz's observation that the telling of stories might actually enable us to create something new in the world...

In my class discussion section this afternoon, we explored (along with those self-sufficient mollusks Perrin mentioned!) one current example of this last idea: ways in which our understanding and then revising current stories can actually alter the shape/state of the universe--that is, the recent creation of two new chemical elements, which both fill a gap in the periodic table and hint @ other yet-to-be discovered elements.

There are similarities in myth/truth between different cultures. For example, all three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) share similar prophets who are recorded to have told similar stories (there are few exceptions, of course. Changes needed to be made to satisfy the population, maybe?). But even before the birth of these religions, ancient cultural myths (such as Ancient Greek myths) told similar stories. If life is thought to have evolved from a common ancestor, does the same thought hold for our stories? Did they evolve from a common ancestor?

God is a loose term that we have given to "truth". all people seek truth, but some people call it God. Perrin is on the right track, but i think it should be recognized that our search for truth is less about security as it is about the innate human desire to understand.

In Grobstein's discussion section on thursday i wondered whether with globalization/technological advances there would be a resurgence of evolution after generations of reproductive isolation.

i think it is fair to say that there is already a great degree of cultural evolution in many societies, and that this evolution will in turn lead to biological changes. orah made a point the other night, which i had been pondering myself, and that is whether this return to evolution is like the contraction and expansion we had spoken about in previous weeks. there is contraction and expansion in literature, science, and all aspects of life...so why not evolution?

And on a similar more universal note, could other planets be different examples of evolution, like our own Earth story, but with different changes made over time and/or different paths taken? Are other planets the "what ifs" that we wonder about?

Mind boggling.... I shall have to continue thinking about this one.

and i ask again,
what are the stories we tell to BE ourselves?
and how by being ourselves do we disallow others from being themselves?

Also, I find it striking that most gods are in the shape of humans (or bear human resemblance). Observing the natural world, people gradually came to the conclusion that no other known species is superior to them.(true, some are stronger, but none of them can come up with ruses and srtategies for hunting, harnessing water etc). This observation makes me wonder whether peole can worship something they can't imagine. Can human imagination beget forms no one has ever seen? Or can people only collect various pieces of the world they see and simply improvise on putting them together?

Furthermore, people have always tried to take some advantage of nature. Because trade/agriculture/the well-being in general of a society often depended solely on the nearby river/sea/ocean, why not try to propitiate the Spirits that control them? That natural objects are controlled by a superior force is beyond doubt for the primeval societies. From their observations of the regular patterns of natural events they could deduce that somebody/something must be in charge of them. So, if a society's well-being depends on this somebody/something, why not try to propitiate him/her/it?

Myths make me reconsider the role of Ernst Mayr's story. He is not telling a new story, what is the aim of the book then?

PETER THOMAS: But sometimes, regardless of approach, historical linguistics is faced with an unsolvable puzzle. There is one language in Europe which has baffled scholars for centuries. Sarak looks like a typical French village, but its graveyard holds a linguistic secret. Inscribed alongside the French is the mysterious language of the Basque people. The language is called Euskara, and it has resisted any classification so far. It is called a language isolate, an orphan among languages with no known relatives. The land of the Basques straddles the borders of France and Spain. No amount of analysis has been able to link Euskara to French, Spanish, or to any European language, nor, in fact, to a language anywhere in the world. How could this linguistic isolation come about? Perhaps it was the fierce independence of the Basque people, their resistance to outside invaders and their strong history of oral tradition. But, whatever the reason, the Basque language has withstood centuries of influence. Scientists have wondered whether a biological comparison between the Basques and their Indo-European-speaking neighbors would reflect that isolation as well.
LUIGI CAVALLI-SFORZA: What we ordinarily do in biology is, really, bilateral comparisons, but we do them all, all the possible ones.
PETER THOMAS: Geneticist Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University was a pioneer in the search for notable biological indicators.
LUIGI CAVALLI-SFORZA: They must realize that there is a degree of relationship, and that it's very important to take that into account. Otherwise, you cannot do anything.
PETER THOMAS: Cavalli-Sforza was interested in exploring historical relationships among different populations by examining their genes, rather than their languages. Would his research team find the Basques as unique as the linguists found them? If the Basques are as isolated as their language suggests, this isolation might also show up in their genetic makeup, blood groups, DNA patterns, and so on. New techniques now make it possible to carry out much more detailed analyses of individuals and populations using just a few living cells, in this case, cells from a hair follicle. The DNA pattern not only distinguishes the Basques from their neighbors, it suggests they must have been among the earliest people to settle in Europe.
LUIGI CAVALLI-SFORZA: Basques were recognized as genetically different a long time ago. Basques are so different that they must have been proto-Europeans. Basques were probably the descendants of cultures that have made all those beautiful painted rock paintings in the southwest of France and in the north of Spain.
PETER THOMAS: These cave paintings, many of them located in Basque country, were painted fifteen thousand years ago. Since the genetic data suggests the Basques have been a distinct group for thousands of years, isolated from other peoples, it may have been their ancestors who painted these caves during the last Ice Age. Although this conclusion is speculative, Cavalli-Sforza is trying to use these techniques to solve other linguistic puzzles, including Greenberg's controversial classification of Native American languages. DNA samples from may different tribes in North and South America were collected and analyzed in Cavalli-Sforza's lab at Stanford. He believes his results provide a strong confirmation of Greenberg's groupings.
LUIGI CAVALLI-SFORZA: When we took all the data from American natives, they clearly fell into three classes, and they correspond exactly to the linguistic families that have been postulated by Greenberg. Not only that, but the family which is most heterogeneous of all genetically is the one that is linguistically more heterogeneous of all.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2120glang.html

Thinking about it now again, there are more similarities between these two stories. It's possible, even likely, that language was 'invented', so to speak, simultaneously all over the place by groups of people who had moved around, as it is possible that different forms of life sprang up simultaneously in different places at the very beginning. For both ideas, it's possible that this process, or a process involving only one starting organism/language happened several times with the species dying, no life, and then a new one created. How many origins could there have been? Is this science? Philosophy? both...
...
ALSO!
I'm so glad that Orah and Katherine and Stefanie(and others?) feel this way about GOD/LOVE/UNDERSTANDING. It really strikes a chord (I've always wondered, is it strikes a chord, or strikes accord?) with me...I've always loved those 'AHA' moments when you find a parallel, a pattern, what in physics, I think, has come to be known as the theory of everything, how we feel that there is some answer that will make all of our questions obsolete, that everything is connected. I think we can feel it all around us, and yet it's so invisible and elusive, . I think that when we feel most fulfilled, it is perhaps when we come closer to understanding these connections, viewing at the same time these exapansions and these contractions, these fluctuations of IT, whatever that may be, God, Love, ultimate Understanding, George...
I think that's all I have for now...still brewing.

There are some really mind-bending things being bounced around this week. Hard to keep track of it all, hard to find my own deep-down opinions about some of this stuff. If life on earth started over again, we went back in time to the moment when the rocks and gases first fused to make this planet, would evolution happen in exactally the same way with the same results as now? I must say flat out, No, I don't beleive we would find the same exact results twice. Evolution and life itself seems to be a matter of chance. (Especially if evolution is really not directed at any purpose, the purpose is nothing, why would it ever follow the same path twice?) Random mutations have no logical order, they just happen. So I think that it would be more likely to have a different random mutation and evolutions the second time around than the same one.

Um...what are the stories we tell to be ourselves? I take this to mean, how do we imagine ourselves? What do we bring together in our minds to create an image of who we are as an individual, and how is that reflected in our actions, and how do these actions affect people around us? I am not ready to divulge to this forum exactally what stories I tell myself to make me who I am, that's a bit personal, but what stories to Bryn Mawr students tell themselves, how does that shape the image of a Bryn Mawr woman? I think that we like to tell a story of strong womanhood. We like (but perhaps I am wrong) to imagine an instant link with each other because of our sex. The story of the Bryn Mawr woman includes free-will, free-expression, an excellent vocabulary, etc. And who do we esclude by creating this story of ourselves as Bryn Mawr women? Do we exclude raically, sexually (yep), or along class lines?

Reading this (and re-reading this over and over again) I couldn't help but feeling that Emily had struck a nerve with her statement. Where Emily tells stories out of fear, I realized that I believe in stories out of fear. If I don't have the "story" of God, or the "story" of religion, or even the "story" that somehow, in the cosmic existence of things, my life does really matter, that my life does hold some purpose, if I don't have these "stories" then I don't have my self. And if I don't have my self, then I am left with nothing but a story of myself...and why would this story be any different from all the rest?

We tell stories, and we believe in them, because this is what shapes our existence. Last week I was concerned with the evolution of thought, but more importantly, it was the introduction of thought that set us apart from all the other species of the world. And what did we do once we began thinking as a species? We began to tell stories. Without these stories we don't exist. And to not exist is a very scary thing.

I think most people who like to say that humans are perfect, or at least more perfect than anything else, or at the top of the food chain or what have you mean that we are the best at what we do. Most Americans like to think of themselves as above average, and to some degree this attitude is visible in all humans, visible in that we almost always think of ourselves as better than all other living beings.

Obviously we're the best; we speak, build cities and use complex tools, reason out how the universe works, do so many things that place us far above other animals. True, they can often run faster than us, or hear better, or live in better harmony with the world, or do something that we can't do at all, like fly. But those things just aren't as good as talking, right? Well, I suspect that if, say, eagles can think, and are pondering the nature of the universe as they turn lazy circles high up in the air, they're thinking about how they are obviously superior to all other beings, especially us humans who spend all our time running around for no good reason and can't even fly.

My point here is, when most people say humans are the best, they mean we're the best at what we do, which is the most important thing to be able to do because we can do it and we're the best.

Mayr, of course, talks about levels of perfection of all creatures, not just humans, but I think he's just expanding that same thought process to all creatures. A creature that is "perfect" in some way is a creature that is very good at something it does. Maybe it's the best of all creatures at that thing. So when he says things are perfect he doesn't mean they've reached some goal, have found some evolutionary nirvana; he just means they're very good at what they do.

Probably this isn't the whole reason Mayr calls things perfect; there's no reason to use such a touchy word when he means something relatively innocuous. But I feel that' s part of the reason he describes things that way.

But I didn't get the impression from reading the book that Mayr was implying such a thing. I found myself nodding in agreement with Elizabeth in her estimation of Mayr's intent: A creature that is "perfect" in some way is a creature that is very good at something it does. Maybe it's the best of all creatures at that thing. So when he says things are perfect he doesn't mean they've reached some goal, have found some evolutionary nirvana; he just means they're very good at what they do. On Thursday when we were divided into our sections, Anne commented on how Mayr's rather careless use of "perfection" might have simply stemmed from a scientist's natural awe at the world, and a biologist's appreciation of just how amazing it is that life has evolved into such rich diversity and adaptability. I remember when I was in the rainforest in Costa Rica two years ago and looked around me, thinking to myself, "This is so perfect" -- and I didn't really mean "perfect" in the strict definition of the word, but just how all the flora and fauna and even the accompanying weather (a tremendous downpour of rain, followed by bright sunlight filtering through the trees) seemed to be in such a wonderful balance and state of "rightness." Every plant was suited for that environment; so was every animal.

And yet, it didn't have to happen that way; Prof. Grobstein asked in this forum "whether biological evolution is inevitable. Suppose that one were to start the proccess over again, would it come out the same?" I believe that evolution in inevitable, but if we started the process all over again, I highly doubt it would come out exactly as it has in our world. Perhaps Alternate Earth would have life even better adapted to its environment...but life on this earth is pretty impressively adapted itself. And that, I think, is part of what was in Mayr's mind when he spoke of "perfection." I wish he didn't use the term, but I can understand his reasons for doing so.

Julia said "so much of our personal evolution is random spontaneous actions that are often taken for granted." I was having a conversation with a friend this weekend. She is a BMC senior who has taken science courses for all of her life and is pre-med. She has always wanted to go to med school and become a doctor... but just recently she has begun to reevaluate that and has started thinking that she might want to be an architect instead. This is causing quite a bit of anxiety on her part because she has spent so much of her life headed in this one direction and does not find anything terribly wrong with the direction where she's going. She said that she never would have even considered doing something other than med school if there had not been several things which happened in the past two years, one of which (the factor particularly relevant to this particular forum entry) was deciding to take architecture courses at Bryn Mawr because she had never done that before. So I guess the point is, that this random act of taking architecture classes may have a lasting effect on her future. I think it's wonderful that she's open enough to re-evaluate... (to let different prokariotes bump into each other to speak metaphorically) because something really wonderful and unexpected may evolve. My friend and I taked for a long time trying to figure out what she should do and in the end, I told her that it didn't matter too much what she did because there are an infinite number of "whats" in the world but only one "who"... that she will still be essentially who she is at the core whether she becomes an architect or a doctor. I hadn't thought that this was much related to evolution but I do think that it somehow is, especially with Professor Grobstein's lecture... that a large part of evolution did in fact happen by chance... I guess what matters is not so much how it happened as the fact that it happened. But as individuals, we somehow need to know how it happened to exist happily within the realm "it did indeed happen." Frightening, exciting, necessary, perplexing... Here we all are.

In our discussion we may be shifting our own definition of something that sounds brittle and inflexible (perfect) to something that's iterative and regenerating...as if all that happens happens on two interacting axes—like the earth rotating around the sun, combined with the earth spinning on its axis—both of which contribute to the changing seasons. Maybe this is a universal formula that applies at both the macro and micro levels in our realm of reality.

Maybe we're recognizing that nothing may go in a straight line from simple to complex (or good to better to best of all). The relevant geometric shapes for evolution seems to be the circle, the sphere.

BTW, does any of what we're thinking about--or the way in which we're thinking and talking--remind anybody of Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass"?


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