How are Humans Better?

A new comment thread on an old post discusses the precept that humans are somehow "better" than all other creatures. Sure, as a member of our team, I'd like to think that we are Number One. We've even written books attributed to deities that prove that we are the reason for creation, that the octillions of stars in the universe were all put there just for our amusement. Therefore, the book and its believers maintain, we must be the best thing ever. But as an educated human raised by scientists to find first sources and question suppositions, I wonder: "How are we better?" I have posted before on some of the ways in which our Creator (to use that paradigm) has short changed us. Name any characteristic of which we are proud, and it is easy to find another creature that exceeds our ability. I can only think of one exception: Communicating in persistent symbols. Unlike cetaceans, birds, fellow primates, and others who communicate fairly precisely with sounds, gestures, or chemical signals, we can detach communication from ourselves and transport or even delay it via layers of uncomprehending media (paper, wires, illiterate couriers, etc). We can create physical objects that abstract ideas from one individual and allow the idea to be absorbed by another individual at a later time. It also allows widely separated groups to share a single culture, at least in part. This learned behavior is based on our apparently unique ability to abstract in multiple layers and to abstract to a time well beyond the immediate future. We can take an idea to a series of sounds to a series of static symbols, and back again. Our relatively modern ability to reason abstractly (math, science) evolved from our ability to abstract communications. Even Einstein couldn't hold the proof of E=MC2 in his head. But is this unique ability really sufficient to declare ourselves overall inherently "better"?

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Steven Pinker on the American culture war

Marilyn Westfall of the Humanist Network News recently had an engaging chat with cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The conversation first focused on why the north and the south differ so strongly on thing such as textbooks:

HNN: You've written a great deal on the impact of the political left and right in the United States. How does the political division figure into the debate over textbooks and especially the teaching of evolution? SP: Partly it really is a culture war. The country does have two cultures: the European Enlightenment and the Culture of Honor. The Scots-Irish settled into a lot of the South and West. What came of this was two different paths to civilization. One path was civilized by the law and government and the king, and the other by self-help justice, avenging wrongs and insults with the help of your own manly honor. They co-exist in one country, but they are different cultures. The civilizing force in the West came first from the church. A lot of the Western cowboy towns were first civilized by the women and the church--in cahoots. Churches have the talismanic role as the source of morals and decency and civilization. But part of the division is just sheer oppositionalism: if the liberals say x, we'll say y. Part of it is also an emotional affiliation with the church, and some of it is a disengagement from the wider world.
The conversation eventually turned to atheism. Why do so many people despise "atheists"?
[Atheism evokes] a very primitive emotional reaction in the minds of many people. Many people simply equate it with immorality, which is why I think they tell pollsters that atheists are people they distrust the most. Often when there is a disliked word--a word with a negative connotation--people find a euphemism, that's why what used to [be called] garbage then became sanitation and now its environmental services. And likewise atheism is constantly reaching for the untainted euphemism. Secularist, freethinker, humanist, bright and so on. I think each one is going to get infected in turn until the societal attitude changes. Atheism is merely absence of belief.

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Biology is drowning in data and complexity

In the April 2010 edition of Nature (available only to subscribers online), you can read a counter-intuitive story of illustrating that more information is sometimes add confusion, rather than making things simpler. Maybe another way of putting it is that the path to understanding can often take one through phases of disorientation resulting from new influx of accurate data. This particular story, by Erika Check Hayden, titled "Life Is Complicated," considers what has happened in the field of biology subsequent to the Human Genome Project. Prior to the Project, many biologists guessed that the human genome contained about 100,000 genes that coded for proteins. At the conclusion of the project, however, we found out that only about 21,000 human genes code for proteins. One might think that this would simplify the field of biology, especially since biologists now know what many of these genes are. Many people thought that we were going to have for ourselves a clearly understandable "blueprint," of the human species. The opposite is happening, however: "It opened the door to a vast labyrinth of new questions." What kinds of questions? This article really surprised me with the vast scope of new territory opened up by the Human Genome Project. It can be summed up by Hayden's quote from biochemist Jennifer Doudna: "The more we know, the more we realize there is to know." Hayden explains that sequencing the genome undermined "the primacy of genes by unveiling a whole new classes of elements--sequences that make RNA or have a regulatory role without coding for proteins." It turns out that "much non-coding DNA has a regulatory role "that we are just beginning to understand." To illustrate how complex things have gotten, Hayden discusses what we've now learned about a single protein, "p53," which for many years was simply known as a tumor suppressor protein. Consider what we know now: In 1990, several labs found that p53 binds strictly to DNA to control transcription, supporting the traditional Jacob-Monod model of gene regulation. But as researchers broadened their understanding of gene regulation, they found more facets to p53 . . . [R]esearchers now know that p53 binds to thousands of sites in DNA, and some of the sites are thousands of base pairs away from any genes. It influences cell growth, death and structure and DNA repair. It also binds to numerous other proteins, which can modify its activity, and these protein-protein interactions can be tuned by the addition of chemical modifiers such as phosphates and methyl groups to create through a process known as alternative splicing. P53 can take nine different forms, each of which has its own activities and chemical modifiers. Biologists are now realizing that p53 is also involved in processes beyond cancer, such as fertility and very early embryonic development. In fact, it seems willfully ignorant to try to understand p53 on its own. Instead, biologists have shifted to studying the p53 network as depicted in cartoons containing boxes, circles and arrows meant to symbolize its maze of interactions. Hayden reminds us that the p53 story is one of many similar stories in post genomic-era biology. She explains that we now know that many of the signaling pathways that we thought we were close to understanding are not simple and linear but organized in vast complex networks that sometimes appear fractal. She quotes James Collins, a bio-engineer: "Kevin made the mistake of equating the gathering of information with a corresponding increase in insight and understanding." Here's another counter-intuitive result of this new dilution of information: many of our models have gotten too complex to be useful. In many cases the models themselves quickly become so complex that they are unlikely to reveal insights about the system, degenerating instead into mazes of interactions that are simply exercises in cataloging. The genome project has made biologists into kids in a big candy store: a candy store with unending aisles and endlessly deep bins of dazzling, disorienting candy, much of which is currently out of our reach. Such is the horizon of new knowledge, equal parts frustrating and tantalizing.

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The Apollo 11 launch close up and slow

Check out this a wonderful video and commentary regarding the launch of Apollo 11, the first lunar landing. All of this action is captured with a still video camera perched almost unimaginably close to the rocket exhaust. 500 frames per second turned 30 seconds into 8 minutes. This video reminds me about the many ordinary things that had to happen according to plan in order to allow the success of what has to be the one of the most spectacular journeys in the history of humankind. Keep in mind that the Saturn V Rocket was 363 feet tall, only one foot shorter than St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Each one of the F-1 engines (which are still the most powerful rocket engines ever built) were 12 feet in diameter at the nozzle, and there were five of these monsters powering the launch.

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

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Dawkins’ Greatest Show on Earth

Richard Dawkins released The Greatest Show on Earth in November to really and truly assemble substantial amounts of understandable evidence in one place for those 40% of Americans who can't stand to follow the evidence where it leads and for those of us who want the hordes to quit making excuses and to follow that evidence. I haven't read Dawkins' new book yet (though I own it), but Jerry Coyne has read it, and he reviewed it at The Nation. Coyne begins his review by characterizing the absurdity of refusing to acknowledge evolution by natural selection. The situation is as bad as as this hypothetical:

Imagine for a moment that a large proportion of Americans--let's say half--rejected the "germ theory" of infectious disease. Maladies like swine flu, malaria and AIDS aren't caused by micro-organisms, they claim, but by the displeasure of gods, whom they propitiate by praying, consulting shamans and sacrificing goats. Now, you'd surely find this a national disgrace, for those people would be utterly, unequivocally wrong. Although it's called germ theory, the idea that infections are spread by small creatures is also a fact, supported by mountains of evidence.

Coyne also describes Dawkins' chapter setting forth powerful evidence illustrating that evolution is a tinkerer:

In a wonderful chapter called "History Written All Over Us," Dawkins shows that animal anatomy is like a medieval palimpsest, carrying traces of our evolutionary ancestry. Human goose bumps, for instance, serve no function: they're remnants of the muscles used by our mammalian ancestors--and our living relatives like cats--to erect their fur, making them warmer and giving enemies the illusion of greater size. Modern genome sequencing has also uncovered vestigial DNA: useless, broken genes that are functional in our relatives and presumably were too in our ancestors. Our own genome, for instance, harbors nonfunctional genes that, in our bird and reptile relatives, produce egg yolk. Embryology--the study of development--brings more proof to the table. The pharyngeal arches of the early, fishlike human embryo are derived directly from the gill arches of fish, though they go on to become, among other things, our larynx and eustachian tube.

Coyne has given us a well-written review. Now it's time for me to go read Dawkins' book itself, so I can speak first hand. BTW, Catch this excellent 3-minute video of Dawkins describing the purpose of writing The Greatest Show on Earth.

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