What is Natural?

What wakes you up in the morning?  An alarm clock?  A clock-radio set to your favorite station?  The sunlight coming through your window?  Your dog?  Your child who wakes up before you do?

The answer depends upon your particular life circumstances.  At one stage in my life, when I worked at a job that began before daybreak, I would often rouse up before the clock-radio, out of my anxiety that I would oversleep.  Now that I am retired from that job, I can enjoy letting my body's own internal "clock" wake me up.

Thinking about what wakes us up in the morning is an easy place to begin reflecting upon a complex question:  Namely, what is natural?  That sunrise certainly is natural, in contrast to that electronic clock that mimics the sun's 12-hour-average day.  Our body's internal "clocks" are also natural -- although they can be thrown off their rhythms by our having stayed up late the night before, using artificially created electricity to run our man-made computers.

There is more at stake in that word "natural" than the matter of how we wake up.  That is because in trying to understand ourselves, we try to discover some aspects of our human nature that have some connection to the world of Nature.  Even as we declare some human actions to be right or wrong, we also describe some of those actions as being "natural" or "unnatural."  We ask, "What is human nature?"

Over the past few decades, a number of scientists have presented depictions of human nature that have drawn upon the biologist Richard Dawkins' idea of "the selfish gene."  As Dawkins now famously wrote:

"We are... robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules
 known as genes."

However, there is something askew about Dawkins' characterization.  He attributes more personality to genes ("selfish molecules") than he does to human beings.  Whereas genes are able to guide outcomes, we are just robots.

One of the conclusions Dawkins puts forward from his depiction of genes is that humans are fundamentally selfish in nature.  As he wrote, "We are born selfish."  It is here that the philosopher Mary Midgley stepped in to critique what she saw as being the crude simplifications resulting from selfish-gene rhetoric.  Midgley admits the valuable point that genes that contribute to the reproductive and survival potential of a species are more likely preserved.  But she points out that part of that process is genes' making us naturally mammals and social creatures.  And so, one of our gene-related potentials is our ability to take care of other individuals.  As Midgley puts it:

"If we ask whether we are indeed... creatures that are naturally just hell-bent egoists, we can see that this cannot be true because ancestral creatures like that would never have gone through all the trouble and sacrifice that are needed to rear human children.
Such people would leave no descendants."

Midgley underscores our natural potential for offering care by spotlighting a parent's love for their child (even if that child does sometimes wake up the parent who wanted to sleep longer).  Even though as an infant our earliest yearning was to be loved, love was built into our mammalian, social nature.

Midgley's worry is that "the crude metaphor" of "selfish gene" has been employed to promote "an ideology of everyday cynicism."  She writes:

"To repeat -- officially, the doctrine of selfish genes does not mean
 that individuals are motivated only by self-interest."

Our human lives and societies are complex integrations of the natural and the man-made.  Valentine's Day is an artificial, societal construction.  And yet, like those natural cycles of the sun, Valentine's Day's annual rhythm can wake us up again to the importance of being loving.  Loving toward partners.  Toward friends.  And even by being courteous to the stranger we meet.

~ ~ ~

(Where do you see love at work?)

(The Dawkins quotations are from The Selfish Gene, © 1976, 1989, pp. 127 & 3.)

(The Midgley quotations are from her article "The Origins of Don Giovanni" in the magazine Philosophy Now, Winter 1999/2000, p. 32.)

The Cute, the Cuddly, and the Colossal

nine-banded armadillo

Contemporary psychologists have been able to figure out why human beings are drawn affectionately to certain animals.  The secret lies primarily in our emotions being easily captured by the round, big-eyed face of a baby, an instinct that has helped the human race protect its fragile offspring and thus endure.  This instinct is also revealed in our hearts' being easily tugged by paintings of big-eyed children, and by dogs bred to look more baby-faced.  That human instinct cannot explain, however, the seeming proclivity of Texans and other southerners to find armadillos cute. Those animals, with their long pointed noises and tiny eyes, have heads the very opposite of human babies.  There is a bit of a mystery here.  Behind armadillos also lies a story about how Darwin unraveled what was once called the "mystery of mysteries."  Namely, how new species evolve.

depction of
ancient armadillo (Glyptodon)

When Charles Darwin was on his groundbreaking trip on the Beagle around South America, he stopped many times to travel inland, studying the life-forms in that foreign land.  Darwin had a keen scientific eye for the similarities and dissimilarities between various species, both living and extinct.  Scientists at that time had been trying to piece together the puzzle of the fossil remains of some colossal species that no longer existed.  Darwin found the fossilized armor-plate of an extinct nine-foot cousin of today's armadillos (which in the U.S. are about one-and-a-half feet long).

Even though most of us today might be repulsed by the idea of eating an armadillo (either because of its possible taste or its cuteness), Darwin and his companions dined on a species of armadillo.  The preparation of that meal would have helped Darwin see the similarities and dissimilarities between the armor-like coverings of existing and extinct species of armadillos.  As he explained later in his autobiographical reflections:  "During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillos...."

The relationships between the complex skeletons of existing and colossal extinct species (such as sloths) was challenging even to scientists.  Here is where the simpler armor of armadillos was something Darwin could take advantage of in Origin of Species, writing that a "relationship is manifest, even to the uneducated eye, in the gigantic pieces of armour like those of the [extinct] armadillo found in several parts of la Plata."

Now that Darwin and evolutionary biologists have done so much work on the background of these creatures, we are left with trying to understand ourselves:  Why are people so easily fascinated by armadillos, even finding them cute?  With their hard covering, they do not fit into the category of "soft, cute, and cuddly," which would latch in with our mammalian tactile affection.  Some of our delight in armadillos seems to come from their very oddness.  Also, when one is spotted in the wild, there can be the excitement and fun of trying to chase the small animal as it scurries in the underbrush.  We are just lucky those colossal nine- footers are no longer around!

~~~

Have you ever seen an armadillo or other peculiar-looking animal in the wild?  When?

(The Darwin quotes are, respectively, from

 The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow, © 1958.  p. 118.

and from The Origin of Species [1959] by Charles Darwin.  Chap. 10.)

(The photo of a contemporary armadillo is by Jerry Segraves.

The artwork of extinct armadillo by Pavel Riha is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Doing Without a Brain, or Just a Little One

My musings on this matter of the size or absence of brains began when I was confirming another fact with a retired biology teacher.  I had been wanting to make sure my description of the size of tiny coral animals was correct.  Although I had not requested the additional information, my adviser added:  "The coral are invertebrates, like sea anemones.  They have no brains."  It sounded like just the setup line for a joke by a late-night TV comedian (particularly if our elected officials had done something seemingly nonsensical earlier in the week).

Another brainless invertebrate,
a freshwater sponge

Nevertheless, my adviser on biology had simply been making the factual observation that corals, sea anemones, and other invertebrates such as sea sponges make do without a spinal cord or brain.  They do quite well without such "extras."  Sea anemones, being much larger than the nearly microscopic coral animals, are easier candidates for observation if you have a chance to watch a saltwater aquarium.  They have a mouth on top, surrounded by numerous paralyzing tentacles that detour passing food into the mouth.  The creatures, although continuously hungry, seem quite content in having no brain.  Although we humans might think that having brains is a "no brainer," evolution tells us brains are not really necessary for being a plant or even an animal.

Besides that TV-comedian joke about some people apparently not having a brain, another derisive brain-related joke is to call some person a "bird brain."  Here again, birds -- as well as many other small vertebrates -- seem quite capable of getting along with a quite small brain and skull compared to the human race.

On one occasion, I was pitted brain-to-brain against a creature of sparrow-sized brain, and I lost the competition.  My challenger had been a bat.  I was standing on a second-story balcony in the early evening, at the balcony's rail, looking out upon the open grounds before me.  In literally less than a second, a bat flew straight at my face.  Even though the whole incident happened in an instant, I was able afterward to clearly remember seeing the rapidly flying bat no more than two feet in front of my face -- and aimed right at me.  But then, the miraculous occurred:  The bat, securely guided by it's sonar system that I could not hear, instantaneously made a sharp left turn, thus preventing a collision.  I could never have been able to react that quickly.  But its tiny brain did.

We need not stop with the example of a bat's brain if we want examples of forms of intelligence packaged in a small size.  In his poem "A Considerable Speck," Robert Frost observes the behavior of a nearly microscopic "mite" (as he calls it) on a sheet of white paper on his desk. Watching the tiny animal's response to the movements of his writing pen. Frost drolly concludes:

"Plainly with an intelligence I dealt....

I have a mind myself and recognize

Mind when I meet with it in any guise

No one can know how glad I am to find

On any sheet the least display of mind."

~~~

Is there a non-human species you admire?  What species is that?  Why do you admire it?

(The excerpt from the Frost poem is taken from

"A Considerable Speck" in Complete Poems of Robert Frost, © 1967.)

Unable to Detach from the Past

1872 painting by John Gast

Examine the population and growth patterns of cities in the U.S., and you will find that many of them have grown more heavily toward their west sides than to the east, especially in the post-World War II boom. Although a fair number of cities are now seeing new growth in older, inner areas (often because of the appeal of shorter commute times), suburban sprawl is often greater on U.S. cities' western sides.  This peculiarity developed out of a much larger growth pattern in U.S. history:  The movement of European settlers on this continent has been primarily to the west.  A century-and-a-half ago, Horace Greeley quoted John Soule, commanding, "Go West, young man," and people in the U.S., men and women, young and old, have done just that.  Today's cities echo the nation's past.

This phenomenon is but one case of how we cannot escape our past, even as much as we might want to.  Frequently, our ties to the past remain unconscious.  For example, because of the westward growth of many cities, more people commute by driving into the sun in the morning and into the sun again in the evening -- an inconvenience we would have avoided if it had been the only factor affecting our decisions of where to live and work.

This inconvenience of squinting into the often blinding sun as we commute reveals another way in which we cannot escape the past:  We cannot break away entirely from patterns of Nature that were laid down long before Homo sapiens were around.  The sun is not about to change its course in response to where we build our houses and places of work.  The 20th-century author Maya Angelou cleverly wrote, "Nature has no mercy at all.  Nature says, ' I'm going to snow.  If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough.  I am going to snow anyway.' "

Given that we are unable to detach ourselves entirely from the past life on this planet,  how might we relate to it?  The answer all of the world's faith-traditions have given is that we should cultivate an appreciation of and a desire to emulate the highest values of the past.  Despite that commonality among traditions, people of one faith-tradition have not always comprehended the methods of another.  For example, Lin Yutang, an early 20th-century Chinese émigré to the U.S., explains how Christian missionaries mistook Chinese shrines honoring ancestors as being idolatry.  Thus the translation of the name for practices at the shrines as "ancestor worship" in English.  Lin Yutang clarifies the practices in this way:  "Only by the wildest stretch of imagination could they be called idolatry..."  Instead, the practice "for the Chinese, is the embodiment of reverence for the past and continuity with the past....  It was the basis of all that was good and honorable and of the desire to go forward."

Maya Angelou also had some succinct words about those who went before:  "They existed. We can be.  Be and be better.  For they existed."  That statement could describe non-humans in our evolutionary past just as much as it describes our human ancestors.

~~~

What have you received from the past that you are particularly grateful for?

(The Greeley/Soule quote [1851] is taken from Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett, © 1968.  p. 678b.)

(The Angelou quote is from "Maya Angelou: An Interview," Oct. 1974, in Conversations with Maya Angelou, ©1989,)

(The Lin Yutang quote is from From Pagan to Christian by Lin Yutang, © 1959.  p. 37.)

(The painting by John Gast [1872] is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

A Forgotten Lincoln Quote

In his day, Abraham Lincoln stood out in a crowd because he was unusually tall.  Today, however, Lincoln's birthday gets lost in the crowd of mid-February celebrations.  When the U.S. federal holidays were standardized, a generic "Presidents' Day" was created (partly because only northern states celebrated Lincoln, whereas more states celebrated George Washington). More recently, a growing number of churches, synagogues, and mosques celebrate Evolution Weekend in order to emphasize that the scientific theory of evolution can be compatible with religion.  That Evolution Weekend is placed near Charles Darwin's birthday.  Unfortunately, by sheer coincidence, Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day -- Feb. 12 -- and so Lincoln can also get eclipsed by Darwin.

I suggest we might let Lincoln back into the February conversation, by bringing him in through the back door, so to speak.  Most of our documentaries on Lincoln are about the Civil War, so we miss out on what goodness developed in that man without that national tragedy.  I would propose we begin our recovery of our picture of Lincoln's character with a virtually forgotten statement widely attributed to him:

 "I care not much for a man’s religion
whose dog and cat are not better for it."

That quotation could even be slipped into an Evolution Day sermon.  After all, Evolution Weekend events bring into one world-view religion and the evolutionary web of life.  So also does Lincoln's statement bring together thoughts of religion with thoughts of other forms of life. Specifically, those we encounter most frequently, our pets.  Moreover, because Lincoln is considered a secular figure, not a religious leader, the quotation attributed to him is easily ecumenical:  It could be used by Christians, Jews, Muslims, or any other faith-tradition.  It could even be used by those who do not practice any organized religion, but who might think of an individual's "religion" as being that person's deepest values and way of living.

If it seems strange to our ears to hear the test of a person's religion being whether their "dog and cat are... better for it," one reason would be that over the past several centuries, most Christian theology in the West has become narrowed down to the human sphere.  This was not always the case.  The Hebrew Bible (which constitutes the Christian Old Testament) contains examples of how in Biblical times, religion included a number of directives for the considerate treatment of animals.  Although in the culture depicted in the Bible people did not have dogs or cats as pets, they did have domesticated animals.  And the heart of Biblical thought on how such animals should be treated was expressed by the following proverb (in which "righteous" means people who act rightly):

        "The righteous care about their livestock's needs."  (Prov. 12:10a)

Abraham Lincoln is for many people a symbol of strong moral character.  Few people, I dare say, when thinking of Lincoln think of how a person's religion could be revealed in how that person treats their pets.

~~~

What do you think about the Lincoln quote and the Biblical proverb?

(Proverbs 12:10a is given in the translation of the Common English Bible, © 2011.)
(Both illustrations are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired.)

(You can read about Evolution Weekend at this external link:  Evolution Weekend)

Dead Stones and Fossils of Life

There is probably no object within Nature that has not been used as a symbol sometime in human history.  Sometimes it is hard to understand what association provoked a particular object to become overlaid with certain meanings.  But not in the case of stones.  The obvious hardness of stone invites symbols and metaphors drawing upon that quality.  ("He had a heart of stone.")  So also does the association of timelessness prompted by rocks' not changing visibly during a single human life.  ("It is carved in stone.")

Given these associations with solidity, there is irony in that in the late 1700's, stones became associated with change -- immense change!  So much so that people felt that the stability of human existence was crumbling. In the late 1700's, the Scottish geologist James Hutton developed the principle that geological features of landscapes, even as immense and striking as they sometimes can be, had come about through slow geological changes over an immense amount of time. The shocking message of the stones was that, viewed from a wide perspective, they had been forever changing. Moreover, the message in some of those stones -- fossils -- was that there had been forms of life long before human history.

Today, a couple centuries later, most people have accepted that our human history is but a tiny piece of an immense cosmic timeline.  A timeline so incomprehensible that we have to use abstract numbers or metaphors (such as a 24-hour cosmic clock) to try to grasp it. Our human urge to connect with life encourages us to bring this matter of immense time down to a level we can relate to.  Down to a level we can hold and touch and feel.  That is what a small fossil can do!

I remember when, as a child, I first had a fossil explained to me.  I do not recall what type of tiny animal the fossil was an imprint of.  But I do remember how, as I held the hard stone and examined the small shape, I felt as if I were holding not an imprint but the skeleton of the animal itself.

John Muir
  (1838-1914)

For people of James Hutton's era and of the 1800's, an additional shock was the message in the fossils that entire species of life had gone extinct.  How could Providence allow such a thing? Other minds, however, were able to look at the matter of fossils and extinctions from a different perspective.  A more favorable perspective seems to have been more accessible for people who could see God's Spirit as being present through all the course of time, and as caring for all forms of life, not just human life.  For example, the American naturalist John Muir, looking at stone fossils as if they had a written message in them, put it this way:          "In looking through God's great stone books made of records reaching back millions and millions of years, it is a great comfort to learn that vast multitudes of creatures, great and small and infinite in number, lived and had a good time in God's love before man was created."

~~~

Do you remember when you learned about fossils?  Is there some fossil you particularly recall?

(The photograph of the fossils is by cobalt123 and is used under a

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.)

Seeing What Animals See... Kind of

The contemporary author Andrew Parker writes:  "Today we live in a visual world."  It certainly sounds as if he's describing our contemporary urban societies.  Signs (mostly advertisements) sprout from every surface, all the way down to the tops of gasoline pumps.  Television (especially its commercials) uses more images per minute, trying to hold our attention .  Even our portable phones now use a visual screen.

stick insect
on end of a tree trunk

Andrew Parker was not, however, writing about modern technological societies.  Nor was the "today" he referred to even the past half-century.  Instead, his topic was what resulted from a development in biological evolution that began 500 million years ago -- the sense of sight. Parker's very next sentence describing some of this "visual world" also reveals that he is referring to the world of animals:  "There would be no such animals as stick insects, chameleons, or birds of paradise... if we did not [live in a visual world]." We have a clue as to what Parker means in that two of the animals he lists are familiar examples of camouflage:  A stick insect is hidden from predators because its body so closely resembles a stick.  A chameleon's skin changes colors to match that of its surroundings.

I enjoy watching shows such as PBS's Nature, whose cameras give me a peak into the world of such animals. On TV nature documentaries, however, the narrator usually talks about the evolution of the features of the stick insect, chameleon, or other camouflaged creature.  Andrew Parker points to the other side of the coin, which is equally important.  Namely, the evolution of vision in the predator who sees (or does not see) that camouflaged prey.

Those two sides of one coin thus demonstrate one type of what evolutionary biologists call co-evolution, which means that features of two species evolve in conjunction with each other. The two sides, camouflaged prey and seeing predator, evolved together -- each driving the evolution of the other. Camouflage is an example of one of the paradoxical forms of co-evolution. Part of the paradox is that predators have improved the evolution of their camouflaged prey, making what they want to catch harder to catch.  The paradox also extends to the other side of the coin: The increased camouflage of the prey improves the evolution of the predator species' eyes, making the prey easier to catch.  A sneeky, unconscious cooperation between what seem to be enemies.

This also means that as we look at Nature, a great deal of the diversity of appearances we see has resulted from the evolution of the eyes and power of vision in animals.  We see a world shaped by sight.  It also means that as I delight in looking at the almost amusing stick insect, I am also getting a glimpse into the vision and mind of whatever preys upon that insect.  Thus, in a way, I see some of what animals see... but only up to a point.  Through contemporary scientific research, we also know that some animals eyes can see things our human eyes cannot, such as the ultraviolet end of the spectrum.  To some degree, the worlds of other animals must remain their own, not meant for our eyes.

~~~

Do you remember every seeing an insect, lizard, or other animal whose color especially interested you?  Do you know why that species had evolved that way?

(The quotation by Parker is from Seven Deadly Colours, by Andrew Parker, © 2005.  p.265.)
(The photo of the stick insect is used under a under a
 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license [no name given].)

A Dog Named Polly

Neither Charles Darwin nor his dog Polly made it to the cemetery of the St. Mary's churchyard, which was where Darwin had wanted to be buried.  St. Mary's was a centuries-old flint-stone church in the village where he had lived most of his life.  But Charles Darwin did not get his way because people outside his family intervened, convincing his family that his scientific legacy called for his being buried in Westminster Abbey, where scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton, and poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer had been laid to rest centuries before.

With Darwin's burial at Westminster, it was not just a scientist who was laid to rest, but also a veteran dog-lover.  When Charles's future wife Emma was being courted by Charles, one thing that attracted her was the kindness he demonstrated toward dogs and other animals.  During the course of his lifetime, Charles had a dozen different dogs.

Charles's daughter
 Henrietta
with Polly

The last of those dogs, and Charles's favorite, was Polly, a terrier.  She had originally been given to one of Darwin's daughters, Henrietta, but when Henrietta married and moved away, her dog remained behind with the family. Polly would usually accompany Charles on his daily walks on a sandy path around the grounds of the home.  And when he spent hours in his study doing scientific research or recuperating from illness, Polly would often be found nearby, resting on her dog-bed.  Charles's son Francis recalled that his father "was delightfully tender to Polly, and never showed any impatience at the attention she required."

drawing of Polly from
"The Expression of the Emotions"

As with other animals Charles encountered, Polly also became an object for Darwin's scientific observation. (Even Charles and Emma's children could not escape his scientific interest in human and animal behavior.) Darwin's aim was to find similarities between not only the anatomy of humans and animals but also between their bodily behavior and facial expressions -- similarities that would be additional evidence of common ancestry. That decades-long project of Darwin reached its apex in one of the later books of his career, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  That book contained a drawing of Polly, poised, pointing, with one front paw in the air.  The engraving was titled, "Small dog watching a cat on a table."

Polly, the pet who had become most deeply engraved in the affections of Charles Darwin's heart, died less than a month after he passed away.  Polly was buried under the apple tree near the Darwin home.  Being a dog, she would not really have been a candidate for burial in the graveyard of St. Mary's church, the place where Darwin also did not manage to be buried. And yet, then as now, pets were free of the complexities regarding cemetery plots, burial permissions, death certificates, and wills that can make human life complicated.  Nevertheless, Polly, being a pet, had helped Darwin make the case for his theory of evolution.  By including examples of the behavior of dogs, he had taken advantage of the similarities many readers had already observed between themselves and their pets -- animals with which they also had an emotional kinship.

~~~

Do you have a fond recollection of a particular dog?  What was the dog like?

(The quote by Charles Darwin's son Francis is from his "Reminiscences" in

 Selected Letters and Evolution of Origin of Species, ed. Francis Darwin, © 1892, 1958.  p. 74.)

(The drawing of Polly is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

The Earnestness and Frivolity of Flowers

The painter Georgia O'Keeffe once said, "A flower is relatively small."  And yet she depicted them as being enormous!  Her easily identifiable paintings of flowers, which were one of her favorite subjects later in her career, often depict a single, huge, brightly-colored flower spilling over the edges of the canvas.  One of O'Keeffe's flowers can cover a hundred times its square-area in real life.  A biologist could easily appreciate that out-of-scale depiction, although for biological rather than aesthetic reasons.  After all the flower was a revolution in the evolution of life on planet Earth.

Green plants with photosynthesizing chlorophyll did exist on our planet before there were flowers.  However, it could take those conifers over a year to produce seeds snugly nested in cones.  One revolution flowers brought (when they evolved 100 million years ago) was the ability to release a seed in only a month.  That was an explosion in reproductive capability. That flower-explosion also brought about a revolution in the prehistoric world of animals.  As flowers evolved into different shapes, the insect world evolved simultaneously, new insects being adapted to take advantage of new food-source shapes.  In turn, bird and mammal species found new food in the flowers, seeds, and insects, thus putting competitive pressure on the older species of dinosaurs.

Today, understandably, few people are thinking about such significant events in the history of planet Earth when they purchase or pick a flower.  Flowers can be an earnest business for commercial flower-growers and florists.  But it is a flower's enjoyable color, fragrance, and shape that capture an average person's attention.

True, flowers do sometimes become a part of solemn ceremonies.  A wreath of flowers can soften the hard edge of a coffin, thus soothing the hearts of the bereaved.  Despite the flower's fragility, symbolizing the transitoriness of life, its reproductive associations bring a hint of life into the acceptance of death.

More frequently, however, flowers shout out "life!"  The humorist Mark Twain made the earnest observation that "Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole."  Over a century later, men wear boutonnieres much less often. But the symbolic tie between flowers and restored life endures.  All the way down to anti-war demonstrators inserting flowers into phalanxed soldiers' rifle barrels.

With their colorful intensity and their message of new life, specific flowers have gained a role as a prominent symbol in many of the world's faith-traditions:  The lily of Easter resurrection in Christianity. The lotus of life-giving tranquility in Buddhism. And the light-giving Golden Flower in Taoism.

For the billions of bees and other insects who search for food each day, flowers are a serious business.  But for most people, flowers are just plain fun!

~~~

Where do you encounter flowers?  Do you have any favorites?  What do they express?

Green in Tooth and Claw

As my explorations of history become more detailed, I find our misconceptions about history most interesting.  Frequently, it seems to me, our misconceptions reveal as much about us as they reveal about the actual historical events.

Such is the case with the all so familiar phrase "red in tooth and claw."  Today it is often used to evoke a picture of a "Darwinian" world of a predatory "survival of the fittest."  So much so, that most people assume the phrase "red in tooth and claw" was inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution.  In fact, that blood-tipped phrase predates Origin of Species by nine years, having been penned by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his 1850 poem "In Memoriam."  Moreover, Tennyson's poetic lament was prompted not by the death of any dinosaurs, but by the death of one of Tennyson's closest human friends.

Regardless of the origins of the phrase, more significant is what it conveys about our perceptions of Nature -- especially as we try to relate Nature to our human spirituality.  Or as we aim to say whether we can discover a sacredness in the world of Nature.

Charles Darwin

A parallel misconception about history lies behind the phrase "survival of the fittest," which most people assume to have been introduced by Charles Darwin in Origin of Species.  In fact, what Darwin used in the first edition of his book was the phrase "struggle for existence," which does not sound as competitive.  Even that phrase was already in circulation -- but for describing human society.  In Britain during the first half of the 19th century, industrialization and migration to the cities had increased social strife.  Darwin employed that firsthand experience of a human "struggle for existence" in order to make his explanation for the evolution of other species of life more understandable.

(I do sometimes wonder what animals might think if they could know all the human projections we place upon them.)

bee covered with pollen
in hibiscus flower

Today, our vastly increasing knowledge from the science of ecology reveals how evolution has occurred not just through competition but also through all sorts of mutually beneficial relationships. True, there is an ambiguity in Nature, in that the death of the prey means life to the predator.  And it is also true that there is an element of chance in biological evolution (just as there is in human life). However, one teacher of biology tells me that because of all the ways birds and insects pollinate plants as they gather food, there are more cooperative relationships than there are competitive relationships in Nature.

Nature as a whole is strongly self-sustaining.  So much so that we might borrow the word "green" from the environmental movement to say that Nature is green in tooth and claw!

~~~

Where do you see relationships in the non-human realm of Nature?

(The drawing of Darwin is in the public domain

in the U.S. because it is over 70 years old.)

(The flower photograph, by Luc Viatour, is used under terms of GNU Free Documentation License.)

Nature’s Time Machine

"Let's set the Way-Back Machine to the year...."  Many a person in the U.S. of my generation, upon hearing that line, will recall the Peabody cartoons that were part of the Bullwinkle TV show. With that periodic segment, the Bullwinkle show joined the long line of plot-writers (primarily science-fiction) who employed the device of time travel.  It's a literary tradition that can be traced all the way back to H. G. Wells's 1895 appropriately titled novel The Time Machine.

When we look at species of plants and animals, if we have some knowledge of evolutionary biology, we can also be taken back in time.  We Homo sapiens are late arrivers on this planet (150,00 yrs. ago).  And so, knowing other species sets the dial of the time machine farther back.  To use another metaphor, if evolution is thought of as a huge tree of life with numerous levels of branches, as we look at branches that began lower on the tree, we are taken further back in time.

leaf of
a ginkgo biloba tree

Despite many extinctions, most species still around today have endured an incredibly long time.  I remember the day I noticed the unusually shaped leaves of a tree beside the sidewalk in a southern city I was visiting.  The person I was with explained that it was a ginkgo, which, unlike other trees in the U.S., was of a type that dated back a quarter-billion years.  Another example of going way back are some species of marsupials, such as ancient opossum species.  Marsupials (which include kangaroos) represent an early state of mammalian evolution, having no placenta. They bear young that are extremely small, and carry the young in a pouch for the remainder of their early development.

A nautilus,
another ancient species

For those of us who think of God as the Giver of Life and as the Fountain out of which all possibilities come, evolution can be seen as the way by which the Divine manifests its power and wonder.  Although evolution, seemingly paradoxically, requires elements of chance (such as mutations and chance experiences), there is in evolution a discernible direction toward a richer diversity of life.

Although Peabody and Star Trek episodes took the audience back in time (to such periods as Prohibition or ancient Rome), H. G. Wells's The Time Machine actually took the reader forward in time.  That is a harder task when it comes to evolution. No one studying the varieties of species 100 million years ago could have predicted that a meteor would hit the earth off the Yucatan, bringing such thick clouds that plants would die, thus cornering all the great species of dinosaurs into extinction.

We do know however, that we are suffering a loss of biodiversity -- a reduction of the number of branch-tips at evolution's treetop of the present.  The main cause is human:  the stresses of loss of habitats and climate change.  It is not yet determined in what way this plot will turn out.  Whenever we work to preserve the rich diversity of inter-species relationships that strengthen life, we try to write a happy ending for the story of life.

~~~

Does it add something to your perspective or your life to imagine way back in time?

(The photograph of the leaf is by Daniel Miłaczewski.  That of the nautilus is by Lee R Berger.

Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licenses.)

Painting the Universe by the Numbers

Some people are clearly better working with words; other people are clearly better with numbers. All of us, however, have to at some point think about the huge universe that surrounds our lives and planet Earth if we want to add a cosmic dimension to our thought.  And modern science's knowledge of the universe cannot be explained without resorting to numbers in some fashion. That is especially true when it comes to talking about the age of the universe.

The human limitation we run into here is that we humans have not evolved with any instinctive need to comprehend the kinds of immense numbers modern astronomy must employ.  For example, I have a ready, physical sense of any number up to ten because of my having ten fingers.  But how do I have a gut sense of what a million is?  I know abstractly that it is 1000 x 1000, but I have a hard time envisioning one thousand of anything repeated a thousand times over.  The difficulty of comprehension is even greater when trying to truly grasp what a billion is.

Thus it is that some metaphor using words becomes handy.  You may have heard of one often-repeated metaphor of the entire age of the universe fitting into a 24-hour clock. Personally, that common model of a 24-hour clock gets me only a little way towards imagining the immensity of the universe's age.  One problem for me with it is that I don't have a mental picture of a clock containing 24 hours.  (Our traditional circular clock-faces only go up to 12.) Also, on clocks the numbers go round and round repetitively -- but the universe's age stretches out in linear fashion far into the past with no repetition.

the universe's timeline as a row of books

A better model for me has been presented by the contemporary Christian evolutionary theologian John Haught.  He uses the model of a set of books on a shelf, something that I, with my literary bent, can more readily imagine.  Haught explains:  "Imagine that you have thirty large volumes.... Each tome is 450 pages long....  Let this set of books represent the scientific story of our 13.7-billion-year-old universe.  The narrative begins with the Big Bang on page 1 of volume 1, but the first twenty-one [of the 30] books show no obvious signs of life at all....  [L]ife doesn't appear until volume 22....  Even then, living organisms do not become particularly interesting... until almost the end of volume 29.  There the famous Cambrian explosion occurs....  Only during the last sixty-five pages of volume 30 [the last volume] does mammalian life begin to flourish....  [M]odern humans do not appear until the bottom of the final page."

With this picture in my mind, one thing in particular stands out:  That immense gap between the beginning of our universe and when life finally emerges out of formerly inorganic molecules.  Although I know it is my human-centered viewpoint, I cannot help but think of that gap as a time of waiting -- the universe working and "waiting" to make life finally appear.  On the other hand, I can look at that relatively short time in which life on Earth has existed and see graphically the power of life itself.  It only required life to finally get started before it could take off, leading to millions of species in a relatively short time.

~~~

Do you have any thoughts about humans' being such a short part of the universe's history?

(The Haught quote is from

 Christianity and Science by John F. Haught, © 2007, p. xii.)

Humans a Part of Nature... But...

On a recent morning, when I stopped outdoors just before daybreak, I thought for a moment that I was in a painting by the 20th-century painter René Magritte.  No, it was not one of his more obviously surrealistic paintings, such as those in which men in bowler hats float across the sky, or a window frame encloses a brick wall.  Instead, it was as if I were in one of his more subtle paintings that merge reality and unreality in the way they portray a house between trees with the sky and clouds above.

At first, the painting appears perfectly realistic, until you realize the clever way Magritte has played with light.  Part of the front of the house is illuminated by an artificial light near the door, in just the way it would appear at night.  But above, the sky is light blue, just as if it were day.  It's neither night nor day but impossibly both!

That illusion is so similar to the light I saw as I stepped outside just before daybreak.  What first caught my eye were the white clouds above the house across the street, along with a couple stars visible above the clouds in the night sky.  As I turned my head upward, I saw that the same very white clouds formed a ring all around me, a nearby treetop blocking only a small part of my view of them.  Straight above me was a large opening in the white clouds, revealing the dark night sky with a few more stars visible.

But how could this be?  If the sky told me it was night, how could the clouds be so white?  The reason was that they were illuminated by all the artificial lights of city, which I could not see directly.  Just like Magritte's painting, what appeared to be totally natural was, in fact, a fusion of the natural and the artificial.

To me, this experience stands as a metaphor of who we human beings are in relationship to the natural world:  Our human lives are part of both natural processes and our humanly-created cultures.  We are in one way a part of Nature, and in another way not.  In trying to describe who we are, drawing upon our contemporary scientific knowledge about biological and cultural evolution, some contemporary writers are increasingly using the word "emergent."  We humans, relying so much upon our cultural artifacts, are an emergent species.

Another metaphor that proves helpful to me in understanding our human emergence is that of a strikingly colored flower on the tip of the stem of a plant.  Just like the colorful flower, we stand out as something different, even though we would die if we were cut off from the plant.

Back in the 2nd century, the Christian theologian Irenaeus also spoke about human emergence, without confining God's spirit to the human realm.  Irenaeus  wrote:  "God sleeps in a stone, dreams in a flower, moves in an animal, and wakes in man."

No individual human could survive without either Nature or human culture.  That is our dilemma. Maybe we can make it our joy.

~~~

In what ways do you think we are more than a part of Nature?  In what ways a part of Nature?

(The detail from the Magritte painting "The Empire of Light,"

 © 1950 Museum of Modern Art, is used here through Fair Use.)

Being Sensitive or Not

"Don't be so sensitive!"  It's something that many a parent has told a child in order to deal with injured emotions.  It is for the very same reason that children are taught the verse, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

What got me to reflecting upon this matter of sensitivity, however, was not any incident involving a child's tenderness.  Instead, I got to thinking about this matter because of a tiny fern-like plant, the Mimosa roemeriana.  It's common name is, in fact, the "sensitive briar," and it is indeed quite sensitive.

When I was growing up, the children in my neighborhood would sometimes keep a lookout for the plant growing snug against the ground, hidden in the grass at the edge of the driveway.  If its pink puffball of a bloom was not present, it could remain camouflaged from our sight in the grass.  But what delighted us was not that pink ball, but the plant's sensitivity to touch.  Even just touching the leaf lightly with a small twig could make the rows of leaflets on each side of the center spine fold in against each other.

We were never able to figure out how long it was before the leaflets would re-open. However, there is one thing I have figured out from my study of this world:  It is not just humans and the sensitive briar that are sensitive.  Every animal, plant, fungi, algae, and bacteria upon this planet is.

Buddhism employs the word "sentient" (from a similar Latin root as "sensitive") to help cultivate a compassion not just for humans but for all animals.  That's a worthy endeavor, especially because too much of Western Christianity has narrowed down its focus to the human sphere.

Nevertheless, even plants, fungi, algae, and bacteria are sensitive in their own way in that they are responsive to stimuli from outside their bodies.  Although the relatively quick responsiveness of insect-eating plants such as the Venus's-flytrap is visible to our naked eye, all plants are changing their metabolism and growth patterns as the sun shifts and the water level changes. And we humans are learning the hard way how even bacteria species adapt to the warfare of our antibiotics.

Indeed, if any species of life had not been sensitive to its environment, it would not have evolved into the species it is today.  It is as if at the inception of each species, Evolution had commanded, "Be sensitive!"

~~~

How do you try to find a middle ground between being overly sensitive and not sensitive enough?

(The green artwork is licensed under a Creative Commons

 Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license by Ade McO-Campbell.)

Darkness

waning moon

I did not myself notice a possible meaning in the way the prayer was worded.  So, at first I thought the Iroquois prayer was a simple prayer of gratitude, perhaps used at bedtime to relieve anxiety about the night ahead:

"Great Spirit who puts us to sleep in darkness,

We thank thee for the silences of darkness."

I had even liked saying the prayer, finding that it helped bring upon me a grateful spirit, so as to overcome worried thoughts about the day ending or the day to come.

But one day my wife made a comment that made me see in the prayer a possible added dimension.  She said, "It implies that the night has more than one silence."  Indeed, the wording was plural:  "silences of darkness."  I had taken the plural to refer merely to the many nighttimes we experience, one following the other, periods of darkness separated by each day.  But could the prayer's idea be that each night has more than one silence?

The image of a series of silences brought back to me the first night my wife and I camped in a state park in east Texas.  Taking longer than usual to get to sleep because of the unfamiliar feel of the air mattress on the uneven ground, my ears were particularly sensitive to the unfamiliar sounds of Nature around me.  As I tried to drop off, my mind was brought back to keen attention with each click or scrape or seeming moan I heard.  What was it?  Was I safe?  And after I did at last fall asleep, my rest was interrupted time and again by the silence being interrupted by sound (including the local raccoon's making the rounds of the park's trash cans).  Oh, how I would have enjoyed having the night be a single long, uninterrupted silence.

What trust a person would have to have to choose to live in total darkness!  If we imagine not being able to see anything (as many of the legally blind cannot), it should be no surprise that one of the Bible's most powerful symbols for ignorance is darkness.  And the very word "Buddha" is a title meaning "en-lightened one."

Earth's regular darkness

That night camping, however, reminds me that Nature's world is not dead even when people are, as we say, dead to the world.  For many creatures, the night is the time to truly live!  Not just that raccoon, but also bats, moths, and countless other creatures.  The biologist Francisco J. Ayala has described evolution as being "opportunistic." Life on earth began with bacteria that evolved sensitivity to light, followed by plants that required light for photosynthesis.  However, the alternate world of nocturnal life opportunistically evolved the ability to take advantage of darkness.

Darkness is thus essential to this planet's biodiversity.  Moreover, this planet itself would have burned to a crisp on one side long ago if it did not rotate frequently, thus bringing nights of cooling darkness.  We should not be in the dark about the importance of darkness to this Earth.

~~~

How do you use your nights?