Animal Joy

Reverend William Buckland (1784-1856) was an English geologist and paleontologist. He was invited to contribute to a series of books "on the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation." In 1836 his book titled, Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology was published. In it Buckland explained that carnivores were consistent with a benevolent God, in that they provide swift death to creatures that would otherwise suffer from sickness or injury, thus reducing the aggregate amount of suffering. He concluded,

The appointment of death by the agency of carnivora as the ordinary termination of animal existence, appears therefore in its main results to be a dispensation of benevolence; it deducts much from the aggregate amount of the pain of universal death; it abridges, and almost annihilates, throughout the brute creation, the misery of disease, and accidental injuries, and lingering decay; and impose such salutary restraint upon excessive increase of numbers, that the supply of food maintains perpetually a due ratio to the demand. The result is, that the surface of the land and depths of the waters are ever crowded with myriads of animated beings, the pleasures of whose life are coextensive with its duration; and which throughout the little day of existence that is allotted to them, fulfill with joy the functions for which they were created [emphasis added].

I ran across this quote in The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins (and he got it from Nonmoral Nature by Stephen J. Gould). It immediately reminded me of the creation narrative from the temple where, as Hugh Nibley put it,

...it is the privilege of every form of life to multiply in its sphere and element and have joy therein. (Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints, p. 43)

Of course, Buckland published his work before the temple as we know it existed. It is tempting to think that whoever included the sentiment expressed by Nibley into the temple narrative (Joseph? Brigham?) was importing a view of nature already prevalent in the culture. On the other hand, I don't know how prevalent such a view was, and anyway it seems to me that, in the context of the temple, it represents God's creations in a state of paradise rather than in our fallen world.

Natural theology, however, held that nature reveals the character of God, so unseemly features of nature such as carnivores had to be cast in a positive light. Gould wrote,

We may find a certain amusing charm in Buckland's vision today, but such arguments did begin to address "the problem of evil" for many of Buckland's contemporaries — how could a benevolent God create such a world of carnage and bloodshed? Yet this argument could not abolish the problem of evil entirely, for nature includes many phenomena far more horrible in our eyes than simple predation. I suspect nothing evokes greater disgust in most of us than slow destruction of a host by an internal parasite — gradual ingestion, bit by bit, from the inside. In no other way can I explain why Alien, an uninspired, grade-C, formula horror film, should have won such a following. That single scene of Mr. Alien popping forth as a baby parasite from the body of a human host, was both sickening and stunning. Our nineteenth-century forebears maintained similar feelings. The greatest challenge to their concept of a benevolent deity was not simple predation — but slow death by parasitic ingestion. The classic case, treated at length by all great naturalists, invoked the so-called ichneumon fly. Buckland had sidestepped the major issue.

Those flies made an impression on Charles Darwin too. In an 1860 letter Darwin wrote,

I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

Alas, the joy of animals notwithstanding, "the problem of evil" remains a difficult one.

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Good Riddance

October of 2002 was a scary time for my wife and I. At that time an unknown person (or persons) was shooting--usually fatally--people at random in the D.C./Maryland/Virginia area. As the days passed, another person would be gunned down and the shooter would vanish into the fall air. One of the murders occurred less than a block from where I often bought gas. Although nobody had been shot in their home, we covered some windows that allowed a view into our living room from the busy street outside, and we watched the nightly press conferences given by local law enforcement. An angel of death that seemed unstoppable roamed the area, and nobody was safe.

Finally on October 24 John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were captured, and we breathed a sigh of relief. Days later we became parents.

As I write this, John Allen Muhammad has 5 minutes until execution by lethal injection. Having been turned away from the Supreme Court and denied clemency by Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, it is all but certain that Mr. Muhammad will die tonight.

I know that there are problems with the death penalty. I know that innocent people have been put to death, and I support efforts to make the application of the death penalty fair and just. However, I also continue to believe that some people deserve the death penalty, and that justice demands it. And I believe that this is one of those cases.

In the day that all wounds are healed, I hope that John Allen Muhammad will be a new person--fit to live among saints. But for now I say good riddance; let justice be done.

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To read about how the case unfolded, see here.

Update: John Allen Muhammad died at 9:11 pm.

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Doubt Is Their Product

This week I finished reading Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, by David Michaels. Michaels is a professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. During the Clinton administration he served in the Department of Energy, and he is President Obama's nominee to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Here is a description of the book from its website:

"Doubt is our product," a cigarette executive once observed, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."

In this eye-opening exposé, David Michaels reveals how the tobacco industry's duplicitous tactics spawned a multimillion dollar industry that is dismantling public health safeguards. Product defense consultants, he argues, have increasingly skewed the scientific literature, manufactured and magnified scientific uncertainty, and influenced policy decisions to the advantage of polluters and the manufacturers of dangerous products. To keep the public confused about the hazards posed by global warming, second-hand smoke, asbestos, lead, plastics, and many other toxic materials, industry executives have hired unscrupulous scientists and lobbyists to dispute scientific evidence about health risks. In doing so, they have not only delayed action on specific hazards, but they have constructed barriers to make it harder for lawmakers, government agencies, and courts to respond to future threats.

If you don't want to read the whole book, you can get a good feel for it from an article he previously published, "Manufacturing Uncertainty: Contested Science and the Protection of the Public’s Health & Environment [pdf]."

I am not unsympathetic to the desire of industries and companies to avoid excessive regulation and drains on productivity. On the other hand, employees, consumers, and the general public have a right, I think, to be protected from harm (or at least warned of harm). Navigating the conflict between those interests is not easy, and I'm glad it isn't my job. But although government regulation is much maligned in political discourse, a moment's thought reveals what a miserable place this country would be without them. For various reasons, Dr. Michaels argues that the balance of interests is currently tipped in the favor of industry, and gives a number of examples. In some cases, industry and government are (or have been) allied in disregard for human health.

Read the book (or at least the article) and see what you think.

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A Conspiracy of Statisticians, No Doubt

Statisticians reject global cooling

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.
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The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA's year-to-year ground temperature changes over 130 years and the 30 years of satellite-measured temperatures preferred by skeptics and gathered by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Saying there's a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.

Identifying a downward trend is a case of "people coming at the data with preconceived notions," said Peterson, author of the book "Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision Analysis."

Let's just remind ourselves what those NOAA data look like.

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Pros and Cons of the H1N1 Vaccine

From The Daily Show (Oct 15):

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Let's Get Something Straight About Ardi

Last week the journal Science published a raft of papers describing the fossil remains of Ardipithecus ramidus, an ape that lived 4.4 million years ago and that is more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees. The split between the lineages that (in retrospect) lead to humans and chimpanzees is thought to have occurred about 6 million years ago. So Ardi--as the fossil has been nicknamed--lived a million (or two) years after that split.

The common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees remains unknown because of a lack of fossils. In fact, it may surprise you to learn that until a few years ago there were no chimpanzee fossils either--and what has been found is just teeth. Presumably this is because they live in areas that are not conducive to fossilization.

Anyway, in the absence of fossils scientists have only been able to imagine what that common ancestor was like, and at times they have tried to make inferences based on chimpanzees. But it's easy to forget that chimpanzees are the product of 6 million years of evolution just as we are. Ardi gets us closer to that common ancestor, and based on her the discoverers argue that some of the traits of the common ancestor were a little more like humans and less like chimpanzees.

Unfortunately some of the reporting on Ardi contains confusing language--sometimes coming from the scientists that made the discovery. For example, one of the authors (C. Owen Lovejoy) has been quoted as saying that we didn't evolve from apes--apes evolved from us. First of all, humans are apes (just like we are mammals and primates). But more importantly, chimpanzees did not evolve from humans or vice versa. Each came from a common ancestor. Apparently that common ancestor has traditionally been thought to have been much like a chimpanzee. What Lovejoy means is that we can no longer use chimpanzees as a stand-in for the human-chimpanzee common ancestor because some chimpanzee characteristics evolved after the split.

The bottom line is that in light of Ardi, the authors argue that the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was a little more like humans, and a little less like chimpanzees, than previously thought.

I hope that helps. See Carl Zimmer's informative post, Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last for more.

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An Evolutionary Prediction with Teeth

I don't think this needs additional comment. From the author summary of a paper published earlier this month:

Enamel is the hardest substance in the vertebrate body. One of the key proteins involved in enamel formation is enamelin. Most placental mammals have teeth that are capped with enamel, but there are also lineages without teeth (anteaters, pangolins, baleen whales) or with enamelless teeth (armadillos, sloths, aardvarks, pygmy and dwarf sperm whales). All toothless and enamelless mammals are descended from ancestral forms that possessed teeth with enamel. Given this ancestry, we predicted that mammalian species without teeth or with teeth that lack enamel would have copies of the gene that codes for the enamelin protein, but that the enamelin gene in these species would contain mutations that render it a nonfunctional pseudogene. To test this hypothesis, we sequenced most of the protein-coding region of the enamelin gene in all groups of placental mammals that lack teeth or have enamelless teeth. In every case, we discovered mutations in the enamelin gene that disrupt the proper reading frame that codes for the enamelin protein. Our results link evolutionary change at the molecular level to morphological change in the fossil record and also provide evidence for the enormous predictive power of Charles Darwin's theory of descent with modification.

Reference:

Meredith RW, Gatesy J, Murphy WJ, Ryder OA, Springer MS. (2009) Molecular Decay of the Tooth Gene Enamelin (ENAM) Mirrors the Loss of Enamel in the Fossil Record of Placental Mammals. PLoS Genet 5(9): e1000634.

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President Uchtdorf's Creation Conundrum

I've been kind of lazy about blogging lately. So here is something quick that I had intended to post on a while ago, but had forgotten about.

Last year at the October 2009 General Relief Society meeting, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf gave a talk that included counsel to exercise individual creativity. That portion of the talk served as the basis for this brief Church video.




Here is an excerpt:

...remember that you are spirit daughters of the most creative Being in the universe. Isn’t it remarkable to think that your very spirits are fashioned by an endlessly creative and eternally compassionate God? Think about it—your spirit body is a masterpiece, created with a beauty, function, and capacity beyond imagination.

It struck me as odd that President Uchtdorf used spirit bodies as examples of masterpieces of creation. First, to say that most people have never seen a spirit body is--I think it's safe to say--an understatement. When I read those words all I can do is imagine that he's right. Why choose something that most people can't directly identify with?

But beyond that, the human (physical) body is often held up as an example of God's marvelous creations. (For examples, see here, here, and here.) Why didn't President Uchtdorf follow suit? Maybe he just wanted his example to correspond to his earlier use of the words "spirit daughters". Or maybe he was being sensitive to the body-conscious among his audience by using a more abstract and idealized example. But I can't help but wonder: Is it possible that he intentionally avoided a traditional example of natural theology? If so, why?

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