All items reduced... part 3

(Part 1 is here)

(Part 2 is here)

The study of life (humans very much included) has not missed out in race to reduce. Our studies have borne much fruit. The realisation that DNA, inherited and reproducible, encodes our entire bodies has revolutionised our understanding. A natural conclusion of this might be that everything about us can be explained by our genes. Going back to our ‘onion’, we’ve peeled back all the layers to the core, found there a reel of programming, and then worked our way back out taking with us explanations for everything as we go. In some ways this is helpful and indeed true. In other ways it is hopelessly inadequate.

Take for example human behaviour. It is true that our genes do affect us and the way we act. We know this from twin-studies. Taking whole series of identical twins and seeing how their behaviour is similar or different to their brother or sister gives us a good idea of how much influence their shared genetic programmes have. What we find is that whilst the genes do have their say, they don’t have control. For some behaviour patterns there is a stronger genetic pressure than others, but the important thing to realise is that their effects are limited. They are only a fraction of the story.

Genes contain the programmes that have given us the bodies, and especially the brains, that in turn have given us permission to enter a whole new world, an unprecedented vista of culture, history, legacy, spirituality, morality and countless other things that when added together make us human. In these realms genes are like a parent unwilling to let go of a child though it has come of age. They still have influence but they’re limited, sometimes even powerless.

Suppose I were offered the position of Agony Aunt in my local paper (an unlikely scenario I know). In my new position I get asked by one heartbroken individual about why they were suffering so much in their love life. Would it be out of place of me to politely suggest that their problem is all down to their particular variant of the gene AVPR1A (known to be involved in pair bonding and relationship quality)? Or how about if I blame it all on their oxytocin levels? I don't think it would go down to well or even actually be of any help. Clearly, in these kind of situations reductionism doesn't work.

So, whilst we can gain much from breaking any complex subject down into its component parts - in many cases that isn't enough. Some scientist/philosophers fail to spot the difference.

On the origin of life...

Why is it that anytime even a *hint* of a drop of water is found anywhere else in space there are loud cries of 'Life!' to accompany it? Is it anything to do with research budgets?

The latest example spotted by NASA is Enceladus, a tiny moon orbiting Saturn.  Let's be fair though, if they're right then this is more than just a drop - its a whole subterranean ocean.  The BBC report has the following quote:

"We need three ingredients for life, as far as we know - liquid water, energy and the basic chemical building blocks - and we seem to have all three at Enceladus, including some fairly complex organic molecules," commented John Spencer, a Cassini scientist from the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

Now don't get me wrong, this is an exciting find, but the one thing that has been learnt in the study of abiogenesis so far is that it is far from straightforward.  The search is still on for how to get to 'first base'  and gather all the necessary basic ingredients.  A very recent suggestion is Titan, another one of Saturn's satellites.  It has an atmosphere made from Nitrogen and Methane giving traces of other simple organic compounds.  So maybe the basic chemicals were synthesized there and came to Earth on the No 42 meteorite?

I'm not saying a natural mechanism for life's origin will never be found but if it is I'll wager it will be very intricate, very coincidental and very unlikely... almost to the point of being unbelievable.

Who were Adam and Eve? Part 1

In uniting the twin progeny of God’s Word (the Bible and Creation) the most serious question raised is, ‘How do Adam and Eve fit in?’

There are at least two possible scenarios that I’d like to suggest.

The first is the simplest and most literal option. Adam was miraculously moulded from the dust of the ground and Eve just as miraculously was moulded from Adam’s flesh: in other words exactly as a straight reading of Genesis 2 describes.

The Bible does indicate that there were other humans around at the time but Adam and Eve were special. In the Garden of Eden they were separated off from the world beyond its boundaries, free to live and walk with God, and the first creatures to have a knowledge of and relationship with Him.

This was the beginning of God’s direct revelation. With such revelation comes responsibility. Knowing what God wants brings the opportunity to accept or reject it. As Genesis 3 documents they chose the latter and so sin (choosing to go against God) entered the world.

Following their eviction Adam and Eve’s family went on to build their lives in the dog-eat-dog world outside. And the rest? Well that's history.

See here for an alternative scenario.

All items reduced... part 2

(Part 1 is here)

Well it wasn't a leaf!

The problem is that you were only looking at part of the picture.

Here in this simple analogy we come to realise the great danger of reductionism, and how errors can creep into our thinking. The closer we get to a topic, the more we zoom in, the narrower our field of view becomes, until we eventually lose sight of the whole picture. Where the picture is relatively simple this isn’t a problem. The reduction can tell us just about everything we need to know. Reducing the flight of a passing comet to be an object that follows clear, definable laws of physics allows us to predict with incredible accuracy the next time when we’ll see that comet again. All well and good. But what about something more complicated?

Disease

Some diseases lend them self to a reductionist approach. A single point mutation in a length of genetic code can wreak havoc. Whilst the symptoms may be complicated, reduce it down to the level of the gene and we find the cause of the problem. Yet most of medicine isn’t quite so simple. Many diseases have much more complicated causes, they can affect different people in different ways, and treatments that work on one individual might not work on another. Then there are the psychological issues. What effect do they have? The reductionist is doomed to failure. That’s not to say that there isn’t a logic to what is happening, there is, but it cannot be reduced. Doctors have long realised that to be successful they have to take a holistic approach, tailoring their treatments to the patient and looking at the whole picture.

Reductionism is a great tool for solving 1-dimensional problems. It has its uses in more complicated situations as well but these are limited because often a 3, 4 or 5 dimensional problem cannot be broken down into components. Each aspect affects the others; unless you have them altogether the picture isn’t true. Perhaps we see this most clearly when we start to look in the mirror.

All items reduced... part 1

If monolith of science can be described as having a ‘general tendency’ it would probably be fair to say that this has been to reduce the universe down. No we’re not talking about a giant shrinkage experiment to create a new kind of Lilliput. What we are saying that in order to understand the world science has tried to reduce it, break it up, to its component parts. So the computer that I sit at to type this out can be broken down to keyboard, mouse, processor chips, memory cards etc and these in turn can be broken down into their basic materials, silicone, plastic, aluminium, and then even further to atoms, molecules, and whizzing electrons, and then… You get the idea. The great thing about this process is that, hopefully, as we reduce down through the various orders of magnitude, like peeling back the layers of an onion, each layer explains how the last one worked. So, the passage of electrons through conductors explains how computer chips work, for example.

This procedure has yielded outstanding results in practically every single discipline of science and as such has led some people to suggest by reducing the world down, again and again, we will eventually be able to explain our entire existence. Is this true? Or being drunk on our own success have we missed something?

Consider the image above. What is it?

Why I am not an atheist

1) Though the universe offers no proof of God's existence it does show strong evidence. From the anthropic principle to the remarkable beginning of life on earth and onwards to the arrival of us human beings there is plenty to suggest that there is more going on than mindless, meaningless materialism.

2) God has spoken to us through the Bible. Its message, delivered over a period of 1500 years to over 40 different individuals, testifies to that.

3) The prophetic vision of the Bible commends it as being from God.

4) After the crucifixion of Jesus many of his followers were persecuted, tortured and killed for their belief that Jesus had risen. Many of these were eye-witnesses.

5) The human senses of eternity, morality and spirituality are there for a reason.

A bird in the hand...

There are lots of reasons to think that birds evolved from therapod dinosaurs but there are also lots of questions. One of those questions appears to have been answered by a new fossil find.

Early therapods have a hand with five digits. Birds have three. As the shape of the birds 'fingers' look like numbers 1, 2 and 3 of their dino predecessors it was assumed that they had simply lost numbers 4 & 5 through time.

Then enter the developmental biologists to throw a spanner into the works! They observed that in bird embryos all five digits start to develop, but then numbers 1 & 5 wither away leaving 2, 3 & 4. That kind of vestige is powerful evidence for evolution but it did leave a bit of a puzzle. This new find helps sort it out. The developmentalists were right.

Limusaurus inextricabilis is a therapod dinosaur of a 160 million year vintage. It has 4 digits but number 1 is dramaticaly reduced in size whilst 5 is absent completly, and there are shape changes too... in other words this is a snapshot in the process that starts with 5 fingered therapods and ends with modern day birds.

The first man, the last man

In the New Testament the actions of Adam and Jesus are compared the one against the other. Looking at the details of this pairing can be very enlightening in regard to understanding who Adam was. Here's an example:

'Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.' 1 Corinthians 15 v 45

Before we go any further there's a ground rule for the discussion that follows, and that is:

The sense in which Adam is the first man must be the same as the sense in which Jesus is the last - its all part of the same argument.

Okay, well I must admit I find it hard to say exactly how Jesus is the 'last'. One thing that is obvious is that he is not the 'last' in terms of the line of human history. The testimony of two thousand years of babies born proves that! Likewise it must follow that we cannot use this passage to insist on Adam being the 'first' in the line of human history.

So what does it mean? At the moment my favourite suggestion is that Jesus was the last man in the duration of the reign of sin. (Here I'm picking up ideas from Romans 5). Jesus defeated sin, so after him it was finished.

But for this to be acceptable we still need to check it back against the ground rule. Does the principle still hold true when we apply it to Adam? Well yes it does. It follows neatly that, as Jesus was the last man, so Adam was the first man in the line of the reign of sin.

Finally, as an added bonus, this whole suggestion runs nicely in continuity with the earlier part of the chapter:

'For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.' v 21, 22

Something for the mantlepiece

A new 100 000 year old find from South Africa may provide an insight into the culture of early humans. This one is a piece of engraved ochre and can be added to various other examples of pierced shells and geometric carvings that have been dated as being over 75 000 years old. The only explanation for objects like these seems to be human culture of some kind.

Looking at the photographs of these artefacts with my untrained eye I can't help thinking that some of them look fairly innocuous, but then others have clearly deliberate markations - like the one above.

The big question is: What are they for? Are they symbols intended to mean something?

The authors of this paper (Henshilwood et al) are sure that the marks are not notations (record keeping). Instead they believe them to be symbolic and part of a tradition of symbology.

One eye open, one eye closed

I've just been reading an essay by Susan Blackmore (psychologist and author of books such as 'The Meme Machine'). In it she writes:

'In spite of education and rational thought, and in spite of the harm done by religious war and oppression, it seems generally hard for people to live without religion.'

Quotes like this illustrate how as a group atheists are just as prone to words of arrogant piety as anyone else, but that's not the point I want to bring out here.

Blackmore has written extensively about 'memes'. Whilst the name 'meme' may sound exotic the fundamental thesis is very simple. A meme is basicaly 'an idea'. The big revelation is that some ideas do well and prosper, others fall by the wayside. Hardly anything earth shattering.

To be fair though the suggestion that a meme can be thought of in ways similar to a gene is helpful. Like genes, ideas can be replicated, altered and spread through the population. They undergo a kind of natural selection too.

The punch-line Blackmore suggests is that many aspects of culture like language, music, art, and religion are merely products of the selfish meme. Its a moot point, but for our purposes here lets go with it. Let me raise two issues.

Firstly, even if all of the above are the products of the evolution of memes it doesn't stop them being true.  This is where her logic seems to short-circuit. Take music for example. The mathematics of melodies, harmonies and rhythms are easily established and so the difference between music and just noise is quantifiable. Even if, as Blackmore suggests, it took memes to discover it - music is still 'true'.

This point is rammed home when you get to what many people think of as being the holy grail of reason - science. Well, our scientific understanding can thought of as being nothing more than the product of an arms race between memes.  Our understanding that the earth travels round the sun is a very effective meme.  Is it then simply the product of our collective imagination?  Of course not.  More than just a meme it is actually true.

The same ultimately applies to religion. Even if it was memes that first uncovered religiosity, it was because it was there to be discovered in the first place.

Secondly, and much more succinctly, we musn't forget that most (all?) of our meme's come from external sources. For those of us who 'believe' its obvious that one of those sources is God. Religious ideas can well be thought of as a pool of memes going round our minds. It doesn't stop them being true, and it doesn't stop them being from God.

Blackmore highlights how easy it is to fall into the trap of reductionism. She has one eye peering down a reductionist microscope, and the other is tight shut.

Cain's Enemies

I used to think that the story of the human family is precisely the same as the story of Adam and Eve's. That may be true spiritualy but Genesis 4 gives three reasons to suspect that outside of Eden they were not alone.

Firstly there's the classic question of Cain's wife. Its amazing that the incestuous explanation of this has persisted for so long... like incest is only wrong for genetic reasons? There is no reason in the text insisting that Cain married his sister - its based purely on the assumption that there were no other humans around (and that the first family were geneticaly dramaticaly different from the rest of us). Cain started his family outside of Eden, which is where I would suggest he found his wife as well.

Secondly there is the question of Cain's enemies. When God told him he was to be evicted from Eden how did he respond?

'Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.' v 14

Whoever finds me will kill me? It seems that Cain knew full well that outside of Eden's protection he would be in a world of violence and danger. Perhaps he was talking about wild animals? Well the text simply doesn't read that way. See how God reassures him, it seems to be pointedly aimed at the only animal we know that could understand such a curse... humans:

'Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.' v 15

If there still lingers any doubt verses 23, 24 seem to clear the matter up.

And thirdly there's the details of Cain's building projects.

'When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch. ' v 17

Now we'd be wrong to thing of this as a spralling metropolis like London, New York or Sydney but equally its something more than pitching a tent. The Hebrew indicates that this was a guarded settlement and so its another indication that there were other human beings around at the time - to live with and to try and live without.

Creationism or creationism?

The term 'Creationist' has been well and truly pigeon holed over the last forty-odd years to describe a specific view that life on earth (that's each individual kind of organism) arose literaly out of nothing by God's supernatural power.

Well, writing that first sentence has taken me about 5-minutes. When you think about it the whole idea of 'Creationism' has an incredibly narrow focus. Sure there are variations (broadly speaking from Young Earth to Old Earth Creationism) but when you come down to it what links them together is that opening phrase. Its tempting to define Creationism as a belief in a literal understanding of the opening chapters of Genesis but actually that doesn't work either. Whilst its true that the young-earthers do take things hyper-literaly, the old-earthers by necessity can't do the same.

When you think about for long enough the Creationist view becomes inconsistent. The Bible is clear that you - sat reading this posting - and me - sat writing it - have been created by God. Take Job, as an example:

'Your hands fashioned and made me... Remember that you have made me like clay;
and will you return me to the dust... You clothed me with skin and flesh,
and knit me together with bones and sinews.' ch 10 v 8-11

Powerful words, but let's try understand them in a way that is true and consistent to the Creationist interpretation. Let's take this passage literally. Let's forget genetics, meiosis, mitosis, embryology or any other aspect of the science of reproduction. Let's picture a ball of mud in our mother's womb.

Well of course no one does. These aspects of science find acceptance across the board. What this means is that to believe in the words of Job and believe in God as a creator means to believe in a God who works THROUGH natural processes. The natural consequence of that is that Creationism (with a big 'C') is a breaking of the mould.

Sure there are clear examples of 'special creation' - Jesus must have got a Y-chromosome from somewhere - but these are the exception, not the rule.

I am all for consistent creationism.

All Change!

A common and misleading claim of Creationist literature is that there aren't any examples of transitional fossils. In other words every creature that ever existed on this planet has appeared without even a glimmer of any preceeding relatives in the fossil record.

Well, a special edition of the Journal 'Evolution: Education and Outreach' has come out that is all about transitions. It's open access so anyone can read it and you'll find it here.

There are in fact some very good examples of transitions and they provide strong evidence that rather than 'zapping' new creatures from nothing the Creator works through process to bring His word to fruition.

Roll back the clock

One way of working out how far back the human line goes is to use the 'Mitochondrial Clock'.

Mitochondria are like the engine of the cell - they supply the energy to help the cell do what it needs to do. But what's handy is that these little boiler houses have their very own package of DNA (separate from that found within the nucleus of the cell).  Rather being a mix of both parent's DNA - like in the nuclear version - the package found in Mitochondria comes entirely from the mother.  That keeps things nice and simple.

As time goes on that DNA mutates a little and on average it mutates at a predictable rate.  So if you take a group of modern day people and see how different their mitochondrial DNA is, then it's possible to trace how far back it would have been that those people had the same DNA pattern - what's dubbed as Mitochondrial Eve.

Well a new piece of work has looked at the accuracy of this method and calibrated it. The researchers worked out that humans dispersed from a small population around 55-70 000 years ago (Soares et al, American journal of Human Genetics 2009).  As part of their study they ran checks against known points in recent history where human populations have resettled, and these used these to verify their findings. What this means is that the group being tested shared an ancestor in a small group of human beings all that time ago.

This is way before Adam and Eve walked the Garden of Eden and together with other evidence illustrates that the human lineage extends a long, long way. I discuss the Biblical for this here

In the beginning...

Well I've been thinking of doing this for a while and now I actually have!

From this point on all the thoughts I've been tinkering with for the last x years will be logged down and recorded in all their preposterousness and for posterity.

There's an alarming thought.

I should explain the title. Its a Greek word for 'invisible' or 'that which can't be seen'. Take a look at the verse at the bottom of the screen and you'll see why.

Finally I also wonder what it is I would like to get out of this?  Clarity I suppose.  The chance to travel along and see where we go.  The odd comment would be nice too!