A story of five robins

I’ve just put together some photography and video footage of the robin family in my back yard.

They have left the immediate area now, and I hope they’re doing OK.

If you have a moment, check it out.

Love is all around

Creationists often complain that naturalism belittles emotion. It allegedly reduces profound feelings to chemical reactions. This is, I believe, a false dichotomy: emotions can be profound and chemical at the same time.

But there is another rather intriguing implication of naturalism (one that may actually be true!), and it applies to other animals, especially other mammals. As a Christian, I used to wonder if other animals could experience profound emotions like love, given that they weren’t made in God’s image as we supposedly were*.

In a naturalistic framework, though, it seems reasonable to conclude that animals do, in fact, experience these emotions. This is because feelings of love (and other emotions) are essentially nature’s way of tricking us into adopting certain adaptive behaviors. Evolution doesn’t hand each animal an instruction manual laying out cogent arguments for reproducing, eating, etc. Instead, it develops brains that are hardwired to reward adaptive behaviors and punish non-adaptive behaviors. We experience these rewards as love (and other positive emotions) and revulsion (and other negative emotions).

The feeling of love for one’s partner or spouse is adaptive because it prompts us to care about the welfare of another being long enough to produce, and care for, offspring.

And, given that all of today’s mammals have a common ancestor, it seems likely to me that the basic sensation of love, evolved as a reward for stable partnerships, is common among most, if not all, mammals. It is quite possible, then, that love really is all around us.

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* I also seem to remember C. S. Lewis making a rather odd argument that it is impossible for people to truly love their pets and other animals, but I’m afraid I don’t remember the gist of his argument. Suffice it to say that I do not agree with this sentiment – it didn’t convince me when I first read it as a Christian, and it doesn’t convince me now.

Machines can be complicated, too.

I’m thoroughly enjoying Proust was a Neuroscientist, by science writer Jonah Lehrer. His theme is as follows: artists have, on many occasions, discovered profound truths about the brain long before scientists have cottoned on.

It’s a fascinating read.

However, I have one little quibble (thus far). In a chapter about neurogenesis and brain plasticity, Lehrer concludes that so much uncertainty and complexity is involved in determining personality and behavior, that we can effectively say good-bye to determinism, and the lack of free will that accompanies it.  We are not, he claims, the machines we once thought we were.

Not so fast, Mr. Lehrer!

This is, I believe, a problem of misplaced perspective. The types of machines we build, like the 1939 BMW boxer sidevalve engine shown above, are actually just one subset of the machine category: they’re simple. Extremely simple, in fact. They may seem complicated, but far greater complexity, flexibility, and dynamism can easily be found in nature, especially in complex organisms such as ourselves.

Lehrer is therefore quite correct in pointing out how complex and dynamic we are, and he is right that we are not quite like the simple machines we are accustomed to using in everyday life. He is even right that it is not practically possible, at this point, to even attempt to predict human behavior – the amount of information needed to make such projections is staggeringly huge.

But this contrast between ourselves and our machines does not justify placing us in an entirely separate category. We are extremely complex chemical, electrical, mechanical machines, with many more inputs, outputs, and degrees of freedom (in the engineering sense) than most of the machines we’re used to dealing with. We do, nonetheless, perform some of the same functions as our machines: we move, we perform calculations, we sense signals, and we maintain stable thermal and chemical conditions against changes in our environment.

Perhaps we see ourselves as unique because we are conscious, or because we can think. But even these abilities, arising as they do from brain function, can be described in terms of basic physics and chemistry, and are therefore the result of machinations just like everything else.

In short, there is no ghost in the machine.  We are the machine.

If the word “machine” still grates, perhaps there is solace in the knowledge that we – homo sapiens – are the most astoundingly sophisticated, versatile machines ever to have come into being. (To the best of our knowledge, of course!)

Science and belief – a graphical history

Here’s a short (and grossly oversimplified) graphical illustration of the rise of science and its effect on supernatural beliefs. This was inspired by a friend on the Atheists and Christians Facebook page – thanks Wes!

Sensible in Mississippi

The Mississippi ballot initiative to define human beings as “persons” from conception, has failed.

This is good news. What irks me, though, is a detail in how this initiative is described in some reports (such as this one and this one), namely as an attempt to redefine the moment when “life starts”.

First, the ballot initiative does no such thing. It merely concerns the term that should be used to describe human life, it does not attempt to define when life begins.

Second, the idea that a scientific question such as “when does life begin?” can be answered by a political vote is ludicrous.

Third, the question of when life begins has only one proper answer: billions of years ago.

There is no magical moment at which each person’s life begins. The sperm and egg that join to form a new embryo are alive before they meet. Two live cells join to become one live cell.

In short, life is inherited, not created. The only time it was created was during the process of abiogenesis billions of years ago.

An intriguing fossil find

A transitional hominid skeleton, about 2 million years old, has been found in the Malapa cave, about 200 miles from Pretoria, the place of my birth. The discoverer, Lee Berger, reckons it may be the best candidate yet for the first member of the homo genus. The NPR article links to this nice graphic, in which the possible position of Australopithecus sediba, as the fossil has been named, is shown.

Beautiful science

An article in today’s New York Times discusses the neural network mapping of the C. elegans nervous system. This worm has only 302 neurons, making it amenable to the sort of detailed study reported in the article. My main reason for posting about this story is not, however, because the science is fascinating (it is),  but because I was struck by the beautiful graphic used to demonstrate some of the key points (another simple yet beatiful representation of the C. elegans connectome can be found here).

Communication is a such a crucial part of science, and beautifully produced, easy to understand graphics such as the one in the NYT article, or the one of the partial connectome of the human brain pictured above, go a long way to bringing out the fascinating aspects of scientific work.