Monday, March 17, 2014

AN ANALOGY FOR THE MISSING LINK



THE AGES OF MAN: AN ANALOGY FOR THE MISSING LINK

All analogies break down. They’re not perfect, but here’s the best I can do to illustrate where the missing link charges by the Creationists break down.

Imagine that at the moment of birth, an unmanned camera begins to take snapshots of a person every second from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death. At the moment of this being’s death, a daily record of his entire existence is now stored on file in the Whole Earth Library along with the photo records of all the people in Whole Earth County.

Now, with that moment by moment record of existence for your perusal, if I asked you to point to the exact moments when the being moved from infant to toddler and toddler to adolescent, from adolescent to post-adolescent, from post-adolescent to young man (you get the picture), could you identify those moments? No, of course not, because there is no missing link. The change is so gradual that you can’t do it. Same with the whole history of life on earth, only we’re talking about “species creep” in reality and not Shakespeare’s "Ages of Man".

You’ll say, “But I can still tell that’s a male child and a man all the way through.” Okay, all analogies break down, so let me make the analogy even a little closer to the case at hand.

Let’s add some details to the being’s life. At some point in the being’s life, he fights in a war, becomes a one-legged, one armed paraplegic in a wheel chair whose face is so badly disfigured by fire and shrapnel that nothing can reconstitute it because he’s in a fairly unscientific age. But since we have the entire record on file, stored in the archives of the Whole Earth Library, we still know this man to be the same being all the way through. It’s all on record, and we can definitely now recognize the prewar from the postwar being.

But let’s add another bit of reality to the case.

Suppose a hurricane tears into the Whole Earth Library long after the man is dead and passed away. It spreads the record of his existence over a twenty mile area. Some of the photos drop into fires which are burning, some onto the surfaces of the river and float away, some onto the surface of a lake to soak and sink, some drop into wells and crevices (you get the picture—destruction and dispersal of the record of our man). But if you get to the spot of the catastrophe soon enough, given the amount of evidence still remaining, you will probably pretty easily figure out that this series of snapshots are of one being, unless, of course, many other series of snapshots are lying around and mixed up with his. Now the problem of finding the “moments of transition” is getting very complicated by too much evidence and by it’s being randomly dispersed and mixed with other kinds of photo evidence all over the county. In fact, I’d say the ability to identify any missing “link” or “moment when his age changed” is now pretty well lost to time, even though we know they occurred. Probably we could never have done it in the first place, given the nature of the reality of change’s slow time frame.

But let’s add more reality to our analogy.

Over a period of two thousand years, many wars are fought over this very ground where the remaining photos lie. Bombs blow craters and refill them. Nature does its work too. Wild fires cross and re-cross the ground, rains fall on it, sun burns down, winds blow, natural catastrophes sweep over the land (you get the picture). Surveying the ground where the Whole Earth Library once stood, we’ll be lucky to find evidence that a library was there at all, let alone a weathered photo of a single man, our man. Any photo that might lie on the surface will be weathered and faded, and it will be hard to even identify it as a photo. Our photos of the man would seem like bits of the earth itself.

Now, how will we be able to identify the “moments of transition” through Shakespeare’s Ages of Man of this particular example of our species, even if we find four or five photos? I think it’s impossible, don’t you? At this point, I’ve brought us somewhere near to just before our current age of exploration where we humans stood when Darwin arrived on the scene. 

But let’s get even more real.

Suppose an alien “consciousness” evolves (the key word is consciousness) with the body of what we might call an ant, a consciousness which has never heard of humankind and its culture and which evolved somewhere far from Whole Earth County (maybe another planet) but which  eventually grows curious enough to travel over the earth to see what’s up.

Standing on the grounds of what was once Whole Earth County, the alien consciousness finds one fairly intact and not too faded photo which, fortuitously, has been protected inside an upside down ration tin which one of its many feet kicks as it walks. It’s the picture of a human infant in a crib. The ant consciousness has no idea what it’s seeing but it’s curious. It can’t tell animate from inanimate in the photo. The ant calls for backup.

More ants arrive and begin to search the ground and dig it up. After decades of human time, the ant researchers come up with three more photos of our original man. Of course, they don’t know that. We do because we are a sort of objective camera which is observing and recording this whole tale. One photo is a full length view of him as a young man before the war. Another shows him from the waist up in a hospital bathrobe. He’s in early convalescence just after the war, with face burned beyond recognition, missing limbs, in a wheelchair built for bipedal persons. The third photo is from our man’s death bed scene with a hairless, toothless, shriveled face peeking over the edge of a hospital sheet.

At this point in our story, the ant consciousness can’t even tell if this “thing” in a barred place which you and I recognize as an infant is the same kind of thing that sits in a wheeled carriage or as the thing peeking out of the covers. They just have no concept for these “things” they’re seeing in the snapshots.

Eventually, though, one bright researcher ant notes that all the things have heads and maybe eyes, except for the thing in the wheeled thing. The researcher can’t make out that thing’s blasted, burned head too well. You know? No one can really tell if these things they’re looking at are one thing or four things. Not really. So they’re stored away in fossil drawers.

Eventually, however, other ant consciousness begins to understand from other photos that these things they are studying had things which took pictures of other things, and they learn that photo paper has distinctive traces and that some photos are numbered or marked in some way or another. Call the discovery of paper types and the numbering systems for photos, the underlying and connecting thread of all the photos, “natural selection” or “DNA”.

Now, to wrap this analogy up, a researcher near Whole Earth County pulls the four photos of our man out of the fossil drawer and study’s the paper. The researcher finds the four photos are made of the same paper. By their numbering, research can sequence them.

Finally, as a few more photos from Whole Earth County pile up, the ants can reliably predict that these different “beings” or “things” are connected in a line by the DNA of photo paper, but the transition points between the thing in the barred cage, and the prewar thing squinting in sunlight, and the thing in the wheeled carriage and the old thing under the sheet are perhaps forever missing. Still, our ant consciousness has snapped the picture correctly.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

AN OLD BEATNICK MEETS GEORGE BUSH IN A TAVERN

Finally watched The Butler last night. Spent a large part of the movie in tears. All the pain that finally buried this "very sensitive" child under alcohol abuse came back last night. The interesting thing to me is how "conservative" I was as child and youth, in that I believed all the myths about America. After WWII, I really believed all the things about America's greatness, its love of freedom and justice and free speech. What the 50s and 60s taught me, finally and painfully, was that the American people were no better or worse than any other nation of people. 

Unrealistic "idealism" is what tortures modern conservatives also. They cling to the past, and they believe all the nonsense they were taught as children. They can't see modern America in a real light, and they are incapable of seeing the "injustices" created by free enterprise or capitalism. I do believe that capitalism is the best method for distributing a nation's wealth as long as the distance between those most and least rewarded does not grow too great. Which it has. 

Sadly, modern Teapublicans can't help "blaming" others for being poor because conservatives cling to the myth of "free will", thus it's easy for them to blame others and to praise themselves. They are controlled by evolutionary forces just as much as the less fortunate are controlled by genes and nurture. Those who succeed usually have a "sense of entitlement". The sense of entitlement describes a psychological or electrochemical state in the brain/body that leads to success. Their "psychological state" is a cause of success rather than an effect of success, and a grown Teapublican can no more take credit for that psychological state of being than a honeybee can take credit for being the queen of the hive. 

This film explores the difference
In my own case, I was driven by pain to try and understand who I was and what made me into the person I was. Success became secondary to that struggle. I was tortured by insecurity and shame. Until I reached the bottom of my personal struggle, trying to escape my worker bee status was next to impossible. It was like trying to climb up a hill of marbles. By the time I did understand the forces that drove me, I was in my 50s, a late start in the rush to earn fame and fortune in the free enterprise system. If only Teapublicans understood their fortunate electrochemical inheritance and quit "being proud" of themselves, we'd have quite a different nation to live in. 

Pardon my length, but simple-mindedness is not one of my strongly evolved characteristics. Complexity of thought comes with the territory of self-understanding. Thus, I am not George Bush and he is not me. Back in the day, however, I'm sure we'd have enjoyed drinking a beer together had we known each other. I enjoyed the company of many a young George Bush in the taverns where I "bought my alcoholism" one drink at a time.

Friday, January 03, 2014

FEATHERED SHAFT OF BEATNICK OLDSTER PUNCTURES A DUCK'S BREAST

Today I took my hour walkabout in the nearby Fred Meyer store (recently purchased by Kroger). When I emerged, the clouds had flown the sky, and, unfortunately, I missed a chance to take my walk on a decently warm winter's day.

My real topic, however, is a sadder theme. At one corner of Freddy's, I several times passed the angry face of Phil Duck, glaring from a pillow no compassionate woman would want to lay her cheek upon, and I realized for the zillionth time how sad the face of the average (not all) faith-ridden Southern male is. He can display only various shades of two faces: an angry face and the sarcastic smile which is all the humor an embittered Southern male can manage. Just study the faces and listen to the quips of the Duck Billed Robertson family. It's so obvious, it's a wonder not more are wise to the ducktails they use as mouths.

Their foul temperament comes from two sources. Their forefathers lost a war and they still can't get over it, and they are the victims of a religion which encourges the average (not all) father to lay freely about himself with a rod upon the shoulders and backsides of his average child so as not to spoil him. From such an unspoiled philosophy, the average (not all) Southern Bible Bibber is left with bitterness and sarcasm as his two responses to a world he did not make and cannot accept. If that isn't a sad tale, I don't know one when I see it. 

The story I linked to above (see Phil Duck) claims that their ducky show sports 8.6 million viewers. If you'll notice that number is close to the numbers that old time German, Rush Limbaugh, used to claim and Fox News still claims. All three claim the same sad number of embittered, out of touch Americans. A very sad, small, unchanging number indeed.