Evolution Now: A Message of Moral Reponsibility
Presented by Karel Rogers, PhD, Retired Professor of Biology, former Biology Department Chair, Grand Valley State University
About the Speaker
Karel Rogers is a retired Professor of Biology and former Chair of Biology at Grand Valley State University. Her research in paleoclimate has been funded by a series of grants from the National Geographic Society and the Climate Dynamics Program at the National Science Foundation. She is active in environmental work at the international, federal, state, and local levels as well as in working for systemic cultural change through political activism.
About the Event
Summary with Commentary for the 253rd meeting of CFI-Michigan, held at the Women’s City Club in Grand Rapids, Michigan on May 28, 2008.
This meeting’s topic was Evolution Now: A Message of Moral Responsibility. It was presented by Karel Rogers, PhD, Retired Professor of Biology, former Biology Department Chair at Grand Valley State University.
Dr. Rogers’ research on paleoclimate has been funded by a series of grants from the National Geographic Society and the Climate Dynamics program at the National Science Foundation. She is active in environmental work at the international, federal, state and local levels as well as in working for systematic cultural change through political activism.
Evolution is incorrectly seen as a process of the past but it is an ever- present fundamental force of existence. The visible world is made up of levels of organization- molecules to social groups- each level depends on the previous one but also has emergent properties subject to selective forces. As citizens of the US and of the world, it is our responsibility to actively drive these selective forces in positive directions rather than abdicate this moral responsibility to market forces.
Roger’s presentation to us was on the theme of a forthcoming book by her. She announced, honestly, that we were to serve as guinea pigs for the material presented and she would, in turn, use our criticisms and other responses in tweaking the book as well as in shaping her future lectures on the subject presented at this evening’s meeting.
A problem that arises in getting people to think of their place in nature and how their actions affect various natural systems is that humans tend to view themselves as outside of Animal Kingdom and that whatever degree and form of evolution that they find themselves in agreement with, is viewed to have somehow stopped when our species came along. We typically see ourselves as the be all and end all of the cosmos; part of some master Plan that had us as the inevitable outcome and that what we are able to perceive from our limited vantage point is what constitutes the history of the universe.
But the situation is completely reversed from this. To help illustrate our real place in cosmic evolution, Dr. Rogers displayed a pie chart showing that roughly a quarter of the whole of the universe is composed of Dark Matter. Much of the remaining chart was filled in with what was labeled Dark Energy. The remaining 4% was all that went to Visible Matter; the tiny portion that we operate in. This is in a universe that is 13.7 billion years old. Our own Milky Way galaxy is one of countless others shot throughout the universe and it is not the biggest or subjectively the best, nor is it located in any special place. It is composed of about a hundred- billion stars; our own is not exceptional and is but one out of all those other billions in the Milky Way. As with the galaxy itself in the universe, our solar system is located inconspicuously on but one of the spiral arms of the galaxy our solar system resides in, not in any central or otherwise prominent position. Our star- the Sun- is ringed by nine orbiting planets, our own being just one of those.
Seeing things from this vantage point, it is very difficult to still imagine that the universe came to be with us in mind. But what about our own planet- Earth? Surely IT was fashioned and formed for us, right? Well, as Dr. Rogers showed us in another chart that was set up like a clock face, a significant portion of the 4.5 billion and change years of the Earth’s existence was involved in molecular evolution, that resulted eventually in the origin of life. Prokaryotic life, as represented by bacteria for instance, held sway for the majority of Earth’s existence. Then multicellular eukaryotic life emerged on the scene. Various body plans came to be and were discarded until ones developed that set in motion the evolution of our most remote ancestors. A book that this summary writer recommends for how it clearly shows our deep connections to life forms going far back in time is Your Inner Fish; A Journey into the 3.5- Billion- Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin (Pantheon Books). While bacteria is arguably the most successful, if early, of lifeforms, other ages played out that were given names related to a particularly dominant type of being from each specific age; such as the Age of Fish, the Age of Reptiles and the Age of Mammals, the group that we are in. The other forms of life are still extant; mammals did not replace them and more than reptiles replaced fish, but instead found other niches to flourish in. All of the complex multicellular life occurred in the last portion of Earthly evolution. When the totality of the evolution of life on Earth is represented as a twelve- hour clock, as it was in Dr. Roger’s chart, then the genus Homo comprises but the last three seconds out of that 12 hours; our genus would have come into being at 11:59 and 57 seconds! If the point of Earth’s existence was to produce us, it certainly took it’s own sweet time in doing this.
Moreover, our very existence was allowed only by a contingent event; a meteor from space that crashed into the Earth 65 million years ago, effectively extinguishing the dinosaurs that had ruled and filled in every environmental niche (land, air and the seas) for 250 million years. Who knows how much longer their reign would have been without that meteor strike? We do know that mammals larger and more diverse than the small scurrying insectivores of that time (leading up to our genus and species) would never have developed without the demise of the dinosaurs, so again, it would be odd, in light of this, to think that humans were the intended product of life’s evolution on our planet.
Of that last three seconds of time on the 12 hour clock when the genus Homo emerged, only within the last second did human speech occur. Within a split second, religion came to be, and with that, the notion that the entire universe and everything within it had to do with us. Switching from the temporal to the scope of the Kingdom Animalia, humans represent only one, out of the 1.8 million known and named species- excluding microbes- on our planet.
Until about 150 years ago, humans lived within nature as a part of it. With the Industrial Revolution and especially since WWII, Western culture had divorced itself from what Dr. Rogers called: How This Place Works. More on this theme to follow.
Our presenter spoke of the reductionist approach to investigating the processes involved in life, where smaller parts explain the next level. An example she gave was that of atoms going to molecules, going to single celled organisms, flowing toward muticellularity, which may produce beings possessing a brain. As this upward flow toward greater complexity occurs, we find that there is an emergence of new properties that come into being along the way. Life systems are highly organized with collaborative actions going on. Each level of complexity adds features not found in the lower strata, such as the aforementioned brain existing in multicellular organisms that is lacking in single celled life forms, and with cells having properties that molecules do not possess.
Brains are an organized collection of neurons that allow physical and cognitive functions to occur in particular ways. The complex mind of the human being generates a sense of self and how the owner of the mind understands others— intentionality, motivations and so on. The mind may also be laid out along a track of a system of increasing complexity, where it may go to communities— virtually a network of minds within a bounded structure- and then ecosystems. Our human brains allowed us to create language, which in turn led to culture. Dr. Rogers later spoke of how complexity increases with time as knowledge builds on past discovery. Language is a way of preserving past experiences and creating repositories for knowledge that may be accessed later, and otherwise carried on into the future and built upon. Written language vastly increased this power, and now with the digital age, we may access virtually the entire world’s bank of human knowledge instantly.
Over time, minds became adapted to the settings in which they evolved. Different beings carved out their own way or approach to their environmental settings, with most beings living fully within the systems that they evolved in. Humans may transcend this through culture, language, technology and so on. While this may lead to greater glory and power over the environment, it also tends to lead humankind away from being integrated into the rest of Earth’s biota in a natural, collaborative process. We disrupt systems that have been in place for great stretches of time in a twinkling, without foresight into the detrimental effects that our practices and procedures produce.
Dr. Rogers finished the flow chart look at complexity starting with mind going to community and then to culture and the moral basis created for actions and prohibitions within the various cultures, by showing the next level, which was economy. Economy is worshiped in the US, she asserted. Although she did not start off by referencing how media of exchange initially involved tangible items that may be held in the hand (precious and rare or hard to obtain commodities; items of barter uncommon for one group but in some abundance for another, etc.), she did go on to note that we are now living in a time where monetary value is reduced to symbols- ones that are far removed from the intrinsic value of a tangible item. Examples she gave of this included how words and symbols replace actual currency in so many instances; the electronic exchange of units of value and how money is represented digitally- as bits of information- that may be bounced around the world via satellites, rather than going from hand to hand. This is another example of how we are separated from the real world sensations and experiences that our ancestors evolved in.
Next, Dr. Rogers turned to CAS, or complex adaptive systems, as proposed by John Henry Holland, the father of genetic algorithms. He described CAS as a dynamic network of many agents, such as cells, species, individuals, firms, or nations, acting in parallel, that are constantly acting or reacting to what the other agents are doing. Coherent behavior is generated only when the agents compete or cooperate amongst themselves. The overall behavior of the system is the result of a huge number of decisions made every moment by many individual agents.
CAS, also known as complexity science, may be applied to everything from the stock market to ant colonies. In human affairs, it is focuses on social group- based endeavors and deals with emergence (as discussed by our presenter) and self organization. It is grounded in Darwinian ideas of adaptation and evolution and may be applied to complex phenomena from cosmic to social objects., where complex emergent properties are examined from the interaction of the individual agents within a given system.
Control, in this view, is dispersed and non-centralized. The elements within the system can replicate and change physically or via mimicry. Frozen accidents, or chance events, may leave a lasting impression (such as the cataclysmic event of the meteor striking the Earth at the CT boundary, forever changing the fortune of the mammals that were minimalized by the dinosaurs up until that event) are also taken into account. As touched upon, complexity arises from increasing information from previous successes that are transmitted along into future generations as well as building upon proven collaborations between elements within the system. None of this can be conjured up by magic, but only through natural processes.
As another example of a contingent event that ended up having consequences beyond the sum of its parts, Dr. Rogers noted how Adam Smith’s writings on economics influenced Darwin in his formulation of the mechanism of natural selection as a driving force behind biological evolution. One might add, too, that if Darwin hadn’t been the son of a wealthy and successful doctor in class- conscious Victorian England, he would never have found himself aboard the vessel, the Beagle (affording hi the opportunity to collect samples of beings directly showing transmutational adaptations to changing environments), where he served as ship’s companion to the captain who was deemed to be of a higher class than the rest of the crew. Darwin was superfluous as a naturalist- there was already another in place for this role on board- but was needed to keep Captain Fitzroy company during the long lonely voyage where he was not supposed to interact with those below his social station.
Another way in which different elements may be brought together in different combinations to produce a self- organizing system of increasing complexity, is through sexual union.
Turning to computers, Dr. Rogers discussed the work of George Boole whose work became the basis of what was termed Boolean logic. One of the most prevalent uses of his ideas from the 1800s now seen is its use in search engines. Very simple rules allow for complex and vast stores of information to be accessed logically and swiftly.
Rogers contrasted biological evolution with cultural evolution; the speed in the former is constrained by reproduction and the differential environmental fitness of individuals possessing slightly advantageous adaptations; the latter speeds up with time, is cumulative and has different forces that act on its speed and transmission. For instance, religious views move slower than the overall culture while technology moves faster than the overall culture. Economic systems are examples of cultural evolution. Dr. Rogers discussed some aspects of economic forces at this point in her talk.
As indicated earlier in this summary, we returned to a more detailed discussion on what our presenter referred to as How This Place Works. One version of this involves a supernatural Creator: God. Such an entity may or may not have been involved in the process. Rogers said that science cannot touch this since it falls outside of the natural purview that science operates within. That said, her personal preference is that there is a God rather than Nothing. In her vision, God did not create humankind in Its image but rather the reverse is true: humans created God in their own image. This summary writer will add at this point that many writers in this vein have noted that if horses (as an example) were the dominant sentient life forms on our planet (and had possessed language, culture and technology), that their deity would likely be envisioned in the form of an enormous equine. Dr. Rogers believes that we may get insight into God by humbly looking at this creation. Her God is big enough to withstand any questions we might ask and any answers we might find. She also touched upon the fine- tuned universe and other Anthropic Principle arguments to bolster her God rather than nothing preference for how it all came to be.
She next contrasted spirituality with religiosity as they may be employed in such concerns as the definition of God, morality, life’s purpose and connectedness. God may be defined as a projection of human limitations and biases. It may also be defined as the humble acknowledgment of human smallness within the cosmic story. The traditional definition of morality is usually framed in the context of the views from the major religions, but it may also be defined from the perspective of a great unfolding story of the universe, with humans as part of that story, rather than a failed experiment in the vast expanse of time. Life’s purpose for some is to get to heaven. Others may see it as our participation in the great cosmic story. As integrated into the fabric of the cosmos, we would, in keeping with this view, want to ensure health and abundance for all species. As for connectedness- the traditional religious view holds that humans are separate and above nature; here to dominate nature to our will. We are, in this view, the culmination of creation, the end point, and what the whole cosmic story is all about. Another way, however, of looking at this is to see humankind as an important part of the cosmic story, while understanding that we share the Earth with other species and, with this more enlightened understanding, we should strive to forge interconnected alliances with natural processes and beings to produce the greatest benefits for all life forms.
But regardless of the God question, we should realize that we are all interconnected and interacting elements in the CAS and learn to see the connections between different levels of organization in nature. She encouraged us to see how our choices put strong selective pressures on all levels of the complex adaptive systems around us. We should strive to make the distinction between destructive and synergistic approaches to dealing with the systems around us. Also, there is no evidence that CAS stopped evolving. All such systems are dynamic and interactive and each action places consequences and reactions within the system. Short term human intervention may allow for short term benefits from our small vantage point, but end up with large scale catastrophes in the wake of it.
Another contrast Dr. Rogers made was to pit Nature’s Way against the way of US Culture. Nature utilizes waste beneficially as food. All is absorbed and utilized with nature’s approach. Our approach makes no use of waste while generating increasing quantities of it. We leave behind toxic by- products and lose fertility and glut landfills. We use up natural resources with abandon and do not think of the connections between them. Fossil fuels are, for instance, ancient stored solar income, as she put it. Thom Hartmann wrote a book, I would add, on the subject of our fossil fuel use called: Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. We tend to squander the dwindling resource of trapped ancient sunlight, while Nature’s way is to run on current solar income. Nature depends on diversity, where we, by contrast, tend toward a monoculture, an assembly line process, factory farming, etc. Nature uses subtle, simple and sophisticated solutions to problems. The mechanisms of biological evolution are good examples of this simple elegance that is seen in nature. Our approach is one where we heat, beat and treat materials to bend them to our will, as Dr. Rogers memorably phrased it.
More diversity, as is the way of nature, means better natural resistance to disease. Our way forces us to counter the vulnerability to disease in our crops from lack of diversity by using pesticides and other treatments, which have their own negative impact on the environment. The CAS distributes power broadly with all parts interacting together. Our way is to centralize power and limit interaction and feedback. We are cognitively cut off from the very process of our food getting and the means by which we obtain power (electricity and other utilities) and natural resources. This disconnection allows us to remain blind to the detrimental impact we are having on the Earth and makes it harder to exert our own individual control on resource use and distribution. Our feeding/eating habits are ones that take food out of the context of the history of life, as Rogers put it.
The Western diet, with its meat centered, refined and processed foods; our monoculture, use of pesticides and fertilizers, is one that she declared as being immoral. Dr. Rogers talked about our obsession with food pyramids, our quest for getting the proper balance of nutrients and seeking to ensure that we have the correct number of servings of a certain food item, and wondered aloud how our ancestors ever survived without such rituals. She also discussed the economic influences that mitigate messages about limiting meat and dairy products from getting to us.
Some of the by- products to what she described as our immoral diet include obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease, cancer, and so on. The Western diet leads to Western diseases, she said. All this negatively impacts our economy through increased health care costs. Our Western diet and industrialized agricultural practices are being spread far and wide, so our deficiencies are also being exported, further reducing diversity worldwide.
Bad food creates a huge business opportunity, which is why powerful forces are set against making changes in the status quo. Some areas where business is booming due to our dietary practices include the expanding health care field, the nutritional supplement industry, the general food industry, the producers of quick- foods and the purveyors of diet gimmicks and goods.
Our Western monoculture is based on corn and soy beans and we have produced genetically engineered corn that cannot reproduce by itself, but requires the use of fertilizers and pesticides. Corn is run through other animals to get other products and is used as an ingredient or additive in most processed foods as in corn oil, high fructose corn syrup, etc. Corn is somewhere in the process of providing us with our milk, eggs, cheese, yogurt, etc. Everything from carpets to car fuels have or may have corn used in its production, not to mention such items as even diapers and crayons.
As indicated, monocrops are pest havens and degrade the fertility of the soil. The system we use kills not only diversity and all the benefits derived from that, but also kills synergy. Cows that evolved to eat grass are fed corn and even their own kind; this latter instance is what led to mad cow disease. We have produced genetically identical cows as a way of keeping them more uniform and standardized during the factory farming process. This lack of diversity on the bovines also leads to more use of antibiotics as their resistance is lowered, and therefore more things going into our meats that were never intended to be there. Monocultures are, Dr. Rogers said, automated nature. This is a strange thought to hold in one’s head.
Back to the wastefulness of our system; it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food. This is the reverse of how nature operates. Fifty gallons of oil is used to grow one acre of corn. Thirty five gallons of oil is used to fatten one steer. Dr. Rogers also talked about how it takes 3,000- 5,000 years to make soil; soil is a living thing. This is another resource we are using up fast, while it takes so long for it to be created naturally. We are negatively impacting our water from pollution caused by run off from fertilizers and pesticides and the urine and feces from jammed together factory farmed animals. We are producing dead zones in the water where no oxygen is found and nothing can live there. We kill off nature’s characteristic abundance. Underground rivers and aquifers holding what is called fossil water are going down. The common theme is that elements that take great gulfs of time to produce and emerge are being used up quickly without any way of replacing them.
Evolution is a fact of nature. It is not something that occurred in the past but is a dynamic mechanism shot through all of life and may be observed in action now. As written of before in other summaries, the Grant’s research on finches shows just how rapid and readily observable changes occur in populations to allow successful adaptations to changing environments. Biodiversity is what makes evolution work, so when this is decreased, so is the driving force behind evolution, which blunts the natural response to changes in the environment, which then, wreaks further irreparable damage on more and more natural systems.
Bodies do not do well without omega 3 fats which are found in fish. But the oceans are being over fished via factory trawling, an indiscriminate method that kills everything caught, throwing overboard the dead catch that is not prize, as waste. The fish themselves are so processed that it is hard to tell what we are really consuming by the time it reaches our tables. A dire pronouncement that Dr. Rogers made was that it is estimated that by 2040 there will be no fish left to eat. Tuna are farmed in nets, not living wild, and are sustained by artificial means as a way of ensuring uniformity of the end product while not considering the quality of the product itself. All life and other natural resources become a commodity to process and exploit, rather than a part of natural systems that evolved to work with other systems over evolutionary timescales. Humans throw all these systems out of balance and vastly speed up the processes at the expense of other interconnected systems without regard to the depletion of resources or sustainability.
We consume food- like substances that damage our health with the engine that drives its production running on fossil fuels. It is immoral to buy this sort of food once one knows the harm that it causes, our speaker declared. We may vote with our dollars to begin to correct these problems. Our system is built on the bottom line, not the health and welfare of our citizenry. The way to influence this system, then, is through not giving support to it and this is accomplished by changing our attitudes, becoming aware, and supporting alternatives to the monoculture society we now live in. We should eat real food, not food- like substances, and seek out food grown from local organic farmers as well as home grown foods. Know where your food comes from. Be aware of what conditions your food existed in prior to your consuming it. Limit meat consumption. Preserve food for winter months. Avoid foods labeled nutritional; they probably are not.
Other choices we can make include where we choose to live, who we vote for, how we measure success, what consumer products we buy and so on. Dr. Rogers exhorted us to lean toward sustainable practices that do little harm to the environment. As our population has increased, our environmental impact has become greater; our behavior- how we interact with nature- affects ever more of the world around us and even includes the survival of our children.
Omega 3, mentioned earlier, may be obtained from grasses and other sources, so one does not have to consume so much fish to derive its benefits. We should try to be better informed about the corn hidden in so many foods.
Our economy should be in service of the people, not the other way around as it is now. The changes that must be made seem too big at first. We may not see how to turn around something so entrenched and powerfully established. But Dr. Rogers offered that if only 20% of the population begins to share a common moral response to our non-sustainable current practices, a big impact can begin to be made which will feed upon itself and grow.
As noted before- different forms of evolution occur at vastly different rates. Cultural and technological evolution are much faster than biological evolution. We are still operating emotionally at the level of our distant ancestors but with the means to detrimentally affect so much of the planet now. Dr. Rogers summed these ideas up neatly in a quote from E. O. Wilson: Humans have stone- age emotions, a medieval governing system and god-like technology.
Genes collaborate and cooperate with each other; we as social organisms need to learn to do the same. Science informs us on how this place works, but if we do not listen, we will be doomed to become a failed experiment in cosmic evolution.
Summary written by Charles LaRue.
