Despite the fact that we live in a hyper-connected world, there are still things that slip through the cracks, only resurfacing via happenstance when the algorithmic gods mindlessly decree. In this particular case, I'm thinking about two things about dinosaurs that I learned this week: Utah has evidence of an intermediary tryannosaurid that helps fill in the story of how the Tyrannosaurus rex eventually became the tyrant reptile king, and the amber-preserved tail of a mid-Cretaceous dinosaur. The former was published on 22 February 2019…the latter, which I just found out about, was published 8 December…of 2016. So, even though there are two really cool updates to our understanding about dinosaurs that I learned about this week, only one of them happened this week. I'm feeling behind the curve, sadly. So, in an effort to make myself feel better about my inadvertent lapse (maybe I should set up a Google Alert for dinosaurs?), I wanted to write just a bit about my impressions about Moros intrepidus, this newly named beauty. On one hand, I'm pretty excited about it. The find, as the news article linked above points out, shows how the demise of Utah's state fossil, the Allosaurus, opened up a new niche that the tyrannosaurids were able to exploit. How did T. rex get so big? Well, there were ancestors to the King back when Allosaurus was chomping its way through Jurassic Utah. When the other reptile died off, Moros intrepidus was there, ready to take over the spot as top predator. Add in a few million years of evolutionary pressures, and you've a recipe for the Rex. On the other, this sort of thing, while exciting, feels a bit rushed. This is simply my take, as an armchair paleontologist: I wish we had a bit more of the skeleton before making the claims we have. If you check out the article in Nature, you'll see that the dinosaur is described because of some leg bones and a few teeth. One of the things that paleontologists and paleoartists have been criticized for is the way they tend to wrap bones in some pebbly skin and call it accurate. There's a lot of possibilities about what's going on in the shape and type of body that isn't fossilized. (Think, for example, how different your dog looks when shaved versus when she's still in her winter coat.) When it comes to describing a dinosaur, we almost never have a complete skeleton in a single place. Often, the understanding of the creature comes because we've found multiple pieces from sundry places and specimens. Together, we're able to cobble together a fuller picture. But just like the idea of what they looked like, we sometimes miss things. And I worry that there might be something crucial that Moros intrepidus has in the space between its legs and its front teeth that could change a lot of what we're assuming here. Consider the distinctive heads of a Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus, and Diplodicus. Their bodies are constructed differently, yes, but their overall shape and purpose is pretty similar. Without their heads intact, however, there's a potentially huge error in describing what their faces would have looked like. As a person who's really invested in being as precise as we can about these ancient creatures, I'm reluctant to make the kind of interpretive jumps that come by having so few bones. That being said, the deal with Moros intrepidus isn't new; most of our dinosaur species come from very fragmental sections of the animal. We do this all of the time. I just…kinda wish we didn't? I mean, I'm not trying to diminish the hard work of the paleontologists who made this discover--it's really cool, and it helps guide future work in the field toward a deer-sized tyrannosaurid (which, let's be honest, is freaking awesome). When I see the news article, I realize how little we know about it. The newspapers, however, make it sound much more certain it is. There's simply too little evidence about the creature to make more than vague, hazy guesses. Did it take advantage of the extinction of Allosaurus as the Cretaceous started up? Yes, that much is clear. Did it look as depicted above? No idea. Though it's doubtful, we could ask how the scientists know it doesn't have an impossibly cool crest like the Cryolophosaurus. And the answer is, they can't. Not until more is found. So it's less that we've a new tyrannosaurid and more the idea that we're making a lot of assumptions about its shape and appearance that's bothering me. But, hey, I'm usually behind the times on this sort of thing. By the time you read this, there could be something else entirely discovered that will set the whole thing on its head. And that's the great part about paleoscience; it, like the biology it describes, is evolving.
Dr. Yuval Noah Harari wrote a sequel to his book Sapiens, which--just on the conceptual level--is kind of impressive. After all, Sapiens is a record of human kind, with a broad view of the entirety of the evolution and history of the species. And though he deliberately (and necessarily) has to abridge that history over the course of a single volume, that book is really thought provoking and detailed nonetheless. If you haven't picked it up, I'd recommend it (though realize that the guy's a bit of a polemicist, even if he wouldn't consider himself one, and he relies heavily on scientific processes and explanations) as it makes for some interesting reading and might adjust the way you view the world.
Homo Deus, then, is the sequel. And if you're writing a sequel to a history book that is supposed to cover the history of humanity on the planet, there isn't a lot of room to grow, is there? And, yet, here we are. Sapiens' subtitle is A Brief History of Humankind. For Homo Deus, Dr. Harari picked A Brief History of Tomorrow. That really sums up the thesis of the book: Where do we go from here? Harari starts off by talking about the three largest problems that humanity has had to deal with since its inception: War, plague, and famine. Most of human history involves looking at the struggle against these three things. Our current society is an outgrowth of those priorities…yet they are, according to Dr. Harari, conquered. Though war still happens, we don't see it on the same scale we did in the past--particularly a century ago. Diseases can threaten small sections of humanity, but modern medicine has made significant inroads--so significant that massive epidemics appear to be a thing of the past. And, as he points out early on, for the first time in human history, more people are dying because of overeating than undereating. The argument of the rest of the book is one of potential futures of mankind. He isn't looking closely at the ecological future (that's The Sixth Extinction), so there's an assumption in his arguments that we'll either fix the problem or invent a solution to massive ecological loss. In that sense, he's pretty cheery about the future prospects, which include self-driving cars, automated everything, and an eventual disappearance of humankind into a mass of information according to dataism (belief in the supremacy of data) and current trends. Harari attacks all sorts of closely-held beliefs, including liberalism, humanism, socialism, capitalism (though he gives it a utilitarian pass by avoiding the quickly admitted shortcomings), free will, and the reality of gods or God. This iconoclasm isn't particularly shocking, as he'd made similar claims in Sapiens. But he is more thorough in this book, taking time to address the strangeness of consciousness--which he admits science can't explain--and then pushes the argument further to dismiss the unique status of humanity as anything other than the current winner for survival. On the one hand, I can see where he's coming from: We exceptional humans have decided that we're exceptional, and since there's nothing else who lives up to the criteria we set out to justify our exceptionality, we must, therefore, be exceptional. It's a bit like arguing that the hare is better than the fish at running a race, therefore the hare is better. And there's a humbling allure to this. What makes us special? Almost every tick-box on our list can be found in another species of animal, including language, social behaviors, and a host of other human traits. Is it that all of these things together, rather than any one thing, makes us special? For humans, we often say that we have a soul, yet Dr. Harari dismisses this as being unprovable. Consciousness, of course, is inexplicable, but we see the effects. The assumption, then, that there's a point at which the intelligence gathered inside of a system switches over to consciousness is his reason for arguing that robots--in the near future--will have to be granted human rights on the same grounds. All of these ideas are interesting and any one of them is worth interrogating at length. But the one question that really got me thinking was (and I'm paraphrasing, since I listened to the book and don't have the text in front of me), the one about religion. It should be fairly clear that, if Dr. Harari believes what he's writing, he himself is an atheist. I'm not, so there's definitely a difference in opinion, as it were, on that front. However, what I can't argue is Harari's point about how religion used to be on the forefront of creating humanity. Looking specifically at the radical changes that grew out of the Protestant Reformation, Harari notes that religion used to be the hotbed of new thinking. Changes of behavior and society came because of religious impetus, with religious justifications. Now, however, he argues that religions are all reactionary. They aren't making any claims about the future, but rather cling more pointedly to the past. And while there may be more nuance than he's finding, he has a point with this one: Religions aren't equipped to answer the larger questions that scientific breakthroughs are creating on an almost daily basis. While the Bible may have some pretty solid answers for things like how to treat other people and how to behave around a neighbor's ass, there's nothing in there that answers the questions about robot consciousness. Transhumanism (which Harari alludes to but never calls out precisely) makes the argument that human experience, being exclusively mental, can be downloaded out of the human body, digitized, then put back into a new body--mechanical or organic, it varies on the transhumanist. What does the Bible say about that? To be more specific, Harari claims that death is a matter of a technical glitch in the human system. Once we figure out the technical problem, scientifically-generated immortality will be possible. How does one stand before the Judgment Seat of God if one never dies? What happens when 80 becomes the new 50? How does one go about "honoring thy father and thy mother" when there are multiple generations, each going in separate directions? Say that death isn't completely defeated, but is instead delayed (as every medical intervention is designed to do)? How does one plan a family in that instance? Is having children and a family a transient thing, like public schooling? The idea that Homo sapiens can be so modified means, for Dr. Harari, that we will step out of this species designation and become Homo deus…god-like Man. And that's enough to put religious readers on edge. Of course, the religious answers to the earlier questions are likely to be reactionary. "Oh, well, it's blasphemous to say we can live forever" (though that's the point of the resurrection). Or, perhaps, "we can live forever, but only through God's plan". In other words, it's not an approach to the changes, nor are there predictions for this sort of thing within religions themselves; instead, it's a denial of them, a push away, a rejection. Even on something that isn't so eschatologically fraught (though what isn't eschatologically fraught when it comes to religion?), such as human rights for sentient and conscious robots, I don't think religion is equipped to talk about it. I mean, I can see myself raising the question in Sunday School and being dismissed with a thoughtless snort. (Okay, I'd never mention the idea in Sunday School. I'm silently iconoclastic.) What frustrates me about this concept, though, is that, based upon the truth claims of Mormonism, we shouldn't be afraid of talking about these questions. That's the whole point of the religion: To seek out truth. And there are undiscovered truths, which Mormonism is supposed to accept. But can it? As I said before, the book is immensely thought-provoking, as well as replete with thoughts that ought to be grappled with. I don't know how many of his predictions (or, as he prefers to think of them, "possibilities") will--or even can--come true. Still, the book is worth reading, thinking about, rejecting or accepting. Unlike some of the other books that I've read lately, it's one that I feel like needs time to ponder and, perhaps, even a reread. I am interested in history. This wasn't something I expected earlier in my life: I never excelled at it, nor really had a lot of interest in my history classes all the way up through college. It wasn't until I was hired to teach history along with my English skills that I started seeing the appeal of history. With that growing (albeit still nascent) ability of appreciating nonfiction came a renewed passion for prehistory. There's always been a love for dinosaurs in my nerdy heart, but it really increased thanks to my training on understanding history. And, in a lot of ways, that's not surprising: Prehistory is still history. Additionally, I love science fiction, with its predictions and predilections about the future, the ways in which mankind may (but likely won't) go. From The Expanse to Battlestar Galactica to Star Wars and Star Trek, I like seeing what may be. The future is an exciting place to be. And, since I won't be going there myself--no warp drive is likely in my lifetime, alas--it's great to visit the future, if only in my imagination. The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert is a future-history-prehistory. By that I mean that it looks at the deep-past extinctions--a topic I'm interested in not only because of its connection with dinosaurs, but also because I'm trying to write a story about dinosaurs and need to fill the well with extinction data--and describes the evidences of them. Of the big five extinctions (Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian-Triassic (part of when almost 90% of life on earth died off), Triassic-Jurassic, and Cretaceous-tertiary), none perfectly follows the others. That is, though there are common threads, there's never a root cause that matches its fellows. The most famous mass extinction, the Cretaceous-tertiary, happened because of an extraterrestrial impact. Though there's plenty of evidence to show massive volcanic activities during the time of the death of the dinosaurs, it has become more and more clear that the huge loss of life that transpired about 66 million years ago came because of a rock the size of Manhattan slamming into the Yucatan Peninsula. This is unique to the K-Pg event. We don't see the Great Dying (the Permian-Triassic) transpiring because of space rocks. That's what I mean by the idea of it being a book about prehistory. But it also talks about the minor extinctions, brought on because of human interaction with the environment, that can be traced throughout the recorded history that we have created. Kolbert talks about all sorts of species that have been dying off at an accelerated rate ever since we've been able to track these things. Some of the extinctions came about because of happenstance--a change in the environment brought about by humans accidentally wiped out a species. Others, however, were deliberately hunted to extinction, like the flightless moa. Their extinction coincided with the arrival of humans to New Zealand about 600 years ago. More recent examples also abound throughout her work. As Kolbert walks through the causes, effects, and implications of the sundry extinctions--all minor, in the grand scheme of things, yet taken as a whole add up to something really unsettling--she shifts from history toward future-history. What are the possibilities if human behavior continues in the way that it has? Like every other mass extinction, there's a unique factor, something that makes a difference. In the case of the current mass extinction, that factor is human behavior. Part of what might make the claim difficult for some to process is the brevity of a human lifespan. The entirety of written human history is so short that the same time frame, rolled forward from the catastrophic event at the Chicxulub Crater, probably still saw the earth covered with dinosaurs. In other words, these events are geologically rapid, but as far as day to day? Well, they take time. Nevertheless, even within the finite perception of what we can perceive in the world, it's clear that we have a significantly less diverse Earth now than we did in the past. While the viability of the planet for human life* is in question, there's no concern about losing "all life on Earth". If nothing else, learning more about these extinctions--and the background extinctions that are accelerating around us--has helped me to see that, in the immortal words of Dr. Ian Malcolm: ---
* Since I'm a Mormon, I probably should point out that my religious tradition teaches a millenarian concept of "the end of the world" that takes the Book of Revelation pretty seriously. I can't pretend to know what God is thinking in those terms, of course, but I don't think it's impossible that a Second Coming could come about simply because we've poisoned our world. It's a deus ex machina ending, but it might be the most fitting. Nothing can save us from ourselves: Only God can do that. Though I won't be around to see the continued ramifications of the ways that humans have manipulated the world, it's fair to assume that things will get a lot worse long before they get better. In this, science and religion agree. I finished The Book that Changed America recently. In case you didn't click the link, it's a look at the way the America was when Darwin released his book, On the Origin of Species. I haven't read that particular tome, in large part because, though it's a foundation for biology and the modern understanding of the natural world, it's incomplete in its science (no understanding of genetics, for example), and the full-scale ramifications of the theory are more visible in modern explorations of evolution, its pressures, and its successes. In other words, much like Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, I recognize it as being a bedrock text and don't have much desire to read it.
It was interesting to see how some of the intelligentsia of mid-nineteenth century America took to the book, including a surprisingly powerful endorsement from Henry David Thoreau. I am not much of a transcendentalist--I don't like nature that much and though I appreciate their poetry on a certain level, I'm not down with their worldview--but I had no idea that Darwin's book caused major waves in the circles of the transcendentalists in America. Even Louisa May Alcott's father, Bronson, was pulled into the gravity of Darwin's work for a while. One aspect of being a teacher of world history is that I sometimes forget to map world events onto the American timeline. On the Origin of Species came out in 1859, a scant year or so before the outbreak of the American Civil War. The book itself provided fodder for abolitionists, who, despite the fact that Darwin makes almost no claims about the descent of Mankind via natural selection, nevertheless saw in the theory the commonality of all humanity. Using Darwin's thinking, they found justification for their views that white supremacy couldn't be verified through scientific understanding and that Blacks were as human as Whites. Learning this, it made me wonder if part of the vestigial hatred for Darwin and his views stems from a sublimated fury that Darwin helps to quash white supremacy. There can be a lot of reasons to dislike, dismiss, or decry Darwin, and it's ridiculous to assert that everyone who rejects evolution is secretly a white supremacist, but the correlation between the two is still stark. It also reminded me that the time just before the Civil War were far less civil and pleasant than our own fraught and tense political climate. Better historians than I surely look at the late 1850s and at our modern time and say, "Well, we're not there...yet." Seeing the way that the nation considered itself, the depths to which it sank in order to preserve a repulsive and evil practice, made for some sober reflection. The last point that really struck me was how the North was committing economic suicide by insisting on emancipation. The moral high ground notwithstanding, the North profited immensely because of the slave trade--and the Northerners knew it. Union armies were fighting against the economic stability of generations of interdependence between the North and the South. While I always sort of knew this, The Book that Changed America made me understand it better than I had before. If this were a book review, I think I'd recommend the title. It's interestingly written--I wouldn't say that Fuller is my favorite historian now (for non-Shakespearean historians, I'm definitely an Erik Larsen fan), but he does a good job, for the most part, and shares the information in a way that's accessible and insightful. But it's not a book review, so take that for what it's worth. |
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