March 24, 2005
Poetic Darwinism: A Description Of Haeckel's Infinite Carpet
He not busy being born is busy dying.
--Bob Dylan, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"
We're climbing on the strangest ladder that was ever there to climb.
--Mike Scott and the Waterboys, "Strange Boat"
There is no future in a sacred myth. --Daniel Dennett
by Jerome du Bois, with a note by Catherine King
Richard Feynmann once wrote:
Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers; you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.
(What Do YOU Care What Other People Think? 1988, p.244.)
And the scene hasn't changed much, at least in the visual arts, in the ensuing seventeen years. (And Doc, I care more about how other people think, rather than what, since the former shapes the latter.)
I made the artwork in the title as a poetic palimsest, a meditation device on some elements of The AllGoRhythm, by which I mean evolution by natural selection: the Modern Synthesis of Darwin, Mendel, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Watson & Crick, and the other greats of the ensuing waves, William Hamilton and George Williams and Manfred Eigen and Graham Cairns-Smith and John Maynard Smith, and the list goes on. I'm posting a photograph, some details, and a detailed description of this artwork here (after the jump, which I'll get to eventually) as an oblique and poetic contribution to the current debate between The AllGoRhythm and the God-driven alternatives. Before the jump, though, let me be direct and blunt.
Intelligent Design and plain old Creationism --can you gimme Hallaloooolyah!?-- thrive here in Phoenix, as mysteriously persistent as Valley Fever. On February 17, The Tucson Weekly online published a summary of the scene by Diedre Pike. Here she briefly profiles Arizona State Senator Karen Johnson (R-Mesa):
To Johnson, a Christian fundamentalist, the teaching of evolution in the schools isn't simply unfair; it could be "faith-destroying," she says.
"It's hard for me to understand how evolution can get put into school science programs and get stuffed down the throats of those who don't want to hear it and who don't believe it anyway," Johnson says. "Children should choose what they want to believe. . . . Science is basically the search for truth. The opposite of truth is myth. In my opinion, evolution is a myth. Those who adhere to the evolutionary theory, it's like a religion for them."
When Johnson talks to constituents, she's often struck by how few accept evolution.
"I can only find a few who think (the) theory of evolution has any merit," she says, "like professors at universities."
You can almost hear her sniff as her nose goes up in the air. You know --those kind of people. I think a lot of university professors are worthless jerks, but mainly those in the humanities, not the hard sciences. But let's be honest, Ms. Johnson; let's "search for truth:" when you say,
Children should choose what they want to believe
you don't mean exactly that. You mean that children should choose Christian Creationism over evolution by natural selection. You don't mean that students should choose the creation stories of Hinduism or Zoroastrianism or Buddhism or Islam or The Great Turtle or anything else over evolution. I was a born-again Christian for over ten years; I know how your minds work; one reason among many I'm Christian no longer. (And, by the way, mind your metaphors, mom: one neither hears nor chooses nor believes with one's throat.)
[She is correct, depressingly, about the percentage of the American people who believe evolution is true. I've seen various figures that range from 13% to 25%. After over 150 years . . .]
Earlier, on January 30, the Arizona Republic quoted the head dude of the Arizona Board of Education:
"If a student says, 'Well, I think intelligent design is a better theory,' then the teacher is obligated to treat that in a respectful way," Arizona Superintendent of Education Tom Horne said. "Those kind of discussions can make the study of evolution itself more interesting if students know that there is a controversy going on."
I have no problem with mutual respect; so that when the teacher says, "Intelligent Design is forlorn --that means 'alone, and without a friend'-- and you'll be wasting your time building any work on it," and refers the student to one of the many websites contributing to the controversy, one hopes the student will listen and follow his or her mentor's expert, reasonable, and knowledgeable advice. Part of a teacher's job is to alert students to the chimeras within the controversies. The student thinks he or she has time to burn. The teacher knows better. Besides, what kind of mentor gives directions to a dead end?
Superintendent Horne would. He would waste the student's time to avoid hurting the student's feelings or, more likely, losing the student to a Christian school. (Like American Muslims, American Evangelical Christians are a politically canny, persistent, and powerful lobby. Just ask IMAX.) Horne is probably ignorant of the real controversies inside The AllGoRhythm, intricate, rigorous algorithmic and repeated consensually validated experiments which bring the broad arguments brought by people like Dembski (see Pike) and Michael Behe to a standstill.
When Behe posits "irreducible complexity," it's as though he has not examined with his own eyes or heard with his own ears the logical possibilities laid out before him prior to him publishing his already-refuted arguments.
Long before Behe came running in waving his hanky, falsely crying foul, people like Richard Dawkins were saying (in paraphrase), "Well, duh, we know that's what we need to explain: how did the macromolecules become the macromolecules? How did the stupid primordial soup create something --Life-- that strains at a leash --constantly and unstoppably-- toward the future?"
What were the basic lifeless building blocks of Life?
We still don't have a defintive answer to that question, but check this notion out, from Daniel Dennett's peerless book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which, though now ten years old, is simply a basic text for the 21st Century. Honestly, before the year is over, reader, promise yourself to read this book.
A good Darwinian, faced yet again with the problem of finding a needle in a haystack of Design Space, would cast about for a still simpler form of replicator that could somehow serve as a temporary scaffolding to hold the protein parts or nucleotide bases in place until the whole protein or macro could get assembled. Wondrous to say, there is a candidate with just the right properties, and more wondrous still, it is just what the Bible ordered: clay! Cairns-Smith shows that in addition to the carbon-based self-replicating crystals of DNA and RNA, there are also much simpler (he calls them "low-tech") silicon-based self-replicating crystals, and these silicates, as they are called, could themselves be the product of an evolutionary process. They form the ultra-fine particles of clay, of the sort that builds up just outside the strong currents and turbulent eddies in streams, and the individuals crystals differ subtly at the level of molecular structure in ways that they pass on when they "seed" the processes of crystallization that achieve their self-replication.
[Aside: In The Book of J, Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg point out that "Adam" derives from adamah, the purest, smallest, most pulverized, persistent, enduring and refined red clay. This is the first verse of the book that forms the foundation of three major world religions, written circa 1000 BCE:
Before a plant of the field was in earth, before a grain of the field sprouted --Yahweh had not spilled rain on the earth, nor was there man to work the land-- yet from the day Yahweh made earth and sky, a mist from within would rise to moisten the surface. Yahweh shaped an earthling from clay of this earth, blew into its nostrils the wind of life. Now look: man becomes a creature of flesh. (P.61)]
Since I've introduced religion, here's a good place to bring in Jim Holt's recent incisive points in the NYT Magazine, February 20, 2005. "Unintelligent Design" (you have to pay) carried the headline "Nature is often sloppy and bizarre. Can critics of Darwinism explain why?"
First, Holt calls attention to the fact that the laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, as in most mammals,
extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.
Then he reminds us that
perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, since random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?
He continues with a point about pain:
. . . Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases . . . the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.
And finally, a point about abortion:
And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine tha a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception.
His conclusion (though he makes other good points):
It is hard to avoid the inference that a designer responsible for such imperfections must have been lacking some divine trait --benevolence or omnipotence or omniscience, or perhaps all three.
I'm the first to recognize Nature raw in tooth and claw, and I can see the awe in awful, but let's remember that Nature has no mind, no purpose, no intention. Dennett writes, introducing a quote by Nietzsche: "Mother Nature is heartless --even vicious-- but boundlessly stupid. And as so often before, Nietzsche finds the point and gives it his special touch:
'According to nature' you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power --how could you live according to this indifference!"
Now, reader, imagine this indifference awakening into conscious consideration, reflection, and total self-awareness. Coupled with Holt's points above, does this not make God synonymous with Cruelty?
Another question: Which is colder and more harsh, a godless world or one presided over by Him?
Another question: Which is a better world, one in which Life created itself, slowly, earning every inch and using only what was around, or one in which Life is a gift rained down from above by a Capricious Mystery?
Let me say it another way. I believe it would be a better world if everybody realized what it has cost the world for us to be here --what it really means to be homo sapiens sapiens. Every bone, every nerve, every wrinkle in the brain was hard-earned, so hard-earned the scale of suffering and success --over both time and space-- is so Vast as to be literally mind-boggling.
We are fearfully and wonderfully made, but I think religious believers, especially Christians, have let the fear overwhelm the wonder: the fear of the importance of the insignificant, and the fear of the leering monkey. But the fear goes deeper, and I think Dennett has a handle on it, so I'm going to end these notes before the jump with an extended quotation from him (wherein he quotes Eigen) at the mindless busyness that grounds so much of Life:
[Dennett] . . . Through the microscope of molecular biology, we gt to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to "do things." This is not florid agency --echt intentional action, with the representation of reasons, deliberation, reflection, and conscious decision-- but it is the only possible ground from which the seeds of intentional action could grow. There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level --all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there's nobody home. The molecular machines perform their amazing stunts, obviously exquisitely designed, and just as obviously none the wiser about what they are doing. Consider this account of the activity of an RNA phage, a replicating virus:
First of all, the virus needs a material in which to pack and protect its own genetic information. Secondly, it needs a means of introducing its information into the host cell. Thirdly, it requires a mechanism for the specific replication of its information in the presence of a vast excess of host cell RNA. Finally, it must arrange for the proliferation of its information, a process that usually leads to the destruction of the host cell . . . . The virus even gets the cell to carry out its replication; its only contribution is one protein factor, specially adapted for the viral RNA. This enzyme does not become active until a 'password' on the viral RNA is shown. When it sees this, it reproduces the viral RNA with great efficiency, while ignoring the very much greater number of RNA molecules of the host cell. Consequently the cell is soon flooded with viral RNA. This is packed into the virus' coat protein, which is also sythesized in large quantities, and finally the cell bursts and releases a multitude of progeny virus particles. All this is a programme that runs automatically and is rehearsed down to the smallest detail [Eigen].
[Dennett] Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe. [End Dennett; my emphases]
Or, as I put it in my artwork: "Our Mother Is Absolute Ignorance." (Don't even ask about Dad.) And that scares some people.
We are the palimpsest of the history of this planet. It is writ small in us all. (Think of the frontispiece to Leviathan.) We owe it to both our ancestors and our descendants to shape the future with the truth. And The AllGoRhythm is the truth.
Haeckel's Infinite Carpet, 2002, 30 x 30 inches, acrylic, ink, pencil, tracing paper, and hot pink gel pen on two layers of Arches Paper, with cutouts.
A Description of Haeckel's Infinite Carpet
In 2002, Catherine King wrote about this piece for our online gallery Art For Our Times, now closed:
Mysterious life forms peer from precise windows cut through Haeckel’s Infinite Carpet. The strange creatures swim in a yellow sea beneath the Carpet’s red plane. Hundreds of pink arrow snakes slither over its surface, restlessly pointing out connections.
Eight open doors lay near the sides and corners of the square-patterned Carpet. They open onto an intense blue space where pink constellations align with perfect wisdom.
A yellow hand reaches out from a deep pink portal through the center of the Carpet. A closed pentagram made of five finely drawn stars overlays the deep whorls of the palm print. This is the Sign of the Human -- with our five-fingered hands we make and mark the world.
Haeckel’s Infinite Carpet floats, human-made, over a teeming ocean of evolution. It seems to order the chaos below by alternately revealing, then hiding it. The Carpet is the platform on which we stand in order to construct our view of the universe. We can never see all that lies below the surface and the life we glimpse one moment has already drifted away the next. We can grasp no fixed truth in this bloody, blooming biology. Unanchored, we hang on with our five-fingered Navigator and trace maps through trials with tears. --CK
Thank you, beloved wife and muse. And here I would like to add my own notes.
I began with a simple picture of infinity provided by Rudy Rucker in his book Mind Tools. This layout of squares is the second stage of a regular fractal called a Sierpinski carpet. "It can be defined on its own as the limit of the process of removing the central one-ninth of squares."
So, first, I cut out the central (pink) square, which "created" eight others, the four adjacent and the four diagonals. So I cut out their central (blue) squares, which "created" sixty-four more (yellow) squares. That was enough to keep the process going mentally with the viewer, who can imagine finer and finer squares, until the edges around the larger squares begin to resemble a regular foam. You can hold infinity in the palm of your eye. Also, the process is an algorithm, which is the drumbeat of the free-floating rationales that inhabit the universe whether we do so or not. Finally, I like the idea that the original nine-square resembles one of those rationales --the cellular automata of John Horton Conway's Game of Life, a 2D dynamic whose complexity arises from one rule, as does the Sierpinski carpet itself. The power of simple recursion often leads to combinatorial explosions which foster novelty, a key element in natural selection. It also hints at the capacious and tensile strength of the modern mind. The ancient Greeks hated, feared, and denigrated infinity, calling it apeiron, which connotes a dirty rag crushed up and stuffed in a corner. But handling infinity has opened our minds, given us confidence to grip new rungs on the strange ladder.
The dot patterns behind the blue squares depict the lo-shu magic square. Let Rudy Rucker explain (p.52):
One of the earliest examples of people using dot patterns to represent numbers appears in the Chinese image known as the lo-shu. Here there are patterns representing the numbers 1 through 9, and these patterns are arranged into a "magic square." Supposedly, Emperor Yu saw the lo-shu pattern on the back of a tortoise on the banks of the Yellow River in 2200 BC. The pattern is called a magic square because the sum of the numbers along any horizontal, vertical, or diagonal is always the same: 15.
I chose the lo-shu first because it appeared on the back of a tortoise, of course! Beautiful patterns fall out of nature by accident, but their order and formal arrangement fascinate us --and point in helpful directions, as with the Fibonacci Series. Busy busy busy, we arrange and rearrange, combine and twist and add and subtract, sifting for sense, scratching at novelty, for the glint, the hint of the future.
Look at all those curvy pink snake arrows, pointing in both directions. These restless roaming curves are like ampersands, endless asking "How about this and this?" "Okay, what about this and this?" "Okay, maybe--" and so on.
Long ago Johannes Kepler stood out in the snow, night after night, holding a glowing coal in tongs in one hand, scribbling notes on star positions in a notebook (derived from Tycho Brahe's) with the other. Later he would scan these spreadsheets and ephemeri for hours on end, looking for pattern. It was crazy, but it worked.
The yellow squares show off-center pencilled depictions of microscopic creatures, on gauzy paper, all sixty-four drawn from Ernst Haeckel's book Art Forms in Nature. The little yellow squares become like windows on the bottom of a boat, revealing glimpses of the teeming --and imperfect-- life below. (Yes, I'm well aware of Haeckel's political odium. We note it, condemn it, learn from it, and move on.)
The eight blue squares contain some of the more important claims and positions of natural selection. I won't take them in order.
Cranes, Not Skyhooks. The genius Daniel Dennett, who I long ago nicknamed The Great Engineer, is the most practical philosopher I've ever read. You could bring him the sweetest little conceptual machine, sleek and shiny and sinuous as a Frank Gehry building, but if it didn't produce future --if it just solved some philosophical puzzle, some shoelace knot, or covered one's philosophical ass-- he'd thank you, put it on the mantle, and pick up his tools again.
Dennett uses skyhook --from OED, "an imaginary means of suspension in the sky"-- to refer to any statement or thing which can't be anchored to the Earth, whether it be about gods, or mysterians, or the so-called "naturalistic fallacy" (a chimera), or "irreducible complexity."
A crane is any statement or algorithm or object which begs no questions. It stands on firm ground, and every part of it, including its blueprints, can be accounted for. It works. It lifts. It can even lift other cranes. Cascading cranes produce the future.
Our River Flows Uphill is a tribute to William Calvin's river / biology chronicle, "The River That Flows Uphill: A Journey From The Big Bang To The Big Brain." It's a tribute to our energy, our hard work against entropy. The sun pours the energy down endlessly, burning up the Second Law and spawning the multitudinous glories of creation.
Our Mother Is Absolute Ignorance I've discussed briefly above. Steven Pinker puts it even more succinctly: "No peeking." No theory of the history of Life on this Earth can depend on anticipation or purpose or plan. It happened to happen, but it could have happened otherwise, or not at all, and that should thrill everyone. Dennett: "Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution could have produced us, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us." (p.56) There is no Anthropic Daddy, not even in principle.
Hand Shapes Brain is a tribute to the Toolmaker, the Tinkerer -- homo habilis-- and also to Frank R. Wilson's contemporary classic (another must-read) The Hand: How Its Use Shaped The Brain, Language, and Human Culture. The language explains much of the content, but not its richness. We Know In Our Bones and Read Your Head both fit here, too. Just one example: the neurological-physiological algorithm or program which directs my arm reaching out through the branches for just the right apple to twist, pluck, and bring to my mouth --that program may be quite similar to language sentence structure, which the brain adapted for its use.
Our Tree Is Real. Most religions and traditions feature trees or tree-like structures, including sacred oaks, maypoles, the Trees in Eden, the crucifixion cross, and especially the American Liberty Tree. Each tries to grasp a part of us. But only the Tree of Life --"the graph that plots the time-line trajectories of all the things that have ever lived on this planet"-- grasps it all. Nobody puts it better than Dennett, at the end of his book (p.520), and I can think of no better way to end these notes:
Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love ["Tell Me Why"] tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, I say with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.
Amen.
CODA: Irrationaly, I neglected to mention the yellow hand in the middle of the piece. It is my left hand, though it could be read the other way. Of course it is meant to evoke Lascaux, but also something else --the irrational need for sacrifice. I lost the first joint on the third finger of my left hand in a childhood accident. But, as Walter Burkert notes in his excellent account Creation of the Sacred, finger sacrifice, an ancient practice of supplication and substitution, persists to this day, doesn't it? In fact, during this week, as many will remember, it was extended to the entire body of one man, wasn't it?
Posted by Jerome at March 24, 2005 10:32 AM | TrackBack