Evolving

There are lots of things no one has quite figured out about evolution. Is it gradual, or not? Why is there a relative lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record? Some species is happily cavorting or barking or ruminating away and then it's gone, and evidence of a later form pokes out of the stone, something smaller or pointier or more burrowy. What happened in between? I believe it was Stephen Jay Gould who observed a caterpillar that looks like bird poop and wondered how that particular adaptation gradually evolved: sure, it keeps predators from wanting to eat it, but where is the percentage in looking just a little bit like a turd?

It was Gould and friends who postulated something he called "punctuated equilibrium," in which a species could be expected to remain pretty much the same for a very long time, and only an abrupt change in environment or circumstance would cause the various mutations rumbling away in the margins of the population to surge. Dog-sized critters didn't gradually inch up into horses. In this scenario, mutations are happening all along, but in a large population well-adapted to its environment, those little accidental genetic ideas are overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of standard-issue traits. One creature might show up with an adorable little horn between her ears and say "Look! I can drill holes with this thing!" and everyone else is all Yeah, that's just weird. And that's it for the horn until something happens in the environment that makes hole-drilling really handy.

It's suggested that these little developments lead to species changes only in the edges of the population, where a group might break off from the main herd and get isolated geographically, and at that point some of those accidental ideas get more of a hearing. Things could then change in a hurry, in a matter of generations. And if the diverging population meets up with the original species again, they don't even recognize each other anymore. "Ew, horns," they hear. "Gross."

"Yeah? Drill you," they say back.

Some events are more consequential than others. You get a lot of tectonic mayhem happening and all of a sudden you've got the isthmus of Panama, and everything changes. Marine species discover themselves in separate oceans. Llamas move into South America. Porcupines pass them going north. Warm Caribbean waters can't play with the Pacific anymore and now there's a serviceable Gulf Stream gyre affecting things in Northern Europe. It's a big deal.

That's what I think happens in politics, too. Things don't change too much and then there's a big event, or a series of them, and minds change, and things that weren't possible before are suddenly inevitable. Gay people are persecuted and killed in one decade, fighting unsuccessfully for basic civil rights in the next, daring to demand the right to marry in the one after that; it's too soon, they're told; it's too much; some county allows marriage on a Wednesday and yanks back the licenses by Friday. But the push is on. And more and more people are willing to come out to their family and friends. And they talk to other people. It's a cascade of truth. And all of a sudden gay marriage is legal. "Ew, horns," some people still say, but nobody reallly cares what those people think anymore.

We are now in a very unusual time. A formerly well-regarded nation can't keep its people healthy, or housed, or even fed, and we're on a fast track toward an unlivable planet, yet nothing seems to change. Billionaires are still isolated in their own country called Money and we're caught in the same gyre of power and greed that has dominated the world for centuries. On the edges of the population, ideas emerge: the rise of the commons, the rejection of racism, the deliberate restructuring of a world economy toward a just and sustainable future. The ideas are shouted down. Too radical. Too soon.

But a global pandemic reveals the fault lines in the system. Hurricanes and fire and drought lay their fingers on ever more people. Women speak up about their mistreatment at the hands of men and are heard. Cell phone video reveals how much Black lives still don't matter, and citizens finally listen, and learn, and march, and keep marching. Facing disasters all around, Americans begin to imagine life with adequate health care, with livable wages, with compassion toward each other and the stranger.

The ground is quaking. We're poised to tumble toward a more sustainable existence. It's a Panama moment.

What Snot To Like?

I might have recently referred to fiber as the scrub brush of the intestines. Move it along, fiber says, slapping its little nightstick in its little palm. Without it, your poop has no motivation. That's sort of the way people looked at fiber for a long time, but it turns out to be not exactly true. Fiber is way more important than that, and it is implicated in way more health issues, although unmotivated poop is no bag of giggles.

It all has to do with those bacteria we're all harboring. Bacteria, some of them, eat what we can't eat, like fiber. We didn't invite them, actually, but they go where the food is, like everyone else, and we've set up the big buffet in our intestines, and word got out.

Every living thing is all about finding energy to operate. Plants, bacteria, us, we're all looking for fuel. If it were not so, the people who study us would be called geologists. So we eat plants and animals for energy and bacteria finish off the bits we can't. If we never had them, all our food would slide out with the nutrients removed but otherwise recognizable and ready to plate up again. But because we have evolved with the bacteria, at this point we need them. And since they're here, we have to figure out what to do about them. That's where mucus comes in.

Gut snot, basically. We've got lots, and maybe at one time we thought it was about slicking up the poop delivery system, but there's more to it than that. We need lots of mucus to keep the bacteria away from our delicates. They ride on top of the mucus layer and do their thing and don't bother us. They also send little chemical messages to our intestinal lining to beef up the mucus. But if we don't get enough fiber, our bacteria falter and our mucus thins out. That puts the bacteria a little too close to our intestinal walls and that triggers an immune reaction, and ultimately chronic inflammation, which is bad news all around.

Not all bacteria get energy from the same sources. Some of our bacteria get energy from the fiber, and other bacteria get energy from the first bacteria's poop. It's an ecosystem, and fiber is what holds it together. You withdraw the fiber, and the populations crash. The bacteria that are left behind might start attacking the mucus layer. Out of spite, probably. Then you get your inflammation and that War On Terror that the heightened immune system represents. Nothing good can come of it.

It all seems as though it was designed, but that kind of misrepresents what's happened. Any kind of working ecosystem is basically a truce. If we didn't have bacteria foraging around us for whatever they like to eat, but instead had packysnappers, we'd look quite different. Maybe packysnappers like to eat fingernails and claws and such, and if we evolved with packysnappers, we'd judge each other's attractiveness on the basis of the plumpness of our cuticles. Instead, we've got bacteria and gut snot.

So that's the system we've got. And that's why we should be stuffing kale and sweet potatoes into it. And not throwing in stuff like antacids. That's like putting up a wall. Or threatening to nuke. Not good. That's asking for trouble. That's when you get your headache, your nausea, irritability, weakness, reduced kidney function, fascism, and acid rebound.

Kale is diplomacy.

The Phallically Burdened

Well goodness gracious, it hardly seems possible that it's been such a big secret all this time that women (A) are frequently devalued and harassed and worse and (B) don't like it, but evidently that's the latest news. Like, we've had five thousand years of recorded history and it's just coming up now.

I don't know why, to take a common yet current example, a man would grab a woman and jam his tongue into her face. I do know that it always comes as a shock--you don't see it coming. And that it's not trivial. It's gross as hell. It feels like you're being probed by an alien, but not in a good way.

Some of us are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore, and others of us have a more nuanced reaction. The really angry, take-no-prisoners women tend to skew younger, in my observation. Some of us elders perhaps have more expectation that things will change. We're having a moment here, and things are going to be different. We base this on having had more decades of seeing things actually change. The degree to which women used to be considered a decorative, inferior form of human can hardly be imagined now. It used to be a staple of comedy that "girls" were to be chased around the boss's desk, or sit around home waiting to be comforted when their cakes fell flat. Our concerns were trivial, and our reactions childlike. We were lesser beings. We were inconsequential.

When I was a kid, I accumulated some forty-plus stuffed animals and every one of them was a male, except for rubber-faced Mrs. Teddybear, who was a hand-me-down. She wasn't interesting. The rest had jobs and hobbies and personalities. Almost none of my classmates' moms worked outside the home. We grew up to be "Women's Libbers." That was a pejorative, but it did get us out and about, and able to have our very own checking accounts, even if we were still expected to cook the brown rice casseroles for the boys running the revolution.

One reason this old broad gives more leeway to certain miscreants than others is that I remember being a part of it all, doing things that shouldn't have been done, going along with things that used to be considered comedic, playing it for laughs. It's well established that I couldn't enter politics if I wanted to because there's way too much shit in my closet. There's not much (and not many) I haven't done. I've got plenty to be ashamed of, if I were inclined that way and had a memory. And even so, I think I'm an okay person with stuff to offer the world. I think some of the men who have something to atone for are, too. Check for signs of authentic contrition: it exists. We need way more women in positions of power in every field, but males should be allowed to evolve. And I trust they will.

I'm not saying my former complicity with the patriarchy is on a par with the unearned, malignant power of the males who exploited it. I don't suppose much of what I did actually hurt anyone. I probably haven't even broken any hearts, except for that one guy back in '71, and he really wasn't emotionally stable, just between you and me.

So yes, I think things can and will change. I never thought people would stop lighting up cigarettes any damn where they wanted. I never though people would pick up dog poop. Yet the air is fresh and I can go months without having to scrape my shoes against the curb.

Many men are now worried that "anything" they might do or say will be misinterpreted. But, guys, it's pretty simple. Pretend, as hard as you can, that women are fully your equals, until it starts to feel natural. And be willing to take no for an answer. It's quite easy to know when a line is being crossed. At least, it is for us. We've negotiated and enjoyed years of friendly banter and flirtation and never had any trouble finding that line. We can feel it. We know when someone is looking right through us and not seeing us. We know when we've been discounted. We know when someone is assuming ownership, is prepared to take possession. When we have a situation on our hands.

Let's get it all out there and put men on notice their secrets are no longer safe with us, and things will change. They will. It's happened before. But let's remember there are degrees of offense. A humiliating or dismissive ass-pat isn't as bad as a forcible kiss. Which is not as bad as rape. Which is not as bad as murder. Which is not as bad as war.

Which is not as bad as plundering a sweet planet and extinguishing its life-forms and enslaving its humans in order to shovel ever more treasure into a few, fat pockets. Focus, people, focus.

Terrorist Rodents

Let me introduce you to the Eastern Gray Squirrel. Isn't it cute? Pretty little gray and brown coat, white vest, big fluffy tail. What a busy little thing! Oh, see it scratch. Scratch, scratch, scratch! It's plumb full of mites and it's itchy as hell. Look at that hind foot go! If you could get that thing threaded you could sew up a shirt in ten minutes! Ha ha! A-dorable!

I kid, of course. The Eastern Gray Squirrel needs no introduction, because it's introduced itself every damn where already. Just the fact that it's called an Eastern Gray when it's all the way out here in Oregon lets us know that it's an illegal immigrant, but once you let enough of them in, nobody can do anything about it anymore. The Eastern Gray Squirrel eats nuts, berries, Trail Mix, and bird seed that totally does not belong to them. When it isn't scratching or eating, it's running around like it's coked up and/or making new squirrels, in the absence of any evidence that there is a shortage.

Fun fact about these squirrels! Sometimes they don't eat bird seed that totally doesn't belong to them. Sometimes, instead, they eat all the insulation off your electrical wires, causing your house to burst into flames when you're trying to sleep. Or, as we have recently observed here, they take shelter under your solar panels, and, in a leisurely but thorough manner, strip the insulation off those wires, causing your solar panels to become very expensive squirrel shelters that produce no electricity. Every now and then a squirrel will actually electrocute himself. But not nearly often enough.

Why do squirrels chew on wires? Well, due to a horrible idea on the part of evolution, their teeth keep growing all their lives, and they need to file them down by chewing on your house and other things that totally do not belong to them. There's no good reason they couldn't have designed themselves to allow their teeth to get nubbier and nubbier over time until they become senior squirrels and they can recline in their nests while their kinfolk bring them mushy stuff to gum, but no, they are not interested in such a caring social structure, when they can just hunker under solar panels that totally do not belong to them, and ruin them with their freaky growing teeth. It's a stupid adaptation. It would be like if humans had one leg that never stopped growing and in order to keep from walking in circles all the time they had to go file it down by kicking Eastern Gray Squirrels.

Whatever charm these little rapscallions ever had has worn off for Dave and me long ago, but there's a limit to what we can do about them. Dave does own a Crossman PowerMaster BB rifle that he is perfectly willing to use to dent them up with, but we live in a very deep blue pocket of a blue state and we do not have the emotional fortitude to withstand the wounded looks and earnestly expressed dismay of our neighbors. Short of a stealth advertising campaign to promote Very-Range-Free squirrels as The Other Stringy Meat, our only option is to engage the services of one of our urban coyotes--just once a week, say. It would be bad news for all those neighborhood kitties that like to massacre all our birds that totally do not belong to them, but that's a chance I'm willing to take.

The Rise Of Mr. Happy

There was a time when we thought Mr. Happy would never rise up, would remain just a withered stump of a thing. But we were wrong. Mr. Happy is standing up straight and proud and pink, a little disheveled around the dark curls at his base, but still a sturdy spike of glory. He's magnificent. One look at him and you can tell he doesn't belong here. You can hike all summer long around here and not run into another ten-foot-tall tower of flowers. The other way to tell is to remember how many days Dave had to wrap him in a blanket with a light bulb for heat and read "Charlotte's Web" to him last winter. It ain't natch'l.

So I'm not getting away with anything here. If I was planning to get an official certification as a Backyard Habitat, Mr. Happy would put the lie to it. It would be like trying to shoplift a refrigerator under my overcoat. People can tell.

I've only recently become aware why someone would want to have a certified backyard habitat. Rules aren't stringent. Someone needs to come by and see that at least five percent of your vegetation is native to the area. Five percent. Why would anyone want to have a garden with just the same straggly stuff you could see in the local woods anyway? Glad you asked.

It's a little lesson in evolution. Every living thing is trying to get along. Get along in life, that is, and not necessarily with each other. Definitely not with each other. It's eat or get eaten. You have a plant that wants to eat sunlight, and a raft of caterpillars that want to eat the plant, the plant is going to have an opinion. And it's going to back up its opinion with some chemical defenses. And sooner or later some branch of the butterfly family tree is going to do an end run around those defenses, and that's where the eggs are going to be deposited. If the emerging caterpillars manage to chew the plants all up, then they've screwed themselves too. But if the birds pick off most of the caterpillars, leaving just enough of them to keep the butterfly franchise going, everyone makes out. What you are witnessing in a natural landscape is the truce that remains after everyone's done duking it out.

This balance the plants and insects are achieving as they dance through time together can get to be pretty precise. Many butterflies are adapted to one host plant only. You start carting them out and replacing them with pretty flowers that evolved somewhere far away, you'll find your insect population at a complete loss. You strip-mine the Midwest with Roundup so you can replace the native milkweeds with corn and soybeans, you'll crash the monarch butterflies. They don't have thousands of years to come up with a new plan.

This is not good news for the birds that are counting on the insect hatch to feed their own young, like

our chickadee friends, the Windowsons. It takes a whole lot of grubs to raise a baby Windowson. They're hauling them in so fast it looks like Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz doing an episode in a sausage factory. Visualize an endless chain of links pouring into the birdhouse. Your pretty new garden does not provide enough little green sausages for the bird population.

Fortunately for you, you don't remember when there were ten times as many birds. Or ten times that many. That was in your mom's era, or your grandma's--might as well have been the Cretaceous. So you're free to enjoy your exotic flowers. I know I do.

But I'm still keeping my favorite invasive species, Tater Cat, indoors, and when Mr. Happy finally shrivels up--he can't last forever--I'll think about slipping in a nice local flowering currant.

How To Make A Big-Ass Horse

We went to the Rose Festival parade this year, which is weird. Parade-watching doesn't work out that well for Dave and me. We start out curbside, but Dave suffers from being as considerate as he is tall, and as people worm their way in front of him to see, he keeps stepping back and stepping back until eventually we discover we're all the way back home again. But this time we found a spare spot right downtown and parked our butts in the front row.

Turns out it really matters to be up close. That's how you find out how truly large those Budweiser Clydesdales are. I mean, we've all seen them on TV, but it's an entirely different thing to have one clop by and put the other side of the street in total eclipse. Holy shit. You could put the whole family on one of those: the kids on their bellies in the middle with a Monopoly board between them, and Mom and Dad reclined on a blanket with a bottle of wine and the Sunday paper.  They could get up and stroll over to the withers and back for exercise. A couple of those skinny houses could go up alongside the hocks and no one would even notice right away.

They are big-ass horses. Regular horses are big enough, but they're little green houses on Baltic Avenue compared to the Clydesdale's hotel on Park Place. They have feet like kettledrums with a big fur bustle. Plus, they prance. No one laughs at you if you prance while large.

They're named after Clydesdale, a place in Scotland, which is named after the River Clyde, which is probably named after some guy named Clyde, which just goes to show you never know where your name is going to end up, even without the internet.

It took almost no time at all to make a horse this

Note Clydesdale Snot on butt.

big. Three hundred years ago someone drug in some stout Flemish stallions from Flemland and got the ball rolling. They started out strong, but they weren't all that tall, as those things go. They were exported all over the place to do work such as hauling coal and building Australia, and it wasn't until the 1940s that someone decided they could be taller. That way they would look cooler in advertisements in case the Super Bowl ever got invented. So essentially we're talking just a few generations to polish up a modern Clydesdale.

It's something to think about if you're dubious about evolution. Take eyes: we find the first fossil eyes in 540-million-year-old strata and it's estimated it might take only 400,000 years to go from a dab of light-sensitive cells to a complex eyeball. The dab of light-sensitive cells couldn't do much but let you know when it's bedtime. Once the cells had organized themselves into a cup shape, they were able to tell how strong light was and where it was coming from. After that it was just a matter of refinement, and all kinds of critters did it. Octupi made eyeballs by sinking pits into their heads and, independently, vertebrates made them out of a part of their brains they weren't using for anything else, but both operate much the same way.

We're all basically organized dust, which is pretty terrific, if you ask me; but if you ask some people, they're rather offended by the idea. They're not buying the eyeball thing. They might not even believe the modern horse emerged out of a skittering critter the size of a fox in only fifty million years, even though entire Clydesdales were assembled right in front of our complex eyeballs in no time at all. And that's nothing:

We went from Grey Wolves to Barking Purse Hamsters in a few thousand years.

How To Keep It Up Forever

Kansas is thinking about outlawing sustainability, so that solves that. It's a great example of outside-the-box thinking, and the Reality Box has really been cramping our style. Kansas means business. It is duct-taping a legislative brick to Thelma and Louise's accelerator pedal. Look out world! This is the kind of creative thinking you can get when you quit teaching evolution.

I've been thinking of this law as the Lemming Liberty Act, but it occurred to me, as it often does, that I might be selling lemmings short, so I did a little research. There are a lot of myths about lemmings.  We're familiar with the mass suicide idea, but lemmings have inspired other ideas over the years. The Inuit people are said to have believed that lemmings were spontaneously generated during stormy weather and fell out of the sky, and a geographer named Ziegler put his official (white man) stamp on that notion in 1530. I am assuming that lemmings popped out during storms and no one could think of any way they could have gotten there but to have dropped from the sky, sort of like how it rains earthworms on the city sidewalks during a sharp downpour.

Well, this is just the sort of thing people like to come up with. There's nothing so old-fashioned about it. Even now, billions of people note how splendidly we are endowed with the right temperatures and the right food and the availability of liquid water and other things we really need, and they conclude that all of this stuff was put here just for us, because we're just that special. It doesn't tend to occur to them that we evolved and thrived in response to what was here, and if something different was here, we wouldn't be here at all, but maybe something else would be. Maybe some methane-huffing critter without quite so much of a sense of self-importance. And it doesn't occur to them that if we somehow jigger the works, we can create the conditions in which we will not thrive at all. Here we are: we must have dropped out of the benevolent sky.

The spontaneous-generation idea was soundly refuted by the noble natural historian Ole Worm, who demonstrated that the lemmings were perfectly respectable members of the rodent family, and were probably created by slightly older lemmings in the usual way, and not spontaneously generated during storms at all, although he did agree that they blew in on the winds. Sometimes science advances in increments.

The mass suicide notion is also faulty. Lemmings do not, in fact, decide to get in line and charge off a cliff to certain death. That isn't their plan at all. And yet they do suffer massive die-offs periodically, when their own overpopulation and thin resources encourage them into a mass migration for better conditions. They can swim, but if in the course of a migration they start swimming in a body of water that is a little too large, they might get too far away from shore and drown, and their little bodies will end up stranded in the reeds like meatballs in a stoat restaurant, a vision that might have given rise to the spontaneous-generation idea to begin with. Although why a storm should whip up dead rodents and drop them on the ground is still a mystery. Anyway, it is incorrect to conclude that the lemmings are trying to kill themselves.  They're not. They end up just as dead, but they don't mean to. They're like us that way.

So I'm sticking with the Lemming Liberty Act. If Kansas wants to make sure anyone who wants to pop down to the Gulf and swim to Belize is free to do so, I'm willing to go along with it. Or I would be, if all us lemmings weren't roped together.

Pogo Fans: Can you help? A reader wants to find the original source of a quote I attributed to Albert The Alligator. It was "funny how a handsome man look good in any old thing he throw on." If any of you have old Pogo books with this particular strip, let me know.

Embryonic Glory

Photo by Nina Harfman

My recent musings in which I implied that salamanders are the crown of Creation were not meant to state anything that wasn't already obvious. I mean, look at them. But it got me to thinking about a scientific maxim I learned in college: ontology recapitulates phylogeny. It's a dense phrase. It is, of course, designed to make people feel stupid, then defensive, then irritated at smartypants elites, then prone to making snide references to Obama and his "faculty lounge" as though educated people should be scorned, and before you know it they've voted in a bunch of scoundrels wholly devoted to getting themselves and their friends rich enough to buy out God. So probably the phrase should be retired.

Photo by Nina Harfman

But what it means is pretty cool. The idea is that in the course of developing from egg to embryo to fully-realized critter, we exhibit the stages of our own evolution. We start out sort of wormy, then begin to sprout the accoutrements of our species, reabsorbing our tails and fattening our heads and whatnot. Mom's a little uncomfortable in the second trimester when we go through the triceratops phase, but things smooth out. It's a very attractive notion. It was first proposed by Ernst Haeckel who drew a picture of the various embryonic stages, pointing out the early salamander. That's the hook, right there--who wouldn't want to claim a salamander in her heritage? I've noticed that most people who have looked into their own genealogy have been able to trace back to Charlemagne at some point. We like to think well of ourselves. This just ups the ante.

Trouble is, apparently it's not true. I am old enough to have learned it in school, but it's not true. I also remember looking at a world map in fifth grade and all of us kids pointed out what is perfectly obvious: it looks like the Americas had somehow split off from Europe and Africa. We got on our tiptoes and reached up to trace the map, our voices rising in excitement. The teacher smiled at us indulgently and shook her head and began talking about our delightful imaginations and segued right into something about Santa Claus that we also didn't want to know.

So she was wrong on two points, if you include Santa. But that's science for you. We don't always get things right, but eventually the weight of evidence is brought to bear, and minds are changed. Sometimes it takes a while, because scientists are human too, and they see what they want to see.

Photo by Nina Harfman

That's one of the differences between science and religion, at least the ones that purport to know something. It's hard to knock a good religious story off stride. Once we've got a good narrative going, we don't really want to examine it too closely. An Iroquois succumbing to deadly curiosity could march all the way around to the bottom of the world and back around to the top and approach the shaman and say, "you know? I checked, and the world really isn't balanced on the back of a turtle after all," and that will be the last sound you hear before the thunk of his severed head hitting the ground. For a lot of recorded history, curiosity killed a lot more than cats.

But I'm a curious soul, and I have to go where that leads me, rather than where I want it to. I'm really sorry I didn't get to spend a fetal week as a salamander, but that's life.

All the splendid portraits in this post were made by Nina Harfman over at Nature Remains. She's a great photographer with some sweet subject matter and she's pretty dang limber, too.

Woody

It's spring, and a woodpecker is hammering away on the neighbor's tree, checking for bugs. It's likely either a Downy or a Hairy woodpecker, which differ only slightly, but even novices can readily tell them apart by asking a real birder. Sometimes they hammer on a chimney. There are no bugs in there--they're trying to attract a mate. The flicker that likes to drill holes in our house succeeds, at least, in attracting Dave, and he's not easy. Well, yes, he is easy. Still, woodpeckers are attractive.

The males in particular are often crowned with a bright red patch which they use as a sexual signaling device. They also have short, stiff tails that help anchor the bird to the sides of the tree while he's hammering and support him while he's climbing. Humans lack this and must resort to a crotch harness, which doubles as a sexual signaling device.

Many people wonder how the woodpecker avoids brain damage while he hammers away. Bird experts ("ornithodontists") point out that, for one thing, he has a very small brain. So he's utilizing the same sort of evolutionary stratagem that protects humans from debilitating tail injuries. I'm not sure I buy it. Although it is true that brains and peckers are rarely associated, the real reason woodpeckers don't get headaches is that their children all leave the nest in under a month.

And they don't have a lot of room for brains, because they need to free up the space to store their tongues. Many species of woodpeckers have a long tongue for exploring cavities and retrieving insects and sap. Then they have to reel it back into their heads so as to remain properly aerodynamic. So they run it up the backside of their skulls and tuck it in at the nostrils. Hummingbirds have a similar design. When they make little hummingbird yummy noises you can see the tongues go back and forth over the top of their heads. I'd like to think that the ability to ripple your head when you're happy could be a sexual signaling device, although for hummingbirds, which also have little fingers on their tongues, that might be gilding the lily. I know if a human were to develop little fingers on his tongue, word would get out.

Creationists, or proponents of Intelligent Design, are people who are more comfortable with mystery than knowledge, and they like to point to the woodpecker as being an example of Irreducible Complexity, proof that God had to have stamped it out whole, perhaps from a perceived shortage of time. As evidence, they point out that the woodpecker's tongue is anchored in its nose, which is not true, and that only God would think of doing such a thing, which might be true although we'll never know because he didn't do it, and that (most importantly) it directly contradicts Genesis, which is undoubtedly true, end of story, amen.

In reality, mutations can result in structural changes whose functions change over time, or fall into disuse. In humans, a hallmark of our evolution is our large brain, which allowed us to fashion tools and develop strategies and acquire knowledge so that we were able to achieve considerable success in spite of our physical weaknesses. Now, in many parts of the population that prefer mystery to knowledge, the brain is no longer being used much except as stuffing so our hats don't fall off. Only time will tell if this is a useful adaptation. I plan to keep exercising my own brain, just in case I need it later. Or at least until I can ripple my head.

Save The Fetal Corporations!

It's getting on late afternoon, which means it must be about time for another Republican debate. They're showing up more often than rate-increase notices from the cable company. I try to catch as many as I can, because they're not going to go on forever. By mutual agreement, they are capping the number at 665.

I find them fascinating. But there's no danger I'm going to be voting for any of these people. I have a pretty basic set of priorities: I want to see serious progress getting away from a dangerous and unsustainable fossil-fuel economy. I want an equitable and steeply progressive tax structure. I want regulation in place to prevent the plundering of assets by a piratical sliver of the population. I want sound science and a long view to prevail over ignorance, short-sightedness and religiosity. I want a single-payer health care system that covers every American.

So what we've got in the Republican horse race is the promise not to disturb the profit engine of the private insurance industry, the promise to remove regulation, and several propositions for shoving even more of the tax burden onto the middle class. We've got the governor of Texas, which is in the process of flaking off and blowing away, insisting that if the climate is changing, it's only because it wants to change, and putting his state under the protection of the Dunderhead Fairy. One fellow put out an ad featuring his campaign manager taking a long drag on a cigarette. Not to be outdone, another readied one showing her manager in a Klan hat failing to scoop poop. Meanwhile, all expressed a willingness to drill right into our uteruses in case there's oil there. The only guy who actually put in a sensible health-care program is swearing he didn't. To their credit, the panelists did stop hopping up and down and nit-picking and throwing shit at each other long enough to scoff at the theory of evolution; and everyone anticipates the Almighty will show up at some point as soon as he is ready to make an endorsement.

Not my cup of tea, as it were. I didn't think we had any common ground at all until they weighed in on the Personhood Amendment. They're in favor. The Personhood Amendment would define a fertilized human egg cell as a human being deserving of all the protection of the law. As a liberal, I agree it's important to pinpoint the moment a human is created, so we can know when to start taxing it, but there's a lot of disagreement on what that exact moment is. Some would point to the time of fetal viability; some would say at birth. Some propose a probationary period until age eighteen. Many believe a fertilized egg is at most a potential human, although the same could be said about sperms. (Sperms are unquestionably alive--zippy, even. And you can't beat their slick delivery system.)

The amendment might have the effect of outlawing many of the most popular forms of birth control, such as the Pill and the IUD, because they make the womb inhospitable to the implantation of the petite human, which would then drift and wither and die before it ever learned how to pull a slot machine. It is being proposed in Mississippi, and no wonder. Sure, Mississippi is already solidly in first place in births to unwed mothers, at over 50%, but Louisiana is hard on its heels. Something had to be done.

At any rate, finally I can get on the same page as the Republicans. I think we can all agree that corporations are just people, too, really large bloaty ones, with their own hopes and desires and Facebook pages, but they're big enough to take care of themselves. What we need to protect is the fetal corporations, those little entrepreneurial blastocysts trying to grow to the point they can live on their own. And in order to protect and nurture them, the local book store, the cottage industry, the neighborhood fix-it guy, we need to ensure they are able to thrive in their environment. We need to make sure they have an adequate infrastructure, sewers and roads and whatnot, educated workers, and a population of decently-compensated potential consumers. If guaranteed health care were extended to all, that would help them immensely.

So there's our common ground. Jump on board, Republicans.

Murr's All-Star gallery of blastopreneurs, in order: Donna Guardino of the Guardino Gallery; Néna Rawdah of St. Johns Booksellers; Timothy of the Community Cycling Center; Barbara McLean of The One Stop Sustainability Shop; and Jehnee Rains of Suzette. Shop local, people!

Mouse On The March

Antediluvian cousins: Don in front

I was thinking about my cousin Don the other day, and wondering what he was doing. I was hoping it wasn't the dog-paddle. Don lives in Minot, North Dakota, where the Mouse River has been over-expressing itself of late. It's not a really big river, but it doesn't have to be to cause trouble, because it runs through really flat terrain. Any water that breaches the banks will flow wide and far. There is some variation in elevation in Minot, but a lot of it is caused by moles, and I don't know the town well enough to know if Don's house is built on a molehill.

Obviously it isn't completely flat there, because otherwise there wouldn't be a river. It would just be a sea. That's what used to be in North Dakota, a big inland sea. We know that for a fact because of the work of scientists in the fields of geology and paleontology. Discovering things like the origins of our topography allows us to have topography of our own. Everything we learn builds on everything else we learn and directs what we might learn next, until our knowledge accretes in hills and ridges and uplifts and moraines from which we can see splendidly. It's a beauty and a joy.

Looked at that way, and only that way, the contestants in the last Miss USA pageant are really flat. Each was asked the same simple question: should evolution be taught in our schools? And nearly every aspiring queen had the same answer. Only two betrayed the slightest familiarity with science. They reacted as though the interviewer had farted in church, then regained their poise and merrily allowed that maybe evolution should be taught "too," so that children have a chance to learn "both sides" and decide for themselves what to believe. This is a land of freedom, and every child should have the opportunity to conclude that she is living on a five-thousand-year-old landscape the shape of a dinnerplate under a whirl of spinning stars that have a say in her love life, if that's what she wants to believe. God bless America!

Meanwhile the Mouse floods like it's never flooded before, tornadoes strafe the prairies and speculate into New England, islands sink and glaciers die and vintners prospect for land in the Yukon, all of which was accurately foreseen by scientists from the high ridges of their own hard-won education, and nothing can be done about any of it because a small number of powerful people have enough money to buy a controversy where none exists. And when years of deliberate miseducation have flattened out our population, a little stupid can flow wide and far.

Putting The Squeeze On Evolutionary Theory

wombat

I am indebted to reader AnnieS for bringing this article to my attention, and where were the rest of y'all? Literally dozens of people must have known that wombats produced cubic poop and didn't tell me. Don't hold it in, people. Cubic poops are the building blocks of a blog post, at the least. Add a plumb bob, a level and a vat of Febreze, and you've got yourself a domicile.

Wombat poop looks like the squared-off chunks from the larger size Tootsie Rolls of my youth. Tootsie Rolls didn't taste all that great, but they were cheap and didn't taste all that great for a long long time, and I speculate that the same could be said for wombat poop. If all goes well, we shall never know. But why, you might ask, do wombats crank out cubes in the first place?

wombat poop

The prevailing theory includes the observation that many animals poop to mark their territory. According to this scenario, some among the early wombattery noticed that turds with corners did not roll away, and they popped them out on rocks and logs like heads on a pike, proclaiming: keep out, this is my space. I would argue that this is at best a secondary reason to poop, but it has merit. I used to do the same thing with used Kleenex and toenail clippings when I had roommates. Also, the wombat can be confident his crap will remain where he left  it, and can easily follow them to find his way home. Since he snaps off 80-100 dice a day, this can get him pretty far afield.

This theory implies that without boxy poop, all the wombats in a given population trying to find their way home via the process of elimination might wind up bunched together in a ravine, or some other low spot. I see a number of problems with this.  For one, I have never noticed that shit in general does a lot of rolling. It's sticky. I have counted on this very property of shit over the years, as one who can only find the direction of a slope in the woods by observing which of my feet gets wet when I pee. Also, you can roll dice. Especially in craps.

constipated wombat

It's hard to squeeze out a solid evolutionary advantage to cube-pooping. Wombats do take fourteen days to digest their food, so that suggests a certain amount of backup, and their posteriors are made of cartilage. There is much to indicate that squaring up one's poop takes a toll.

Whatever the reason, somebody has found a market in paper made of wombat poop. It is dense and fibrous, and, after all, it's already square, but I suspect that the original innovator got the idea because of the poop's stay-puttedness. "Look," our inventor said, a dim light bulb going off over his head, "it's stationary." This is the kind of thing you get in the spell-check generation, and also explains why so many little asses are running boroughs in New York City.

baby wombat

Speaking of burrows, which we almost were, that is where wombats live. They are excellent excavators, spending a lot of time pointed downwards with their bony rears in the air. Being marsupials, they carry their young in a pouch for six to seven months, while they tell them how smart and talented they are. They come back later after they spend some time in the real world and discover no one else wants to buy their drawings. The pouches are installed backwards, so dirt doesn't get in them while the mama wombat digs into her burrow. This situation puts the little ones at risk of falling out when she goes back uphill, but fortunately, baby wombats are square. They don't go anywhere.

All of this is a lot to ask natural selection to account for. The alternative is to postulate that God, by the eighteenth or nineteenth day, just flang out a bony-assed fuzzy critter that carries its young in a pocket with a view of its own butt and likes to produce geometrically pleasing turds on rocks, just for the pure hell of it. I'm a science girl, but I'm going with Number Two. That's sure what I'd do.

Evolution, Explained

There still seems to be some misunderstanding about evolution and creation, and I'm just the gal to clear things up once and for all. You're welcome!

The evolutionary biologists are constrained by the scientific method, wherein hypotheses must be tested rigorously and either found to be supported or abandoned. The creationists are constrained by the premise that the Bible was dictated word for word by God Almighty and does not need any editing. It is not true that this is a conflict between non-believers and believers, as there are plenty of theists among the ranks of evolutionary biologists. It would be more accurate to say that this is an argument between those who believe in God, and those who believe in God but do not believe he has any imagination.

There are a number of objections the creationists raise to the theory of evolution:

One. Evolution has never been observed. Whereas this does appear to be the case, at least among humankind since the Scopes Trial, 84 years is not considered by scientists to be enough time to really get the evolution ball rolling.

Two. No transitional fossils ("missing links") between man and the apes have been found. This is patently untrue, and very unfair to Liza Minnelli's ex-husband David Gest, who has only begun to fossilize.

Three. The doctrine of irreducible complexity holds that some entities, such as the eyeball, are so complex that they had to have been created in one fell swoop, and not a sequence of lesser swoops. This illustrates a misunderstanding of the biological mechanism in question. Evolutionary biologists would note that an adaptation is adopted if it confers some sort of advantage to its owner, but this does not have to relate to its ultimate function. There are many examples of this in everyday life. For instance, the very complex device currently being used worldwide to hold up windows that are missing their sash weights was originally developed to allow humans to watch Kevin Bacon on the small screen anytime they wanted to. A similarly complex example is the United States Congress, consisting of 535 individual moving parts, if we include Robert Byrd. Every one of these parts came into being to fulfill a purpose of its own, from the metabolism of lobbyist money into defense contracts to the metabolism of lobbyist money into personal wealth, and yet in aggregate they are able to hold up health care reform.

Four. The creationists reject out of hand the notion that life can arise out of a primordial soup situation involving a few key molecules, water, and a source of energy. However, this can and has been demonstrated in a number of areas, including the laboratory setting, deep-ocean vents, and my shower, where just the other day, using only water, heat and whatever inanimate matter had sloughed off my own body, I was able to remove the drain cover and pull up an entire mammal.