The Evolution of God

A couple weeks ago, James McGrath offered copies of Robert Wright’s new book The Evolution of God to the first five readers of his blog who contacted him.  I was lucky enough to be one of those five, and there was a copy waiting when I arrived home from my Florida trip.*

I picked it up tonight and started reading the introduction.  He writes

On one hand, I think that God arose as an illusion, and that the subsequent history of the idea of God is, in some sense, the evolution of an illusion.  On the other hand: (1) the story of this evolution points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity, and (2) the “illusion”, in the course of evolving has gotten streamlined in a way that has moved it closer to plausibility.

I’m impressed – and reassured – to realise that there just may be other people who approach the whole “god” thing in the same way I do.  Can’t guarantee it will continue to make sense to me, but that’s a very good start.

Boats…

Some things hit too close to home.

On Monday night I heard mention that two NFL players, Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith, together with a third man, William Bleakley, were missing off the Florida coast after their boat overturned.  The fourth occupant of the boat, Nick Schuyler, was found clinging to the boat.  I immediately found myself compartmentalising, almost stepping outside of myself as I watched the brief news story.  Last night I heard that the Coast Guard had called off the search.

This morning I had to dig deeper, learn something about what had happened.  CNN reported that the boat overturned while they were trying to lift anchor.  The story goes on to say that they were not wearing life jackets at the time, but that they were able to dive under the boat and retrieve them.  It also says that “all four men clung to the boat for a time, but then became separated”.  Schuyler, when rescued, was reportedly suffering from hypothermia and dehydration.  He was rescued at 1.25 pm on Monday, probably two days after the boat capsized.

It’s been less than two months since we lost Karl and Floyd in an accident that was disturbingly similar.  Having spent hours trying to imagine the scene, what happened is very vivid in my mind.  Some things are terribly similar, others different.  One thing that really jumped out at me was the phrase but then became separated.  Rough seas, dehydration, hypothermia…it’s not a shock.  Unless, of course, you know to tie yourself to the boat like Adolphus, the captain of the boat Karl, Floyd and Ryan had rented, knew to do.  If these guys had known to do that, things might have turned out differently.  But so they teach you than in basic water safety courses?

This recent tragedy also reminds you that things could always be worse.  Only one person was rescued, instead of two.  And the families of Cooper, Smith and Bleakley are left not knowing.  In my opinion, it’s better to know than to hope against hope.  My heart goes out to all the families, and to Schuyler, who’s left to try to make sense of his experience…

Berry Go Round #14

While I’ve been neglecting my blog, the blogging world has marched on.  The 14^th edition of Berry Go Round is up at Gravity’s Rainbow.  With BGR’s founder Laurent on hiatus from blogging, Mary at A Neotropical Savanna has taken over managing the show.  Look for next month’s BGR over at her place (any why not submit something you have written?  What? You don’t write about plants?  Well don’t you think it’s time you started?)

The 33rd edition of Festival of the Trees, and the second edition of Carnival of the Arid are also up.  (Yeah, I know, I’m copying from Jeremy…I should just post a link to his post and be done with it!)  This is the first I’ve heard of Carnival of the Arid, but it certainly looks promising.  But are dry forests arid enough for them?

Finding Osama bin Laden with Biogeography

I saw the coolest thing ever on the Rachel Maddow Show tonight.  Ever.  Thomas Gillespie of the Geography Department at UCLA was on the show discussing his attempt to predict bin Laden’s location using satellite imagery and biogeographic theory!  It was so amazingly cool to hear him discussing distance-decay models and island biogeography theory to predict bin Laden’s location.  It’s all the cooler because Gillespie is, at least in part, a tropical forest ecologist, did his Ph.D. on tropical dry forests in Nicaragua, and has published on dry forest fragments in south Florida.

It also make me wonder.  This is fairly basic work as far as biogeography goes.  It seems like a much simpler, much more tractable problem than you tend to get in actual conservation biology.  Gillespie may not be right, and presumably if he was, bin Laden has moved by now.  You tend to think of the intelligence community having highly sophisticated tools for data analysis.  But then you hear things like the fact that they are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data, and that they just don’t have enough analysts to deal with all the information they ‘capture’.  It makes me wonder whether the intelligence community should be hiring more community ecologists.  Community ecologists (and, apparently, environmental geographers) are faced with a “middle numbers” problem – they are faced with far too many data points to actually enumerate, but far too few to truly generalise. While this has posed a huge problem to the development of ecological theory, it hasn’t paralysed the field. Part of learning to function as an ecologist is learning to to deal with the issue.

Last month, after Karl’s funeral, Ryan reminisced about a recent interaction between him, Floyd and Karl.  He and Floyd had been counting and measuring the fish the had captured in their sampling.  After watching them measure and record several hundred fish, Karl pointed out to them that they should simply have put the fish into size classes and tallied the number in each size class.  It’s always hard to discard information that you’ve already gone to the trouble of collecting, but it’s often something you need to do in order to make sense of the data you have collected.  It’s something you learn to do as an ecologist…you learn to focus on that portion of the data that you can actually use.  It get the impression that it’s the kind of experience that might translate well into the world of intelligence analysis.

Gillespie, Thomas W., John A. Agnew, Erika Mariano, Scott Mossler, Nolan Jones, Matt Braughton, and Jorge Gonzalez. 2009. Finding Osama bin Laden: An Application of Biogeographic Theories and Satellite Imagery. MIT International Review. Online edition.

Tomorrow…

Tomorrow is Darwin Day, the 200^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s (and Abraham Lincoln’s) birth.  It’s Fern’s fifth birthday.  It should be so exciting, it should be such a big deal.  But I can only think of it as the one-month anniversary of The Day Hope Died.

I’m getting back into the rhythm of things.  I’m starting to feel less adrift in class (although I still feel like an interloper in “their” class, rather than a participant).  I’ve gotten through a busy first half of the week.  And yet…this.  I tell myself that it’s getting better, but I think the reality is that I’m just further away from it all.  There’s nothing odd in not running into Floyd or Karl in my daily life.  So it’s easy to pretend that they’re just not there right now.  As long as I can distract myself, I’m fine.  But I can’t always distract myself.

I gave the first exam in my class today.  Between handing out the exams and getting the first one back was an eternity – an block of time with nothing to distract me.  No one to talk to.  No buzz of conversation.  No one moving around.  Just sitting there with nothing to distract me.  Why are you so petrified of silence? Because once the distractions fade, you start to think.

Top 100 Botany Blogs

Online College Blogs has posted a list of the Top 100 Botany Blogs.  It looks like a great source of stuff to read.  I also managed to get mentioned, which is pretty cool.

Tragedy. I never really knew the meaning of that word before.

I was lucky enough to have one brother by birth, Karl. In Floyd I was lucky enough to get a second brother. This morning came the news that I had lost both of them, and my niece had lost not only her father, but also her favourite uncle.

When I learned on Sunday that they were missing at sea, I was horror-struck.  But I hoped for the best – they were wearing life jackets, there were searchers out.  I woke up this morning after a night of fitful dreaming, feeling confident that some good news would come today.  At the worst, we could not lose both of them.  Not at once.  But the world doesn’t work that way.  Now there are only memories and a huge hole in my heart.

I am so thankful for the outpouring of support.  I always felt that those simple words – “I’m sorry”, or “my condolences” meant so little, were so utterly inadequate.  I was wrong.  While even the smallest wish might bring me to tears again, they were tears that made me feel a little less hollow.  I was always ashamed of my tears, but today I shed them with pride in memory of two people I loved, and the only shame I can feel is shame at my hesitation to shed tears for others, to shed tears in the past.

Karl, Floyd, I love you both.  I will miss you both.  Always.

Bad news, no news

Yell. Yell from the hilltops. It would be just about as useful.

My brother and brother-in-law are missing at sea. Boat capsized. That doesn’t even seem like a real modern concept. Something out of history.

Thousands of miles away, I can’t do a fucking thing. Not that there’s anything I could do if I were there either, I know.

Stunned, I suppose. Need to do something to help, but there’s nothing I can do. Need for the world to stop doing what it’s doing and sit up and pay attention.

Details: Trinidad Guardian; Trinidad Express; neither can spell Karl’s name right, of course.

Updated story from the Guardian,  Express.

Eugenics, genetics and how they collided in the 20s and 30s

Roystonea, the royal palms, are the most striking palms in the Caribbean, and arguably, in the world (though, granted, a talipot palm in flower comes a close second). The name of the genus was coined by Orator F. Cook, an American botanist, in 1900, in honour of Roy Stone, an American general involved in the capture of Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American war.

I’ve wondered for years why Cook replaced what seemed to be a perfectly good generic name, Oreodoxa, with Roystonea…turns out that there were problems with Oreodoxa that were not easily addressed. Over the course of trying to figure that out, I started reading some of Cook’s writing. The article in which he first proposed the name¹ gives fascinating insight into the state of botanical nomenclature a century ago (now there’s a subject I can imagine throngs of people being fascinated by), so I did a search on Web of Science to see what else of his I could easily find.

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Berry Go Round #12

The 12th edition of Berry Go Round, the botanical blog carnival, is now online at Foothills Fancies.  Lots of good reading to be had.