Category Archives: Biology

What I Got Wrong About Pandemics

13 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by in Biology, Curious Fictions, My Fiction, Science Fiction, Stories, The Time of Troubles

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I’ve been obsessively trawling through news feeds for more articles about the novel coronavirus pandemic, as though somewhere in the thousandth article I will find some life-saving pearl of advice that I didn’t see in the previous 999 articles. I can see that what I’m doing is a strategy–shared by many, I suppose–to offer myself the illusion of control in a cataclysm which is fundamentally beyond anyone’s control. (Of course, while the pandemonium is beyond anyone’s control, it’s not beyond everyone’s collective control: I’m very happy to see the people in my community of Portland, Oregon, starting to close up shop, hunker down in our houses, and practice social distancing even without explicit direction from our psychically damaged and malignant president).

As I hunker down here at my dinner table, reflecting on scary days ahead, I am reminded of a pandemic story I wrote years ago, one of my earliest science fiction efforts. The piece is called “A Murmuration of Starlings;” it was my first sale to a major sci fi publication (Analog Science Fiction and Fact). While there are a few elements in the story that I would have handled differently if I were writing it today, on the whole I think it has held up quite well. And there is a lot in “Murmuration” that I anticipated correctly about what a pandemic would be like: the focus on social distancing, the eerie calm in once-bustling places, the bemused emails and phone calls.

Starling, by M. Shattock

But, now that a pandemic is truly upon us, I’m more interested in the things I got wrong about the story, the things I failed to imagine. It didn’t occur to me to write about economic collapse, though of course that’s one of the things that’s easiest to notice about our current predicament. I didn’t think at all about the case fatality rate of the disease I was writing about: in the story, 90% of people who were infected died, though it seems to me now that a disease that deadly would burn itself out very quickly. It never occurred to me how much chaos and misery could accompany an infection with a 98% or 99% survival rate. I wish, now that I’m living through a real pandemic, that I had said something about the dithering and denial of the authorities in the early days.

If you don’t happen to have the June 2012 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact lying around, you can read the story here. I can reassure you that there is a redemptive arc to the story, just the sort of thing a reader might need while hunkering down through a real pandemic.

Thoughts on 2001: A Space Odyssey

23 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by in Biology, Journeys, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, Science, Science Fiction, SETI

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I had the joy of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen the first time in my life a little while ago. For those of you living near Portland, The Hollywood Theater purchased a 70 mm print of the film a couple of years back, and they show the movie to a sold-out house a couple of times every year. I had seen the film many times before on video–it’s one of the truly formative pieces of art in my life–but seeing it in a literally larger-than-life format impressed me deeply: the movie reminds me why I work in the genre of science fiction.

One of the most celebrated elements of the film has been its technological accuracy. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke, working before CGI or the moon landing, were able to predict so many of the challenges and curiosities of living and working in space. As much as I loved Star Trek and Star Wars growing up, I always had the sense that those two franchises were more science fantasy than science fiction (especially Star Wars). 2001, by contrast, looked like some thrillingly-plausible documentary footage from a future just over the horizon.

But it is not the accuracy of the film that affects me so much now. Rather, 2001 is worth watching because of what Tolkien would have called its mythopoesis: its creation of a new mythology in which we could view our modern predicament. As much as any other work of art I can think of, 2001 gets at the painfully intermediate position of our species as part animal and part divine: the film is a 164-minute meditation on Hamlet’s musing: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

(Another quote, just as apt, comes from Nietzsche’s This Spake Zarathustra, the book which also inspired the iconic theme music for 2001: “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”).

While the film is set in space in the near future, as realistically as Kubrick and Clarke could conceive of it, the setting is just as much a place of the inscrutable divine: in other words, its setting is really The Dreamtime, the Underworld, Faerie. Even though the US Space Program was deeply influenced in real life by 2001, the movie is closer to the mystical cave paintings of Chauvet or Lubang Jeriji Saléh than it is to the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.

Of course, there are many elements of any piece of science fiction that won’t hold up well after 50+ years. In the case of 2001, Kubrick and Clarke seriously underestimated the amount of progress our species would make in some aspects of information technology, while at the same time overestimating the progress we would make in artificial intelligence and manned spaceflight. Those are easy mistakes to make, by the way: I can’t think of any science fiction before the 1980s that successfully anticipated the internet, and of course a movie made in 1968, the year before Apollo 11, would extend the logic of manned spaceflight out to regular orbital shuttles and populous moon bases and manned Jupiter missions.

But the beauty of 2001 is not how much the movie correctly predicted but rather how well it explores the timeless theme of what it means to be a human being. What strange gods called out of the darkness to our rude, frightened hominid ancestors to make us human? What awaits us if we can survive the deadly unintended consequences of our own ingenuity? In wrestling with those questions, 2001 is every bit as bottomless a work of art as Paradise Lost or Faust or the Popol Vuh. One can argue that there are no gods that made us, that the monoliths of the movie will never be found because they never existed in the first place. However, 2001 speaks to something very deep in our cultural DNA (and, for all I know, in our literal DNA): the yearning for our spiritual parents.

Two hundred years from now, if we somehow survive this dreadful bottleneck of overpopulation and ecological collapse, our descendants may be living in domed cities on the moon and Mars; we may be gliding in beautiful submarines through the oceans of Europa and Ganymede. We will still be looking for the monoliths.

Review of The Origins of Creativity

14 Saturday Apr 2018

Posted by in Biology, Book reviews, Musings and ponderation, Science Fiction

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Edward O. Wilson’s latest book, The Origins of Creativity, is a return to the trails Wilson explored almost 20 years ago in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. In both books, Wilson attempts to bridge the gulf between the sciences and the humanities which has opened over the last century or more. Wilson makes a heroic effort in The Origins of Creativity (touchingly so, given that the great scientist is nearly ninety years old and has given the book some of  the touches of a final work). In the end I was unpersuaded by his exertions, but I am grateful for his return to a theme which is so meaningful for me personally. And, if Wilson’s proclamation of a coming Third Renaissance doesn’t quite convince me, I believe that Wilson still does us yeoman’s service in making an attempt to unify the humanities and the sciences.

Wilson’s starting point is uncomfortable, though obvious, for English teachers everywhere: the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields have far outstripped the humanities in the public funds they receive, and STEM fields have been vastly more successful at producing lucrative jobs for college graduates. Elected officials regard the arts & humanities as luxuries whose comparatively tiny public budgets are often hard to justify.

Wilson’s diagnosis of the problem is that the humanities are stuck in the cultural cul-de-sac of present day. As Wilson puts it: “The main shortcoming of humanistic scholarship is its extreme anthropocentrism. Nothing, it seems, matters in the creative arts and critical humanistic analyses except as it can be expressed as a perspective of present-day literate cultures.”

While I do think that much of what goes on in the humanities is culturally blinkered, I’m not exactly sure how one would go about making the humanities less anthropocentric. The purpose of art is to explore what it means to be a human being–the humanities are anthropocentric by definition.

It is true that, with the exception of some artists working in the genre of science fiction, most artists and humanities scholars are not deeply educated around science. To put it another way, I think most scientists know way more about the humanities than most humanities scholars do about science. However, I’m not sure how our becoming more literate about evolutionary psychology and paleontology will make artists less anthropocentric. Art is one of the most anthropocentric activities on earth.

Would it help bridge the gulf between the arts and the humanities if the arts expressed something other than “a perspective of present-day literate cultures?” Maybe, but I don’t see it.  True, we would probably gain something by being better educated about the deep, biologically-driven ways that the lives of “present-day literate cultures” are related to the lives of the Lascaux Cave painters and the sculptor of the Venus of Willendorf. It does help us to recognize (and I think most present-day literate people do recognize) that those paleolithic artists were just like us in their humanity–their emotional lives were just as rich and subtle as Margaret Atwood’s. And, I do suppose that realization helps us in humanity’s most pressing moral challenge, that of seeing all humans across time and space as part of a single family, our common fate tied to the health of the ecosystem in which we live.  

Lascaux II

But this realization will not by itself bridge the gulf between the humanities and the sciences. That gulf is there because there is simply too much information to keep tabs on in the sciences for any human being to become an expert in more than a very small number of fields. It may be that our species is gathering scientific insights so quickly now that it’s impossible for a single human to become a true expert even in a single field as broad as chemistry or biology.

I’ll be the first to argue that artists could afford to learn a lot more about STEM fields. After all, science and technology are some of the most important organizing principles of human existence today. But whatever art we produce will still be to a certain extent time-bound: we make the art we do to give our lives a some kind of shape that makes sense to us. Our art remains bound in time and place because the human condition binds us to the time and place we live in.

 

Loneliness

31 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Biology, Musings and ponderation, Science, Stories, Utopia and Dystopia

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all alone.jpg

Sculpture Credit: “All Alone,” by a young Gloria Pitkin

To be a modern human is to contend with loneliness.

While this insight has been with us for decades or even centuries, it’s only recently that a body of research around the causes of loneliness, as well as its effects and its cures, has started to catch the public imagination.

Folks like Kafka and Camus seemed to assume, in the previous century, that loneliness was simply fundamental, part of the warp and weft of human existence. Today, though, researchers have begun to argue that loneliness is no more basic to human existence than tuberculosis–that, in fact, loneliness is a medical condition that can be prevented and cured.

The January issue of Scientific American has an article on loneliness that really spoke to me, perhaps because I was so lonely for so much of my youth. The author, Francine Russo, argues that in much the same way that the disease of consumption was medicalized and clinicalized into tuberculosis, we may be in the process of reconceiving loneliness as a treatable and preventable disease rather than a central reality of the human condition. For an artist like John Keats in the early 19th century, tuberculosis and loneliness were existential threats that he spent his life and work grappling with. Today, TB is (for many people in the developed world, anyway) something that one is vaccinated against.

But what vaccine is available for loneliness? Russo suggests cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a technique which has had deeply positive effects on my own life. And yet, in spite of my having experienced both chronic loneliness and CBT first-hand, I lacked the imagination to conceive of loneliness as a disease rather than a consequence of my very flawed character.

The other thing that dawned on me as I read the article was just how often I write about lonely characters in my stories. I just signed off on the galley prints for my latest story, “Potosí,” and realized that the main character spends a good deal of the story in utter solitude. Just like Miranda in “Full Fathom Five,” Epic in “Proteus,” and Sandra in “Lamp of the Body.” Stories with well-adjusted characters and lots of friends seem to be more rare with me.

As with all things Scientific American, the print article isn’t available online, but this closely related SciAm blog post is.

 

Science Fiction As a Gateway Drug

14 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by in Biology, Games, Journeys, Musings and ponderation, Science Fiction

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For a few years in boyhood at least, I loved science and technology. One of my fondest childhood television memories was of watching the original Cosmos miniseries with my dad, seeing Carl Sagan in his turtleneck and corduroy blazer as he traveled the universe on his “Ship of the Imagination” over Vangelis’ spacey soundtrack. I can remember my dad scoffing pretty frequently at Sagan’s goofily over-acted facial expressions–Sagan perpetually appeared to be having some kind of ineffable and mystical experience on his dandelion-seed ship–but the show appealed to the ten year-old me, so much so that I believed in 5th grade that I was destined to become a physicist.

I left science behind in junior high school for the same reasons that a lot of kids do: math and science classes were difficult (often not all that well-taught, too); I struggled with the emotions of puberty and my parents’ divorce and didn’t find factoring polynomials to provide much of an escape from my problems. For a couple of years I became a lackluster student in most subjects, but especially so in science and math, culminating in my freshman year of high school with the lowest grade I received in my many years of formal schooling (a D+ in biology).

Somewhere around age 14 I realized that the kids I thought were cool–the orchestra and debate kids who watched Stanley Kubrick movies and listened to classical music for fun–seemed to get As and Bs pretty effortlessly. And I wanted enough to be like them that I wised up in school a little. However, my perception of those cool kids was that coolness was all about literature and music, Camus and Sartre and Kafka and Stravinsky and Bauhaus (the band, not the architectural movement). Coolness had little to do with science and math beyond getting good grades. And so my trajectory through high school, college, and some time beyond kept me almost entirely in the humanities, with results which I probably could have predicted and which might have depressed me if I had predicted them: by age 24 I had a master’s degree in English and was an adjunct faculty member of a tiny community college.

Given where I ended up, how did I come back to science at all? I came back the same way that many, many young people get into the sciences in the first place: through science fiction. In 1998 I purchased one of the seminal computer games of all time: Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Players of Alpha Centauri guide a faction of colonists through the development of humanity’s first settlement beyond the solar system. I was fascinated by the idea of a planet-wide university, of colonists building supercolliders and space elevators and massive ecological engineering projects.I loved the idea of a human society devoted to the acquisition of knowledge and careful stewardship of natural resources–an ideal that sometimes seems far removed from the society I actually live in.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - PC - IGN

I also realized (pretty slowly, after a couple hundred hours of game play) that all of the projects which the game modeled on this fictional alien world were projects that real human beings were actively pursuing on this planet, for good and ill. Among them, there are massive environmental protection projects, ecological restoration projects, and sustainability efforts whose success or failure will determine the future of human civilization. I realized that I wanted to live in a world of science, not merely as an observer, but as an active participant.

In years since, the burgeoning of the internet, with its powerful democratizing effects, its incubation of the citizen science movement, of “outsider science,” of the makers’ movement, has convinced me that the ideal of a human society made entirely of scientists, naturalists, and ecologists could be our society. All people can become scientists. Becoming a scientist requires time and dedication, but it requires no secret gnosis that is kept from non-scientists. Do I want to learn how volcanism works? I have only to read and observe for several hundred hours before I will know a good deal about it (ironically, that’s about how much time I spent playing Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri). Do I want to learn calculus? Khan Academy is right here on the internet, assuring me that I can learn anything, for free, forever.

You Can Learn Anything | Valley Oaks Charter School Tehachapi

As there is in most science fiction, there’s a lot of hand-waving and pseudo-scientific ersatz explanation in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Some of the hand-waving, now that I know a little more about science, seems pretty laughable in retrospect. But that hand-waving got me in the door, years after I’d thought I’d closed the door. People like Gene Roddenberry and Sid Meier have done as much to recruit scientists as anyone on earth.

 

 

Finn the Human Boy: a Modern Gilgamesh

27 Friday May 2016

Posted by in Biology, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation

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I’ve been trying to learn a little more about graphic novels–a literary genre that I have almost no experience with–and pulled from the public library shelf Gilgamesh: A Graphic Novel by Andrew Weingarner. I have always been fascinated by the epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written story known to humanity: I loved the old John Gardner translation of the story, and I had a good time with this graphic retelling. The various cosmic monsters that Gilgamesh battles are drawn very well–they’re intense, original, but also evoke a Mesopotamian vibe.

The central partnership in the story–the ur-dynamic duo that informs so many later character dyads–is that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu: Gilgamesh, the civilized, anxious, ambitious king, and Enkidu, the wild and natural “hairy man.” The duo appears later as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,  as Prince Hal and Falstaff, as Han Solo and Chewbacca.

And, I realized a little later, as Finn and Jake from Adventure Time.

Besides the cosmetic similarities of the two pairs, Finn the human boy and Jake the magical talking dog are also spiritual and characterological siblings to Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Finn and Jake are perfectly matched combatants, each unable to defeat the other, whether in combat, in their long-running pranking competitions, or in their frequent video game and Card Wars match-ups. Like Gilgamesh, Finn is a rambunctious upstart, eager to attack real or perceived injustice head-on, usually through violence. Like Gilgamesh, Finn is also beset with anxiety–often as a result of his phobias or bad dreams–yet Finn and Gilgamesh are also paradoxically able to set aside their nagging dread and fight fearlessly, even foolhardily, in battle.

Jake is a striking modern recreation of Enkidu, literally a magic talking animal. In much the same way that Enkidu advises and guides Gilgamesh, Jake is wiser and more experienced than Finn in most matters, especially those relating to the basic animal appetites for sex and sleep and food.

Both duos spend their time hustling from cosmic battle to cosmic battle with monstrous or demonic antagonists. It’s easy to imagine Humbaba, the earlier epic’s demonic guardian of the cedar forest, as a creature drawn for Adventure Time (even Humbaba’s name would fit well in Adventure Time); it’s just as easy to imagine an Adventure Time antagonist like Hunson Abadeer appearing in a sculpture from some Sumerian ruin.

Found on a Mesopotamian fresco…

The mapping of one duo to another isn’t perfect–Gilgamesh is a character rooted in a 3000 year-old value system that doesn’t translate well to our own. He is cruel by our standards: violent, an abuser of women, a despoiler of the environment (ironically, the pre-civilized Enkidu is much easier for contemporary readers to sympathize with). But the Gilgamesh-Enkidu pairing still speaks to us in much the same way that Finn and Jake speak to us, because the relationship is archetypal. The relationship speaks to our odd predicament as creatures that are both animal and transcendent of our animal nature: we are, as Hamlet says, “in action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god,” yet we are at the same time deeply aware of our brutish status as just another mammal, tied down to the “Four Fs” of feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing that govern all animal life. For both Gilgamesh-Enkidu and Finn and Jake, we are promised that all good things in life–justice, mercy, peace, love–come to us when these two natures are reconciled and act in partnership. We are warned that madness follows when we act in opposition to it.

A Meditation on Time

18 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in Biology, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction

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I have been taking my sweet time in reading Anna Karenina, a Christmas gift from my lovely stepdaughter. At the rate I’m going, I would guess I have two more months with this delicious, painful, hilarious book. Meanwhile, as I dither through this enormous work of art, it’s been hanging over my head that I don’t keep up my blog as befits a serious writer, dispensing witty remarks and novel observations at least once per week.

I really don’t yearn for “simpler times” (e.g. Tolstoy’s time), in which the world of ideas moved more slowly and people had time–from our perspective, anyway–to write long letters and long novels, to linger over an idea in a journal for months and even years. Many people of Tolstoy’s day didn’t regard their time as leisurely: they felt as rushed and harried as we do now, since the era of railroads and electricity had sped up life for them at an unprecedented rate. Perhaps in a hundred years my descendants will regard my lifestyle as leisurely, since most of us today don’t yet have Adderall prescriptions or cranial implants or other technological prostheses to speed up our rate of pumping out new ideas and reacting to new ideas we see.

This morning as I read my ten pages on the bus, I was taken by Tolstoy’s words about time: Prince Shcherbatsky is reacting to being told that “time is money,” and he says, “Time, indeed, that depends! Why, there’s time one would give a month of for fifty kopeks, and time you wouldn’t give half an hour of for any amount.”

It occurred to me as I sat with that quote today that I have given away lots of time in my life for fifty kopeks, or for less. When I returned to graduate school in my thirties, I was so excited to be able to take classes at public expense (since I am an employee of the state, my classes cost $5 per course)–I often joked with people that I had spent more money on parking tickets than on tuition when I was in grad school the second time. I feel thankful to the Great State of Washington every time I think of what I learned there.

But I also made a huge blunder by valuing my labor at zero in those days. The courses cost $5, so my degree must only cost about $100, no? Yet, of course there was the massive opportunity cost of my shutting myself up for years to read academic papers on ecology and statistical analysis: there were hikes I didn’t take, other skills I didn’t learn, traveling I didn’t do. I’ve written in a couple of my stories from that period about students who get into ecology because they love spending time outdoors in nature, but that their ecological studies lock them up in a lab for months on end doing gas chromatography or grinding up plant tissue samples.

I’ve come home with a fever tonight–ironically, the fever is what has slowed me down enough to be able to meditate about time in this blog post. And I have realized that as I age, I am becoming less and less willing to give up time to others (that is, to people I don’t love) for any amount. Even if by magic I could, I wouldn’t give up this feverish time tonight–unpleasant as it is–for money. I’m sure I have my price for taking on more work, but I’m realizing that the price is much, much higher than a community college would typically pay. I would just rather have the time.

Glad Solstitial Tidings

20 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by in Biology, Musings and ponderation

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Tomorrow I’ll be ringing in the winter solstice with my wife at Breitenbush Hot Springs. There will be poetry, yoga, maybe some ecstatic dancing of some kind–who knows? I’ve never been to a Breitenbush solstice, but I loved spending some time there last year and I think it’s extremely likely I’ll have a good time.

One thing I bet I won’t hear, given the circles I travel in, is many references to the birth of Jesus or other Christmas-related greetings. That’s not a problem for me–in fact, I far prefer it. I consider Christmas the most debased festival in the liturgical calendar (and anyway, as a Quaker, I feel a scruple about observing any religious holidays at all).

My friends’ silence might seem curious at first blush, given that practically all of my close friends are culturally Christian if not nominally Christian. Most today would not consider themselves Christians of any stripe: my friends are atheists, agnostics, spiritual tourists, a’la carte Buddho-Hindu-Taoists, Sufi-curious, and neopagans. But, aside from the Friends in my Quaker meeting, I can’t think of many who regard Christianity sympathetically today.

Frankly, the Christian movement–which has been an accomplice of oppression and intolerance at least as often as it has worked to bring peace and justice to the world–deserves plenty of opprobrium. To say it in Christian language, The Church has been so soiled by the world that it has departed from Christ. So I’m not surprised to have friends who may have been raised in a Christian church who today distance themselves from what they regard as a fountainhead of exploitation.

But what I do find curious is how often my friends and acquaintances–even many of those who consider themselves atheists–engage in behaviors that might be considered reverent or even spiritual. While I know a few people whose atheism is so deeply held that they are able to see all ceremony as ridiculous, more often people seem to gravitate towards reverence even if they reject the particular rituals they grew up with.

One of the most important books I read this year explores this phenomenon: David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral. Wilson’s thesis is that religious behavior is evolutionarily adaptive, that our urge to find sacredness in the world is a way of enforcing group cohesion and eliciting altruistic behavior. This thesis is radical in biology circles, partly because it depends on a concept of natural selection that acts on groups as well as on individuals. It’s beyond the scope of this post to unpack the reasons this idea is derided by most biologists (nor why I believe it is correct); for now I’ll just offer a quote from David Sloan Wilson and his co-author E.O Wilson (no relation) that summarizes the entire argument behind group level selection: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary”.

Friends, I wish you well this holiday season. If you believe that altruism exists, I urge you to practice it. If you believe that altruism does not exist, I urge you to look harder. May you one day find yourself practicing altruism unawares. I wish you happiness in this season, not on account of the solstice, nor on account of the birth of Jesus (who was very unlikely to have celebrated his birthday on December 25), but on account of the biology of our species, on account of the deep urge to be kind to one another, in spite of the ways I fall short.