Blessed by the Potato

Orson Scott Card recently wrote an opinion piece on Intelligent Design vs. Darwinism. He made some good points, but I also think that he skimmed over some of the issues in reaching his conclusion.

First off, he did a good job of distinguishing Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Darwinism. Creationism is not quite the same as Intelligent Design: while they both contain appeals to a Higher Being to explain gaps in the evidence, Creationism is significantly more dogmatic and, well, silly. Creationism essentially says that the story of creation in genesis is literal truth. God really did create the earth out of nothing in 6 days, and all the species were placed there in their final, complete, and perfect forms. Any fossils or extinct species we may find today (such as dinosaurs) were simply those species that were not carried by Noah on the arc, and saw mass extinction in the Flood, or alternatively, placed there on purpose by God when He created the world to, as proclaimed by the (non-canonical) prophet Biff, “Fuck with our heads.”

Intelligent Design, by contrast, is… somewhat… scientific. It agrees with Darwinism on a number of important points, including that evolution occurs (species change and diverge over time), and that natural selection may, in some cases, be involved. But where it differs is in the nitty-gritty: rather than relying on the mechanics of random chance and mutation to generate the differences upon which natural selection acts, ID instead invokes the actions of the “Designer” (generally, the Christian/Judaic God). ID (and OSC) argue that the appeals to a Designer are only made in the areas of the Theory of Evolution that are not fully understood, and so are no more religious than the Darwanist appeals to fortune and chance. By that argument, both theories break down into dogma at some point, and so neither should be taught in the schools. Instead, the Theory of Evolution should be taught, but only up to the point where it is well-supported by the evidence (namely, that species change over time, and that selection of the fittest and descent of traits over time is invovled. No mention of why these changes occur, what generates the variance for selection to act on, nor what else might be involved in addition to natural selection).

I’d like to make a few points of my own though (realizing the danger of trying to debate someone as talented as OSC, I’m not going to post a copy of this on his forums :)

He says that ID only exists because it explains the “holes” in Darwinism. I’m not sure that there are holes in Darwinism.

Let’s start with a few quick definitions and some common ground. We agree that evolution occurs, and that natural selection plays a role. This is the basis of the Theory of Evolution — notice that I capitalized Theory, this is because I wish to distinguish it from the word “theory”. You see, we have “theories”, which are our best guesses as to what is going on, stories that explain the facts as we know them, but which aren’t necessarily solid yet. Then we have Theories, where I’ve reserved the capitalization for those special theories that have been proven over and over and which form a fairly fundamental basis of our body of knowledge. So by this, I mean things like the Theory of Gravity, the Theory of Evolution, etc.

So, the Theory of Evolution covers the fact that species change over time, and that natural selection is the engine of that change. If, for example, two subpopulations of a species have different traits, the one with the trait that is more advantageous to survival will survive longer to breed more, and in the next generation that subpopulation will make up a larger portion of the species as a whole, until virtually the entire species has changed to contain the trait.

I would say that it also covers other important aspects of the process, tying into the inheritance of traits (the theory doesn’t work very well if those who survive due to their traits can’t pass them on), which ties into genetics. It doesn’t strictly rely upon another theory explaining where the variance that natural selection acts on comes from (mutation, or divine fiddling), and it doesn’t necessarily get into explaining other problems that I’ll get into (rather, the theories explaining those problems are based on the Theory of Evolution).

First off, we have the “problem” of explaining where the variance comes from that natural selection acts on to cause evolution. We know that inheritance occurs via genes encoded in DNA, and we know about copying errors and other mutations that can change those genes, which produces variation. The problem, as the ID people see it, is that by far most of the mutations we’ve observed have been harmful. Our bodies appear to be finely tuned organic machines, and futzing with the blueprint, even in relatively minor ways, can have disastrous results. So, they cite this as a shortcoming of the theory, and make their first call to the Designer, to put in beneficial mutations on purpose (for how else could something with such a low probability get in there?).

My response to this is that it’s not really necessary. True, getting hit by a cosmic ray and mutating in such a way to improve your odds of survival is like winning the lottery (or even worse!), but we have two things that make this system work. The first is sheer numbers. When dealing with whole populations as long as any one member gets a beneficial mutation and survives to pass it on, it’s gravy, even if millions of others suffered negative mutations and were culled (or even failed to gestate). The other is time. Evolution, particularly drastic speciation, can take place on very long timescales, which gives us lots of opportunities for a beneficial mutation to come along. Keep in mind that the whole time natural selection is also acting on the deleterious mutations, preventing them from becoming too problematic.

Closely related to this is that mutation rates for different genes vary. The genes that are critical to survival, such as the ones that encode the proteins that digest sugar or heat shock proteins (my own topic of study), hardly change at all over billions of years, with just a few trivial basepair substitutions accrued in the divergence of yeast to humans. While other less critical genes, such as those for various pigments, are more open to variation. The arguments over this are difficult for both sides. One one hand, it seems like exactly the sort of thing a Designer who did not wish to meddle too much would put in place, while at the same time, since it offers such a high increase to survival, it would be “strongly selected for” by natural selection. How it got there may be something we may never be able to answer one way or the other, but in my opinion, since it’s there now, it gives a mechanism for “undirected” Darwinism to take place.

The next argument, and perhaps the strongest in the ID arsenal, is the issue of complexity. There are two facets of the argument. The first one, and in my opinion the only valid one, concerns the intermediate steps. A valuable adaptation, such as an eye, or a bat wing, does not spring out of whole cloth in a single generation (though if it did, that would practically scream out the existence of a Designer!), there’s a lot of complexity involved there, and the intermediate steps on the way might not necessarily confer an evolutionary advantage. So if we consider a “fitness quotient”, the base organism might have a value of 100, and the “evolved” organism (with a complete wing or eye) might have a value of 125, but in-between, it has to pass through the “half-finished” stage, where it might be less survivable, with say a value of only 80. Our Theory tells us, then, that barring the outside influence of a Designer, the less-survivable “half-finished” version sould be selected against in favour of keeping the original.

There are a few responses to this. It’s not necessarily true to assume that the intermediate steps hold no value. This has been demonstrated with the eye: if you break it down into more logical steps, you wouldn’t start with an unseeing globe on your face, you’d start with a simple light receptor. All it could do is sense the presence or absence of light. And you can immediately see the use in that: you can more reliably determine what time of day it is, or if the weather is really terrible out (blocking out the sun). If you’re a pond-dwelling organism, you can then decide when to move out into the sun, or when to move away from the fresh-water slick formed on the surface during the rain. Then you can proceed to the next step: an array of photoreceptors to determine direction of light as well. From there, you can enclose them in a globe behind an aperature like a pin-hole camera. Useful both for protection and forming images on the photoreceptor array. Then, you can develop a lens that allows you to better focus the image, to look at specific things in detail. I tried to do the same for the bat wing as a school project, and it was a little harder to go through each step, but there I was helped by the fact that it requires fewer steps. If, for instance, you want to start with something like a flying squirrel (so you already have the soaring behaviour and the flaps of skin), it only takes a single mutation to make one finger freaky long to really stretch the skin out and glide like crazy. One other complication is that selection pressure is not equal through time. Selection pressures change depending on the climate, the relationship with other species and other factors. While unlikely, it is possible that a species could experience next to no selection pressure for a time. For example, let’s say that a group of rats swam to a previously uninhabited island. There would be abundant food for several generations before they had to compete amongst themselves, and predators were completely absent for a time. In those sorts of conditions, all sorts of “experimental” evolutionary off-shoots could take place, regardless of their usual survival value. A few generations of these sorts of conditions could allow a new change (like a bat wing) to progress through those poorly adaptive intermediate stages to form the basis of a fully-functional subspecies.

So this is an area where Darwinism has difficulty explaining the evidence, and where the theories become small-t ones, but I really don’t think it’s a “shortcoming” that requires an alternative explanation like Intelligent Design.

The other part of the complexity argument is that for each of the simple changes I’ve described above, there are fairly large biochemical changes. There’s just so much that has to change, that surely it requires divine intervention? This one, I think, is merely a misunderstanding of the problem. True, there are tens of thousands of genes with millions of amino acids, but the thing about our bodies is that they’re based on a very modular blueprint, and the genetic code is not necessarily on a one-to-one basis with phenotype. You can make minor changes to certain genes and get huge changes in body design, while big changes to other genes make very little difference. And because everything is so modular, it’s very easy to just copy a gene and make minor changes. For example, if you wanted to have 4 arms like Goro in Mortal Kombat, you wouldn’t need to find, copy, and alter all of the genes involved in arm construction, such as the ones that encode the nerves, the muscles, the vasculature, the skeletal basis, etc.; all you would need to do is find the protein that during embryogenesis directs all those other genes to form an arm, and alter it so that it instead called for two arms to be made. The already-established set of genes that direct arm formation would handle the rest. (Though if you wanted to use the arms, you might also need to alter the genes that make shoulders).

Far less complexity than one would think…

Anyway, I’ll wrap up my diatribe here. I agree that definitely the Theory of Evolution should be taught in schools, but I don’t think that it is so deficient in certain aspects of the how and why that appeals to a Designer need to be made. While those parts may not deserve a capital-t Theory (yet), I think they have a good enough probability of being true that they should be taught in schools (and that they’re not quite as religious as OSC makes them out to be). While Orson doesn’t think either ID or this extension of Darwinism should be taught in schools since they’re both based on faith at the moment, I’d have to disagree. While we may not know it to be scientific truth yet, these theories on how evolution occurs represent the best idea we have so far, and teaching them to our kids will give them the best foundations to discover what the real story is in the future.

Moreover, this theory has some predictive value, and is useful in that way. Whereas Intelligent Design won’t ever give you predictive powers unless you can speak to the Designer in some meaningful way — and if we could do that, the debate would be over!

Finally, I don’t mean to say in any of this that science or evolution deny the existence of God. It’s just that invoking Him isn’t necessary to make our theories work, and to explain the world around us. However, if it suits your belief pattern any better, God can happily influence any random process, from your rolls at the craps table in Vegas to the pattern of mutations underlying evolution, without ever impacting the science of your theory. Randomness is and perhaps always will remain beyond our control and understanding. It’s in this domain that God can potentially carry out His divine machinations without overtly revealing Himself and thus denying Faith. It is perhaps for this reason that fundamentalist religious types don’t like science. They don’t like the idea that they may just be praying to pure dumb random chance.

Edit 1: Too many “first offs” :)
Edit 2: Last paragraph.

Hell. Yes.

This has been a very bad year for hurricanes, with some very large, devastating storms hitting the equatorial region (notably New Orleans), and with the season extending well past the usual end-date, exhausting the prepared list of named storms and spilling over into greek letters.

Last year, storms damaged lettuce and tomato production in Mexico, leading to shortages in grocery stores and Subway restaurants. This year’s weather hasn’t improved the supply situation too much (though the notices in the windows have long since come down). As a result, Subway staff have really been skimping on the toppings for the last year or so, and that’s really starting to get on my nerves.

You see, I really like Subway. They’re furiously expensive (getting subs for two people costs as much as pizza for 3, and IMNSHO, pizza tastes better — or to put it in Wayfare’s terms, you get leftovers with pizza, so that’s two meals you don’t have to cook!), but even at the end of the day the sandwiches are hardly ever skanky, and it’s no trouble to get your sandwich built the way you want, even if you’re a freak of nature like me (no, just one slice of tomato for me). I can even fool myself into thinking they’re healthy (as far as I know, they’re the best of the fast food options out there, but still not as good as a nice plate of mashed potatoes or an actual salad with actual low-fat dressing)

But lately, Subway’s been pissing me off. First came the lettuce shortage, which hit me the hardest since basically all I get on my sub is lettuce (bun, cheese, lots of lettuce, bit of onion, cucumber, and if the tomato looks good, one slice of tomato). Sure, it tripled in price for a while there, and hasn’t fully come down, but it’s still the cheapest of the sub toppings. It’s still filler… like popcorn at the movie theatre, it’s not a big factor in the final sale price. It used to be that I’d ask for lots of lettuce, then if they didn’t put enough on, I’d ask for more, and they’d comply. The last few times though, I’ve asked for more and they’ve looked at me and just put on like two leaves, which barely brought the whole affair up to what used to be the default amount of lettuce before the shortage (nowhere near my salad-in-a-bun “lots of lettuce” sub). They’re even skimping on the other toppings, with the cucumbers being sliced so thin lately as to be transparent. Here’s a quick hint: lettuce & cucumbers are virtually tasteless, their purpose in my sandwich is to add crunch, and thinly sliced toppings in small quantities add no crunch, it just leaves me with a soggy bun with green stuff in the middle.

Though maybe it’s an attempt to get me to toast my bun so that I’ll recover some manner of texture.

Anyhow, next up came the cancellation of the “Sub Club” stamp program. This also hurt, since it effectively raised the price of eating there by about 10% (one sandwich of every 9 was free, but you had to buy a drink), and there was no corresponding decrease in base price. Keep in mind that the reasons stated for axing the program were theft: when I asked, one employee told me people were printing sub stamps by the roll and selling them on eBay (I have to wonder though, if they were printed off or simply stolen). So by axing the program they should have been saving enough money to pass some along to their loyal customers, whether through base cuts, or a new sub club program (perhaps just carry the card to flash for a 10% discount, along the lines of the coke card that ran for a few summers). But no, instead, prices have gone up! The thing is, unless the fraud was really widespread, I can’t really see them losing that much money, since you still have to buy a drink.

Which brings me to my third point, and this one actually predates the lettuce shortage: the nebulous Subway price structure. When I go in to order a sub, I have no idea how much I’m going to have to pay when I get to the register. It varies store-to-store quite significantly, and even a little visit-to-visit. When I first started eating there it was $4.25 for a footlong veggie sub at the UofT cafeteria, and $4.59 at the subway down the street. Prices have gone up since then, passing the magic $5 price point. The one close to the hospital here typically charged me $4.94 for a veggie sub, then raised it to $5.05 after about a year. Since then, it’s fluctuated almost daily between $5.05 and $5.26. The one by the grocery store has never rung in below $5 for me, usually at $5.15, but sometimes going to $5.74 (are they ringing me in for extra cheese I didn’t order, I wonder?). I’ve seen the phenomenon mentioned on other blogs too, so I know that I’m not the only one who’s seen this.

And then my yearly Subway coupons arrived in the mail, the same as usual: a few coupons for buy a drink and 6″ sub, get another 6″ sub free, and a few for the 12″ ones for 99 cents. But the ones that came to Wayfare’s parents’ house (for some reason, my parents never get any good coupons) were 49 cents for the 6″ and $1.49 for the bonus footlong. Now the prices have even gone up for the two we could get with coupons? What a rip-off!

But then I got some Quiznos coupons in the mail yesterday, and they’re better deals (and more of them, too!). A straight $2 off coupon if you just want one sub and nothing else, a free upgrade to a combo, and a buy one get one free coupon (no need to buy a drink if you’re taking it home anyway). I’ve never been to Quiznos, largely because their angle has centred around the toasted subs (and people always tell me they’re more expensive), which just doesn’t work for my plain veggie sub. But with these decent coupons, I think I’ll try them soon and let you know what I think.

Our building is ridiculous for fire alarms: every month they test them, often for hours at a time. So of course, our first reaction after hearing one go off is to ignore it. You’d think some of these insurance agents/safety inspectors had never heard of the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Anyhow, one went off incessently today, and their trick for telling us that it’s a real one through all the tests is that a real one will “sound continuously”. Not that it matters, but on test days it sounds almost continuously… there are just 1 second breaks every 30-40 seconds. So after about a minute of non-stop bleeping, I start to guess that this might be a real one. So I grab the cat and throw her none-too-gently into her carry crate (which she’s not thrilled with, not one little bit) and head out into the hallway.

The alarm in the hallway is somehow even louder than the one in my apartment, seriously threatening permanent ear damage (and I fear for the poor kitty, who can’t even shove her paws in her ears). Is there some sort of limit as to how loud they’re allowed to make those things? As it stands, the alarms in the hallways are loud enough that the one in my unit is completely redundant. Out in the hall were a number of other people who also waited over a minute before deciding to poke their heads out and herd their pets, similarly lulled into thinking of the fire alarm as a mere annoyance rather than a life-saving device.

At least there was smoke in the hallway, so it wasn’t a complete jerk-around.

Relax, everything’s fine: it turns out that some welders had come by to make some repairs to… something, and hadn’t adequately ventilated their area, and the hallway around them filled with smoke and tripped the alarms. So after getting to the lobby, they sent us all back up, dog owners desperately trying to keep them from sticking their heads into the assembled cat carriers, while the landlords finally got the alarms to turn off for a minute.

Then I’m not sure if they decided to bump fire alarm test day up by a week, or if they just couldn’t get the alarms to stay off, because they went on and off intermittently for another hour, further freaking out the cat and annoying me.

Oh: does anyone know if I can recycle a frying pan? There’s a lot of metal in there, but it’s “contaminated” by the non-stick coating and the paint on the bottom and stuff…

For the long and tortured life of this site, I’ve always reserved my copyright through the rather barbaric means of putting in the copyright notice at the bottom with the date of the last update. Considering how important this could potentially be, I’ve decided to look into the matter a little more.

Obviously, I’m allowing free, non-commerical reading/access to my content by the simple existence of this website, but haven’t made any mention of copying, performing, derivatives, or any of the other issues.

First and foremost, I’m not interested in releasing my stuff into the public domain: I have to retain certain rights, especially my right to later sell some of my crap. For example, if the site gets big enough an interesting enough, it may be possible for me to bundle it all together into a book form and sell it to those who love the site so much they wish they could put it up on the bookshelf and dust it once in a while (some people have strange ways of showing love, for example my cat shows her love for Wayfare by sneezing on her, and her love for me by sitting in my lap, purring, then getting frightened of random noises so faint as to be undetectable by the human ear, and jumping away in a panic, digging her claws into my groin for traction).

For the interrobangers out there who simply must know the motivation behind each post: no, I haven’t had any sort of publication deal, no matter how much I visualize it; this actually comes from election discussions, and how ineptly the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage Sam Bulte handled the accusations of corruptions stemming from the fact that she’s accepting huge donations from record companies and the like who want sterner copyright legislations… legislation that she drafted just prior to the election, which is languishing in parliament. (there are several different links buried in her title :) In the process of this, I uncovered a neat site: www.howdtheyvote.ca that details how each MP voted on, from what I can tell, pretty much every motion made in parliament. Could be a handy research tool, and a way to check up on your MPs after the election.

Anyhow, back to copyright: I’m a little torn on allowing people to copy my site. I know that if they did, I’d require a link back and a mention of the site’s title (Blessed by the Potato), or my real name for printed material. I don’t want to restrict someone’s ability to quote me if they’re writing an article of their own, and if say, Robert Munsch were to do me the great honour of performing Thump, I wouldn’t want to have him suffer the indignity of getting permission in writing; but I don’t want someone to just cut & paste the site whole cloth and put it up as their own (even with the required citation, it would still essentially be like someone else taking credit for my stuff). Obviously, I don’t want people making money off of my work without getting a piece of it myself!

As for derivative works, I don’t want to restrict someone else’s creativity if they can take something of mine and build off of it, but once again, want to reserve some rights (specifically, the right to make money :)

Some parts of the site have been opened up, though. For example, my WordPress theme (the style & layout of the page, the colours and fonts chosen, a limited amount of the functionality, etc.) is copyleft under the GNU license. That’s partly because I didn’t sink too much effort into it (so I wouldn’t be upset if it were stolen), partly because I know I’d never in a million years sell it, and partly because I based it heavily on (or more properly, made minor modifications to) the Darkfall theme that is itself released under the GNU license.

So, anyway, I’m thinking of using the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5” license. Any opinions on that before I throw that into my page footers?

It solves all of my issues, I think (except my distaste for whole-cloth copying, though that is unlikely to happen anyway). I retain most of my rights so that if, by some miracle, a situation presents itself where I can sell my crap, I can. But, it also gives permission for a large number of reasonable uses without requiring specific written permission for each one — the issue there is that, as far as I know, a copyright holder must enforce his copyright to maintain it. So if, for example, I happened to find a site where one of my essays had been posted verbatim, even if it was noncommercial and had my name & website referenced, I would have to demand that the site’s webmaster take it down until they had negotiated permission from me for that particular use. If I didn’t, then if I later found out that someone else was selling that essay and demanded that they stop or give me my share, my claim would be void, since I had failed to enforce my copyright earlier with the free site, and thus my crap had become public domain. It really sounds like a pain in the butt, and with a license like this, I won’t need to worry about most non-commerical uses.

Of course, the open-source communist hippy inside of me might even want an even looser license, such as allowing any sort of derivative works (allowing people to build on my stuff without requiring that they also allow others to do the same to theirs).