Governor DeSantis needs to get out more

Dear Dear Readers,

Dear readers,

I haven’t posted here for a while, and I apologize for neglecting you.

Here’s the text of a Letter to the Editor of the Tampa Bay Times that I submitted.

I’ll let you know if they publish it.

Bernard

To the Editor,

Governor DeSantis says that Disney has abandoned its family friendly attitudes. The governor needs to get out more. I recently visited the Magic Kingdom, and aside from some actors dressed as cartoon and movie characters, the only people I saw were in families. They were welcomed by the park staff, and all were having a great time.

Governor, take your wife and little ones to see for yourself. I recommend a visit to the It’s a Small World ride. Your children will love the gentle boat ride and the singling dolls. Governor DeSantis, pay attention to the words the dolls will sing:

It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears
It’s a world of hopes and a world of fears
There’s so much that we share that it’s time we’re aware
It’s a small world after all

…

There is just one moon and one golden sun
And a smile means friendship to everyone
Though the mountains divide
And the oceans are wide
It’s a small world after all

Sincerely yours,

Bernard Leikind

Carrollwood

 

Rough seas ahead for US and everyone else

Dear Bernard,

I believe that the most important fundamental differences between the American Founders’ times and our current times are twofold:

• Now, anyone can communicate effectively instantly with anyone else anywhere, even with people who are floating in an orbiting space station or walking on the moon.
• Now, anyone can travel across an entire continent in a few hours and around the entire planet in a day or two.

Our America system of government – local plus states plus federal – was and is predicated, however, on inability to communicate rapidly, and on inability to travel rapidly across a county much less across the whole country or continent. We have a localized, deeply hierarchical, paper-driven system of government that was designed to run methodically and well under 1775 conditions: borough/town/city, county, state, federal.

The first major disruptions of the American system came around the time of our Civil War with trains and telegraph, bringing comparatively rapid travel and near-instant communication across long distances. But these tied together only a few places on any one continent, those connected by rails and/or by cables. Transatlantic telegraph cables were first laid down just after the Civil War.

Nearly a century later, in the 1950s, routine air travel for all became near-supersonic. In the 1970s faxing and single-purpose electronic networks emerged, for example ARPANET. Around 1997 communication became 100% instant for everyone on the planet via the web and generalized email.

We are at most a few decades into an extraordinary acceleration of human movements and inter-human communications, orders of magnitude faster than ever before. We are changing faster and faster. No one can reliably and accurately predict where these extreme changes will take us.

Today’s humanity wobbles between the old and the new. Smaller governmental entities try to maintain and continue their historical functions such as voter qualification, ordinances, legal processes, political districting, driver’s licenses and so forth. But the larger world crashes into them daily. Communities become more and more virtual as opposed to physical. I communicate far more with distant people (like you) than with my next-door neighbors. People of all persuasions and beliefs connect with each other remotely, leading sometimes to bizarre and previously all-but-impossible actions like January 6. Humanity is flocculating, splintering into groupings of all kinds and manners, good and bad, purposeful and purposeless, dangerous and benign.

I’m afraid that we’re in for massive and often deadly convulsions for the foreseeable future.

What do you think will become of us Sapiens?

Wayne

Badly Chosen Words About Evolution Do Real Damage

Was Dr. Chan wrong? That depends on what she meant.

The term “adapt” applied to evolution means for an organism, or population of organisms, to adjust or to change in response to something in the surroundings. That something could have been present all the time, or it might have recently emerged. Humanity didn’t recently emerge. Thus Dr. Chan must have meant that the virus somehow changed to reach a state in which it would turn out to be highly transmissible among humans. Reaching that state did not need human intervention to happen.

Here’s the crux. We humans adapt self-awarely and with purpose. We humans routinely map or project this purposefulness on non-self-aware life-forms like dogs and viruses. This is a problem. This is why Dr. Chan is being attacked. She almost certainly didn’t mean self-awarely, or that humans had self-awarely cultivated and created the specific adaptation.

Dogs are not self-aware to the degree humans are. A dog will usually learn to act in particular ways based on the rewards or punishments its master delivers. But not all dogs do: harsh biters that don’t stop attacking are normally culled or put to sleep. A learned behavior is a true adaptation, but it need not be purpose-driven. The dog doesn’t self-awarely seek to please its master. It seeks to be fed and not be punished.

Covid did not self-awarely adapt to become transmissible among humans. It did not learn to be transmissible. Like all other viruses and all other DNA-based life, it varied and still varies during each new generation of replication/reproduction. The details of these variations are not predictable. Most come from RNA transcription errors, which ultimately come from slight variations in protein foldings, which in turn come from quantum oscillations. We humans often call such errors “mutations”. We label them as “random”, meaning that we cannot predict them and that they typically are able to go in any feasible direction.

It’s certainly possible that Covid happened to evolve to be highly transmissible among humans even before it ever infected a human. But it clearly did not adapt itself ahead of time for the purpose of infecting lots of humans. And it’s extremely unlikely that humans engineered it purposefully. How could they test it to know they’d succeeded? They probably would have had to infect many actual people in order to know.

Dr. Chan is a victim of bad language, bad habits of thought and expression about evolution. She didn’t invent these ways of writing and speaking. She should not be scolded or condemned for using them. Instead, we all should clean up our habits of thought and expression about evolution, our anthropomorphic cuteness that misleads and can cause real damage, as here. This is my project. I think it’s important. I suspect that Dr. Chan does too.

Re Moran’s Sandwalk: Is the Modern [Evolutionary] Synthesis effectively dead?

https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2021/06/is-modern-synthesis-effectively-dead.html

Dear Bernard,

You sent me the above link to Lawrence Moran’s recent blog entry, for which thanks. Here again, though, the hotter the rant, the more confusion inflicted on the reader. So many buzzwords and vague allusions! No definitions, no explicit reasoning, just academic jousting. So much complication, yet the core facts of evolution of life as we know it are so simple.

A revolution in thinking and expression about evolution will eventually occur. I cannot myself drive it because I’m just one layperson with no credentials and no reasonable way to broadcast the message effectively. But the revolution will occur. And it will look like the following.

• Life as we know it is a digital/discrete phenomenon. Because the genome is discrete, an organism once launched into the world cannot fundamentally change. But the world and universe change unpredictably all the time: time is change. Thus each organism must eventually die, because its environment will have changed too much. Therefore, for life to continue and persist, organisms must reproduce. But reproduction must always be at least slightly imperfect, else lineages will not continue to vary in the face of their always-unpredictably-varying environments. As Darwin put it, life must include descent with modification. But what modification(s)? Because the directions of change cannot be predicted, only undirected modifications can/will succeed over time. Beyond just being undirected, modifications must typically be uniformly distributed across all possible variations for each trait. All these aspects are beautifully realized by organic chemistry, random mutations, meiotic sexual recombination, and unicellular lateral gene transfer. Below these strata lie quantum oscillations and the rest of physics. Nothing more need be known or labelled.
   
  But humans invent names and fuzzy concepts willy-nilly. The airwaves are clogged with this stuff, this fluff. All of the following arise from people sensing/feeling/touching aspects of the elephant that is evolution of life on our planet: Genetic drift. Spandrels. Natural selection. Adaptation. Niche development. Punctuated equilibria. Fitness (the worst!). Fixation. Neutral theory. Macroevolution. Microevolution. Adaptive landscapes (second worst!). And many more.
   
  Yes, the universe is most likely non-algorithmic. But life as we know it amounts to discrete mathematics embodied, thus it’s purely algorithmic, and its algorithm – like AlphaZero’s – is the Monte Carlo method, in effect randomized trial-and-error. I encourage you to read Stephen Wolfram’s pages about cellular automata and biological evolution, freely available online here.

I don’t mean to be personally rude and testy about Sandwalk and the like. I do feel that, nearby, there’s a far better world of discourse about these matters. And I hope it emerges soon. I’m doing whatever I can to help it debut. 

Wayne

Maryland, My Maryland

Wayne,

I am native of Washington, DC, but my family moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, when I was 3 years old. I grew up there. We moved to Bethesda when I was in high school. I was educated in Montgomery County schools. I attended graduate school at the University of Maryland in College Park, just a few miles from our Silver Spring house.

In elementary school at the start of each day, we’d sing a patriotic song, say the Pledge of Allegiance, and, for a few years, say the Lord’s Prayer. I have vague memories of some class lessons in which the teacher taught us the meaning of the words we were singing. These were the words to the Star-Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful, My Country ‘Tis of Thee, and Maryland, my Maryland.

I was a smart little boy, and I liked school, but I am thinking back more than 60 years!

I have vague memories that the teacher wanted us to understand the meaning of “despot” and “tyrant.”

Here are the words of Maryland’s state song, from the State’s web site.

From Maryland Manual On-Line, A Guide to Maryland and Its Government

https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/mdmanual/01glance/html/symbols/lyricsco.html

Maryland State Song – “Maryland, My Maryland”

(as enacted by Chapter 451, Acts of 1939; Code General Provisions Article, sec. 7-318)

by James Ryder Randall

Maryland, My Maryland

I
The despot’s heel is on thy shore,

Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,

Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,

Maryland! My Maryland!

II
Hark to an exiled son’s appeal,

Maryland!
My mother State! to thee I kneel,

Maryland!
For life and death, for woe and weal,
Thy peerless chivalry reveal,
And gird thy beauteous limbs with steel,

Maryland! My Maryland!

III
Thou wilt not cower in the dust,

Maryland!
Thy beaming sword shall never rust,

Maryland!
Remember Carroll’s sacred trust,
Remember Howard’s warlike thrust,-
And all thy slumberers with the just,

Maryland! My Maryland!

IV
Come! ’tis the red dawn of the day,

Maryland!
Come with thy panoplied array,

Maryland!
With Ringgold’s spirit for the fray,
With Watson’s blood at Monterey,
With fearless Lowe and dashing May,

Maryland! My Maryland!

V
Come! for thy shield is bright and strong,

Maryland!
Come! for thy dalliance does thee wrong,

Maryland!
Come to thine own anointed throng,
Stalking with Liberty along,
And chaunt thy dauntless slogan song,

Maryland! My Maryland!

VI
Dear Mother! burst the tyrant’s chain,

Maryland!
Virginia should not call in vain,

Maryland!
She meets her sisters on the plain-
“Sic semper!” ’tis the proud refrain
That baffles minions back again,

Maryland!
Arise in majesty again,

Maryland! My Maryland!

VII
I see the blush upon thy cheek,

Maryland!
For thou wast ever bravely meek,

Maryland!
But lo! there surges forth a shriek,
From hill to hill, from creek to creek-
Potomac calls to Chesapeake,

Maryland! My Maryland!

VIII
Thou wilt not yield the Vandal toll,

Maryland!
Thou wilt not crook to his control,

Maryland!
Better the fire upon thee roll, Better the blade, the shot, the bowl,
Than crucifixion of the soul,

Maryland! My Maryland!

IX
I hear the distant thunder-hum,

Maryland!
The Old Line’s bugle, fife, and drum,

Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come!

Maryland! My Maryland!

 

Despot is in the first line of the first verse, tyrant is in the first line of the sixth:

The despot’s heel is on thy shore,

Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,

 

Dear Mother! burst the tyrant’s chain,

I do not recall my teacher explaining who the despot and tyrant threatening our state was. As far as I can remember she was vague about the other referents to people and events.

The song, we were taught was a call to arms in defense of freedom, which was a very good thing for Americans and Marylanders to defend.

The despot and tyrant was President Abraham Lincoln.

To what do these words refer:

Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,?

This refers to a mob attack against US Army as a regiment marched through town from the northern station to the southern one. The patriots whose gore discolored the street were the rioters.

Here is a picture of the event. You and I think that the men in blue uniforms are the heroes, the poet thinks the armed rioters are the patriots.

 

Here are some lines from verse 3:

Remember Carroll’s sacred trust,
Remember Howard’s warlike thrust,-

Charles Carroll was the richest man in the colonies with large plantation properties, and a thousand slaves. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a prominent man in colonial and Maryland politics. Carroll County is named for him. Indeed, Greater Carrollwood where I live in Florida is named for him, according to the Wikipedia account, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Carroll_of_Carrollton . When I tell you that he was a prominent support of the early American temperance movement your views of this otherwise admirable man may decline. Here he is.

Howard refers to John Eager Howard, another prominent wealthy early American. He fought as an officer during the American Revolution, served in Congress. As is common among wealthy Southerners of that time, his wealth arose from the labor of his enslaved people. Here is the estimable Howard.

Here are lines from verse 4:

Come with thy panoplied array,

Maryland!
With Ringgold’s spirit for the fray,
With Watson’s blood at Monterey,
With fearless Lowe and dashing May,

A call to arms. I’ll remind you that a panoply refers to the complete set of armor worn by ancient Greek hoplites; helmet, breastplate, greaves, and shield.

Ringgold was this fellow.

Samuel Ringgold, from an important Maryland military family, was the first US Army officer killed the Mexican American War.

I am sure it was not his handsome younger brother, Cadwalader Ringgold.

He was an important US Navy officer, called out of retirement to command during the Civil War.

Watson’s blood at Monterey refers to William H. Watson, killed at the battle of Monterey during the Mexican American War. All I have of him is this from Wikepedia.

May refers to Charles Augustus May, who was another officer in the Mexican American War. He survived but did not serve during the Civil War. Here he is.

 

I didn’t find anything about “dashing May,” but I’ll guess he’s another US Army officer who served in the US. Army. Readers are welcome to help me out in the comments.

Skipping right along to verse VI.

Dear Mother! burst the tyrant’s chain,

Maryland!
Virginia should not call in vain,

Maryland!
She meets her sisters on the plain-
“Sic semper!” ’tis the proud refrain
That baffles minions back again,

Maryland!
Arise in majesty again,

Maryland! My Maryland!

 

What is Virginia calling upon Maryland to do? Join her in rebellion against the despot! Abraham Lincoln, of course.

Sic Semper, supposedly uttered by one of the Roman murderers of Julius Caesar means Thus ever for tyrants!

Shouted by John Wilkes Booth as he stood on the stage at Ford’s Theater after he had shot Lincoln. No doubt this explains why Sic Semper Tyrannis is Virginia’s motto today.

Here’s verse VIII.

Thou wilt not yield the Vandal toll,

Maryland!
Thou wilt not crook to his control,

Maryland!
Better the fire upon thee roll, Better the blade, the shot, the bowl,
Than crucifixion of the soul,

 

The Vandal also refers to the Vandals, barbarians who sacked Rome in 455. Better to be burned, stabbed, or shot than to submit to Lincoln’s tyranny.

The “bowl”? Anyone have any ideas?

Verse IX contains these lines:

The Old Line’s bugle, fife, and drum,

Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come!

 

In other words, Maryland’s state song is a call to treason against the United States. The song was a popular Southern anthem during the war. An orchestra played it at a ball in Gone With the Wind.

There have been a dozen attempts to remove this song. One year, 2015, the legislature appointed a committee to study the matter of an appropriate state song. They said, according to the Wikipedia account: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland,_My_Maryland

The panel report stated that the Maryland state song should:

• celebrate Maryland and its citizens;
  
• be unique to Maryland;
  
• be historically significant;
  
• be inclusive of all Marylanders;
  
• be memorable, popular, singable and short (one, or at the most, two stanzas long) ^[24]
  

 

I think that a good sixth point would be:

• does not call for treason or insult US presidents.

I am not a Marylander anymore, but I encourage locals to write a new song that honors Chesapeake Bay crabs, and Cal Ripkin.

I read that the legislature had passed a bill to get rid of this disgraceful state song, but I haven’t heard that the Governor Hogan had signed it.

This article from the New Republic a few years ago leads me to guess that he will not.

https://newrepublic.com/article/130667/state-song-confederate-battle-cry

I will post an update if I hear. As he is a Republican, I am not hopeful that common sense and decency will prevail.

Prognosticator-in-Chief – a false prophet and bad investment advisor

A Trump tweet from the week before the election:

 

Two charts, corona virus cases and deaths from the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/

 

 

 

 

From CNN Business on Wednesday, July 8, 2020: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/08/investing/biden-trump-stock-market-election/index.html

“If you want your 401k’s and stocks, which are getting closer to an all time high (NASDAQ is already there), to disintegrate and disappear, vote for the Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats and Corrupt Joe Biden,” Trump tweeted Monday.

 

 

 

From CNN Business, November 30, 2020: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/30/business/stock-market-dow-jones-trump-biden/index.html

New York (CNN Business)President Donald Trump repeatedly warned Americans that if they failed to reelect him, the stock market would implode. In reality, the opposite happened.

Between August and October alone, Trump sent six tweets saying markets would “crash” if Joe Biden were elected, using a word presidents typically avoid.

“The Dow Jones Industrial just closed above 29,000! You are so lucky to have me as your President,” Trump wrote on September 2. “With Joe Hiden’ it would crash.”

Cited in Snopes.com: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-stock-market-prediction/

 

From MarketWatch: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/spx

Life in the Integers

Life as we know it is a digital, discrete, integer-based phenomenon in an otherwise continuous, analog real world. Each organism’s DNA molecule can be represented as an integer, typically an enormous one, that is almost certainly unique among all life-form DNA molecules that have ever existed or ever will exist.

As an aside, one way to do this would be to encode bases G, C, A and T in binary as, say, 00, 01, 10 and 11, so the string GACCGT would map to 001001010011, which equals the integer 595 in decimal. To distinguish 5′ from 3′ ordering, either one more bit would be needed, or the convention could be always to use the 5′ order. The smallest currently-living DNA has about 160,000 base-pairs, thus its representation would have about 320,000 binary digits – a truly huge integer, incomprehensibly larger than the number of subatomic particles in the whole universe. But still a humbly finite integer, tiny in the infinite sea of integers. Human DNA has about 3 billion bases.

DNA molecules replicate themselves with fantastic fidelity – a mistake about once in every billion ladder-rung base pairs – but, crucially, not with 100% fidelity. And out of that tiny percentage shortfall comes evolution, endless change, which is driven also by random mutations (damage from gamma rays and such) and, again crucially, by genetic recombination/shuffling during descent with modification.

Cloning during descent always fails sooner rather than later, because the environment is always changing unpredictably. All evolution is co-evolution: every lineage must change within an ever-changing context.

At the level of life, nothing is ever constant or unchanging. Discrete, integer-based phenomena exhibit far more complexity, pound for pound, than do continuous, analog phenomena. See for example Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science regarding cellular automata as universal models. Even very small and simple rules can generate arbitrarily complex, unpredictable, non-repeating patterns. DNA seen as a computing entity is Turing-complete, maximally powerful.

A mountain range cut in two by a vertical lava dike remains a mountain range. A cell cut in two must die, because life, to be life, must remain integral else perish. To be alive – for life as we know it – is to be separated from the rest of the universe by a semi-permeable, fully-enclosing membrane through which energy is being exchanged both ways (Schroedinger 1943).

Some incoming energy, in the form of matter, can be damaging, like Covid-19. The only feasible mode of defense, a mode which can persist through long stretches of time and many generations, is uniformly randomized production of antibodies, some of which might turn out to be just the right ones to disable this particular damaging influx. But others of which might turn out to be toxic to one’s own life form, via an auto-immune storm.

Subtractive “Adaptation” and Co-Evolution

Varying reproductive outcomes – also known as “natural selection” – lead to changes in individual traits and characteristics across a population. These changes arise from two sources: varying genomes and varying developmental histories.

Suppose twins with identical DNA get separated at birth. Suppose one receives plenty of nourishment and a kind and caring upbringing, while the other is starved of both food and love. Their reproductive outcomes could certainly differ, not due to DNA but rather due to their differing surroundings and circumstances. They were apparently equally “fit” at birth. But they already differed at birth: they had gestated in different locations or orientations inside the womb, and one of them was born before the other and therefore is technically the older. Each exists outside the other’s enveloping membrane, inside the other’s surroundings and circumstances, inside the other’s environment.

No two things, living or not, are 100% identical. In fact, the identical twins’ DNA almost certainly differed in at least one base pair (out of about 3 billion total) because of an unrepaired DNA replication error or because of a mutation from radiation or chemicals. Chances are that such a tiny difference will have no effect – but it could have arbitrarily large consequences, maybe lifelong brilliance, or maybe early death. This is the very definition of complexity: tiny differences or changes can cause radically different results. Usually they don’t, but they can. No one can predict with certainty, except in highly negative cases such as known-critical defects in certain genes.

Suppose the older twin had the positive early life and had healthy children, but the younger had no children. Suppose also that the twins’ genomes did differ at least slightly, almost certainly the case. After the twins’ lives have played out, the population will have changed in its overall genetic composition: something in the older twin’s DNA was passed on, while something in the younger’s disappeared.

The crucial question is this: Did adaptation occur with these twins? Before an answer, some discussion.

Things absolutely could have gone a different way. The blessed older twin might have had no children while the challenged younger did – probably you’ve known a “can’t miss” young star who came to little good, while a plucky little misfit did great. Or neither might have succeeded with children, or both might have. No one can predict reliably accurately at the start, even knowing every minute detail of the genome, every exact base pair, again except for highly negative instances. Why can we not predict? Because no one can reliably predict the details of the always-changing surroundings and circumstances, and no can accurately predict individual trajectories through them.

All evolution is co-evolution. Everything is always changing.

Informally, to “adapt” means to change in some way that achieves a better fit with the environment or the situation. Formally, it means a percentage change, across a population, in the frequency of some variant – some allele – of a particular gene that has led to more successful reproduction by organisms that have that variant.

We self-aware, spatially-cognizant, book-reading, forward-looking humans make plans to adapt, to change our persons or our groups or environments. Sometimes we succeed. We can proactively adapt. But to the best of our knowledge, no other life can proactively adapt through imagination, planning, executing and monitoring. Maybe chimpanzees and bonobos can, and maybe some birds can, but even if so it seems their behaviors are more fully instinctual, less based on persistent knowledge, and less self-aware than our behaviors.

So: No adaptation occurred with the twins. Not in the informal sense anyway.

The older twin did not adapt. The twins’ population did not adapt. The only thing that happened was that the younger twin did not have children, and therefore some of his/her DNA was subtracted from the population’s pool.

Carry this reasoning through generations of any kind of life. In no (non-human) cases do individual organisms proactively adapt genetically. Populations seem to adapt, but that’s an illusion built from our own inner experiences. We observe what seems to be adaptation by other organisms. Adaptation exists in our minds, not in life itself. Populations and individuals do tend to improve in a slow-changing environment, to increase in fitness, to become faster or smarter or differently colored. But any such improvement might come with a hidden cost, like higher malaria resistance with vulnerability to sickle-cell anemia. The faster cheetah differentially does usually tend to get more prey and to feed her cubs better than the slower one, resulting in differential reproduction. But maybe her eyesight was compromised at the same time, so she didn’t get more prey after all. No single trait or characteristic by itself is the full and final word, except when it is severely negative and unconditionally subtractive. Beyond these we can make only statistical statements, verifiable only in hindsight.

“Natural selection” and “adaptation” are both subtractive.

Neither can be predicted reliably accurately, especially not by organisms progressing through life. “Fitness” is a statistical measure of what happened in the past. Many have addressed the tautology of Herbert Spencer’s concept of “survival of the fittest,” notably Ernst Mayr in his discussions of teleology versus teleonomy. What survives? The fittest. What does it mean to be fit? To survive. But, of course, survival is not the actual criterion – successful reproduction of viable and fertile offspring is. Life as we know it is always mortal. So far, life has been sufficiently recursive, via descent with modification, to continue. But the only guarantee we have is that eventually it will end.

You and Your Egg Meet Again

Imagine peeling a hard-boiled egg. You crack it on a hard edge and use your fingernail to pry open the shell. Just under the shell and around the entire white of the egg stretches a thin membrane, which can be tough. To peel quickly and smoothly, some people sweep a thumb’s skin gently sideways, to coax away large sections of the shell along with attached sections of membrane, leaving a glossy and unbroken white. Using a nail instead of skin can tend to break away small pieces of shell, each with attached membrane fragments and messy chunks of white. Many variable factors affect peel-ability: the hen’s age, what the hen ate, how long since the egg was laid, the temperature and humidity at which the egg has been stored, how it was boiled, in what kind of water with what additives, how long it was boiled, how long since the boil was completed, and so on.

You might wonder, was this egg ever alive? Almost certainly not. If it had been, you might find an embryonic chick folded around the yolk, to your great surprise. A rooster had to have contributed, but roosters are rare nowadays in industrial societies. Men might become similarly rare after robots start handling physical threats and heavy objects, and sperm banks start providing the male half of most new human genomes.

Your skin is equivalent to the egg’s membrane. Your skin is the membrane that defines you as a living organism in life as we know it on our planet. It includes the mucous membrane in your nose and along your entire digestive system. Topologically, you are a section of digesting pipe with some holes and some protuberances. To be a living organism is to be exchanging energy with the surroundings, now, through a semi-permeable membrane. Had there been a chick in the egg, and had the chick hatched successfully, its skin, its new membrane, would newly define it as an organism, replacing the egg’s temporary-storage membrane.

Somewhere in the earliest moments of life as we know it, the first membrane came together to enclose the first living cell. In the billions of years since then, that one membrane has budded and divided into uncountably many pieces, each enclosing a living organism. To reproduce is to pass on a piece of the membrane that surrounds and encloses its own DNA. Life on earth consists of exactly one membrane, divided and re-divided and re-divided for eons.

Your human membrane is part of a lineage that started about 6 million years ago, splitting away from what are now chimpanzees and bonobos. Mammals split from reptiles some 250 million years ago. Down the other lineage, birds split from the other reptiles about 60 million years ago. Humans domesticated chickens about 5,000 years ago.

You and the egg you hold in your hand are both descended from exactly one common ancestor, one living reptile of unknown type, that walked or swam on the earth more than a quarter billion years ago, just before the first mammal came into being. You and your egg are relatives. You share the same skin. Say hello!

Natural Subtraction

Horticulturists and breeders select which of their stock will reproduce a next generation. They do so for specific purposes, for example to gain more tomatoes per vine, more milk per cow, more speed on the racetrack, less aggressiveness inside the home, and so on. They cull – remove – the least-promising individuals from the current population. Darwin wrote in Origin of Species, “When a race of plants is once pretty well established, the seed-raisers do not pick out the best plants, but merely go over their seed-beds, and pull up the ‘rogues,’ as they call the plants that deviate from the proper standard.” Selecting the next generation proceeds mainly by subtracting the least well-suited, the least desirable, the least fit.

Sometimes culling – un-selection or selection-against – happens in effect naturally, needing no judgment on the owner’s part. Some individuals simply cannot reproduce, for example because their sexual organs did not develop. Others turn out frail, or hyper-restless, or lame, or unable to digest well. Such individuals are usually predictably unfit and routinely culled. Still, some few might have reproduced successfully.

On the other side, some of the most apparently fit individuals will turn out not to reproduce purely due to chance, say a lightning strike. Others have deep, hidden defects that will lead to non-viable offspring or prevent reproduction, such as a cow’s twisted uterus. These defects often emerge too late for the owner to have culled efficiently. Nothing and no one can predict with certainty that any one apparently fit individual can and will produce viable, fertile offspring. In contrast, unfitness is often predictable with certainty.

Darwin used the term “natural selection” to help his intended audience understand evolution. Many if not most of his readers were breeders and/or horticulturists either for livelihood or by hobby. He himself bred pigeons and cultivated primroses and orchids. He knew the risk of using this term: in the first of his two volumes on variation he wrote, “The term ‘natural selection’ is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity.”

He was wrong. Use of the term “natural selection” has sown ongoing confusion and delay in understanding evolution. It continues to do so even now, more than 160 years after Origin was first published. Creationist critics flog it as empty – which it is. Nothing is selecting. Natural selection is not a force, yet a search on “force of natural selection” returns upwards of a million hits.

Natural selection is the outcome of life having proposed and the environment having disposed. For an evolving river, nothing selects the actual channels and basins and oxbows, and no one reflects on what designs a river. For life reproducing or attempting to, nothing selects what will turn out to be the successes.

In the wild, natural subtraction occurs. Chance disables some robust individuals or prevents them from reproducing. Other individuals were born with defects, some visible, many not. As with a river, a model complete enough to enable reliably accurate prediction of reproductive outcomes would have to approximate the size and complexity of the entire ecosystem, the whole planet, the total universe. Such a model cannot exist. Outcomes remain forever unpredictable other than in a statistical sense.

I propose that we humans retire “natural selection” gradually and instead call it “natural subtraction” or “natural erosion” or something equivalent. The environment is not passive in the process – the predator seeks its prey, which happens to be our organism of interest – but the environment overall has no purpose and no goal. Differential reproductive outcomes cannot be predicted; they can be known definitively only in hindsight, in the minds of observers. Like quantum states.