Prospero's Books

We can minimize damage

"Heavy rainfall leads to a rising river in a town," writes Morowitz in The Emergence of Everything (see What I've Been Reading). "While most residents await the flood, one individual, in a display of leadership, persuades everyone to build a sandbag levee to keep out the floodwaters. The level [sic] holds, and the town is spare the great damage that would have ensued without the levee."

He continues:

There is no violation of the laws of meteorology or hydrodynamics, but the violational act of one individual and its social consequences change the course of the waters. This is a miracle of transcendence. It is the kind of miracle potentially always available to us as humans.

And later:

If we and our minds are the emergent transcendence of the immanent God brought about by the rules of emergence, and if we possess any measure of volition or free will, then the burden of optimizing the good and minimizing evil is ours and ours alone. We cannot yet stay the waters of the floods, but we can minimize damage (199).

The atom's way of thinking

From Morowitz's The Emergence of Everything (see What I've Been Reading):

Emergence has in an orderly way moved from protons to philosophers. At this level there is a kind of closing of the loop, because philosophers think about Big Bangs, protons, and all the other hierarchies connected by emergences. The emerging world turns inward and thinks about itself. As George Wald once said, a physicist is the atom's way of thinking about atoms (183-84).

One hundred generations

As a writer and (especially) as a writing teacher, I am fascinated by the way Harold J. Morowitz expresses how recent an invention writing is:

Formal pictographic writing probably goes back over 5,000 years, to be followed by syllabic writing in the Fertile Crescent. After the development of writing, there was constant intercultural exchange among the various societies. A fully alphabetic writing seems to have developed in Greece about 2,800 years ago, and the system has become almost universal. This is only 100 generations into the past (Emergence of Everything, 168, emphasis mine).

After chapters featuring numbers in the millions and even billions, the number one hundred is petty cash. One hundred is a number I can get my mind around. And the fact that we went from the first alphabetic writing to Shakespeare in fewer than ninety generations, and to James Joyce and the World Wide Web in about a hundred, astonishes me.

I also realize that it's no wonder writing is so hard. We've just now begun learning how to do it.

Cain and the emergence of agriculture

In The Emergence of Everything (see What I've Been Reading), Morowitz's twenty-fifth emergence is that of agriculture. He points out that like the emergence of language (discussed in yesterday's posting), the emergence of agriculture is placed at about the right time in Genesis:

When the authors of the Bible tried to chronicle the entire history of the world, they went back into the epoch of the emergence of agriculture as the "creation" they could relate to. The hunter-gatherers Adam and Eve gave rise to the herders and farmers Cain and Abel. The idyllic world of the hunter-gatherer changed to a world of working "by the sweat of one's brow." The biblical dating of creation is close to the emergence of agriculture (163-64).

Only off a factor of ten

In The Emergence of Everything (see What I've Been Reading), Morowitz discusses a fascinating  relationship between a very old story and the emergence of linguistic signs in the global system:

Along with toolmaking, the emergence of language must have occurred in Homo sapiens between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago. Along with the slow emergence of toolmaking, which goes back into our animal past, the more dramatic rise of language and symbolic thought probably began about 60,000 years ago—only going back about 2,000 generations. Modern Homo sapiens are truly a recent arrival on our planet. The authors of the Old Testament were vastly off in dating the origin of the universe and the solar system at 6,000 years ago, but in dating the "creation" of man, they were only off a factor of ten or less, assuming that man as we know him is coincident with linguistic man (156).

A fresh look at alchemy

In an article Transforming the Alchemists, the New York Times reports a growing interest in alchemy among historians of science:

“Experimentalism was one of alchemy’s hallmarks,” said Lawrence M. Principe, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University and a trained chemist. “You have to get your hands dirty, and in this way alchemists forged some early ideas about matter.”

Bent over boiling crucibles in their shadowy laboratories, squeezing bellows before transformative flames and poring over obscure formulas, some alchemists stumbled on techniques and reactions of great value to later chemists. It was experimentation by trial and error, historians say, but it led to new chemicals and healing elixirs and laid the foundations of procedures like separating and refining, distilling and fermenting.

“What do chemists do? They like to make stuff,” Dr. Principe said. “Most chemists are interested not so much in theory as in making substances with particular properties. The emphasis on products was the same with some alchemists in the 17th century.”

The best quote in the article:

Pamela H. Smith, a history professor at Columbia, said alchemy “was the matter theory of its day” and was “incredibly multilayered and therefore a powerful way of viewing nature.”

The unintentionally funniest quote:

In his chemical cosmology, [Paracelsus] saw the world as a great distillation vessel and its changes as parallel to the operations carried out in a laboratory. But he recorded his material and spiritual ideas in the deliberately opaque writing typical of many alchemists, who expressed themselves in codes, symbols and emblems to conceal their findings from the uninitiated.

Whew! It's a good thing modern scientists (and we academic humanists as well) never do that!

(Thanks to Greg at Masonic Traveler for the tip.)

By Orion to the moon

Reuters reports that the spacecraft being developed by NASA to take astronauts back to the moon will be named Orion.

I'm happy about that for two reasons. First, one of the smartest practices at NASA, from its beginning, has been its use of mythological names (Saturn, Mercury, Apollo, and others) to properly reflect space travel's mythic dimensions. And second, Orion has always been my favorite constellation. I have a letter, written to me as a toddler by my Grandfather Davis, saying that he wished he was with me, but that he could see his old friend Orion and know that Orion could see me, and it made him feel close to his new grandson.

So I've been checking out Orion all my life. I've seen him from a plane window flying over Siberia. I've seen him upside-down over the Kalahari Desert in Botswana.  This time of year I begin to anticipate seeing him almost every night from behind our house in Indianapolis. Now I can also begin anticipating moon voyages bearing his name.

Nightwatch

I've rarely seen as powerful a juxtaposition of signs, story, and spirit as in a photograph a former student forwarded to me today. (Thanks, Heather.)

The photo, by Todd Heisler of The Rocky Mountain News, won second place for General News Reporting in the Pictures of the Year competition. (Please see the photo on the POY site, in a larger size than is available on this blog.)

The first place winner, also by Heisler, shows the arrival in Denver of the body of Marine 2nd Lieutenant James Cathey. It's an astonishingly beautiful image. But it's the second place photo that I keep returning to. Heisler writes of it,

The night before the burial of her husband's body, Katherine Cathey refused to leave the casket, asking to sleep next to his body for the last time. The Marines made a bed for her, tucking in the sheets below the flag. Before she fell asleep, she opened her laptop computer and played songs that reminded her of 'Cat,' and one of the Marines asked if she wanted them to continue standing watch as she slept. "I think it would be kind of nice if you kept doing it," she said. "I think that's what he would have wanted."

An object of poetic rapture

In The Emergence of Everything (see What I've Been Reading), the eighth of Morowitz's twenty-eight emergences is the one he has specialized in as a biologist, metabolism. My eyes glazed over as I began this chapter, because of what Morowitz admits are its "tongue-twisting polysyllabic words such as nicotinamide-adenine-dinucleotide-phospate." Although I have vivid memories of disecting a cat in my college biology course, I have no conscious memories of learning the principles of metabolism.

I now wish I did, because the chapter is gripping. It tells two stories. One story is of the emergence of metabolism, the basis of life, out of the earth's lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. The other story is of humanity's growing  understanding of the intricacies of metabolism, as diagrammed in the Chart of Intermediary Metabolism (here's one version of it).

I like Morowitz's characterization of the chart:

The intellectual accomplishment that we here praise is not the work of a single individual, nor was it put together in a blinding flash of insight. Rather, it is the product of many researchers working at their laboratory benches over a period of more than a hundred years. Because the great structure came about so slowly and in such small steps, few biochemists have shown interest in extolling its magnificence. Their reticence may also come from the fact that the Chart of Intermediary Metabolism is very complicated and remains an unfinished efice, like the great cathedral of Cologne, which was left with a crane still standing on one of its towers for many years as a symbol of the tasks for future generations (71).

I first visited Cologne Cathedral, with Bette and our kids, in the summer of 1981. Like most visitors, I almost lost my breath to the immensity and beauty of its nave. But then something totally unexpected happened, a kind of emergence in its own right. Suddenly, reverberating through that glorious space, came the sound of a single soprano voice singing, in English, the first line of "Amazing Grace." Then a second voice joined in, and a third, and more, sopranos and basses and altos and tenors, finishing the hymn in a capella harmony.

We soon learned that what we had heard were members of a Baptist choir from Texas, visiting the cathedral only as tourists like us, but unable to contain their spontaneous expression of awe.

So I understand exactly what Morowitz means when he calls the Chart of Intermediary Metabolism, like Cologne Cathedral, an "object of poetic rapture" (71).

We come from the water, turn the world around

Morowitz's seventh emergence in The Emergence of Everything (see What I've Been Reading) is the emergence, from basic planetary structure, of the earth's four geospheres: the lithosphere of rock, the hydrosphere of water, the atmosphere of air, and the biosphere of life.

They parallel, of course, the four elements of the Western tradition: earth, water, air, and fire.

My favorite expression of the four elements, and our emergence from them, is Harry Belafonte's joyous song "Turn the World Around," which begins

We come from the fire,
Living in the fire,
Go back to the fire,
Turn the world around.

We come from the water,
Living in the water,
Go back to the water,
Turn the world around.

We come from the mountain,
Living on the mountain,
Go back to the mountain,
Turn the world around.

The song's end draws the elements together:

Heart is of the river,
Body is the mountain,
Spirit is the sunlight,
Turn the world around.

We are of the spirit,
Truly of the spirit,
Only can the spirit
Turn the world around.

(You can hear a clip from the song on Amazon, in Windows Media and RealOne Player formats. Belafonte's delightful performance of the song with the Muppets is available on DVD. Later, he performed the song at Jim Henson's funeral.)