Love In The Time of Evolution

(Giant Sphinx Moth, the Ghost Orchid's Perfect Mate)

Shreddakj’s comment on my last post really kept me thinking about our “minimum requirements,” or at least “desired qualities” we seek in a mate. I thought a lot about the people I dated in the past who all looked good on paper but made for awful partners. Do I even know what’s best for me? If not me, then would anyone have insight into what qualities make someone good for me? Am I really flying so blind?

For example, one ex I had sounded a lot like my proposed Stepford Husband. This blue-eyed, well-read, atheist, city-boy who always declared his love for me and even made dinner from time to time should have been my every-dream-come-true. The relationship just lacked some sort of chemistry that I couldn’t put my finger on and it slowly disintegrated. I simply grew apart from him with each passing day.  Then, when I considered that I am now in a happy monogamous-yet-barely-defined relationship with someone who believes in life after death, hates my favorite book, and wishes he could live out in the country where dogs run free and the milk man delivers milk in glass bottles left on your porch, well, I was at a loss. Was I just plain wrong about what I wanted? Do opposites attract? Do people change, and did *I* change?

It was when I was watching my brand new Blu-Ray of “Life” (The BBC version, of course) that I was reminded of the very unique relationships that flowers share with other types of living things. Darwin, when looking at an orchid in Madagascar with its nectar buried deep within its flower, correctly predicted that a moth with a tongue of the exact length necessary to reach that nectar would one day be discovered. He based this on a principle of co-evolution that allows different living beings to evolve together to better benefit each other. The benefit for this orchid is that its pollen is extremely likely to be shared with its own kind as the special moths take advantage (nearly exclusively) of the nectar supplies available for less competition from this very specific type of flower.

And, a more recently discovered example:

This large sphinx moth (Cocytius antaeus) has an extremely long proboscis (tongue) – here seen fully extended as it would be if the moth were sipping nectar from the bottom of a very long-tubed flower. Important pollinators, some sphinx moths have very specific relationships with the plants they pollinate. The giant sphinx, for example, is the only known pollinator of the rare and delicate ghost orchid of Florida’s swamps.

This type of species-monogamous relationship lends a very interesting benefit to both parties. I wondered if maybe the initial “ingredients” of a human relationship are less important than their ability to co-evolve into something strong and so mutually beneficial that being together and monogamous gives both partners a distinct advantage over being single or being with others.

So, how did the Ghost Orchid and the Giant Sphinx Moth choose each other? I won’t go into an explanation of natural selection, but I imagine there *were* a few initial qualities that were required. Maybe one orchid plant mutated with a slightly deeper nectar pocket, and it happened to be visited by a moth partner with a tongue just a bit longer than its relatives to take advantage of the orchid's differences. Over generations, through many tiny changes, their partnership slowly evolved into something incredibly strong and completely exclusive. But if you think about it, only two very small qualities were really necessary for this to begin.

People do evolve, and people do change. (Sorry, Dr. House, we’ll disagree about this.) People might *prefer* (and fight for) the natural safety we feel in predictable environments, but our bodies and surroundings are constantly in flux. Is it possible that in one of these ever-fluid situations we discover another being with which we share one small complimentary quality – just enough to keep us together long enough to react to each other in a way that we discover is mutually beneficial? Does the relationship grow when we change and adapt to our lives in tandem? The more I consider it, the more I really believe this is possible. I imagine that sometimes the benefits are temporary and people evolve apart as situations in life change. But maybe sometimes a foundation is established so well in thousands of tiny decisions and adjustments that the evolution of each person becomes rooted in the evolution of their partner that despite the fact that they may in some ways be as different as a flower and a moth, they have found happiness and strength for themselves in what they share.

This would also mean we might be wasting our time hoping for a pre-made ideal mate. In the beginning, the sphinx moth was not perfect for the orchid; it only offered a slightly nicer answer to a small variation in structure. It was only when they continued to adapt to each new environmental variation with each generation in each other’s favor that they became the perfect match. In other words, maybe we make our perfect match for ourselves at the same time that they are creating us.

S.A.M.

Do I Want a Stepford Husband?

One thought led to another yesterday and I found myself on Netflix watching "Stepford Wives."  Okay, so the movie itself is not that great, but it's at least thought-provoking.  (Maybe I would have enjoyed the book better...)  Anyway, I found myself daydreaming (as I did the housework) about the whole concept.  Would I want a Stepford Husband?  How would I program him?

It's a question that's surprisingly hard to answer.  I mean, let's fess up - most of us have at least considered the qualities that would make a perfect mate for ourselves, and if offered that, would we refuse?  I might not want the 50's husband, but what would constitute my ideal and could those qualities be programmed?

The first requirement I thought of for my Stepford Husband would be that he does not put his random things all over the dining room table (which is constantly a battle for me to keep clear and clutter free).  Maybe that's because I was sorting through all sorts of old mail scattered over the table at the time, but the flood gates were now open and I was "programming" my ideal man.  He would have to be intelligent and well-read.  He would at least share the rest of the housework with me too.  Oh, hell, why share?  I can program him to do anything - he can do it all, and I can focus on my career.  He would have to have the bluest blue eyes, and sing to me to make me smile.  He would love my cupcakes and cookies, and he would cook me dinner a few days a week.  He would always compliment me when we are talking to other people, and he would enjoy spending time with my friends and other couples (maybe with their own Stepford Spouses).  My Stepford Husband would surprise me with flowers or little presents from time to time.  He would give me amazing massages when I am stressed, and play the piano instead of video games.  Of course, he'd be excellent in bed!  He would have no religious views, obviously.  And.... what else?  I started to quickly run out of ideas.

"That's it?  That's really all I think it would take for a guy to be my ideal??" I thought to myself.  That may be all I would want to program, but I realized that I probably wouldn't be content without his free will.  There's no way to "program" a John Galt (or Bertrand Russell!).  Would I really enjoy the surprises and flowers if I, in a way, told him to do it?  Do I smile when I hear singing in my house now simply because I like to listen to singing, or does it only make me smile because I know that's what it's intended to do?  And who am I kidding?  I actually like watching Joshua play video games.  My favorite aspects of his personality are all related to his staunch individuality.  I even like when he takes vacations with his friends instead of me because it gives me alone time that I love so much.  I actually like spending a whole afternoon doing housework sometimes!

Soon I was wondering if I would like to be a Stepford WIFE.  What would it be like to live up to that 1950's ideal?  I'm sure that it would actually be nice to play the role for awhile.  Anyone who knows me would probably be shocked to find out that I have had this thought, but, really, I've considered it before.  I think sometimes that it would be a relief to have a very clear set of standards to live up to.  It would be nice to not have to worry about going to work and I really do feel fulfilled and proud when the house is beautiful and dinner is cooked.  It would be a new challenge for me, for sure, but part of me would really like to try.  Secretly, only when home alone, I sometimes dance around with my broom like Disney's Snow White does when she first gets to the cabin in the woods.  The dog hops around behind me like a helpful forest creature, and I blissfully sing some happy song.  For a moment, I am pure Stepford girl.

Realistically, however, I don't think I would last long without a job.  I enjoy working too much.  I like the challenges and environment.  I also like arguing too much to be so submissive!  And, really, I like to be in charge, at least of myself!  I can't rationalize spending a lot of time or money looking perfect all the time.  Most of all, I like to improve myself.  I like the process of learning, getting better at things, experimenting and exploring new possibilities.  If I was already fitting a certain standard for "perfect," there wouldn't be room for any of this.

So, as I washed the last dish, turned out the lights on the almost-immaculate rooms, and headed up to my freshly made bed, I decided that Stepford might be fun to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Sam + Bertrand Russell 4EVER (heart)

As I delve into Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, I am reminded of how I fall in love with Bertrand Russell all over again each time I read him.  I thought I'd share our (light-hearted and facetious) love story.

I first met Bertrand through our mutual friend Ayn Rand.  I love to investigate philosophers' interests and influences, and thus, we first made acquaintance.  It was a brief and casual fling - I read a few pages on general logic and left him with a pleasant and satisfied feeling in my heart.  I knew that if we happened to find each other in the same place, I'd be pleased to pass the time with him once again.

A few years later, as I eagerly devoured Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, I was introduced to Bertrand in a new and fascinating light as I learned of his "teapot."  Over a cup of his mystical brew, he illustrated his atheism in bold and brilliant strokes.  I was dazzled and delighted; the stars that were the backdrop of his explanation of unbelief became stardust twinkling in my eyes.  I read so much, we shared so much, and I felt as if he was articulating the bleary yearnings of my young and inexperienced heart.  I learned from him; he made me laugh.  We explored passions and religions together, and came to conclusions about our reasons for not being Christians.

Sadly, however, as things often happen the the realm of love, we drifted apart.  After hashing through our shared atheism, did we really have much left in common?  I couldn't understand his devotion to mathematics.  And in the mean time some other philosophers caught my eye.  Our second matchmaker, Dawkins himself, with his Scarlet Letter, was alluring.  And his friends, the other three horsemen, were so inviting with their modern existences... Bertrand and I spent less and less time together, until it quietly became none.

I spent a year or two learning, growing, and developing on my own.  I encountered a multitude of others' ideas that served as guides to clearing the brush and beginning to build a path of ideas all my own.  With my slightly strengthened identity, I began to share my views with the world, sometimes even on my T-shirts.  While sifting through pages of websites of philosophy-themed clothes, a tiny red teapot caught my eye.  My smile brightened as memories came flooding back.  "Oh, how joyfully I shared in Bertrand's revelations then!" I thought.  The sparkle returned to my eyes, my heart fluttered.  Soon, I was wearing his celestial teapot, placed so thoughtfully between Earth and Mars, proudly over my heart as a badge of honor we both shared.  We  may not have been spending time together then, but I thought of him often.

It was only last week that I traced my fingertips over the faded screen printed mystical china piece and thought, "My friend, it has been too long..."  I pulled out my Kindle and typed his name for the first time in a long while and chose a new title: The Problems of Philosophy. It only took a page for us to pick up where we left off.  I was immediately the starry-eyed student in our private classroom, and he so eloquently lectured to my eager ears.  His writing was always so remarkably clear and crisp to me that I felt as if we were enjoying a personal lesson.  Once again, I find myself hanging on his every intriguing word, my heart leaping and falling in time with his own, enthralled and in love with my professor, Bertrand Russell.

S.A.M.

"The God Virus" Postmortum

I finished the book The God Virus and, really, it was at its best during my last post about it. I mean, overall, the book was okay, but I think it just wasn't for me. The second half of the book was all about how to deal with religious people, as if they were some dangerous foreign race. I imagine that most people out there have had exposure to religion and religious people their whole lives, even if they are an atheist now. I don't need some self-help guide explaining how to conduct myself in a religion-permeated world; I already deal with many of the issues brought up in the second half of the book on a regular basis. After the great section explaining how religious systems interrelate when sharing the same physical environment, the rest of the information was already familiar to me from reading other publications. I might recommend this to someone new to atheism or new to questioning religion even, but it seemed to be strictly written for atheists and would be most interesting to someone who is not yet well-read on the topic.

The highlight of the second half, for me, was a brief mention on the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific. They are a favorite topic of mine - just such a fascinating and telling illustration of the development of religion. Don't get too excited, though, if you also love the story of the followers of John Frum - it was only discussed for about one paragraph.

I also enjoyed the many quotes throughout the book. They make up a majority of my bookmarks.

My overall opinion: This may have been a good book, but it just wasn't right for me.

S.A.M.

Atheist Mortality

Michael Rubinkam/Associated Press

As I was checking the news this morning, I came across a story out of Pennsylvania about an elderly woman who exhumed her dead husband and twin sister and kept them on couches in her house for years.

Somehow, about two-thirds of the way through the story, the article seems to take a turn toward blaming this incident on her lack-of or weak religious belief:

"Well, I felt differently about death."

Part of her worries that after death, there's ... nothing. "Is that the grand finale?" But then she gets up at night and gazes at the stars in the sky and the deer in the fields, and she thinks, "There must be somebody who created this. It didn't come up like mushrooms."
So she is ambivalent about God and the afterlife. "I don't always go to church, but I want to believe," she said.

Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a psychiatry professor at UCLA who researches how the elderly view death and dying, said people who aren't particularly spiritual or religious often have a difficult time with death because they fear that death is truly the end.

For them, "death doesn't exist," she said. "They deny death."

Ms. Stevens, she said, "came up with a very extreme expression of it. She got her bodies back, and she felt fulfilled by having them at home. She's beating death by bringing them back."

What?? Wow. I was temporarily speechless.

That is quite a leap.

Really, isn’t it the religious people who believe that total death doesn’t exist because a spirit or soul lives on in some afterlife? Is that not pure denial of death? And, for a moment, I’m going to be truly nitpicky and say that the phrase, “because they fear that death is truly the end” really irked me. I think that death is “truly the end,” but it’s not a fear – it’s a fact in my mind. I feel like the journalist (Michael Rubinkam of the Associated Press) is implying that the sense that religious views are wrong evokes an unavoidable and deserved anxiety. It’s as if the article is saying that a nontheist SHOULD feel this way when considering death.  Also, why would it be true (as this psychiatrist professor says) that just because a person thinks that biological death is the complete experience of death, they are in denial of death?  Maybe they are simply in denial of life after death, which seems like a pretty rational denial to me.

My other concern is that this generalization was made simply because the woman took an agnostic stance. She didn’t say she was an atheist. She actually sounded like she DID have faith in some type of god despite the fact that she didn’t subscribe to a religion per se. She “wants” to believe in something spiritual, but that was not enough to convince this professor and her interviewer that the overriding reason for this was her lack of faith. I’d hate to see what she had to say about a real atheist.

Clearly, this woman has some psychological problems, but they seem to be rooted more in loneliness or social strain rather than lack of religious vigor. This woman was desperately attempting to console herself and possibly deal with the issue of her own mortality after she was left feeling alone in the world (and I think most people would feel that extreme loneliness in her situation of losing the two people she loved most in life). Her anthropomorphism of the corpses didn’t seem to approach a true delusion – she seems to understand that they are dead on some level. Death DOES seem to exist to her as a reality, contray to what the psychiatrist believes to be true of nonreligious people like her, and she is struggling with that idea and attempting in her own (misguided) way of coming to terms with that.  That fact might actually, in one small way, make her a little more sane than the person who “sees” the dead Virgin Mary visiting them or prays to and makes choices according to the divine direction of long-dead loved ones with the strong conviction that they are still alive somewhere.

This is an extremely sad story, and my heart goes out to this woman. I hope that she manages to get the help she needs to reach a sense of peace after living through the deaths of her two closest loved ones.

As for this journalist - Michael Rubinkam – I hope that at some point he learns to be a little more careful about balancing his stories. Choosing your sources wisely is part of getting the story right. His editor will certainly be getting a letter from me.

Maybe in the future I should write a little more on the subject of mortality from an atheist perspective. It’s certainly an under-discussed topic, in my opinion.

S.A.M.

United States Receives "Creation"

Great news!

But first of all, Happy 4th of July!  I hope everyone got a chance to celebrate America's Birthday (and one of the least-religiously-linked holidays we get in this country)!  I personally thanked all of the atheist, agnostic, deist and skeptical founding fathers who made this country what it is today.  I spent the day watching the History Channel's marathon of "The Story of US," which I just loved.  It's like everything I learned in one year of 7th grade civics all condensed into one day of exciting high-def viewing experiences.  Really, my biggest impression was that, in general, America is a hard-working, work-loving, opportunity-making populace, and has been that way throughout its history.  It also left me thinking, "Damn, can we get a break?!" Our current economic situation seems pretty mild compared to all of the other crisis that we have faced.  And for the Pat Robertsons of the world who really think that every hurricane is a punishment from God for recent behavior or the people who say our weather is totally wacky in ways we've never seen before due to some new global warming - watch the segment on the freaky dust storms that swept across the country.  Hurricanes look pretty normal after that.  And while I'm in this psudo-review, I'll mention that my favorite segment was the invention of the light bulb.  :)

ANYWAY, the great news!! I saw an advertisement for the "Creation" movie!  It was released a few days ago on DVD in the US.  That made me smile.

May The Fourth Be With You!

S.A.M.

Because I (Heart) Science Education

I love this! Found it on Dead-Logic.com's Blog.  Had to share, and thank Dead-Logic for sharing as well!

God Going Viral

I am about half-way through the book The God Virus by By Darrel W. Ray, Ed.D. My first reaction was that the book seemed unnecessarily stand-offish. Do I think religion is fantasy? Absolutely. However, religion is a significant and complex sociological phenomenon and shouldn’t be treated as “silly.” While I might not respect the tenets of any religion, I do respect and support the study of religion itself. I think it’s incredibly important to understand how these behaviors began and continue in order to correct for them toward a more rational society.

I initially got the impression that Ray found religious people to simply be silly, or at least the oblivious victims of a god virus. I disagree that victims are completely oblivious, and I strongly hold that maintaining a religious perspective involves conscious decisions made to that effect as much as one would continually face decisions while living life as a skeptic. Still, half-way into it, the author takes his analogy a little too far from time to time. However, I think the goldmine in the book is not his leaps to make the analogy between religion and a virus seem closer than it is, but rather his look at the propagation and history of religious development when he is momentarily free of his “virus” idea. I wonder if the analogy would have made a great introductory paragraph or chapter if left at that – it’s possible. I look forward to reading more of his real theory, free of his attention-grabbing illustration.

S.A.M.