Fish with feet

[andrew_jorgensen]

My mother, who last week was installed as the new pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Nowheresville, Michigan, just sent me this email:

As I listen to Diane Rheme talk about the Florida case, I would like to tell you my wishes. I do not want to be kep alive if I am in a persistent vegatative state is. After I reach 80 or so, I would like to die naturally. If I break my neck I do not want to be put in a halo. One of my parishioners who is over 90 broke her neck and is in a halo. It looks terribly painful.

To which I responded, "In that case, you really picked the wrong line of work. You should have stayed a lawyer – they never get put into haloes." Not that my mother, in her heretical Zen Presbyterianism, puts much stock in the concept of an afterlife -- or in many of the other tropes of Conservative Christianity. She really wants to get one of those Darwin Fish for her car, an act that might be seen as antagonistic to community values, judging from the number of Jesus Fish I saw affixed to cars on the Ohio and Indiana Turpikes when I drove up to visit her. (It should be noted that I was down with the Jesus Fish long before it sold out and went mainstream: it was an important symbol to Philip K. Dick, and as a crossword devotee, I love it just for its simplicity as an acrostic.)

However, if the Darwin Fish is antagonistic, those antagonised by it give as good as they get. Before I had even left the East side of Cleveland, I passed a car with the bumper sticker:


I felt a little antagonised myself, because I first thought that this was referring to the old canard that Darwin had renounced evolution on his deathbed, a canard that even creationists have abandoned. (The one story of a noted agnostic scientist undergoing a deathbed conversion to Christianity which is well documented is that of John Von Neumann, who was born into Judaism and spent most of his life as an atheist, but did in fact convert to Catholicism -- for the second time in his life -- while he lay dying in Walter Reed Hospital. Of course, Von Neumann was instrumental in the invention of game theory, and he may have just been taking Pascal's Wager.) After a moment of reflection, I decided that the bumper sticker was merely saying that Darwin, now that he is burning in Hell, has probably reconsidered, which is Argument No. 39 of the 519 Arguments for the Existence of God, the Argument From Post-Death Experience:

1. Person X died an atheist.
2. He now realizes his mistake.
3. Therefore, God exists.

In any case, while I like both the Jesus Fish and the Darwin Fish, I'm a little disappointed in some of the other options. Frankly, it's not enough for me just to say whether or not I accept evolution, I want the ability to say which of the strains of modern evolutionary theory ("modified descendants," if you will) I favor, all from the comfort of my driver's seat. For example, were I too favor a gradualistic view of evolution, I could paste the following to my bumper:


(Do note that I could stick an outline of an acacia tree in front of each fish and have a pretty good iconographic reduction of Lamarckianism.)

On the other hand, were I instead a subscriber to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, I could use this bumper sticker:


Though, as this representation still seems to buy into an implied progressive view of evolution, it's not the best description of Gouldianism. And while I'm misrepresenting the big names in popular evolutionary writing, I'll commit a false synecdoche and generalize Richard Dawkins's ascription of selfishness to genes to the organism as a whole:

I'm a little confused by adaptionism, and I'm a little confused by my own illustration of adaptionism.

I'm not sure whether the feet of the fish evolved as an adaption to the ecological niche provided by the abundance of soccer balls, or whether the soccer balls evolved in response to the presence of feet. It's probably co-evolution.

I like cladistics, I really do. It's a nifty little classification scheme. However, one might not be able to tell that I like it from:

That graphic demonstrates how I can't seem to break free from the progressivist view. It also shows a little break from actual physiology: tetrapods remain tetrapods, and unlike dragons, do not grow a set of true wings without repurposing another pair of limbs. I suppose my drawing skills are poor enough that I could get away with saying that that last fish has grown not wings but instead a complex back plate, in the manner of Stegosaurus, probably for the purpose of heat distribution.

Finally, we have what I consider an entirely accurate summation of Evolutionary Psychology:



Ahh, car fenders. They're the new Lyceum, I tell you!

Comments

Re: On the unfalsifiability thing

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

I've slept on it, gotten rid of my headache, and decided that it's easier for me to just reject Popper than it is for me to craft a thoughtful response. I'm stuck in little language loops of what falsifiability means. Perhaps I need coffee, or just to be smarter.

The "Just So" story critique of adaptionism, especially when it comes to sociobiology, was one of Gould's favorites, and is certainly on the mark with much of the hyperadaptionism out there.

Rejecting Popper

[masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com]

Well, Popper's main sin was being a philosopher. Trying to find "the" model of ideal scientific reasoning when there are in fact a gazillion of them in that messy thing called real life.

And trying to make his model of scientific reasoning precise and elegant, without realizing that the simpler the explanation, the less it explains in that messy thing called real life.