With the first of three Hobbit documentaries being released this year, it seems an appropriate time to announce the new revolution in the study of origins: Tolkien Science. Though evolution, with all its associated irony may well be the more appropriate word…

Tolkien Science has been brewing in the firey Mount Doom of scientific enquiry for decades and is now as indestructible as the One Ring itself. Yet it is still untaught in our schools, dismissed as mere science fiction, when it is in fact fantasy of the old sort: an imaginative conceptualization. Like Einstein who imagined himself riding on a beam of light and so discovered relativity, JRR Tolkien – an Oxford Professor and founder of our field – imagined himself on a quest to Mordor and, in doing so, discovered the origins of the universe. Between 1937 and 1955 he published a series of monographs synthesising knowledge from many fields into a coherent and, as I shall show, accurate account of the origins of the world. His his papers took the form of epic fantasy novels – befitting a man of such penetrating and creative intellect – but they were appended by detailed notes providing the data underlying the theory, much of which was only published after his death. It is a cause of celebration that his monographs are more widely read than either Darwin or Dawkins, and in the early years of the 21^st century were made into a trilogy of powerful documentary films by the renowned New Zealand Tolkien Scientist Peter Jackson, which brought to the world’s attention this exciting new paradigm.

Unlike Darwin, whose theories were invented during the luxury of a round the world cruise, Tolkien’s quest to understand the history of the universe began on the battlefields of World War One. In the same way that humanity’s ego had rent Flanders’ Fields apart, Tolkien surmised that the world was once flat, but that the arrogance of men had caused it to have become round. The evidence for this came from the discoveries of German scientist Albert Einstein – that, when events of such gravity as the Doom of Numenor occurred, space could actually become curved. The stories of Atlantis, Mu and Hy-Brasil – all island nations flooded in a great cataclysm – passed down unchanged over the generations, give the theory that nice, convincing human element that allows it to transcend the Popperian planes to the level of scientific truth. Bearing in mind that geologists have never actually been under the earth’s crust to see if their tectonic plates really do float, the idea that the all-powerful Valar simply caused the shape of the world to change is a far more convincing explanation of continental drift.

Tolkien’s theories, which emphasize the effect of Valinor-based Powers, let us throw out the implausible geological yarns of mainstream science. Ice-ages in the Northern Hemisphere are more parsimoniously explained by the evil wrought by the cold-hearted Morgoth in the First Age and by the Witch King of Angmar in the Third. Nonetheless, like all true sciences, Tolkien science has its controversies. Another hypothesis claims Ice Ages are a figment of geologist imagination. Erratics are rocks found far away from home, usually said to have got there by hitching a lift on a passing glacier. Some Tolkien scientists, however blame erratics on trolls getting caught out in the sunlight. The strength of the theory is in its predictions: trolls are social creatures – as evidenced by Tom, Bert and Bill Huggins, who turned to stone together around a campfire. We would therefore expect to find tall rocks scattered in clusters around the landscape where trolls have frozen together. A visit to Stonehenge should suffice to convert the world’s geologists.

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la-java-de-cezigue said: sounds like a plan, the first years actually like it when your telling them interesting stuff

I was out for a run, and I invented a lesson (or two, maybe). I would do endosymbiosis, Cambrian ‘explosion,’ ‘retard’ fish, the platypus, marine mammals, ants, chimpanzees … and I’d probably do dinosaurs or snakes as well. I’d contextualize it with geological and paleoantological data as well. I think to explain the process of evolution I’d do the eye. 

Only thing is Miller’d never let me.

Plus, I’m not really qualified.

The origin of life, the LUCA, has got to be the biggest question that science has to answer. There may be no god(s), but we have yet to explain what separates us and all other living things, fundamentally, from the elements we’re comprised of.

MY RESPONSE

Tomorrow, when I’m not exhausted, I think I’ll write a post dealing with the science of whether there is any fundamental difference between life and non-life. It’s an interesting issue.  In the meantime, I’ll quote from an essay I wrote about a year ago on the philosophy of biology. What you’re espousing is Vitalism, and its something I disagree with. I wouldn’t take too much notice of the scientific details in here, a lot is quite out of date, simply because I was ignorant of the latest theories at the time. Some of the points on Vitalism do stand, however:

“…First, to understand what life is, we must understand how we identify it. Evolutionary psychologists claim that we distinguish living and non-living things only because it confers a genetic advantage. Animals need to know what to count as predator or prey – they cannot afford to waste time running away from rocks. The human tendency to err on the side of caution – the coats in the cupboard become a terrifying monster – is a throwback to our evolutionary heritage when failure to recognize sleeping lions as alive could be fatal. Because of the obvious survival-advantage of life-recognition, psychologist Steven Pinker argues that we possess a ‘folk biology,’ analogous to folk psychology:

“The distinction between living and non-living things is appreciated early, perhaps before the first birthday. The cut originally takes the form of a difference between inanimate objects that move around according to the rules of billiard ball physics and objects like people and animals that are self-propelled.” 

Experiments by psychologist Frank Keil demonstrate that toddlers shown a toy bird being covered in real feathers and filled with ‘avian-insides’ always say it is still non-living. Despite lifelike cosmetic changes, it still lacks a critical something to make it a real bird. We can conclude that in the same way that we think of other humans as possessing minds, we think of other living things as possessing some quality which makes them living. This, I believe, is the origin of Haldane’s intuition.

The philosophy of Vitalism values this intuition as the best tool to define life, arguing that every life-form is made living by a something special, an ‘oomph,’ which we cannot reduce to mechanical laws. Haldane himself said: “It is life we are studying in biology, and not phenomena which can be represented by the causal conceptions of physics and chemistry.”  Life, being self-propelled, was somehow beyond physics – this idea led philosopher Henri Bergson to posit a new vital-force of life located in the cell cytoplasm. In the early twentieth century, however, cytoplasm was revealed to be governed by the same laws as any chemical – no magical ‘oomph’ was ever found. And no wonder! It is an easy explanation which explains nothing; a hazy tautology – vital-force is the thing that makes living things living – designed simply to justify our intuitions.

Ultimately Haldane came to reject Vitalism, preferring to see life as a multifaceted phenomenon. This appealed to philosopher Henry Woodger who urged scientists to abandon the word life, instead sticking to listing the properties of living organisms. The laboured definition has now become paradigmatic, turning biologists away from the big philosophical questions concerning life. This is seen in the introduction to most biology textbooks.

But the problem with the listing method is that it pretends to tell us what life is, but really only gives us a shopping list of things to look for in living things, ignoring the deeper question of how these properties make things living. Furthermore, lists almost always disagree, being dependent on the author’s personal prejudices. Hiding behind our intuition, Steven Pinker says, is a subjective tick-box of properties which the professional biologist merely couches in technical language. The most important of these properties is the idea that each life-form, besides being self-propelled, contains an essence – a caterpillar may change into a chrysalis, and then into a butterfly, but despite these huge anatomical changes we feel it is still the same animal. Non-living objects lack this essential identity which goes unchanged during the life-cycles of living things.

Taxonomist Ernst Mayr believes that Essentialism is just as dangerous as Vitalism when defining life. He blames Plato’s Perfect Forms and their overbearing influence on Western philosophy. We divide organisms into broad taxonomic categories, specifying the ideal (average!) ant or panda – knowledge we can then use to generalize and make predictions about nature. But therein lies the rub: Mayr says “generalizations in biology are almost invariably of a probabilistic nature.”  Science, as a product of our essentialist intuitions, has been dominated by the search for strict definitions and universal laws. When defining life, however, we must embrace what Mayr calls ‘population thinking.’ We must see each individual in the population as unique, rejecting the idea of the typical tiger.

Because “variation is attributed to the imperfect manifestation of the underlying essences,”  many intuitive essentialists struggle to accept evolution by natural selection. Consider the creationists’ mocking demands for a ‘fronkey’, halfway between frog and monkey – they see species as inviolate categories. They imagine evolutionary change as being a Pokémon-like transformation from the essential-Frog to the essential-Monkey. But all life-forms are perfectly capable of breeding with their children, and with their grandchildren – they are ‘essentially’ the same animal. Once we increase the genetic distance to the thousands of generations, however, life-forms diverge, and become ‘essentially’ different. Nevertheless, neo-Darwinism necessitates that there can be no moment when one species turns into another. Species are nothing more than convenient spatial categories which divide reproductively-isolated populations, descended from a common ancestor.

So if our sharp essentialistic categories are mistaken, why not the jagged vitalistic dichotomy which splits living from non-living? When ethologist Richard Dawkins popularizes evolution as a River Out of Eden – Eden being the beginning, or origin, of life – we must extend the metaphor and ask where does the river begin? A river’s source can be an underground spring. Yet the source of the spring is the water table, the source of the water-table is seeping water, whose source in turn is snow, and so on ad infinitum. A geographer could define any of these points as the source, yet his definition would ultimately be arbitrary. By the same token, the moment in time when non-living matter became living matter is itself an arbitrary point.

The chemist Manfred Eigen argues in his book Steps Towards Life that the origin of life was instead itself an evolutionary process. The title is telling: he posits no jump from non-living to living, but a gradual evolution from silicate-based molecules to self-replicating carbon crystals and thence to single-celled organisms. The insight is not in the chemical details but in the process described. Pre-biotic molecules, Daniel Dennett says, can be called ‘macros’: “bare, minimal self-reproducing mechanisms.”  Basically non-parasitic viruses, they are a phenomenon reducible to chemistry, but which also carry self-replicating information in the form of RNA. Natural selection can operate on that information favouring in the end the development of cell-walls and all the paraphernalia of life: “macros gradually built up [the] ‘molecular toolkit’ that living cells used to recreate themselves, while also building around themselves the sorts of structures that became, in due course, the protective membranes of the first prokaryotic cells.” 

 This theory – or at least the underlying mechanism – chemists say, is our best plausible explanation of the origin of life. For philosophers investigating life, however, the interesting fact is that evolution by ‘macros’ is purported to have taken almost one billion years. Thus we have a huge temporal fuzzy zone between matter we would definitely call non-living and prokaryotes we would certainly call living. Dennett calls the macros ‘quasi-living’ – but are they 99%, 50% or 20% living? The question is absurd. Yet, if we take Vitalism seriously, we are obliged to ask it – if living things are driven by pure ‘oomph,’ quasi-living things must have some fraction of that ‘oomph!’ The evolutionary model of the origin of life says that there is no exact cut-off from non-living to living, implying that whatever defines life cannot have just appeared; it must have evolved. The consequences of this for our understanding of life are enormous. If we can’t clearly separate living and non-living matter in time, why should we be able to do it in space? This calls for a far looser concept of life, derived from those pre-biotic macros.”

taken from 

http://candide94.tumblr.com/post/17515765589/what-is-life

source: http://io9.com/5887189/10-science-policies-i-wish-the-government-would-institute

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how science is defined and who does it best. I don’t much care to follow that, because it makes me stomp around my room shouting at the walls, and that’s a waste of time. I’d rather discuss science in a way that makes other people shout at the walls. So here are the ten things I would enforce, in the science department, if I ran a country. Any country at all.

10. Creationism is Only Discussed Publicly if it Involves a Randomly Selected Creation Story

This goes for all debates, articles, and talking heads on TV news shows. Anyone can talk about teaching Creationism as a scientific theory or advocate for it. The catch would be that, before they go into the debate, the city hall meeting, or the tv show, they would head to a computer, press a button, and one of the many creation stories would pop up on screen for them to use. So on any given day, or television set, you would see people advocate for teaching kids that the world was created by Odin and the human race emerged from between his toes, or that the Titans are trapped in Tartarus and the human race was created when Gaea the Earth banged Uranus the Sky, and so on. Not only would it add a great deal of variety and novelty to the debate, it would neatly separate out those who think Creationism has scientific merit and those who just want to teach their own religion.

9. Companies That Do Health Research on Their Own Products Must Disclose the Results to the Government

Hi tobacco companies! Hi! Companies do internal studies on their own products all the time. They use what they learn to find better ways to market their substance, and better areas of research. From time to time, though, those studies seem to indicate something sinister. Obviously, companies can’t be forced to outright publish their results or their hard-earned data might be used by their competitors. It seems, though, that someone needs to be watching. And that someone watching, if they see something really troubling, needs to then turn the study over to the actual public.

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8. Every Study That Uses Public Funds is Published Publicly

This is as much to help scientists as to help everyone else. A lot of public money is spent on a lot of scientific studies. Those studies, if they are judged (often by people who volunteer their time) to be worthy of publication, are published in journals far less widely read than the people who do the work, or the people who need the work, would like. Scientific journal subscriptions can be massively expensive, and a barrier to people having the scientific information they, kind of, paid for.

7. Scientists Must Come Up With A Different Word for “Theory” When Used in a Scientific Sense

Look, it’s obvious that people simply can’t handle this one. Oh, they’re okay with gravity. Some start taking issue with relativity. And then? Then we get into other theories and people start saying, “Well, well, you know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion, man.” No. No it is not. I like the way ‘theory’ trips off the tongue, and I like, generally, when scientific terminology has everyday applications as well, because it lends richness to the language of both the scientific and the everyday. But this one’s caused enough grief. Just make up a word and use that.

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6. The Government Shall Always Be Building One “City of the Future”

Every few years in a magazine, or every time Disney builds a new theme park, people start showing off a ‘City of the Future.’ It’s stylish and minimalist, sometimes with innovative new public transportation systems, sometimes with extraordinary vertical farms, sometimes with inspiring or insane cooperative ways to power the city, and always with building that look like soaring groups of white wings. None of those cities actually happened, did they? And why? Because no one built them. America has a growing population that has to live somewhere. It’s time to just build one. Pick a place and really do it right. It could be a boon to research and a goad for other cities to modernize. If nothing else, it will make for a fascinating documentary in a few decades.

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Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.