Memories Of The Alhambra

The second in a series looking at some of my favourite music and showing how they represent a hybridization of different cultures resulting in a thing of great beauty.

Here I look at a wonderful piece of classical Spanish music written in 1896 for the guitar by Francisco Tárrega called Recuerdos de la Alhambra (Memories of the Alhambra). This, more than any other piece of music, is the one I want played at the celebration of my life after it has ended and my body have been suitably recycled.

This music was inspired by the Moorish Alhambra Palace in Grenada, Spain. If you have never been there, go. It is one of the world's most beautiful and tranquil places, spoiled only slightly by a lumpen and ugly Christian building plonked triumphantly in the middle of the gardens by the conquering Catholic King Carlos V as a act of pure vandalism.

It Could Never Happen To Us - Zombies Controlled By A Parasite.

The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis has a macabre life-cycle. It infects carpenter ants and takes over their brains, controlling their behaviour so that they leave the colony and find a leaf at the right height, temperature and humidity in the forest canopy. There they crawl round to the under-side and bite into the central vein. Then they are killed by the fungus which has been consuming their body.

The fungus then sprouts a fruiting body from the head of the ant and releases spores which fall to the forest floor to infect other foraging ants. The bite mark on leaves heals to leave a characteristic dumbbell-shaped mark on the underside of the leaf. These characteristic marks have been found on 28 million-year old fossil leaves from Germany, so this parasite had evolved at least 28 million years ago, even before the Himalayan Mountains had formed.

It's not just fungi that can perform this trick either. A parasitic flatworm called Dicrocoelium dendriticum does a similar thing. I'll let Oatmeal explain it.

The video on the left shows this behaviour in the unfortunate ants.

So, that's fungi and flatworms which can perform this trick. How about other classes of parasite?

Here we have a genus of barnacles, Sacculina, consisting of nine species, which take over the bodies of crabs and use them not to produce more crabs, but to produce more barnacles. Male crabs are even 'turned into' females by these parasites. The infected crabs go through the same motions they would perform when laying eggs to ensure their widest possible distribution, except that they don't lay eggs; they 'lay' barnacle lava.

Now, I'm not going to ask the obvious question here about why any compassionate intelligent designer would go to the trouble of creating these parasites which seem to serve no useful purpose other than to create more copies of themselves, and which give nothing back to the hosts they mercilessly parasitise. That would be too easy a point to score.

What I'm going to speculate on is whether another form of parasite can take over its hosts brain and use it not for the benefit of the host but for the benefit of the parasite. Could it happen to us? Remember, when considering organisms like parasites we are thinking about collections of replicators called genes which act together to build a machine for replicating themselves. This machine is the object we think of as an organism.

But why should this principle be confined to the objects produced by genes to replicate themselves? Why should it not also apply to other replicators like the memes which build cultures? Memes are units of cultural inheritance just as genes are units of genetic inheritance. Our cultures are meme machines built by memes to replicate memes. Through a combination of meme-gene coevolution we have arrived at where we are today - a cultural, civilised, ape with culturally evolved ethics and morals which enable us to work cooperatively together, at least within our local grouping.

What if a parasite could evolve the ability to take over this meme machine to produce more copies of itself by controlling the behaviour, beliefs, attitudes and even the ethics and morality of its hosts, not for the benefit of its hosts but for its own selfish ends? Indeed, in a Darwinian competitive environment where the only relevant test of fitness is the ability to produce the most copies, how else could such a parasite evolve? It is bound to evolve in a way which makes it better at controlling its host.

Apart from the possibility that the parasite has taken over even the rational thought processes of its victims, making them distrust evidence and even being afraid to consider it, it's hard to see why we don't regard religion as an example of just such a parasite. A combination of fear of a watching invisible thug and the hope of life after death for those afraid of it, seems to have done the trick. Protection from a non-existent threat and a promise which can never be delivered. Some reward for using our body and mind and taking away our freedom and independence, eh?

Yes, it could happen to us and very probably has.

The question now is whether we can rid ourselves of this malignant parasite and protect our children against infection by it. Probably the hardest part will be convincing its victims that they have been infected because, to them, just like the ants and crabs, it must feel entirely normal, otherwise the parasite wouldn't be in control.

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Memes And Genes: A Small Difference

Reading the introduction to Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" by Richard Dawkins, I came across a superb illustration of how memes can act just like genes and can give rise the a different phenotype.

Supposing a Martian geneticist visited Earth and carried out a study of humans, one thing would almost immediately recognised as a phenotypic difference between males. He would notice that some males have foreskins and some do not.

This set me thinking about how said Martian might interpret this and how this could lead to scientific discoveries maybe new to Martian science, some of which might be counterintuitive and hard for a Martian to believe.

To avoid some people's delicate sensitivities in these things, let's call these Type A and Type B males.

If this Martian geneticist knew nothing of human cultures and religions or about the memes by which we inherit these things, it would appear exactly as though this condition was genetically inherited. By and large, Type A males would have Type A fathers and, in those instances where they were not, looking at their grandparents might show interesting patterns of inheritance:

1. Maternal grandfather has the same Type as the grandson but the paternal grandfather has the other Type.
2. Paternal grandfather has the same Type as the grandson but the maternal grandfather has the other Type.
3. Neither of the grandfathers has the same Type as the grandson.

Religion And The History Of Blood Sacrifice

There seems to be something in the human psyche which assumes sacrifice in general and blood sacrifice in particular is somehow magical and has the power to change the universe. In particular, those cultures which worship a malicious or angry god seem to assume it is mollified, even pleased by the sacrifice of an animal rather than a plant and especially if it involves blood.

Cultures in which sexual activity is regarded as sinful or frowned upon by one of more of their gods often include virginity in the ritual so the best and most powerful effect is obtained by the blood sacrifice of a virgin, and best of all a human virgin.

This has lead to the notion that a god made angry by transgressing one of it's rules, or simply by not worshipping it enough, or in exactly the right way, or even by just being born and existing, can be persuaded to forgive that 'sin' by a blood sacrifice.

The earliest accounts of human sacrifice cannot be distinguished from myth with any certainty but the existence of those myths in the first place with their assumption that human sacrifice to appease or simply to please gods, is indicative of a cultural assumption and a vestigial belief.

Khali

The Hindu Vedas refer to purushamedha, a symbolic human sacrifice which is clearly derivative of an earlier actual sacrificial ritual. Actual human sacrifice was probably practised in Bengal until the late 19th century and by the Khond tribe in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh as late as 1835. The Thuggee cult dedicated to the Hindu god of death and destruction, Khali, probably accounted for some 2 million deaths.

According to Roman historians, the Celts of Europe, including the British Isles practised human sacrifice. This is supported by archaeological evidence. It has also been suggested that the 'sacred groves' of Druids, rather than places of natural beauty where one could be as one with nature, as is romantically assumed, may have been fearful places of human sacrifice where human body parts were hung up as offerings; a grotesque tradition which may have an echo in dressing the Christmas tree. See Kingdom Of The Celts by John King.

There is evidence of human sacrifice during early Greco-Roman times. The god Artemis saving Iphigeneia, who was about to be sacrificed by her father Agamemnon, by replacing her with a deer, may be a version of the Abraham and Isaac myth of the Hebrews where the deer has become a ram.

Hawaii Human Sacrifice

One form of human sacrifice, the retainer sacrifice, where a powerful person's servants were killed and buried with him, was common across Euro-asia from earliest times and was in some areas, an integral part of the comitatus system by which a ruler gathered a trusted band of supporters, often tied with blood rituals and oaths of personal loyalty. The comitatus system found it's way into early Islam following Islam's expansion into Central Asia. The stories of the putative Christian founder, Jesus, having a small band of loyal disciples may also be a form of this.

James Cook Witnessing Human Sacrifice, Tahiti

Human blood sacrifice was certainly praticed in the Pacific islands, notably in Hawaii where luakini temples were constructed specifically for human sacrifice, and in Tahiti where it was witness by James Cook.

In pre-Columban America Mixtec, Aztec, Maya and Inca people all practiced human sacrifice.

All three Abrahamic religions trace their origins back to a legendary Bronze Age nomadic tribal leader, Abraham, who according to tradition, seems to have accepted that it was perfectly natural for a god to demand a human sacrifice, albeit one which is stopped at the last moment. There is nothing in the legend to suggest that Abraham found the idea strange, or grounds for doubting the divinity of the voice he was hearing, so very clearly the culture in which the legend arose saw human blood sacrifice as a normal way to appease gods,

Later on, as the Hebrew legends develop there are accounts of the slaughter of defeated enemies being ordered by their god and of its demands that anyone who transgresses the more important of its 'laws' were to be killed to appease it or its wrath would be visited on those who had allowed the sin to go un-punished. This is still to be found in the religions which have evolved out of this primitive Bronze Age legend.

And of course there is the Hebrew scapegoat tradition where the sins of a people can somehow be transferred to an animal which is then ritually sacrificed to the god who then forgives the people for their 'sins'.

And finally, we see the blood sacrifice represented by the death of the legendary Jesus of Nazareth, an act which even today followers of that tradition believe somehow 'saved' them from the wrath of the very god of whom the sacrificial victim was supposedly a manifestation. What sacrifice could possibly better the blood sacrifice of a mere mortal other than the blood sacrifice of a god itself, and a virginal one at that? You will still even hear people today claiming their 'sins' have been 'washed away' by the blood of Jesus as here and here.

In 1099 when Crusaders captured Jerusalem after a long siege, they ritually slaughtered all the Moslems and Jews who had defended the city, so the the city was said to be 'knee-deep in blood'. When Saladin re-took Jerusalem for Islam in 1187, in order to contrast Islam with Christianity, the inhabitants were spared and the former Moslem holy sites were restored and 'cleansed', not by washing them with sacrificial blood as the Christians had done, but with rose water.

A more recent example of the blood sacrifice can be found in Irish history. It is said of the Irish patriot Patrick Pearce:

For Pearse, the idea of a blood sacrifice had additional appeal. Even as a child, he had unusual fantasies of self-sacrifice for his country, derived from Celtic myths and religious writings. He later fused together his nationalism and his Catholic faith. His Christian devotion had always centred on Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion, and he gradually developed a consuming yearning for martyrdom, in conscious emulation of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. He wrote: ‘One man can free a people, as one man redeemed the world’.

Pearse was also influenced by a mystical belief in the assumed benefit to mankind of blood spilt in violent conflict. He wrote in 1913: ‘Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing'.

Pearce led the 'Easter Rising', the timing of which was probably deliberate, and was executed for his part in it, as were thirteen others, in an act by the British authorities which resembled ritual sacrifice and which turned Irish popular opinion even more solidly behind the revolutionaries. The 'blood sacrifice' had worked, but not in some magical, mystical way, but by public revulsion at those who had carried it out.

Strangely, in all of this there is never any explanation of just how a blood sacrifice works. It seems to be something buried so deeply in the primordial human psyche that some people just assume it's so obviously true that it requires no explanation. It has been said that the frequent calls for the death penalty for particularly heinous crimes may be a demand for a blood sacrifice and that the burning of heretics and witches were forms of it.

Obviously our memes have picked up some strange mutations during their long evolution, and, as one would expect of a parasitic memeplex, it's component parts serve the needs of the meme, not their host. Possibly these demonstrations of power by a ruling and priestly class came to be accepted as having power in their own right; that rather than being demonstrations of power, the acts of human blood sacrifice was actually the source of their power.

Clearly there are people who are still infected with a memeplex which includes the acceptance of the magical power of blood sacrifice, although they will usually recoil in horror at the thought of followers of other gods, or people from earlier, less civilised times, practising it and yet their religion would not have gained any traction in a society in which the idea of human blood sacrifice was unknown or abhorrent.

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Where Creationists Get Confused.

Darwin's sketch of part of the tree of life

Creationists, either disingenuously, or because of genuine ignorance, seem to have missed the whole point of taxonomy, so they continually make idiotic mistakes which, even though they might imagine them to be valid arguments against evolution, are recognised by those who understand the subject as evidence only of their ignorance. And, with so much information readily and freely available, this ignorance can ONLY be either deliberate or feigned. No one remotely interested in the subject has any excuse for their level of ignorance.

The point of taxonomy is to classify all organisms into a hierarchical system of relationships starting at the lowest level and working up through various levels of increasingly close relationships, ending with recognised and defined sub-species and varieties. These classifications are as man-made as are the political boundaries on maps. Simply drawing a line on a map does nothing to the land either side of that line. The geology itself is completely unaware of the line and feels no compulsion to conform to it.

Species are defined in broadly utilitarian terms and often it's a matter of differing opinion about whether this population or that is actually a distinct species, a sub-species, or a variety, and sometimes it's not clear even into which genus a species should be placed. This is even more complicated with plants where hybridization, environmental variants and polyploid varieties are common, especially in some families.

But the point is that it is humans who make these 'rules' of classification and create the groups into which we fit individual species.

Additionally, the rules were originally devised to classify living species. Life was seen as a hierarchy forming a tree-like structure with living species forming the terminal twigs of branches which were themselves branches of main boughs, all branching off a main trunk. In reality, of course, this tree is still growing and has always been growing.

Moreover, many branches don't arise abruptly but gradually diverge from each other, as we can see from the many examples of ring species and clines, so that, if we were to cut a cross-section of branch at any point in its development at different times and tried to classify it, we would see different degrees of divergence, decreasing as we go back in time and increasing as we come forward so that it would become increasingly difficult and meaningless to force any branch into one of the modern classifications. The only solution might be to create a new species into which to place it or give it a sub-specific or varietal status of its own.

If we could visualise the entire tree of life, we would see divergence occurring followed sometimes by re-uniting in some branches, or even one branch meeting and fusing with a near-neighbour. This could happen if populations of a species become isolated for a while and begin to diverge into different races, then come back into contact and interbreed freely to form a single race again, as is happening with homo sapiens today.

So, not only is classification a man-made concept with rules to which nature was not party and feels no obligation to conform but it becomes even more meaningless when used to classify earlier forms of an evolving species. Nature does not read the rule book!

This is why we can laugh at creationists when they come out with such ignorant statements about micro- and macro-evolution and get so confused about classification of ancestral forms of modern species and the supposed lack of transitional forms between a pair of randomly chosen modern species which no one in their right minds would ever expect to see because no one in their right mind would ever imagine evolved into one or the other, or between an ancestral form given the status of a distinct species and a modern form given a different one.

Of course, we can understand those under-educated simpletons who get so confused about this aspect of biology because they simply lack the ability to think for themselves. What is unforgivable is those educated pseudo-creationists (how do they know what to lie about if they don't know the truth?) who make a handsome living out of maintaining this ignorance in their target victims and supplying them with the necessary misinformation with which to pretend to know as much about biology as those who actually do, without going to the trouble of learning any.

Even more unforgivable are those who assiduously maintain their own ignorance by refusing to read anything, like this blog, which might cause them to abandon their cherished beliefs, for these are the people who are quite deliberately and consciously fooling themselves into believing what they know to be false. These will be the ones who are constantly asking what they like to think are the 'killer knock-down' questions of biologists and who then ignore the answers and ask the same questions again next week. You only need to read their sanctimonious condescension and pretence to have greater knowledge than the scientists who spend years learning and researching the subject, to see what they are getting out of their intellectual dishonesty.

I wonder if they really believe they are fooling their imaginary god by being dishonest even with themselves. No one who believes they are being watched over by an omniscient god of truth and honesty who knows our very thoughts, could conceivably believe it is being fooled by dishonesty.  If this god really existed, it would be as ashamed of them as they should be of themselves.

I suppose the parasitic meme of theophobia can induce all sorts of strange irrationality in its sufferers. Once one sets off down the path of irrational belief, all manner of irrationality becomes possible, even essential, to maintain the delusion. Maybe we shouldn't expect anything better from it's victims.

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A Fantasy Horror Story.

I believe I may have hit upon the plot for a scifi fantasy horror book and film. The basic idea is quite simple:

An organism, say a virus or a bacterium, or maybe a parasitic worm or even a fungus - it really doesn't matter other than having to think up some way to pass it on - develops the ability to control human minds. This organism then depends for its success on making it's host determined to infect anyone and everyone they meet, including their own children, by any means, in the belief that being infected is normal and being free from infection is somehow abnormal, even dangerous - so dangerous in fact that infection-free individuals should be denied basic rights and even killed if they won't become infected.

The Evolution of God

A silver-backed male watches over his tribe
benevolent, yet threatening

Whenever you’re wondering about the origins of something in human evolution or human culture, think 'East African plains'. The East African plains are where almost all our modern characteristics evolved. That's where we evolved upright walking, fully opposable thumbs and, perhaps most importantly, our brains.

As our brains developed we developed pattern-recognition, maybe firstly for facial recognition, which led us later to develop reading and writing skills, amongst other things. Early on however, it helped us to track animals by recognising the footprints of the different prey and predator species. We are probably the only species which can look at a set of footprints and ‘read’ the information in them. We can tell the species, or at least the family – big cat, dog, antelope, ostrich, etc - and we can tell where it came from, where it was going and, with a little learning, how long ago it passed by.

All this is invaluable information for both catching lunch and avoiding becoming something else’s lunch. Inheritors of these skills, in the presence of a powerful brain, would have had enormous advantage, so the genetic variations which facilitated them would have spread rapidly through the gene-pool.

Our brain allowed us to learn these skills and to pass them on to the next generation, and the ability to teach and to learn also allowed us to develop cultures by establishing group norms and ethics, and to pass these on to the next generation. Group cohesion and, especially, group identity would have been enhanced by these cultural norms, inculcated from birth and accepted as ‘right’ by the whole group. Failure to comply would have meant exclusion from the group – not a very attractive prospect for a species which is relatively weak as an individual but immensely strong when part of a coordinated group.

Incidentally, Man is not alone in developing cultures which are passed from one generation to the next. The other African apes all have observable cultural differences between groups, as do some more distantly related simian species such as macaques, and baboons. Dolphins and killer whales also have distinct cultural groups and even some species of bird have local (i.e., cultural) calls and songs.

But I digress.

Early humans were now inheriting two different sorts of replicators. They were inheriting biological genes which determined their physical form and they were inheriting cultural or 'memory genes', more correctly now known as memes, which determined their culture, group norms and ethics.

Just as with the other African ape species, we would probably have lived in small groups of related individuals, each group dominated by an alpha male. This alpha male would have won his ‘right’ to be leader and the size of the group would have been related to how many individuals this alpha male (and maybe his alpha female mate) could exert control over. The alpha male would have had first pick of the females and would have enforced this right, maybe through a group of loyal supporters, by the sanction of physical punishment against those who infringed his right or who threatened his dominance. The idea that the alpha male had this right would have been passed on from one generation to the next as a group norm or ethic.

In evolutionary terms, there would be an advantage in the alpha male passing on the genes which enabled him to dominate and the group would have benefited by being more likely to be led by a strong male able to dominate and lead. However, there would have been an evolutionary arms race between these ‘alpha male’ genes and genes which predisposed to illicit sexual activity, since these genes would have enjoyed the protection of the alpha male. Whether these ‘genes’ were actual DNA genes or memes, inherited as part of group culture, is immaterial. The fact is that human groups would have been evolving by gene-meme co-evolution. Replicators have no concern for the nature of the other replicators with which they form alliances.

Now, place yourself in such a group in the plains of East Africa. The plains of East Africa have very many rocky out-crops which offer shelter and which are good vantage points from which to survey the surrounding plain. These outcrops also give the alpha male good vantage points from which to survey the group and keep an eye on what’s going on: who’s doing what and with whom, with particular regard to illicit sexual activity. Alternatively, other males and females will be trying to evade his watchful eye, and those of his supporters.

It is easy to see how this idea of a dominant alpha male, who is at the same time, the strong leader on whom the group depends, and the vengeful deliverer of pain and suffering for any transgression of the group norms, came to evolve in human culture. It is also easy to see why this alpha male takes a special interest in the sexual activities of his 'subjects', and is especially concerned that females remain inactive until he's had his turn, or at least sanctioned their mating.

Domination of his group through controlling their sexual activity ensures his genes get priority and he can also use this control as a reward system to ensure obedience. Meanwhile other selection forces are ensuring continued 'illicit' sexual activity, even making this thrilling and exciting.

Now, move on two or three hundred thousand years and remove man from the East African plains. Place him now in larger nomadic tribes or into settled farming communities and towns across Africa, Europe, Asia and into the Americas. Now there is no place for a single alpha male to sit and watch the whole group and the group is too large or diverse for him to dominate it, yet he still exists in the culture. The memes which arose on the plains of East Africa are still being replicated down through the generations. So many of our cultural ideas have been conditioned by the alpha male's presence and have evolved in an environment in which he exists, but the physical reality of the alpha male has now been replaced by the cultural idea of one.

The alpha male now sits on some imaginary vantage point overlooking the tribe, still the benevolent protector and leader, the guardian of the law, and the vengeful enforcer of his right to grant permission for sexual activity and for whose permission all, but especially the females, must wait until he grants it through the symbolic ceremony of marriage.

His loyal supporters who act as his enforcers, still exist though. They have become a self-selecting band who act as though the alpha male still exists and whose claim to power and authority is that they represent him and are doing his bidding. They have become his priesthood.

Welcome to the god hypothesis: the imaginary benevolent leader who is also the object of fear; the loving protector who punishes transgression and who takes a special interest in our sexual activities. The man whose authority to rule is now so deeply embedded in human culture that many regard it as a sin punishable by unimaginable pain and suffering and withdrawal of the alpha male's 'love' even to question it. And the leader who may just take it into his head to show us his power by some random act of indiscriminate violence if we're not very careful.

God: a cultural idea which is a fossil relic of our evolution as an ape on the plains of East Africa.

Cultural evolution explains both the origin of the idea of a god and its fallacy. The cultural idea of a god is evidence of human evolution as an ape on the plains of East Africa.

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