Killing Time? The Evolution of Hobbies

As I have continued reading Lonnie Aarssen’s book, What We Are, I ran across another interesting idea. He claims, and is probably correct, that human evolutionary psychology has been strongly influenced by the awareness that we are going to die. Many aspects of our cultures result from our responses to the certainty of our deaths.

One category of response is to create something that outlives us. Most of the estimated 90 billion people who have ever lived have not left any trace, other than perhaps a name on a record somewhere, that they ever existed. It doesn’t take many generations for this to happen. My great-grandfather exists now, as far as I am aware, of two photos from about 1890, a grave, and some DNA in his descendants.

 

But people who have had more money and power than did my great grandfather can do a lot more to create an enduring legacy. Rockefeller and Carnegie had endowments that are still giving awards to people. Simon Bolívar has a country named after him. These legacies create the false impression, while we are alive, that we will not die, and after we die, that we are still alive. In the Becky Hobbs/Nick Sweet musical Nanyehi, devoted to our ancestor Nancy Ward, the great Cherokee leader, the Nancy Ward character says, when you see the white swan’s wing, know that I am still alive. Of course, she isn’t, and there is remarkably little of her personal effects that can still be found (she died about 1822). But Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bolívar, and Nanyehi are still having an impact on the world.

Sir Francis Bacon noted that childless men put more into their legacies (he was thinking of creativity and intellect) than do men with big families precisely because they have no physical posterity. Wikipedia lists no children for Bacon. I have one child and two grandchildren, but this is below the world average.

The main motivation I feel in creating a legacy of writing is that I do not feel that I should hoard for myself the insights I have encountered in life. I want to share them.

Another category of response is to lose ourselves in hobbies. This allows us to ignore the fact that we will die. My Dad, for example, recorded country music on hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes, and spent countless hours documenting and organizing them. They have almost all disintegrated. I have his tape of country songs sung by our next door neighbor’s brother, Truitt. Are these hobbies just a way of killing time?

That is clearly one purpose of a hobby. But some of us try to turn our hobbies into legacies. I have thousands of photographs. They would be depressing if they were just a pile of pictures. But since 2007 all are digital, and I scanned the others. I labeled each photo with a descriptive name, and the year, so that the next generation of my family will know what each one was. Just in case they ever look at them. Of course, my daughter and family are in my photos also. You can see about a thousand of these photos (mostly of natural areas, not of me and my family) at my newly refurbished author website.

One of the best ways to create a unique legacy is to write a book. Major commercial publishers have published six of my books; I plan one more; all about popular science and history. I have also written articles, which are on various databases. My website is me, in the future. The books that I know I cannot publish through increasingly unstable commercial publishers will be, or so I plan, on Amazon. My tech-savvy son-in-law can probably find a few minutes a year to maintain my digital presence long after my passing. The essays on this blog, starting about 2008, will be available perhaps as long as the internet exists.

And that is pretty much what I do these days. I have no hobbies that are just for killing time. Time is precious, and I want to use it—all of it—to make the world better. This includes activities that maintain health and vigor, since I do not want all of my work to collapse if I have a stroke or something. And to keep me happy, since I do my best work as a writer and a grandfather by being happy. I hope to put a reasonable finish to my work and then, one day, I just won’t wake up.

Of course, my main legacy (both biological and cultural, even spiritual) will be my family, which so far is resisting extinction, and consists entirely of good people. World, you will be glad we were here.

Breathtaking Racism in Modern America against Native Americans

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book. You can find more information about this book and these videos in my science blog.

 

When you hear about racism in America, you usually think of white racism against black people. More recently, racism against Hispanics have been in the news, since being Hispanic makes you a possible illegal alien, until proven otherwise. Once in a while you hear about racism against Asian Americans. And, of course, immigrants from every country in the world, except the very white ones, face discrimination.

But there is one group about which you hear less often, the largely-silent victims of racism: the Native Americans. Natives are underrepresented in reportage and in fiction. Many if not most Americans think of Native Americans as dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the Rez in flyover country. Most Americans who have this image of Natives say this with pity, rather than with scorn, the way true racists would say it.

I can write these things because I am a member of the Cherokee tribe, with my lineage completely documented. And I build my book, Forgotten Landscapes, around ten generations of my family’s history.

Perhaps the major part of the racism against Native Americans is that most Americans (assuming themselves to not be racist) believe Natives were hunter-gatherers prior to the coming of European “civilization.” The racists would say “savages” instead of “hunter-gatherers.” Those who consider themselves non-racist would say that there was (or is) nothing wrong with being a hunter-gatherer.

Many people even think that the European-white American conquest of Natives was a blessing, because it replaced a miserable savage condition with a happy, white civilized condition.

But this perception of Natives is about as wrong as it can possibly be. The factual basis upon which anti-Native racism is based is just simply wrong. Not just offensive, but factually incorrect. Some tribes, it is true, were hunters and gatherers. But many tribes—such as the Cherokee tribe from which my family comes—were not hunter-gatherers.

Native Americans had large cities before European contact, and by the time Columbus came these cities had shrunk into large villages, but they were still connected by strong continent-wide trade networks. There were millions of healthy well-fed people who were able to resist Viking invasions (which nobody else did) and would have resisted later European invasions had it not been for European diseases such as smallpox, and European guns.

Native Americans transformed the North American landscape by the controlled use of fire, by skillful group hunting, by agriculture, by irrigation, and even by planting orchards. The whole face of “wilderness America” was an artificial product of Native activities.

I’m not talking about Aztecs and Incas and Mayas here—regarding whom everyone has heard—but the civilizations of North America, which reached their peak around 1200 AD. It has been erased from history, and from the landscape, by racist assumptions. You can hardly find any remnant of it anymore; we don’t even know what they called themselves, or which tribes still in existence are their descendants.

We are here; we have been here longer than any other group; and we had an important impact on the American landscape, until we were decimated by Europeans starting in 1492. You need to know this about us. Too often, people look right at us and do not see us.

These are big claims, I realize, but I explain and document each of them in my book, which I encourage you to read.

Forgotten Landscapes: Truth and Sanity

 have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How NativeAmericans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.

 I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book. My first video is Darwin Restores Truth and Sanity.

In March 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. I’m sure Donald Trump thinks he can rewrite American history by simply speaking His version of it into existence, but even He cannot do this. All he can do, by executive order, is to remove all National Park and Monument signage that does not have his version of American history on it. He cannot rewrite the textbooks and change all school and college courses, however much He would like to do so.

What version of American history does He want to impose? The white supremacist version. He wants to proclaim that white settlers moved into an empty North America and brought the bright white light of civilization to the few savages who already lived there. Trump is offended by signage that makes reference to slave owners and to white who killed Native Americans.

My book, Forgotten Landscapes, is in fact the way to restore truth and sanity to American history. I do not, like Trump, do so by calling my critics liars and insane. Instead my book presents the evidence:

• That Native population densities were large before European diseases decimated them
• That Natives managed the North American landscape through fire management, hunting, and agriculture

This is not the first time the Trump Administration has tried to erase Native Americans from history. In January 2025 the Justice Department proclaimed that Native Americans did not quality for birthright citizenship. The very day I made this video, the Supreme Court was deliberating a birthright citizenship case. (Update: On June 27 the Supreme Court decided that Trump had the right to limit birthright citizenship. This means that Cherokees like me might very well not be citizens of the United States or of any other country.)

The only way to restore truth and sanity to American history is for all of you, individually, to make sane and truthful use of the evidence. My book provides that evidence.

Who Was This Guy Anyway?

I ran across a couple of articles written in 1987 and 1989 by some guy who thought not only that the world is ruled by a good God, but that he could prove it! How weird is that?

Lots of people believe that there is a good God, somewhere, but that this God does not do very much to help the world except maybe in some special once-in-a-while miracles, but that the universe pretty much operates as if there is no God. That is, they are not atheists. It’s just that God is pretty much irrelevant to the way the world works. But this guy saw the goodness of God operating all around him. I’ve got to hand it to him; he amassed a lot of disconnected information from his voluminous knowledge into a big steaming pile of assertions. He was apparently Piled higher and Deeper.

To his credit, this author spent his entire first article admitting that the natural world did not, in fact, reflect the God of love. Even the things that appear peaceful and beautiful actually resulted (by evolution) and continue to function (by ecology) by means of selfish processes. Pretty flowers, for example, are selfishly efficient at attracting pollinators, and singing birds are selfishly establishing territory and attracting mates. He admits, then, that the way for a Christian to look at what nature tells us about God is to look at it figuratively (as Jesus did in parables). The problem the author overlooks, however, is that the figure depends on the observer, resulting in circular reasoning about a God of love. This circular reasoning deliberately omits many important things. Jesus said, If God so feeds the birds of the air; but what about the ones God doesn’t feed, and they die?

Then, in his second article, the author describes a “pervasive theme” in the natural world and in human history, when viewed as one might view a piece of literature: Blessings emerge from adversity. I’m sure you can think of lots of examples; the author drew together a mixed grab-bag of them. An ape, or what the Bible calls “dust of the ground,” became capable of understanding the world. How’s that for a blessing from privation? He cites lots of Bible examples of God elevating the humble to positions of prominence, such as Joseph, David, the prophets, in fact the whole nation of Israel and the whole church. Our own spiritual development, he says, depends on our optimistic response to challenges.

Then he turns to the natural world for lots more examples. Some of the greatest evolutionary innovations occurred in response to natural disasters. Right from the start! Oxygen in the air was a primordial poison, but the cells that could not just tolerate it but use it became the ancestors of nearly all life forms now on the Earth. And on and on for billions of years. Mammals spent more millions of years skulking in the shadow of dinosaurs than as the dominant animal life forms as they are today, from our perspective. Altruism has evolved. Parasitism evolves into parasitism. He even points out that rates of extinction in the fossil record have been declining, a point he got from reading Stephen Jay Gould. Even the acclimatization of individual organisms to changes in their environments (which is not evolution), and ecological succession (which is not evolution either), are examples of life proliferating in adversity. He ends the second article with a quote from a largely-forgotten Scottish botanist who looked at the world the same way.

With all of these examples, how could the pattern not be true? But the author could not say that the pattern was miraculous. The best he could manage was to say that blessings out of adversity was God’s “activity” in nature. Like, how is that any different?

Of course blessings can arise from adversity. But we only hear about the successful ones. We hear the hero stories of people who confronted terrible suffering, and not only persisted but lived to tell about it. We do not hear from the ones that got killed because they are dead. We hear the story of Malala Yousafzai, shot by Islamic terrorists who attacked a girls’ school and who worked for peace, receiving a Nobel Prize (this happened after the articles were published); we do not hear the stories of the girls who died.

Of course blessings can arise from adversity. Adversity creates opportunity, and some organisms are able to capitalize on it. A forest fire releases nutrients from dead plant matter and allows an influx of sunlight. Too bad about those trees that died, but the wildflowers bloom like crazy. But that is what wildflowers do.

This author’s view is a beautiful artistic view of the world, but it tells us nothing, nothing at all, about God. The author was, and is, happy, even if this vision is a fantasy.

As you have figured out, the author was myself, back in my evangelical days. Though I can no longer assert the actual truth of these statements, I really enjoy thinking about the things about the natural and human world that I like, especially when I need some diversion from the things I don’t like.

The articles appeared in the September 1987 and March 1989 issues of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith.

Premature Optimism about Science and Religion in America

One of the foremost opponents of all attacks on evolutionary science has been Niles Eldredge, retired from the American Museum of Natural History. One of his many books was The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism (the last phrase was printed backwards on the cover, spine, and title page). When Eldredge wrote this book, he was pretty angry at the creationists.

In recent decades, I’ve stopped getting upset about what the creationists do. You cannot stop them from making false claims, and profiting from the support of millions of people whom they have duped. They are part of the conservative movement which now controls America, and they are not going to step back from the power and money that comes with it. They know they are lying, and it does no good to point out their errors to them, or to the people who willingly believe them.

Instead, what I do is to use creationism as an opportunity to teach science, and to do so by the use of humor. I have now published two articles in Skeptical Inquirer magazine entitled “Creationist Funhouse,” episodes one and two (readable by subscribers only). More are on the way.

Eldredge allowed himself to be optimistic toward the end of his book, which was published in 2000. He wrote, “The tired old creationism debate—mired as it so thoroughly is in the nineteenth century—simply has not prepared us for the kind of positive interaction between science and religion that I see as eminently possible as we enter the new Millennium and grapple with tough environmental issues.” As Eldredge and the rest of us now know only too well, religion and science are further apart than ever, because “religion” now often means unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump, and there is less hope than ever for environmental problems to be solved, once again because of unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump. Eldredge’s millennial optimism was a good try, but reality has proven worse than we could have imagined back in 2000.

This essay also appeared in my science blog.

The Meaning of Life

At one time, about 1985, I thought I had figured out the meaning of life. I thought I had figured out why there was suffering in a world governed by a good and all-powerful God. I eventually wrote an article about it, which was published by the American Scientific Affiliation; you can still find it on their website.

It was not a new idea, although I treated it as such. It was simply that blessings arise out of adversity. What made the idea different from what many people already believe is that I saw many scientific examples of this principle too. For example, a great diversity of species emerged on the Earth after the Cretaceous extinction. The extinction was a massive worldwide adversity, but it allowed the evolution of hundreds of thousands of new species of flowering plants, insects, birds, and mammals. (Obviously I was no longer a creationist by this time.) As I recall, I even found examples of this principle on the molecular level. Try not to laugh until you have finished reading this. Blessed chemical reactions occurred only after the harrowing adversity of having their bonds broken. Okay, now you can laugh. This idea is still sitting out there like a coelacanth stranded in the ocean depths, going nowhere but not actually extinct. The idea of “blessings out of adversity” was too vague to actually be disproved. Like some physicists say of string theory, my theory was not even wrong.

The problem with the idea is that there must be just the right amount of adversity in order for blessings to arise from it. You need just the right amount of adversity in your life to get you up off of your butt and strive for success, but not enough to overwhelm you. And I imagined that this was how God ran the world: he gave us just the right amount of adversity. Actually, this is what the Bible says. But we all know it is not true. At least most of us know it. Mitt Romney does not know it; he thinks that the only reason that 47 percent of Americans are not successful is because they are too damn lazy. But even I knew that many people were overwhelmed by bad luck. I just did not want to admit it. I did not want to admit that it was not T. rex’s fault that it became extinct, no matter how many new species of flowers evolved after his demise.

What I needed to understand, but did not, was what Qoheleth wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes. I have written about this in earlier blog entries, to which I will here direct you if you would like to read more. I needed to understand that the race is not to the swift or riches to the wise, but time and chance happen to them all. Only now can I see that Monty Python was closer to figuring out the meaning of life than I was.

Requesting Your Input

As we begin the third year of this blog, I will continue to post essays that I have written based upon news items, books I have read, and selections from my books. I am a scientist, but my essays will not be limited to science. For example, in early 2010, I wrote about agnostic ideas found in the Bible and in works of music such as Carmina Burana and Die Winterreise.

But starting this year I would like to actively request ideas from my readers. You have always had the comment box, but I would now like to invite you to use it to suggest ideas and share your own insights, not just to respond to what I have written. What topics, related to religion and science and life, would you like to discuss? I think our small blog community could benefit from your insights. Our community is small, because I have not advertised this site on my other outlets. I am a professional with regard to evolution and ecology, and their political and religious connections, but I am an amateur with regard to many of the things I write in this blog. Amateur is not a bad word; in its Latin roots, it means “one who loves.” I love to discuss topics on which I am not an authority. Which is why it will be particularly interesting to draw in your insights.

Some readers find it difficult to post comments, since Google requires you to have an account with them in order to post your comment. If it is easier for you, feel free to send your comments to abutilongr@aol.com.

Let me know what you are thinking, by writing in the comment box. Also, feel free to send the link to other people you know who would be interested in the discussions on this blog.

I have also started tweeting. Follow me on Twitter, @StanEvolve.