Darwin Meets Albert Schweitzer

It is likely that few of you in the newer generation have heard of Albert Schweitzer. He was famous in the middle of the twentieth century. He lived a long time in the city I now call home, Strasbourg, France. I just posted a video about him.

Schweitzer was most famous for doing what almost nobody does anymore. He was a polymath, that is, a genius expert in what seems to most of us like unrelated fields. His fields were:

• Music: He was an expert at playing and building organs.
• Philosophy.
• Theology: He wrote about the historical Jesus and the mystical Paul.
• Medicine.

Unlike many of us, who are certified in one field (mine is plant ecology) but who know a lot about other fields because we have read a lot about them, Schweitzer actually had degrees in music, philosophy, theology, and medicine. Some examples of people who have thought broadly about more than one area of inquiry are:

• Isaac Asimov, the biochemist who wrote about science in general and even about theology; he even had a joke book;
• René Dubos, the microbiologist who wrote about human nature;
• Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist who wrote about everything, even baseball;
• John Polkinghorne, the physicist turned priest.

Schweitzer felt called to be a medical missionary in Africa. He was criticized because his field hospital in what is now Gabon was not up to the medical standards even of the time. But in its first nine months the clinic had 2000 patients; some of them traveled for days and hundreds of kilometers to go there. Could somebody else have done a better job? Probably, but there was no one else.

He won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize not just for these things but also for his activism against colonialism and nuclear proliferation.

Was there a theme that tied all of these things together? I think it was reverence for life. The aspects of music, philosophy, theology, and medicine that he emphasized were those that made life better for humanity, which he loved.

Today it is difficult or even impossible for a scientist to be an expert in more than one major field of human thought, because every field of thought has grown exponentially; at least, science has. He was not trying to get people to know more scientific facts, but to celebrate how science (in this case medicine) can improve people’s lives (this is my message to the science blog readers). Nor was he trying to get people to believe certain doctrinal points. He was an evangelist, but not of doctrine; rather, of a reverence for life—this is my message to the religion blog readers.

Joan of Arc and Science

I recently visited the equestrian statue of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) in Strasbourg, France. I have posted a video [https://youtu.be/ahKGTla7E18 ] about what I learned.

Joan of Arc was a peasant girl, aged about 17, when she claimed that the Archangel Michael and Saints Margaret and Catherine had told her that she needed to lead the French troops to victory over England, which at that time (1429) occupied a large portion of what is today France. This was during the Hundred Years’ War, and France was not doing too well. The French troops were under siege in Orléans.

Jeanne must have had a mesmerizing personality, because she convinced the future French King Charles VII that the voices in her head had told her France would prevail and Charles would be king. She was put in charge of the portions of the French army that eventually drove the English away from that siege and some others as well. She was a military heroine—a 17 year old peasant girl. The story did not end so well for her. She started losing battles, and when she was 19 she was put on trial and convicted of heresy. She was burned at the stake in 1431. One of the charges was that, in leading battles, she had worn men’s clothing. Later, a new trial found her not guilty and today she is esteemed as one of the patron saints of France. Everyone has heard about her.

Every artistic depiction of her shows her to be very beautiful. The usual standards of physical beauty, however, is not at all necessary. She would have appeared beautiful to those who believed her divine claims, no matter what she actually looked like.

What this means for us, as we examine the role of religion in human history, is that even the craziest of claims are credible if the person making them is persistent and absolutely convinced of them. She heard the little voices in her head and had not the slightest doubt of their authenticity. Many historians today believe that Jeanne was schizophrenic (the little voices were in her brain) or had Menière’s disease (the little voices were in her inner ear). We do not know. More to the point, she did not know.

Religious claims can be made and believed on no further basis than the assertion of those who make them. No other evidence is needed. Many people claim that there is, in fact, evidence other than assertions that support many religious beliefs, such as Jesus’ resurrection. But such evidence is not necessary to true believers.

Scientific thinking, however, requires that the person making a claim provide evidence that is verifiable to people other than the one making the claim. You can read more about it in my book Scientifically Thinking. This is an important reason that we should depend on science, rather than religious assertion, to guide us in making decisions of worldwide importance—which nearly all of our decisions are these days.

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.

The Real Me and the Real You

My main purpose in my social media is to help you make better sense of the world and your life in it. I do this primarily by sharing my scientific understanding and my personal experiences. My social media (just two blogs, here and here, and video channel) have now had over 900,000 visits. The main traffic is from search engines. This means that most of my readers are not followers but are finding my work because they are searching for insights not about me but about the topics I write about. And that is just the way I like it.

Perhaps the most fundamental question we have about ourselves and the world is, who am I? This question is of interest not just to me, but to whoever might read this essay.

What, exactly, is the real me? There is no easy answer to this question. Each of us consists of at least two general things: the self that we want to be, and the self that we are subconsciously.

Over the first of these we have a measure of control. We can control what we think, the decisions we make, the kinds of interactions we have with people, the things we say. This is generally the self that we present to the world. Some people think this is a false face, merely an image of what we want people to think about us. But we all know it is much more than this. It is the self that we want to be, not just how we want to appear.

Over the second of these we have less control. We can generally control what we say, but sometimes we blurt things out before we have a chance to think about them. Curses, for example, come from a different part of the brain than regular speech. Most of us cannot control our dreams, either. When we experience things that make us angry or lusty, our heartbeats and breathing become more rapid, and there are other physiological responses that I do not need to tell you about, even if we try to calm ourselves down. These things make up the self that we do not want to be, not merely the things we wish to keep hidden.

Over some things, we have an intermediate level of control. For example, my blood sugar is high, enough for me to require medication but not drastic intervention. I cannot completely control it. It is my cell membranes that do not absorb enough of it from my blood. The main thing I can do is to eat less sugar. Medication and eating less sugar has reduced my blood sugar down from the crisis level it used to be. Blood sugar level is the result both of things I can control and things I cannot.

I suggest that the real me, and the real you, are the first of these two. They are the most highly developed systems in our evolutionary history. The second “self” has an ancient origin that goes back at least to the origin of the vertebrates. At least, I think so. Do fishes get angry?

Another way of dividing ourselves up into the selves we want and the selves we hide is to consider the things over which our DNA has direct control. Our DNA does not control everything about our bodies. It controls the structure of our brains, nerves, muscles, bones, and systems such as the digestive system. It controls, basically, everything that is within our epidermis and mucous membranes. But it does not control what is outside of our bodies, which includes the things that are in our digestive system.

The contents of our intestines includes not just the partially-digested things that we have decided to eat (which is under our conscious control) but also trillions of bacteria and other microbes. We cannot control what those microbes do. They metabolize, to get energy and nutrients for themselves, and eject their wastes into our intestines. These wastes include carbon dioxide (odorless), methane (odorless), and hydrogen sulfide (the smell of farts). Though we can to a certain extent influence their timing, neither we nor our DNA can control our farts. The cosmos inside our intestines is a wild world over which we have no control other than diet (yogurt helps) and medicine.

And our digestive system responds not so much to us—our nervous system, or even our DNA—as to the wild world in our intestines. When the bacteria in the food produce a lot of gas, they expand the intestine. Local nerve networks take care of what happens next. Intestinal nerves detect the expansion, then cause the smooth muscles around the intestine to start contracting, which will push the food and the farts along further down the line. One result is that when a fart is on the way, you can’t stop it. Another result is that when you gotta go, you gotta go. Your brain can control the muscles at the end of the line, the sphincter muscles, to try to hold it in, but success is not guaranteed.

So another view of yourself is that the real you is what the DNA controls, and the secret you is what your bacteria do.

So when an honest biographer says, regarding the subject, which might be you or me, “he or she tells the true story, warts and all” (maybe farts and all), this is not really being honest. Warts are caused by viruses, and farts by bacteria. Your honest biography would be what your DNA does, and what you decide to do, rather than by the random, uncontrollable activities of your bacteria or your subconscious mind.

The bacteria and subconscious mind are not always bad. Having written what I just wrote, and living a more relaxed life, both the products of the real me, have an effect on what my subconscious mind and even my bacteria do.

I hope this helps. And tell your bacteria that I said hi.

Once again, I posted this essay on my science blog. But for this religion blog I can add, you are not responsible for your subconscious urges, but only for what you do in response to them. God help us.