The Only Way to Stop the Tide of Illegal Immigration?

The tide of illegal immigration from or through Mexico slowed down just once in recent years, and that was during the 2009 economic collapse, which was caused entirely by selfish billionaires trying to trick their investors. The Big Short, we could call it, as in the movie. This suggests that if immigrants see that they won’t find work in America, they will stop coming.

That is, the only way American can stop the immigrants is by making itself infernal. Hellish.

Already, this is the view that many Europeans have of America. European tourism in America has declined precipitously for several reasons, including social disruption and the danger of disease and gun violence. Why would tourists want to come to America when they have to stand in line many hours to get on an airplane, where they might get shot by a gun, and when they might get a disease that Europe has eradicated within its borders?

A funny little thing happened this morning at the post office, when I was mailing my taxes to America (federal and state). For many years, I have written “Internal Revenue Service” in such a way that “Internal” was clearly written with a T but which, with a little imagination, you could read as an F. I asked for delivery confirmation. Europe has stopped delivery confirmation directly to the United States, but the UK still does it, so Europe sends delivery confirmation parcels to the UK. (Fortunately, as I told the clerk, pas d’urgence.) He printed out my receipt with the tracking number, then wrote by hand the place to which I was sending the letter: He clearly wrote, in capital letters. INFERNAL REVENU. Perhaps he realized what it meant; in French, hell is enfer.

So if Trump turns America into a dictatorship in which, from one moment to the next, even citizens do not know what their rights might be, the economy will collapse and the immigration problem will be solved, come hell or l’eau haute.

Sexual Selection and Music: Nannerl's story

Something to think about (music and sex) as spring arrives.

Back when I was taking music courses as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, everyone was wondering why the great musicians were male. Not all of them, of course; two female composers, Thea Musgrave and Emma Lou Diemer, were on our faculty. Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife, was an example from the nineteenth century. More recently, there was Dawn Upshaw. But this list is very short, compared to the list of famous male composers.

It is easy to attribute this solely to male oppression of females. Male domination in music is just another example of male domination of society in general.

But there is another factor at work. Males often show off to other males, and to potential female mates, in the hopes of increasing their mating opportunities, within or outside of a pair-bond, in humans as in many other animal species. While this often takes destructive forms, such as war and abuse, it can also take creative forms, especially in big-brained humans. Artistic or intellectual creativity is often a way in which males can show off. We all know of the spectacular paintings on European cave walls. But those same caves echoed the music of bone flutes and drums by which musicians (perhaps mostly male) enthralled their congregations.

This happens more often males than females because evolutionary fitness in males often results largely from the number of mates, while this is not true so much in females. For a man, reproduction can consist of a single sex act, while for a woman the whole process of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children may be her burden alone. Thankfully, there are many of us men who are nurturing and faithful rather than rapacious. But a male can have hundreds of offspring (or thousands, for Genghis Khan) while no woman can have that many. The inevitable result of sexual competition is that some men have lots of offspring, while most of the others compete with one another for whatever women are left.

Women also compete with one another to have the best males as the fathers of their children. Also, women need to have musical ability in order to recognize it in men. Anna Schindler, herself only a passable musician, nevertheless recognized the genius of Gustav Mahler and maneuvered herself into being his wife. Nevertheless, sexual competition is stronger in men than in women.

Sexual selection must have chosen whatever genetic basis there is for musical ability, in men more than in women. But that genetic basis cannot be found only in men. Men have a Y chromosome, which is largely a lump of useless DNA. The genetic basis of musical proficiency must be found on either the X chromosome or the non-sexual chromosomes, and this means that it shows up perhaps just as frequently in girls as in boys. In the absence of ongoing sexual election, musical ability, even if it began as a male characteristic, would soon equalize itself between the sexes.

And this is why even spectacular musical ability shows up in females even if it started in males thousands of years ago.

Everyone has heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was clearly a musical genius. But did you know he had a sister who was perhaps just as gifted as he was? She was a superb keyboardist, and her father Leopold took her on concert tours throughout Europe at the same time as he took young Wolfgang. Audiences were perhaps even more impressed with the beautiful Maria Anna Mozart (nicknamed Nannerl) than with her little brother who could do musical tricks. But her father convinced her that her only chance for success was as a performer and teacher, and as a wife. While she continued teaching and performing until her own death, decades later than Wolfgang’s, none of her compositions survive. One movie I saw (of several that have been made) showed her, at about fifteen years old, sadly burning her compositions in the family fireplace. It turns out Wolfgang was a genius; but perhaps Nannerl was also. We will never know.

 

Natural and sexual selection, drivers of human evolution, are not destiny. The adaptations they provide must be continually maintained by culture, as I explained above. As culture evolves, the forces of selection can change. Thankfully they are already doing so. When I was in high school, most brass players in school bands were boys, except the very competent Linda. The girls chose flute and clarinet. When I was in California State Honor Band in 1974, I was the last chair baritone horn player. The first chair player (in the concert band) was a black girl. She was really good. I admired her for her pioneering spirit on her instrument and for the way she represented her ethnicity. This was an important part of my development, coming as I did from a racist family.

There are forces that try to suppress opportunities for women. A few years ago, there was a scandal among the Southern Baptists because male leaders often seduced females without serious punishment. The church’s response? There were a few women in positions of Southern Baptist leadership. The church removed them and forbade women to be in such positions at all.

But even religion cannot completely hide female talent. Probably every church choir director has heard of composer Natalie Sleeth. Things look pretty grim for women in conservative religion, but I suspect things will never get as bad as a Margaret Atwood novel.

The Tortilla Curtain: Nightmares about Possible Worlds

A lot of alternative-future fiction is nightmares about what could happen if we project current trends forward into the future. We could also call these alternative-fiction nightmares “prophecies,” because that is what Old Testament prophecies were: they were not predictions about what would actually happen, but speculations about what might happen if current (to the prophets, sinful) conditions continued.

Rolando J. Diaz wrote a collection of stories in 2007 called Tales of the Tortilla Curtain. In his stories, set in the middle of the 21^st century, the Tortilla Curtain was an actual very high wall that ran along the entire border of Mexico and the United States, like an unhealable wound. It had every imaginable type of technological gadget for detecting anyone trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico, and then eliminating them. This would include land mines and automatic machine guns that would pulverize anyone crossing the border without prior authorization. Most of the border enforcement was coordinated by Dusty, the name by which the Data Systems Tracker was known. It was an artificial intelligence that pretended to be friendly. (Diaz wrote before AI became an everyday term.)

 

 

In story after story, the reader starts to get inured to clouds of blood and piles of torn, rotting corpses. This was a nightmare reification of the animosity that conservative Americans felt, then as now, toward immigrants from Mexico, originally walled wetbacks because they would swim the Rio Grande. American seldom felt animosity against the equally illegal, though extremely rare, frostbacks from Canada. Rolando’s stories pose the question, just how far would we go to lash out against people we with would not come to America? Would we be willing to kill them and to leave their bodies for work crews to shovel into trash trucks? To (if we were Hispanic Americans) shoot our own relatives?

The immediate cause of Rolando’s nightmare was the reaction of white Americans against Arabic people after nine-eleven, as we now call it. If white Americans could so passionately hate Arabs, then might they also hate Mexicans?

Note that Rolando wrote and published these stories not only before the first Trump administration but before the first Obama administration. Rolando could not have imagined (or maybe he did, but could not have actually foreseen) that Trump would campaign on the promise of actually building such a wall—thousands of miles and billions of cubic feet of concrete, with advanced technology. Such a project was always impossible and unaffordable, and once Trump got what he wanted—election—he conveniently forgot his promise. It became a metaphorical wall, at most consisting of extra electronic surveillance along existing fences.

And now, during Trump II, the reality may be less violent than Diaz described in his nightmare—not as many piles of dismembered body parts—but is more pervasive. The anti-immigrant hatred is not just along the border. It extends throughout the country, even most infamously in Minnesota, where ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in case any of you do not know) considers detaining even legal immigrants, and shooting and killing even white American citizens, to be an acceptable cost of their war against illegal immigrants. The federal government, with Trump’s enthusiastic support, pays ICE agents very well, gives them lots of benefits, allows them to wear face masks to hide their identity, and then lets them do whatever they want (though pretending to disapprove), up through and including killing people. Diaz’s wall was bleeding violence along the Mexican border; the real Trump wall cuts right through the heart of America.

It is possible that part of Trump’s Wall includes hostility toward other countries, not just our possible enemies, but also our allies. It seems to be part of his policy to make wild threats (We will take over Greenland! We will annex Canada!) against our friends. He backs off from them, but our allies have not forgotten. European leaders are still meeting to make preparation for a possible American takeover of Greenland, for example. This week, Marco Rubio is coming to France to discuss European support for the Iran War, which America started without even consulting our European allies. At the time of this writing, I do not know what might come from these meetings. It would be justified if the European leaders told Rubio, you started this war, you finish it, if you can.

In one of Diaz’s stories, an American citizen of Mexican origin was detained because he did not carry his passport with him when he happened to be arrested by federal agents. This raises an important question: do all Americans need to carry proof of citizenship (a driver’s license won’t qualify) at all times? Or, maybe, only if you have dark skin? (Which, incidentally, Diaz does not have.) This is starting to sound like the old Soviet Union, Comrade Trump.

Throughout Rolando’s book I found empathy. I would like to add one real story to Rolando’s fictional ones: the story of the little girl Josseline Janiletha Quinteros, who died in the desert in 2008 while coming to America to look for her mother. Alas her photo is no longer available.

Reading Diaz’s collection of stories made me shiver because his 2007 nightmare has elements that feel frighteningly like today’s news. An Old Testament style prophecy.

The Evolution of Wierdness

Weirdness cannot be defined, but whatever it is, it evolved, which means it provided an evolutionary advantage at many times during human evolution.

One reason it cannot be defined is that what one culture, in space or time, considers weird, another culture may not. One example is psychopaths. In most cultures, most people dislike psychopaths. They are very, very smart, and almost always use their intelligence and their charisma to advance their own interests. We tend to think of the psychopathic mass murderers and other criminals, but many psychopaths (who constitute about one percent of the population) pass as ordinary people and may be surprised by their own (often genetically-based) diagnosis. A lot of politicians and preachers are psychopaths, who cultivate the goodwill of others for their own financial or sexual benefits. And they also like to shame you for suspecting that they are committing acts of evil. It takes highly-developed social intelligence to recognize a psychopath. See the book by Kevin Dutton: The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us about Success. New York: FSG, 2012.

The success of psychopaths depends on the social situation. Adolf Hitler was a psychopath, and he got millions of people to follow him. After Germany lost World War Two, many Germans felt mentally liberated, and wondered, What were we thinking, to follow this jerk? Germany was not a nation of psychopaths, but maybe the Nazis were a party of psychopaths.

But there are many other ways of being weird. Most of us are a little weird in a few ways. But I mean clinical weirdness. One example is Williams Syndrome [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome]. People with Williams Syndrome have distinctive facial characteristics, and medical problems such as heart conditions. They have diminished intelligence, overall. They are extremely talkative, and effusively express their emotions. They are almost always cheerful. I have never knowingly met one but I get the impression that it would be really hard to not like them.

One word you would not associate with Williams Syndrome is suspicious. In order to become socially powerful, within your society, you have to be suspicious of the motives of other people in your society, and certainly of people in other societies. People with Williams Syndrome will walk right up to you and trust you. This is socially awkward. But openness and the willingness to trust is an essential component of altruism, of social bonding. It’s just that these people have too much of a good thing.

Another reason weirdness cannot be defined is that each kind of weirdness has its own social and genetic basis. Williams Syndrome is associated with a specific genetic deletion that affects a specific part of the brain. There is no set of terms in any language that exactly matches the symptoms of this deletion. And, in fact, characteristics resulting from mutations can be highly modified by upbringing and social circumstances. I am thinking of a person who acts as if she has Williams Syndrome, but who looks normal, and is brilliant.

Throughout human evolution, behavior patterns have sometimes been useful and sometimes not. Since each behavior has a different set of causes, human behavior has proven to be immensely variable. This has happened not because natural selection has done a bad job on human behavior, but because both the source and the target of human behavior is constantly shifting.

We can be glad we have empathy and altruism in the human species. And maybe Williams Syndrome is the price we pay for it.

Next, I will write about the evolution of nerds. Or not. Maybe I am a bit too close to the subject to be objective.

Biblical Deserts

There are many references in the Bible to deserts, none of them good. One of them is an Old Testament prophecy that Handel used in The Messiah: Make straight in the desert a highway for our God (Isaiah 40:3).

Clearly, Old Testament deserts are things that we should get rid of. And the Old Testament describes the reclamation of desert areas as the work of God. One of these passages follows immediately after the above quote.

When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights and fountains in the midst of valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane, and the pine together, that men may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it (Isaiah 41: 17-20).

The deserts, or wilderness areas, are not to be confused with thriving, highly-evolved desert ecosystems. In natural deserts, the plants have many exquisite adaptations to deal with heat and drought. Succulent plants store water, desert bushes have very deep roots, and desert plants even have special forms of photosynthesis that allow them to make food under all but the driest conditions. Some desert plants are small and tender, and have astonishing flowers, and they appear totally out of place in a dry desert. The way they survive is by living their whole lives, from seed to seed, in the brief rainy season. These are the deserts we need to protect, such as in Saguaro National Park (Arizona) or Anza-Borrego State Park in California. These are not the deserts to which the Bible refers.

 

The deserts of the Bible are the lands that have been corrupted by human civilization. Poor farming practices swept away the natural plant cover and caused soil erosion, leaving a barren landscape. That is why cities that were once thriving consisted only of collapsed walls surrounded by bare soil. This is what the earliest Sumerian cities looked like even at the time Isaiah wrote his prophecy. There was plenty of degraded land even around Jerusalem that everyone who heard Isaiah’s prophecy could readily see. To this day, most of the land around the Mediterranean remains partially degraded from millennia of human abuse. Today we think of Italy and Greece as dry shrublands; but they used to be, according to ancient writings, covered with thick forests.

If you are someone who is involved in any stage of land reclamation, to take a landscape that has been devastated by decades or centuries or millennia of human mismanagement, and turn it into a thriving ecosystem, you are doing some of God’s work. Although I do not believe that the modern nation of Israel is in fact God’s own special country, it is obvious that modern Israel has done a lot of reclamation, making what had been a devastated landscape bloom. They have been pioneers of soil conservation and dry land agriculture. Drip irrigation was invented in Israel. The joke goes: on the cover of the birthday card it says, In honor of your birthday, a tree has been planted in Israel. Inside the card it says, Wednesday is your day to water it.

The lands that have been reclaimed from human-produced deserts do not look like natural deserts. Just read the list of plant species in the passage above. Cedar, acacia, myrtle, olive, cypress, plane, pine. There is no natural ecosystem where you will find all of these trees together. They have to be planted in a garden that has displaced the degraded land.

None of this is miraculous. It is just good, hard work based on scientific studies (many of them Israeli). Isaiah says that God has done this. But it was not miraculous. God works through us, in this case through scientists and farmers. In order to see it as God’s work, you have to do what Isaiah said: to see and know, to consider and understand together. A quick glance at the trees is not good enough to see the work of God through mankind.

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.

Platonic Friendships

I have been reading a book, What We Are, by Lonnie Aarssen. Aarssen is a Canadian plant ecologist, roughly contemporaneous with me. He has made the transition from plant ecologist to evolutionary psychologist—that is, studying the effects of our human evolutionary history on the way our brains work. I have made the transition from plant ecologist to a general science writer, so I know about evolutionary psychology, but do not know as much as Aarssen.

I’m not sure platonic friendship can be defined, but most of us have a general understanding of it. Aarssen makes the assertion that it is very difficult for men and women to form platonic relationships. Why? Rather than attempting a detailed summary of his reasons, I will just say that it is because men are jerks. They want to conquer women, not befriend them. That sort of captures the meaning.

I immediately recognized that this is not true of me. As I think over my life, I have had lots of platonic relationships with women. I recently made a list of people—men and women; all ages; most of them still alive—who have been important in my life, just so I could remember them. The list had 111 names, and the list keeps growing. Of these, 55 are women of a reasonably similar age with myself and with whom I had a close friendship, and with none of which I had sex. What is wrong with me?

In many cases, it would have been professionally unethical—for example, students and colleagues. But in at least 30 cases, there was no such difficulty (they were single and not, at least at the time, my students). So, I ask again, what is wrong with me?

What is wrong with me is love. In earlier decades, it was religious conviction. Later, it was that I did not want to endanger or stress my marriage. Neither of these is known, on a societal level, as a reason why a man does not have sex. But I loved all of these women, and did not want to mess up the trust they were placing in my friendship. I know for a fact that at least a few of them would have welcomed sexual intimacy from me. But a life is something you build, and as I look back on mine, I am satisfied with the choices I have made.

I knew that I was unusual, but I did not realize how unusual.