Expired Firefly

I found this firefly on the ground one morning, just before dawn. It was glowing faintly--you can see its glow area as the whitish area in the top photo. It is about half an inch (one cm) long. Click to enlarge.

Firefly Veneration

This spring/summer has brought us a very active firefly mating season. In May and June, hundreds of fireflies drift through the nighttime air, flashing their particular species' signal, hoping to find a mate and carry on their species' existence. The males float along, flashing their signal—looking for a female who might respond with a similar flash code from the ground; all driven to mate and procreate.

Over the last few years we've observed a decreasing number of flashes—worrying us about the health of these incandescent beetles. (Yes, they're not a true fly, but a beetle.) Maybe last summer's plentiful rain was favorable to the health of the current generation? In any case, we're thrilled with their plentiful flashing displays this year.

On a recent evening, I was settling into an overnight sojourn in my meditation hut, deeply absorbed by the multiple illuminations of these wee light sources. Many subspecies were active that night, as I observed a wide variety of flash codes—from steady flares of a second or so in duration to twinkles that pulsed several times a second. It was truly mesmerizing.

I had lit my customary candle and set it outside on a statue of the Buddha, when I began to notice several fireflies hovering near the candle. Were they intrigued by its beacon? Did one of them wish to mate with this mysterious and continuous light source?

My mind played with the whimsical possibilities that could be playing out. I began to imagine what might be going on in the minds of these flashing beetles. I fantasized about how they could possibly interpret the light from the candle. They must have been amazed at the strong, unwavering nature of the strange luminescence being emitted by that thing. They may have been thinking: “It's not moving. Could it be a female? Why doesn't it blink? There seems to be something otherworldly about it. It's awe inspiring—almost frightening.”

Then one of the fireflies might have exclaimed that it could be a god. “It doesn't seem threatening, but none of us is able to maintain that steadfast glow. It obviously has superior powers. It must be a god.”

Just then a moth spiraled into the candle, and the fireflies seemed to back off in amazement. “It has to be a god, because we've just watched a sacrifice. Hail to the firefly god!” Many of them moved a little farther away, either out of respect or fear. Some of them flew off at a distance—not wanting their god to witness their lurid mating scenes.

I watched two fireflies that remained. Were they older and wiser? Were they filled with reverence? I imagined the older one predicting that the god's light would soon wink out. He'd seen it before. He knew that some of the younger guys might lose a little faith when that happened, but he also predicted that in another four nights the god would return, radiating its steady, holy beacon. “Keep the faith, brother. Our god will return.”

[Note: My wife and I do an outdoor bath every four days, after which I spend the night in my meditation hut. Thus, the wise firefly elder is right. Another candle will be lit four days from now.]

Upright Origins

Evolutionary studies have conclusively demonstrated that humans and the great apes originated from a common ancestor, some six million years ago. In fact, DNA analyses show that we share some 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos. We are close cousins.

So why do Homo sapiens stand upright on two legs, while our ape cousins hunker down closer to the ground, getting about on four legs? While we began running around on the ground on two legs, they maintained the ability to negotiate their way through the trees with strong forearms. Our forearms, on the other hand, morphed into appendages capable of carrying things around, while theirs maintained the ability to swing from tree to tree.

It has become an acceptable idea on the part of anthropologists that at some time in the past—some four million years or so ago—the vast forests of Africa transitioned to vast savannas of grasslands, punctuated by occasional trees. What's a tree-swinging ape to do, when the trees become spaced too far apart to enable it to swing from one tree to another? Well, it comes down to the ground and forages for food there, adapting to the new environment.

The threat on the ground, however, is that now lions and tigers find you at their level—providing them a new tasty treat. Lions love the savanna, which gives them the opportunity of chasing down prey that cannot leap into a tree to escape their charge.

Evolution, ever on the march for one species to be eaten and another to avoid being eaten, transformed our ancestors into critters who could stand upright, so they could better spot a lurking lion, and survive another day. Those savanna grasses could be peered over by ancient upright Homo erectus, giving them a survival advantage. In the meantime, chimps retreated to dense stands of trees along rivers, while our direct forebears came to preside over the open savannas. Not only could we see better in our elevated stature, but our arms were now available to carry food, weapons, and babies.

So what brought about the transition from dense forests to wide-open savannas? Climate change of some sort probably did it. Over the last several million—or even billion—years Earth's climate has spectacularly fluctuated. The causes of change have been diverse. We are often not sure of the origins of climate variation, although we can demonstrate that it did happen and describe the consequences.

Now comes the results of a recent fascinating study at several US universities suggesting that a series of supernovae in our corner of the Milky Way Galaxy showered the Earth with cosmic rays a few million years ago. For quite a long period of time these rays ionized the planet's atmosphere—causing it to be far more electrically conductive. The result could have been an increase of wildfires triggered by lightning in African forests, transforming the terrain from forests into grasslands. With trees much more scarce, grasses took over, and it's an advantage to stand above the grass, to spot those hungry lions.

So, were exploding stars the trigger for Homo species to become dominant? We know that, without supernovae, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium would never have been created in the early universe. Thus, it's true that we are all stardust—from rocks to plants to animals. Maybe we humans even owe our ascendancy to those exploding stars?

Dill Dew Drops

Dew drops on a stalk of dill weed. Click to enlarge.

Physics Envy

There are the so-called “hard sciences,” like physics and chemistry. Then there are the “soft sciences,” like psychology, biology, and economics, which have often aspired to build models that are as precise, quantitative, and “hard” as those of physics. The appeal of Newtonian physics these last 400 years has been its simplicity and its ability to derive equations that elegantly express the behavior of the natural world. 

But the allure of physics is much more than its basic equations such as Newton's F = ma or Einstein's E = mc²; it's the capability to predict the future behavior of things. These straightforward equations allow one to predict what will happen tomorrow, based on what we see today. That ability to prognosticate shows us that there is order to the physical universe.

This capacity to predict has a great attraction to soft-science economists and psychologists. If they can boil down their social sciences into similar elegant equations or postulates, they will then achieve what physicists have long done: simply describe how things behave and how they will go in the future.

The problem with economics is that it is nowhere near as mathematically precise as physics. This annoys economists, because every lay person feels qualified to weigh in on economics (thinking they understand this very complex process), as they tend to leave physics and its often complicated equations to the erudite scientists. For example, what happens in the theoretical world of particle physics seems to have little to do with my daily existence (or my ability to understand it), but what happens to the Federal Reserve's interest rate, I can feel in my bank account.

A central issue here is that science is studying the natural world—which is consistent and repeatable—while economics studies the unpredictable, if not sometimes whimsical, behavior of human beings. So in the late 19^th century and into the 20^th, several leading economists tried very hard to give economics a solid mathematical foundation. The school of economics led by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago helped to put economics on what they believed to be a rational, mathematical basis. This process reached an apogee in the 1990s, when economists like Alan Greenspan (who spent nearly 20 years as the chairman of the Fed) became lionized as the gurus of economic “scientism.”

Instead of realizing the prosperous future that their models predicted, however, things went disastrously wrong. Greenspan's policies—implemented by Bill Clinton—fueled a speculative bubble that badly burst in 2008. So today a number of economists are waking up to the fact that economics is a field that is neither as quantifiable nor predictable as they'd thought. 
 
Furthermore, research shows that people do not make economic decisions based on rational thinking. We are impulsive and many of our choices are driven by our subconscious urges. We are not mathematical in our behavior. Thus, market transactions do not behave as straightforwardly as the laws of nature, in a concise mathematical way.

So physics envy on the part of “soft” scientists has largely been a misplaced attempt to quantify the squishy discipline of economics. This was outlined nicely in a 2010 paper: “Warning: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous to Your Wealth,” by two professors at MIT. It's taken a few years for some economists to accept that their discipline is not precisely mathematical or even very predictable. The authors of this paper point out that, although the attempt to make economics a mathematical science has brought some insights into the market place, “physics envy has also created a false sense of mathematical precision in some cases.” 
 
My former career was in physics, largely because I liked the simplicity and consistency of that hard science. Economists have learned in recent years to give more weight to the erratic choices that we make in the market place. Maybe that might help avoid another Great Recession, as happened in 2008.