Crow Scientist is Live

For years, I’ve been fascinated by crow behavior, and now I have something to show for it. It’s the free app that shows kids how to observe crows the way a scientist does, and for this project I had the pleasure of working with John & Colleen Marzluff. It was a real treat to learn about crows from the experts. We talked for the first time in May, and the app is done already, with Karen Lewis’s art and all. We need feedback from players, and we need 5-star reviews. Here’s a link to the official Crow Scientist page.

The app naturally relates to my overall goal of teaching evolution science to children. Specifically, it teaches two important lessons about natural selection. First, what allows animals to survive is their behaviors. Kids observe crows and note their behaviors on checklists. Second, animals have lots of offspring, most of which die. One checklist is for breeding season observations, including young crows ending up killed. 

Doing the heavy lifting for the app was David Marques, who also published Clades Solo. He’s a creative partner as well as the programmer, and he added a wonderful feature to the app: you can add in your own photos of the behaviors you see. I’ve started adding my own photos, and it’s silly how fun it is. Players can even submit their photos to Phosphorlearn for possible use in the app. 

Kids can also submit their crow art, which the Lead Crow Scientist will post on Instagram. That’s Colleen Marzluff. She’s passionate about kids, nature, and science. You can submit art on the Phosphorlearn page or contact Colleen directly on Instagram.

Family Climate Action Event

Kids made art and letters

A bunch of kids in my UU congregation decided that climate change is their biggest concern, so they contacted the climate action team, where I’m a co-chair. Together we came up with this plan for engaging several families in what we called the Family Climate Action Event. The main purpose of the program was to have the kids work together to take collective action and then to learn what more they can do. In addition, it helped families get to know each other and stay in touch during the pandemic. During the first of two zoom meetings, the families talked about environmentalism, and the kids made art and wrote letters for policy-makers. For the concluding meeting, a climate-oriented policy-maker met with the families to explain the current political scene. If intergenerational climate action is your thing, a Family Climate Action Event is easy to pull off. Here’s how it worked for us. 

First Meeting, Art and Letters

This meeting launches the project, it connects the kids’ actions to the community, and it helps families get to know each other. We had a couple climate-action folks from the congregation drop in, too. 

Welcome, Chalice Lighting, and Introductions: For Introductions, people took a minute to find something that reminded them of the interconnected web of existence and bring it back. When each family introduced themselves, they also showed their item and talked about it. 

Artwork: Got kids started on their art. The church provided blank postcards for the kids to put art on. 

Adult Fishbowl: Each adult recounted a personal experience with the environment, pollution, climate change, etc. Kids pretended they weren’t there. (5 min) 

Kids’ Fishbowl: Each kid said something about the environment. Grownups pretended they weren’t there. (5 min)

The 70s looked dire.

Speaker: I talked about my lifelong experience with environmentalism and how experiences at church have brought me to focus on collective action. The conclusion I shared is that personal behavior change is good but collective action is where the main action is. (5 min)

Letter Writing and Art: Kids started wirting letters or kept working on their art, and they chatted. The leaders provided names and addresses of policy makers that they could write to, including the policy maker they were scheduled to talk to. 

Screen Grab: Kids held up their art for a screen grab. Ideally you get an image that’s fun and safe to share. 

Closing 

Second Meeting, Policy Maker

For our Washington state congregation, we chose Rep Joe Fitzgibbon, who chairs the House Environment & Energy Committee. We arranged a half-hour block where he could meet with our families remotely. He spoke about his own passion for addressing climate change, and he answered questions prepared in advance by the families. As it turned out, he touched on some points that had come up earlier in the Art & Letters meeting, such as beef and acid rain. The families all changed their names on zoom so we could take a screen shot and not identify anyone. 

The families met for half an hour before the meeting with Joe and for half an hour afterwards. That was more than enough time, and the extra space led to a valuable converation about get out the vote efforts and the election. 

Rep Joe Fitzgibbon talked to us about his
passion for fighting climate change

Other Unitarian-themed posts: jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/search/label/Unitarian

Not "Race" but Ancestry

Modern genetics says there are no
homogeneous, essential “races”

tl;dr I used to think that “race” meant nothing, biologically speaking. Now I think it means not much.

In the 80s, I studied race as part of my BA in sociology, and I was proud to learn views that represented the best science. Experts such as Richard Lewontin and Stephen J Gould taught that what we think of as “race” does not correspond with human ancestry or meaningful biological differences among groups. Gould, perhaps the most storied popularizer of evolutionary thinking the 20th century, said, “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years”. Cultural change had taken over, the experts said, and biological change had ended. Based on that scientific understanding, it was impossible that people of different “races” could be biologically distinct in any way. Learning this view, I considered “race” to be as irrelevant to biology as astrological signs are. That was the 80s. Since then, two things have happened that led me to adjust my views, albeit not to reverse them. Personally, I married a black woman, and we raised a biracial daughter together. Scientifically, geneticists mapped the human genome. Based on new evidence, I now see differences in continental ancestry as biologically real but still mostly insignificant. That position contradicts today’s racists, who want us to believe that “racial” differences are telling and definitive. It also angers people who either still believe what Gould and Lewontin taught in the 80s or who think that we shouldn’t talk about the new evidence because it’s too problematic. A recent study suggests that teaching students the facts of human genetic variation leads to a significant reduction in prejudice, and that sounds great to me. The alternative—not talking about the new findings—means that racists can tell potential recruits that we egalitarians are hiding scientific information. If we act like we’re afraid of these findings, it helps racists spread the lie that the new findings are a threat to our egalitarian ideals. Our society has a problem with the return of racist pseudoscience. My view is that the best way to counter pseudoscience is to use good science.

Sometimes when people hear me talking about differences among “races”, they jump to the conclusion that I endorse all the claims people make about such differences, such as alleged innate differences in IQ. Let me clarify in advance that my point is just the opposite, that we should distinguish the claims that have scientific support from those that don’t. Here for example, is a study that distinguishes between certain medically-relevant differences (supported by the evidence) and cognitive differences (what the racists want you to believe). The racists want people to consider all these claims as equally valid—all good. Certain of my fellow progressives agree with the racists to the extent that we should consider all these claims to be equally valid, although with the idea that they should all be rejected. Treating all these claims as alike in their value seems to be a mistake because it puts racist pseudoscience on the same footing as research you can find on PubMed. 

In 1992, I married a black woman secure in the knowledge that humans from all over the world are basically the same, and nothing I’ve learned since then has changed my mind about that. Despite whatever genetic differences there may be from one group to another, a man and a woman from any two places can have healthy, normal children together. The large differences among the “races” are socially constructed differences, while the biological differences are minor. My wife passed away in 2008.

In 1994 when our daughter was born, a nurse told me that she was physically advanced. I made some joke about my good genes, and the nurse responded by telling me that black newborns tend to be advanced compared to white babies. That response came as a shock to me because it violated expert opinion as I’d learned it. Since this observation contradicted my deeply held beliefs about “race”, I compartmentalized it. Despite the contrary evidence, I still believed that “races” were not just merely social constructs but in fact constructed out of nothing. Thanks to this compartmentalization, it took multiple lines of evidence from different sources and years of mental adjustment before I could see that Gould and Lewontin had simply been wrong. If some of my fellow progressives are angry at me for my views about genetics and human variation, I can sympathize with them because they are the views that would have infuriated me when I was in my 20s.

The other lines of evidence came from genetics and medicine. In medical research, doctors need to know what the biological facts are, regardless of politics. They have found real differences among different populations, although they’re not the sort of differences that racists wish they had found. For example, if you’re looking for a compatible donor for a bone marrow transplant, your continental ancestry* makes a difference. European-Americans are more likely to find a compatible donor among the pool of other European-Americans, and you can say the same thing for other groups. Researchers studying obesity have also found that people of different ancestries tend to carry fat on different parts of their bodies, so an overweight person of East Asian ancestry is likely to suffer ill effects at a lower proportion of body fat than someone of sub-Saharan ancestry.

Another line of evidence comes from genetics. With a sample of someone’s DNA, scientists can determine which continent or continents the person’s ancestry derives from. Personally, I’m northern European. In the 80s, I had been led to believe that human genetics was such a blur that we’d never be able to pinpoint someone’s “race” from their DNA (see “cline”). Now that we’ve mapped our genome, geneticists can identify not only someone’s continental/global ancestry but also which smaller ethnic group they belong to and in some cases which valley their ancestors lived in. For certain ethnic groups, such as East Africans, Uighurs, or Hazaras, geneticists can measure how much of their DNA comes from one continent and how much from another. East Africans represent an admixture of West Eurasian (“Caucasian”) DNA and sub-Saharan African DNA. Uighurs and Hazaras represent admixtures of West Eurasian and East Asian DNA. A close look at the features of people from these ethnic groups seems to confirm these ancestries.

As for Gould’s claim that there has been no biological change for tens of thousands of years, just the opposite is true. Cultural evolution has not replaced biological evolution but instead accelerated it. Domesticating milk-producing animals, for example, has led several human groups to independently evolve adaptations that allow them to digest milk sugar (lactose) in adulthood. Scientists have also identified an adaptation among Tibetans for living at high altitudes and an adaptation for diving among the indigenous Bajau of Indonesia. Gould’s outdated argument against the importance of “race” was that natural selection hasn’t operated fast enough to differentiate people of different continental populations. In fact, natural selection has operated so fast that there’s a new argument against the importance of “race”. Evolution has led to regional differences within each continent, contradicting the idea that continental populations (“races”) are homogeneous. Racists might want to talk about a single “white race”, but Europeans represent an admixture of three “races”: indigenous hunter-gatherers, Anatolian farmers, and finally cattle-herders from the steppe. Sprinkle in a little Neanderthal DNA, and obviously it’s impossible for any white person to be “purely” white. The same goes with any other “race”: they’re all amalgams. These amalgam genomes vary from one valley to the next, so continental gene pools play out as countless variations at the local level. No one of these variations is the “real” genotype or phenotype of that gene pool. 

In addition to changing my scientific view of genetics as new evidence became available, I have also personally become more matter-of-fact about “race”. The views I hold today, as innocuous as they seem to me, would have angered the Jonathan Tweet of 1994, and I’m not surprised that they anger some folks today. So should we talk about the differences that researchers have identified? Maybe I’m wrong, but it looks like avoiding these findings doesn’t work. My daughter and I do not want to see racist pseudoscience gain any more ground, and the practice of avoiding the new evidence has evidently failed to keep the pseudoscience in check. If avoiding the evidence hasn’t worked, what can we do? 

When I spoke at Seattle’s first March of Science, I said that evidence can bring us together. Charles Darwin looked at the evidence and concluded that humans all over the world are the same species, not separately created kinds as certain creationists had concluded. In my children’s book, Grandmother Fish, I coach parents to explain to their kids that we are one human race, all the descendants of “Grandmother Human” (see below). I’m heartened to learn that antiracist researchers have confirmed that teaching the facts of human variation can reduce prejudice. Certainly, some people who share my egalitarian ideals take exception to my approach to human biology, but I don’t bear them ill will. Their motivations are positive even if the way they treat me is negative. Twenty-five years ago, I would have agreed with their criticisms, and that perspective makes it easier for me to be charitable toward them than it is for them to be charitable toward me. My hope is that over the next few decades the power of evidence will lead us to greater agreement.

“If, as scientists, we fully abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing human differences, we will leave a vacuum that will be filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.” 

—David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018)

* AKA “global ancestry”

Links

“Can Biology Class Reduce Racism?” by Amy Harmon. Experimental curriculum uses science to head off students’ racist intuitions.

‘The Native American/East Asian "race"’, using modern genetic science to debunk 19th-century racial categories.

 * * *

“Race”: I put “race” in scare quotes because it doesn’t really exist according to its traditional understanding but there’s no widely recognized replacement term for groups that share continental ancestry. [EDIT: I asked around, and “ancestry” or “genetic ancestry” look like good terms. Link.] [EDIT: Also, “global ancestry”.]

Being Wrong: What it was like for me to be wrong about big ideas.

Speech at March for Science Seattle: Evidence can unite us.

Diversity in D&D: Gender and human “races” in D&D Third Edition (EN World).

Testosterone for Amateurs

Testosterone drives male
robins to compete

Testosterone is in the news these days. It’s an interesting hormone that gets talked about a lot, especially in terms of human differences. Speaking personally, I value testosterone as one of the things that connects our little human family to the wider family of animals. Here’s what I’ve learned about testosterone over the last 10 to 20 years.

Testosterone (T) is a steroid. It occurs in both men and women, but most men with “low testosterone” have levels that would be off the charts for women. In addition to levels being higher in adult males, they are higher in male fetuses, infants, and adolescents. 

In vertebrates at least, testosterone mediates the development of a masculine phenotype, with “masculinity” meaning different things for different species. The hormone that drives a male robin to face off with other males is testosterone. In the winter, when T levels are low, male robins tolerate each others’ presence rather than fighting. For most mammals, T spurs growth and thus males are larger. For species of lizards in which males are smaller than females, T inhibits growth instead.

The default body plan for mammals is female, with male hormones diverting the embryo toward the male phenotype. An XY mammal that is insensitive to T develops as an infertile female.

In almost all mammal species, testosterone makes males bigger and stronger, on average, than females. That’s true for humans, and men’s upper body strength points to an evolutionary history of physical struggle. The dimorphism in our species, however, is small relative to other apes and nothing compared to gorillas or sea lions. Men don’t have antlers or peacock tails or other outlandish adaptations for out-competing the other males. Our species’ modest level of dimorphism suggests that male-to-male competition over mates has been low, lower than among chimpanzees or orangutans.

Testosterone levels have a large effect on human development and a smaller effect on current behavior. Exposure to T in the womb organizes the brain along male lines, especially with connections that become active when exposed to T at adolescence. In mammals, brains are wired for both male and female behaviors, with males predisposed toward but not limited to male-typical behaviors, and the same with females and female-typical behavior. 

Prenatal exposure to T predisposes a child to rough-and-tumble play and probably to being sexually attracted to women. 

Boys tend to be born larger than girls, especially a woman’s first son. Hormones at puberty increase the dimorphism between the typical males and females.

T promotes the sex drive in men and women. 

Trans men who take testosterone often report changes to mood. 

Each human is individually more or less sensitive to testosterone depending on the length of the “CAG repeats” associated with their androgen receptor genes. The gene is on the X chromosome, so women have two copies and are thus more likely to be in the “average” range of sensitivity. 

Further Reading

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley. If you want to learn about how sex functions and evolves not just for humans but across the family of living things: bacteria, parasites, millipedes, etc. 

The Female Brain and The Male Brain by Louann Brizendine. If you want to learn how hormones affect individual development and the human experience from embryogenesis to senescence. 

Other Evolution-Themed Posts

Crow Scientist is Live, 2020

[Review] Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett, 2019

Not “Race” but Ancestry, 2019

Testosterone for Amateurs, 2019

Evolution Unites Us All, 2018

March for Science, Seattle, my speech, 2017

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day, 2017

Mother Love and Human Nature, 2017

Kids and Grandmother Fish, 2017

Reading about Religion, 2014

Creatures of Love, 2011

Grief and the Human Animal, 2011

Evolution Unites Us All

Protesters in New Mexico

In 2017, New Mexicans crowded into a public hearing to speak up for scientific literacy, and the state Department of Education listened. Citizens criticized the department’s plan to drop climate change, the age of the Earth, and evolution from the science standards. In response to backlash, the DOE dropped its plan to edit the standards. Instead it will follow the Next Generation Science Standards in full, as developed by a consortium of states and organizations, such as the National Science Teachers Association. This news is a welcome change in a world that has increasingly rejected evolution science. Recently, governments from Turkey to Florida have been undermining children’s education in evolution. Our kids deserve a scientific understanding of who we are and where we came from. Evolution is more than just the bedrock of biology. Humans evolved from earlier life forms, and a scientific understanding of that fact promotes self-understanding and justice. From biology, we learn that each of us is born unique, that we are related to all life on Earth, and that we are connected to each other.

The theory of evolution tells us that humans can never fit neatly into categories. Natural selection works because the organisms in a population always vary among themselves. Today we need this lesson especially in the realm of gender diversity. Human brains prefer simple binary thinking, so it’s common for people to consider “male” and “female” to be all there is to say about gender. Obviously, we see more diversity than that, and biology tells us why. Biology is messy. The concepts of “male” and “female” are handy shortcuts, but the messy truth is that all sorts of different developmental processes contribute to that dichotomy, and human populations exhibit variety in all those processes. Generating adult male and female humans requires many steps. The fetuses’ genitals develop, their brains masculinize or feminize, the infants experience life either revved up on testosterone or not, children develop gender identities, and they develop sexual attraction. Finally, puberty hits and hormones activate the hormone-sensitive brain structures that were laid down during fetal development. Humans differ from each other in all those biological processes, most commonly in terms of sexual attraction. If all this built-in gender variety isn’t enough, the brain evolved for behavioral flexibility, so of course humans express more variety than found in our genes and hormones. Opponents of gender diversity treat is as if it were a violation of an ultimate, binary division, but evolution says that variety is our birthright.

Paradoxically, while the theory of evolution affirms that we are each unique, it also tells us how much we have in common with the rest of the living world. Traditionalists say that humans are essentially separate from animals, but evolution says we are in fact animals. When I was working on Grandmother Fish, Eric Meikle of the National Center for Science Education impressed on me that the core message of evolution is, “We are all related.” We need this lesson today because scientists say that we are driving our planet into its sixth global extinction. Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid wrecked the planet, but today the villains are climate change and habitat destruction. The theory of evolution tells us that the species we wipe out are our flesh and blood. The polar bears and all other living things are literally our distant cousins. Furthermore, just as all living things are one family, all humanity is one human race, as Darwin himself recognized. In fact, the entire Homo sapiens population today is just one closely related branch of the human race, which until recently included the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and more. Evolution science says that those of us on humanity’s one remaining branch are more alike than different.

Evolution tells us that we are related to all people not only by our shared DNA but also by our shared social instincts. Zoologists call a species like us “obligatorily social.” In everyday terms, we need each other. If you think that hell is other people, anyone in solitary confinement can tell you the opposite. For the human animal, sociality comes built in. Our natural habitat is not the savanna but the tribe. Our smile, for example, is an instinctive sign of happiness, and it functions only in a group. Our eyes also have white scleras so one human can see where the other is looking. Other primates have dark scleras so that competitors can’t track their gazes, but we humans are born to work together. According to social psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt, caring for others is a moral imperative that our ancestors evolved long ago. Today when politics is so divisive, maybe the theory of evolution can remind us of the value we all place on the primeval drive to care for each other.

Evolution says we are all unique, all related, and all bound up in each other’s destinies. Let’s take that to heart. Opponents of evolutionary theory are undermining the scientific understanding of human origins, gender diversity, and human nature. In this time of cultural conflict, let’s speak up for science like the people of New Mexico did in 2017. Let’s honor our connections—to our neighbors, to all humanity, and to the entire living world.

Speech at March for Science Seattle

Here’s the 4-minute speech I gave at the March for Science in Seattle, Earth Day 2017, April 22. That’s Karen up on stage with me, wearing a coral reef on her head. It was an honor to speak and a joy to march.

My topic is how evidence can unite us all. My book, Grandmother Fish, gives children evidence for evolution when they wiggle like a fish and hoot like an ape. Kids love learning that humans are part of the great family of animals. Evidence also says that humans are all one family, as Charles Darwin concluded. Evidence can unite the human family because it allows people to share ideas across cultural boundaries.

“Can you wiggle?”

Karen and I are available for artist and author visits, either together or independently. Contact us here: http://www.grandmotherfish.com/contact/

For what it’s worth, here are the notes I used when giving the speech.

evidence together
grandmother fish
earliest fish with jaws
over 400 Mya
200 million greats
3 years
evidence
Grandmother Fish
evidence for little kids
wiggle like a fish—earliest fish
crawl & breathe early reptiles
squeak & cuddle early mammals
grab & hoot early apes
walk & talk early humans
kids love: animals, family, animal family
“I am a HUUMAN”
family of life
humanity one big family
Charles Darwin knew—evidence
evidence says: all related
evidence bring us together
Chinese translation of Grandmother Fish—language, culture, political system, economic system
Not like me: English, Seattle, Mary Oliver, Unitarian
everyone’s story
we are all related
a vision of who were are that we can all share

2017

Male robins fighting over territory

Robins and Evolution for Kids

[This post was posted in March of 2017, before John & Colleen Marzluff and I created Crow Scientist, the free app that teaches kids how to observe real-life crow behavior.]

Now that spring has come to the northern latitudes, here in Seattle the robins are back in the parks. Robins are easy to observe so they provide a good opportunity to talk to kids about how behavior and natural selection play out. Here are science notes for kids, worded simply and arranged roughly from the most basic for the younger kids to the more advanced for older kids. These notes teach a core evolutionary concept, that individuals within a species compete with each other to have healthier and more numerous offspring.

Brighter Robins Are Male, Plainer Robins Are Female

The robins you see easily are males. They have bright red feathers on their chests, and they spend a lot of time out in the wide open. You can sometimes spot females, too, but they have duller breast feathers, and they don’t put themselves on display the way males do. Males also tend to be somewhat larger than females. Male robins are like roosters, and female robins are like hens. 

Male Robins Fight for Land

Robins need to gather food for their children, so each male fights to have a bigger plot of land. You often see two male robins out on a field or big yard, each keeping his distance from the other. When two robins face off and neither one backs down, they fly at each other and turn around each other in a sort of whirlwind. It’s easy to spot male robins facing off against each other because they stand out in the open. If they notice that you’re watching them, however, they might stop fighting, so be sneaky.  

Female Robins Choose Males with Good Land, Good Feathers, and Good Songs

When a female chooses a male with brighter feathers and a stronger song, that male is probably healthier than average. When she picks a male with a larger area of land, she probably gets more food for her chicks. If her mate is healthier and her chicks have more food, then her chicks are more likely to be strong and to survive. 

Most Chicks Die

A robin mother might hatch a dozen hatchlings in one summer, and most of them die before winter.   

Robins Fight Because They Can’t Cooperate

Robins don’t have language, laws, money, or other tools that humans use to divide up resources. That’s why robins are stuck fighting. Fighting takes lots of time and energy, and it’s dangerous, but it’s the only way a male robin can claim enough land to get a mate. Male robins don’t help each other, work together, or make friends with each other. 

Robins Don’t Know What They’re Doing

Male robins don’t know why they’re fighting. When they see another male’s red chest, they just feel like fighting. Female robins don’t know why they choose males with lots of land, bright feathers, or strong voices. They just feel like making that choice. Humans are driven by feelings, too, but we can reflect on our own behavior and even make explicit agreements with others about what we will do or won’t.  

This lesson is a big one because it’s easy for humans to project human-like thinking onto animals, or even machines.  

Testosterone Drives Male Competition

Hormones are chemicals that animals’ bodies make that affect how they grow, feel, or act. Testosterone is a hormone that affects how robin chicks develop in the egg. One effect of testosterone is to organize the male chick’s brain for fighting. When the chick grows into an adult and the breeding season starts, the male chick’s body creates more testosterone, driving it to fight the other males. Testosterone is a type of hormone called a steroid.

“Testosterone for Amateurs”, the basics about this much-talked-about hormone.

Cock robins at peace, a 10-second video of newly returned male robins hanging out peacefully. 

Bonus Science Humor

Robins are a type of thrush, and the genus name for thrushes is Turdus (Latin for thrush).

Crows in the Park
Once you learn the call of a hungry juvenile crow, it’s easy to spot crows families. With any luck, you'll see the the juvenile beating its wings and the parents feeding it.

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day

A song about natural selection by
cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo

Happy Darwin Day! Today I’m running a bunch of activities at Seattle’s Darwin Day celebration, noon to 3 in Bellevue. To coordinate with the organizer, I made a list of evolution activities that I’m ready to run, and here it is. I’ve done most of these activities at school visits or other events, but a few are untried. 

Grandmother Fish

The book is a starting point for discussions about evolution and about the history of life on earth.

Wiggle-Along: A read-along of the book, with five kids in front demonstrating the sounds and motions of each Grandmother. Everyone follows along. Great for kids getting their wiggles out. If you’re not familiar with the book, you can see an early draft being read to kids for the first time in this video, which we originally did for the Kickstarter campaign in 2014. 

Timeline exercises: The five kid volunteers are part of a visual demonstration of how much time has passed since each of the Grandmothers, compared to each other, compared to Earth’s history, and compared to the existence of the universe. You can print full-size images for the five “grandmothers” to hold, available here. 

The story of my book: For kids who dream about being authors someday, the story of how I wrote Grandmother Fish is partly inspirational and partly a caution. It took me many years to figure out how to do the book, and I needed help from many friends to get it right. You can do great things, but it can take a long time, and you need to learn to accept help. 

Q&A: There’s a ton of science behind Grandmother Fish that is not obvious on the surface, so if kids have questions, I have answers.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game
This is my animal-matching card game of evolutionary relationships. A “clade” is a complete branch of the evolutionary family tree. For example, “birds” composed a clade, and reptiles and birds together form a larger clade called Sauropsida. Up to 8 kids can play at once, but they’d have to all squeeze around a shared play area. This game is suited to an activity center, sort of like a craft session but for a game instead of a craft. People can drop into and out of games. The game is also a “conversation starter” for evolutionary history, as represented by the animals on the cards. Clades is illustrated by Karen Lewis, the same wonderful children’s artist who illustrated Grandmother Fish.

Kids’ Songs and Dances

We humans all evolved from people who sang and danced around the campfire all night. This stuff is fun for kids, and when kids dance, it’s an excuse for grownups to have fun, too. 

“Charles Darwin” dance: The hokey-pokey meets evolution, where kids evolve from fish into humans one body part at a time. Here a link to the lyrics. They start like this, and you get the idea. 

     “You put your right fin in, 

     You take your right fin out,

     You put your right fin in,

     And derive an arm right out…”

“If You’re Disgusted and You Know It”: A lot like “If You’re Happy and You Know It” but with universal facial expressions and sounds for key emotions: happy (smiling), sad (weeping), scared (scared face), disgusted (yuck face), and surprised (“oh” face).

“Five Violet Spiders”: A familiar tune gets original lyrics and a video by cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo. The song demonstrates natural selection, as the most visible spiders get eaten.

Link to video

Stand Up Interactive Activities

These activities require people to stand up and move around. 

Bloodlines: Roll giant dice to simulate the identification of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam in deep time. Little kids can do it, although it involves probably going extinct.

Mates: Mate-choosing simulations with cards. We simulate monogamy, mixed polygamy, and total polygamy. Kids can do it, but that might be weird. 

Life-on-Earth Timeline: This activity follows the Grandmother Fish reading. It could also be cut loose as its own activity. 

Walk-and-Talk

Stand and be counted with your people! Everyone stands in a group. The leader presents the group with either/or choices such as, “If your favorite dinosaur is a Triceratops or other herbivorer, move left. If your favorite dinosaur is a Tyrannosaur or other predator, move right.” Everybody moves and then gets to see how everyone else in the group answers each question. Opinionated people on either side can explain their choices. Periodically we stop and discuss, and then move on to new questions. The questions cover evolution questions that people can answer personally, such as favorite extinct animal, experience with evolution while growing up or in school, mammals versus birds, personal experiences (hunting, foraging, cooking, having children). It’s something of a mixer. 

Kahoot! Quizzes

These are two short online quizzes with my original questions and creative-commons images. They cover big ideas, not trivia. For each question, one option is a silly answer, so kids who can’t actually answer the questions can still play along by spotting the silly answers. I use each question as a way to put some aspect of evolution into a greater context, showing how this information fits into the larger picture. These quizzes are on the Kahoot! site, which allows people to answer questions on their phones and participate in the quiz all at once. The quizzes are free for the public to use. 

Wings Quiz: 12 questions on wings, which was the theme of Seattle’s Darwin Day this year. You can also listen to a 15-minute audio of my practicing running the quiz. You can see how I pull in evolutionary concepts and use the questions as starting points. 

Link to quiz    Link to audio

Evolution Quiz: 10 questions on evolution, Charles Darwin, and life on Earth. These are big ideas, like what Darwin thought of “savages”, not trivia, like what years Origin of Species was published. 

Link to quiz

Poetry Reading: “The Sea” by Mary Oliver

This poem is about a woman yearning to return to the fishy life of her ancestors. It’s so good I memorized it to recite at Burning Man one year. Evolution isn’t just about what happened in the past. It’s also about how we feel today, knowing that we are connected to all living things.

Link to poem    

There’s only time for me to do a fraction of these activities at Darwin Day today, but I hope to do the rest someday.

Mother Love and Human Nature

The three of us in 2006

In college in the 80s, I studied psychology and sociology, and at that time everyone knew that the biological view of human nature was bunk—racist, sexist, reductionist bunk. Thirty years ago, that outlook seemed reasonable, but now it turns out that the biological view has a lot to tell us about ourselves. It’s embarrassing that I was so wrong about human nature, but I have come to embrace the biological view. The biological view says that each person is unique, that variety is built into the human genome, that the brain evolved for behavioral flexibility, and that we humans are the most behaviorally flexible of all animals. The biggest benefit of biological thinking is that it makes better sense of the human experience than the blank-slate view that I learned in college. As a personal example, I submit the love that my late wife had for our daughter. The biological view affirms that mother love is a core component of human nature, while the blank-slate view portrays it as more like victimhood. 

Nothing that a biologist says about human mothers represents anything essentially true about humans as a group or as individuals. Biology is too messy to be essentialist. Nor can biology tell any individual that they must be a mother or should be a mother. When conservatives say that women should stay home and be mothers because it’s natural, that’s not biology talking. Considering the biology of human motherhood doesn’t oppress anyone. It’s the blank-slate view that minimizes the lived experience of most mothers.    

My wife had a hard life, but being a mother to our child brought her joy and a sense of purpose. Her love for our child came from deep within her being. Our daughter, for her part, was more than a passive subject of conditioning. She responded to her mother’s love with complementary instinctive behaviors, completing a positive feedback loop of mother-child communication and bonding. In the 80s studying sociology and psychology, I learned that a mother’s love for her child was something that had been trained into her by the culture’s gender role system. It didn’t spring from deep within and in fact was a tool that the patriarchy used to keep women down. My wife’s love was a conditioned response, they’d say, like thinking of pink as a “girl” color. Love like my wife’s, I was taught, merely feels as though it springs from deep within. That’s what I learned, but biology knows better. In reality, humans make the best mothers on the planet, bar none. Our mammal lineage has been developing mother-and-child instincts for hundreds of millions of years. As mammals go, we apes are exceptionally good mothers, and as apes go we humans are tops. The love my wife felt for our daughter really did spring from deep within her.

The blank-slate view tells women that their deep maternal feelings are actually shallow. The biological view says that a mother’s love for her children is the real deal, a profound element of the human experience.

2016

Great-Great-200-Million-Times-Great Grandmother Fish

Great Great Grandmothers of Deep Time

How long is 400 million years? How do you get a child to understand that Grandmother Fish lived 400 million years ago? Honestly, that span of time is beyond the comprehension of an adult, let alone a child. So here’s a thought experiment to help little minds and big one appreciate the mind-boggling span of time between the first jawed fish and us. How long would it take you to say Grandmother Fish’s name if you said it out in full with all the “greats” that she deserves? It’s been 200 million generations since Grandmother Fish was alive, so she is our great grandmother with 200 million “greats”. If you said two “greats” per second, it would take you three years to say her full name.

Kids can understand what three years means. They might have siblings that are three years older or younger. They might remember how little they were three years ago, and they might imagine how old they will be in three years. It’s still a long time for a little mind, but it is comprehensible in a way that 400 million years is not. If you really want to drive this home with a kid, have them imagine that somewhere there’s another kid who is just now starting to say Grandmother Fish’s name with all the greats. Then for the next three years, occasionally remind your child that this imaginary kid is still saying Grandmother Fish’s name without a break. Poor kid. You can see why I call her just “Grandmother” Fish. Then three years after you first mentioned it, tell your now-older child that the imaginary kid has finally finished saying Grandmother Fish’s name.

The other value of this exercise is that it drives home an astounding fact. If you went back in time 400 million years and found the earliest jawed fish, they would be the direct-line ancestors of every human on the planet. They would literally be your flesh-and-blood ancestors, your family. The fish you found would also be the ancestors of all land vertebrates, not to mention nearly all fish. What a difference 200 million generations can make!

Here are all five Grandmothers, the number of “greats” in their names, and how long it would take to say the name out lout (at two “greats” per second). These figures are based on estimates from The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, a book that helped me greatly as I worked on Grandmother Fish.

• Grandmother Fish, the earliest jawed fish. 200 million greats. 3 years.
• Grandmother Reptile, the earliest amniotes. 170 million greats. 2.5 years.
• Grandmother Mammal, the earliest eutherians. 120 million greats. 2 years.
• Grandmother Ape, the earliest apes. 1 million greats. 6 days.
• Grandmother Human, the earliest behaviorally modern humans. 4,000 greats. 80 minutes.

The time it takes to say a name corresponds to the number of generations that have passed, not the number of years. Apes have a slower life cycle than our earlier ancestors, so the number of “greats” in Grandmother Ape’s name is relatively small compared to the 30 million years since she lived. 

And if a kid gets excited and wants to try saying one of these names out loud, let them try. See how far they get.

Spotting Crow Families

An adult on either side, the juvenile in the middle.

This post is for animal lovers and especially for science-loving parents with little kids. Learn the call of the juvenile crow, and you’ll be able to find crow families for fun and education.

Here in Seattle, you can often hear fledged juvenile crows pestering their parents for food. Here’s a link to an audio clip of this distinctive call.

Juvenile crow call

In this call, a parent might recognize the whiny tone of a demanding child. It’s April, and the complaining has begun.

If you hear this call, it’s often easy to find the juvenile. They’re not in the nest. Instead, Mom and Dad are taking Junior out for a scavenging tour. Mostly Mom and Dad get food and fly it back to Junior. Sometimes you’ll hear Junior’s call start fine and get garbled. That’s when a parent puts food in its mouth in mid-whine. As Junior grows, Mom and Dad act less and less accommodating. Junior has to fly closer and closer to the food to get fed. Eventually Junior has to follow Mom and Dad to where the food, and finally Junior is scavenging on its own.

You can spot a juvenile crow because it looks like a goof. Adult crows are just the opposite: savvy, aware, together, and poised. Juveniles are awkward, with clumsy posture and a certain air of cluelessness. Sort of like a teen boy who’s grown so tall in the last year that he doesn’t know what to do with his limbs. Other than this cluelessness, juveniles are hard to tell from the parents. A juvenile’s feathers puff out and make it look big, probably an adaptation that helps juveniles get eaten less often.

If you spook the parents, they may fly away, in which case the juvenile will follow them. If you hold still, you may be able to observe the adults feeding the child. Looking straight at a crow makes it more wary. It’s less threatening to watch them out of the corner of your eye.

If you’re a city parent, crow families are an opportunity to show your kids a little bit of nature and the cycle of life. For example, crows are a lesson in pair-bonding. Mom and Dad crow work side-by-side, not just raising kids year after year but scavenging day to day. Very different from robins, where the males love to fight each other and the most successful ones establish families with multiple females. Robins also choose mates over again each mating season. That’s a different sort of lesson for your kids.

Bonus self-referential question: Ask a kid if they can think of any other kind of animal that takes its young ones out and about to learn about the world. If you’re walking with that kid in a park telling them about crows, then the answer is you.