Kids and Grandmother Fish

Kids loved even this early draft of  Grandmother Fish.

Macmillan is picking up Grandmother Fish for a second edition in September, and Karen and I are ecstatic. We’ll reach a lot more kids, and we won’t have to do the packaging, shipping, and marketing. This deal is really quite a milestone for us, and it’s a joy to bring the miraculous story of evolution to lots of little kids. Last year at this time, I was really excited by the response that the book had gotten from parents and educators. Now I’m even more excited because I’ve seen and heard how children respond to Grandmother Fish. 

Before finishing the book, we had lots of people read sketchy versions to children, and the results seemed promising. We even saw the “light go on” when a girl, having the story read to her by her mother, saw Grandmother Human and realized that the story was about her. The only test that counts, however, is when parents are reading the finished book to their children. Now that we have self-published the book, we have heard from plenty of parents about how kids in their own homes respond to it, now complete with all of Karen’s lovely art. The verdict? Kids love Grandmother Fish. Lots of parents tell me that this book is their children’s favorite book, or even that their kids want the story read to them every night. 

A professional editor said she was surprised that both her 3-year old and her 6-year old loved it. One 4-year old has memorized the book and now “reads” it to his dad, something he’s never done with any other book. 

For an older girl, it’s the first book she was motivated to read (actually read) by herself. 

One 2-year old delights in telling people “I AM A HUMAN!” She belts out that phrase at the store or over the phone—wherever she finds a listener. 

A 4-year old reportedly asked his parents, “What do you think we’ll evolve into?” His dad told me that the question made his heart and his wife’s heart “sing a little.” 

One father, an author I greatly respect, sent me a video of his little girl struggling to read the “cuddle” page. Then, in a heart-melting comment, she says she wants to put the book in her “beauty drawer,” where she keeps beautiful things forever. 

A blogger and mother of two boys with autism says Grandmother Fish is great for her kids. 

Lots of parents also tell me that kids love studying the phylogenetic tree in the back, a great feature that Karen encouraged me to add to the book. 

It’s been tremendously gratifying to hear all these stories. As near as I can tell, the book really seems to connect to kids. Wiggling like a fish is a lot of fun, but I think what really appeals is that the story grounds the child in the family of living things. When a 2-year old announces to strangers “I AM A HUMAN,” she’s saying “I see where I fit in.” I would say that reaching kids this way is a dream come true, but honestly I never dreamed that children would respond so deeply to Grandmother Fish. Karen and I can’t wait until the second edition releases in September. Then we’ll all really see what the reaction is like. 

2016

Description of first PNW gathering

Oasis Coming to Seattle

Oasis is a secular community that started in Houston, spread to Kansas City, and is now opening chapters across the US. Founders from Houston and Kansas City came to the Pacific Northwest to support locals who are interested in opening a chapter here, and I was curious enough to attend the first gathering. A group of mostly ex-Mormons, connected over the Internet, is providing the core of interested people bringing Oasis here. It’s similar to Sunday Assembly, although with weekly gatherings, less singing, and better childcare. Overall, I liked what I saw, and I recommend folks check it out. 

Oasis meets weekly, which is great if it works. Folks are not expected to attend every week, but they’ll still probably attend more often than folks attend Sunday Assembly, which meets monthly. In terms of building community, the more you meet, the better. 

Music at Oasis is provided by musical guests for attendees to listen to, as opposed to the group singing that typifies churches, Sunday Assembly, and all manner of communal gatherings back to our primordial history. Lots of secular people feel weird singing in groups, so for them Oasis is going to be more comfortable. As for me, I’m not much of a spectator, so listening to someone perform isn’t as compelling as singing in a group. I can’t really sing, but I don’t let that stop me. By not singing together, modern people are turning their backs on our universal heritage, but that’s a whole other story. 

Oasis offers childcare, although it doesn’t yet have a curriculum or formal program. They’re already ahead of the game if they provide a casual program where secular kids have fun together while their parents do something more adult. They also have their ducks in row as far as background checks and other security precautions you need when dealing with children. Kids’ programming, or at least childcare, is something that most secular groups leave out, and usually you have to go to a church to find an intergenerational community. (That’s what I do. I’m a Unitarian.) For me part of being a feminist is supporting parents and families. If a program offers no options for kids, that’s a burden for both men and women, but mostly for women. 

Like Sunday Assembly, Oasis features informative and personal talks as well as music. Talking and listening to talks is one activity that secular people have nailed. In fact, if even listening to songs is too churchy for you, the Seattle Atheist Church offers a program that’s all talk. As for Oasis, I’m happy to report that their policy is not to take their gatherings as an opportunity to carp about religion. There’s more than enough negativity in the atheist community already.

Oasis also features social events. In fact, in Kansas City the atheist group there is devoted to activism, leaving Oasis as the default place for organizing secular get-togethers and service projects. Some participants skip the services and just participate in the social and service programs. Here in Seattle, the social angle is already well covered. Seattle Atheists has a huge array of get-togethers and a few regular service projects, Sunday Assembly offers a parallel track of get-togethers, and smaller secular groups provide more options for social gatherings. Seattle Atheists has a book club, Sunday Assembly has a book club, and Oasis will probably have a book club. Seattle Atheists has game nights, so does Sunday Assembly, and I bet Oasis will, too. It sure would be great if there were an easy way for someone to see all the social options there are out there for secular people in the Seattle area.

A big question is where the gender ratio will end up at communities like Oasis. Atheists are mostly men, and church appeals disproportionately to women. So where does that leave “atheist churches”? We’ll see. Given how hostile the atheist community can be for women, I'm sure that these groups focusing on community will do better than atheist forums on the Internet. 

The information meeting was in Tacoma, but the first chapter might open in Seattle, where the largest number of interested people were from. The group is organizing a launch team to prepare for a launch in June. If you’re interested in getting involved, the Meetup group is a great place to start [http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Oasis-Secular-Community/], and you can contact organizers there.

2016

Clades Card Preview

Squamates, by Karen Lewis

Karen recently updated the card face for Clades, the secret game we’re working on, and here’s what they look like. With this nice look, I’m getting excited about this game. For years I was stumped by the question of how to do an evolution game. Now I have one.

All my life I have loved biology, but I never learned what a clade was until I started studying evolution to write Grandmother Fish. Now that I know what a clade is, I’m so excited about the idea that I created a game about it. A clade is any complete branch of the evolutionary family tree. In other words, it is an ancestral population plus all the descendants of that population. “Mammal” is a clade because all mammals descend from an early mammalian population, and no other animals do. The category “reptile” is not a clade because birds descend from the same early reptiles that lizards and crocodiles descend from. Since “reptile” doesn’t include birds, it doesn’t include all the descendants of those early reptiles and can’t be a clade. Biologists have reclassified living things along cladistic lines, putting birds with reptiles in the “sauropsid” group (meaning “lizard-face”).

The top card shown is the clade Squamata (“scaly”). Squamates are lizards and snakes. The card also shows four smaller clades: the chameleon clade, the snake clade, the gecko clade, and the Toxicofera clade (including snakes and chameleons but not geckos). In turn, the Squamata clade shown on this card is part of the sauropsid clade with birds, turtles, and crocodiles. The bottom card is the clade Whippomorpha, which includes whales, dolphins, and hippos. The whippomorphs are part of a major mammal clade including deer, pigs, horses, carnivores, and most large land animals.

Whippomorphs,  by Karen Lewis

Since the concept of the clade is based on common descent, clades demonstrate that evolution has happened. The only reason that scientists can read the genomes of different organisms and classify them together in clades is that different species evolved from common ancestors. When we say that hippos are closely related to whales, we don’t mean that they’re alike. We mean that their common ancestor lived not too long ago, maybe 50 million years ago in this case. In the 1700s, Linnaeus classified organisms according to their traits, such as whether they have scales. Today, we classify organisms according to their evolutionary family history.

The clades concept helped me create an evolution-themed game that kids and grownups can both play. For years I’ve mused about how one could create an evolution-themed game that didn’t compromise on the science. The big problem, as Richard Garfield has observed, is that games are about players planning to reach a goal, which is the opposite of evolution. By its nature, evolution defies the default structure of a game. Another problem is that you “win” evolution by reproducing. Computer games can model reproduction easily, but that’s hard to do with a tabletop game. One year when the Burning Man theme was evolution, I ran mate-choice simulations using playing cards, but we couldn’t do successive generations because there’s no easy way to represent reproduction. And that’s where I was stuck. Thanks to my research on Grandmother Fish, I learned about clades. That gave me a new angle from which to approach the problem of how to do an evolution-themed game, and I’m gratified to have finally designed one. Happily, this game is all about Karen’s cute, little pictures of animals, which are on all the cards. 

As with Grandmother Fish, it’s exciting to be on the side of scientific literacy, especially evolutionary science. Scientific literacy has been on the rise for the last century, and that may have contributed to the rise in IQs. Science is so well-proven that even the opponents of science, such as creationists, pretend to be scientists. Evolution in particular is a great topic to be working with because it’s a scientific topic that people respond to emotionally. Some people hate it, but others respond warmly to it. It’s about who we are, and I bet that’s why it matters to people. 

No more details yet. Just wanted to offer a peek at the cards and rave about clades. The plan is to run a Kickstarter later this year. Stay tuned. 

Clades in Grandmother Fish: post from last August.

More on clades: The Berkeley site Understanding Evolution has some nice explanations of clades free online. I also worked on the Wikipedia page. 

Historical Jesus Beats Mythical Jesus

150 years ago, David Friedrich Strauss described 

the gospels as part history and part myth, a formulation

that has stuck ever since.

Sometimes people ask me why, as an atheist, I'm so sure that Jesus existed as a real guy. Here's why. Historians conclude that Jesus probably existed because that’s the best explanation for the evidence we have.  There is a ton of evidence that an apocalyptic sect popped up within Judaism in the first century AD, and historians hypothesize an actual Jewish faith healer and martyr as the inspiration for this sect. The Jesus-myth hypothesis, on the other hand, doesn't offer any alternative explanation for where this sect came from. In fact, it  doesn't even try. Finally, you can just look at the state of Jesus mythicism and tell that it’s not credible scholarship.

Who founded Jewish Christianity?
A thriving Jewish sect existed before Paul established Christianity for gentiles. Who started it? Where? Historians say it was Jesus in Galilee. Mythicists have no clear answer.

Why did early Christianity have no official leader, rules, or creeds?
Early Christians struggled to figure out who could be a Christian, what you had to believe, whose direction to follow, and even who Jesus had been. There was no church hierarchy or pope to specify which people and beliefs were legitimate. Historians say that Jesus’ execution left the sect without clear direction and leadership. Mythicists don’t explain why the people who invented the sect left these leadership issues up in the air.

How did certain leaders in the early church get identified as Jesus’ brother and apostles?
Paul meets with Jesus’ so-called brother James, and with two so-called apostles, Peter and John. Historians explain this by saying those people were Jesus’ brother and disciples. Mythicists have no clear answer.

Who is the preacher who composed the sayings attributed to Jesus?
The gospels include a lot of unremarkable teaching attributed to Jesus that really anybody could have said. The synoptic gospels, however, also include a body of original teachings that challenged the assumptions of 1st century Jews. We underestimate the power and originality of these sayings because 2000 years later they’re old hat, but at first they were so unusual that evangelists sometimes “tamed” them with a little editing. Who came up with these remarkable sayings? Turn the other cheek? God's reign is like dirty leaven? Who is behind this distinctive voice? Historians say it was Jesus who said these unusual things. Mythicists have no clear answer.

Why did the author of Mark create a new literary genre, the gospel?
Today we take gospels for granted, but the first gospel was unprecedented. According to historians, the author strung together elements from written and oral traditions to synthesize a narrative. While myths tend to be about great heroes of the distant past, this was the story of a hillbilly bastard exorcist who had died a loser’s death just a generation or two earlier. Historians say that this genre-creating work was inspired by Jesus. How do mythicists explain Mark?

Why don’t Jewish and pagan critics of Christianity question Jesus' existence?
Critics said he was a fool, magician, fraud, or bastard but not a fiction. Historians say that Jesus was a public figure, so even critics of Christianity acknowledged that he had lived and died. What is the mythicist explanation?

Hitchens asks, why are the gospels full of weird details?
That's right, Hitchens laid out "impressive" evidence for why he thought there may have been a historical Jesus, whom he characterized as a charismatic, deluded rabbi. Hitchens makes the point that the gospels have enough weird elements that they are evidently “not a whole-cloth fabrication”. If Jesus were merely an invention, why would the gospels say he was from Nazareth in Galilee and not the “right” city, Bethlehem in Judea? Early Christians had to invent two competing explanations for how Jesus could have been born in Bethlehem despite growing up in Nazareth. If he were just a myth, why bring in Nazareth at all? And why are the first witnesses to the resurrection just lowly women and not higher-status men? Again, not a detail that one would invent. Here is a link to a video clip of Hitchens making his case.

What are the telltale signs of a fringe idea?
Revolutionary ideas, such as natural selection, deny the scholarly consensus and offer something better. Fringe ideas merely deny the scholarly consensus. Creationist arguments are primarily criticisms of evidence for evolution, not a better explanation of the fossil record. Mythicist arguments are primarily criticisms of evidence for Jesus, not a better explanation for how Christianity started. Where is the biologist who uses creationism in their work? Where is the historian who uses Jesus mythicism to write a better history of Christian origins?

What are the telltale marks of group-identity bias?
If a fringe idea is largely confined to an identity group, it’s probably the product of group identity rather than evidence. The same is true if the idea is especially popular with the more outspoken members of that group and if it readily inspires emotional arguments. Young-earth creationism is like this, and so is Jesus mythicism.

More evidence
My arguments are holistic and brief. If you want to get down to brass tacks and assess evidence in detail, here’s a great article in which an atheist historian lays it all out for us. Again, Jesus mythicists will try to pick apart each piece of evidence, but they can’t propose a more plausible explanation for where Christianity came from.

The Big Picture: Jesus Mythicism and Atheism
Accepting the historical consensus on Jesus and rejecting mythicism would be a great way for the atheist community to show that we value scholarship and evidence over our own group-identity bias.

2015

The amniote clade split into countless smaller clades.

Clades in Grandmother Fish

Last week the printer shipped me two of the first finished copies of Grandmother Fish, which I raised money for last year on Kickstarter. There’s a lot I can say about Grandmother Fish: the 15 years I’ve been working on it; the help I got from science communicators, parents and children; how Karen’s art brought out the soft side of evolution; the difficulty of turning evolution into a story; or the power of kinesthetic learning. Today what’s on my mind is the concept of clades. In the old way of thinking, each living thing went into one or another categorical bucket, as in bird, reptile or mammal. In terms of clades, there are no buckets. Instead there are countless branch points, each leading on to more branch points. A clade is an ancestral population and all living things that ever descended from that population. Each time the evolutionary tree of life branches, both new branches are still part of the original clade, but each also represents a smaller clade of its own. Grandmother Fish shows children how living things are related, branch by branch. What excites me about this is that it demonstrates a new way of thinking about relatedness. In the old way of thinking, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals were all classes of vertebrate. In the new way of thinking, reptiles and birds are in one clade, with mammals in a sister clade. Those two clade combine in the amniote clade, with amphibians as their sister clade. Then the amniotes and amphibians combine in the tetrapod clade, and so on. Where 19th century scientists saw tetrapods as four classes, 21st century scientists see them as countless nested populations defined by sequential branching in the family tree. That’s one of the subtexts of Grandmother Fish, that we organize living things according to their lines of evolutionary descent.

Creationists can’t create a book to match Grandmother Fish. They have no cogent explanation for why animals resemble each other the way they do. The evolutionary family trees in Grandmother Fish show children how various sorts of animals are related to each other. Creationists can’t even generate a list of which animals are which kind. They say that each animal is in one and only one kind, and that these kinds have biological reality, but they can’t assign each animal to a kind. That’s because animals come in clades, not kinds. Relationships among animals are complex. Creationism reduces relationship down to a single factor: for any two animals, are they the same kind or not? Evolution posits a more complex and informative question: for any two animals, what was their most recent common ancestor, what was it like, when did it live, and where?  That’s what the five Grandmothers are in Grandmother Fish, they’re common ancestors found at major branch points in the history of our lineage.

The two-page phylogenetic tree in Grandmother Fish was a stretch goal, and I’m glad we added it to the book. Getting each branch point in the right sequence was a challenge, especially because genetic testing is rewriting the tree year by year. But the hard work means that these two pages include a large amount of scientific information, all distilled down to a simple, visually appealing diagram. It’s the sort of information that one can’t imagine without understanding the concept of common descent.

Am I a Fake Atheist?

Atheists often say Jesus was a myth.

Occasionally, some of my fellow atheists accuse me of being fake. Sometimes they say I’m a Christian going undercover and trying to undermine atheism from within. To one guy, I’m a wannabe Christian, which at least is a little more imaginative. Or I’m a fake atheist, whatever that means. It feels weird to have someone from the tribe declare me an outcast, but I try not to take it personally. It’s just what I deserve for flouting tribal boundaries. 

Online and at atheist gatherings, I’m likely to challenge atheists when their criticisms of religion are unfair. For example, saying that there’s no evidence for a historical Jesus is a flat-out error. Identifying religion with mental illness is another popular misconception. It’s natural to be unfair to the “enemy camp,” so errors like these are common. In terms of tribal politics, my criticizing a fellow atheist’s attack on religion is tantamount to treason. It’s just the sort of thing that gets you cast out of the tribe. But I’m not really defending the “enemy.” It’s not religion that I’m trying to protect. I'm trying to protect atheism—our secular community, such that it is. Humans in any group are prone to think negatively and speak unfairly about “enemy” groups. In fact, people generally love to hate the “other,” as everyone generating propaganda knows. Atheists are no different. The humanity we share with the believers makes us more like them than different from them. It’s no surprise to see us atheists engaging in the same simplistic, us-versus-them rhetoric that we accuse believers of indulging in. 

So does that mean I’m wasting my time, fighting human nature like this? Sometimes it feels like I am. But it’s not healthy to build a community around negativity, and I have reasons to hope that atheism can lose some of this bias. Why should I hope? 

• We atheists pride ourselves on being evidence-driven. Even though this principle is often neglected, it’s still an ideal that I can appeal to. We atheists humbly acknowledge that our evolved minds sometimes trick us into seeing things that aren’t there and believing things that aren’t true. 
• Young atheists from secular homes don’t necessarily have the same chips on their shoulders that so many of us older atheists do. 
• A number of atheist writers, such as Alain de Botton, have pointed out that there’s more to religion than oppression. 
• As for human nature, if it is our nature to be tribalistic, it is also our nature to be adaptable. Western civilization has made great progress in terms of self-awareness and broad-mindedness. 

All these factors give me hope, and I’ll keep expecting reasonableness from my fellow atheists. At least until they take my atheist card away and kick me out of the tribe for real. 

More Posts About Atheism

Walk-n-Talk Discussions

Walk & Talk at Burning Man

How do you get a large number of people to share their opinions in meaningful discussions? An open discussion seems to be something of an ideal among atheists, perhaps because we lean toward analysis and individualism. The first problem with open discussions of any size is that they are too easily dominated by extraverts. If someone gets angry over a sensitive topic, they also take more than their share of the spotlight. Usually, a few people do most of the talking. I’ve organized and participated in a lot of discussions over the years, and I want better results than that. Particularly if you’re concerned with empowering women’s voices, the issue is salient because on average it’s men who do most of the overtalking. Part of the problem is with extraverts, especially the loudmouths who feel compelled to talk and often talk over others. Don’t judge them too harshly. Everyone’s different, and some people are different by being more of a loudmouth. There’s another reason, however, that we don’t hear from some people. Speaking up in front of a big group is scary for a lot of people. And honestly it’s a big responsibility, taking the spotlight and asking a large group of people to listen to you instead of saying what they have to say. Plenty of people don’t even want to take their share of the air time. They have things to say, often some really insightful things, but they’re comfortable speaking in smaller groups, not big ones. How do you even things out, so that loudmouths can’t shut people out, and so shy people can contribute to a discussion without being forced to take the stage? My proposal is to run the discussion as a “walk-n-talk.” It’s an event that I’ve run several times at Burning Man, game conventions and Unitarian Sunday school. Instead of sitting, the participants stand in an open space and they all share their opinions on a question by walking to one side of the room or the other. A moderator leads a more or less regular discussion, except that each participant also gets to “voice” their opinion without taking the spotlight and in a way that can’t be talked over.

Here’s an example of the walk-n-talk format working. One year we had a quiet 7th grader in Sunday school. She paid attention in our discussions but she never spoke up. Near the end of the school year, we did a walk-n-talk, and for one question she walked way to left, as far as she could get. I asked her why she felt so strongly, and she explained her perspective to the class. It was easier for her to finally say something because she the walk-n-talk format allowed her to first voice an opinion without commanding others’ attention or even talking. We can encourage shy kids to speak up in class, but context counts more than words. 

Here’s my boilerplate description of the event for game conventions.

Walk & 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 you like pirates better than ninjas, move left. If you like ninjas better than pirates, move right.” Everybody gets to see how everyone else in the group answers each question. After each question, we talk briefly, and people on either side can explain their choices.  Then we move on to new questions. The questions cover whatever topics would be appropriate to the event. Participants can also pose questions to the group. Originally a Burning Man event.
   
Requires an open space where a dozen people or more can walk back and forth. Good for a high-traffic area because people can drop in at any time. Works best at 50 - 90 minutes.

Instructions for Moderators
If you have a feel for moderating the process, no instructions are really necessary, but here is the process spelled out. If you’re not moderating, these instructions still work as “the rules.”

1. You, the moderator, stand on the centerline of the room or area, dividing it into left and right. You stand at the edge of the play area. The participants gather into a mob in front of you, in the center of the play area.

2. Explain that this is a safe place for a conversation where people can disagree without criticizing someone else’s feelings or questioning their experiences.

3. The moderator poses a two-answer question to the group, such as, “Which do you like more, dogs or cats? If you like dogs more, move over that way.” Point right. “And if you like cats more, move that way.” Point left. “If you like them equally, stand on the center line.” Indicate the halfway line across the area, the imaginary line directly in front of you.
    

4. Participants move to one side or the other, often groaning at the difficulty of the decision.
    

5. You elicit a conversation on the topic. Call on people on each side. Encourage them to try to explain their viewpoints and possibly convince people in the middle. People can change position as they see fit.
    

6. Keep the conversations short. When they get too long, tell everyone to get back in the middle for the next question. You can often do new questions inspired by the discussion.
    

7. For some questions, you will want people moving not just left and right but up and back. For the cat and dog question, for example, you can add a new dimension to differentiate city people from country people. Once people are divided into right and left for dogs and cats, have them move forward (toward you) if they’re city people and back if they’re country people. Are there correlations? Do urban dog-lovers love different sorts of dogs from rural dog-lovers?
    

8. Start with safe topics, like movies or food. Gradually you can get to more personal issues, such as personal life.
 

9. My events are usually 50 to 90 minutes.
 

10. In a public venue with an open invitation, it’s nice to position the players so that you are facing the entrance, and it’s behind the players. That way new players can unobtrusively join in the back. They can also slip away if they like.

Advice for a Burning Man Walk-n-Talk 

For anyone who want to know more, here is a link to a document that I wrote to coach a friend the first time he was running the event.

Guidelines

Verbatim Notes from Gamefest

Here are the notes I prepared for the last walk-n-talk I did at Gamefest in Denver. The topic was gamer identity, an easy catch-all topic. As you will see, the notes are highly sketchy, really just reminders for me to refer to quickly when I need a new topic.

Verbatim Notes

Availability
If you want me to run a walk-n-talk at your event, email me: jt at jonathantweet dot com.