SALON

Evolution

Friday, May 13, 2005 7:26 PM UTC

A real monkey trial

At Kansas' mock trial of evolution, the creationist majority flaunted its ignorance of high-school level science. How close is the religious right to bringing God into the classroom?

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On the second day of Kansas’ mock trial of evolution, Kathy Martin created a moment to remember.

Martin is a member of Kansas’ Board of Education and part of a 6-4 majority that appears dead set on changing state standards so the creationist theory of intelligent design, and perhaps other religious ideas, can be taught in science classes along with evolution. Martin and her creationist colleagues are ready to override a report recently issued by scientists and educators on Kansas’ curriculum committee, which wants to keep the state’s solid science standards intact.

But Martin had trouble even articulating just what she dislikes about the current standards. Martin, you see, has not really read the curriculum committee’s report, nor does she think such scrutiny is necessary.

“Please don’t feel bad that you haven’t read the whole thing,” Martin told a creationist “witness” at the hearings on the science curriculum, “because I haven’t read it myself.” Audience members groaned. To clarify, Martin later explained: “I’m not a word-for-word reader in this kind of technical information.” So it went at Kansas’ evolution hearings, which concluded Thursday, a Board of Education event where a concrete understanding of all that pesky technical information involved in science was apparently considered unnecessary to reach a verdict on evolution.

“This is absolutely and thoroughly a kangaroo court,” says Jack Krebs, a science teacher who co-founded Kansas Citizens for Science (KCFS), a pro-evolution group, to combat the state’s notorious 1999 decision — since reversed — to drop evolution from its required science curriculum. “The board committee was not even capable of understanding science at the high school level. They had neither the desire nor the competence to be any kind of judge.” Nonetheless, having staged its elaborate mock trial, complete with testimony and cross-examination, the board is expected to approve by August new guidelines that many feel will allow religious views to be a part of science education.

Fearing the fix was already in for creationism, scientists around the globe adhered to a KCFS-organized boycott of the event, regarding it as a publicity stunt concocted by officials. “It’s frankly not a controversy,” said Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, about the hearings. “In the scientific community, evolution is an accepted fact.” Krebs, though, sat through the hearings, which began in Topeka on May 5, watching a parade of creationists testify about intelligent design, and working with evolution’s lone advocate in the proceedings: Topeka civil rights lawyer Pedro Irigonegaray, who concluded matters with a presentation highlighting the religious underpinnings of intelligent design — the contemporary version of the 19th century argument that life is too complex to have evolved incrementally from simple forms.

Krebs, like others around the country who have stood up for evolution in recent years, regards the current creationist fixation on intelligent design as a wedge, intended to open the door to the introduction of a wide range of creationist ideas in science classrooms. For that matter, he also views the entire struggle over evolution as merely a wedge in the religious right’s efforts to tear down the constitutional wall between church and state. “This is all part of a bigger political struggle,” says Krebs, matter-of-factly. And some creationists agree. “If you believe God created [a] baby, it makes it a whole lot harder to get rid of that baby,” Terry Fox, pastor of the Southern Baptist Ministry in Wichita, told a Washington Post reporter this spring. “If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die.”

Indeed, while the battle over evolution is not necessarily fought along strict party lines, it contains many of the familiar dynamics of contemporary American party politics. Evolution’s advocates feel they have the facts on their side but admit they struggle with complacency within their constituency. The pro-evolution forces also acknowledge they must catch up to creationists in organization and strategy, in order to combat a well-funded, aggressive opposition with a penchant for slick sound bites, message discipline, and a current strategy of cloaking radical aims in innocuous-sounding rhetoric. More than any other event this year, the mock trial in Kansas — timed for the 80th anniversary of Tennessee’s famous 1925 Scopes trial, in an apparent signal to religious fellow travelers — bring these issues into sharp relief and lay bare the strategies and tactics of the two sides in this struggle.

More than anything else, the nature of the struggle in Kansas demonstrates how much creationist tactics have changed since the state’s 1999 anti-evolution episode. Now as then, the driving force behind the creationists is Steve Abrams, a veterinarian, former Kansas gubernatorial candidate, one-time chairman of the state Republican Party, and current chairman of the Board of Education. In 1999, however, Abrams and his allies backed a version of creationism heavily dependent on the biblical creation stories in the book of Genesis. By contrast, for this month’s hearings, the Board of Education brought in a long string of advocates of intelligent design, who argued that standard evolutionary biology is based on incomplete evidence and that some sort of designer must have been at work to develop life.

Abrams himself still publicly admits he is a so-called young-Earth creationist — one who believes Earth is as little as 5,000 years old, based on a reading of the Bible. Intelligent design advocates are more likely to acknowledge an age closer to the current scientific standard — 4.5 billion years — and, in their testimony at the hearings, held fast to the current creationist strategy of publicly de-emphasizing religion as the source of their beliefs.

During cross-examinations, Irigonegaray asked questions intended to bring out this connection, making intermittent headway. For instance, when Russell Carlson, an intelligent design advocate and biochemist from the University of Georgia, testified, Irigonegaray queried him about the integral role a deity plays in the theory. “In your view the intelligent designer is God, is it not?” asked Irigonegaray. “Well, yeah, I would agree with that,” Carlson replied. It may not seem likely that a Christian who believes in intelligent design pictures a designer other than God, but most intelligent design advocates were more circumspect in their answers than Carlson.

Looming behind this kind of sparring, like backdrops on a stage set, lie political and legal events that show why creationists are taking a more indirect approach. Politically, in 1999, Kansas became the butt of jokes after bluntly dropping evolution from its science requirements. The ensuing backlash helped pro-evolution moderates regain power on the Board of Education. “At the time, I said democracy got us into this and it will get us out of it,” says John Staver, a professor of science education at Kansas State University, who co-chaired the state’s science curriculum committee after the 1999 debacle and helped reinstitute evolution in the classroom.

But in 2004, some conservative Republicans unseated their more moderate GOP counterparts in primary elections for the Board of Education, tipping the balance back to the creationists. “When the primary elections were tallied last summer, we knew we would have an ultra-conservative religious-right majority of 6 to 4,” says Staver. Democracy, he adds wryly, has “now gotten us back into it.” Abrams, Martin, and their creationist colleagues promptly used the state’s regularly scheduled curriculum review to reopen the door for creationism — by handpicking pro-creationist allies to serve on the state’s curriculum committee and draft their own report (as a counterpart to the one Martin has merely skimmed).

A principal aim of the creationists is to scrub the definition of “science” from Kansas classrooms — now described as “human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations” for phenomena — and to replace it with a more general definition lacking the words “natural explanations.” If that sounds like an innocuous change — well, that’s the aim. By removing the notion of “natural explanations” as part of science, the creationists aim to give religion a foothold in the classroom, in the name of scientific balance.

“They are just as creationist as ever,” Eugenie Scott, president of the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland, Calif., pro-evolution clearinghouse, told me in an interview before the Kansas hearings began. “But they’ve learned not just to boot evolution out, since that gets them laughed at on ‘Letterman.’” Fox, the Wichita pastor, acknowledged as much in March: “The strategy this time is not to go for the whole enchilada. We’re trying to be a little more subtle.”

This approach is not just a political or public-relations strategy, however, but a legal one. The legal backdrop to the 2005 Kansas evolution dispute is, plainly, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1987 decision banning creation science from the classroom — a ruling that also fits into some familiar-feeling political contours. When then-Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas lost his reelection bid to Republican Frank White in 1980, White, riding a wave of conservative confidence after the election, wasted little time signing the so-called Balanced Treatment Act mandating that creationism join evolution in the classroom. Based on the model recommended by the dominant creationist think tank of the time, the Institute for Creation Research in Southern California, the act featured an approach to creationism based on biblical literalism.

The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the Arkansas law in court and won, with the presiding judge ruling that the law was inspired by the book of Genesis, had “no scientific merit,” and had as its sole goal “the advancement of religion.” This violated the First Amendment by bringing sectarian beliefs into the classroom. Soon after, a Louisiana judge struck down a similar measure in that state — a ruling creationists appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court upheld the ruling, with Justice William Brennan’s majority opinion saying the Louisiana law was meant to “provide persuasive advantage to a particular religious doctrine that rejects the factual basis of evolution.”

These days, therefore, Genesis and biblical literalism are out as the public rationales for creationism. Intelligent design and its leading think tank, the Discovery Institute of Seattle, are in, as creationists search for an approach that appears broad enough to withstand legal scrutiny. In this vein, this year the Kansas Board of Education also brought in advocates with a variety of religious backgrounds — like Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish newspaper columnist and Muslim who tried to make the case that teaching evolution in the United States generates “anti-Westernism” in other parts of the world. In so doing, they are trying to present a public face for creationism that cannot be defined as representing a particular religious sect.

“I think there’s no doubt that in order to solve some problems that got defeated back in the 1980s, the I.D. movement has been designed to make things look more like science, and less like religion,” says Krebs. And it might work. While both sides, predictably, have claimed to have scored points at the hearings, the Kansas’ Board of Education will almost certainly get its way for now.

That only underlines some of the inherent problems that evolution’s advocates face — like usually being in a reactive position. In most states, after all, science’s backers merely want to maintain the status quo, while creationists can create energy for themselves by trying to overturn the established order. “It’s an asymmetric situation,” notes Nicholas Matzke, a spokesperson for the NCSE. Foundations like the Discovery Institute, which produced creationist witnesses at the Kansas hearings, are better funded than their pro-evolution opponents and churn out sound bites by the score. “Teach the controversy,” for instance, is a favorite slogan of creationists, who say their own dissent is evidence that a scientific controversy exists.

Similarly, in many states, creationist efforts to change curricula are based on the template of the “Santorum language,” a nonbinding statement that GOP Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania attached to the 2001 No Child Left Behind education bill, which stipulates that where “evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy.” That claim, evolution’s backers say, is a back-door way of introducing religion-based theories of creation to science classes.

There are some basic rules of engagement evolutionists have developed in recent years, though. One is that these tussles are, ultimately, local. “It’s always got to be an on-location fight,” says Krebs. Politically, these are battles for seats on school boards, at both the state and the district levels, and involve monitoring the regular reviews of state science curricula, which usually occur every four or five years. Thus, getting local pro-science figures involved is crucial. Statements of support from the AAAS might sound good in theory, but local scientists carry much more influence.

Take the situation in New Mexico, one of the most interesting successes evolution’s backers have had in striking back against creationists. After the state Board of Education slipped pro-creationism language into the curriculum standards in 1996, physicist Marshall Berman of Sandia National Laboratories ran for a position on the school board himself. Helped in part by the endorsements of New Mexico’s admittedly high percentage of prominent scientists, Berman won a seat in 1998 and within about a year had changed the school standards back.

Berman also says he cultivated a strategy an increasing number of science groups are now taking up — reaching out to moderates and religious leaders who are willing to accept evolution. “I think the appropriate approach is to make it very clear that this is not a struggle between religion and atheism,” Berman says. “After people realized I didn’t have horns and was not a monster … we returned modern biology and geology to the curriculum.” Like Krebs, Berman also believes that “evolution is just a wedge — the beginning of an attempt to do away with the separation of church and state in this country.” Thus he thinks a crucial part of forming a solid pro-evolution coalition is recruiting religious leaders who still appreciate that separation.

This is where national organizations can, in fact, combine with local pro-science groups to reach out to religious groups. The AAAS, for its part, is publishing a new book for distribution in religious communities this summer, “The Evolution Dialogues,” about the process of balancing both religious belief and acceptance of evolution. “We’re trying to demonstrate that it’s not necessary to abandon faith to believe in evolution,” says Jim Miller, a program manager at the AAAS who has led many of the organization’s religious outreach efforts and who is also an ordained Presbyterian minister.

That may not be the approach favored by, say, fans of evolutionary biologist (and noted atheist) Richard Dawkins. But as Miller points out, many religious moderates already believe in the idea of a transcendent intelligence behind the world; intelligent design appeals precisely to these groups of people, “most of whom don’t have any scientific background at all,” he notes.

Finally, in states like Kansas and Michigan, where creationist efforts have coincided with state policy programs to improve the economy by developing the life-sciences industries, pro-science advocates are beginning to express support for evolution in economic terms: A good educational system will help the kids of today get jobs tomorrow and help attract business to the area. Even as his side suffers a setback in Kansas — and in part because of it — Krebs thinks active support for protecting the teaching of evolution will grow.

“The mainstream religious community, the business world, the scientific community, they haven’t always taken this as a serious threat, but they’re starting to,” says Krebs. “We’re seeing a much greater level of concern than we had in 1999.” After all, the notion that bad science education can lead to fewer jobs in the future is an argument almost everyone can follow — even if they don’t want to read a bunch of technical stuff about science.

Peter Dizikes is a science journalist based in Boston. More Peter Dizikes.

Monday, Apr 9, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

“Darwin’s Devices”: Here come the robot fish

A scientist uses aquatic automatons to plumb the mysteries of evolution, intelligence and the future

By A detail from the cover of "Darwin's Devices"

Fish, without a doubt, gotta swim, but how do they do it? And how, over millenniums of evolution, did they get to be so good at it? These two questions have driven the career of John Long, a professor of biology and cognitive science at Vassar College. Long is so into fish that his primal scene of intellectual seduction involved a Ph.D. trying to get him to join her team by taking him out for coffee and asking, “Have you seen the vertebral column of a marlin?” Thus was Long launched into a course of study that would ultimately lead him to the improbable task of making robot fish.

As geeky as this may sound, it turns out that the problems inherent in making robot fish yield some of humanity’s deepest questions: How did we get here? What (and where) is thought? How much can we trust the symbols (words, images, digital signals) that dominate our lives? Long’s new book, “Darwin’s Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology,” is part Descartes, part MacGyver and part Douglas Adams, turning from rumination on the possibility of intelligence residing in a brainless body to tips on making artificial fish vertebrae out of coffee stirrers to the dopey yet endearing jokes that seem to flourish in laboratories all over the world.

Long works in a field called biorobotics, which builds physical devices to test hypotheses about animal behavior, rather than studying either the animal itself or digital models. Sometimes an animal can’t be studied for logistical reasons: marlins, for example, die in captivity and plesiosaurs are extinct. Computer models allow scientists to simulate complex, unreproducible conditions — say, the modeling of 10,000 generations of a particular organism — but as abstractions, they are prone to certain errors.

Robots, as Long explains, have their peculiar virtues. Long himself once created an impressive computer model illustrating how the marlin’s backbone helped the fish achieve its awe-inspiring swimming and leaping speeds, only to have a revered elder scientist note, “it appears to me that you’ve created a perpetual motion machine.” Robots, as Long points out, can’t violate the laws of physics. Instead of operating in a simulation of a physics-compliant environment, robots simply exist in the real universe, and must therefore play by the rules as a matter of course. At the same time, robots can be simplified to the degree that certain characteristics can be observed in isolation.

The main thing Long uses his robots to study is evolution. His first robot-fish experiment involved creating a bunch of large, tadpole-like “Evolvabots” designed to do one thing: swim toward a light source. With his team of students and fellow scientists — Long makes a point of mentioning the names of everyone who made significant contributions to his projects, a big departure from spotlight-hogging senior-scientist tradition — he rated their success at this imitation of “food-seeking” behavior. The robots (called Tadros) were given tails of varying degrees of stiffness and length and were then “mated” (algorithmically) over several generations to see if this would lead to selection for certain kinds of tails. The hypothesis Long and his colleagues wanted to test was that primeval invertebrates evolved backbones because it improved their ability to feed.

The experiment didn’t work out as they’d hoped, mostly because, in designing the experiment, the scientists had failed to fully appreciate a factor called wobble. One of the most intriguing and important aspects of “Darwin’s Devices” is the way it places the reader in the lab, at the shoulder of people doing hands-on science, sharing in their frustrations (over disappointing data, recalcitrant grant committees and astutely critical colleagues), their successes and their failures. And Long does this so lucidly that you find yourself caught up in the process, grasping the basics and eager to learn the results. It’s the best depiction of how science really works that I’ve ever read.

“Darwin’s Devices” could also administer a chastening rebuke to the many laypeople who talk and think sloppily about evolution. Determining exactly how growing a backbone helped ancient invertebrates thrive might seem superfluous to the quick-and-dirty school of cocktail-party Darwinism. Obviously, backbones helped because otherwise vertebrate animals would never have evolved. But as “Darwin’s Devices” illustrates, we can easily mistake the reasons for the evolution of certain traits by jumping to what seem like “logical” conclusions, and natural selection is not the only evolutionary pressure applied to a species. There are times when you just have to build something to understand how it works.

For example, the next type of robot Long and his colleagues developed they named Madeleine (because it is shaped, roughly, like the little French cakes). Madeleine had four paddles at each corner of its body, much like the extinct plesiosaur, a marine reptile. This creature was a tetrapod: a sea-dwelling animal descended from land-dwelling ancestors. Living aquatic tetrapods include whales, dolphins and sea otters, but “none of the living aquatic tetrapods ever use all four appendages to swim underwater — they only use two.” With Madeleine, the researchers hoped to figure out why this is so, since “it sure seemed like using four flippers for propulsion should be better in almost any way imaginable.”

It isn’t, actually, and that launched yet another branch of inquiry about why the plesiosaur used four flippers at all. If it’s that easy for legitimate scientists to be mistaken about something as seemingly simple as four-flippered locomotion, you can see why so many of them regard popular but highly speculative pastimes like evolutionary psychology as pseudoscience.

One party who has found the activities of Long and his robotics lab keenly interesting is the U.S. government. It’s not a big leap from “robot fish” to the notion of defense applications, and Long, despite a youthful infatuation with all things military, finds this troubling. But not that troubling! After a bit of hemming and hawing about it — noting that, if over 50 nations are pursuing military robot research, then American scientists can’t afford to opt out — he plunges into rampant (and, I must say, fascinating) theorizing about what sorts of robots would work best in battle. They need to be complex enough to cope with contingencies, but simple (i.e., cheap) enough that commanders aren’t afraid to burn through them.

Long ends with these cautionary words: “The reality is that evolving robots are and will be created for academic, industrial and military purposes. This means that we should all become students of robots of any kind, whether they be evolving robots, nonevolving autonomous robots, or semiautonomous and remotely controlled military robots. We need to understand robots so we can proceed with due caution and deliberation.” Yikes! And probably true. “Darwin’s Devices” will get some of us, at least, a little closer.

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Tuesday, Jun 21, 2011 9:22 PM UTC

Miss USA contestants: Unevolved?

The contestants were asked whether evolution should be taught in schools. Here are our winners and losers

By

The Miss USA pageant crowned its annual winner on Sunday, but the contest is drawing new attention  for a video of all 51 contestants wrestling with the question, “Should evolution be taught in schools?” The results, as you might expect, are all over the place. To wit: While only a couple said a definitive “no,” dozens more squirmed through answers — trying as hard as possible not to offend anyone — before arriving at the common conclusion that evolution should be taught alongside “alternative beliefs.”

We watched through the video, and decided — in the keeping with the pageant theme — to hand out awards.

Winner: Lauren Carter, Miss Vermont, who said:

I think evolution should be taught in schools, because not everybody has the same religious backgrounds, and it’s important to have scientific facts about the world. We do know that evolution exists even on the small scale, like … bacteria that are becoming resistant to drugs and what not, so [we] might as well learn about it.

(Carter earned bonus points for referencing micro-evolution.)

Worst Answer: Kia Hampton, Miss Kentucky, who said:

I honestly don’t think you can ever have too much knowledge on any subject. That’s my personal view. But I do feel that evolution shouldn’t be taught in school, just because there are so many different views on it, so many definitions. How do you teach a child the true meaning of evolution when so many different cultures have their different beliefs, and sciences have their different theories. It’s just not a good subject that I feel everyone would agree on in classrooms, when kids come from all different backgrounds, different cultures, different beliefs. So, I just personally don’t think its a good topic for school, at all.

Weirdest Answer: Sarah Chapman, Nevada, who said:

I think evolution can be taught in many different ways. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about people, and how people evolved. It can also be about [how] communities [evolved] as well.”

Overall, we counted 24 answers in favor of teaching evolution in school and 3 against, with 24 equivocating to some degree — oftentimes, but not always, arguing the impossible but impossible-to-argue-with goal that  everything should be taught. The contest’s winner, California’s Alyssa Campanella, answered with an unequivocal “yes.” Runner-up Miss Tennessee said that evolution should be taught, but people should be able to decide for themselves. (We also counted that as a “yes.”)

As an addendum: It does bear mentioning that even among the women who answered in the affirmative, many seemed to be under the impression that evolution is not already taught in schools. That, in fact, might have been the most head-scratching thing about the video. Oh, well…

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More Peter Finocchiaro.

Friday, Jun 17, 2011 7:18 PM UTC

Time-travel sex: Bad for sea monkeys

Study shows female brine shrimp survive longer when they don't mate with "males from the future or the past"

By

For a new study set to be published in the journal Evolution, scientists from the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier, France, mated female brine shrimp (“sea monkeys”) with males from past and future generations.

The report, called “Male-Female Coevolution in the Wild: Evidence from a Time Series in Artemia Franciscana,” found that the female brine shrimp “survived better and had longer interbrood intervals when mated with their contemporary males compared to when mated with males from the future or the past.” Its formal conclusion: “[T]he process of male-female coevolution, previously revealed by experimental evolution in laboratory artificial conditions, can occur in nature on a short evolutionary time scale.”

How is it possible for females of a species to breed with males from past or future generations? For brine shrimp, it’s actually easier than you might think. Science writer Carl Zimmer explains:

Brine shrimp produce tough eggs that can survive through droughts for years and then hatch into healthy young when water returns. In the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the brine shrimp egg cysts form layers on the lake bed going back decades. [Study leader Nicolas] Rode and his colleagues gathered cysts from layers that formed in 1985, 1996, and 2007. They brought the cysts back to their lab and reared the sea monkeys. And then they orchestrated some sea monkey sex. They had females mate with males from their own time, as well as from the other years. For example, females from 1996 could mate with males from 2007 and 1985.

What happened next? Zimmer summarizes:

Rode and his colleagues … discovered … that having sex with males from another time is bad for a sea monkey’s health. The further away in time the sea monkeys were, the sooner the female sea monkey died. When the male traveled 22 years to mate with a female, her life was cut short on average by 12%.

The report’s suggestion that female shrimp are better suited to mate with their contemporaries than with males from the past or future seems to corroborate the theory that “sexual conflict is an ongoing process,” with males and females adapting new mating “strategies” in concert or in competition with each other over time, Zimmer writes — although it’s still not clear what sort of pattern the conflict might follow (nor is it obvious, in this particular case, exactly “how the time-traveling males [harmed] the females”).

Just to be safe, though: If your dream historical dinner party with Cleopatra, Henry VIII and Napoleon ever does happen, you might want to consider heading home early.

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Emma Mustich is a Salon contributor. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich. More Emma Mustich.

Friday, May 13, 2011 7:49 PM UTC

Five signs your Republican governor wants to be president

Did he suddenly express doubts about evolution or develop an interest in bombing foreign countries? Watch out

By Chris Christie and Jon Huntsman

Chris Christie, a wealthy, well-educated lawyer from New Jersey, is suddenly not willing to say whether or not he believes in biological evolution. Christie went to a very good public high school and he’s a mainstream American Catholic, not an evangelical Protestant, so I am going to guess that he does believe in evolution, if he ever even gives the idiotic question any thought. I’d also guess that believing in evolution is not particularly controversial among New Jersey Republicans, who are not exactly Kansas Republicans.

So why hedge? Well, someday — maybe someday soon — he may want the support of Kansas Republicans. And sometimes, successful Republican politicians begin debasing themselves to win the votes of far-right rubes well before they begin forming exploratory committees.

Here are some signs that your formerly rational Republican governor (or former governor, or mayor, or representative) might be planning a presidential run:

Candidate develops doubts about evolution

Evolution, a scientific fact, is not recognized by one of America’s two major political parties, and a majority of Americans are either creationists or at least express “doubts” about evolution, so it just makes sense for people seeking the Republican nomination to align themselves with people who think the Earth is 10,000 years old.

But belief in evolution correlates to education level, and most of the elites in politics and media are well-educated, so you don’t want to become a creationist — then you will be mercilessly mocked — you just need to signal your tacit support for creationism and promise to let it be taught in schools. Just like Chris Christie did!

Candidate suddenly agnostic on or openly hostile to climate science

Not that long ago, most Republicans agreed that climate change was real and something should be done about it. Nearly everyone currently running for the Republican nomination supported cap-and-trade, which was the moderate alternative to a proper carbon tax. Now, though, not so much!

Now, even those who still profess to believe in climate science think the government shouldn’t do anything to stop it (the “reasonable” Jon Huntsman approach) and the rest of them no longer think climate change is happening, because Al Gore, who is fat, is also now divorced (the shameless Gingrich approach).

Candidate suddenly has opinions about foreign policy

A governor does not really need to know what to do about Iran or North Korea, but if one suddenly starts telling everyone his or her ideas about what to do about Iran and North Korea, this governor is probably dreaming of the nation’s highest office. (Or at least a Senate run.) If those ideas seem to just involve bombing everyone, everywhere, this guy’s serious! (If the candidate becomes a paleocon isolationist instead, no one will allow them anywhere near the nomination.)

Another hint: A non-Jewish politician suddenly becomes deeply, passionately interested in Israel.

It’s a red alert if your governor reveals these positions in a book of some kind.

Candidate no longer thinks the government has the right to collect revenue on anyone by any means

Most governors and state legislators have to balance their state budgets, and to balance state budgets during horrible times like these, lots of taxes (often renamed, as in Tim Pawlenty’s Minnesota, “fees”) are necessary. But current Republican orthodoxy has it that any taxation, at all, on anyone, is a tyrannical attack on LIBERTY itself.

So they will defend their “fee”-raising as not taxation while demanding that the national deficit be taken care of within three years without a single tax increase on any American. That is leadership. (Plus, you want Grover Norquist on your side.)

Candidate no longer likes transportation projects

Sure, free federal cash for a major infrastructure project sounds great on paper, and also in reality, but Republicans hate trains now, so you better turn that money down, even if you formerly campaigned for it. Trains are for Europe!

If your governor checks off two of these, get worried. If he or she hits three, get ready for the major Politico story on the Republicans Secret Weapon (or Reluctant Best Shot).

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Wednesday, Jan 19, 2011 1:30 AM UTC

The science of the smooch

Why mash our mouths together? An expert explains the evolutionary reasons for kissing, and why men like more tongue

By close up portrait of young caucasian couple kissing(Credit: Serg Zastavkin)

Let’s be honest, a kiss is never just a kiss. It is the ultimate romantic symbol in our culture — from Shakespearean tragedies to Gustav Klimt’s gilded embrace to the legendary V-J Day smooch in Times Square to those critical words “you may kiss the bride.” Sometimes it’s instead an expression of affection, elation, loyalty or, on the other hand, disloyalty (see: the kiss of Judas). In cruder manifestations — take Britney and Madonna’s lip smacking, and the tonsil hockey of modern reality television — it’s a way to scandalize. But despite this breadth of meaning, we have very rigid ideas of what types of kissing are appropriate and acceptable — as Stephanie Seymour recently discovered after photos circulated of an ocean-side embrace with her son.

This rich cultural history makes kissing seem so natural as to be fairly unremarkable, which is why many readers will greet the new book “The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us” with skepticism. How much is there to say about locking lips, anyway? A whole lot, it turns out. Sheril Kirshenbaum, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, gives an engaging overview of the possible evolutionary basis for two people mashing their mouths together — a practice that is actually pretty odd, once you think about it. There’s the way sexy red lipstick plays on our hunter-gatherer past, how swapping spit can help us develop immunity against disease and why it might have first developed as a way to literally sniff out genetically appropriate sexual partners.

That’s not to mention the tremendous variety in kisses the world over — from the Eskimo to the French variety — and that’s just in the human world (bonobos, for example, will suck on each other’s tongues for as long as 12 minutes). Salon spoke with Kirshenbaum about how our lips are “genital echoes,” the natural high of making out with a longtime crush and how technology will change kissing.

What is it about lips, why are we so drawn to them?

There are several theories. For starters, psychologists will tell you that red grabs our attention. I spoke to a neuroscientist and he thought it might have something to do with our ancestors looking for ripe fruit. Those that could detect the color red could find food the fastest and they had an advantage and survived to pass on their genes, and that might be why we notice the color red.

Red became pronounced in different areas of the body, and it became a sexual cue over time. Certain parts of the female anatomy, especially with our primate ancestors, were enhanced with red, and it especially had to do with the female being ready to reproduce. As our ancestors began to walk upright, rather than males being attracted to the female’s posterior, they began to focus on the breasts and the lips — they call this “genital echoes.” In research on lip color, men consistently choose the women wearing the bright red lipstick as the most attractive — there’s this power to making the lips slightly redder. There’s a lot of evidence to back up the existence of the makeup industry.

Much to my surprise, you make a connection between kissing and breast-feeding. Can you explain that?

Nursing is a very pleasurable activity. The lips are so sensitive to stimulus, and the hormone oxytocin, which is involved in social bonding and attachment, is stimulated in the infant and the mother during nursing. We start to associate this bonding with lip pressure. As adults, when we kiss there’s this rise in oxytocin, which is so important in new relationships and in maintaining relationships. Nursing is very important in putting those neural pathways in place. When our lips are stimulated later in life there are these associations with those early experiences.

What about non-romantic kissing?

It’s a really powerful means of expressing yourself. All of our senses are engaged in the behavior. Traditionally, scent was so important in terms of recognizing our friends and family members. In prehistory they were using scent to recognize each other and assess the health of someone. Social kissing probably evolved from a sniff to cheek kissing. It’s one of the most powerful things we can do to connect with another individual.

How do kissing styles vary from culture to culture?

The mouth-to-mouth kiss that we recognize is definitely not the only universal style of kissing. Charles Darwin wrote about this: He suspected that if you talk about kissing in terms of touching the lips to any body part, and even behaviors like licking and blowing, then it’s probably a universal practice.

Traditionally, many cultures around the world didn’t mouth-to-mouth kiss. It was probably not the same experience before there was mouthwash [laughs]. I went into all these historical accounts written in the 1800s, mostly by European explorers. There’s this great anecdote where an explorer goes to Africa and falls in love with the daughter of an African king, and one night he’s brave enough to kiss her. She reacts by screaming and running from the room. He realizes later that she thought he was planning to eat her.

Has kissing changed much over time? Do certain styles of kissing come into fashion?

Well, I love the French kissing story. It turns out that when people were traveling through Europe, there was this notion that women in France were more openly affectionate. There became this saying: “While in France, get the girls to kiss you.” That sort of evolved to be: “Get a French kiss.” But in France they don’t call it that, they call it a “tongue kiss” or a “soul kiss,” because it’s supposed to feel like two souls merging.

What happens physiologically when we kiss?

A lot. It depends on the kind of kiss, of course. If you’re talking about a good kiss, our pulse quickens and our pupils dilate, which is probably part of the reason we close our eyes. There’s also a rise in dopamine, which is responsible for the craving and longing, that can’t-wait-to-be-with-you sensation. It’s also stimulated by a lot of recreational drugs like cocaine; kissing sends us on a natural high. Dopamine spikes from really longing for something for a while and then getting it. When we’ve been dreaming about someone for a long time and then finally get it, dopamine is involved.

Serotonin causes obsessive feelings about someone. It’s also the same neurotransmitter involved in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It sounds a lot like the symptoms of falling in love. Everyone loves to talk about sex, but kissing is probably the most intimate activity we can engage in. Look at the history of prostitution — prostitutes won’t kiss their johns because they don’t want to get their emotions involved. And, overall, johns aren’t that anxious to kiss their prostitutes either.

There’s a strong gender divide in how we view kissing, isn’t there?

Absolutely. There’s a huge gender divide. In one large study of college-age students, strong patterns emerged: Women were constantly complaining about too much tongue and men were saying, “I really like wet kisses, lots of saliva!” The guys were usually eager to foray into sex without kissing and very few women were. Women paid a lot more attention to the teeth and breath of the person. Men tended to say they would consider starting a relation with someone just because they were a good kisser, and women were not that way. The act of kissing has a lot more significance for women than men. Men tend to report that kissing is a means to an end; women tend to try to figure out what the kiss means about their relationship, what it says about how their partner feels toward them.

Why might this be?

I started getting really frustrated by these findings, because I felt the results were very stereotypical. So I got together 80 of my own friends and acquaintances, and I was pretty shocked to see that they fell almost completely in the same pattern. When you start looking at reproductive strategies, it makes sense: A woman puts a lot more investment into the [sexual] decisions she makes, because she is fertile for a much shorter period of time each month, and a man can theoretically inseminate countless women throughout his life. Women are a lot more sensitive to smell and taste, which can tell a lot about a partner’s health and reproductive capacity.

There’s a great study looking at attraction and scent. It turns out that women are able to identify men who have a very different genetic code from their own, and they tend to be more attracted to them, because if they mate, their children would be healthier and stronger and more likely to survive because of the diversity in their genetics. Interestingly enough, women who are taking the birth control pill seem to have the opposite reaction. They’re more attracted to men with genetic immunities similar to their own. It starts to make you wonder what all these hormones that we take are starting to do to our bodies and whether they’re masking these signals that we’ve developed over thousands and thousands and thousands of years. I came across some pieces asking, “Is it possible that for some couples divorce is a result of the woman going off hormones and all of a sudden feeling less attracted to her partner?” It’s certainly an important question to ask.

What can we expect from the future of kissing?

There are robots that are very eerily lifelike and starting to be able to kiss each other — it’s pretty convincing when you see the actual video. In terms of virtual reality, it might be possible that it could feel like you’re kissing your idealized partner or celebrity.

Just last year, a robot debuted called Roxxxi. She’s supposed to be the first sex robot. I called up the company and spoke to the engineer because I wanted to know whether she could kiss. His response was, “No, but her mouth is one of three inputs.” It turns out kissing was not something they had programmed in. At the time they were about to debut their robot geared toward women and, given all this psychological research, it might be something that women clients would be more interested in seeing.

Speaking of technological changes, what about online dating — how is it changing the courtship process?

Many of my friends were going online looking for love just as I was learning about all these important cues other than what we see in a profile — things like voice and touch and smell taste. We are flying blind when we’re dating online. We’re only able to see a photo and a carefully worded profile. You might invest a lot of time getting to know someone and it might be imminently obvious when you’re actually in the same room that it’s star-crossed, or you might pass over someone who might have seemed ideal if you’d been in the same room together. A kiss just tells you so much more than a poke or a wink — or whatever it is, depending on the service you’re using. I’ve been calling it nature’s litmus test.

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Tracy Clark-Flory

Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory.

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