From bacteria and yeast, I learned about metabolism and DNA synthesis. I learned the genetic code. I deciphered the basics of regulation, how genes can be active at one time and silent another. I acquired the essential tools of molecular biology.

From sponges and coelenterates, I learned about the fundamentals of multicellularity: how cells can communicate and cooperate, how you can build a more complex whole from simpler parts.

From worms and flies, I learned much more. There were genes extracted and isolated and analyzed that were universal to all animals. I figured out the basics of pattern formation: how embryos figure out which end is up, how they determine the layout of their body plan. I learned how to set aside tissue to build a nervous system. I saw how to wire a limb or an eye.

From sea slugs I learned how a reflex works. I saw the molecular cascades that lie behind the circuitry changes that create memories.

From fish and mice I learned about the complexity of vertebrates. I saw the same genes I found in flies and worms re-expressed in novel ways to assemble us. I found a spinal cord, a hindbrain, a midbrain, a forebrain, all organized in similar ways to my own nervous system. I learned about sophisticated behavior.

From primates I learned about complex social interactions. Tool use. Dominance hierarchies. Maternal behavior. Aggression. Cooperation. I see echoes of human culture, of the base behaviors that underpin what we do.

From all of these and more we all learn so much: there is a unity to life that lets us see a piece of ourselves in a bacterium, a worm, a fish, a monkey, and let's us see that piece in a context that illuminates why it is there, how it came to be, what it does in us. It helps us to view the world in a new perspective, one that isn't blinkered by narrow human preconceptions, one that opens up a whole universe to our grasp. This is powerful, rich, deep stuff.

From Powerline I learned how stupid some people can be.

This AP headline caught my eye: Expert: Apes May Be Key to Human Nature. This strikes me as odd. I would think that humans provide better clues to human nature than apes, and we have thousands of years of human history, not to mention six billion or so living humans, to draw on for information about human nature. But the idea of drawing conclusions about humans from observations of apes has a long history, and shows no signs of going away. Why is that? I suspect it's because some people don't like what human history and human behavior tell us about human nature.

Strangely, while I would normally feel anger at such self-absorbed ignorance from a pundit, these comments stepped so far outside the bounds of what we know that I could only feel pity. Poor John Hinderaker; so unaware, so close-minded, so wrong. He sits there smug and insulated, not knowing that right there in his city there are people who are working to derive the history and function of his every molecule, tracing them right back to those apes he finds irrelevant, and further to fish and bugs and worms and the little invisible germs proliferating on his body. How can we understand human nature if we ignore its antecedents?

The conventional view is that religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, represents a backward, primitive way of looking at the world, and especially at human nature, compared to modern, progressive science. But who do you think has a more sophisticated understanding of human nature: Cardinal Ratzinger, the new pope, or the researcher who believes that studying bonobos can enable humans to construct an "ideal world"?

Cardinal Ratzinger is an ape. He is driven by oh-so-typical ape motivations, the desire for dominance, the need to control the reproductive behavior of other members of his clan, the back-and-forth of social feedback. His brain contains circuits of reward and punishment we can find in rats. His neurotransmitters and the signalling cascades that modulate his neuronal activity are present in worms. The ion channels that mediate transmembrane potentials are inherited from single-celled eukaryotes. The machinery of his cells can be mapped back billions of years. I suspect that troop of primates dwelling in the Vatican could learn a great deal from the objective eye of a primatologist.

Who has the more sophisticated understanding of human nature: the man who thinks he can squeeze our history into a span of a few thousand years and the isolated vision of a single species and worse, the limited traditions of a single culture, or the one who aspires to comprehend the full breadth and depth of our place in the universe?

(Thanks (I think) to Norwegianity for bringing that Powerline drivel to my attention)