Speech to the Creationists

Hello, thank you for having me here today.

I’ve heard it said that one of the ways of classifying people into two groups is between the “educational” and “adversarial” view. In the educational view, someone is less concerned with whose side everybody is on, and more concerned with whether or not everyone understands what the issues are about, and what the facts of the matter are. For the adversarial view, facts and understanding are not so important. If someone is one your side, they don’t need to know the facts, and if they are against you, you don’t want them to know the facts.

That may sound like a loaded distinction, and it may be, given that my own orientation is decidedly educational, but I do admit that there are times when the adversarial view is useful, like during a war, or in a court action. A lawyer doesn’t do well if everyone understands what the case is about but he loses, and a soldier cares even less.

Nevertheless, I’m going to go for the educational view here; I think it’s important for you to understand what the real issues are, what the real facts are, and what I think is important. How you then deal with that information is up to you.

So I want to clear up some misconceptions, and let me also say at the outset that many of these misconceptions are common to both sides of the evolution debate, so I’m not saying “Nyah, nyah, nyah, you’re ignorant and we’re educated.” I am going to be saying that the real issues are not what you think they are, but by the same token, I don’t think that the real issues are what most people think they are.

Take the word “evolution” or the words “theory of evolution.” Most people use those words as shorthand for “Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection,” but that’s both oversimplified, and it misses important historical facts, so let me review a few of those.

A couple of hundred years ago, as the science of geology was laying down its foundations, one of the things that kept hitting people who studied rocks and such was how old so many things seemed to be. To take a trivial example, stalactites that grow from the mineral calcite grow very slowly, yet there are caves that have very large such structures. If you look at the current rate for stalactite growth and compare it to those big growths, you wind up with an estimate that it took millions of years for them to grow. There are, incidentally, types of stalactites that grow more quickly; in fact, icicles are a kind of stalactite, and there are others that rapidly grow from gypsum, but no one has ever found or fast growing calcite stalactite, nor has anyone ever demonstrated a way to grow one quickly, because the process seems to be intrinsically slow.

There were a lot of these sorts of things that were found almost as soon as geology became a science, things like sedimentation rates, weathering by water and wind, and so forth. Later we found things like the rate at which the very ground beneath our feet slowly moves, which, over time, creates mountains, buries sediments, and moves the continents around. We also found things like radioisotope dating that corroborated some of the other geological age estimates, and often even extended them, taking our estimates of the ages of the oldest rocks into the billion years range.

Now it should be noted that most of the early geologists were religious, Christians even, but they weren’t what is called Biblical literalists. They didn’t believe each and every word in the Bible was true, and educated men hadn’t really done so since at least the days of St. Thomas Aquinas, who recognized both that the world is round, and that a literal interpretation of the Bible would pretty much require that it be flat. That had been argued by the Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes based on the Biblical references to the Earth’s four corners, and the fact that there were evenings and mornings on each reported day of creation, when a round world always has a morning and evening somewhere, and “day” depends on where you are on the globe. So the early geologists were willing to say that the “days” of creation couldn’t be literal, and couldn’t be just 24 hours long.

In any case, the Earth looked to be substantially old to the geologists, and they had no particular problem with this, at least not on the grounds of religious doctrine. Furthermore there seemed to be a lot of strange bones in among the rocks.

Now some of those bones were just that, bones. They were found in places like the La Brea tar pits, or ancient peat bogs, or even in the Siberian tundra, where we’ve found completely frozen dead animals tens of thousands of years old. Some of the bones, though, were even older, so old that they’d turned into stone, by what looked to be like a similar process that produces those stalactites, where dripping water slowly replaced the original bone with rock.

But what really got everyone’s interest was that the bones they found didn’t look like the bones of known animals. Some of the critters in the tar pits looked like big cats with huge, I mean, really big, teeth, that came to be called “saber toothed.” Some looked like really small horses. And some of the bones that had turned into stone were so big that the animals could never have fit into Noah’s Ark.

That was one of the theories of the time, as you might expect, that the bones belonged to creatures that had died in the Flood. They had to abandon Biblical literalism for that, though, since the Bible says that God told Noah to get male and females of “every living thing of all flesh,” not “every living thing except the dinosaurs and trilobites.”

Then too, a lot of the fossils that they found were fish, fish that probably wouldn’t have minded the Flood too much. They also kept finding one set of creatures in one rock formation, but if you went deeper, you’d find a much different set of creatures. No one really believed that sedimentation from a single event, be it the Flood or something like it, would also do a big sort on everything so that all the little horses and sabertooths floated to the top, while the trilobites went to the bottom and T. Rex wound up in the middle.

No, the fossils came in groups that were separated by geology, and the geologists figured that that was because they were separated in time. The animals that formed the fossils lived and died at different times, and those that lived at the same time wound up in the same geological formation and those that lived at other times wound up in different formations. Any yes, every now and then two geological formations would get jumbled up, the same way that when you knock all the books off the shelves, they aren’t in alphabetical order any more. But for the most part, they were separated.

Now as I said, different kinds of animals seemed to be in different times, and somebody had to figure out what to make of that. Realize, also, that while all this was happening, Europeans were fanning out across the globe, and periodically they’d stop off on an island, replenish their supplies, accidentally lose a dog, pig, rat or two, and move on. Then, sometimes, they’d come back later to discover that the island had “gone to the dogs,” as it were, and oops, you didn’t have any Dodos anymore. In other words, they discovered that species of animals can go extinct. And it occurred to people that, if species were going extinct, eventually we’d run out of species, unless there was something that replenished them.

A while earlier, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but there were some biologists who’d overturned the idea of “spontaneous generation,” the idea that animals are regularly appearing spontaneously out of mud, or rotting meat, or whatever. Some biologists had looked carefully at the mud and saw the eggs that had been laid there, or they kept the rotting meat in a closed container, and saw that no fly larvae came out when you did that. So biology got this idea that “like creates like” or “like comes from like” and that put them in opposition to the facts that seemed to be coming out of geology, where different things kept appearing.

Thus came the “theory of evolution.” There was no mechanism, just the idea that, somehow, over time, like didn’t produce like, but rather, some organisms, some part of a species, could slowly evolve into something else.

Then came all sorts of “theories of evolution.” Darwin’s mechanism was only one of them. Some believed that evolution occurred by animals “striving” to become better, and that in the striving, some of the things that they acquired, like stretched necks in giraffes, would be passed on to their offspring. There is a theory called “Panspermia” that holds that all evolutionary changes are preprogrammed by a rain of genetic material from space. There were even what could be called “theories of devolution,” which holds that, for the case of human beings at least, the original species was much more advanced than we are, and we are a sort of degenerate version. This is more or less what Disraeli was saying when he said, “Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels.” Given that Disraeli couldn’t fly, or work other miracles, he seems to have been at the most something of a devolved angel, don’t you think?

What Darwin suggested was that a plant or an animal that was a bit better suited to its environment than its neighbor would probably have a few more offspring than its neighbor, and that, over time, whatever it was that made it better suited would become more and more prevalent. Then he further went on that, over time, entire species might change, or sub-populations of a species might drift off from the rest of the species and become a new species in its own right. Of course there has been about a hundred and fifty years of thinking, observation, research, and modifications to this, and it’s a big subject, so big that I’m not going to try to go into it here. I will say that the theory of natural selection, as it’s called, is the cornerstone not just of modern evolutionary biology, but also of microbiology, biochemistry, biogenetics, paleontology, and a host of other scientific disciplines. I said earlier that I don’t care that much what side you’re on, and I don’t, but I will say that if you want to have anything to do with any of the related scientific fields, if you don’t know how the theory of natural selection works, you’re out of luck. You might as well try to get a job in a library without knowing how to read.

But there is another thing that I want to say here, and that is about some things that Darwin never said. But it does have Darwin’s name attached, and that, in my view is a tragic misunderstanding. What I’m talking about is what is called “Social Darwinism.”

We’ve all heard the phrase “survival of the fittest” and it’s usually applied to Darwinian natural selection, but in fact, Darwin didn’t invent the phrase, and it was not originally applied to animals, it was applied to corporations in 19th Century Great Britain.

It’s not uncommon to try to apply lessons from on field of learning to another, but it’s often a mistake. When Isaac Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, he created an elegant theory that seemed able to predict the motion of the Moon, Earth, and planets for all time. And some people took this to mean that everything could be predictable, even the affairs of men. So we got what has sometimes been called the “Clockwork Universe,” the idea that everything is predictable. More recently, science has pretty well demolished that idea, both with quantum mechanics and with what is called “chaos theory,” but I imagine that most of you will join me in a little chuckle at the expense of anyone who ever looked at human affairs and failed to see the inherent chaos there.

In any case, the 19th Century had a lot of misunderstandings in it. There had been a theory of economics put forward by a fellow named Adam Smith in the same year as the American Revolution, and he referred to the “invisible hand” of the market. Some people in the 19th Century, and, sadly, even today, mistake this invisible hand of the market for the invisible hand of God, to very bad results. Some of these people were in charge of the policy that had Ireland continue to export grain during the Irish potato famine. That was in the 1840s, and a couple of million people starved to death. No doubt had it been some years later, after the 1859 publication of Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, they would have cited Darwin as well as Adam Smith. But we all know the truth, don’t we? They just hated Irishmen, and the theories were just an excuse to let them starve.

What is called Social Darwinism actually began with the work of a man named Herbert Spencer, who believed that society was a struggle among individuals and that there was a “social evolution” that was equivalent to Darwin’s biological evolution. Actually, the ideas were even older, dating from a fellow by the name of Malthus, who did have some influence on Darwin as well, but the social stuff was all from the 19th century Victorians, who were looking for any excuse to justify their colonial empire. Plenty of people came to believe, because it was so comforting to their view of the world, that social evolution was the same thing as biological evolution, and that a person’s ranking in society reflected their rank in the grand evolutionary scheme of things, or as it was called, “the great chain of being,” another phrase that greatly predates Darwin. In this view, successful people, that is, the rich, the well-educated, the aristocratic were “more fit”, while people who were poor and uneducated were somehow “unfit.”

Well, when you make a mistake this big at the beginning, it just gets worse and worse. Darwinian natural selection talks about offspring, and it’s a general fact that poor and uneducated people have more offspring than do the rich and successful. In Darwinian terms, that would seem to make them “fitter.” Alternately, and this is my view, it says that social standing and wealth are irrelevant to evolution and vice versa.

You might think that this contradiction of the “fitter poor” would bring the idea of Social Darwinism into doubt, but the Social Darwinists weren’t having any of it. The fact that the poor were outbreeding the rich was taken as an indication that we just weren’t being harsh enough to the poor, or that we’d allowed the creation of civilization to get in the way of some biological imperative. The result of that thinking produced what came to be called the Eugenics Movement. In its saner moments, the Eugenics Movement merely advocated policies designed to get the well-educated to have more children. Unfortunately, the moments that weren’t so sane were more numerous, so we had advocates of brutal policies like laws against the “mixing of races”, the sterilization of “genetic inferiors,” various forms of discrimination and strange racial theories, and even outright genocide. We mostly managed to avoid the last one in this country, but the other policies were a matter of law for many decades at the beginning of the 20th Century.

And even now, one of the pitches that is made for the genetic engineering of human beings is that we could somehow “improve” people genetically, without anyone really knowing what that means.

And I mean that. Nobody knows what “genetically inferior” really means, because a person’s genetic makeup interacts with the environment, and what is “fit” for one set of circumstances may well be “unfit” for others. So it’s not something that you can establish from the outset. If aliens came down in spaceships and began to “intelligently design” a human being, the result would depend entirely upon what purpose the aliens had for humans and the environment that the humans were meant for. Frankly, I doubt that aliens would do a very good job of it, at least not from our perspective.

But people who have enjoyed worldly success want that success to be total and intrinsic. It’s often not enough for them to be rich and successful; they want to believe that it’s because of their basic virtue, that they are just plain better than other people. There are, in fact, some religious doctrines that hold worldly success to be the outward manifestation of inner virtue and godly grace. And if some people can enlist their ideas about God to justify themselves, it’s not very hard to imagine that some people, sometimes the same people, think that science will do that as well.

So let me say in conclusion, that, if some magic leprechaun were to give me a single powerful wish that it could be used to eradicate either Creationism or Social Darwinism, I’d get rid of Social Darwinism, because it has caused much greater harm than Creationism in this world. The idea that the day to day struggle for a decent life is part of some grand evolutionary struggle is pernicious at its core, and it does great harm. So if you see your fellow man in some distress, it’s okay to help them out. You don’t have to take every advantage at every step. Kindness is still a virtue; compassion does not harm the human race.

And Darwin is not your enemy, nor is evolution. We all know that we have an animal nature, but it need not define us. Disraeli may not have been an angel, nor are any of us, but it is not a bad thing to consider how you’d expect an angel to act, and maybe aspire to act like one every now and then.

A Bit of Fast/Slow Sculpture

[Crossposted to We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party]

Several years ago, I was walking up Folger Avenue towards San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. The University of California owns a building that sits between Folger and 67 St. on San Pablo Avenue, or at least they did. They’ve been trying to sell it recently, and I’m not current on its status, but they still occupy a lot of it. The building itself is huge, and, as I understand it, actually straddles the boundaries of not just Berkeley and Oakland, but also Emeryville.

I was headed toward the offices of a non-profit that I was involved with at the time (that backstory is ‘way too complicated), but my path took me by the U.C. Berkeley surplus and overstock sales area, at 1000 Folger St., where they have auctions every Tuesday and Thursday. So there are often people loading stuff into trucks, vans, and whatever, starting at about 9 A.M. on those two days each week. There’s a lot of old surplus computer stuff that gets sold that way.

I was carrying a briefcase, which isn’t important to the story, but it’s part of the “sense memory.” I was passing by a guy who was loading a lot of surplus computer stuff into a panel truck, just as the pile of stuff he’d loaded shifted and began to topple towards him.

The wall of electronics included a lot of monitors. Imploding CRTs and glass everywhere: not so good. I stepped in and put my shoulder in an appropriate spot and halted the avalanche. I looked at the guy, who had an interesting combination of gratitude and terror on his face. I realized that he had no idea what to do next, as we were both holding up a wall of computer monitors that was trying to fall.

Okay, here’s where I get to brag a little. There’s a cluster of mental aptitudes that gets called things like “3-D visualization” and “geometrical intuition” and like that. I am nearly off the charts in this particular cluster of aptitudes. I can pack a car trunk or a suitcase like you wouldn’t believe, and I would have made a very good mechanical engineer.

So I shifted my body to where I was doing almost all of the job of keeping the stuff from falling, and I began giving him directions. Move that one over there. Now take that one down and put it one the ground. Now that one, no not that one, the other one. And so forth. We deconstructed the unstable pile in fairly short order, then I began helping him put the stuff back into a better arrangement, one that wouldn’t shift when the drove the truck to wherever he was going.The whole adventure only took maybe ten minutes.

At the end of it, the guy thanked me profusely, I smiled and said, “You’re welcome. It was actually kinda fun,” and I headed up Folger once more. Spring in my step? Probably.

The idea of altruism is considered to be problematic in evolutionary biology, economics, psychology, and moral philosophy. It obviously exists, yet these disciplines don’t feel that they adequately explain it. It may be noted that each of them also has its own special definition of what “altruism” is, one that excludes a lot of behavior that is normally called altruistic.

Part of this nomenclature problem stems from trying to exclude actions that benefit both others and one’s own self, with the notion of what constitutes “one’s own self” being the real slippery one here. Take my little adventure described above. Let me describe the ways I benefited from it.

There are many things that can ruin a morning, bad traffic, being awakened by a wrong number half an hour before it’s time to get up, seeing a dead dog in the road, or watching a tower of computer monitors come crashing down. That would have been quite unpleasant, even if no one wound up injured, and there was a real possibility of that happening.

Moreover, I got to show off a competency, not only at the time, but in the later telling of the tale.

There is also a very abstract pleasure that comes from making sculpture, and that was what I was doing, taking apart a defective sculpture and replacing it with one that was both aesthetically pleasing (to me, anyway) and utilitarian as well. And the sculpture, taken in the larger sense, was kinetic, deconstruction, reconfiguration, then the later driving and final disassembly. I didn’t get to witness the last part, but I’m pretty sure it turned out all right.

Also, the guy thanked me, which is a form of applause, validation, and better than a dead catfish under the driver’s seat.

Intelligent Design Stories

The hypotheses of intelligent design, as well as the related hypothesis of "directed evolution," have been a matter of speculation for quite a long time in the realm of science fiction. In fact, the two ideas are often referred to as the "black monolith theory" after Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, A Space Odyssey, where creatures who look like black monoliths tamper with ape evolution to make smarter apes, i.e. humans.

Intelligent Design advocates are obviously squeamish about inquiring into either the design process or the motives of the designer(s), owing to their religious intentions. They deny that they are actually Creationists, but silence can speak louder than argument. The refusal to address important issues speaks volumes. Fortunately, science fiction writers and readers are not so shy.

In science fiction, the motives of the alien meddlers have long been a matter for speculation (and some cracking good yarns). I'll summarize a few of those ideas here. I will henceforth call the meddling aliens "black monoliths" or simply "monoliths." One hypothesis is that of "Benevolent Education," namely that the monoliths might be lonely, or otherwise desiring of companionship, so they try to create said companionship and do so benevolently, as parents might raise children. At first glance, this might seem to give a special place for humanity in the general scheme of things, and indeed, often that is the case, in such stories. There are, however, other stories whose authors have a greater sense of the ironic. In some of those, it turns out that humanity is merely a byproduct of a plan for some other creature (e.g. "God must love beetles; why else would he make so many of them?"). In other stories, humans are still a very primitive form, and it will still be billions of years before the process produces anything actually interesting to the black monoliths.

A related, and also darker, vision is one in which what the monoliths desire is not companionship, but rather servants, or maybe slaves. In some versions, humanity is too cantankerous to make good slaves. In "happy ending" versions, this leads to either being left alone or a war in which humanity prevails. In more realistic versions, the monoliths just wipe us out and start over.

There is at least one story in which we have not been made slaves because we just aren't smart enough yet.

In various stories, the motive of the monoliths is simply esthetic. The world is made because the monoliths find it pleasing. Sometimes this is of little comfort, since tastes can change, and who knows what next year's fashion brings?

Feel free to add to this list.

Slan: A Critique

A substantive impetus for my consideration of the demographic analysis of science fiction readers and fans came from some discussions that I’ve had with Ben Sano about the nature of Creationism and the Intelligent Design “theory.” Considering ID as just another idea of speculative fiction is not an unreasonable thing to do, and that led me to an informal review of how science fiction has treated evolution and mutation. Yes, these are “just stories”, but how and why stories strike a spark in an audience can tell a lot about the audience.

One thing to bear in mind is that there is substantial overlap between the demographic that supports science fiction (bright children of working class families) and the demographic of ID and creationism (working class families). Moreover, the actual players in the ID drama, the “experts” who provide its main arguments and writings tend to be similar to science fiction fans, e.g., engineers, academics at lower tier colleges, professionals in the “practical” sciences such as medicine, geology, etc.

Let’s just say that there is something about the demographic that makes us suckers for a good story.

So we come to Slan. It was one of the first evolution-in-SF stories I reviewed, because of its obvious importance to the field. An entire generation of sf fans had “Fans are Slans” as a slogan. The publication of Slan just before WWII launched A. E. van Vogt’s writing career, and much ink has been spilled on its behalf. Now it’s my turn, in part, because, despite my having what turned out to be a very good memory of the story, nevertheless, re-reading it and thinking about it gave me some surprising notions. So let’s review the story.

Slan is about slans, a race of mutant supermen, possessing greater than human intelligence, strength, speed, endurance, and resistance to disease. They are also telepathic, with golden “tendrils” in their hair; the tendrils serve as antennae for telepathy. We are not told, though it certainly seems to be the case, that slans are all physically attractive. We are told that slans are kinder, gentler, and more moral than humans, though some events in the tale suggest otherwise.

The protagonist of Slan is John Thomas Cross, “Jommy Cross” to his mother, who is killed by genocidal humans shortly after the novel begins. Cross is nine years old. His father is already dead, having heroically allowed his own murder, rather than turning his great invention (a form of controlled atomic power) on his attackers. We later see the invention, which is in the form of a gun, a curious design choice from such a pacifist.

Cross escapes from those who killed his mother, avoids the police, and finds refuge in the abode of “Granny” a larcenous old woman who expects Cross to use his mind-reading abilities to steal for her—which he does. He uses the time during his refuge with Granny to educate himself and to later (on his 16th birthday) recover the prototype of his father’s invention. At this time, he also discovers the existence of “tendril-less slans,” who possess many of the characteristics of slans (e.g., higher intelligence) without the obvious physical characteristics that mark them for attacks by humans. The tendril-less slans have a separate (and secret) society, where they prepare for world conquest and the probable extermination of humankind. They also hate tendrilled slans as much or more than they hate humans, so Cross has two groups against him. His only natural allies would seem to be the “true slans” but, with the exception of a single girl (Kathleen) that is killed almost as soon as he meets her, he can’t find any! So Cross spends the rest of the novel trying to find the true slans, solve the mystery of their origin, and, by the way, get to the Dictator of the World, Kier Grey, and kill him. This last one is a quest laid upon him by his mother, another interesting interpretation of what “kind, gentle, and moral,” means.

Cross’s search for a solution to the “mystery of the slans’ origin” drives much of the story. Slans were born of humans, and once, briefly, controlled the entire world. But slans “continued making more slans” according to one human in the book, i.e. the mutant births continued, and humans didn’t like having mutants as children. So humans initiated genocide, and killed most of the slans. Cross doesn’t believe the Intelligent Design hypothesis (that slans are originally the product of a mutation machine). He can’t believe that such kind and gentle people would do such a thing.

Finally, near the end of the book, all is explained, first by Joanna Hillory a sympathetic tendril-less slan woman (who had fallen in love with Cross on their first meeting, such is the power of super-human attractiveness), then by Kier Grey, the Dictator of the World. Slans are actually natural products of evolution; humans were stupid to ever think that they were created by a mutation machine. Tendril-less slans, on the other hand, were created by slans as a way of preserving the race. They were then persecuted by slans as an act of “tough love,” in preparation for the inevitable clash with humans. Furthermore, Kier Grey turns out to be a slan himself! And he was Kathleen’s father!! And she is still alive, resurrected with slan super-medicine!!!

So all ends well.

Now let’s consider a few things about the way evolution actually works.

Realize first that large morphological changes rarely occur within a single generation, and when they do, there is always a substantial physiological price to pay. Giantism, for example, leads to early death. Down’s syndrome is a mutation, but the affected individuals are sterile. And so forth.

Next, the formation of a new organ never happens in a single generation. This is the “irreducible complexity” so beloved of the Intelligent Design theorists. There are cases where such morphological jumps appear to occur (e.g. blind cave fish becoming sighted when reared in the light), but this is the activation of a vestigial (previously evolved) trait, not a new organ. So the likelihood of the slan’s “tendrils” occurring overnight is about zero.

Finally, something like generally enhance resistance to disease would be so universally beneficial that, if it were in the evolutionary cards, it would have happened already (and microbes would have evolved to counter it).

In short, if slans were to appear, modern biology would immediately ascribe them to “Intelligent Design.” Fundamentalists might look to a supernatural origin, but most biologists would assume that there was gene splicing behind it. In other words, a Mutation Machine.

Of course, what is actually suggested by Slan is a process of teleological evolution, evolution that has a purpose and a plan. Many people have believed in teleological evolution; there just aren’t any modern evolutionary biologists who do. One reason why teleological evolution is so appealing is that it fits a narrative rather better than does Darwinian natural selection. In any case, Slan is hardly the only example of teleological evolution in SF. Indeed, teleological evolution is probably the norm, if one includes Social Darwinism, which basically holds that natural selection has the purpose of advancing and maintaining a particular social hierarchy.

The implication here is that science fiction readers know little more about evolution by natural selection than creationists. The main difference between the two groups would be that creationists are against it, while science fiction readers are in favor of it. But I digress, and I’ll leave the question of why these two groups have such different reactions to what is essentially the same misunderstanding for another time.

Getting back to Slan, suppose we remove the scientific blunder of teleological evolution from the book’s context. Does that destroy the book, or merely change the reading?

Remarkably, Slan becomes a much more interesting book if read from the modern evolutionary perspective, i.e. if the “mystery of the slans” is answered the other way.

For one thing, it brings forth the idea that, while the protagonist, Cross, is a brilliant physical scientist, he knows little about evolutionary biology. That’s not hard to swallow, is it? I can certainly think of a few very bright fellows with that profile (e.g. William Shockley). Also, it would appear that Cross is entirely willing to believe things that he wants to believe, despite evidence to the contrary. He continues to believe that slans are all kind and gentle, even after he hears about how they brutalized the tendril-less slans (all for the greater good, of course). His mother tells him to kill Kier Grey (ditto), but he does not attribute this to so low an instinct as a thirst for vengence. Finally, he continues to believe in the essential morality of slans, even after learning that the brutal Dictator Kier Grey is a slan. That, it seems to me, requires some truly super-human rationalization. Fortunately, Cross is super-human, so it comes easily to him.

It also would appear that everyone is playing Cross for a sucker. “Give us the secret to controlled atomic power, nearly invulnerable steel, and telepathic hypnosis, and we’ll assure you that all slans are as good as your parents, and no one will get hurt.” And Cross, searching for a place to belong, falls for it.

But how can everyone be lying to Cross? He’s telepathic.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe lying to a telepath is as easy as lying to yourself. It’s easy to see how Joanna Hillory, the tendril-less slan woman could lie to Cross; all that need happen is for her to believe what she’s saying, that is, she could be yet another pawn in the great game. As for Kier Grey, he’s older, more mature, in far better control of his mind. Couldn’t he be good enough to put on over on the youngster?

Still and all, it’s a happy ending. Lovers reunited and everything works out—provided you’re a slan. The outlook for mere human is more problematic. In any case, their fate is in the hands of the slans, not their own.

Historically, Slan is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that struck a chord with several generations of science fiction fans. Since their identification with the protagonist is great, they had little reason to pick at the flaws. What criticisms were made (Damon Knight, Alexi Panshin) went to the obvious holes in the plot, characterization, etc. or the general critique of the wish-fulfillment fantasy as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, not the sort of self-subversion that I’m describing here.

For me, however, the most interesting thing about Slan is that it can be read as a cautionary tale of how someone can be deceived, despite high intelligence and other advantages. As Tom Stoppard has his protagonist say in Professional Foul:” “You can convince a man of almost anything—provided he’s smart enough.”

I would add: provided he wants to believe it.