I remember unexpectedly having that conversation with my mother in law while riding in the car recently:

“What do you mean Sagan isn’t going to be raised Christian?” she asked when we accidentally let slip that he wouldn’t be going to a Christian church.

“There’s lots of possible belief systems out there,” Vicky answered, “and we’re going to let him decide for himself.”

“When he’s old enough, he can read the Bible if he wants,” I said.

“Old enough?” Grandma asked.

“Ummm,” I hesitated and decided to just let it out, “Yeah. When he’s old enough to read stories about daughters getting their father drunk to have sex with him, a husband giving his wife to be raped by a mob and then chopping her up into pieces to mail to his allies, a prophet summoning bears to devour children for teasing him about his male-pattern baldness, fathers sacrificing their virgin daughters to god as thanks for victory in war, mothers entering contracts to eat one another’s’ sons, … You know, when he’s old enough to be exposed to those kinds of stories.”

“Ha. Ha,” Grandma chuckled. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”

It’s so strange that in a world where humans can see to the edge of the Universe, live to a century through modern medicine, access unimaginable volumes of information online, and fly all over the world that I am still put in the awkward position from time to time of having to explain to someone that I don’t believe in any of the mythical invisible entities known as “gods.” It’s also awkward because I don’t walk around all day thinking about the fact that I don’t think about such deities. I don’t identify as a non-theist any more than I identify as a non-Mr. Snuffleupagusist. I identify as a Scientist a person who focuses on our shared empirical understanding of the natural world revealed through experimentation and inductive reasoning.

Mr. Snuffleupagus

Technically I’m a non-believer, but technically everyone is atheistic to a degree. There are thousands of gods and everyone on planet Earth doesn’t believe in most of them, and even when two people believe in the same god they often have major discrepancies in their personal understandings of it. Carl Sagan puts it best:

The word god is used to cover so many different points of view… First of all, you can be religious without believing in god. Buddhists, certainly religious without having any notion of god. Secondly, the word god, it’s amazing how diverse the definitions are. Let me give two extremes. One is the sort of god that I gathered by osmosis during my childhood, which is an outsized white male with a long white beard who sits on a throne in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow. Now that kind of anthropocentric god there is, as far as I can tell, no compelling evidence for at all. None.

At the other extreme, there’s the kind of god that Einstein and Spinoza talked about, not too different from the sum total of the laws of nature. Now there are laws of nature, and not only that they apply everywhere, to a quasar ten billion light years away as to the Eastern seaboard of the United States. And it’s a very remarkable fact that the same laws do apply so generally. It could have been a different set laws applies in every county. So that kind of god of course exists. Who would deny that there are laws of nature.

So I claim you learn absolutely nothing about someone’s belief if you ask them “Do you believe in God?” and they say yes or no. You have to specify which of the countless kinds of god you have in mind. I don’t myself like to use the word in that context, because it doesn’t illuminate at all. If I say I believe in god or if I say I don’t believe in god, and I say no more, you’ve learned nothing about what my belief system is.

For the sake of argument, we’ll put this fact aside and pretend that the term “atheist” only applies to people who don’t believe in the supernatural world whatsoever.

The Reason Rally 2012

This last weekend Vicky, our son Sagan, and I made our way out to the Reason Rally to see some of our favorite public intellectuals, like Adam Savage and Richard Dawkins, speak on secularism and rationality. We arrived just in time to witness Adam Savage of the Mythbusters show on Discovery deliver an enlightening and lighthearted speech in support of science and human potential:

Adam Savage

Testable, provable phenomena, and the predictions they allow, big and small, brought me here to in front of you today and they will take me back to my family when I am done. They allowed me to drive to DC on a bus, type my speech on a screen, ride to this rally in a car, walk on shoes that support my feet, and wear clothes and a hat that protects my pale skin from the sun. To fly on a plane home. That plane I will get on exists and stays in the air because of a million million large and tiny tested predictions lift, drag, material performance, physics, electricity, radio waves, wear, tear sheer, checklists, human error, machine error and redundancy. It is a miracle of engineering. It is the result of an ancient and very human drive. A drive that makes us what we are in all of our unique specialization. A drive to solve problems.

Many tens of thousands of people combine their collective genius to make an impossibly fast and efficient, thin, inflated bubble of aluminum so stable and secure that you’d have to fly for several thousand years before the odds gave you an even chance of being in an accident. Everything that we have that makes our lives possible exists because human beings have tested the things they found in their surroundings, made predictions based on those tests, and then improved upon them. This is reason, the human capacity to make sense of the world.

I was also extremely impressed with Nate Phelps the atheist son of Westboro Baptist Church Pastor Fred Phelps, who spoke so eloquently at the rally while his family picketed him at the sidelines. His story and others like it are why I wasn’t comfortable with people at the rally pointing to my son Sagan with a smile and referring to him as “future atheist.” Like most atheist parents, I will expose Sagan to a wide variety of belief systems, most likely through a community such as a Unitarian Church, let him decide for himself what to belief, and respect that choice. Leave the predestination nonsense to the Calvinists.

Secular Coalition

By definition, independent thinkers are an individualistic bunch. Over 20 secular and atheist organizations were present at the rally, each with their own flavor of skepticism, atheism, or Enlightenment values. There was the James Randi Educational Foundation, with its focus on debunking supernatural claims made by new agers and faith healers. There was the Richard Dawkins Foundation which actively promotes atheism, but also promotes the beauty and wonder of scientific ideas. My favorite organization was also making a strong showing, the American Humanist Association whose slogan is “Good Without God” and presents one of the most positive and uplifting secular messages of any organization present that day. One of my heroes, Isaac Asimov took more joy in being president of the AHA than he did in his leadership of Mensa International.

Richard Dawkins gave an overall good speech, where he lamented the absurdity of needing to hold such a rally, “How could anyone rally against reason? How is it necessary to have a rally for reason? Reason means basing your life on evidence and the logic which is how you deduce the consequences of evidence. In a hundred years’ time it seems to me inconceivable that anyone would want to have a rally for reason. By that time we’ll either have blown ourselves up or we’ll have become so civilized that we no longer need it.” I enjoyed the parts where he praised the natural world and our scientific understanding of it, but grew uncomfortable when he called for everyone to “ridicule and show contempt” for religion.

Richard Dawkins straddles, but never crosses, the line between what I love about science and why I get worried when scientists focus too much on religion-bashing. Christopher Hitchens, PZ Meyers, and the other outspoken atheists who argue atheism for the sake of atheism, on the other hand, come across as hostile and belligerent. They ridicule rather than seek to persuade, seeking to stir up feelings of outrage and contempt in their audiences, framing everything in terms of “Us VS Them,” and portraying theists as not just wrong, but oftentimes as evil. You know who else does that? Religious extremists and political pundits. We walked out of PZ Meyer’s speech at the Reason Rally for the same reason I turn the dial when Rush Dimbulb is on the radio, and I fear these “New Atheists” as they call themselves and “Militant Atheists” as they are called by their opponents are doing more damage than good.

The Origins of New Atheism

The New Atheism, the outspoken, in-your-face controversial atheism is a reactionary movement resulting from the perpetual attempts of theists to impose their supernaturally-inspired belief systems on the public. Theists changed the motto of the United States to “In God We Trust” in 1956, replacing E Pluribus Unum which was the nation’s motto since 1782. Over and over and over again they try to force their supernatural explanations into public school science text books, failing to realize in their short-sightedness that allowing alternatives to factual knowledge would open a Pandora’s box of creation stories from religions around the world. They push legislation defining life as beginning before pregnancy and making it a felony for doctors not to tell abortion patients they will have an increased risk of breast cancer for which there is no scientific evidence. On top of all this churches get to keep $100 Billion a year in donations tax-free, enjoying all the taxpayer-funded benefits of our society without having to contribute anything in return.

Westboro Baptist Church Sign

And yet somehow theists have managed to construct an elaborate scary fantasy of religious persecution in America. They falsely claim they are not allowed to pray in public schools, but the law only prevents them from using official school policy to impose prayer on students. They claim that religious groups are being banned from college campuses, but it is groups that practice discrimination that are being banned. Courts have ruled that private religious groups can discriminate against whomever they like, and organizations, like the Boy Scouts of America and religious organizations can and do discriminate on religious grounds.

America was founded on secularism, when you look inside the Library of Congress you see America portrayed as the science nation. The ceiling of the dome of Congress has a painting of Greek Gods giving the Founding Fathers Enlightenment through the sciences. We have led the world in publishing scientific research and have led the world innovatively and economically because of that, but now China is projected to surpass us in the near future. It’s remarkable that in the same country inspired by the heretic Thomas Paine to revolt against Kings appointed by god in favor of popular rule, so many people care less about our power to innovate through science and more about whether the leader of 300 million Americans shows proper reverence to a supernatural deity for which there is absolutely no evidence.

China Projected to Surpass America

When confronted with such an assault American values, it is easy to fall into a rut of outrage. The antidote to outrage is perspective, doing what scientists do best: looking realistically at the big picture.

The percentage of people who identify as “none” on religious surveys grows every year. Among scientists only 1/3 believe in god and that includes the deistic definition of god.

But most telling is the 3/4 of Americans who believe in god. They disparage scientific knowledge while driving in cars designed by our engineers, proselytizing on our televisions, and commenting on our World Wide Web. When they get sick, it is to our doctors they run. They are immersed in the gifts of science every moment of every day, and we don’t begrudge them this wonderful quality of life science provides, but we can allow ourselves a small degree of knowing condescension at their oblivious hypocrisy.

Atheists Have to Keep it Real

The problem I have with New Atheism is that I’m also a secularist. I might not believe in god, but so long as a person doesn’t use their understanding of a personal deity as an excuse to attack anyone’s freedoms then it’s harmless. People can entertain any supernatural fantasy they like if it gives them comfort, but when they participate in the arena of public discourse, they must confine themselves to the reality we all share. Barack Obama once eloquently explained this point:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible.

You can argue whatever position you like in America, but when the only argument you have is because an invisible man in the sky said so, then you don’t have a legitimate argument. Supernaturally revealed knowledge is not universal in a pluralistic, democratic country. As Obama points out in the above speech, if we saw Abraham preparing to murder his son today, we would lock him up and put Isaac in child protective services.

Secular/Atheist Protest Signs

But we atheists have to look in the mirror and see how we are guilty of this very same fallacy when we argue there isn’t a god. Technically we must accept that atheism is not a position that has any bearing on reality any more than saying there is or isn’t extraterrestrial life in the Universe. These are not scientific positions. The distinguished planetary scientist Carolyn Porco best explains why:

If you were to ask me, if I believed in god. Since I am a professional scientist, I would want to give you two answers. In my capacity as a professional scientist I would have to–I would be required to–be agnostic on the subject since I couldn’t cite with scientific certainty say that there is a god and I couldn’t with scientific certainty say that there isn’t.

But if I were allowed to respond as just a regular non-scientist and if you allowed me to take the very same indulgences that all other non-scientists are allowed to take and that is I’m allowed to reject the training I’ve received as a scientist that taught me–that drilled into my head–not to accept anything as fact that can’t be scientifically proven, but instead I’m now allowed to do what many many others do and profess–I’m allowed now to profess to know something and to profess to strongly believe it in the complete absence of facts…then I’m gonna have to say that my very strong faith, my very very strong belief is that there is no god. But on this level, on this level now, my belief is perfectly equivalent to religious belief. We’re both doing the same thing.

Ryan, Technically an Atheist

This is why I don’t define myself as an atheist any more than I would define myself as an a-dittohead, a-flat-earther, or a-astrologer. As American environmental activist Van Jones put it, “Martin Luther King didn’t get famous for giving a speech called ‘I have a complaint.’” There’s a point where you have to say what you stand for. I am an Enlightenment Scholar, like the American Founding Fathers before me, and I’m pretty damn proud of it.

Spiritual and Atheist

Science has expanded our vision, revealing what we could not see before and in such a way that anyone who wants to follow the procedure can see it. Science convinced me to my present worldview because it presents a world that so much more majestic and moral than any theistic philosophy. Science wins mindshare because it successfully improves our quality of life every single day. Is it any wonder so many great minds have mused on the wonders of nature revealed to us through science?

The Magic of Reality

Richard Dawkins expresses it:

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

Carl Sagan articulates it:

In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.

Albert Einstein conveys it:

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

Richard Feynman elucidates it. Chet Raymo enunciates it. Walt Whitman poeticizes it. Ralph Waldo Emerson glorifies it. Teddy Roosevelt appreciates it.

Everyone should sing praise to science!

Spiritual Naturalist

Chet Raymo succinctly explains the dimensions and complexity of my own belief system (minus the last bit):

So this is my Credo. I am an atheist, if by God one means a transcendent Person who acts willfully within the creation. I am an agnostic in that I believe our knowledge of “what is” is partial and tentative-a tiny flickering flame in the overwhelming shadows of our ignorance. I am a pantheist in that I believe empirical knowledge of the sensate world is the surest revelation of whatever is worth being called divine. I am a Catholic by accident of birth.

The Apotheosis of Washington
(Minerva giving Science to the Founding Fathers)

I am an Enlightenment Scholar, like the American Founding Fathers. Experiments are my sacred rights. Quiet attention to the natural world around me is my prayer. Every school, laboratory, and library is my place of worship. My spiritual leaders are physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, doctors, and professors. My scripture is in the ATGC of each link in the chain of a DNA molecule, the 1420.40575177 MHz frequency of a Hydrogen atom, The He, C, Ne, O, Si, and Fe atoms forged in stars, and the galaxy of elements produced from supernovas. My sense of mystery is the dark fog from the beginning of time at visible limits of our Universe, the inadequate metaphors of waves and particles we use to try and conceptualize the behavior of a sunbeam, and the infinite complexity of Pi, Phi, and e.

This is all so very precious. As the Dawkins Foundation magnets handed out at the Reason Rally said, “It took 13.7 billion years to make something this perfect. So don’t mess it up.”

From time to time I find myself deeply fascinated with the Golden Ratio and its relation to the Fibbonacci set. I even bought a cross-section of a nautilus shell to proudly display in my cabinet of curiosities because they grow along the golden ratio. Then this article clearly illustrated that nautilus shells grow in a logarithmic spiral. Now I’m even prouder of my nautilus cross-section because it tells a story of just how wrong I was about a beautiful hypothesis.

I feel as though a similar thing happened with the band They Might Be Giants, who released a song in 1993 titled Why Does the Sun Shine?, a cover of a song by Tom Glazer & Dottie Evans, that included the following lyric:

The sun is mass of incandescent gas,
a gigantic nuclear furnace,
where hydrogen is built into helium
at a temperature of millions of degrees.

Not bad, but 16 years later on their album Here Comes Science, they rereleased this cover and followed it with a new song titled Why Does the Sun Really Shine? that presents a more accurate description:

The sun is a miasma
Of incandescent plasma
The sun’s not simply made out of gas
No, no, no
[...]
(Plasma!)
Forget that song
(Plasma!)
They got it wrong
That thesis has been rendered invalid

They didn’t try to erase the fact that they (and the original songwriters) were wrong; they republished the inaccurate song and accompanied it with a correction, turning it into a teachable moment. The original song doesn’t lose any value, the tune is just as catch as it ever was, only now the listener has additional, more accurate insights into its meaning.

xkcd: Airfoil

Here’s the thing: It’s OK to be wrong, but it doesn’t always feel that way. We live in a world where less emotionally mature minds equate being wrong on even a few points with being fully discredited. Under such silly zero-sum-game social pressures, people are backed into ideological corners, unable to concede any error or alter their position on a subject in light of new evidence. We see this in politics all the time, where any politician who changes their mind is labeled “flip-flopper.”

But in the world of science and academia admitting to being wrong demonstrates integrity and exhibiting the plasticity of mind to adjust one’s position to fit the evidence is a virtue. Richard Dawkins tells the story of a Professor at Oxford being presented with incontrovertible evidence falsifying one of his strongly-held beliefs (emphasis mine):

I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – ‘My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.’ We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal – unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.

Every time a fundamentalist rejects empirical evidence, they put the vice of obdurateness on display. Every time an ideologue exclaims “Ah-Ha!” in response to someone conceding a point in expressing a nuanced position, they parade their nescience before the public. We feel embarrassed for these diminutive minds because they lack the awareness necessary to feel embarrassed for themselves, and rightly so, but it is never appropriate to feel embarrassed for someone who believes in even a large number of inaccurate ideas because that’s simply being human.

xkcd: Certainty

One thing that becomes apparent when talking to members of the Baby Boomer generation for longer than a few minutes is that they have a lot of misinformation in their heads, but that’s not surprising. They grew up in a world without an Internet and instantaneous fact-checking. Memory is incredibly fallible, and without perpetual reinforcement from easily-accessible references, the data in our heads corrupts and degrades. In fact, it seems that the more we recall a memory the more our brains alter the details.

As part of Generation X, I grew up in a world without an Internet. Then for the first decade of the mainstream World Wide Web, it was considered a cesspool of disinformation. It wasn’t until I was in my 30′s that the Internet became a resource for reference material, and I remember discovering the habit of checking every bit of knowledge I took for granted online at that time and being shocked at all the disinformation in my head.

Ideologues and fundamentalists simply don’t understand the world well enough to know they are as fallible as the rest of us. “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge,” as Charles Darwin said.

Consider one of the most famous examples of brilliance in the modern world. “Einstein” is synonymous with “genius,” but history forgets Albert Einstein was wrong about key tenants quantum physics that he rejected because he could not understand them. The world of physics, in turn, largely ignored his later efforts to develop a Unified Field Theory. Einstein doesn’t stop being a genius for being wrong many times in his life, but he does start being human.

The moment you realize it’s okay to be wrong, you are free. The moment you can recognize when you are wrong about something and shrug off the faulty factoids without a moment’s hesitation, the more adaptable and youthful your brain will remain. As William Cowper mused:

Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one,
Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men,
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much,
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

In 1968, Dr. Paul Ehrlich predicted a population explosion on planet Earth would result in mass starvation in his book The Population Bomb. While millions die each year of starvation, Dr. Ehrlich’s dire predictions did not come true. Many critics of environmentalism often cite Ehrlich’s failed predictions to attack anyone who raises concerns about environmental sustainability, but most of them gloss over the reason why Ehrlich was wrong which was his failure to account for human innovation. Ehrlich completely failed to factor in the work of Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, which saved over a billion people from starvation with irrigation infrastructure, hybridized seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides.

Last month, the Earth’s population hit seven billion, raising questions once more about sustainability as millions are threatened with starvation in Africa, conflicts arise over water, and major fish stocks collapse. We are pushing the limits of what the Green Revolution’s science has granted us as far as a sustainable global population. We need a second scientific revolution to increase the global food supply, and our best hope for that revolution is in Genetically Modified (GM) Foods.

The Promise of GM Foods

The benefits of Genetically Modified Foods are already being born out all over the world. Farmers in China and India are experiencing better health through massively reduced use of pesticides thanks to GM Crops and are experiencing higher crop yields (see here, here, and here). Flood tolerant rice being developed at the Ronald Laboratory of UC Davice will benefit poor farmers who are increasingly threatened by climate change. While Blood Rice will save lives by producing a key component of human blood. This year “Golden Rice,” engineered to be packed with vitamins, will be a huge weapon in the fight against malnutrition worldwide. Genetically modified Papaya single-handedly saved Hawaii’s Papaya farms from extinction, by inoculating them against the ring spot virus.

Papaya Yields

“Organic” food is a nice ideal, but organic farming requires more water and farmland to produce the same amount of food as modern farming. Without GM crops we will need to consume even more forests for farming, driving millions of birds and insects into extinction, and increase pesticide use. With crops that are more nutritious, resistant to pests, and can survive with less water, GM crops make organic farming a realistic possibility.

The company Aquabounty has produced a salmon that includes a genetic modification for faster growth. This innovation has a huge potential to increase the output of farm-raised salmon, which would dramatically reduce the strain on natural fish stocks. Despite the incredible benefit, Aquabounty has spent 15 years working to get their salmon approved for commercial production because of public concerns over Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).

The Safety of GM Foods

Google “GMO Foods” and you’ll find the majority of links are about how to avoid GM Foods and health concerns about them. There was even a TED Talk by Robyn O’Brien, where she blames increased cancer rates and other health problems on the rise of GM Foods in our diets without citing any research to build a causal link. Other anti-GM Food organizations use the term “Frankenfood” to evoke mental images of monsters and mad scientists that also elicit strong emotional reactions in readers rather than provide them with facts that support their arguments about the supposed ill health effects of GMOs.

The European Union has released a preliminary draft of a report reviewing hundreds of journal articles and decades of research on GM crops and have concluded they are safe (with some important conditionals). Additionally, humans have been consuming Genetically Engineered foods for thousands of years. Corn, cabbage, wheat, cows, chickens, bananas and numerous other foods modern agriculture brings to our plates cannot survive in the natural world. They have been created by humans through selective breeding. The genes being put into GM Foods are genes that exist in nature. Scientists are not putting anything new into our food supply .

Ultimately the potential health detriments of GMO foods are insignificant to the deleterious health effects of modern diets. I know people who will go to great lengths to avoid GMO Foods, buying anything at the grocery store that has the “Organic” label on it, but a bag of organic potato chips is demonstrably going to do far more damage to your health than has been demonstrated with any GMO food on the market today.

Into the Future

Chet Raymo succinctly summarizes the history and promise of GM Foods:

Ten thousand years ago, humans learned how to farm. It was an epochal invention that made possible settled life, cities, craft specialization, writing, organized religion, architecture, mathematics. science. Now humanity stands on the brink of a second agricultural revolution potentially as great as the one that occurred when our ancestors gave up hunter-gatherer way of life and settled down as farmers. Scientists and engineers are poised to genetically modify organisms to increase the yield, nutrition, freshness, and pest resistance of food plants and animals, and perhaps even to diminish the use of artificial fertilizers (and fossil fuels) by supplementing biotic nitrogen-fixation systems. Other possible benefits of genetically modified (GM) organisms include improved use of marginalized land—saving wild areas from the plow—and abundant production of vaccines and pharmaceuticals. possibly eliminating diseases such as cholera, hepatitis B, and malaria. The promise is great. But as always with the products of human artifice, not without attendant dangers.

In writing this post, I was unable to find any articles or posts through search engines that were about the potential and proven benefits of GM Foods. The more than a dozen peer-reviewed examples I’ve cited above I had to find by querying the online science community. That’s not right. It’s not right for unscientific viewpoints to dominate this debate and destroy the potential for this science to create a healthier environment and produce more food and more nutritious food with fewer natural resources.

It’s not right for anti-GM protestors to commit acts of violence against the scientists performing this research by destroying public property in Belgium and Australia. It’s not right for hundreds of thousands of people to starve to death in Somalia because the government rejected free grain from America that was genetically modified, citing the same “Frankenfoods” rhetoric propagated by these anti-science organizations.

Drought tolerant maize lines at Kiboko, Kenya
Credit: CIMMYT

As Chet Raymo said, there are dangers in GM food, just as there are dangers in pesticides and corporate farming, but protestors should be pushing for vigilance in studies on GMOs, not seeking a complete ban on them altogether. Anti GMer’s are directly responsible for the deaths by starvation in Somalia and other countries that refuse food aid over GM crop concerns. As we saw earlier in this article, GM Foods not only hold incredible potential to extend the limits of what we can support on this spaceship Earth, but have already proven their potential to save crop lines and improve yields. The only way we’re going to save our environment and feed the projected nine-billion Earthlings that will live here by 2050 is the same way we came to a planet capable of feeding seven billion people, through scientific innovation, not a regression to more primitive times when famine controlled our population growth.

Notes

Credit: watchingfrogsboil

For 10 years of my life, I was one of those $300 toilet seats or $600 hammers you hear about in the Pentagon’s spending. I was the waste, fraud, and abuse that everyone complains about in government, but up until a year ago, I had no idea just how much my job was costing American taxpayers.

A study by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) found the Government pays IT Contractors nearly twice as much as its own IT Workers.

This begs the question: What service is the Federal Contractor providing to justify charging double what it would cost the Federal Government to employ these same personnel directly?

They don’t provide us the facilities to do our jobs. No. The Federal government provides our computers, office space, and pays for all the utilities to keep it running. The government buys all the software, hardware, and pays for any training we need to bring our skills up to date to effectively do our jobs. This appears to be a fairly standard practice in Federal Contracting as a GAO review found “that significant numbers of defense contractor employees work alongside DOD employees in the 21 DOD offices GAO reviewed. At 15 offices, contractor employees outnumbered DOD employees and comprised up to 88 percent of the workforce.” In my department contractors outnumbered government employees by about four to one.

The contractor also doesn’t have to manage us, because the government employees serve as supervisors. In fact, it’s policy in our department that government employees supervise the contractors directly. Our Project Manager was the most expensive billet on the contract but I only met with him once a year for my annual evaluation, where I had to explain what I had been working on for the past year and why I deserved a raise. He never had the foggiest idea what anyone in the department was working on and relied on complaints from Government employees to know when he needed to chew someone out.

The only thing the Contractor is responsible for is ensuring that our timesheets are filled in correctly and on time; otherwise, they might experience a delay in invoicing Uncle Sam. They handle my 401k, medical benefits, and direct deposit my paycheck twice a month. Guess what America? You are paying twice what it costs the government to employ personel directly for the added value of having a contractor manage the human resource functions for 73 employees. The cost for the Federal government to handle this itself would be a fraction of the yearly salary of a single GIS employee, someone who is already serving as the HR rep for all the other government employees for between $50k and $80k a year.

We also have to consider the quality of the service provided by the Federal Contractor in light of its fixed-priced profit motives:

What the POGO report doesn’t mention is that the IT Workers employed by federal contractors are making as much or less than Federal IT workers. When you’re only overhead is your employees’ salaries, you have a very strong incentive to keep those salaries artificially low. Whenever a government position would open up in our department, contractor employees would jump at the opportunity for stability and better benefits.

Why does the Federal Government operate this way, outsourcing millions of jobs to contractors who could be more cheaply employed through directly? The answer, unsurprisingly, is politics. Politicians hand out billions of dollars to Federal Contractors who, in turn, use the revenues to lobby the politicians. “The top 20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 million since 2000 on lobbying and have donated $23 million to political campaigns,” according to the New York Times. It’s a self-perpetuating system.

But there’s a less visible political reason for the outsourcing. Every time a worker leaves the Federal Payroll to become a private-sector Federal Contractor, the President and Congress can claim to be reducing the size of government. They publicize the fact that “1990 total government employment… was 5.23 million,” which fell to “2.84 million in 2009.”

But the number of people whose job depends on funding from the Federal Government: University Grants, Defense Contractors, Construction Workers, Public Schoolteachers, Regulators, etc. etc. has skyrocketed. Redefining “Federal Worker” to include all of these jobs increases the number of people employed with tax dollars to between 14.6 million and 17 million, translating to between 10% and 12% of America’s total employed population. The true number is incredibly hard to pin down because there are no hard data publicly available on how many American jobs depend on funding from the Federal Government. This obfuscation of employment data is why many critics refer to federal contractors as the Government’s “Shadow Workforce.”

I loved my job developing applications for the Coast Guard, but it angered me that the contractor was raking in taxpayer money by delivering sub-quality service to the government while overworking and underpaying employees. When I confronted management about what I considered fraud and demanded solutions, the answer was we will not pay for training, we will not pay for qualified personnel, and we will not bring your salary up to the national average. They even welcomed my resignation despite the fact that it meant the project I had been working on for two years would completely collapse shortly after my absence. Any project failures are the fault of government employees managing them, not the contractor who merely fills the billets.

Between socialism and capitalism, Government Contracting takes the worst of both worlds. It’s capitalism’s greed mashed up with socialism’s inefficiency. With America struggling to define austerity measures that will reduce the federal deficit, eliminating Federal Contractors and employing personnel directly seems like an obvious place to start.

Additional Food for Thought:

The top 100 Defense Contractors cost taxpayers $306,521,269,483.

There was $442 billion in contractor funds available to small businesses in 2009. What gets hidden in this number is the fact that many small business team up with a large corporation to bid on these contracts.

For a particularly egregious example of Federal Contractor fraud, waste, and abuse, I refer you to the Coast Guard’s $24 billion effort to modernize its fleet, which sounds like it actually ruined more ships and equipment than it produced, but the contract was written so that the Federal Contractors could not be held accountable.

“I cannot live without books.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

I had the great joy of attending this year’s National Book Festival on the Washington DC Mall. With over 100 authors in attendance, CSPAN’s BookTv.org covering the event, PBS Kids, Scholastic, and the greatest library on Earth providing educational materials, this was a fun activity for kids and adults, all celebrating the most important cultural invention in human history: the written word.

As Carl Sagan explains, books changed everything:

For 99 per cent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for first-hand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the game of ‘Chinese Whispers’, over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be distorted and lost.

Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate – with the best teachers – the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.

The Library of Congres

Thomas Jefferson

I’ve written about my love of the Jefferson Room in the Library of Congress and compared it to a modern day Library of Alexandria in my book The Spiraling Web. Just as the British Empire defined itself as the time keeper for the world symbolized through the monumental clock Big Ben, the Library of Congress symbolizes the United States’ status as the world’s cultural hub. The entire world sets its watch by Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and it sets it intellect by America’s eclectic melting pot of diversity and open discussion of ideas.

From the Library’s website:

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 147 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 33 million books and other print materials, 3 million recordings, 12.5 million photographs, 5.4 million maps, 6 million pieces of sheet music and 64.5 million manuscripts… in some 470 languages.

Digital Preservation at the Library of Congress

The Library also supports the acquisition of its own collection through the issuance of copyrights, where anyone seeking to obtain copyright protection under the American government is required to submit two copies of their work (electronic copies are preferred now). Additionally, the Library (capital-L) has numerous other projects going on such as Digital Preservation, which includes web archiving and educational outreach efforts to encourage Americans to backup their digital media for long-term preservation. The LoC also has lots of great online educational resources like the World Digital Library, Gateway to Knowledge, Knowledge Quest, and a vast archive of photographs and other media, including photos of the Jefferson Room.

And did you know that the Library of Congress is also a Unit of Measurement in Information Science? 20 Terabytes; although, the LoC has far surpassed that.

Children’s Tents

Electric Company Coloring Poster

Three very large tents hosted a wide variety of games and activities for children. There were lots of folks in cartoon character costumes, presentation, and giveaways. My favorite activity here was the “Klutz Build a Book,” which included all sorts of decorative items to glue into the pages of a spiral bound book. Sort of like scrapbooking, but fictional.

Authors

After the festival, I found out there were tons of authors I would have enjoyed seeing, but, since I didn’t plan my trip out, I only made the effort to see two.

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson, one of the most interesting cyberpunk novelists today and whose book Cryptonomicon I couldn’t finish (gave up at page 300), but did inspire me to buy an autographed copy of IT Security Guru Bruce Schneir’s book Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, was reading from his latest tome. I happily stood in line for 50 minutes to get an autographed copy of the book Reamde for my brother-in-law who is a huge Stephenson fan and is confused as I am as to why I don’t grok this speculative hyper-geek of an author. His writing is kind of dry, but incredibly witty and his science fiction is hardcore and erudite, all wonderful qualities for his subject matter.

Garrison Keillor

A special treat was seeing Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion fame. He was reading from a collection of poems he had assembled titled Good Poems, American Places, which included a nice prayer for the existence of god (YouTube of him reading it), which was a request for god to simply be out there somewhere, and included the amusing line, “for I shall sure be pissed if I should have been an atheist.” Keillor related his experiences in writing, including rewriting scripts on the PHC as the actors were reading them. He also made one of the best observations about the craft I think I’d ever heard, “Writing is never finished; it’s just taken away from you.”

I can’t wait till next year’s festival.

Further Research

You can check out my Creative Commons Flickr Set Here, which includes lots of photos of Neil and Garrison.

Fanboy: Hey gang! Did you read The Sword of Shanara? The characters traveled hundreds of miles described in excruciating detail for hundreds of pages, until they reached the ultimate battle between good and evil! Cool huh?

Scientist: Whatever. The characters in Red Planet traveled 48 million miles to Mars, while those in 2001 traveled 369 million miles to Jupiter. Characters in Asimov’s Foundation books travel millions of light-years all over the Milky Way galaxy in routine manner. Isn’t it amazing what people can accomplish when they don’t have to walk everywhere? Thank a scientist for your planes, trains, automobiles, and spaceflight whydontcha.

Fanboy: Yeah, but did you see in The Lord of the Rings when Gandalf fought the Balrog all the way down a really deep hole and then all the way back up to the top of a mountain peak!?!?

Scientist: Big whoop. The adventurers in The Core traveled to the very center of the Earth, fighting technological, natural, and human hazards all the way down and all the way back up to the Earth’s crust again. Characters in Fantastic Voyage and Innerspace fought their way all through the human body in microscopic form.

Fanboy: Ooookay… But did you see all those maps having to do with the Wheel of Time books? It’s a huge continent! Pretty epic, huh?

Scientist: Thpppt. Not. The film Contact opens with a satellite shot of Earth and pulls away, out of the solar system, out of the galaxy, and out to a view of many galaxies. The film Men in Black pulls out past many galaxies to many universes. Maybe you can find some flat-Earthers to impress with you dinky little maps.

Fantasy and SF Scopes

Fanboy: The Dragon Riders in Eragon spent thousands of years protecting and guarding and stuff. Thousands of years!!! Isn’t that amazing?

Scientist: No, that’s “we todd did.” (Say that outloud until you get it.) The film A.I. begins in our near future and then jumps 10,000 years ahead of that. And you know what? Things changed. Technology advanced incomprehensibly, society changed and its inhabitants evolved. Compare this to a bunch of dumbass Dragon Riders who never updated their swords to guns or dragons to fighter jets despite having millenia to do so? Dude, that’s Weak.

Fanboy: The Balrog, Godzilla, and Dragons are really big. That’s got to count for something. Right?

Scientist: Whaddya want, a cookie? V’ger, from Star Trek, The Motion Picture, is so large that much of the movie is spent showing the Enterprise traveling through it. The living ocean in Solaris covers an entire planet. V’ger wants to find god. Solaris is so advanced we cannot even decipher it’s motivations. Colossal Science Ficiton beings, have much bigger aspirations than growling and smashing things.

Fanboy: There were thousands of monsters and people on the battlefields of Lord of the Rings. When Sauron is destroyed a volcano erupts and the earth swallows its legions of monsters. Now that was awesome! Am I right? I mean, am I right???

Scientist: (Rolling eyes and pantomiming masturbation.) War of the Worlds reduced entire cities to rubble. Star Wars blew up entire planets. 2010 transformed Jupiter into a star just to thaw out Europa for life to evolve there. Your “epic” armies are kind of cute though.

Fanboy: Okay. Okay. Okay. I got one. In LOTR Arwen Evenstar’s father warns her that, as an immortal, if she abandons her elfin people, her mortal lover will eventually die and she will be alone forever. Forever! Top that Science Fiction!

Scientist: Bite me fanboy. In Science Fiction, all of the immortal elves would be cursed, as eventually the Universe would dissipate to an entropic state of absolute zero, leaving them frozen in total darkness forever, completely devoid of emotional, intellectual, or spiritual growth (Not too different from sitting through all 16-plus hours of the extended DVD version of Lord of the Rings). Sucks to be an elf.

In Star Trek human beings travel through space in a type of flying saucer, secretly visiting primitive civilizations like the one we live in presently, never interfering with them so as not to violate the “Prime Directive.” Star Trek provides a powerfully positive vision of what the human race may become through scientific understanding, technological progress, and human ambition.

Conan, The Barbarian is about a barbarian. He travels around a teensy-weensy percentage of planet Earth’s total landmass, chopping things with his sword, and seeking revenge against the man who killed his parents. Conan presents a glimpse into a single lifetime from ancient human history, and one we may aspire to if we abandon all technology, burn down all libraries, abolish all Universities, and stop wiping our butts.

I love Star Trek. Star Trek inspires me to educate and improve myself. I know I can’t achieve in my lifetime what Star Trek presents, but I also know my children’s children’s children will one day make similarly fantastic accomplishments, so long as they remain as inspired as I am by Science Fiction’s vision.

Typical “Chosen One”

At the same time, Conan, while entertaining, doesn’t provide a practical model for inspiring present-day action. I like having a clean butt, and I want my children to have clean butts; therefore, Conan doesn’t hold much appeal as role-model. The Lord of the Rings films were entertaining, but we all know the reality is that Frodo would be missing lots of teeth, Gandalf would be a very stinky old man, and Aragorn would have a serious flea problem.

Not that we could aspire to anything in fantasy stories even if we wanted to. That’s because fantasy stories are about “chosen ones,” be they kings, hobbits, or wizards. Only these elites, born into their castes, may save the world.

It’s also really boring. Here’s every single “chosen one” story line:

Someguy: I think he is the chosen one!

Choosen One: But I’m just some doofy pud-wacker!

Everybody Else: He is the chosen one!!!

The Grand Poo-Bah: He has defeated the melodramatic personification of pure concentrated evil!!! Thus, proving his status as the chosen one!!!

Everybody: Hooray for the chosen one! Let’s party!

Chosen One: Hooray for me!

There, now you can skip seeing Lord of the Rings Eragon, Harry Potter, Willow,, Star Wars, Highlander, Dragonslayer, Flash Gordon, Transformers The Movie, The Golden compass, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Matrix, The Neverending Story, Dune, Legend, Excalibur, and the New Testament.

If you weren’t born with “metachlorians” in your blood, superpowers, a magical birthmark, a fair complexion, blonde hair, blue eyes, and a penus, then I’m sorry, but you don’t qualify as a chosen one, and no amount of body building, martial arts training, gender reassignment surgery, motivational speakers, higher education, psychotherapy, hard work or determination will every make you the “chosen one.”

Compare this to Star Trek, where a team of experts regularly collaborate on problem solving. Star Trek heroes are heroic because they went to Starfleet Academy. They study in their spare time to keep on top of the latest advances in their fields. They are perpetually exploring and broadening their horizons to become better heroes, and anyone, even the audience, can do the same. In Scence Fiction, heroism is open to everyone.

Fantasy sells. Bookstores and theaters are brimming with works of fantasy, be they Harry Potter, C.S. Lewis, Dragonology, Eragon, or Lord of the Rings. Science Fiction sales are in decline, while Fantasy sales are shooting through the roof.

C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia) and J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) were English faculty at Oxford. Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time) has a BS in Physics. J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter) has a BA in French. Christopher Paolini (Eragon) has no higher education as of yet.

These fantasy writers have inspired countless fans to stand in long lines at movie theaters and books stores sporting capes, light-sabers, and elf-ears, while endlessly debating which of their favorite trilogies is superior based on purely subjective criteria.

In contrast, David Brin (Uplift) has a Ph.D. in Space Science. Stanislaw Lem (Solaris) could not attain his medical degree because he refused to accept Lysenkoism, but did work as a scientific researcher. Dr. Isaac Asimov (Foundation) was a professor of biochemistry, Vice President of Mensa International, president of the American Humanist Association, and wrote hundreds of books on science, politics, and human improvability.

These science fiction authors have accurately predicted the future from cell phones to the Internet. They have contributed to the human race’s collective body of knowledge, and they have inspired countless others to do the same.

Science Fiction fans are intellectually engaged with their subject matter, taking the speculation beyond what is presented, and internalizing its vision to inspire their own accomplishments and contributions to society. Science Fiction walks alongside civilization, evolving and growing in potential as we grow and evolve as a society and a species.

Fantasy books use printing presses and desktop publishing software to glorify times when most people were illiterate. Fantasy movies use computer animation and special effects technologies to let people escape to worlds without films and special effects. Fantasy video games whisk players away to realms devoid of computers. Fantasy wants to delude us into thinking things were better, more exciting and morally clear in mythical ancient times without electricity, running water, toothpaste, toiletpaper, fast food, equal rights, aspirin, diet soft drinks, or any of the other myriad conveniences of modern life that science has betowed upon us. All fantasy fans have to look forward to is bigger swords, flashier magic, and more gruesome monsters. Fantasy is an intellectual dead end.

While fantasy broods on an overly idealized dramatization of the past, science fiction looks upwards and outwards to the future. As L. Ron Hubbard said:

[Science Fiction] is the herald of possibility. It is the plea that someone should work on the future. Yet it is not prophecy. It is the dream that precedes the dawn when the inventor or scientist awakens and goes to his books or his lab saying, ‘I wonder whether I could make that dream come true in the world of real science.’

Science Fiction argues that the best times lay ahead of us, but only if we make them happen.

[It is] easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there and cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses … This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.

             ~ Osama Bin Laden (2004 Video)

• On September 11, 2001, ten years ago, 2,977 people died at the hands of 19 hijackers
• Over the next 10 years, America spent $360,000,000,000 on Federal homeland security expenditures and $2,600,000,000,000 on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Terrorist Incidents in the United States 1980-2005
Source: FBI
• From 2002 to 2005, there were two deaths in America as the result of terrorism.
• From 2002 to 2005, there were 171,994 deaths in America from Automobile accidents (see also here and here).
• In 2007, 616,067 people died of heart disease, 562,875 of cancer, 135,952 of stroke, 74,632 of Alzheimer’s, and 71,382 of Diabetes; there were a total of 1,796,013 health-related deaths.
• Federal spending on Defense and Homeland Security for 2009 was $737,000,000,000.
• Federal spending on Medicare & Medicaid for 2010 was $793,000,000,000.
• Americans spent $110 billion on fast food in 2000.

Causes of Death in the United States
Credit: GearBits
• There have been 6,026 American Military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• There have been over 100,000 Iraqi Civilian deaths as a result of conflict since the 2003 American Invasion.
• On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed.

For thousands of years civilizations have extended social safety nets to its most disadvantaged members in order to ensure a minimal level of wellbeing. The Roman Empire, ancient Judaism, the Chinese Song Dynasty, the Catholic Church, Islam and many many other civilizations have a history of providing social welfare not only out of a humanitarian ethic, but in order to raise the quality of life of all citizens. “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members,” to quote Mahatma Ghandi.

This ethical imperative has come under assault in America from a vocal minority over the decades. From form President Ronald Reagan creating the now near-mythological “Welfare Queen” stereotype that pundits have regularly invoked in one form or another ever since, despite a dearth of evidence that such a person ever existed, to the more recent case of Fox News arguably going off the deep end in its efforts to demonize the poor in America (more examples here). They are decrying what they see as abuse of the social welfare system, and many of them advocate its dissolution altogether.

What would happen if we got rid of social welfare altogether? Got rid of food stamps and other governmental forms of assistance to ensure poor children have proper nutrition, basic education, and health care? Science knows the answer.

Science knows because scientists have studied children born in times of famine, seeing how they compare to children born in other times, and have witnessed and documented the lifetimes of hardship that result. As Lise Eliot, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at The Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine & Science, explains:

The effects of malnutrition have been thoroughly studied in experimental animals, where we have achieved a fairly detailed understanding of the timing and type of nutrients needed for optimal brain development. Unfortunately, plenty of data are also available for human populations. A large proportion of children in the world are undernourished because of famine, poverty, war, and other natural or man-made disasters. It is through studies of such children that we have learned the ways in which inadequate early nutrition can permanently impair brain function. Children who were undemourished as fetuses or infants tend to score lower on IQ tests, perform more poorly in school, have slower language development, exhibit more behavioral problems, and even have difficulties with sensory Integration and fine motor skills, compared with children from the same culture who were adequately nourished. The earlier the malnourishment begins (starting with midpregnancy) and the longer it lasts, the greater will be the resulting problems and the less likely they can be overcome later on. By comparison, adults who undergo even the most extreme starvation do not suffer any intellectual impairment. Thus the brain has a special sensitive period for nutrition in infancy corresponding to the phase of massive synapse growth and axon myelination, both of which require considerable metabolic energy. [emphasis mine]

The Great Depression
Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administratio

So the permanent neurological impact of stress and malnutrition have come partly from animal studies, but have also come from observing humans as well. Unfortunately, recent human history has provided numerous case studies in human suffering that allow us to see the long-term effects of stress and malnutrition on other human beings. The Dutch famine of 1944, the Romania Abortion Ban that led to an unsustainable influx of children to poorly-supplied orphanages, and even more recent studies of children who were in utero when their mothers encountered the stress of natural disasters are just a few examples of scientists stepping in to observe the long-term effects of tragic circumstances, and the effects appear to last a lifetime.

Consider journalist Annie Murphy Paul describing the findings of a researcher who was studying the lifetime effects the 1914-18 flu pandemic on the children of mothers who were pregnant at the time:

Initially, Almond doubted that the intrauterine conditions provided by a pregnant woman, even one sick with a virulent strain of the flu, could exert any lasting influence on her offspring. “When I started looking at the influenza pandemic, I was skeptical of the fetal origins hypothesis. I didn’t think I’d find any long-term effects,” Almond says. “But the evidence was the opposite of what I expected.” Through an analysis of census data, Almond discovered that those individuals gestated during the pandemic did poorly as children and adults compared to cohorts born shortly before or after the flu hit. “People who were in utero during the pandemic did worse, on average, on just about every socioeconomic outcome recorded,” he says. Over their lifetimes, they displayed lower educational attainment, lower income, and lower socioeconomic status; they suffered higher rates of disability, and required higher welfare payments. Individuals gestated during the pandemic were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school, and 15 percent more likely to be poor; the men earned wages that were 5 to 9 percent lower, and they were 20 percent more likely to have heart disease or to be disabled as older adults. Even their height was affected: when the cohort of people born soon after the pandemic showed up for enlistment in World War II, they were shorter than recruits born the year before and the year after.

…Because of the long-lasting impact of prenatal conditions, Almond tells me, “you could say that the influenza pandemic of 1918 isn’t over yet.” [emphasis mine]

Malnutrition is the biggest contributor to child mortality
Credit: Gemma :D

Stress and malnutrition during pregnancy and infancy manifest a lifetime of cognitive adversity. Carl Sagan spoke about the crucial period of Perenatal Nutrition in cognitive development (starts at 5:10), and the moral and rational impetus placed on societies to prevent such tragedies:

A major problem is perenatal malnutrition. Around a few months before birth and the first years after birth, if you don’t have enough to eat you get permanent learning deficits, you get attention problems, you have social compatibility problems. This occurs in people of every ethnic group and it’s a lifelong disability. Now, a family staying together, if there isn’t enough money to prevent malnutrition in the baby, doesn’t solve this problem.

Another problem is the extremely poor quality of education in many parts of America, especially poor neighborhoods. Another is the unavailability to a large number of people who want it, of Headstart and related programs. I could go on, including the fact that the United States is not best but 23rd now in combating infant mortality.

Now there are lots of aspects of the problems that children face, the bill for which we are going to have to pick up in the next generation that are not solved in any way by rhetorical appeals to family values. They can only be solved by the government helping these families because, if you don’t have a compassionate bone in your body, just a simple cost-benefit analysis would be sufficient to show it is in the national interest to prevent these disabilities in children.

Credit: publik16

Luckily, thanks to wonderful social welfare programs implemented in America, scientists also have case studies on the benefits of social programs. Just as natural disasters, malnutrition, and prenatal stress have deleterious effects on a person’s entire life, so too do social programs combating malnutrition, lack of education, and parental stress factors manifest in lifelong improvements in a child’s quality of life. As John Medina, affiliate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine, describes with a precursor to America’s Headstart Program:

In 1962, researchers wanted to test the effects of an early-childhood preschool training program they had designed. Kids in Ypsilanti, Michigan, were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first attended the preschool program (which eventually became a model for other preschool programs nationwide, including Head Start). The second group did not. The differences powerfully illustrate the importance of a child’s early years. The kids in the program academically outperformed the controls in virtually every way you can measure performance, from IQ and language tests in the early years to standardized achievement assessments and literacy exams in the later years. More graduated from high school (84 percent vs. 32 percent for the girls). Not surprisingly, they were more likely to attend college. The kids who were not in the program were four times more likely to require treatment for a mental-health problem (36 percent vs. 8 percent). They were twice as likely to repeat a grade (41 percent vs. 21 percent). As adults, those who had been in the program were less likely to commit crimes and more likely to hold steady jobs. They made more money, more often had a savings account, and were more likely to own a home. Economists calculated that the return on society’s investment in such a program was 7 to 10 percent, about what you’d historically get in the stock market. Some estimate a substantially higher return: $16 for every tax dollar invested in early childhood.

Just as Carl Sagan argued, there is a return on the investment to society, in this case for investing in a child’s early education. Annie Murphy Paul cites a similar benefit from America’s implementation of the Food Stamp program:

Seizing on yet another natural experiment, Almond examined the impact of the introduction of the food-stamp program in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The program was rolled out on a state-by-state basis, allowing Almond to compare birth outcomes for poor women who received food assistance during pregnancy to those who did not. His results, published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, found that women who were enrolled in the program three months before they gave birth delivered babies with higher birth weights, and that the improvement was especially significant for African Americans.

If ancient societies could understand the importance of providing for their poorest members, we can provide for our own in the modern world. If stress on the fetus and infant create permanent cognitive impairments on our children, then we have more than just a compelling moral need but an obligatory social imperative to action that will improve our entire civilization’s quality of life. As Lise Eliot best argues, “If children are so greatly malleable. then the best way to ensure a great society is by improving the environment of its youngest members.”

References

Paul , Annie Murphy, Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, Free Press

Eliot, Lise, What’s Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life, Bantam

Medina, John, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five, Pear Press

Further Reading

Annie Murphy Paul has a wonderful passage in her book Origins where she describes the fetus as taking in information about the environment to which it will be born:

Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life—the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the emotions she feels, the chemicals she’s exposed to—are shared in some fashion with her fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. And, often, it does something more: it treats these maternal contributions as information, as biological postcards from the world outside. What a fetus is absorbing in utero is not Mozart’s Magic Flute, but the answers to questions much more critical to its survival: Will it be born into a world of abundance, or scarcity? Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a long, fruitful life, or a short, harried one? The pregnant woman’s diet and stress level, in particular, provide important clues to prevailing conditions, a finger lifted to the wind. The resulting tuning and tweaking of the fetus’s brain and other organs are part of what give humans their impressive flexibility, their ability to thrive in environments as varied as the snow-swept tundra, the golden-grassed savanna—and the limestone canyons of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

I did everything in my power a few months back to avoid all news about the British Royal Wedding that had so many Americans captivated. It was disheartening to see the American media paying so much attention to the antiquated and irrelevant institution of the Royal Family. It just seemed more than a little hypocritical as totalitarian rulers appointed by god are the antithesis of a country founded on the consent of the governed, a principle for which we had endured a bloody revolution to extricate ourselves from their rule.

Thomas Paine in his pamphlet Common Sense, the document that inspired the Declaration of Independence and provided an outline for the American system of Representative Democracy, put it most eloquently:

But where, says some, is the King of America? I’ll tell you. Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law OUGHT to be King; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony, be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is. [emphasis mine]

This revolutionary idea on which America was founded was inspired by the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that spawned so many of the ideas we take for granted today, but also one that we underappreciate or appear to have event forgotten in our academic institutions.

What is the Enlightenment?

Temple University’s Intellectual Heritage Program provides this list of Enlightenment values:

• a deep commitment to reason,
• a trust in the emerging modern sciences to solve problems and provide control over nature,
• a commitment to the idea of progress in material wealth and in human civility,
• a belief in the essential goodness of human nature,
• an emphasis upon the individual as master of his fate and fortune, and
• an engagement with the public sphere of discussion and action.

Joseph Wright’s A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery

Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, Spinoza, Émilie du Châtelet, Locke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Newton, Adam Smith, and Francis Bacon were just a few of the great minds who contributed to the Age of Reason or were greatly inspired by it. They were known as philosophes, the intellectuals challenging the established paradigms of their time and arguing for freedom of expression, inquiry, tolerance, and an emphasis on human progress. Immanuel Kant most succinctly expressed it:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was a time where the scientific method was popularized and the ideal of looking to nature for a more accurate understanding of our world came into prominence. It was a rebellion against the established superstitious dictates of the time that established tyrants empowered by God instead of leaders appointed by consensus. It brought an end to the millennium-long period of stagnation that was the Dark Ages and brought the Western world back into an era of human progress that continues to this day.

The Impact of the Enlightenment

Although the Enlightenment is most strongly associated with cultural shifts in Europe, America’s Founding Fathers were mostly scholars of the Enlightenment. The introduction to the Declaration of Independence affirms the right of human beings “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…” The Founding Fathers filled the Jefferson Reading Room at the Library of Congress with tributes to the sciences and Age of Reason quotes. As Thomas Paine argues in his controversial book Age of Reason, “Those who knew Benjamin Franklin will recollect, that his mind was ever young; his temper ever serene; science, that never grows grey, was always his mistress.” Carl Sagan describes this scientific bent of Americas figure heads in his book Demon-Haunted World:

Dr Benjamin Franklin was revered in Europe and America as the founder of the new field of electrical physics. At the Constitutional Convention of 1789 John Adams repeatedly appealed to the analogy of mechanical balance in machines; others to William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. Late in life Adams wrote, ‘All mankind are chemists from their cradles to their graves . . . The Material Universe is a chemical experiment.’ James Madison used chemical and biological metaphors in The Federalist Papers. The American revolutionaries were creatures of the European Enlightenment which provides an essential background for understanding the origins and purpose of the United States.

Benjamin West’s Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky

The philosophes are associated with having the greatest impact on European culture, but I would argue that they so strongly influenced the American Revolution and the founding of our democracy, events which led to the United States eventually becoming the most powerful and culturally-influential country on the planet, that the impact of their ideas changed the entire world.

Where Does the Enlightenment Fit in Academia?

I started this article in response to my discovery that there are numerous texts that were prominent in this age that are still inaccessible on the World Wide Web. Most notably, I was unable to find an English translation of Voltaire’s Elements of the Philosophy of Newton, a book that established this intellectual as having a powerful understanding of science in addition to exhibiting a strong wit. Nor was I able to find any translations of Emilie du Chatelet’s many science texts, which I was strongly interested in for her close collaborations with Voltaire and who is often credited with inspiring his scientific writing. As my online research met dead end after dead end, I also started to ruminate on the fact that I had only heard of the Age of Enlightenment and its many brilliant authors a few years ago.

Emilie du Chatelet

Why was I never introduced to this crucial period of intellectual thought in school? In Virginia Tech’s English program, I went completely unexposed to the brilliant minds thriving in this era of reason. Looking through the University’s Literature, Language, & Culture Curriculum turns up no courses focused on Enlightenment literature. The Closest we get is Victorian Literature focusing solely on the British literary perspective on this incredibly revolutionary time, and named after a queen who did nothing to advance the cause (It was Russia’s Catherine the Great who deserves credit for nurturing the heroes of the Enlightenment.).

It could be argued that the Age of Enlightenment was one of philosophical thought, and should be relegated to that department, but then we are left with the disparity of so many English departments providing courses in Romanticism’s Counter-Enlightenment which devolved culture to focus on idyllic nostalgia for the past, nationalism in the name of tradition, and the reemergence of superstition and irrationality to fill the world with imaginary beauty instead of appreciating its natural wonders.

Frontpiece to Voltaire’s Elements of the Philosophy of Newton

Depicting Emilie du Chatlet reflecting Newton’s wisdom to Voltaire

Additionally, so many philosophe works have no place in philosophy because they are early works of science. To quote The author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature the oldest.” This strikes at the heart of why Enlightenment studies are so difficult to find in the Academic Universe. The majority of Enlightenment authors are banished to limbo, their hypotheses and speculations overcome by events. Scientists don’t want to read ideas that are wrong, even if they were a crucial step in formulating the ideas that were right. Aristotle’s Physics seems silly and immature in its reasoning after many of its ideas were later disproved by Ibn Al-Haytham, the first scientist, and later Galileo.

Science has no need for Denis Diderot, the philosophe responsible for inventing the Encyclopedia, because his lifetime of tireless work to categorize and disseminate the entire knowledge of the Western world quickly became obsolete, replaced by newer Encyclopedias of increasing accuracy eventually leading to Britannica Sets and Wikipedia. But there are so many profound ideas in Diderot’s version that it would be a tragedy to lose them. Consider this passage from the Encyclopedia entry for “Encyclopedia” where he argues that this innovation could only emerge in an enlightened age:

I have I have said I have said that it could only belong to a philosophical age to attempt an encyclopidie; and I have said this because such a work constantly demands more intellectual daring than is commonly found in ages of pusillanimous taste. All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings. . . . We must ride roughshod over all these ancient puerilities, overturn the barriers that reason never erected, give back to the arts and sciences the needed a reasoning age when men would no longer seek the rules in classical authors but in nature, when men would be conscious of what is false and true about so many arbitrary treatises on aesthetics: and I take the term treatise on aesthetics in its most general meaning, that of a system of given rules to which it is claimed that one must conform in any genre whatsoever in order to succeed…

This is not a scientific passage, but it is strongly relevant to modern scientific thought’s virtue of skepticism and challenging established paradigms. Much of the Age of Enlightenment seems to fall into that gray zone between the humanities and the sciences, where the profound concepts of peer review, skepticism, and Empiricism that we take for granted today were formulated but neither the sciences nor the humanities wants to revel in their achievements.

A Perpetual Age of Enlightenment

It’s important to remember that the Enlightenment, like the Sciences that owe so much to it, is not a destination, but a journey. As Kant wrote:

If it is now asked, “Do we presently live in an enlightened age?” the answer is, “No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.” As matters now stand, a great deal is still lacking in order for men as a whole to be, or even to put themselves into a position to be able without external guidance to apply understanding confidently to religious issues. But we do have clear indications that the way is now being opened for men to proceed freely in this direction and that the obstacles to general enlightenment–to their release from their self-imposed immaturity–are gradually diminishing. In this regard, this age is the age of enlightenment, the century of Frederick.

Constantino Brumidi’s The Apotheosis of Washington: Science

Minerva teaching Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton, and Samuel F.B. Morse

We define the Enlightenment as a period in time, but it remains strongly with us today. We don’t think about the fact that providing empirical evidence to back up our claims was once considered a revolutionary idea that met with resistance from established theological authorities or that our democratic, academic, and scientific institutions were only established by challenging and even revolting against that authority. But we do live in an age of continual progress just as Kant describes in his own era. We continue to push the boundaries of nature with space probes, particle accelerators, microcosmic explorations, and psychological studies that perpetually challenge our established understandings of the world around us.

Whether we acknowledge the origins of our modern way of thinking or not, we are very much living in an extension of the Age of Reason. We are many of us philosophes, challenging and exploring in a culture where free inquiry is at least encouraged, although certainly not revered. We are incredibly advanced in our understanding of the world in comparison to those who lived in Kant’s time, but we have still not reached Enlightenment.

Further Reading

Spending cuts outlined in the Continuing Resolution (CR) bill currently top out at $74 billion, but, with the Tea Party holding Republicans to principle, it will reach $100 billion (updated cuts here). Predictably, this bill has lots of bad news for Science and Technology in America; unfortunately, it maintains the status quo on oil and gas subsidies.

The biggest cuts are to Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (-$786.3 million), the Environmental Protection Agency (-$1.6 billion), the Centers for Disease Control (-$755 million), Clean Water Funds (-$950 million), and a cut of $893.2 million to Science. It hurts, but it’s important to keep perspective. Some of these cuts are merely cancelling out the unspent portions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and we’ve been reminded from both sides of the aisle that “very hard choices” will need to be made on the deficit. A look at the above Pew poll on where American’s think spending should be increased and decreased, and we have to admire the Republican Congress for taking such a political risk.

Federal Subsidies (2002 – 2008)
Source: Environmental Law Institute

But the respect is tempered by the fact that, while cutting subsidies for alternative energies, Congress won’t make the truly hard choice of cutting subsidies for the entrenched Oil and Gas industry, which receives $10 billion annually in subsidies, more than five and a half times the federal subsidies for renewable energy from 2002 to 2008. Internationally, fossil fuel subsidies are 12 times greater than support for renewable energies, $46 billion compared with $557 billion in 2008. By maintaining tax subsidies that keep gas prices artificially low in the United States, the Federal government creates a distorted energy market where consumers cannot compare the true cost of fossil fuels to alternative energies.

Meanwhile, companies like Exxon Mobile continue to rake in record profits each year as a subsidies keep gas prices artificially low. Exxon highly publicizes the fact that the company’s taxes exceed their earnings, but fail to point out that most of those taxes are paid to foreign countries or are paid entirely by consumers at the gas pump. Tax breaks for the oil industry actually result in our Federal government paying them each year while they send taxes overseas. Exxon Mobil’s federal tax liability was -$156 million while its international taxes were $15.2 billion.

Exxon Profits

Will the Federal government cut off this Oil Industry welfare system? Obama received $884,000 from the oil and gas industry during the 2008 campaign, 2010 congressional candidates recieved $17 million, with political contributions since 1990 totaling $238.7 million. In return for its lobbying in the past the oil industry received $16.2 billion in tax subsidies in the Securing America’s Future Energy Act of 2001, while Presidents Clinton, Bush Senior, and Reagan also increased subsidies for Oil and Gas.

House Democrats with Obama’s support want to end $40 billion in tax subsidies to the oil industry to cut another $4 billion a year from the federal deficit. The only ray of hope in this debate is the fact that the Tea Party freshman are not yet beholden to the Oil and Gas industry, giving them the power to pressure their party into supporting this fiscally responsible move. Cutting science funding is easy, scientists are a quiet lot, cutting Oil subsidies isn’t, politicians would have to face trillions of dollars in protest, but it needs to be done if we are to have a fair and realistic energy market.

Further Reading:

Allowing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to discriminate against network traffic with a tiered system would be a disaster of epic proportions for everyone who uses the Internet world wide. If you understand the architecture of the Internet, you understand that the preferential treatment of network traffic would quickly escalate beyond short-sighted offenses such as Cox Communications and Comcast blocking BitTorrent use into an arms race of ISPs undermining one another’s traffic. The elimination of Net Neutrality will quickly lead to a full-blown communications war.

What Americans and politicians don’t understand is that their personal ISP is not the only thing bringing them online services. Look at what happens when I use a visual trace tool to show the path of connections between my location and Google:

Google Trace Route

My connection to Google had to go through 19 locations and across approximately 5,821 miles. See number 11 on the map? That’s where the connection tried to go through one of Comcast’s routers, but couldn’t, and had to be redirected through another path along the network. That’s normal functioning for routers, which are dynamically calculating the best routes along the network for data packets all the time. Sometimes when I access Google the trace route will run all the way out to Europe and back to the United States to make a connection, a completely normal operation.

My ISP is Time Warner Cable, but that company only represents the starting point on this map. As you can see, my connection to Google requires seven ISPs to complete:

Google Trace Route

The problem is that most Americans and Politicians see ISPs as no different than cable carriers or satellite TV companies, providing access directly to the Internet and all that exists on it by themselves. ISPs are simply content providers in this view. What the public doesn’t conceptualize is that it is the network that makes the Internet spectacular, not the content. It’s the ability to send and receive packets of information, and no single ISP has the right to claim they are providing this service, because it takes hundreds of ISPs all over the world, not just the one you are paying, to bring you the World Wide Web, email, and smartphone apps. When you understand the architecture of the Internet as a collection of thousands of ISPs all working in concert to forward one another’s’ packets along the network, you see that these entities are much more like common carriers than content providers.

ISPs want the right to charge companies like Google extra for allowing its packets to travel across their network in what’s known as the two-tiered plan for the Internet. ISPs would get income from us for allowing us to access the Internet, and they would get income from Google, Amazon, and Facebook for letting the content those companies provide reach us. This is an additional cost to what these companies are already paying simply to make their content available on the Internet. It costs me a monthly fee to have this blog hosted, making it available online, and the ISPs want me to pay them extra if I want my hosted content to reach their subscribers.

How are all the different ISPs involved going between here and there going to manage a tiered system? Will every one of them charge Google a fee? Or will they join forces, forming a cartel to have their networks discriminate against companies that don’t pay? Companies lobbying against Net Neutrality conveniently don’t mention this part of the equation for obvious reasons.

ACM in Iran Trace
9,967 Miles in 12 Hops
Runs through United States, Netherlands, German, and Iran

The most infuriating aspect of the Net Neutrality debate is that the same free market ideology that has argued for free trade among nations as the best strategy is now arguing that allowing free trade on the Internet is bad for business. The world markets are a network, no different than the Internet. Allowing companies to implement charges against certain types of network traffic is no different than countries implementing tariffs against certain types of imports or subsidies of certain exports. The practice can quickly devolve into trade wars, like the Airbus-Boeing subsidy war and the recent tariff wars between telecoms in Kenya.

Allowing ISPs to charge at both ends of the connection will inevitably result in communications wars between network providers, which will require first lawyers and then multiple governments to step in to resolve disputes between companies and the countries hosting them. What will be the result? Regulations, a regulations nightmare a million times worse than the American interstate tax system, with its multiplicity of levy rules for each state, or the international trade system, and its hundreds of thousands of customs laws dictating what can cross borders.

Alternatively, we can have one regulation: Net Neutrality. Keep the Internet open, free, and fair. It really is that simple.

Rally Stage

This was a rally with strong roots in geek culture, from the initial petition calling for a rally to take place on 10/10/2010 (Powers of 10 Day) to raising half a million dollars for DonorsChoose in support of classroom projects, there was a heavy geek vibe to this movement.

Not surprisingly, Star Trek, Star Wars, XKCD, and FSM references abounded in the signs the attendees carried:

Geekdom at the Rally

More impressive, however, was that there were even more signs supporting science and enlightenment. I was blown away to see so many people supporting rationalism and empiricism:

Science and Enlightenment at the Rally

Stewart’s speech was brilliant and well-reasoned, making a plea for civility and discourse that reminded me of this passage from Dr. David Brin’s Disputation Arenas:

First, if you want to see clues about our future, step away from your computer screen. Go outside and stand near a four-way intersection that’s regulated only by stop signs.

Watch for a while as drivers take turns, not-quite-stopping while they gauge each others’ intentions, negotiating rapid deals with nods and flashes of eye-contact. You’ll spot some rudeness, certainly. But exceptions seldom rattle this silent dance of brief courtesies and tacit bargains — a strange mixture of competition and cooperation.

The four-way stop doesn’t work in some cultures, and it’s hard to picture anything like it functioning in times past, when mostly-illiterate humans lived in steep social hierarchies and “right of-way” was a matter of status, not fair play. Nor would robots, adhering to rigid laws, handle traffic half so well as the drivers I see, dealing with a myriad fuzzy situations, making up micro rules and exceptions on the spot, even as they talk on cell phones or quell squabbles among kids riding in the back seat. This phenomenon visibly illustrates how simple rules can be used by sophisticated autonomous systems (e.g., modern citizens) to solve intricate problems without any authority figures present to enforce obedience.

How does it happen? Experts in complexity theory coined a term — emergent properties — to describe new levels of order that seem to arise out of chaos, when conditions are right. For example, Kevin Kelly’s book, Out of Control, depicts how rudimentary genetic drives coalesce into the fantastic flocking behavior of birds. When intelligence extends this process to higher levels, the result — our own unique kind of flocking — is called civilization.

Support Commercial Spaceflight

Here’s a similar passage from Stewart’s speech:

Look on the screen. This is where we are. This is who we are. (points to the Jumbotron screen which show traffic merging into a tunnel). These cars—that’s a schoolteacher who probably thinks his taxes are too high. He’s going to work. There’s another car-a woman with two small kids who can’t really think about anything else right now. There’s another car, swinging, I don’t even know if you can see it—the lady’s in the NRA and she loves Oprah. There’s another car—an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car’s a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan. But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief and principles they hold dear—often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers.

And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river. Carved, by the way, by people who I’m sure had their differences. And they do it. Concession by concession. You go. Then I’ll go. You go. Then I’ll go. You go then I’ll go. Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay—you go and then I’ll go.

There’s Waldo!

My favorite sign of the day illustrated what another sign told with, “Signs are an Impractical Medium for Civil Discourse.”

Signs are an Impractical Medium for Civil Discourse

I know the World Wide Web doesn’t lend itself to deep immersion in ideas, but shallow engagement leads to shallow results. Go deep.

Additional Notes:

You can read the full text of Stewart’s speech here.

Check out my complete flickr set here.

Update: The Rally set a new record for metro ridership, breaking the 1991 Desert Storm rally.

Have U Spanke It Today? (sic)
Credit: Moi

“HAVE U SPANKE IT TODAY?” Brilliant. What a profound statement. Well worth the investment of time and bravery.

While I don’t have the fortitude to risk my life spreading my own inspirational quotes, I have taken to carrying around a permanent marker and using it to tag bathrooms, street signs, and other conspicuous places with enlightening quotes:

Stephen Hawking Quote
Credit: Moi

I like to think it makes the world a little more intellectually-engaging.

On his radio show, Glen Beck recently objected to the term “African American being included with the terms “black” and “negro” on a census form:

African-American is a bogus, PC, made-up term. I mean, that’s not a race. Your ancestry is from Africa and now you live in America. Ok so you were brought over — either your family was brought over through the slave trade or you were born here and your family emigrated here or whatever but that is not a race.

Technically, Beck is correct in this isolated statement. “African American” is not a race, but he does not object to “black” or “negro”, appears to consider people who immigrate to America from Africa “African Americans” (contradicting the above statement), and admits he doesn’t know what to call those Americans who were kidnapped, enslaved, and treated as secondary citizens up until just 35 years ago. While coherency isn’t why people become fans of Glen Beck, he does deserve some leeway on this one. The term “race” as we apply it to classifying human beings is itself an incoherent concept (from Wikipedia):

The term race is often used in taxonomy as a synonym for subspecies, in this sense human races are said not to exist, as taxonomically all humans are classified as the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. Many scientists have pointed out that traditional definitions of race are imprecise, arbitrary, have many exceptions, have many gradations, and that the numbers of races delineated vary according to the culture making the racial distinctions. Thus, those rejecting the notion of race typically do so on the grounds that such definitions and the categorizations which follow from them are contradicted by the results of genetic research.

“Race” in the way the American government uses it and to what Beck is objecting is purely a social construct, subjective and devoid of scientific validity. The scientific definition of a “race” is “any inbreeding group, including taxonomic subgroups such as subspecies, taxonomically subordinate to a species and superordinate to a subrace and marked by a pre-determined profile of latent factors of hereditary traits. Every human being on this planet is capable of breeding with one another; therefore, we are of the same race.

So what are Americans referring to when we checkmark “white”, “black”, “asian”, or “other” on our census and equal opportunity forms? I myself can claim to be white, Arab, Persian, or black depending on which of my hereditable traits you wish to focus on. Some critics argue that Barack Obama isn’t the first black president because he’s half white, but, because our American “race” isn’t based on genetics or ethnicity, we make it a matter of self-identification. There is nothing to prevent a white person from identifying themselves as black on a census form, and, in fact, the opposite has not been uncommon.

While we are all Americans, our government must deal with the fact that some Americans have endured centuries of oppression as a result of their skin color and ethnic origins, people who are at a severe disadvantage today from such oppression, and our society has a responsibility to make amends. There is only one human race, but our civilization has been plagued by “racists,” people who believed their “race” was different from that of other human beings, and our census forms reflect this ignorant and destructive government-sanctioned heritage, just as our Constitution will always remind us of a time when slaves counted for 3/5ths of a person.

Previously on ideonexus: The American Anthropological Association says There’s Only One Human Race.