An important rule of evolution is that species lose adaptations they aren’t using. Cave fish have eyes that do not work because they live in an environment without light. Crocodile icefish blood has lost its hemogloblin because they live in oxygen-rich water where they don’t need the protein to transport oxygen throughout their bodies. Kiwis, chickens, and ostriches have wings but can’t fly. Humans lack the gene to make Vitamin C, forcing us to get our ascorbic acid from dietary sources.

This happens because when a trait isn’t in use, natural selection does not discriminate against mutations that break the trait. For example, when an individual carribou is born with a mutation that gives it bad eyes, it gets eaten by a lion, but when a fish in the total darkness of a cave gets bad eyes, they are just as likely to survive as the fish with working vision; in fact, they have a slight advantage for not having to put resources into building and maintaining eyes that provide no advantage.

Crocodile icefish larvae (note the clear blood)
Credit: Unknown Wikipedia User

A question that comes up regularly in popular science media is, Are humans evolving? And the answer depends on what we mean by evolving. If we are talking about the popular public use of the term, which is synonymous with a species getting better (taller, smarter, faster, etc), then the answer is: only in those parts of the world where natural selection is still at work. In Africa, for instance, where famine, disease, and, in some cases, lions are at work there is also natural selection in effect. The inhabitants of famine-stricken areas are being selected for resistance to starvation. Sickle-cell Anemia came out of Africa as an adaptative resistance to Malarial infection by mosquitos; people with the sickle-cell gene survived longer than those without it despite the trait also having a deleterious effect on the carrier.

If we are talking about the scientific definition of evolving, meaning gradual genetic change in a species population over time, then that is occurring in all humans, selected or not; but in First World societies, the change that is occurring is not of the improvement kind, but more of the cavefish kind. Eyeglasses and eye surgery allow people like me to survive. Insulin shots allow type-I diabetes patients and obese people to survive. Immunizations eliminate natural selection for natural immune system resistance to bugs. C-sections have eliminated the need to give birth vaginally. Fertility clinics allow people to reproduce who could not in the past. AIDS drugs allow anyone who is infected to survive rather than select for a natural resistance. Wheelchairs, hearing aids, orthopedic shoes, braces, and a wealth of other medical innovations and modern conveniences have drastically reduced any need for athletic prowess or even most physical abilities in order to survive in modern society.

These are wonderful things. Without them, Vicky and I would not be able to have additional children and our son Sagan might likely have died due to our incompatible blood types (I’m O+, she’s A-), but thanks to a shot of Rh immune-globulin and our pediatrician coaching us, our newborn son overcame his jaundice in his first week of life. Science makes it possible to support 7 billion people on our planet, and keeps most of them in good health and comfort. I am perpetually grateful to scientific progress.

New Zealand Kiwi, Flightless Bird
Credit: The.Rohit

The complication this creates for us is that every lost survival trait in every human being is a survival trait their children will likely not have. When a couple undergoes fertility treatment, then their children will inherit the need to have fertility treatment. As the medical and engineering sciences discover ever new means for us to survive comfortably despite our flaws, they also perpetuate the inventions that keep so many of us alive.

In other words, as our genes fail us, our memes take over.

H. G. Wells wrote that “Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe.” He was right in deeper dimensions than he realized. Consider what would happen if we were somehow magically stripped of all our technology so that tomorrow morning the human race were to wake up to a world without modern medicine, agricultural science, textiles, plastics, electricity, and all the other scientific conveniences we take for granted each day. How many of our planet’s 7 billion people would still be alive after a week? We would quickly be reduced to the tribal population levels of just a few brief centuries ago as only the fittest and healthiest survived.

Our ideas are keeping us alive. That means we must work for a society that keeps our ideas alive. Libraries, public schools, laboratories, and institutions of higher learning aren’t just conveniences, they are crucial to our survival, and the more we depend on them the more we will need to depend on them and that’s a good thing.

Space

So Long Space Shuttle
Credit: Trey Ratcliff

NASA finalized the retirement of the Space Shuttle program with the announcement of their final resting places, with Washington DC, Los Angeles and Orlando getting real shuttles for their museums and New York getting the wooden training vessel (Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!). NASA also unveiled the Space Launch System (SLS) next generation of manned space explorations vehicles that will (hopefully) be taking us to Mars. Along the same goal, the Mars500 completed its 17 month simulated mission, complete with isolation and delayed communications as a partial proof of concept that humans can survive the trip to the red planet.

Gravity Probe B (GP-B) confirmed the geodetic effect and frame-dragging aspects of Einstein’s theory of gravity, that the Earth and other large masses swirl spacetime as they spin like a ball rotating in honey.

The Hubble successor, the James Webb Telescope barely kept its funding after it was projected to run billions over budget. We still might see further into the Universe.

China’s space race continued on its modest schedule, allowing geeks like me to vicariously enjoy the pride of its citizens as they make greater and greater strides into space.

Physics

Still No Higgs Boson Event
Credit: CERN

The world didn’t end and there’s no Higgs Boson yet, but replication of the neutrinos moving faster than light finding provided opportunity for geeky jokes like, “A neutrino and a photon walk into a bar. For 60 nanoseconds, the neutrino complains about how dark it is.” and made physicists sweat.

The LHC also found a difference in the decay rate of D-mesons that could explain why there’s so much matter in the Universe left over from the Big Bang.

By replacing one of the electrons in a helium atom with a much heavier muon elementary particle, scientists were able to get the atom to act like a hydrogen atom; within minutes the geeks at Slashdot had figured out how much less the modified atom would raise your voice.

Computer Science

IBM Watson

IBM’s Watson Computer trounced its human competitors at Jeopardy. It must be one of the greatest joys for anyone to build something greater than yourself.

MIT replicated a single synapse on a chip using 400 transistors to digitally simulate the analogue communication between neurons in the brain, with the next step to be stringing these chips together to replicate parts of the brain.

Berkeley scientists used a neat trick of having people watch videos, recording their brain waves, and then using the video to approximate what others were seeing in their mind’s eye from reading their brain waves.

Earth Science

Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature

The year marking the 150th Birthday of Climate Change Theory brought ever more support to the theory that the world is getting warmer due to human-made carbon emissions. Shortly after the sixth independent review of the “Climategate” non-story found no misconduct in August, a reanalysis of the same data (now all publicly available) partially funded by the oil industry and conducted by an outspoken climate skeptic, Dr. Richard Muller, confirmed Global Warming was happening and turned Muller into a believer.

Archaeology

The sharp-eyed, metre-long Anomalocaris.
Credit: Katrina Kenny & University of Adelade

The greatest known predator from 500 million years ago, anomalocaris, was discovered to have fantastic compound eyes.

The discovery of other raptor-like dinosaurs with feathers cast Archaeopteryx’s status as the missing link between birds and dinosaurs into doubt because there are too many candidates for the missing link.

Australopithecus sediba joined the human family tree.

A high schooler found an improved arrangement for solar cells based on the Fibonacci arrangement found in plant leaves.

Biology

African Gray Parrot
Credit: Retrolusionary

Pet parrots escaped to the wild were found to be teaching other birds to talk.

Two studies confirmed having more friend increased gray matter in parts of the brain responsible for social networking.

Roger Ebert put the smack down on 3-D movies, explaining why the muscles in our eyes and the perception of our brains cannot grok with a flat screen making 3-D demands on our perceptions.

Politics

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
Credit: Shawn Lawrence Otto

The organization Science Debate stayed strong this year and Shawn Lawrence Otto stirred up some buzz with his new book Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. Looking forward to what the organization accomplishes this upcoming election cycle.

In a year of austerity measures, science fought to maintain funding… okay, not really, more like lay down and let politicians cut whatever they wanted, but nothing was accomplished in the gridlocked house and senate.

The American Government did manage to pass the America Invents Act, intended to stop patent-trolling, but may turn out to be a gift to large corporations as it move the country to a “first-to-file” rather than first to invent standard.

Alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs.

Republican presidential candidates fell over themselves attacking Climate Change and Evolution (and one even attacking Immunizations), and a Fox News host wondered if volcanoes on the Moon disproved Global Warming, leading to an awkward moment with Bill Nye.

On the Left, Belgian protesters destroyed a field of GM potato plants being researched for blight resistance.

Wonder

It was a great year for time-lapse videos as first someone took the photographs from the Cassini mission and merged them together into a beautiful fly-by of Saturn and its moons, a whole night at the ALMA Array Operations Site (AOS) made for Earth-bound wonder, the view from the ISS orbiting the Earth was enchanting, and, best of all, 14 years of Hubble photos showing gases jetting and expanding light years away, demonstrating just how dynamic are our night skies (see also the supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy 21 million light years away in August).

The Sagan Series took the words of the most amazing exponent of science and provided music and imagery to do them poetic justice.

The awesomely geeky and science-riddle video game Portal 2 provided much puzzling amusement.

The Royal Society put its entire history of journals online open access.

Personal Life

Stephen Hawking and Sagan
Credit: Hawking Source Image by Rob Bodman, Sagan Photo by Vicky Somma

The biggest news in our lives is the welcoming of Sagan Charles Somma to our family fold. It’s been a big change in our lifestyles, but an ever-rewarding experience as we get to enjoy a feeling of love unlike anything we‘ve experienced before.

Vicky’s photo of a Rhododendron looming menacingly over an American Chestnut sprout won the American Chestnut Foundation’s photo contest.

I made Slashdot in November, pushing this blog to a record 7,000 hits in one day and stressing me out for a week as POGO and other organizations scrutinized my data and found some glaring and embarrassing errors. Thank the Cosmos for peer-reviews.

Borders going out of business provided me an opportunity to stock up on coffee table books, the one thing for which the digital world has failed to provide an adequate replacement.

Memexplex broke 1,000 memes (all me). The tool is fantastic for what I need it for, so I’m not worried that I haven’t found anyone else for whom it’s useful.

Although I haven’t updated my resume, I quit my job with the Coast Guard and have started working in the development of applications for Food Safety labs across the nation, making my life as a Computer Scientist now a Computer Scientist in the service of science. Woo Hoo!

Life is great, so my New Year’s resolutions are pretty light. With science as my candle in the dark, 2012 can only bring more illumination.

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

One of the great joys of being human is our incredible powers of pattern recognition. Our brain’s ability to manifest meaningful associations out of the complex morass of sensory stimuli perpetually assaulting us is a cognitive expertise into which computers are only just starting to venture successfully. It’s what allows us to recognize faces, raed wrdos wtih smrelcabd ltretes, identify with our fellow humans, and compartmentalize the sounds, tastes, and sights around us.

The number 11 has always been my favorite whole number. Ever since I was a kid, I appreciated the way the first nine multiples of 11 are numbers that mirror the tens and ones places (in a base-10 numbers system): {11, 22, 33, 44 … 77, 88, 99}.

You can figure out the result of eleven times any two-digit number by adding the tens and ones place of the two-digit number and placing it between the two digits. For example, eleven times my second favorite whole number:

You can also do something similar when multiplying eleven against a three-digit number.

Eleven is fun.

This year, the Gregorian Calendar has been filled with 11′s in its dates: 1/1/11, 1/11/11, 11/1/11, 11/11/11. Additionally, If you take the last two digits of the year you were born and add the age you will/have turned on your birthday this year, the result will be 111. For me, this is 73 + 38 = 111.

I previously blogged about eleven focusing on the trivia associated with the number, but I’ve come to understand that eleven is a wonderful number for all the patterns we can find in it, and nowhere do these patters become more clear than in Pascal’s Triangle:

Creating a Pascal’s Triangle
Credit: Hersfold

Each row of Pascal’s Triangle sums to the set of exponents of two {1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024…}, and that’s interesting.

What’s more interesting? The digits of each row represent an exponent of eleven {11, 121, 1331, 14641, 161051, 1771561…}. It takes just a little bit of addition to see how this works for the rows with multiple-digit numbers. You have to think of each number as occupying a place value, like ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. Then you carry the additional digits up to their appropriate place. For example, row six in Pascal’s Triangle is:

So Pascal’s Triangle is a tower of powers of eleven, and the patterns within it continue. We can see the first set of diagonals going down the outsides of the triangle are all ones, and the second set of diagonals just inside this are all the natural numbers {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10…}. The third set of diagonals is Triangular Numbers, the number of building blocks needed to make triangles of increasing size:

Triangles One Through Six

The fourth set of diagonals are Tetrahedral Numbers, the number of building blocks needed to make tetrahedrons of increasing size.

Number Sets: Ones, Natural, Trangular, Tetrahedral, Pentatope

The fifth set of diagonals are Pentatope Numbers, which I don’t understand, but they sound like the number of building blocks needed to make 4-dimensional tetrahedron.

5-Cell (4D Tetrahedron)
Credit: Jason Hise

And the patterns continue! If we align all the numbers in Pascal’s Triangle up on one side, the diagonals add up to the Fibbonacci Set {1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 … 55, 89, etc, etc}, which relates back to my favorite irrational number Phi:

Fibbonacci Set in Pascal’s Triangle
(Diagonals colored, Sums Shaded Gray)

There is something fractaline about the conceptual patterns we are seeing in this numeric construction. There are triangles within triangles in the number sets. In fact, highlighting all the odd numbers within Pascal’s Triangle and zooming out far enough, we find an actual geometric fractal, a Sierpinski Triangle:

Animated Construction of a Sierpinski Triangle
Credit: Dean Moore

Powers of 10 Day celebrates the concept of exponential growth, a meditation on the size of our universe as we zoom in or out from our position within it. Powers of 11 Day seems like a good day to look at the patterns that emerge when we zoom out to look down on the big picture. There are patterns within patterns when we line up the powers of eleven in this way, beautiful symmetry, dimensions beyond our three, and geometry that echoes across the function. Our brains evolved to find patterns everywhere in the world, and this mathematical object is perfect for enjoying the immense potential of this natural cognitive proclivity within us.

Further Reading

The images of Pascals Triangle that I composed myself for this post were put together in Microsoft Excel, and you can download the spreadsheet if you’d like to play with the numbers yourself.

Special thanks to Math Forum for the best, most simplest page on the web exploring Pascal’s Triangle and the powers of 11.

In hacker slang, “Elite” is transformed into “leet” which is transformed into “1337″ which is transformed to “1331″ which is transformed into “leel” which is the highest form of elite. 1331 is 11 to the third power.

I admit it. I knew better when I posted the story about the kraken lair to my Facebook for my less scientifically literate friends to awe and wonder at. I could tell from the scant evidence provided in the press release that there really wasn’t anything there but a collection of bones from 45-foot-long ichthyosaurs mysteriously piled together at a site in Nevada. To infer the bones were gathered together by a gigantic ancient cephalopod whose soft tissues left no trace in the fossil record was an admirably imaginative idea, but I knew this extraordinary claim didn’t pass the Sagan Standard’s “extraordinary evidence” requirement. As Samuel Clemens best expressed it, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact.”

And still I posted it to Facebook, where it got eight Likes, three comments, and one share. That’s eight more Likes than my link to Discovery’s Faces of Our Ancestors gallery, featuring facial reconstructions for 11 ancestors of Homo sapiens and for which there is plenty of direct fossilized evidence to support their stories.

Stories. We only have a few millennias’ worth of stories from the written and oral history of the human race, but the archeological record is brimming with billions of years’ worth of them. Like detectives at the scene of a crime, archeologists have reconstructed events out of the shared story of our origins to tell engaging tales of our ancestors trials and tribulations.

There are tragedies, like the 3-year-old Taung child, whose skull bares the scars of an eagle attack. The Australopithecus africanus child was carried away by a bird of prey 2.8 million years ago. We sense the tragic nature of the story when we consider the horror his parents must have experienced, and at the same time there is the fantastic element of our ancient ancestors having to guard their infants against birds of prey.

Easter Island, Moai Rano raraku
Credit: Aurbina

I’ve listened to New Age believers explain the giant statues of Easter Island as being erected with the help of aliens, who took the island’s inhabitants away with them into the Milky Way, but there is an important lesson in what we know really happened to this treeless island in the Southeastern Pacific ocean. Jared Diamond reconstructs the history Easter Island with the help of painstaking research by paleontologists and archaeologists, telling the tale of a materialist war, where competing inhabitants chopped down all the island’s trees for transportation and scaffolding so they could erect monolithic statues of increasing size to demonstrate their wealth and prestige. After the trees vanished, so did the large game, and the trash sites on the island show the inhabitants resorted to eating rats and eventually human corpses to survive. The Easter Islanders didn’t have magical powers for levitating boulders, they were an ancient mirror of our modern materialism. The archaeology of Easter Island tells the story of a civilization that fell prey to conspicuous consumption and provides a cautionary tale for a modern society that would sacrifice environmental sustainability for short-term greed.

Then there’s the 3.6 million-year-old Laetoli footprints of Austrolopithecus preserved in volcanic ash, large and small, male and female, close together as if they were huddling–perhaps the male had his arm around his mate, and the female’s footprints lopsided as if she were carrying an infant. Imagine what it was like for them, walking fearfully across an ash-covered landscape, a distant bellowing volcano preparing to rain even more ash on them. This story of fear and wonder is reconstructed in this famous diorama:

Australopithecus
Credit: Me

There are also the mysteries. Homo erectus, who spread halfway across the world before mysteriously vanishing. Imagining her environment, we know there were a greater number of large fauna back then, as humans would come along much later to drive the big animals and predators into extinction wherever they migrated across the Earth. She had stone tools, hand axes she used to chop up game, but was primitive enough and intelligent enough that I read one naturalist refer to her as the “velociraptor of our human ancestors,” which is why I love this statue of her at the Smithsonian Hall of Human Origins lugging a rotting ibex carcass across the Serengeti on her back:

Homo erectus
Credit: Me

She was a total badass… and then she was extinct.

Where did she go?

As many stories as humans have written in our few millennia of civilization, imagine the number of stories still waiting to be discovered in 3.5 billion years’ worth of geological strata. Stories of tragedy, wonder, mystery, and profundity are all around us, written into the natural world, just waiting for us to read them.

This post has been submitted for the NESCent Blog Contest for Evolution-Themed posts.

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.

This American Life (TAL) is one of the most successful shows on NPR, it started in 1995, has won numerous awards, and one of my conservative friends even described the show as “single-handedly justifying the existence of NPR.” I’ve heard shows from time to time over the years, but a few months ago I downloaded a torrent of every show in the cannon and have been completely hooked ever since. So when I heard Ira Glass’ was coming to Chrysler Hall in Norfolk I jumped at the chance to see him talk about the show, behind the scenes, and how the show is so effective at communicating and connecting with the audience.

Ira Glass started the show with the lights off, simulating the experience of radio as he spoke to the audience. When the lights came up, he joked, “You don’t look like what I expected either.” Carrying a touchpad filled with audio samples, Ira deftly played music, narrated, and mixed interview clips into his talk, oftentimes improvised.

He played a clip from the opening of a CNN special covering an aircraft carrier taking part in the war on terror. With deadly serious narration and a soundtrack Ira accurately described as “straight out of the opening credits of Battlestar Gallactica,” CNN was working overtime to make the story dramatic, working so hard as to be downright silly when you thought about it. News makes the world “scary, simple and small” Ira noted, and TAL wanted to take a different angle of life on the carrier, which he described as a “giant floating nuclear-powered dormitory.” So they started the story covering the kind of mundane work the majority of soldier on the carrier perform, specifically with a woman tasked with keeping the vending machines stocked and the day-to-day operations of that job.

Ira Glass emphasized the importance of storytelling in keeping the audience’s attention. Something happens, and then something, and then something, and then a universal principle is revealed. I recently heard the same advice from Jane Goodall that the best way to get people to see your side of things was to tell stories.

With this technique of storytelling TAL has made me see from the perspective of and sympathize with idealistic Tea Party members, stressed-out gang members, alleged terrorists, and wide wide world of diverse backgrounds and cultures. One show convinced me of the ideological diversity in the Republican Party by taking a varied perspective on the party at that time. At one point in the talk, Ira Glass described Iraq as Ireland with the Shias being the Catholics and the Sunnis the Protestants, a perfect analogy that explained the cultural conflict there better than any mainstream news story I’ve ever heard on the situation.

With the way the news makes the world so simplistic, caricatured, and tiny, is it any wonder the public getting its information from these sources seems to grow increasingly cynical about the state of things? News sources like NPR and the Economist try to convey the complexity, but their droll, elitist tone really turns people off to them. Ira Glass has spent years trying to convince someone in the media to do a news show in the format of TAL, and the show itself has even tried an episode focused on the events of the previous week.

The episode This Week, covering current events, also happened to be the week Osama Bin Laden was assassinated. So they sent a reporter to Cairo to interview people’s reactions there, but the lives of Egyptians were much too busied with the task of rebuilding their country after the recent revolutions. So the story from Cairo was about the Muslim fundamentalists and the liberals getting together to try and find some way to coexist in a functional Democracy. It’s easy to see how such a weekly portrayal of current events could not just be popular, but could calm people down by giving them a peek into the complex worlds everyone else out there is dealing with as well.

Additional Notes

During the question and answer session an audience member asked Ira if there were any other programs that had adopted TAL’s storytelling style, and, to my great pleasure, he mentioned one of my favorite recent discoveries RadioLab, a show about science that uses storytelling to make the factually-fascinating subject matter engaging on a personal level (Ira has a very nice essay about the show).

A funny moment in the talk was when Ira declared “Radio is your most visual media…” which made sense in respect to the way the show must paint a picture in your mind, but then, after a long pause, he said, “That’s not actually true… Turns out having pictures is very very visual.”

Ira invoked Arabian Nights in expressing the importance of storytelling. He described Scheherazade as “very Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 3″ and how she used storytelling to keep the king from killing her for years, after which he could not kill her because the many stories had made him sensitive to the perspective of others, especially Sheherazade’s father, who had spent night after night wondering if this would be the morning he would find his daughter dead.

Stages of Fetal Development
Credit: NHS Pregnancy Desktop

One of the first things Vicky and I established when we first became romantically involved is that we both wanted to have children. We share a deep love of science and the natural world and wanted to share our sense of wonder with children of our own. At the same time, in our sharing we were hoping to experience the world vicariously through fresh eyes, reliving the thrill of learning and discovery.

When the pregnancy test finally came up positive, we were launched into a whole new realm of learning: reading up on diet, lifestyle, and fetal development. We were also put into an unanticipated tour of various types and standards of prenatal care. This post covers what we learned and what we are continuing to learn about pregnancy and childcare.

Researching Pregnancy

Medical Science has doubled of our lifespans over the last 200 years, but it has also made some horrible mistakes when it comes to childbirth. When we asked Vicky’s grandmother about her birthing experiences, she described the days when doctors would administer women in labor the Twilight Sleep drug, which prevented the woman from remembering the act of giving birth, but would also make her lose all self-control, so that she had to be strapped to the hospital bed and wear a helmet so she could wail and thrash. When we asked Vicky’s mother about breast feeding, she told us about how the doctors discouraged the practice, saying it was unsanitary and had less nutritional value than formula. Pre-1950s psychology took the position that showing affection for children was unhealthy and discouraged kissing or otherwise cuddling babies lest they have serious issues later in life. These were unfortunate ideas that manifested lifetimes worth of problems for children born during the times they were popular, but science is a self-correcting algorithm, so I made a point of doing some heavy reading in hopes of learning the latest, most refined understanding of what’s best for pregnancy, labor, and child-rearing.

Pregnancy and Baby Care Books

Anne Marie Paul’s Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives made for a good overview of how life in the womb is affected by the pregnant mother’s environment. It explains, in down to Earth terms, what the mother should eat, what she should avoid, and what lifestyle choices, such as exercise and stress, she should engage and avoid for the health of her developing baby. Humans are a highly-adaptable species, and Paul argues that the fetus is taking in information about the environment into which it will be born so that its brain and body will be customized to best survive in that world.

Meredith Small’s Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent is an important part of the attachment parenting philosophy, which stresses being keenly sensitive to the child’s needs to form a strong emotional bond with them. I appreciated the book’s evolutionary perspective on the subject, advocating co-sleeping and breastfeeding because our ancestors adhered to these practices. The book looks at various cultures and their differing parenting styles to help come to its conclusions. This foundation in anthropology and evolutionary psychology really appealed to me.

Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl’s The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind was a fascinating peek into an infant’s cognitive development. I loved the premise that babies are like scientists, testing hypotheses and adjusting their worldview according to the results. The book has an explanation of the “Terrible Twos” that impressed me: infants at that time are learning that your perspective is different from their perspective and they are having a hard time adjusting their understanding of the world accordingly. The book lays out its ideas exquisitely, bringing all the ideas together into a summary at the end that highly intellectually satisfying.

Lise Eliot’s What’s Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life is an exhaustive overview of every single aspect of the fetus and infant’s development and is also my favorite of all the books I read. The book covers the physiological development all five senses and several other senses that I didn’t even know about. It provides exercises for stimulating these senses so that the child’s brain wires up properly to best take advantage of them. The book can also be a bit scary as it goes over all the things that can go wrong in a child’s development, which set me on edge, but they are important things to be aware of so you can recognize them and get your child the help they need should they manifest.

John Medina’s Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five felt like the Cliff Notes version of Lise Eliot’s book, and that’s a good thing. It’s down to Earth and gets right to what you want to know about turning your child into a supersmart superhuman. I really appreciated some of the worldview adjustments Medina gives, such as to avoid praising your child for being smart, instead, praise them for working hard. Smart is out of our control, but failing a test because you didn’t work hard is something you can overcome.

Depending on your personality, there were a series of “easy reading” books that were less scientific and more about commiseration and practically dealing with parenting and childbirth. For nerds I recommend the Baby Owner’s Manual, found on Think Geek, for its clinically humorous way of covering baby care. For regular guys I suggest the The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for Dads-to-Be, which was pretty in-depth and covered a whole lot of territory focused on the male’s role in things. While men’s men should go with Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads, which actually works on a whole lot of levels, is the funniest of the books I picked up, and has great “circuit training” advice for exercising your baby.

Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: 8th Edition was the “Manual” that everyone took when they kidnapped the baby in the film “Raising Arizona.” It’s criticized for using inductive reasoning rather than evidence-based medicine, and I found some glaring errors in an early edition of the book, like advising parents to put their baby to sleep face down, which we now know puts them at a higher risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrom (SIDS); however, later editions of the book correct these errors and overall the book works as a great big encyclopedia of baby care advice. At the same time, while the book is on my shelf, I’m still more likely to hit a search engine to find out why there’s a white fungus growing on my baby’s tongue (It’s called thrush and it’s perfectly normal).

NHS Pregnancy Desktop

Beyond books, I highly recommend parents check out the UK National Health Services’ (NHS) – Pregnancy Desktop application, especially for expectant dads. One problem I had early on during Vicky’s pregnancy was that she was completely on top of what needed to be done at what week in the process, so that I felt like I was just following along under her guidance. The Pregnancy Desktop application sits on your desktop, opening on startup, and serves as a constant reminder of how many weeks and days you have left until your due date, what’s going on with the baby, and what you should be doing to prepare. Some of the information it provides is UK-specific, but there is also a bounty of good information for mothers in any country. Again, highly recommended.

By far, the most beneficial preparation we made was in attending Bradley Method Classes to learn about Husband-Coached Natural Childbirth based on Richard Bradley’s Husband-Coached Childbirth: The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth, where the husband takes a strong supporting role in the wife’s labor, monitoring contractions, tending to her needs and making sure she’s comfortable, and providing emotional support to help her achieve an unmedicated delivery. In addition to practice exercises to prepare for labor, the classes are also fantastic for the way they educate students on the mechanics and physiological aspects of labor. We learned about various medical interventions the doctor’s might use, pregnancy complications we may experience, and lots of information about what’s going on with the baby and mother’s bodies during labor. One factoid I found very interesting had to do with the health effects of cutting the umbilical cord after delivery, which doctors rush to do, but is probably best to hold off on in order to allow the placenta to pump all of its blood into the baby. The classes are important because the books and software are all just theory (in the non-scientific sense of the word) and you need to get active and increase your kinesthetic intelligence to see yourselves through this.

Pregnancy Lifestyle

Vicky had an extremely easy pregnancy, which we attribute to a healthy diet and active lifestyle. Vicky was great at practicing squatting to strengthen her pelvic floor and hit the gym every day, where she found the fetus became very active while she was on the elliptical, but became less active later in the pregnancy to conserve oxygen while Vicky’s consumption went up. She also gave up caffeine, alcohol, and other environmentals that could harm the developing fetus. As a show of support, I gave up caffeine and alcohol too; unfortunately, I couldn’t convince Vicky that this same logic would apply to scooping cat poop.

Here’s the factoids we incorporated into our pregnancy lifestyle:

Diet: As I covered recently, good nutrition is crucial to cognitive development in the developing brain, which is why in our enlightened civilization we have social services like welfare. But what food choices should the pregnant mother make?

Eats lots and lots of fish, which increases infant cognition. Unfortunately, with so much pollution in the environment, this principle has also become a balancing act between good protein and omega 3s and elevated mercury content that gets concentrated in certain species of fish. Vicky and I referred to tilapia and salmon dinners as “IQ points for baby” meals.

Another thing is to make your plate colorful. Our Bradley Method instructor had Vicky turn in a list of all the foods she ate each week, which was first checked to sufficient protein intake, but then turned to variety. One of Vicky’s homework assignment was to eat a yellow or orange vegetable, similar to Michael Pollan’s advice in his excellent book In Defense of Food.

Lifestyle: Avoid the three characteristics of stress: too frequent, too severe, and too much for you. A great way to counter effect stress during pregnancy is exercise, as it reduces stress hormones that can hurt the baby’s development. Exercise also reduces the amount of time spent in the pushing phase of labor compared to women who do not exercise. There is some concern that exercise robs the baby of oxygen and therefore harms cognitive development; however, there is also evidence that exercise improves intelligence and the fetuses show the same benefits of cardiovascular exercise as the mother experiences.

Things to Avoid: Limit caffeine, which appears to have no effect on the child’s IQ but does cause developmental problems in rats when taken in extreme doses. Definitely avoid smoking, which lowers birth weight, increases the child’s chances of neurological impairment, increases the risk of miscarriage, and increases the risk of SIDS after birth. Also avoid alcohol, which is “thought to be responsible for at least 4,000 cases of mental retardation in the United States each year and perhaps ten times that number of children with mild learning or behavioral problems.” Also avoid the chemical Bisphenol A, which is in certain plastics and causes developmental issues in animal embryos. For knowing which plastics are safe a good mnemonic about recycling numbers to use is “Four, five, one, and two/All the rest are bad for you.”

Vicky has a more detailed post about her Nutrition Worksheets and diet during pregnancy as well as her exercise regimen.

Where to Deliver?

My mother has her Doctorate in Obstetrics Nursing with a lifetime of experience working in the field and is a huge advocate for natural childbirth, that is, vaginal childbirth without pain medications. There are numerous health advantages for babies born vaginally as compared to C-section, including their oxygen level rising more rapidly after birth, increased ability to regulate their body temperature, and higher scores on reflex tests. Additionally, pain medications given to the pregnant mother during labor also drug the baby, hindering its ability to adapt to the dramatic environmental changes it experiences going from the womb to the outside world. There is no such thing as a “local” anesthetic.

Northeastern OB-GYN Logo

Vicky started out attending Northeastern OB-GYN in Elizabeth City North Carolina, which was very good at the prenatal care they provided her. In addition to having a very nifty logo (the above is the largest I could find it online), they also gave us our first look at Sagan through ultrasound. The eggsack in the below photo is actually a vestigial trait from when our ancestors developed in an egg with a yolk.

Sagan Ultrasound 14 Weeks into Pregnancy

After moving to Norther Virginia, we first tried attending About Women OBGYN at Potomack Hospital website makes it sound like they have midwives on staff, which they don’t. We learned that it’s a standard practice in prenatal care to rotate the doctors so that every patient gets to meet every doctor so that when it’s time to deliver the patient isn’t stuck with a complete stranger. The only problem with this clinic was that there was no transfer of knowledge. We had to start from scratch with every doctor we met and there was much confusion about where Vicky was in her pregnancy. As a result, appointments for tests were miss-scheduled and prescriptions were mismanaged.

This experience of being on some sort of poorly-managed pregnancy assembly line prompted us to seriously look into midwife-assisted delivery. Usually this means home birthing; however, four dogs, three cats, and four other residents in the house made this option impractical. So we looked into birth centers staffed with midwives.

An question that comes up with delivering outside of a hospital setting is how safe is it? Studies demonstrate home birthing is as safe as hospital birthing, and studies suggesting otherwise tend to be deeply flawed (see also here). I surmise that these equivalent safety numbers have a lot to do with the fact that midwives and birth centers won’t accept high-risk pregnancies and rely on hospitals as a backup option for when labor does not progress.

In our search for certified midwives, we tried out Birth by Design, who was opening a new birth center in Fairfax Virginia. While the midwives there were very nice, there were some things that didn’t grok with me. They were very focused on herbal remedies and said that Vicky would have to agree to drinking an herbal tea every day for a healthy pregnancy. This seemed a little too New Age-y for me and I was further troubled when they said they had herbal solutions to breach pregnancies and other complications.

Sagan Ultrasound 20 Weeks into Pregnancy

Luckily, that same week we got taken off the waiting list for Birth Care in Alexandria Virginia. The midwives at this birthing center were very professional and clinical in their approach to labor and delivery. Their prenatal care was conditional on the patient taking responsibility for their health with prenatal vitamins, filling out their own chart for blood pressure and weight, setting up pediatric visits, proper diet, and, most importantly, taking birth classes to prepare for the experience.

Dr. Bradley believed there were instinctual behaviors animals were engaging to manage the pain and stress of childbirth. Looking to the animal kingdom for how other mammals handle labor we find the mother needs darkness, solitude, quiet, physical comfort and relaxation, controlled breathing, closed eyes, and the appearance of sleep. Our tour of Birth Care revealed an environment catered to providing such an environment, with a homey feel to the place, real beds, baths, and other comforts to allow the laboring mother to relax her body let her uterus do what it needs to do.

The Big Day: Labor and Delivery

(Note: Vicky has posted here birth story here, which is much more detailed than my abbreviated description. I highly recommend it for the detailed version of our birth story and how she prepared for labor.)

The Bradley Method classes were the most important thing we did to prepare for the big day, and that’s taking into consideration the fact that we only got halfway through them since Vicky’s water broke a month early and on July 12, 2011 Sagan Charles Somma was born at 4 pounds 13 ounces. The timing put him two days too early for us to go to the Birth Care Center, and we transferred to Alexandria Inova Hospital, a hospital we had never attended with doctors and nurses we had never met and had never discussed our desires for a natural, unmedicated birth.

We lucked out, however, as the staff was fantastic. Dr. Kenneth Adhoot observed that my wife was progressing through labor well and was admirably willing to step back and allow nature to take its course under the guidance of your nursing staff and midwife. Midwife Donna Greenfield was very professional and attended the actual delivery of our son, taking measures to avoid an episiotomy. Our nurse Heidi was a huge help, offering suggestions and coaching Vicky through her pushing.

We lucked out in another way in that just the night before we had gone shopping for all the supplies we would need for labor; unfortunately, I failed at the “Don’t let the gas tank go below 1/2 mark the last two months” bullet point and had to stop for gas on the way to the Birth Center, which Vicky was much less than thrilled about. Once at the hospital, our Birth Classes were invaluable in understanding all the procedures and anticipating the sequence of events, like when Vicky went into the Transistion Phase of labor and began doubting herself and her ability to go through a natural birth, but this passed within minutes and she focused to get through Active Labor like a champ.

Sagan Newborn

Despite being premature, Sagan was very healthy. He had a perfectly normal problem with his blood sugar dropping, and we got that rising within 24 hours by feeding him colostrum with a teaspoon. He had problems with jaundice for the first few days because Vicky is an A-Negative blood type and I am O Positive, which prompted Vicky’s immune system to attack Sagan’s red blood cells, but this cleared up quickly by putting him in sunlight and Vicky diligently forcing him to eat and flush out the bilirubin from his system. The only minor problem we had at the hospital during our two day stay there was in keeping Sagan’s body temperature up, which the nurses blamed on our inability to keep him properly swaddled; however, I quickly solved the problem by having the hospital turn off the air conditioning to our room, after which the nurses switched to complaining about how hot it was every time they came in. I owe it to the Birth Care midwives and their policy of keeping their center air conditioned during labor, but unairconditioned afterwards to keep the baby warm and healthy for knowing to ask for this.

Our Parenting Choices

Here’s a grab-bag of notes on some of our early parenting choices:

Breast Feeding: There are myriad health advantages to breast feeding over the health problems caused by formula feeding. We intend to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months and continue the practice for a full year. This sparked some controversy as a family member argued that breast feeding will prevent our conceiving another child until Sagan is weaned and we are nearing our 40s, where we start to move into high-risk pregnancy territory. Our ancestors breastfed exclusively for two years and continued to breastfeed for up to four years. This not only had the benefit of providing excellent nutrition to the child, but also prevented the mother from conceiving until the current child was sufficiently developed. There is also the monetary savings to consider, and Vicky demonstrates on her blog, the Medela breast pump has given us an exceptional return on our investment over the cost of formula feeding.

Immunizations: We have been and continue to get Sagan any and all immunizations suggested to us. Children who aren’t immunized result in hotspot breakouts of measles, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, and diphtheria. If you are considering postponing or foregoing vaccinations, please think about Benjamin Franklin’s personal lament about not vaccinating his son against smallpox:

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen. [emphasis mine]

At the time of my writing this in 2011, 738 people have died since 2007 that were vaccine preventable.

Circumcision: Decided against it despite being circumcised myself. The idea that a civilization of people who thought the all the animals in the world lived within walking distance of Noah’s home had better medical science than millions of years of penis evolution through natural selection seems pretty silly. The foreskin has a bundle of sensitive nerves, it keeps the head of the penis lubricated for easier vaginal penetration (this is why we substitute spit so much in modern sex) and allows the penis to move within the shaft during intercourse as nature intended, and a very promiscuous friend once told me uncircumcised men make better lovers. Don’t mutilate your child, let them make their own decision when they get older (You can read a good factsheet on this subject here).

Co-Sleeping: We have been cosleeping with Sagan rather than having him sleep in a separate crib. It makes sense to us from an evolutionary perspective. As Mark Vonnegut puts it, “The truth is, almost all mammals (including humans) sleep with their babies. Indeed, most human babies in most cultures sleep with their parents, and always have.” The breathing reflex is stimulated not directly by the absence of oxygen but rather indirectly by the presence of carbon dioxide, so sleeping next to the baby and sharing their breathing space increases the carbon dioxide levels in the air and should reduce apnea (I don’t have research to support this however, so take it as my opinion, not science). There is also a convenience element. Baby cries, one of us rolls over to feed him, baby goes back to sleep. With breastfeeding, the mother can roll over to offer a breast and go back to sleep while the infant feeds.

This is a controversial ideal in Western cultures, and each parent needs to read up on it and make their own choice about it. The American Academy of Pediatrics will eventually release an advisory on the subject, but until then, definitely do not cosleep if you are a smoker, on medication, or have been drinking, and if you do, research how to make your bed as safe as possible.

Baby Sign Language: This will surely be the subject of a future post, but thanks to a friend of ours with a Ph.D. in Anthropology, we will be trying out Baby Sign Language as a means of communicating with Sagan before he is able to express himself verbally. I’m hoping to experience some of the same insights into how the infant understands concepts as this blogger writes about with her daughter.

What We’ve Learned at 12 Weeks

What’s surprised me most about having a baby is what an ongoing learning experience we have gotten ourselves into. Specifically, it feels like we’ve gone on an anthropology expedition, observing the ethology of the human family. We are seeing how life was like for hundreds of thousands of years for our ancestors on the Serengeti.

The first thing we’ve learned is the importance of grandparents. Evolutionists suspect that menopause in human females is actually an evolutionary adaptation because it frees the woman up to contribute care for the children of her own children; in other words, grandmother’s are a human adaptation, contributing to the care of offspring as well as contributing to the transfer of cultural knowledge. Vicky’s mother has been invaluable in caring for Sagan, happy to play with him while we use the time to get some work done. Both Vicky’s mother and my own mother have been fantastic resources on the knowledge-front as well, leading to many phone calls for questions about childcare and issues that come up, and such cultural transmission from grandmothers is why humans needed increasingly larger brains. Vicky has a great blog post up about the importance of Grandmas in helping with childcare.

Something that has taken me by surprise is the complete helplessness of the human infant. Science has demonstrated that infants are not blank slates; however, they certainly appear to be blank slates. I was blown away by how incredibly discombobulated is a newborn. They cannot focus on anything except bright lights and make no social connections with those around them until they are a few month old.

This again is the result of evolution. Humans have big brains, which make us incredibly adaptable to any environment; unfortunately, those big brains can’t fit through the birth canal without the mother’s hips being too wide to allow them to walk upright. So biology found a compromise, the infant is born with its brain only partially developed with the remainder of the development taking place outside of the womb. After a few months of oftentimes patience-straining nights up with Sagan, he started making eye-contact with us and now returns our smiles, building the social bonds that endear him to us as such behaviors endeared infants to our ancestors so that they would raise them the many years it takes to become autonomous members of the clan.

Watching baby level-up appears to have the effect of leveling us up as well.

Sagan Smiling

Further Reading

You can see the Thank You letter I sent Inova Hospital here.

You can see the still-rough draft of our Birth Plan here.

I highly recommend the opening portion of This American Life’s episode Unconditional Love, which covers the history of psychology, the pre-1950s idea that affection and tenderness were bad for children, and the psychologist who proved the importance of love, who was a callous person himself.

Just this week I started reading Geek Dad’s book of suggestions for parenting with things like RPG Parenting and weekend projects with your kids. Looking forward to trying some of them out in a few years.

Update

A complete oversight, I meant to give a huge Hat Tip and Thanks to An American Expat in Deutschland for lending Vicky and I so many of the great books we read!

“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.

Vicky and I had the great honor of seeing Jane Goodall at American University in Washington DC this last weekend. The event was a sort of town hall meeting held outdoors in the cool fall air titled Conversation on Peace just a few days before the United Nations’ International Day of Peace.

Dr. Goodall opened the conversation with a small Dove Parade and her signature greeting in “chimpanzee.” She then explained how a “sense of urgency” keeps her going, motivated by the need to preserve our vanishing natural resources. The 77-year-old humanitarian, who founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 and was appointed by the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan as one of the institutions venerable Messengers of Peace, has spent a lifetime dedicated to conservation, not just to preserve wildlife, but also to improve the quality of life for human beings all across the globe.

Dr. Goodall told us the story of her childhood, and how she was inspired by Dr. Doolittle, and wanted to learn how to talk to animals. Later, she read Tarzan, and developed a crush on him, but unfortunately he “married that other stupid wimpy Jane.”

These stories made her want to go to Africa and write a book about it, but being a girl and with World War II taking place, people consider this unrealistic. She worked as a waitress (the host mirrored my own thoughts when she mentioned it was hard to imagine the living legend in such an occupation) saved tips to get a boat trip to Africa, where she observed the chimpanzee tribes and wrote about them. Later she met the archaeologist Lewis Leaky and served as his secretary. He sent Goodall on trips to Africa and arranged for her to work on her PhD without first obtaining a Bachelor’s degree. During her studies she got in trouble because she gave chimps names and talked about their emotions, a violation of the academic principle of “anthropodenial” as I prefer to call it.

Dove Parade

Dr. Goodall talked at length about her Roots & Shoots Program. The name referring to the vigilance of plant life in overcoming obstacles set before it. “Look around you,” she explained, seeds give rise to little shoots and roots that can penetrate concrete to find water, they can get around the problems we have created. My arboreal-fanatic wife wasn’t the only one who loved this analogy.

Roots & Shoots covers many projects dealing with ecosystems, animals, and people. She described the “Fences to Freedom” project for finding islands that orphaned chimpanzees can inhabit as adults, and another project that focused on children kicked out of school for behavioral problems, who are given an animal to care for as therapy. She described Dove Parades on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian border¹, and an event where soldiers standing guard over project to restore natural resources lay down their guns to help children plant trees.

Question Session

Questions came in on hashtag #askjane from all over the world. My question was related to peace, but more of a scientific curiosity:

My #AskJane Tweet

Up against more inspiring and heartfelt questions, I didn’t figure it had any chance of being answered. But earlier in her talk she did address the importance of studying chimpanzees, who we are only one-percent different from genetically and may, therefore, learn much about ourselves from watching them. Like humans, they have two sides, a violent persona and an altruistic one. “Let not the sun set on your anger” was something her grandmother taught her.

Asked about zoos, Goodall explained that there is a spectrum of places for Chimps. On one end of that spectrum we have land set aside for conservation and at the other we have laboratory animals in confinement. In between we have different types of zoos. A good zoo provides stimulation for the chimps, and allows the chimpanzee to serve as an ambassador to the humans who visit, providing stimulation and education for both the chimp and the humans.

A question about 9/11 led to an interesting story, she was in New York at the time it happened, and spent the day watching the news and calling people to let them know she was alright. She was scheduled to give a talk in Portland to students about hope and peace, and was met with the difficult conundrum of what to say to them now. What could she say on the subject with such a horrific event on everyone’s mind? When she got to the school, she related her experiences living through World War II and reminded the students that we overcame a World War and a Great Depression and we would overcome this.

When asked about the planet’s growing population, about to hit 7 billion next month, Dr. Goodall related her advocacy for Family planning in Third World countries, and how volunteers were afraid to bring the concept to villages in Africa because they are so conservative and religious and birth control is often seen as impinging on reproductive freedom. However, the villagers actually welcomed the family planning counselors and were very receptive to their teachings, wondering why they did not offer their help long ago. Goodall explained that this is because family planning is a quality of life issue–about not having a family that’s larger than you can care for.

Jane Goodall Townhall

The question came up on how she engages opponents, for example, people who say animals are here for our use or, to quote Ann Coulter, “God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’” Dr. Goodall noted this is from Genesis 1:28, and that the people who interpret the passage to mean we are to exploit the Earth are focused on the term “dominion,” but this is a mistranslation. The actual word is more like “caretaker.” The other biblical translations of the passage I found online replace the word “subdue” with “bring under your control” and “dominion” with “rule,” which imply more educational interaction with the environment and benevolence.

Jane advised that we shouldn’t make changing people’s the minds the goal, but rather we should seek to change the heart through stories. You never know when you’ve gotten through to someone, she explained, they don’t want to admit their wrong, so never say, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Instead, “tell stories.”

The most inspirational take-away from the conversation was when Dr. Goodall explained that life is a gift and we come into life with different gifts. Her gift is the ability to communicate, and we have to decide how to use our gifts. “You can’t live through a day without making some kind of impact,” she said, what kind of impact do you choose to make?

FootNotes

¹ Later, when asked about her perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by an audience member, Dr. Goodall wisely explained that she was not qualified to speak on the subject.

Far Side Cartoon Referencing Jane Goodall
Credit: Gary Larson

Further Reading

AU Ambassador’s Blog: Dr. Jane Goodall’s Townhall Meeting: A Conversation on Peace

Bush Warriors: What I Learned From Jane Goodall: A Bush Warrior’s Recent Experience

AAAnimals: Presenting Dr. Jane Goodall

[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.

For a man with a memorable career that spans three decades Albert Brooks doesn’t seem to have that many credits to his name in IMDB. The writer/director of Real Life, Defending Your Life, Mother, and Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World has brought us only a handful of films, but they are all memorable for the characters and social insights they bring to the screen. For his most recent work, he has dropped the ‘director’ part of his title to deliver us his first novel, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, a remarkably prescient bit of futurism that will deserve a revisit two decades from now.

Many of the overwhelmingly positive reviews of 2030 on Amazon describe Brooks’ futurist portrayal of the United States with words like “dystopian” and “black comedy,” but I felt these terms undermine the dire warnings about America’s direction the book presages. There was nothing comedic, even darkly comedic, about the situations in which Brooks’ characters find themselves, only tragedy. To call the world Brooks foretells “dystopian” makes it sound fantastical, extreme, like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but everything Brooks describes is not only plausible, but predicted by economic, political, and historical experts in the media on a weekly basis.

2030 is a work of science fiction, but only minimally. Brooks does a great job predicting the tech of the future in that he simply extends the tech of today. Information technology has gone a little further, with more sophisticated GPS devices, more advanced electric cars, real time translation devices, movie theaters that use streaming video, rudimentary robots that are basically animatronic real dolls, and other innovations that are easy to envision from where we stand today. Good science fiction uses technological innovations to explore ideas and concepts that speak to our own time, and Brooks takes our current tech to its logical next step to convincingly paint a world of very real social dilemmas the United States will face two decades from now.

2030 takes place in an America with debt so unimaginable that, while a figure is only hinted at, when “the big one” finally hits Los Angeles and all the insurance companies declare bankruptcy rather than handle the deluge of claims, America is faced with the prospect that the city must be abandoned and its citizens relocated to other cities because there is no way to fund its reconstruction. In this very plausible future, politicians are legislating all they can to keep the country going long enough so that the Baby Boomers can continue to enjoy the lifestyles to which they are accustomed at the expense of the following generations’ quality of life. This is the core social conflict of Brooks’ description of the future, not a culture war or class warfare, but strife between two generations: an older generation that won’t let go of what it has and a younger generation that has nothing.

Albert Brooks at a Book Signing in LA
Credit: Dave Malkoff

Brooks’ (born 1947) intuitiveness on this issue is supported by America’s recent political dialogs over tackling the deficit. Baby Boomer Democrats refuse to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits because it is their generation that is starting to make use of them, and when Democrats and Republicans talk about raising the age for receiving Social Security benefits, they are invariably talking about the change being imposed on the generations following the Baby Boomers. Meanwhile, states are cutting spending on public schools to balance their budgets, setting a quality of education below that which they themselves enjoyed thanks to the hard work of their parents “The Greatest Generation.” It’s interesting to consider that former Clinton adviser Paul Begala (born 1961) calls the Baby Boomers “The Worst Generation,” describing them as “the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history.”

But Brooks doesn’t fall into such an easy, broad condemnation of an entire generation. Instead, he wisely lays the blame on the larger forces at work in our massive political machine. In his future the AARP has become the most powerful lobby in the United States, while every new medical advancement, from curing cancer to strengthening bones, extends the lifespans of its members and swells its ranks even further. Like a union, corporation, or any other kind of lobby, the organization fights for the benefits of its members at the expense of outsiders. This makes seniors the target of terrorism from younger generations, such as the fictional “Youth for Equality” movement.

Brooks’ characters are everyday individuals living out their lives like ants subject to these colossal forces of which they can barely see the big picture. Brooks skillfully weaves the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people into one another effortlessly so that nothing feels contrived. We can understand every character’s perspective, sympathizing with the hopeless youth, established seniors, entrepreneurs, innovators, politicians, and naive terrorists. It is this weaving of personal tragedies that makes the book so effective.

I would love to see this book made into a movie, but it does not seem like something Hollywood’s escapist fare could do justice. Brooks doesn’t simplify complex issues into right and wrong. End of life care, assisted suicide, national debt, and a myriad of other issues are portrayed as the abstruse ethical and social conundrums that they really are. If our politicians and pundits had the same clarity of vision instead of postponing our problems down the road, maybe Brooks’ future wouldn’t seem quite as tragically inevitable.

Further Reading

A related sentiment can be found in what Roger Ebert wrote for his review of the film I.O.U.S.A.:

A letter to our grandchildren, Raven, Emil and Taylor: I see you growing up into such beautiful people, and I wish all good things to you as you make the leap into adulthood. But I have just seen a documentary titled “I.O.U.S.A.” that snapped into sharp focus why your lives may not be as pleasant as ours have been. Chaz and I had the blessing of growing up in an optimistic, bountiful America. We never fully realized that we were paying for many of our comforts with your money.

Several years ago I wrote an open letter to Baby Boomers asking them to clean up their national debt mess before leaving the workforce into retirement. It’s interesting to note that I recieved several critical emails from Conservatives at the time, because it was Bush’s debt then, who told me the deficit didn’t matter, debt was a good thing, and that I didn’t understand anything about economics. Oh how the times have changed.

Big Think has an interesting article on how America will handle its aging population, with cities becoming more senior-friendly in an attempt to incorporate the elderly into the productive class.