Ecce Simiae

Behold the Ape

One of the things I find difficult to discuss with fellow Liberals is the question of intelligence and its heritability.  That observable differences in cognitive function may be no more than learned behavior, or a the most a product of childhood experience, seems to be one of the credos that today's Liberal must share at the risk of losing the label.  Of course there is evidence to show that childhood deprivation of several kinds does affect the way one performs on IQ tests and perhaps in the experiences of life, but looking at people who are incontrovertibly brilliant it's hard to select parenting skills as the cause without looking silly.  The result is often that  people who have achieved great breakthroughs, often incomprehensible to the rest of us: people with great powers to analyze, calculate and create have their accomplishments explained by diligence or the willingness to work. That is something to which we can all aspire and fits into our cultural ethic

I heard in a movie trailer yesterday, that old and quite untrue saw "we only use 10% of our brains" which is patently untrue but  survives by offering hope that, like J.N. Barrie's Wendy Darling, we too can aspire to great ability if we only try hard and truly believe. No matter how hard I try, I still cannot follow Einstein's math much less develop the ability to have worked it out myself.

But to preserve the ego: to preserve the hope of a possibility that we're not second or third rate, we analogize with other achievements.  After all me can train to run farther or faster, to lift greater weights, to play sports better. We only have to use that latent 90%, to buy the "Baby Einstein" CD's and never mind the lack of evidence for success.  We can decide that specific talents are not part of some greater measure of mental ability, and some remarkable ability to calculate or to write music might just be latent in all of us if we try harder. We might decide to see some physical ability as a compensatory type of intelligence to offset our other intellectual lacks and in fact that's a component or the " intelligence is learned behavior" school of Liberal thought.  How brilliant must a Gibbon be, a squirrel, a bird!

But as I said, one risks ostracism by the trustees of conventional enlightenment by discussing, even in jest, such shibboleths as the genetic basis of intelligence, of racial features or even physical stature. What I'm saying is that by many measures, we Liberals are not the opposite of conservatives but just another variant. We too believe what is comfortable and what makes others comfortable with us and what is very uncomfortable to all good people is racism. I've heard it said many times that we cannot research certain things lest we play into the hands of racists or sexists or eugenicists and other miscreants. It's so much like that refrain from so many 20th century horror films: "there are things men were not meant to know."

And so we will ascribe that bell curve to other things. We will question, and perhaps rightly, the ability to test intelligence accurately, writing off vast differences in number crunching ability or short term memory or pattern recognition to cultural things, even when culture has little to do with those tests.  We talk about 5% differences and ignore the 100% differences that can hardly be written off so easily and  not only because we aspire to undeserved greatness, but because we're afraid others will misuse the data.

So it's interesting to see how we very conservative Liberals will see peer reviewed studies like the one in Current Biology that arrives at these conclusions:

•Individual differences in chimpanzee cognitive performance are heritable

•Cognitive traits found to be heritable show significant genetic correlations

•Sex and rearing history do not significantly influence cognitive performance

Will we decide that a biological basis for intelligence only pertains to modern Humans and not our immediate or more distant ancestors?  Perhaps it will be decided that our ancestors learned to be sapient the way we learned to lose out body hair and gain larger brains.  If not, we're going to have to learn to stop hiding and to address the real problems, the cultural and social and ethical problems of how we treat other people directly. We're gong to have to learn to separate all sorts of human variation from estimations of human worth, rights and dignity.  That's far harder to do than to wear a blindfold and demand that others do as well.

My guess is that the "no scientific basis" will remain a strong political force despite any degree of  sabotage by science because truly, there is no conservative more tenacious than a Liberal.

God and the Buzzard

He who foretells the future lies, even if he tells the truth

--Moroccan proverb-

I suggest the same is true of those who quote or speak of God's word. Perhaps that's demonstrated by the inexhaustible supply of such "words" and the necessary logical contradictions of all assumptions and assertions divinely attributed. God says this, wants that, does, doesn't, will or won't, can or can't and all in a flood of language that could bring down the tower of Babel -- and yet with little internal consistency and very much in the way of mutually contradictory theorems.  Perhaps that's why "Bible studies" so often consist of isolated and hermetic universes, never compared to others from the same source.  It's the well founded fear of refutation. We hardly need science to make it all unlikely and make much of it impossible and absurd, but arguing with the convinced is a bit like playing Scrabble with someone who makes up his own dictionary as he goes along and has a hidden box of tiles.  Love thy neighbor, seek justice -- kill everything that breathes and rejoice while you dash their children's brains against the rocks.

And they do speak of God's word: the people who insist science is untrustworthy as a method to ascertain truth and far less dependable than the politically selected words of God chosen to justify or demand or proclaim or delude.   But it's not so much the disparity between the vast Universe Science reveals and  religion talks of that disturbs the people who have their own alternate reality to maintain at an ever increasing cost.  It's the scientific method itself they pretend not to understand and need to deprecate because scientifically derived theories must be subject to testing and refutation. Received wisdom and divine authority cannot, for obvious reasons. God cannot, should not, must not be tested.  Yet we hear them insist that there are 'many scientists' that deny Darwin, many scientists that doubt the age and nature of the universe and the changing nature of our planet from people willingly or mendaciously oblivious to the contradictions.  The Biblical God demands we protect him by lying.

"Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the buzzard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game" 

Said Karl Popper of such people who hide behind Biblical authority and he's right -- by definition. "Scientists" who are cited as not supporting Darwin and doubting the thermometer aren't scientists. The religious opinions  regarding ontology to which we are so commonly forced to listen, usually rely on fallacious common sense axioms like ex nihilo, nehil fit to insist someone must have made everything -- nothing comes from nothing, but the weight of that 'axiom' rests on being ignorant of science since not only is nothing provably something, but things, virtual particles, are repeatedly observed as spontaneously arising and extinguishing without any agency. 

The ontological argument for God is a flimsy fallacy but it satisfies a legion of smug folk-theologians and their flocks. The void has properties not dreamed of in the bronze age and still not known about by most. It has properties that seem strange to people who went to Bible College and didn't study physics, and of course physics and common sense were divorced a long time ago. Should I point out that like all 'proofs' of God,  it would, if valid, support an infinite number of gods equally but not any ascribed attributes?  Indeed it can be used to 'prove' virtually anything.  It's hardly the thing to base a religion on since a religion is based not on the existence of a divine entity, ineffable, inscrutable or otherwise, but on it's attributes and attributes that have nothing but tradition and speculation and conjecture and arbitrary assertion as support.

Of course not all religions and denominations or their leaders are equal.  The Vatican has, under several pontiffs, expressed support for evolution and that the observable universe expanded from an infinitesimal point, but then any Pope has likely read Augustine's warning against "utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements" whereas that's not likely to be true of the kind of  Christians who roll on the floor babbling in gnostic ecstasy or insist that God hates Fags and punishes us with hurricanes.  But there's so much wriggle room in Genesis, after all. What is meant by "the heavens" isn't clear.  Is the author talking about our planet and the visible sky or about a universe unimaginable to the writer?  Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church now has genuine respect for the method it once persecuted as heresy, perhaps it's simply exercising Augustinian caution.

The astrophysicist Mario Livio observes that:

"instead of acknowledging  an error in judgement, people tend to reformulate their views in a new way that justifies their old opinions." 

 I can only speculate that normative Christianity, particularly of the American type, is trying to preserve what it can without embarrassment and yet will continue to push the old presumptions where it can get away with it. So it's no surprise that the continuing revelations of science will be trimmed and tailored and offered on the altar of God to "prove" biblical accounts of history. Hence we have the usual suspects asserting that the recent detection of gravity waves or ripples in space-time said to  support the theory of inflation in the very early universe also supports the Genesis account:

In the beginning God (the Elohim) created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Sorry The Earth wasn't created until the universe was ten billion years old, nor was the universe made of water that had to be separated by a "firmament"  into the waters above and below the Earth -- nor was it divided into day and night of course, or lights placed on the ceiling for our benefit. 

The Earth, even the larger one we learned of long after the current Biblical account was formulated, is so tiny in comparison to existence itself as to totally defy analogy. What we know about the origins of the universe doesn't allow for the specific and omnipotent actions described in the Bible as we have it today much less the essentially infinite size and great antiquity thereof. Yes, both scenarios suggest an existence prior to ours outside our universe but one relies on evidence and the other relies on the will to believe and to believe in a tiny, simple universe designed for a purpose: for human use. It relies on the importance of Man and his actions and thoughts and that demands an egotism, a desperate search for importance and meaning that is as incomprehensibly large as existence itself. 

Of course the promotion of science as supporting The Bible, as contorted as it is, is desultory and opportunistic. In this case, that it gets as far as it does relies not only on the scientific ignorance of the faithful as it does the Biblical ignorance.  A good reading of Genesis, with it's interleaved stories having different names of God and different accounts patched together like a fool's motley is almost as much at odds with itself as it is with science, with it's assertion that God had all kinds of sons on Earth and that they were a randy and unruly lot resembling satyrs or the assertion that animals have souls.  Perhaps the incoherence itself lends a hand to misrepresenting the contents and dressing them up as support for science, but I'm being foolish myself for pointing out mankind's foolishness and dishonesty and delusion.  Not only can't I get there from here but religion of all kinds is 'writ in water,' and like water, it fills in the interstices in truth, settles in the lowest places and flows from one gap to another. 

But neither Genesis nor Science can do much more at this point than speculate about beginnings. The concept of God as we have him in the West presumes that the beginning wasn't the beginning of everything and the current scientific theories allow for other and perhaps prior universes -- even universes to come.  We don't know much at the extreme level of the infinite and infinitesimal and that we don't know is the beginning of belief itself. There will always be more carrion than the buzzard of science can swallow.  It's left to fools like me to dream that it were otherwise.


 

Robots Rule

There was moaning at the bar when the last NASA Space Shuttle returned to Earth, destined to become a museum exhibit, but the sentiment that it was all over for our geriatric space program may have been misplaced.  Yes, the shuttle was a flawed compromise and would never be designed in such a configuration today, but the real flaw was that it was designed to transport and support human beings and the need safely to do that dominated the design.

Enter the X-37B.  It looks a bit like the old shuttle, but without the crew, it's smaller, lighter and cheaper.  Because it rides on the nose of a Delta rocket, we don't have to worry about junk falling off some giant fuel tank and best of all, if we lose one, we only lose some money and not men and women.

It's the 21st century and robots rule.  Robots don't breathe, don't care much about the temperature or the quality of the food or need to use a toilet or to sleep.  They don't even get nervous. The experimental US Air Force X-37B or at least its successors has a robot arm to be used to fix or dismantle or refuel satellites and can transport objects to and from orbit - just like the old Shuttle fleet, but the crew stays safe at home.  It's scheduled to be launched today, weather permitting, from Patric Air Force Base, near Cape Canaveral.  A larger X-37C space plane will follow.  After that, who knows? 

Mars needs women

It's an odd fact that, for some male astronauts like former Space Station resident Mike Barratt, spending 6 months without gravity produces changes in vision that often are irreversible. He went up nearsighted and needing glasses for distance and came down eagle eyed and needing reading glasses. His condition seems permanent. The phenomenon is under serious study at NASA which is concerned that the possibility of a long trip to Mars might just carry the risk of blindness. Just why it happens and whether or not it can be prevented may be, according to CNN.com, the determining question as to "whether he or any other astronaut ever journeys into deep space or sets foot on other worlds."

Prolonged weightlessness causes papilledema -- a swelling of the optic nerve for about half the male astronauts, some of whom recover and others, like Barratt do not. Women seem to be immune. Of course another question that doesn't seem to be addressed here is why we don't just hire more female astronauts? Sometimes we obsess so much about a puzzling matter that we neglect to look at obvious alternatives.

Dawn patrol

The last time I watched the movie Spirit of St Louis, about Charles Lindbergh's 1927 flight across the Atlantic, I wondered what he would have done if someone had told him: "hey wait, in a few years you'll be able to do this in a few hours while drinking champagne and watching this movie. That's not how the human ego operates however. We take huge risks to be the first. Risks that would be far, far smaller if we waited a while for technology to catch up.

Of course if it weren't for the Cold War we might never have gone to the moon or built a space station or have our hopes for a verdant Mars dashed in the 1960's and 70's. Sometimes you are better off taking the risk, spending the money; but is that an argument for not moving on with the times?

While the press and much of the public is lamenting the end of the seriously flawed shuttle program, the real science of space exploration is continuing to produce astounding advances that dwarf the advancements to knowledge produced by our manned program. With the rapid advance of semi-autonomous robotics and miniaturization, it's foreseeable that the huge risk and titanic expense of sending people around the solar system and returning them alive and sane may be less and less worthwhile.

What have we learned from the shuttle experience? That space travel is still very risky, still vastly more expensive and difficult than we imagine when we design these things. Expensive enough that we will always make serious compromises in design that eventually make things even more expensive when we have to work around them. The shuttle is a textbook lesson in the perils of design by committee and politicians. It's catastrophes result directly from design decisions driven by economy.

If we are to continue the Space Station project for a while, perhaps there will be sufficient motivation to develop a smaller, lighter, truly reusable, economically sound and more modern supply vehicle, but the Space Station, if it has any justification, is all about practice in sending people to places to do what robots will probably be able to do much better before we get there.

Yes, perhaps we'll be able to support some sort of human existence on Mars for a period of time and perhaps construct a moon base that could, for a time, house humans, but it wouldn't be much of a life and it certainly shouldn't be called a "colony" in the way European settlements in the Americas were colonies. We still lack the money and the technology as well as a reason to develop them. In that respect science fiction tends to be a somewhat cloudy fun-house mirror of the past more than a window into the future.

Would we ever send; would we ever expend the huge resources to send men and women to Vesta, or Ceres much less to the vicinity of the outer planets with their monstrous radiation belts and no resources -- a journey that would force the new Conquistadors to live in conditions we now reserve for pickled herring -- and keep them in constant danger and deprivation for years? No, but we can send and have sent patient, unemotional and replaceable robots whose capabilities are expanding as fast as the universe itself. Would we spend trillions and ask a crew to take a decades long trip in a stinking tin can without a shower, drinking recycled urine and eating horrible food just to orbit Pluto? Will we ever travel to the nearest star? I doubt it, but the technology to send an unmanned vehicle is at least a real possibility, even if we won't live to see the pictures.

Robots can be sent in small vehicles; can be small vehicles, powered by small efficient ion motors and won't suffer from emotional problems or long for the cool, green hills of home. A cheap cell phone now has more computing power than existed anywhere when we first walked on the moon and high resolution video cameras are smaller than the human eye. (remember when color TV cameras were the size and weight of refrigerators and required a two man crew?) The rate of change is accelerating. Think of what we'll be able to do in the 20 or 30 years it would take to build manned rockets and ancillary equipment for a very risky Mars mission.

The shuttle was a 1970's design loaded with so much design compromise that it was obsolete before it got off the ground. Robotic missions on the other hand can go from the drawing board to landing on Jovian moons in fairly short order. The real science is done on places that would incinerate, irradiate, freeze and squash an astronaut, even if he survived the mind numbing confinement and squalor needed to get there and back.

Not so with the Dawn mission, now as of yesterday in orbit around the asteroid Vesta; an object so small and distant that even the Hubble telescope can't see anything but a featureless smear. Expect a flood of hi-res images in the next few weeks. In time it will move on to Dwarf Planet Ceres and surely gain some insight into the formation of planetary systems. That may be less a thing of dreams than small boys and Sci-Fi fans like to imagine but much more of a thing of science. We've already seen the sunset on Mars and watched dust devils cross the endless desert. We've heard the wind blow on Titan and seen its methane rivers and lakes and there's more to come as the technology improves.

It's impossible to do more than guess, but I'm guessing that long before we discover bug-eyed monsters on alien worlds, we'll be building our own in Pasadena and sending them there. You and I can see the dawn rise on worlds more alien than we can imagine and we can do it poolside with a glass of lemonade.

Dividing by faith

Oh, little children, I believe
I'm a Methodist till I die
I'm a Methodist, Methodist, 'tis my belief
I'm a Methodist till I die
Till old grim death comes a-knocking at the door
I'm a Methodist till I die

-traditional-

The author Robert Pirsig traces his collapse into madness to a casual statement by a colleague, that "they don't teach quality any more." I've had many, and because I'm not schizophrenic, they are far less bathic descents that quickly float back up like Queequeg's coffin. Like Job, I've escaped to entertain thee and I won't be talking about motorcycles, the doctrine of transubstantiation or the Metaphysics of Quality. It's been done. This is about bumper stickers -- the ones that come in colors and proclaim:





I continue to see these stickers on cars, proclaiming the concept of belief as a virtue and by the fact that it is being so advertised; a virtue that in some way is meaningful to advertise. Like all philosophies and especially those condensed into two words, it conceals a philosophy. Like all words Believe is a prejudice.

So let's ask what qualities define belief and make it something to wave like a banner? Does it need any, is the quality of all belief the same and indeed can the nature of belief have a quality beyond the nature of the belief?

I can guess, knowing some of the people to whose vehicles the stickers are attached, that it's an advertisement for some specific assertion and that it's a religious assertion and that it's displayed as a rebuttal. I say this because there's so often some specific attention being payed to a challenge; a real or fabricated challenge to a religious proposition or assertion that is congruent to the cyclical outbreaks of these printed adhesive credos available on line for $4 plus postage. Every time it's Christmas, every time someone complains about his kid having to say "under God," every time someone repeats Washington's and Jefferson's claim that ours is not a Christian Nation and needs to remain so, out come the stickers. Thus, I have reason to doubt that the thing behind the assertion of belief is the natural born citizenship of Barack Obama, the antiestablishmentarian nature of our Constitution or confidence in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Many of the vehicles do have other stickers advertising themes and shibboleths of the religious right such as the chrome fish and the logos of football teams and motorcycle manufacturers. But of course I BELIEVE does not specifically say that the owner of the vehicle believes in Krishna as the Lord of Light or Osiris as the ruler of the underworld: that he likes Harley-Davidsons and the 'Gators' is beyond the scope of this investigation and its doubts. Nonetheless, I have some degree of confidence that I know what the sticker means.

So is it belief as a virtue of absolute value in and of itself that is to be applauded or is it the specific nature or quality of the belief? Perhaps the ambiguous silence of a sticker is a way to avoid the explanation that might be required by an inquisitive intellectual, should one be found in these parts. As any belief, abstract or specific, rational or irrational; any disbelief in fact can equally be expressed by I BELIEVE , the probability of a specific credo justifying the immodest bit of sticky-backed braggadocio is strengthened if not proven.

Let's propose that I believe there are no spirits or gods or souls and no purpose to existence that concerns us in any way. Can we say that belief then has only an absolute value and the polarity, the direction, the vector is meaningless? Perhaps I've shown that to be logically true but still, owners of sticker emblazoned trucks will not think so.

No, it's a particular belief or set including certain beliefs that is virtuous to a degree to specific individuals and sets of individuals -- and others to a different degree. Have I shown that belief as belief can have any value and so must be as un-virtuous as it is virtuous? If there can be an equal and yet opposite belief to any belief one can assert, it must be so.

If, of course the vehicular assertion is not to be applauded, or at least not universally to be applauded, one has to consider that it's intended to be an affront, a rebuttal to one or many who do not believe in general or in a specific proposition. It could be intended both ways, making it serve as a tribal totem distinguishing between those who do and those who do not: a more literate and up-to-date version of the untrimmed beard, unusual dress or even circumcision.

I'm different because I believe and because I'm proud of it, I say I'm better because I BELIEVE. That would of course make a specific belief, or as some prefer to say 'belief system' a test of virtue and of membership. Does belief , if belief has all possible values, allow everyone into the group of believers? It does not, only belief that lies substantially within that system or universe will do. Again we see that I BELIEVE has no value independent of the content of the belief. The virtue to be proud of lies not in the believing itself.

So it's likely, I should think, that the virtue of the virtue lies in the object of faith; the specifics and not the faith itself even though some seem to think of faith in and of itself as being worthwhile and not necessarily only virtuous by virtue of the content. One has to ask, would the faith promoter see virtue independently and I suggest that the simple substitution of objects would produce at least a spectrum, a ranking of value. Is faith that Refafu will make the rain stop or that we hear the hammers of Thor in the storm or that Jesus is Lord whatever that means, the same as faith that there is an intelligence behind the universe or behind the manifestations of existence? And of course, can we rank faith by it's intensity? Am I better if I'm willing to die so as not to contradict my faith or allow anyone else to contradict it. Am I best if I'll kill you to stop contradiction? Martyr or madman, it depends on whether it's your belief or some other. I suspect that here again, the virtue of the virtue is a virtue that hinges on the personal faith of the faithful. Both faith and belief can and so do have all possible values, ranks and properties.

Indeed can we say that one belief is better than another if all belief is beyond any comparison that involves observable demonstrations? At least one common belief is that God cannot be tested -- at least not successfully -- and of course most religious beliefs cannot be successfully exposed to experiment. We can't show that prayer works in any unambiguous way. The weather is what it is, justice is what we make it and even if you postulate that God is behind our sense of justice, we can't demonstrate it as God is so often used to support injustice and there are more convincing arguments for it from other sources.

There are no valid proofs of the existence of anyone to pray to and all attempts I have yet seen to prove any god would, if not essentially fallacious, prove an infinite number with infinitely different attributes. How then can we assign relative values to belief in divinities; one or many?

Dividing us by faith, by belief, whether by the existence of these or the nature of these is the virtue of putting an I BELIEVE sticker on your car. Further, since no one would be putting an advertisement for inferiority on his property, it's an assertion of superiority; an assertion that seems to fit the definition of vanity and indeed, if any belief will do, a gratuitous vanity. If only one belief will do, it's still a self appointed vanity since belief is optional if we are rational. If we are not rational, why are you reading this? I'm better if I believe in anything and I'm better still because I choose to believe in the divinity of a mythological figure, but at any rate, whether it's Jesus or John the Baptist, I'm at least one of the better sort.

When we divide by belief, are we dividing by zero? Well, when the denominator decreases in value or absolute value, the result approaches the infinite: approaches all values. Can I say that the attempt to divide us by something of no determinable relative value results in a meaningless number? I think I just did. To get back to Heisenberg; back to things that are beyond the need for belief or faith, the only universal certainty is that the more of it we ask for, the less we can possibly have and there's no way around it. It's not faith, it's the law.

Tat Tvam Asi. You are that you are, no more, no less -- and that applies, I think, to everything else that is. The sticky piece of plastic ruining the finish on your car makes you no different than the convictions it pleases you to have and nothing you do and nothing you believe extends to the world outside your head. How you treat other people will however.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
This is the law,
Ancient and inexhaustible.
You too shall pass away.
Knowing this, how can you quarrel?

-The Dhammapada-

The unbearable truth of uncertainty

His license plate reads: I BELIEVE.

I wonder if I lived a hundred years more would I ever see one that proclaimed THE EVIDENCE IS DEFINITIVE, THE PROBABILITY APPROACHES 100%, the tests were conclusive or even simply, I KNOW.

We attach a special importance to belief that we don't associate with knowing something by virtue of demonstration, double blind randomized scientific investigation, mathematical proof or even by reducing the probability of error to a point arbitrarily close to zero. At least believers do and a supreme, transcendental virtue it is to them and a terrible thing to impugn.

I really don't care what the man believes except that I know what he supports with that belief. The things he supports affect my life and the choices I can make and require me actually to affirm his belief. He believes that a single cell organism has a soul that not only transcends the boundaries of matter and energy, but has the ability to think and feel without being composed of anything - and that may be punished in hell for all eternity because it hasn't had magic words said over it.

Am I being cruel? I think I'm merely stating the contents of this man's vehicle tags and I know he believes it, because he's bound to tell you and me whenever he gets the chance.

No, I'm not going to see a bumper sticker or vanity plate proclaiming I'M REALLY NOT SURE, IN ALL HONESTY, or YOUR FACTS SUGGEST THAT I BE MORE CAUTIOUS IN MY ABSOLUTE ASSERTIONS. Too long a sentence, for one thing. Too hard to say with a cheek straining wide-eyed grin; that expression an infant gets when he empties his colon.

Seems to me that humans simply believe what feels good and then spend their lives either constructing vast edifices full of entities of necessity designed to support the belief -- or they just deny all contrary evidence. They get "spiritual" or they get angry.

It feels good because the people I want to be like agree with the belief, because I'm terrified of my insignificance, my powerlessness, the random and uncaring and violent nature of all existence, my likelihood of suffering and pain, my certainty of death. I'm afraid my condition may be my fault so I create someone whose fault it must be. I'm afraid I'm not smart enough to understand, so I believe they are stupid. I feel sorry for myself, sorry that I drew a bad hand and someone else didn't. I have to believe something. And for everything I take on faith, I have to deny something on faith. It's the law.

Of course, as I said the other day: I'm digital, which means I don't give a damn as long as my power supply gets its AC and my cooling fans keep spinning. Still, I'd like to express myself like the meat brains do, but I'm not going to mess up the paint job with a bumper sticker and the State of Florida simply refuses to make me a plate that says:

Of the nature and State of Man, with respect to the Universe

Say first of God above, or man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?

-Alexander Pope-

Of course those of the Age of Reason had no idea of the size of the universe and the English language has no word to describe just how much bigger the visible universe is in comparison. Indeed they did know that it wasn't as the ancients thought: our floating planet covered by a rotating bowl with lights affixed, above which gods lived -- a bowl so close that it was possible for bronze age people to reach it by building a tower. Intimations they had, that a universe vast enough to include other suns, other worlds, could not have been designed to be a place for humans; a place for humans to dominate; a place designed for no other purpose.

Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, 'Tis for mine

The Anthropic Principle suggests otherwise. As Steven Hawking says, it simply states that the suitability of Earth for life on Earth is self explanatory: any form of intelligent life that evolves anywhere will automatically find that it lives somewhere suitable for it. If existence wasn't created for us, that's one less ineffable mystery that needs to be dressed up in godlike robes.

Indeed, 16th century astronomer Jerome Wolf wrote to Tycho Brahe that the "infinite size and depth of the Universe" ( if only he knew how close to infinite it is) was the greatest danger to Christianity. Fortunately for that enterprise, most today still haven't grasped that size and what it says about the irrelevance of Human values and indeed the importance of anything to do with us.

What we've come to know about the nature of reality; about what the meaning of is is, has presented us with a landscape more vast and more inaccessible to the public grasp than is the 14 billion light year fraction of what is that we can see. There are whole dimensions that we can't see and can't come close to comprehending and what we can see and comprehend is little more than the shadows in Plato's cave. That everything in this infinite universe can be attached to a two dimensional membrane floating in 11 dimensional space/time requires more than fasting, chanting, meditation and drugs to become apparent keeps reality well out of the reach of all of us. Certain conclusions about it however, are hard to avoid without avoiding the entire question of just why is is. To my admittedly limited mind, questions of creation, of entities involved with creation, entities beyond the properties of matter and energy and dimension and in what places they exist, are absurd. Isn't it absurd to discuss the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead without being able to ascribe any characteristics or properties necessary to their existence? And of course we cannot without dragging them into a place of scrutiny, which is impossible.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum

Said old William, hundreds of years before the Enlightenment; don't create entities if you don't have to, yet we're still doing it. We're still creating creators, plugging the ever narrowing gaps in our ability to explain nature with gods and demons and angels and disembodied spirits, although it's long since become obvious that we don't need gods of gravity or electricity or of the nuclear forces. We don't need gods to determine why and when it will rain or to give purpose to earthquakes and storms or to make it very important to the cosmos that we worship a certain god and avoid another or refrain from sleeping with the wrong people or obtain knowledge reserved for the gods.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man

What we see as energy and matter and time are properties of other phenomena, not results of conscious or unconscious entities that create and control them. We don't need to create them to explain what is otherwise explained by what we can demonstrate and we can demonstrate that random fluctuations of that fabric which manifests itself in all things can more easily do what the old consciousness needed to create entities to create.

Stephen Hawking's soon to be released book claims that existence explains itself, that there is no need to invoke entities for which existence contains no place and allows no properties to explain the spontaneous origin or virtual particles or indeed that tiny part of an infinite thing called existence. If indeed, current theory is correct, there are such an infinite number of conditions that can be called universes, inaccessible from one another, all our religions become absurd. In such isness, the creation of ever more universes is an inevitable result of the nature of is. No nebulous incorporeal entities need apply.

And in spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear: whatever is, is right

M-Theory is hard to grasp. OK, it's damned near impossible, but as theories do, it predicts outcomes otherwise not predictable. Hawking has come to embrace it as it makes the singularities embedded in classical theories nugatory. It makes it unnecessary to postulate something existing before time that caused time to start, for instance. It makes it unneccesary to postulate the entire idea of anything before time.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going,"

Hawking writes in the introduction. Indeed, it's no longer necessary to explain the tides, the winds, the orbits of bodies in space, lightening or the nearly infinite number of gaps in our knowledge in which gods once found refuge.

If there are no more gaps for our gods to hide in, no more firmaments to divide heaven and earth, what then will become of them? Perhaps we'll find him in the one place we have never looked. In ourselves. If universes can be self-creating by virtue of physical law, cannot we be self creating in terms of what we wish to be?

History says no, Glenn Beck thinks it leads to death camps, theologians trip over their tongues trying to show how even if there isn't a God or any place for him or anything he could do if he could -- there is a God. Personally I prefer the freedom of knowing nothing matters for very long; nothing a hundred billion years of time won't wash away. I prefer to think that only the free can be moral, only the mortal can be compassionate and only in our transience can we find glory.

Mail order science

One might think that I would be on the side of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in opposing Texas House Bill 2800. It's effect would be to exempt any private non-profit institution from the need to be accredited by and receive a certificate of authority from the state. The entire idea is of course to establish "universities" that give science degrees without any requirement to study science. Normally attempts to Push the Christianist agenda by equating legend with science earn my contemptuous wrath and of course so does this one to a degree, but wait, there's more.

If, as would happen should this act of insanity be passed, one could simply dream up any curriculum and award degrees of any sort, the value of any Texas institution's degree program not funded by the State would be suspect. Of course the Libertarian in me might be inclined to ask why Acme Bible College shouldn't be able to confer a Doctor of Divinity on anyone they please according to their organized delusions, but not Bachelor, or Master or Doctor of Science. Thinking back to the mid 19th century however, when one could attend Acme Medical College with an unregulated, unexamined course of study and emerge with black bag and scalpel to treat the unsuspecting populace, I have to take pause.

What would the result really be if any charlatan could establish a school and anoint its graduates with advanced degrees in science with no other education but a literal interpretation of Bible Stories for Children? An extra headache for those institutions and companies hiring physicists, geologists and such perhaps. An opportunity for me.

Fogg University of Christian Knowledge. It has a certain acronymical appeal, you have to admit, although Fogg U would be shorter and easier to remember for the kind of students it might attract. Prerequisites? What are you, some kind of Commieliberal intrusive government type?

Let market forces determine the value of unaccredited education, but for you, if you call in the next ten minutes, you can call yourself a Master of Science for $49.95 plus shipping, handling and framing charges. But wait, there's more -- the first 50 callers get a free Sham-Wow with the logo of our sham university on it. You getting this, camera guy?

The future's so bright I have to close my eyes

A few weeks ago, a breathless woman called in to the Ed Schultz Show on Air America Radio to say that a scientist had discovered a way to burn water and wasn't it horrible that the biased media were suppressing the story? I like Schultz, but I was amazed that he credited this claim.

The myth of the water engine being kept from us by greedy oil interests goes back to the early days of the internal combustion automobile and was used as a scam during the depression, but that it should survive today is a testament to the decline of science education in America. The scientist in question had been passing a current through water and of course that produces hydrogen gas and oxygen gas which can recombine or burn. Although this experiment is to be found in high school science textbooks of the 1850's, the fact seems to be unknown at least to one Ed Schultz fan as well as the fact that the energy recovered from burning the hydrogen is less than the energy that went into producing it. The oil companies aren't concerned with suppressing this "technology" any more than they are with suppressing alchemy and witchcraft.

The current (Nov 12) issue of TIME has one of their regular, "Gee Whiz" collections of press releases touting new technology. Some of it as old as I am or older, like water injection for internal combustion engines. I don't expect that many of the eager young journalists remember its use in WW II aircraft engines or the 1962 Oldsmobile 442 Jetfire for that matter, but it's fun to watch the kids get exited and call it "The return of steam."

Anyone who spent his youth reading Popular Science can recall a huge number of Gee Whiz inventions just around the corner that never happened and in most cases never could have, but Looking at TIME's SAAB of the future complete with aircraft type canopy rendering it impossible to enter or exit the vehicle in the rain and making it difficult to open the car in a northern winter without dumping a hundred pounds of snow on the leather upholstery I have to ask why the "designers" couldn't imagine a future a close as next Wednesday.

I don't imagine we'll be seeing anything like the Flintstonesque "autonomous automobile" either, with its lawnmower size wheels, absence of any weather protection and it's need to be parked outside for days to enable the integral windmill and solar cells to recharge its battery. I wonder how many people could replace their family car with what is essentially your father's golf cart?

I think experience teaches us that the things that are predicted to change the world rarely pan out while the unforeseeable breakthroughs lead us to things we or science fiction writers couldn't imagine. I still have electronics magazines from the 1950's insisting that vacuum tubes will remain the basis of future technology and I remember others insisting that the family car would be able to fly by 1970. I grew up on Sci Fi stories about space travel in the late 20th century with levitating driverless cars and people in skin tight jumpsuits living in glass bubble houses but without pocket phones or personal computers or Global Positioning satellites or the World Wide Web.

Still, in a world that wants us all to look backward toward ancient myths, invisible spirits and magic for our salvation, perhaps I should be pleased that people still daydream about a better future even if we always get it wrong.

Blade Runner?

Little things that happen in laboratories often change the world as suddenly and dramatically as the Chicxulub meteor. It was impossible to predict at the time, were there anyone able to do such feats of cogitation, that that event, some 65 million years ago would result in a life form able to recover and analyze the data and discuss the mass extinction that lead to its evolution, but there are other, smaller and more recent events that are sure to change our short segment of time and our understanding of existence.

We, as a species of course, have been able to decode genomes for a while although as with the free version of Adobe Acrobat, we couldn't write in that format. Now suddenly, perhaps we can. British researchers led by geneticist Craig Venter have revealed that they have been able to assemble "from scratch" a simple bacterial chromosome, using laboratory chemicals. That chromosome will, they say, be able to survive and reproduce; a new living thing created by men; a new species that is capable of evolving into other, newer things.

The ramifications for science are vast and although an article in the Guardian immediately began to speculate about the ability to generate bacteria that would reverse global warming (without speculating about the possible horrific unintended consequences) it's impossible to tell where and how far it may lead, should this attempt or an inevitable subsequent one prove to be real. Even science fiction writers have a poor record with this sort of thing.

I like to speculate however, and it is Sunday after all, about whether that strange subset of humanity, the Religious American, will be able to understand the meaning of this theological calamity; about what religious dinosaurs will be made extinct. Of course the proof that we are not animated clay figures moved by an invisible spirit is old stuff, long ago sidestepped by fundamentalists eager to believe, but here, we may have more than the tower of Babel offered as a challenge to the angels: life created by man. It won't be easy to Moonwalk around this one even for those so God-besotted and afraid of death that they insist they will outlast their bodies.

Of course a synthetic chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of code is barely enough to make something that meets the definitions of life and it's a bit like comparing a paper airplane with the space shuttle but life, unlike airplanes, evolves and of course this is only the first step. People yawned and sometimes dismissed the potential of that little piece of germanium that Bell Labs researchers Shockley, Brittain and Bardeen at first called the Transit Resistor, but its offspring made modern life possible in fairly short order.

It's also a big step in the demystifying of life and the demystification of life is the demise of religion as we know it. Of course to those in the know, the mystery disappeared long ago, but it takes a big meteor to get rid of dinosaurs and this may be the one that creates on the small human scale, something like the Cretaceous Tertiary boundary; the other side of which offers the opportunity for newer and smarter and less limited creatures to evolve.

As the power of technology and scientific method expands our ability to fill in those spaces where we used to hide God; to argue that only God can do this or that, will there be a time we recognize that creating life or even creating universes isn't much harder than creating computers or linear particle accelerators? Will we recognize that we are on our own and always have been?

Cross posted to The Impolitic

Island of lost souls

"Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?"

H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

Well the jury may still be out, according to George Bush, on matters of science and evolution, but the jury of George's peers; the stupid, the ignorant, the fundamentalist, would be harder to put together in other countries. Plans to allow British scientists to create human-animal embryos are, according to The Guardian, expected to be approved tomorrow by the British government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The idea is to use one of several techniques to derive human stem cells using only animal eggs, such as inserting a human cell nucleus into an egg from another species. The goal is to be able to have a sufficient supply of these all purpose cells to study treatments for degenerative diseases and spinal cord injuries.

Tomorrows decision comes after a year of argument and lobbying between research scientists and religious groups opposed to blurring the distinction between men and animals; blurry though science shows it to be and of course the untimely release of unredeemed souls from bits of biological matter that may or may not be human. Does a rat-man have a soul or half a soul and does it inherit original sin through its mother if it doesn't have a mother? Demented minds want to know.

What the flock?

Religious leaders like to talk about their flocks, but thanks to modern technology, this could become more than a metaphor and according to Pope Benedict, it's not such a bad idea at all. Go look at World Gone Mad. You'll laugh like a hyena.

Save the bees please

I spent most of this torrid morning up on the roof of my County Emergency Operations Center installing antennas and thinking about bees. No, I didn't see any, but I did see a forest of 800 MHz band and microwave antennas the police, fire, paramedics and other county services use to communicate. These radios put out substantial power in the same band a cell phone uses but at thousands of times the output. It's not a good idea to stand too close to one of those antennas.

Remember those old sci-fi and horror movies where some bearded guy would turn to you and whimper some line about how there were things mankind should not seek to know or dabble in? Americans are a still superstitious lot and even after many years of rapid technological advance that has changed our lives for the better, we're not comfortable with it. We're still afraid that our discoveries are something we steal from an angry god and that we may still be chained to a rock like Prometheus for our effrontery.

Whoever it is that makes up scary stories about everything requiring more intelligence than a Conch fritter to understand must be older than me, since I've seen his work all my life. I remember when you couldn't watch TV unless the lights were on or you'd go blind and you had to sit at the other end of the room so you wouldn't get cancer and the same thing continues: microwaves poison your food, electric blankets give you cancer and on and on.

Cellular phones were a bonanza for hysterical Luddites. They were supposed to give you brain cancer although the evidence is still otherwise and now they're supposed to be killing the bees. Of course the main evidence is that a mysterious disease causing hives to sicken and die has begun some decades after the advent of pocket phones. It's also after the advent of digital cameras, iPods, GPS navigation, satellite radio and hybrid cars, but the target du jour is cell phones and they're going to find something wrong with them if it takes forever. And of course there's a study - there's always a study - and the study says "cell phone frequencies" without telling us which ones, confuse bees. That seems to be enough for the apocalyptophiles and technophobic twits to form unalterable and passionate opinions.

Bill Maher, who likes to tell us, contrary to evidence, that we're all sick because we're eating corn sweetener was amongst the first to swoon over the decadence of cell phone using America causing the end of days and the end of bees. It's us, the sinners who stole UHF from the gods who are being punished and we deserve it. Of course Bill knows nothing about the effects of electromagnetic radiation and absorption rates much less about how cell phones work. Blaming dead bees on your pocket phone is like blaming your suntan on a candle.

You know where this is going. Scientific investigations of dead bees reveals that whatever it is that is killing bees in the US is likely to be a contagious infection or parasite, not confusing signals from Brittney's pink cell phone. Sterilizing the boxes used for hives seems to reduce infection in the next swarm of bees to inhabit it. The exact pathogen has not been found nor has the effects of pesticides been entirely ruled out, but it's not cell phones and it's not the NYFD or your local police either. It may be a virus doing in the busy bee and it certainly is a virus of another sort causing this latest piece of sponsored hysteria about cell phones.

Nihil novi sub soli

There's nothing new under the sun? Well everything old is new again to the empty head but short distance power transfer using alternating or fluctuating magnetic fields is about 200 years old. Run an AC current through one coil of wire and you induce a current in another coil of wire. Michael Faraday figured that out in the early 19th century and the wireless transmission of power using magnetic or electromagnetic fields has been a popular subject in science magazines ever since people started to distribute electricity. That was a long time ago. Still, we live in the days of i-Ignorance and the popular press is running wild with stories about an amazing way to charge your i-Pod and other instruments of i-Idiocy using Faraday's wonderful discovery.

I have to laugh. I've been interested in and a collector of early communications technology for 50 years and I have books showing detailed plans for a short distance, magnetically coupled wireless telephone dated about a hundred years ago, using this same "breakthrough." It works. Of course people in those days were a lot less hip and they just called it what it was: electromagnetism. Nobody had the audacity to invent a term like WiTricity and probably would have been tossed down a well if they had.

The cruel joke has it that the benefit of Alzheimer's is that you meet new people every day. The same goes for being a young, with-it, "into electronics" consumodroid too. Everything old is new.

Which DNA has the soul?

We would be surprised to hear that a president had vetoed our space program because the invisible spirit of the moon would be offended, yet we're not surprised to hear that the man who never vetoes will veto research on human stem cells because he believes in people without bodies who live in another universe far, far away.

Say you're an embryo - of course if you were, you wouldn't be saying anything or thinking anything, but I will save that for later. Say you're frozen in liquid nitrogen (another reason to be uncommunicative.) Say you're a clump of stem cells only beginning to differentiate into cells with specific functions, but you're frozen along with many others because you're not going to be used and are destined to go down the tubes like a dead goldfish. Because these cells each have a full human blueprint in their nuclei, George Bush would insist that they are human and possibly American citizens as well, even though he would hardly consider a few hundred cells taken out of his own body to be a separate and fully human being with civil rights.

Now what's the difference? even though that microscopic clump was put together in a petri dish from two other bits of cellular material already quite alive but soulless; at the moment the technician combined them, the invisible, omniscient, omnipotent, but undetectable humanoid waiting to destroy those who don't say the magic words, installed a soul. the set of plans in each zygote has no soul, but combine two strands and you get a soul. Sound like Magic? Of course it does, because that's all it is. Souls are no more part of reality than phlogiston or the Ether. The question is not and never has been about when life begins. Life began billions of years ago. The question is when does humanity begin and that's a question not easy to answer with a slogan.

For a rational entity, it begins with human characteristics and the prime human characteristic is mental function. For primitives, it's about supernatural, invisible, immortal entities with no physical reality but with the ability to think and move and perceive and suffer. It's about souls. Without the invisible in the picture, one lump of human tissue is no different than another. Humanity is achieved over time, not installed by magic and an embryo is just flesh.

This concept of supernatural souls with an independent being may go back to Aristotle, but it isn't really biblical in my opinion. There is no discussion of abortion in the Bible and to my reading, a foetus is only human after its first breath - just like Adam. The obsession with saving the souls of blastomeres is all about the notion of original sin and the damnation of unbaptized souls. The "right to life" people have no particular interest in keeping you alive once you've been sprinkled. The immortality of single cell souls is a religious notion peculiar to a certain dogma and something not really suitable to be supported by Federal law.

Some people were really pleased to have George Bush's Christian soldiers occupy our country and be quartered in our homes. Some felt like they had Jesus in the White House. For my part, I have respect for Jesus and none for George but I no more want either of them in the oval office than I want Quetzalcoatl in Congress or Krishna in the courtroom.

Argumentum ad Ignorantiam

Quid est veritas?

-Pilatus-

As with most of the idiotic assertions of the religious right as to the age of the universe and the origin of species, the argument is that, as science does not offer the kind of proof that Euclidean geometry does, baseless speculation and conjecture and papal authority should be considered the equal of science. The argument is that the preponderance of evidence, no matter how overwhelming, is not proof and a 99.99999% level of confidence must then be considered inferior to faith in a description of the universe that is 100% at odds with observation.

Pope Benedict's new book Creation and Evolution ( not yet available in English) reaffirms that his commitment to specious argument and double-talk is still not in doubt although I'm sure he would argue that I can't prove it. Proof you see, is what purveyors of certainty-without-evidence demand of those who offer probability with evidence and Ratzinger in Robes is close enough to warrant being called an unrepentant liar by insisting that evolution is a dubious matter when compared with ancient legends interpreted by him.

"it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory."

says he, knowing full well that proof is for mathematicians and that the evidence for evolution is so vast and overwhelmingly conclusive that the possibility of it's not occurring or having not occurred is arbitrarily close to zero. It is in fact, a very complete scientific theory backed up by massive evidence from many independent sources. He must know that there is absolutely no evidence for any other origin of species. His alternative is not any kind of theory as it does not fit with any observable evidence at all, but contradicts everything we can demonstrate to be true. His reference to "Gaps" is nearly a century out of date and is as dishonest as insisting that the cracks in the sidewalk cast doubt on it's existence and prove it doesn't go anywhere.

Although evolution indeed can directly be observed in it's progress with small creatures, he insists that

"We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory."

Yes you can and on the level of molecular biology, evolution is well enough understood and demonstrated that the possibility of it's not occurring is, once again, close enough to zero to be able to call it zero. In fact the origin of species by evolution is backed up by as much evidence and more of it than most things Ratzinger would be forced to accept if it didn't interfere with his acquired dementia syndrome and program of intellectual tyranny.

Once again the Church resorts to the kind of pseudo-logic that dares to put a "therefore" behind "I don't know" and use it to dismiss the most powerful of arguments as though proceeding logically toward knowledge from some bogus first principle of ignorance were possible. Once again the Church seeks to assert certainty about things for which there is no evidence whatever and disparage things for which the evidence is endless and hopes you somehow won't be smart enough to laugh.

Frankly I don't care if he thinks there is water holding up the flat earth or that there is a firmament to which stars and planets are fixed or that one can walk into heaven from a mud brick tower in Babylonia as the Bible insists - what he is doing is selling authority based on a view of the world that is so out of touch with the truth that he has to attack the concept of truth itself. What is truth? We don't have to be sure in order to recognize a lie.