I did not, after all, have the faintest clue what a “clone” was.

Eventually, after struggling mightily with the word to see if I could wrest meaning from it, I asked my Dad what clones were.

He said “It’s a process where you can make a copy of someone by taking a piece of their skin and turning it into a baby twin.”

I said “Wow, you can make a copy of me, just with a piece of skin?”

“Not really,” he said, “it’s just a cool idea for a story.”

Already having some idea of how science fiction worked, I asked the next logical question: “So…is it possible some day? Or is it just pretend?”

“It’s just pretend,” he said. “Some people think it might be possible in a hundred years, but that’s a long time–longer than you’ll be alive.”

In the intervening decades, cellular biologists have discovered a whole class of cells called “pluripotent stem cells.” These are cells that are created in the first generation of pregnancy–a zygote is a pluripotent stem cell at fertilization, and the first few generations of replication produce more pluripotent stem cells until the cells start differentiating.

Funny thing, though. In the last couple years induced pluripotent stem cells have been discovered, refined, and perfected–in Argentina they’re now using them to clone cows from the ear tissue of a parent cow. If that weren’t wild enough, how would you feel about turning your skin into brain tissue to cure you of Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative diseases?

I love living in the future–it’s been a quick hundred years!

Vanity

On the ever-so-self-indulgent subject of, well, me, there are a few items potentially of interest.

First, I released a second Clarke Lantham novel. When Clarke Lantham goes home for Christmas, the results can’t be good.

Meanwhile, the first Clarke Lantham book has been getting some attention. KindleAuthor just interviewed me about it, View from Valhalla loved it, and Seth Harwood, Gail Carriger, and Philippa Ballantine all liked it well enough to provide blurbs. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check out the first couple chapters here. For that matter, you can check out the first part of book to, A Ghostly Christmas Present, here. Enjoy!

Art and Writing
If you’re an artist, or a writer, and you live somewhere that the influence of Hollywood reaches (i.e. everywhere), it’s very easy to forget that being “in shape,” “fit,” or “athletic,” doesn’t mean the same thing as “lean,” “6-pack abs,” or “what I saw on the cover of Vogue this month.” Forgetting this basic fact of life robs stories and paintings and graphic novels of realism, even if slightly. So, for your benefit and mine, here’s a photo essay featuring over 100 Olympic atheletes in phenomenal shape, each featuring a very unique body type.

Odd how the two most “offensive” words in the English language at the moment were words that were only mildly naughty 30 years ago. While one of these will continue to be a problem for a while, the other is redeemable. Check out Hal Duncan’s brilliant linguistic history of “cunt,” and his take-down of the implicit sexism sold with the demonization of what is, after all, a very cute word for a very delightful organ. He also goes into depth in the way usage varies on either side of the Atlantic. Unusually thought-provoking, and not played for shock value. Very useful for writers who write cross-culturally.

Publishing
We all know publishing is changing — snooze, hit the alarm, pull the other one, etc. We read about it in the New York Times a hundred times, which one would expect, as publishing is a big presence in New York. But when you read about it in the LA Times you know the movement’s gone big. Of course, this is the LA Times, which isn’t exactly a bastion of non-sensationalistic accuracy. Even so, it’s a fun read full of links to authors doing innovative things. Fun stuff!

TeleRead posted an interesting overview of the history of book piracy, it’s sociodynamics, and economics, with a follow-up column speculating on what it means for the industry. Some interesting stuff here by Chris Meadows.

For those of you who, like me, have a huge library full of books by dead people that will never be released in e-book format (or, at least, not for anothe decade or two) there is an inexpensive non-destructive way to digitize your books. This method is legal and ethically benign so long as you do not share or sell the resulting digital books. As an open source advocate and DIY culture member, I am very much in favor of projects like this. As an author who makes his living off his intellectual property, I work hard to make sure my work is always available in forms that do not strip the reader of his or her fair use rights. The other side of that contract is that the reader doesn’t steal or pirate the creative work of the entertainers whose work they consume. So, with that caveat, enjoy the workshop experience I’ll keep writing ‘em if you keep reading ‘em.

Speaking of piracy, Paul Cornell writes a provocative ethics article about illegal downloading filled with many good and some rather flacid points. Worth a read, nicely thought-provoking.

Got a book available on Kindle? You can now post the sample on your website with the Kindle for the Web app. This post from indieKindle gives instructions for embedding the app on your site or in a blog post.

And, speaking of e-books…solar powered e-reader, anyone?

Beauty
A really fun time-lapse of what looks like the blizzard from hell — over 3 feet in less than 24hrs. Most impressive – the best 30 seconds you’ll spend today.

Terry Gilliam, whose work has always been kinda steampunky anyway, is producing a steampunk puppet movie that looks really damn cool if this short film version of it is any indication.

Not to be out-done on the time-lapse front, NASA brings you a time-lapse of a sunset from another world. Click here to watch a Martian sunset.

And for breathtaking, how bout a collection of photos of man-made footprints on other worlds?

Science & Technology

Recycling. We all do it for the environment, but some kinds of recycling–like recycling plastic–are a waste of energy, resources, money, and doesn’t yeild an environemntal or economic gain. This isn’t true for everything–aluminum, scrap metal, electronics, and (thanks to a recent breakthrough in dealing with treatment of toxic de-inking chemicals) paper–all yeild tremendous benefits when properly recycled. But plastics…man, plastics are a problem. They’re all chemically different, they have to be very carefully sorted, cooked, and then are downcycled (made into things further down the supply chain) rather than recycled to the same quality. It’s a dirty secret, and it’s been a bit of a problem and embarassment for a couple decades now. That might not be true for much longer. Seems that, rather than resorting to dogmatism and moral guilting on one side, or lazy-bones naysaying on the other, one scientist has figured out a process for recycling all plastics that’s inexpensive, energy efficient, and a net environmental gain. Bravo!

In the realm of philosophy of science, Alvin Plantinga, an otherwise respected epistemologist from Harvard, is in the process of dipping his face in egg when it comes to philosphy of science. His companionable discussion with Daniel Dennet gives you the bulk of his case in his own words, and P.Z. Meyers (whom I consider entertaining but not exactly one for nuance) takes him apart very effectively here.

Research on different kinds of invisiblity continues apace. This article talks time distortion effects of certain kinds of meta-materials, and gives a roadmap for a proof-of-concept. I’ve been having a blast watching this field go from the stuff of dreams and science fiction to the stuff of serious, hard-core well-funded research in the last ten years. I can’t wait to see–or not see–some metamaterial-based invisibility prototypes in action.

In other news, 3D image editing for anaglyph is coming soon to a computer near you.

The field of linguistics has long been one of those in-between sciences–not quite a real hard science, but something more quantitative than a social science. Google Books looks to be changing that. Ronald Bailey talks about the new trend in tracking linguistic and cultural evolution using quantitative analysis of Google’s book database.

You know the insomnia you get after a traumatic experience? Turns out that trying like hell to get to sleep might not be such a good idea after all.

If you’ve heard about geopolitical unrest because of China’s attempts to lock down the rare-earth metal market, don’t worry. Turns out they’re not the only country with lots of the “rare” stuff.

Education

If you’re a strong autodidact like me, you’re always on the prowl for new educational stuff. OpenCulture just updated their list of free online courses from major universities this month, and the selection is getting really impressive. Even scarier, as one who grew up in academia, I’m starting to recognize a lot of names on that list.

Meanwhile, one of the most excellent shows on the history of technology, James Burke’s Connections, has made its way onto YouTube. Bears multiple re-watchings. Check it out.

If you’re like most people, you’ve heard about the Theory of Relativity (E=MC^2) and have a vague idea that it means all matter is energy or something like that, but you’ve never really been able to get your head around the math to understand what it really means. Well, fear not — the always-readable Bertrand Russel wrote the definitive popularization of general relativity, and Derek Jacobi read it. Now, it’s available for free to the public as an audiobook. Go grab it now, give it a listen, and prepare to have your mind turned inside-out. Fun stuff

Also in the “good clean fun” department, someone with actual sexual experience on the order of decades is now producing a sex education series on youtube. Funny, clever, and no-bullshit, he calls it the “Guide to Getting It On,” and he hits a lot of points that younger, hipper educators often miss.

Politics

This is the only political article this time, and I’m including it because of how much of a shocker it is. Francis Fukyama’s analysis of where liberal econimcs went wrong by embracing the liberalization of financial markets instead of trade-goods markets. It’s very interesting watching the Keynsians, the Monetarists, and the Hayekians all starting to converge on this point in the wake of the recent banking crisis. More interesting to me is that Adam Smith got there two hundred years ago–and that politicians and policy makers still aren’t listening.

— — — —
I got tons more in my salad bowl, but that’s already a more substantive meal than I had planned to serve up. Hope you enjoy — and have a great New Year!

Crazy Silly Creative Things
To start off with our garnish, you could do no better than watching this 3 minute video about what Welshmen really do with sheep. Don’t worry, it’s work safe–but you won’t be while watchign it. This is seriously, amazingly cool.

Johnny Carson presents The Great Flydini, an utterly silly and borderline obscene magic act that will leave you in stitches. Don’t let obscene put you off — it’s work safe.

While you’re at it, put down your drink before reading this story about the trials of moving house with a pair of neurotic dogs.

Writing
Gail Carriger shares a surefit of useful research resources for those interested in the Victorian world.

Publishing
Some industry analysts are just flat terrified of change. The tired old doom-and-gloom saw, complete with a helping of elitist nuttery and starry-eyed nostalgia, receives a very articulate (and surprisingly informative) defense in the Boston Review article Books After Amazon. Fortunately for readers, most publishers aren’t this short-sighted, but it is a very informative view into the mind of those who think that ebooks will kill the publishing industry.

Copia, a latecomer to the ebook market, is hoping to create a major third-mover advantage by leveraging social media in a pretty creative way, turning its reader into a Facebook-meets-Twitter-meets-Goodreads-meets-kindle type “experience.” Time will tell.

While we’re on the subject, the official word on Google Editions is that they ARE coming…someday. At least, we think so.

If you sell a story during 2011, be sure to drop an email to this guy. He’s editing the “Best Of” anthology for 2011.

By the way, James Bond? Yeah, his author’s estate gave its publisher the boot and went independent. Details here.

Science
By now you’ll have heard all about the new life form discovered at Mono Lake. Here’s a sober and understandable account of this very exciting, but fairly overhyped, discovery.

Speaking of which, I’m getting very tempted to declare the 21st century the century of virology. It turns out that a lot of cancers, possibly obesity, and now possibly schizophrenia are caused by the irritating little bastards.

Moving to the meteorology front, the Telegraph has an article full of amazing photos of supercell tornadoes that’s well worth a squint.

Miscellaneous Cool
I stumbled across a whole bunch of color movies from the 19th century. Our notion about the Victorian Era being drab and grey where the clothing is concerned? Yeah, that’s a load of crap, and here’s the evidence.

Space Travel
It’s not quite a moon base, but it’s still kinda cool: NASA aims for a base at L2.

Vanity
And finally, your moment of torture. On Get Published, I cackle in my surly way about writing, marketing, publishing, and making a living off of fiction in ways I’m hardly qualified to do.

Bring on the leaves!

Culture
David Brin writes a graphic novel called “Tinkerers” about the maker culture, manufacturing, and the future of progress, and puts it online for public reading.

On the indie film front, here comes a new farm system that might take a couple years to become completely clogged: Amazon is launching a sort of on-line film festival that looks like a hybrid of Project Greenlight and what Sundance used to be. Worth keeping an eye on.

I’ve talked from time to time on Dealing In shows about the unique political history of the United States, and how that has directly contributed to our current culture wars. Here’s some news that dovetails with the discussions about the Civil War and Reconstruction — for some people, the Civil War never ended.

Sexuality
For some reason–maybe because both Down From Ten and And Then She Was Gone featured elements of the BDSM culture?–I’ve gotten a number of people recently asking me how people could possibly get pleasure from pain. I’ve never been a fan of Freudian explanations for this — they’re too much like just-so stories, and they rely on a theory of mind that’s now totally discredited. So, in the interests of science, here’s some interesting neurological research that bears on the question of how pleasure and pain relate in the brain.

Space Science
First ever exoplanet from outside our galaxy. Yes, Virginia, our galaxy does seem typical of this universe.

The Telegraph runs a story on being homesick from orbit, which contains some of the most gorgeous astronaut photography yet published.

Project M, the weridest space travel project to date. This is what you get when engineers get really pissed off — and it’s kinda cool, too.

TSA Security Theater
Like a lot of you, I’ve been seriously apalled by what’s been going on the last ten years with air travel. This week, the policy wonks might actually have gone too far by requiring a strip and/or grope search of everyone flying through one of about 68 airports around the country. So I’ve got three links to help you out if you have to travel by air thruogh any TSA occupuied airport.

First, for those of you who have to fly before this mess is resolved, at the bottom of this page is a list of the airports who currently have the new pornographic version of security theater scanners in place.

And if you’re looking for something you can do about it, check out this most creative (and potentially effective) response I’ve yet seen. November 24: opt out of the scanners, force a backlog of pat-downs, and wear kilts to really embarass the fondlers. Full details here.

Finally, a heartening tale of Citizen activism against the TSA

Internet Civil Liberties
For those of you who have been following COICA, the internet censorship bill, it’s been voted out of committee and onto the floor. There’s a big fight coming up on this one — if you’re a fan of social media, art and science on the net, or an author or content creator, this is your fight. Find details here.

Biology, Geology, and Energy Research
Life really is everywhere, and a new discovery makes the question of the origin of oil even more murky. Thomas Gold (and the Russian scientists he plagerized) might have been right after all. Time will tell.

Materials Science
Carbon is your friend, really. It’s at the heart of the current materials revolution that’s giving us both radical life extension and sustainable space travel. Today’s news? Ultra hard graphite, harder than diamonds, developed in a lab.

And then there’s the quantum supersolids–a holy grail of materials science–and the new evidence that they may actually exist http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19748-new-evidence-that-weird-quantum-supersolid-exists.html

And that materials revolution that you’ve been hearing about for years? It’s officially here. First molecular manufacturing tools are in the works.

Medical Science
They’ll fix you with a ray gun! Radio wave-based treatment for hypertension more effective than drug cocktails, and might prove permanent.

I saved this week’s coolest link for last. A new (and replicable) stem cell therapy can now reverse some of the symptoms of Autism. Check it out!

I’ll be at Seattle Steamcon II this weekend — hope to see you there!

Specifically, the word “conspiracy” came up a few times, as in “Do they really expect us to believe scientists are in a conspiracy about the Big Bang?”

So why would I, someone who publicly fancies himself a fairly rational fellow, post something that smacked of conspiracy thinking and call it “interesting?” Because I think there’s a difference between a conspiracy and a paradigm, and it starts with understanding how scientific theories work.

Scientific Theories

In common parlance we use “theory” in the same kind of way Spock uses it on Star Trek: i.e. as an idea that gets troublesome problems out of your hair. For example, “I have a theory, Captain: in order to save the Enterprise, you must seduce the alien’s girlfriend” is not a theory, it’s a policy recommendation designed to remove something troublesome (i.e. Kirk) from the speaker’s (i.e. Spock’s) immediate view, perhaps permanently (i.e. when the phaser-weilding alien catches Kirk boinking the girlfriend).

The closest we get to this kind of thing in science is an hypothesis—“hypo” from the Greek meaning “deficient” or “underdeveloped” and “thesis” meaning “idea” or “argument.” A hypothesis is a guess phrased in such a way that it can be proved wrong if an experiment or discovery goes the wrong way. As an explanation, it doesn’t yet have a good body of experiments establishing that it’s likely correct. If you have a guess about how plants grow, but can’t yet offer supporting evidence, you have a hypothesis.

A “theory,” on the other hand, is what happens when hypotheses grow up. A theory is an explanation for a group of related facts that has withstood (or been changed by) a great deal of experimentation. Because theories are always constructed in a way that makes them vulnerable to contrary evidence, no theory is ever “proved,” it is only “established.” In other words, a theory is what happens when you fail often enough, and learn from it.

One quick note on facts: when it comes to science, facts are almost worthless. It’s not that they’re irrelevant, but rather that all of science exists to explain facts. We’re at no loss for facts, the problem is the opposite: we’ve got too many of them, and they don’t make sense unless we can establish the relationships between them. Theories are the tentative maps of those relationships.

Thomas Kuhn and the Fastest Gun In The West

There was a philosopher in the 1960s who caused a big stink by taking this basic premise (that theories are only “established” and not “proved”) one step further and arguing that theories were essentially fashions, having no dependable relationship with either facts, good theory, or the truth. His name was Thomas Kuhn, and he made this argument in a paper (and book) called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

These fashions, he called “Paradigms,” and he argued that they are enforced by the academic and scientific establishment, which squeezes out competing theories and contrary data until enough contrary data exists for younger scientists (i.e. the ones without an investment in the status quo) to come along and wreak havoc. Thus, he argued, science is a socially constructed and socially determined endeavor, not a search for truth or a method for discovering and minimizing error. As a sociologist at the height of the social determinism and constructivism movements, he makes an ironic poster child for his own argument.

So, by Kuhn’s lights, the only time science ever advances (and it doesn’t really ever advance, it just changes fashions) is when enough young hotshots gun for the old coots that they succeed in overthrowing the old dominant theoretical structure and replacing it with a new one. This phenomenon he called a “Paradigm Shift.” And yes, he invented that term.

Kuhn’s notions have permeated deep into popular culture, which already had an erroneous idea of science as THE TRUTH and the source of CERTAINTY (capitalization intentional). As you can guess, it helped make the whole scientific enterprise deeply suspect. Kuhn’s thesis has become an under-girding element of postmodern epistemology and philosophy, and has had a number of other interesting knock-on effects.

It turns out that most of the history Kuhn relied on to make his arguments was incorrect–he was, after all, a sociologist and not an historian, and as Rodney Stark demonstrates, it’s very easy for a very good sociologist to get himself into trouble when he makes sweeping arguments based on a naive understanding of history. The book Thomas Kuhn in the Light of Reason goes through Kuhn’s work with a much-needed critical eye, and is very accessible. Kuhn greatly exaggerated his conclusions and was wrong about some of its mechanisms, but he does deserve credit for spotting a legitimate social dynamic at work.

So, stripping it of some of the bullshit that Kuhn’s over-ambition imbued it with, a paradigm is a collection of theories that comprise an overarching model of the world. And Kuhn was right about something important: Science advances because researchers try like hell to poke holes in the existing theories. Shooting the old fastest gun in the west is a great way to make a name for yourself, or get a Nobel prize. Stephen Hawking made his name paradigm busting, and he helped the same kind of thing.

Conspiracies

Where a paradigm is a structure of theories, a conspiracy is a collusion of people to suppress or obscure the truth, or to frustrate attempts to reveal the truth. Denialists often invoke the language of conspiracies to explain why their ideas are not accepted by the mainstream. Some examples:

The film Expelled posits a widespread conspiracy among scientists to suppress the fact that the theory of Evolution is contradicted by almost all of the facts, and to punish scientists who believe in God. The conspirators allegedly do this in order to advance a utopian social vision.

Holocaust deniers posit a widespread conspiracy among veterans, historians, the media, and others to pretend that the holocaust happened, in order to provide a public justification for the existence of the state of Israel.

Climate denialists posit a nearly perfect collusion of scientists across a wide variety of disciplines in order to whip the public into a frenzy, secure funding, and (depending on who you talk to) transfer national sovereignty to the United Nations.

All these theories, and all other conspiracy theories, depend on three notions: 1) A large number of people have a vested interest in lying about information that is publicly accessible, 2) that vested interest is directed toward a set of articulable ends, and 3) despite the thousands of people involved, they maintain near-perfect discipline and informational control.

Pretty damn unlikely.

That’s not to say conspiracies don’t exist — they do. A conspiracy assassinated Abraham Lincoln, another one led by Deitrich Boenhoffer failed do assasinate Hitler. Read properly, the dealings that brought the U.S. Constitution into existence could be plausibly described as a conspiracy. But the problem with conspiracies is that people talk. Information control is difficult, and becomes exponentially more difficult the larger the conspiracy gets.

History is littered with failed conspiracies (such as the Watergate cover-up) because, as one of history’s most successful professional conspirators and revolutionaries said, “Three may keep a secret, so long as two of them are dead.”

(That was Ben Franklin, by the way, in Poor Richard’s Almanac).

Gunning for the Nobel Prize

So when you’ve got stories about scientific revolutions happening–and there are a lot of them going on right now, it’s an exciting time–don’t mistake the excitement of a paradigm-buster who’s trying to prove the old guard wrong and experiencing social resistance for a paranoid conspiracy theorist. They can sound similar on the surface (in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Climate Denialists and Climate Skeptics can), but when you dig deeper, you’ll discover this distinction:

The Paradigm-buster or skeptic is interested in fixing an outstanding (and often a very widely acknowledged) problem with the state of scientific knowledge.

The Denialist or Conspiracy Theorist is interested primarily in fomenting paranoia and discrediting an existing social power structure by any means necessary (including character assassination, dishonesty, and intimidation).

These categories aren’t ironclad–humans are complicated. Sometimes legitimate skeptics get so angry they act like denialists. And sometimes Conspiracy theorists are really slick and can maintain for a long time the illusion that they’re only interested in the science. Eventually, though, people do tend to sort themselves fairly dependably into one category or another on a given topic.

I’d love to carry on the conversation–please post your comments below!

P.S. For those of you wanting more background on yesterday’s article and the topics it’s addressing, check out Lawrence Krauss giving a lecture on contemporary cosmology, and you can get a multi-perspective quickie overview on this BBC Horizon Documentary about the current cosmological revolution. In both cases, the scientists involved are quite open about the problems posed by Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and other X-factors. It is these X-factors that the article I linked to yesterday is attempting to address.

Sometimes, though, the exciting stuff happens in the sciences. When the incentive system works, the new kids on the block go gunning for the old theories–you make your name by going after the Fastest Gun In The West. With all the fun stuff going on recently with Dark Matter and Dark Energy playing havoc with Inflationary Cosmology, a lot of people have been waiting for the other shoe to drop: at some point, some young and hungry cosmologists are going to try like hell to blow up the Big Bang.

Well, it happened. Whether it will prove a better model, it’s too early to tell. But it is a hell of an audacious theory-in-progress, and lots of fun to read about, so I thought I’d share it with all of you. Enjoy!

One of them comes to Scientific American belatedly (it was originally published on May 16) from the atom smasher at Fermilab, which may just have answered the fundamental question of existence: Why are we here?

I’m not talking metaphysics, I’m talking physics. There’s been a problem in fundamental physics that goes like this: Matter and Antimatter are both created out of the probabilistic churning of the quantum foam in the vacuum all the time – and then they annihilate one another. It’s this kind of probabilistic interaction that produced the Big Bang, but if matter and antimatter annihilate one another, then why should there be anything at all?

Well, after crunching a couple decades worth of data from Fermilab, it looks like occasionally, in special circumstances (like those that prevailed at the time of the Big Bang), the quantum foam produces about 1% more matter than antimatter, so when all the annihilation happens, there’s a residue.

Assuming that the data holds up, we now know with quite a lot of surety why we’re here: because we, and the rest of the universe, were in that one percent of matter which didn’t get annihilated.

But more important than that is the scientific paper today out of AAAS from the lab of Craig Venter, the man who invented shotgun sequencing, the method of DNA sequencing that is now the most widely used in the world. In a modest paper entitled CREATION OF A BACTERIAL CELL CONTROLLED BY A CHEMICALLY SYNTHESIZED GENOME, Venter and his team announced something that will change the world every bit as profoundly as the printing press once did: The creation of an artificial organism.

Let me reiterate: Humans have now created, from scratch (the genome from scratch, that is), a life form that can reproduce, metabolize, and respond to stimuli. An artificial, designed genome runs the show. The ability to do this is something we’ve been seeking for centuries, and now that it’s here the implications are astounding. We now have the ability to, for example, resurrect extinct species, create designer organisms to dispose of pollution or convert electricity from sunlight, and that’s only the very, very tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Remember this date. In twenty or thirty years, when nothing in the world is the same and never will be again, you’ll have Craig Venter to thank for it, and May 19 will be the day on which you remember that it was today (well, yesterday now), that the human race became the author of an entire biosphere, rather than simply the usurping editor of the one in which we arose.

Twitter is a mischievous little meme. On that innocent network yesterday, I noticed fellow podcast novelist, and fabulous debate opponent Scott Roche say of science and religion: “the two are examining different things.”

Naturally, being unable to keep my mouth shut on religion, sex, or politics (this is, by the by, why I never stay long on the east coast – I have to leave quickly before I’m shot for violating public decency laws), I retorted immediately saying: “Science and religion can not meaningfully be said to be examining different things.” Hello, fundamental conflict (and, consequently, hellooooo blog content)!

On Scott’s blog he wondered whether we were operating on different definitions of religion, so was kind enough to define religion as “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices” that, in his estimation, addresses only things that do not belong in the natural world. In other words, religion deals with spirits, gods, angels, demons, and any other supernatural beings which may or may not exist, and its purpose is to put us in touch with whatever we believe about the supernatural.

Science, he goes on to argue, deals with that which exists in the natural world and is (at least in theory) measurable. It is the method by which we divine how one thing is related to another.

Scott’s division of labor between science and religion seems to me to accurately reflect how most people think about the issue, and even on the basis of this postulated Non-Overlapping Magesteria (pace Stephen J. Gould).* History does not reflect this view – it is actually a relatively recent definition arising form the intellectual ferment of the late nineteenth century – so on the face of it I find it suspicious. Frankly, it looks to me like an epistemic** dodge than a genuine description of historical reality – but I’ll leave that aside for now, simply because one of the realities of history is that words do change definitions. I may get back to the history of science and religion in a later post, but for now, I’ll stick to the current situation, and whether or not it matches the definitions Scott proposes.

Sticking strictly to the current state of the world, I think Scott’s argument fails in two important respects.

First, in a practical respect, religion currently serves a number of functions that have only a tangential relationship to the supernatural. It propounds a theory of human nature, and it provides a cosmogony (a set of metaphysical beliefs about things within the universe such as the ultimate nature of reality, the origin and destiny of life, the universe, and everything, the construction of consciousness). It also serves as a platform from which to make pronouncements about morality, relationships, and human flourishing. On every one of these points, religions differ among themselves as to the nature of their claims and functions, but most religions are concerned with most of these areas, and some religions concern themselves with all of them.

Taking them in no particular order, the fields of knowledge and understanding which religion currently claims authority are now well within the purview of the following sciences:

On every score, scientific research confirms some points of religious dogma and contradicts other areas, forcing religions to adapt by either synchronizing or radicalizing on any given point (which, by the by, is why theologians exist – to cope with the discrepancy between received doctrine and contemporary reality).

Continuing in the practical vein for a moment, religion also provides social cohesion and cultural continuity for a large number of people on this planet, including a dependable power structure. On these final two practical points, as well as on issues of morality, religion’s focus is very much on the things of this world (and, often, on securing and/or maintaining power – sometimes political, sometimes military, sometimes interpersonal, and sometimes cultural – in this world). The hegemonic ambitions, large and small, are justified by appeal to the supernatural, but are always, in practice, concerned with controlling the behavior of beings in the temporal world.

Second, on a basic philosophical level, if a supernatural world actually has an intercourse (either perpetual and ever present, as in Hinduism, or incidental and historical as in the monotheisms), then it is at least in principle accessible to natural science at the point of intercourse, and therefore science and religion are both aiming once again for the same territory.

Thus, in both the practical and the philosophical cases, religion and science are very much fighting over the same territory. The nature of this conflict is missed by religious liberals, who have inherited the syncretic mindset and tend to read their scriptures with modern cosmopolitan glasses that retrojects their late, quasi-deistic conception of God back onto times with a far more definite and robust theology. Nonetheless, push hard enough and in the right place, and you’ll find the points at which even liberal religion is on the defensive in the face of scientific inquiry. Need it be this way? That’s a topic for a future blog post, but I can tell you it has not always been this way. Once upon a time in the west, the natural sciences were seen as the handmaiden of theology rather than the other way around.

So, to wrap up, I’m confident in standing by my tweet which opened this conversation. Although religions can (and often do) preserve wisdom worth paying attention to, and often raise questions worth investigating, they are in almost no sense concerned with different things. Now, it may be possible to create a religion that is completely immune to territorial impingement from science forever, but it would not then be legitimate to argue that religion as a phenomenon was free from such a conflict.

Besides, I daresay that a religion which made no claims about reality, made no demands on its patrons, promised no rewards (temporal, eternal, or existential), and said nothing substantive about human nature would maintain a hold on parishioners for very long. Don’t believe me? Look at the thin attendance of liberal protestant churches compared to moderate and conservative ones.

Back to you, Scott!

*magisteria meaning “area of authority”
**epistemic meaning “having to do with one’s theory of knowledge” – in this case, an epistemic dodge is redefining what one means by “knowledge” in order to get around a problem with what one considers “true”

First, the coolest biomedical news this year: Synthetic arteries have arrived.

Second, some really cool news on dog evolution from two fronts. There’s an article discussing the stray dogs in Moscow, and what selection pressures have done to them over the last 100 years. Then there’s the new BBC documentary on how dogs shaped human development, and vice versa – and answers the question “Are dogs smarter than Chimpanzees?” Check out the video here .

Finally, the single most mind-blowing introduction to Chaos Theory I’ve seen or read. Goes into the history, the development, and the implications of the most radically disturbing area of mathematics ever to come around. See it here and prepare to be astounded.

Enjoy! And stay tuned in the next few days for new episodes!

In an article on Beliefnet this week, Michael Ruse argues that the “new atheists” are a “bloody disaster.” He argues using a mixture of caricatures, complaints, and criticisms, so before I go into why I think the man is full of organic fertilizer on the broader issues, I will address the salient ones:

[Cut for opinionated rantings that might irritate some readers]

Caricatures:
1) “…the “new atheists” – people who are aggressively pro-science, especially pro-Darwinism, and violently anti-religion of all kinds, especially Christianity but happy to include Islam and the rest.”

Among the “new atheists” he names Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens, P.Z. Meyers, and Jerry Coyne. Notably absent from this list is the movement’s galvanizing voice, Sam Harris, whose book The End of Faith busted the market wide open for everyone else. Harris is familiar with a number of religions, and in The End of Faith and in his lectures at the Beyond Belief symposiums makes nuanced arguments about the relative merits and demerits of different religions and different flavors of different religions, all while insisting that faith must no longer be socially sacrosanct. He argues that not all false ideas are equally destructive, and it may be that not all religious ideas are equally false, but that it is dishonest, dangerous, and foolhardy to continue to behave as if religious ideas are especially immune from criticism when compared to political, moral, ethical, economic, philosophical, scientific, or artistic ideas. His arguments may have problems – anthropologist Scott Atran has given them an extensive critique – but they do not fit the brush Ruse is painting with in the slightest.

A call to level the intellectual playing field by practicing what Harris calls “conversational intolerance” of religious ideas is the central program of the New Atheists. It’s what Dawkins, Dennet, and Hitchens explicitly advocate, and it’s what Meyers and Coyne deliberately practice. Dawkins frames it as “let’s have an argument.” Dennet frames it as “let’s break the spell that makes religious ideas specially immune from criticism.” Meyers desecrates communion wafers and pulls other provocative stunts to raise discussion and demonstrate that, when it comes to inquiry, nothing is sacred.

The charge that the New Atheists are violently anti-religion is, to put it frankly, a lie. None are in favor of any form of violence towards religion – all advocate argument. Nor is it true that their ire falls especially on Christianity. While Dawkins and Dennet talk about Christianity more than any other religion, neither says that “Christianity is the worst” – quite the contrary. In both cases, being raised in Christian environments, they focus on it simply because they are more familiar with Christian history and theology than they are with, say, Confucianism. On the other hand, Hitchens and Harris are familiar with a variety of western and non-western religions and single out Islam and some of the other more easterly religions out for more severe criticism than they level at Christianity.

Ruse is engaging in well-poisoning on this one. Shame on him.

2) “Francis Collins has been incurring their hatred…since Collins is a devout Christian.”

Ruse is here referring to the controversy over the recent appointment of Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, as head of the National Institutes of Health, but Ruse’s characterization of the controversy is disingenuous. As the head of the NIH, Collins will have influence in areas where he has a dogmatic ax to grind: embryonic stem cell research. At no time that I’ve seen (granting that the web is a big place and I can’t be everywhere at once) have any of the New Atheists impugned Dr. Collins’ scientific credentials, even when directly attacking some of the less scientific things he’s said in print. Check out Michael Shermer’s blog entry on the topic for a quick, representative summary. The question at issue is not Collin’s credentials, and it’s not Collins’ religion. It’s whether his non-rational dogmatic commitments compromise his ability to do the job of overseeing research budgets, and it’s every bit as legitimate a question as asking whether a Quaker or a Jain is an appropriate pick for Secretary of Defense.

Complaints:
1) Ruse complains that the “new atheists” are terribly mean to him – meaner than they are to the religious folks.

To be perfectly frank, I think Ruse’s complaint that the New Atheists have insulted him in their writings is more than a little childish, and also more than a little hypocritical.
First, as demonstrated by the depths he sinks to in this essay, he’s not above reckless and dishonest ad hominem attacks himself – complaining that someone is mean when you’re dishing it right back and worse is gradeschool behavior.
Second, he doesn’t publicly hold the people in the creationist community he considers friends (Gish, Dembski, Johnson) who are even ruder in print and in public (see Dembski’s nasty little cartoon about the Judge in the Dover case for an example).

It should also go without mentioning that, in the war of ideas, people can and do say very aggressive, hard things while telling the truth as they see it. This is an adult world, and Ruse should have learned at University that science and philosophy are not disciplines for the timid.

That said, let’s put this complaint in context, and consider the charges that the “new atheists” level against the priesthood(s). Religious leaders are, according to Dawkins and Hitchens, “child abusers” for their promotion of the doctrine of hell and of infant circumcision. Hitchens further characterizes the Catholic Church’s youth outreach activities as “No Child’s Behind Left.” They all accuse Imams of fostering an environment that might lead us to nuclear war, and Dispensationalist Christians of breathlessly searching for a silver lining (i.e. The Rapture) in the prospect of Manhattan going up in a mushroom cloud.
Whether these accusations are defensible or not is not at issue here. What is at issue is that Ruse evidently thinks a book review calling his ideas “so nonsensical that only an intellectual could believe them,” a book calling his condescending attitude towards religion “appeasement,” and a blogger labeling him “a clueless gobshite” is worse than being called a pedophile, a child abuser, a genocidal warmonger, and a fanatic.

I must say, his semiotic score-keeping system mystifies me.

2) Ruse complains that the New Atheists are mean to him because he doesn’t think all believers are evil or stupid, and that science and religion do not have to clash.

If Ruse honestly believes this is the source of the invective he’s found himself on the receiving end of, he is sorely mistaken. The book Jerry Coyne reviewed is stunning both in its ambitious scope and, more importantly, in its lack of intellectual rigor. The book in question, Can A Darwinian Be A Christian? might be a worthy subject for a book, but Ruse’s method in the book is blinkered toward both religion and with science. Its methods and hermeneutic are only applicable to a very small minority of Western Liberal Protestants and Catholics – the rest of the religious universe (including well over 80% of the world’s Christian population) is unaddressed by his argument, which tries to show the God-of-the-Gaps as the starting point for making Christianity and evolutionary biology mutually reinforcing.

Contrast this with a religious scientist that the New Atheists do not attack, Ken Miller. A conservative Catholic teaching at Brown University, Miller is the author of Finding Darwin’s God, perhaps the most nuanced and well-argued defense of theistic evolution ever written. In his book and arguments, he refuses to give short shrift to science in order to give comfort and shelter to his doctrines, and does not engage in the normal “God of the Gaps” or “NOMA” nonsense. He is an unapologetically religious man who has the courage of his convictions, both religiously and scientifically, and is very much respected by both his peers and his adversaries for that fact.

Criticisms:
1)“Their treatment of the religious viewpoint it pathetic to the point of non-being.”

Unfortunately, with the exception of singling out Dawkins for being philosophically simplistic (a criticism that is, to my mind, pretty near the mark), Ruse provides nothing to back up this assertion. He certainly doesn’t engage any of the arguments offered up in the New Atheist books, nor does he seem to notice that the “new
atheists” are in dialogue with believers. The notion that the New Atheists are boxing with a straw man is belied by the fact that believers in Islam and Christianity overwhelmingly pay lip service to scriptural inerrancy, prophetic infallibility, and a whole slate of other doctrines that the New Atheists are aggressively attacking.
Judging by his comments about Christianity in other contexts, it seems that Ruse considers as straw manning arguments that do not engage liberal theologians such as Bultmann, Tillich, et. al. These men are eloquent writers, and theologically subtle, but such men hold a position in the borderlands between religion and atheism, being held to their religion by personal spiritual experience but utterly unable to defend with argument a single doctrine, not even the existence of God. They are of interest to the academy, but not of much interest to the average pew-sitter. When it comes to the culture war, they are largely irrelevant.

Dennet, of course, isn’t engaging in this kind of argument anyway. He raises questions about how religion got the way it is, how it might have served an adaptive function, what is it that, if we discover parts of it are false, should we hold on to and learn from?

P.Z. Meyers and Jerry Coyne are interested in scientific education and intellectual rigor in that field, and make precious few forays into arguments against religion except when directly addressing the Intelligent Design crowd.

Harris and Hitchens are the only two left, and both have come under a goodly amount of fire for generating more heat than light. However, Ruse’s notion that they are philosophically naive or religiously uninformed is bogus – that they differ in outlook from him is certain, but disagreement does not idiots make. In The End of Faith, Harris articulates an entire epistemology that dialogues with Kant, Bacon, Descartes, addresses postmodernism, and takes heavy account of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.
Hitchens, on the other hand, is highly conversant with all of the great socialist thinkers, and references many of them directly in his book, as well as A.J. Ayer, C.S. Lewis, Bertrand Russel, and many others that would take too long to list here. There may be places where their arguments are sloppy or just plain wrong, but to dismiss the entire crowd as “poor quality,” “pathetic,” “a disservice to scholarship,” and “knowing nothing” of the subject matter is calumnious.

2) “The new atheists are doing terrible damage to the fight to keep Creationism out of schools.” Ruse develops this further, saying that “if science generally and Darwinism specifically implies that God does not exists, then teaching science generally and Darwinism specifically runs smack up against the First Amendment.” He goes on to say “This is the claim of the new atheists.”

Ruse again proves himself aptly named by gracing his audience with a rhetorical ruse. Taking these items in reverse order, the new atheists do not say that science generally and Darwinism specifically imply that God does not exist. The closest you can come, other than statements of personal conversion moments (such as when Christopher Hitchens relates his childhood revelation that our eyes are adapted to the environment and not vice versa, or Dawkins’ lack of ability to comprehend how someone can believe in a god that would ordain a bloodthirsty process like evolution), is Dennet’s observation in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that the idea of natural selection acts as a universal acid, dissolving away our common-sense notion that things are designed from the top down rather than the bottom up.

Now, that may imply that the God promulgated by religion is less likely than not, but let’s not confuse weak implication with necessary conclusion.

Secondly, Ruse is manifestly wrong on the question of Constitutional law. Children are exposed to facts in school which contravene their religious heritage all the time. From Galileo onward, the western world has been inundated with facts that strongly imply that some religious doctrine or another is false, from the corruptible heavens to the expanding universe, from the realization that species can go extinct to the discovery of geologic strata, from the atomic theory of matter to the heliocentric solar system expanding universe, from the discovery of female gametes to neurologically embodied mind, from plate tectonics to ancestral genetics to evolutionary theory.
We forget now, because we don’t realize how profoundly these scientific discoveries affected the doctrinal development of different religions – we assume that the religions we have today are as they always were. But that’s not the case. Each one of the above accepted scientific paradigms either threatened to unseat or completely obliterated at least one accepted religious doctrine that was, at the time, considered fundamental to the faith of Christians, Mormons, Muslims, and/or Jews. The Constitution does not protect believers from inconvenient facts in a government-run school, it protects everyone from proselytization by anyone representing the government. Saying “The Grand Canyon was formed by geological forces over millions of years” is not a religious dogma, even though it specifically gives the lie to the Genesis creation and flood accounts and, if the evidence is followed down the geologic column, eventually calls into question the foundations doctrines such as original sin and biblical inerrancy.

This criticism, the ultimate point of Ruse’s entire essay, also turns out to be wrong on both the facts and the logic, and thus the whole of his article amounts to little more than vacuous grandstanding.

For myself, the thing I find most disturbing about Ruse’s little diatribe is the lack of intellectual honesty (the same problem I have with Gould’s NOMA nonsense). The epistemology Ruse espouses in this article is highly unethical, as his strategy (again, like NOMA) is a bait-and-switch con game with believers. Does this sound unfair? How else can you describe someone who says “We must not tell people that Darwinism implies that there is no God, because it endangers science teaching.” [paraphrased]. If Darwinism does imply that God doesn’t exist, then telling religious folk that “only a few cranks think that” is a lie. If Darwinism does not imply that God does not exist, then all that need be done is argue with the people who say that it does. In neither case is it necessary for an honest person to perpetrate a confidence trick upon people whom he’s trying to sway to his side.

In the article, he also conflates two disparate concerns. First, the scientific:
While what people believe about the universe is their own business – I certainly have my own weird handful of notions – if one wants to play in the science classroom one must adhere *at least* to the doctrine of falsifiability. Thus far, all creationist hypotheses have proved false on every testable point. This is true of even the strong version of Intelligent Design, known as irreducible complexity, whose original examples of irreducible complexity (the immune system, the bacterial flagella, etc.) have since been proved reducible, thus falsifying the hypothesis.

Of course, the weak version of ID (“There must be some designer somewhere out there”) doesn’t make a falsifiable claim, which makes it a philosophy without even an hypothesis. It is not even bad science. To quote Wolfgang Pauli, it’s “not even wrong.”

Second among Ruse’s conflated issues is the sociological:
People love their pet beliefs, particularly when it comes to notions about creation or design, which most people erroneously conflate with metaphysical notions of purpose. Fortunately, affection doesn’t give one the right to have their beliefs coddled in a science classroom, nor should it. Science has always, and (so long as it continues to progress) will always be a philosophically and theologically unsettling enterprise – not just for the religious, but for all of society. As our data about the universe changes, our ethics, philosophy, beliefs, laws, and values change in reaction to it. Sometimes it’s subtle – sometimes it’s hugely traumatic. In neither case may one claim an exemption from coping with that fact because it conflicts with something someone taught in a church or read in a holy book.

The argument over the teaching of evolution is one of four major arguments now brewing that effect the whole of the scientific endeavor. The others are neurology, biogenetic research (particularly, but not exclusively, on human embryonic stem cells), and nanotechnology. All three of these fields profoundly threaten a variety of doctrines from a variety of religions in ways at least as profound as evolutionary theory does – and all of them are indispensable in dealing with climate, famine, pollution, disease, and a host of other engineering challenges that either loom on the horizon or are already with us. Ruse’s strategy of accommodationism didn’t work in the last 50 years of the 20th century – it seems that a different set of tactics are needed. Direct confrontation and argument is a more honest and, quite possibly, a much more productive mode of engagement in the culture wars of all sorts than is ingratiation.

In every form it has been hitherto proposed, creationism is either a falsified hypothesis, a con game, or an assertion without
any content. We scientifically literate folk should treat our adversaries in this culture war with the dignity that they’re due as adult human beings and be clear that, in so many words, we’re fairly certain that they’re full of shit. It is both dishonest and insulting to pat them on the head and point at the sandbox in the corner and say “over there we have a little room for your theology, and we promise not to wreck your sandcastles – at least not today.”

Of course, there are different levels of pugilistic engagement – P.Z. is a provocateur, and proud of it. So be it – the world needs people like that, lest we all get so afraid of offending someone else that we lose our willingness to participate in the arena of ideas. A free culture needs its assholes like a pond needs water.

Friends arguing philosophy over beer in a pub have the option to be kind – that’s the kind of forum I participate in at Apologia, and I’m proud to do it. But friends don’t generally take kindly to being treated like children by their peers, and there is a difference between kindness and mealy-mouthed passive aggression; practicing the latter in a friendly conversation might well get you snubbed at the next get-together, because it displays both cowardice and condescension.

However, intellectual pugilists in the arena of ideas do not have the option of sparing the feelings of the other side. It is possible for one side to be completely wrong on a given issue, and in such circumstances, seeking a middle ground is dishonest. So, I say “Hooray” for the new atheists, and wish more people, especially those who think they’re assholes, would actually read them. I’ve known more than a few Christians (including very conservative ones) who find the new atheists refreshingly honest and who can make common cause with them in the matter of intellectual ethics, even as they disagree completely on matters of theology, morality, politics, et.al.

Let us stop honoring opinions as sacred, and instead honor those who are willing to have an argument – regardless of what they believe.
And let’s honor them by informing ourselves and actually engaging the argument, rather than complaining that they don’t like us.

*** Appendix ***

In the comments below, Todd Stark points out a basic dichotomy of approaches to intellectual arguments – how some see them as a fight, while others see them as a conversation. He’s right about this, but his comments point up that I wasn’t clear enough about the basic premise from which I was operating.

I don’t think “argument” equates to “fight” – but then, I also don’t think “adversary” equates with “enemy.” There is a place for the friendly conversation (for example, Apologia). There’s also a place for the boxing match. Both are an argument, defined well by Michael Palin in the Monty Python sketch “An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.” It’s not “the automatic gainsaying of something the other person says,” neither is it abuse. In such a sense, both are conversation, fraught with all the normal difficulties you point up in conversations.

In other words, The fact that open societies exist shows that people can be pragmatic about their irreconcilable differences. Argument separates the substance of the opinion from the person holding it for the purposes of understanding – you may think I’m batshit crazy for thinking it’s worthwhile to have humans living on mars, and I might think you’re batshit crazy for reading a horoscope, but I know from arguing about those things with you that you’re ethical in the way that you think, so we can still have a business relationship, or a friendship.

I think the whole reason to have an argument is to ferret out the substantive differences from the semantic ones, whether that argument is friendly or adversarial, the basic structure remains: I’ll stack my facts and logic up, you stack up yours, and we’ll critique each other.

Some particularly colorful arguments, particularly those between public intellectuals like Ruse and Meyers (or William Dembski and anybody, or Christopher Hitchens and anybody), can contain abuse, but if abuse is the entire argument, then there’s nothing to see. My objection to Ruse’s paper is that it consists of very few facts (almost all of them wrong), with the balance spent abusing his opponents while complaining that they abuse him. He has jumped into the boxing ring and is complaining that he’s getting hit, which seems, to me, childish.

Thanks for the comment and the constructive criticism, Todd!

—Also check out the responses to Ruse by two of his targets. Jerry Coyne’s reaction is here. P.Z. Meyers’ reaction is here.

Part 2 of the Richard Carrier is now live. We continue our conversation about science in the ancient world, discuss the works and missteps of Rodney Stark and his theory of the scientific revolution, read and discuss ancient documents germaine to the topic, and talk about the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. Hera Flea returns with more Reprobates News, and Danny Schade continues to supply additional questions and commentary.

Next time, in about two weeks, we’ll talk to Cory Doctorow about DRM, Freedom, Surveilance, and Linux.

Enjoy!

It’s been a long time! Before my life was swallowed by the podcast of my novel Predestination and Other Games of Chance, I recorded quite a bit for Reprobates Hour. So now, to kick off part 2 of Season 3, Richard Carrier returns to talk about science in the ancient world. We discuss the works and missteps of Rodney Stark and his theory of the scientific revolution, we talk about the amazing and usually forgotten scientific and technological discoveries and innovations in the ancient world, and have a lot of fun along the way. In this first of three episodes, we talk about science in the Greek world. Next week, we talk about the Roman world. Hope you enjoy!

The Reprobates are back in town — spread the word!

If you enjoy world religions, are wondering where science fiction can go from here, or are curious about transhumanism or The Singularity, you’ll find something to entertain you and possibly get your dander up here.

Enjoy!

Scientific knowledge has progressed astoundingly fast since most of the current party political alliances were formed seventy years ago, and that pace has accelerated since the last medium-sized realignment thirty years ago. The lessons of history in that same period of time are also momentous – if anyone actually cares to look at them. And most don’t. This creates a problem.

I’ve had a lot of fun this election year tweaking my left-wing and right-wing friends by telling them I’m voting ‘No’ for President this year. “It’s the most important election of the last fifty years!” they tell me “You must participate.” They may be right – it could be a hugely important election, which is precisely why I’m not voting for either major party candidate of for either of the two big minor party candidates.

You see, I’m sick to the teeth of Democrats claiming the mantle of science while ignoring economics any time the findings of that discipline contradict the New Deal Keynsianism that infects the party. I’m sick of Republicans being in favor of “free markets” when they bail out failing businesses. I’m sick of both parties claiming that they are forward looking when their major alliances are built on late-1960s political expediency. I’m sick of the Libertarians pretending that anarchy and liberty can co-exist in a meaningful way, and I’m sick of the Greens claiming that opposing GMO crops and technological advance while embracing pseudo-Marxist economic policies are the key to an environmentally viable future.

In 1862, in his address before Congress, Abraham Lincoln called “Bullshit” on the way partisan politics were polarizing the north on the issues surrounding the Civil War. He said: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” The same is true today. Thirty years ago, “left-winger” David Brin and “right-winger” Ronald Bailey could never be seen as allies, and yet now, while they have some minor quibbling disagreements on taxation policy and public research funding and other minor points here and there, both are in fundamental agreement on issues of science, technology, trade policy, environmental concerns, human morality, reproductive technology, and civil rights. The same kind of shift has occurred everywhere, as the facts of the world have shifted beneath the complacent, religious devotion of people to their political parties.

It used to be that you could marry theocrats to conservatives who loved traditional freedoms, because both were opposed to social change that seemed too rapid for the country to handle. That kind of alliance doesn’t work anymore, because the country has adapted to the rapid rate of change while preserving its heritage of individualism.

It used to be that you could bring Left-wing Malthusians together with humanist scientists over environmental concerns. But as science shows that the only way towards responsible environmental stewardship is technological innovation on a grand scale rather than a scaling back of industry, that alliance becomes just as inviable.

There is a political divide in America. But it’s not between the “left” and the “right.” It’s not even between the Keynsians and the Hayekians, although that argument will remain very important for decades to come. No, the divide is fundamentally between those who see humans as a legitimate part of the natural world and those who do not.

Those who do not see humans as a viable part of nature tend to see them instead as either a blight upon nature or the rulers of nature, but they agree that science and technology are fundamentally tools by which humans exercise dominion over nature. They may not agree on abortion, but they do agree about genetic engineering. They may not agree about tax policies, but they do agree that taxation should be a tool of social engineering. They may not agree on the ultimate destiny of humanity, but they do agree that a peaceful society must be fairly ideologically uniform. And, militarist or peacenik, they also tend towards cultural and economic isolationism.

Meanwhile, those who do see humans as a legitimate part of nature form a group that is generally favorable towards both technological advance and environmental stewardship. Favorable towards both a peaceful world and economic freedom. Opposed towards both the enforced repression of minorities and towards the prescriptive Newspeak that comes from the New Right and the New Left. And, militarist or peacenik, this group tends towards a policy of active international engagement on cultural and economic levels. This natural alliance might find internal division over issues such as gun rights, or minimum wage, but those differences are minor compared to the differences in parties of the past.

This political realignment has been in progress for some time now, and it may take quite a while for it to conclude. But personally, I’m sick of participating in a quadripolar political game that is fifty years out of step with the fundamental facts of the world. Since I live in California I have the luxury of my vote not counting no matter what I do, so this year I’m taking advantage of it to make my point.

Whichever way you vote, take time to consider the fundamentals of your political philosophy. Dig down below your policy positions, figure out what really matters to you. Examine your positions and values critically, and see if they really line up. See if they line up with the candidate you support. Don’t just vote out of habit.

As for me, this year I really am voting “No.” On everything.

This recent opinion piece on abortion illustrates the point nicely, although the language is very religious and the whole essay is shot-through with magical thinking. Even removing those magical elements, the view articulated there holds true even for many Republicans whose worldview is primarily secular (yes, they really do exist).

Of course, this view of abortion doesn’t just rest on religious authority, it claims to be rooted in a clear understanding of history and to take seriously the view that if we mess around with our biology we are playing God (a job we’re not qualified for). A zygote is a living organism that, if left alone, will develop into a human, therefore abortion ends a human life, therefore it must be murder, and any ethical gerymandering to the contrary can’t change that fundamental fact. Ditto for stem cell research, which destroys human embryos, or for hybrid experimental cloning, and for dozens of other biotech research techniques.

At first blush, that seems to be a pretty solid rooting in biology – but it’s not. A true ethical grounding in biology has to contend with a few other facts that make the connections between point A and point B very tendentious.

The first problem is evolution: All life is made from the same stuff, and human life on a biological level is in no way distinctive. Human nature and human biology are subject to the same selective pressures as the rest of the biosphere, plus the internally imposed selective pressures of human culture. It’s not impossible to make a case for human exceptionalism (I’m a human exceptionalist myself), but it’s not axiomatic.

The second problem is embryology: only somewhere between 25% and 60% of all zygotes become viable pregnancies, and 8% of those that do fail to make it to term without any intervention. Not every conception results in a life – and most wouldn’t even if medical abortion were never discovered. George Carlin had it right: If life begins at conception, then every sexually active woman who’s had at least three periods is a serial killer.

The third problem is technology: Since the conception of a zygote creates a life, and if that life is seen to have value because it is a potential human being, then technology poses a new and frightening problem. A zygote has only a minority potential of surviving to birth – and so does a clone. Although cloning tech is still in its infancy, it is now possible to artificially split embryos in vitro, making every IVF procedure the potential ancestor of countless offspring in one generation. More importantly, it is now possible to take the genetic material from an adult skin cell and implant it in the nucleus of an ovum, throw a few hormonal switches, and have a viable zygote. With this the reality, every time I scratch my arm I’ve engaged in a holocaust of potential human beings.

The fourth problem is medical: We now know beyond any doubt that the seat of human consciousness is the central nervous system (i.e. the brain). You can argue about souls all you want – whether there is a ghost operating the machine or whether we are all machine – but the machine does not operate at all without a brain. Before the 22nd week of gestation, there isn’t enough of a brain there to operate the machine. Any ghost that may exist can’t have moved in yet. Citation.

These four problems are not the only problems with Republican attitudes towards biotech. There’s also the question of those who die from potentially curable diseases if research is suppressed – are their lives worth less than, or more than, the lives of potentially viable zygotes and blastocysts?

Banning pre-viability abortions, banning biotech procedures, or banning government funding of either will neither reduce the number of murders in the world, nor will it reduce eugenics. It will not further respect for human life – in fact, as demonstrated in the book Freakanomics, an abundance of unwanted children leads directly to an increase in violent crime and a lessening of the social value of human life. Therefore here, as with the Democratic equation of "mitigate global warming by reducing energy consumption," the policy prescriptions will not – and can never – achieve the aims they are meant to achieve. And yet right-wing Republicans and abortion, just like left-wing Democrats and global warming, the prescriptions themselves are a matter of doctrine, not of reason, and it’s a damn shame.

Join me for my concluding thoughts on the whole topic in Part 3

William James hit a lot closer to the truth when he spotted that Americans are a fundamentally religious bunch. We don’t usually like to think of ourselves that way – even most of us who are religious in a traditional sense tend to pride ourselves on being independent, pragmatic thinkers. We like science – we really do – but most of us don’t really know what science is, and this is where we get into trouble. Even our scientists often mistake ideology for science.

Looking at things through a scientific lens (that is, a perspective that is empirically grounded), one would expect political philosophy among scientfically-minded folk to change as the experience of history and the accumulation of knowldege schools us in the ways of the world. That doesn’t mean that all political opnion should converge on a common conclusion: It’s quite possible, through differences in priority order, for clear-thinking people to disagree on what particular actions should follow from a given and agreed-upon body of knowledge (and that kind of disagreement is healthy). However, this isn’t what happens in today’s America.

Douglas Adams nailed the way politically-minded folk tend to think in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where a main character talks about a computer program that helps people make decisions. It doesn’t work forward from problem to solution, instead it allows the user to chose his desired solution (for example, owning a Porche when he can’t afford the payments) and then work backwards to the present situation, creating a bulletproof logical scenario that nobody can shoot down (not even the financing director at the Porche dealership). This is not goal-oriented thinking and planning, it’s maturbatory self-justification, and it’s pretty much de rigeur politics. Perhaps that’s just human nature – but here’s where it gets tragic and irritating.

The 21st century has seen the cementing of a very strange dynamic in American politics, whereby each side of the political discussion picks its own facts and tries to ignore the rest.

For example, if you don’t like second-hand smoke you’ve got a custom-made political movement already on your side. All you have to do to fight alongside them is pretend that studies showing an actual elevated disease risk through continued exposure over a long period of time actually mean that anyone anywhere who smells second-hand smoke is being poisoned. It’s really easy, all you have to do is ignore the single most basic law of biochemistry: The dosage makes the poison.

The same kind of dynamic goes for nuclear power, or carbon dioxide, or private property rights, or environmental regulation, or evolutionary theory, or lowering the drinking age. You can pick a side, and find a custom made political machine ready to spin reality in the direction you’re already sympathetic to.

This election year is a fun exercise in spotting this kind of thing, because we have one candidate (Obama) who’s deliberately positioning himself as the pro-science guy, in opposition to the Bush administration and the McCain candidacy. He supports NASA. He supports stem cells. He’s on record saying that he doesn’t think blastocysts are human beings. He even (in opposition to major blocks of his own party) supports Nuclear power. He positions himself as a pragmatic man who intends to implement real-world solutions, over/against the fuzzy thinking of his opponent.

On the other hand, we have another candidate (McCain), who has picked a running mate specifically to appeal to the rural romantic consitutency of the country. He talks about freedom and saving the economy, and he’s running with someone who speaks in tongues, thinks humanity begins at conception, and thinks the Earth was created in six days not-too-long-ago.

On the face of it, it seems like a pretty clear choice for anyone who cares about science. On one hand you have a guy who cares about going to Mars – on the other hand you have a guy who thinks a planetarium projector is an “overpriced overhead projector” akin to a futuristic SharpVision.

I wish it were that simple, but it’s not. The curious political alignment of the early 21st century has produced an environment where each party has become very good at spotting pseudoscience and antiscience bullshit in the other party, but can’t smell it in their own even when it’s shoved up their nose. Here are two examples, one from each party’s list of pet issues, to illustrate my point.

Democrats, for example, tend to assume a straight-line cause-and-effect relationship between the scientific fact “CO2 is a greenhouse gas, whose concentrations are rising rapidly, and this drove most of the climate change in the 20th century” and the policy conclusion “we must conserve energy in order to prevent as much damage to the bioshpere as possible.” But no such obvious relationship exists. You can make a case for such a relationship, but in order to do it you have to ignore another whole field of science: economics.

Without getting too technical, economics is the study of the monetary, social, and political systems that result from human interaction in a given set of conditions. As with most social sciences it’s a contingent and contextual field, but the thing that sets it apart from most other “soft” sciences is its quantifiability. Economic phenomena can be measured, and based on the measurements falsifiable predictions can be made, and over time, a more coherent picture of how the economic world works has been built from earlier theories and ideologies that have been subjected to testing in real-world laboratories.

Energy conservation is a fun economic study, because there’s one thing that energy conservation always results in: net energy usage increases. That’s because as demand for energy for a particular application falls, due to more efficient technologies, the money and resources previously devoted to that task get freed up. When that happens, any or all of three things happens: money previously spent on a small number of energy-intensive activities gets spent on a larger number of less energy-intensive activitie. 2) task which used to be too expensive for a segment of the populationn (because they couldn’t afford the energy costs) become accessible, due to increases in efficiency and consequent lower costs of operation. 3) a short-term collective decline in demand results in a short term drop in energy prices, as supply exceeds demand on the market. Any of these three eventualities leads to a net increase in energy usage – all three operating together leads to large net increases in energy usage, even while the per-application energy usage and costs fall through the floor. If you’re an environmentally conscious person who wants to reduce greenhouse emmissions and pollution, you’re not going to achieve your goal through mandating more efficient technologies, or promoting a cap-and-trade carbon scheme, or encouraging energy conservation among the hoi polloi. Those measures will instead reliably lead to higher and higher levels of net energy consumption – both per capita and in aggregate.

Continued in Part 2

For those of you who haven’t stumbled upon this conference yet, here’ s a brief history:

The Beyond Belief Conferences started three years ago in response to the culture wars arising from the new era of jihad, the resurgence in American religiosity, the wars over science in school, and the so-called “New Atheist” movement. Meeting at the Salk Institute, a number of America’s (and Europe’s) top scientists joined in a three day interdisciplinary conference entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, and the Future of Reason. At the conference, it became clear that the split between the antireligious and the generically secular scientists drove as deeply as does the cultural divide between fundamentalists and mainstream believers. However, one thing that seemed unanimous was that the future of the West depends upon a culture-wide renewal of scientific inquiry and thinking.

Year two’s conference was entitled Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 and focused upon the different kinds of relationships people have with science. It got really interesting as several speakers on economics presented their recent research and different attendees talked about the entrenchment of their own political biases and how it effects the way that they cope with different scientific disciplines.

This year, the conference is entitled Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark in honor of the late Carl Sagan’s final book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Specifically, the conference gets its focus this year from the following paragraph from the introduction to Demon-Haunted World:

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

Written in 1996, that quite seems remarkably prescient today – even if Sagan’s views on economics were outdated and somewhat simplistic (an argument for another time), the notion of a technocracy where only an elite knows anything about how the technology works, where the common person is swallowed in superstition, and where all dissent is centered around marginal (and, frankly, stupid) issues like “Should we post the Ten Commandments in our courthouses?” and “Did he have sex with that woman?” and “Why do I have to pay money to see a doctor?” is both chilling and familiar. After all, such issues do distract us from debating issues that might actually effect how we make account of ourselves in terms of preserving and furthering liberty and prosperity, intelligently engaging holy wars without and within, limiting nuclear proliferation, and creating alliances that decrease the incentives for warfare.

I can’t speak yet to how year three is, because I’m about to start watching them this afternoon as they become available on Google Video. However, there are a number of reasons why you should take the time to watch it (as well as the previous two conferences):

1) It is easy to think of the scientific community as an ivory tower free from the concerns of the real world. The truth is far more radical: scientific inquiry has advanced to the point where very few things that we discover fail to have a direct bearing on how day-to-day life unfolds. The reach of this phenomenon is astounding. It also gives the lie to postmodernist claims that scientific knowledge is a fictional construct designed to serve white male power structures.

2) If ever you’ve thought that “scientists say xxx” is a meaningful statement, you need to watch these conferences. These are the best and brightest minds in the English-speaking world, and they disagree violently on a number of important issues. As an exercise in critical thinking, watching the conferences is fabulous, as you sit through lectures, presentations, panel discussions, and sometimes shouting matches, you see how prone even the best among us is to the tug of ideologically-driven magical thinking, and how frightening integrating new discoveries can be. There is very little in the way of consensus science practiced here – the constant call from the audience is “show me the evidence.”

3) On the flip side, all of you who keep hearing about The Secret or What the Bleep Do We Know?or the “Intelligent Design” philosophy (no, it’s not a theory, by admission of its proponents at the Dover Trial – read the transcripts) and think that scientific controversy means that there’s support for your claims, you’d do well to give this a watch too. “Controversy” doesn’t mean “a theory in crisis” any more than “consensus” means “it is proven.” Reality is far subtler, and you won’t get a better baptism by fire than watching scientific conferences where such things are discussed.

4) The best reason I can think of to watch it: You’re curious. You want to learn about the world, but it’s too big and you don’t know where to start. Well, start here. These scientists are witty, intelligent folks, many of them have excellent senses of humor, and very little of what gets discussed is dry. And, dammit, it’s *fun.*

And on the topic of this year’s election, economic meltdown, and other things: as I look out over the blogosphere, I see a lot of party-line thinking. In a world as complicated as ours, under an Republican President AND a Democratic Congress with some of the worst records in history, party-line thinking doesn’t cut it. If you continue to go to your party and your partisan activist groups as your primary source of truth, you’re asking for trouble.

You know how the Intelligent Design folks say “teach the controversy?” Well, if you’re a curious person, or you’re a politically or socially active person, then you damn well better understand the controversies you care about – and that means reading the other guy’s newspapers and blogs. A climate skeptic? You’d better be reading RealClimate.org. A Global Warming believer? When was the last time you read ClimateAudit.org? A bioconservative or a transhumanist? Have you read Kurzweil, Bailey, Fukiyama, and the Report of The President’s Committee on Bioethics? Not every issue has two sides – and some issues have ten sides, but if you’re feeding your brain on only the stuff you find agreeable, you don’t have an informed opinion. So, if you’re of voting age and you have a pet issue, and you can’t articulate the controversy from an opposing point of view (in language that the opposition would find agreeable) then, frankly, you probably don’t understand the issues you care about well enough to vote on them, and we’d all be better off if you stayed home.

You want to be informed and involved? Well, then, have a Candle, and maybe it can help you get an Election. If not, you can still have a lot of fun with the Candle.