I’m officially a fan of Morning Edition’s Friday science report, “Krulwich on Science”. It’s a lighthearted look at current and past science that manages to communicate a real sense of wonder about the world around us. Today’s piece, “Have you heard about B flat?” is a delightfully wonky exploration of a completely inexplicable pattern, the recurrence of a particular musical note throughout nature, that recalls Douglas Adams at his weirdest. Another favorite of mine is “Charles Darwin and the racing asparagus”, in which David Quammen helps Krulwich build a playful picture of the gentleman scientist at work.
Essay: Explicable, and sacred
Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not a miracle.
— Terry Pratchett
I’m building a career in explaining things. It’s what scientists do: we poke at the incredible spinning mechanism of the universe around us, trying to figure out how it works. And, perhaps not surprisingly, this makes some people (religious people, usually) angry.
This is puzzling to me in part because I’m religious, and I don’t think I’m doing religion a disservice by figuring out how Creation works. As far as I can tell, though, religious people who don’t appreciate science are chiefly upset because scientists try to explain things, things that they (the religious people) firmly believe are God’s doing.
Where did we get the idea that what God does must be humanly inexplicable? Or, rather, how did the term “miraculous” come to mean “beyond any eventual human understanding”? (Maybe it always has) The difficulty, of course, is that if we assume that (1) miracles are evidence of God’s existence and involvement with our universe and (2) miraculous = inexplicable, then we’re naturally going to be hostile to folks who try to figure out how miraculous things like the beauty, diversity, and complexity of life on Earth came to be, because they’re chipping away at our evidence for God.
What I know is this: I can explain (or look up explanations for) much of the history of Joshua trees, citing the history of the genus Yucca in general, and how it has been shaped over millions of years by yuccas’ dependence on a group of small, drab pollinating moths; but when I look out over a Mojave desert landscape, with the sun shining through the strange, spiky branches of a Joshua tree forest, I feel something that has nothing to do with natural selection.
Science ultimately aims to explain everything in human experience – it’s actually not possible for scientists to define areas of experience that we cannot now and will never explain. There are two ways that religious people can respond to this: they can choose to reject the scientific worldview altogether, or they can embrace it and seek the spirituality of the explicable.
An extreme example of this might be Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist/philosopher. He posited a universe that was evolving toward union with God, in which any gain in understanding of the physical world’s workings was a step toward greater spiritual perfection, too. Teilhard is a bit too optimistic for my taste – the history of humanity doesn’t seem, to me, to bear out the hypothesis that greater scientific knowledge is correlated with greater moral/spiritual understanding.
I see a better option represented in an action most Christians perform every day: saying grace over food. But why do we do this? Recall the episode of “The Simpsons” when, asked to bless a meal, Bart once prays, “Dear God, we paid for all this ourselves, so thanks for nothing.” And technically, Bart has a point.
Why do we thank God for a meal we’ve bought and prepared ourselves? Turn the question on its head for an answer: does God have to make food appear our our plates in a flash of light for us to give Him credit? The answer, of course, is no. Even after preparing my own dinner, I bow my head over it for a moment before I eat. Under this view of the world, everything in human experience is sacred, a cause for gratitude infused with spiritual meaning in spite of (or even as a result of) our understanding of its mechanics. So, when I see a beautiful sunset, knowing as I do that it’s the light from a ball of fusing gases 93 million miles away, my soul fills with gratitude.
Essay: Airports
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”
– Douglas Adams
I hate airports.
I hate their architecture, identical in every city no matter what attempts at local color are pasted over it. Metallic, vaulted, sharp-edged ceilings arc over vast expanses of smudged, dusty glass and stainless steel. Below, acre upon acre of scuffed linoleum and gray high-traffic carpeting is scattered with the minor detritus of a million passing people, microscopic crumbs of food, droplets of coffee and soda, threads and lint from parkas and duffel bags and raincoats and Bermuda shorts, fragments of magazines and books and boarding passes. Departure lounges are full of haphazardly distributed seating – a hundred minor variations on linked rows of narrow seats upholstered with greasy, worn black vinyl over sagging plastic foam padding.
I hate the concourses lined with fast food restaurants selling nearly-identical, overpriced prepackaged salads and fruit cups and bottled water and hamburgers and pizza and tacos and Chinese food; indistinguishable newsstands and bookstores proffering the same bestsellers and magazines and books of crossword puzzles; the occasional clothing store selling t-shirts with cheery messages about the home city and the logo of the local football franchise, to be purchased by people already juggling stuffed suitcases; duty-free stores full of liquor and perfumes and candy to be purchased by people already stupefied and sickened by long hours in air conditioning and halogen lighting.
I hate the crowds of people, hurrying towards narrow seats in cramped quarters for long hours of sitting and doing nothing, pushed by bad architecture and harsh halogen lighting to something like the edge of violence, driven by the force of urgent business, long-unseen family, old friendships. Parents argue with their children about who should carry backpacks full of soft toys and portable video games, or try to quiet babies crying desperately for a breath of unprocessed air, a glimpse of natural sunlight; couples clinging to each other much as they might in the desperate moments before the ship goes down and the lifeboats fill; businessmen focused on their cellular telephones and handheld computers and laptops, forcing themselves to believe that there must be purpose in this miserable place; students dressed already for the activities they anticipate at the end of the ordeal – in ski jackets and surfing shorts and hiking boots.
Nobody who has flown more than once boards an airliner for the pleasure of flying; we strap ourselves into the tight seats in the climate-controlled, can-like cabins because we hope, in the end, the destination will be worth the discomfort, the inconvenience, and the anxiety. Airports are in this way the ultimate expression of a society given over to justifying means by their ends – the hours we spend in airports, taking off our shoes and belts and watches and standing still for the security pat-down while agents paw through our luggage; sitting on uncomfortable benches next to anxious, irritable people and staring at harsh Arrival/Departure boards; eating prepared salads and pale cubes of melon and flat, greasy hamburgers – we accept these things because we have decided that they are necessary, if we are to get to wherever it is that we are going.
Hussein Hanged: guess what – it makes things worse
Over on Slate.com, Christopher Hitchens directs the full force of his vitriol at the shameful execution of Saddam Hussein’s, well, execution: “The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution.” Is Hitchens, the great defender of the Iraq invasion, working on a change of heart?
Possibly the most important point that he makes in generalizing the Hussein execution debacle into something approaching a critique of the death penalty: the cruel spectacle of a fallen dictator mocked by those he once tormented is not so far removed from the slightly more civilized executions that occur regularly in the United States. Although an extreme example, it points to the motivations underlying every killing performed by the state in the name of justice, and suggests that the value of the death penalty to society may be much less than we like to think.
Hussein is dead
Dictator Who Ruled Iraq With Violence Is Hanged for Crimes Against Humanity.
And does it make any difference?
Followup: edible clones
A reading of the executive summary of the FDA report on the safety of cloned livestock confirms my earlier thoughts: there are no risks of consuming cloned meat per se. All of the identified “risks” have to do with the initial health of cloned livestock (such phrases as “the process of normalizing their [ie, cloned animals’] physiological functions”), which could, I suppose, pose a risk to human consumption inasmuch as it’s never best practice to put sickly animals into the food chain. But the report doesn’t even identify any potential risks of cloned meat as cloned meat.
A potential risk I don’t see identified is the impact of reproductive livestock cloning on the genetic variation in U.S. food animals. With the widespread use of artificial insemination and selective breeding, our meat animals’ gene pools are already pretty shallow, which makes them less able to resist disease outbreaks and gives breeders less raw material to adapt our agriculture to a changing world. If the genetic contribution of a single prize bull is now measured not just by how much sperm he can produce, but by how many times he can be cloned, we could be looking at even more dramatic reductions in livestock genetic variation in the future.
Say what?
From the New York Times (via the AP), “F.D.A. Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe:
After more than five years of study, the Food and Drug Administration concluded that cloned livestock is “virtually indistinguishable” from conventional livestock.
What I want to know is, where do they get the “virtually”? A cloned animal is (supposed to be) genetically identical to its “parent,” so the FDA isn’t telling them apart that way. Perhaps there’s some developmental signature that arises when you create an embryo from an adult cell, like telomere length? Whatever it is, I can’t think of any difference between a clone and a “natural” animal that would have an adverse effect on whoever eats the steak – and neither, apparently, could the FDA.
Here we go again
Slate reports on right-wing ribbing directed at Barak Obama’s middle name. Which is, unfortunately, Hussein. Having grown up with a surname that rhymes with “odor,” I can sympathize.
Key phrase: having grown up. Is the conservative wing of the comentariat so hard up for substantive criticisms of the junior senator from Illinois that they’re forced to resort to the sort of tactics I last encountered firsthand in elementary school? I’m not convinced yet that Obama is as good a choice for President as he is charming, but I hope that if he runs, he encounters critics who can demonstrate they’ve graduated the sixth grade.
Why?
Blogging is a terribly, terribly egotistical activity. It assumes that the world in general cares what I, personally, have to say about whatever topics catch my fleeting, Internet-era attention. It’s so egotistical, in fact, that some people (bloggers all) have carelessly described blogging as journalism, by which standard anyone who turns to anyone else and says, “so I read/heard/saw X in/on The New York Times/NPR/CNN and I think …” is a journalist. Even with the tiny taste of journalistic experience I have (three years on my university’s campus newspaper), I know that journalism takes far more than an opinion.
So if all I have to offer is an opinion, why should anyone care? My dad used to say that opinions are like assholes – everyone has one, but you don’t show them off in polite company. But I spend a lot of time online these days – both for work and to read the news – and it’s hard not to see that todays politics is increasingly driven by what’s said online, whether or not what’s said is worthwhile.
To the extent that I have something valuable to say, it’s because I think I can offer a perspective that isn’t represented anywhere else out there. My background crosses some of the major cultural divides of present-day politics: I’m a baptized member of the Mennonite Church who grew up in rural, conservative Lancaster County, PA, and I presently live in Idaho, in one of the few congressional districts in the nation to remain solidly Republican in the 2006 election. However, my parents raised me to view the Bible as an important, not infallible story; I voted for the Greens in 2000 (for every post except President); and I’m living in Idaho because I’m earning a doctorate in evolutionary biology in the excellent biology department at the University of Idaho. Does that make my perspective unique enough to rate a personal soapbox? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Testing
To refer to peregrinating Celtic monks and fundamentalist lobbyists, Origen and Oral Roberts, the Desert Fathers and Tim La Haye, Jerry Falwell and Dante, St. Francis and the TV “prosperity gospel” hucksters, Lady Julian of Norwich and Tammy Faye Baker, or John of the Cross and George W. Bush all as Christian stretches the word so thin its meaning vanishes. The term “carbon-based life-form” is as informative.
–David James Duncan, “What Fundamentalists Need,” Orion Magazine, July/August 2005.