On the Promise of Genetic Engineering for Alleviating Public Transportation Issues

So I had to fly out to LA yesterday. I took my window seat in the plane and, having seen the shrieking children in the lobby, sat back with oriental fatalism to await their inevitable arrival in the adjoining seats. To my surprise, they perched many rows in front of me. I breathed a sigh of relief, never suspecting that a much grimmer fate awaited me.

It came in the form of a rotund woman with a moon-like, expressionless face. She sat in the aisle seat, and began a verbal assault on the passive woman next to her, who occasionally returned a mechanical nod. Her voice was shrill, piercing, and metallic, occasionally punctuated by a laugh with all the charm of fingernails dragged across a blackboard. She kept it up, never wavering, never faltering, never slackening, for the whole-damn-trip.

I thought I would get a reprieve in the form of a tray of food that a merciful flight attendant brought her, but it was a vain hope. She kept up the barrage without missing a stroke even as she shoveled it down. The ordeal only ended after she had blocked my exit for a few more excruciating moments while she exchanged “pleasantries” with the captain about his skill at landing the plane.

My question is, if we have become so skilled at genetic engineering, and so advanced in the various sub-fields of computer science, couldn’t we give evolution a little nudge? How about breeding a new class of humans with radio buttons in their skulls so you could turn them the hell off on public transportation, perhaps administering a fatal shock to their cell phones in the process? Throw me a bone here!

Well, dear readers, every cloud has a silver lining. I finally escaped, and, hardened infidel that I am, when I did I experienced the joys of paradise. You know what they say about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. It feels so good when you stop.

On the Wisdom of Committing Suicide to Avoid Population Decline

A lot of people seem to have trouble putting two and two together. They’re concerned about the demographic problem so many developed countries are facing on the one hand, and on the other they’re worried about global warming and environmental degradation. Perhaps it’s a good thing that one of the nations most threatened by both these problems is Japan. As Mark Steyn points out, her population peaked at 127.8 million in 2004, and will drop to 89.9 million by 2055 if current trends continue. She will, therefore, be among the first nations that will be forced to solve the problem one way or another. Her people are conservative and aren’t good at assimilating foreigners. Even if they were, Japan isn’t an easy place for potential immigrants to reach, illegal or otherwise. It may be that’s a good thing, both for Japan and the rest of us. It will be good for Japan because she will likely be forced to solve the problem without inundating her islands with immigrants whose language and/or culture is alien to her own. It will be good for the rest of us because it will demonstrate that, for better or for worse, the problem can be solved without risking cultural, political and environmental suicide.

Clearly, we cannot put off the demographic problem forever. We and Canada can import the entire populations of Central and South America, and Europe can import the entire populations of North Africa and the Near and Middle East, but, eventually, the problem will just come back. No nation can support an infinite population. The problem must be faced, and, if it must be faced, it is better to do so with a population that is not wracked by ethnic tensions and that is not so large that the available environmental resources can no longer safely support it.

Human beings can survive without national health care programs. They can even survive with reduced social security benefits. They will have somewhat more difficulty surviving on the planet if we degrade the environment to the point of collapse. Our environment is already threatened by excessive population. When will it be seriously threatened? Depending on your point of view, it may be now, it may be at some distant date in the future, or it may already have been decades ago. It doesn’t matter. The question is one of risk. How much longer will it behoove us to risk the environment of the planet by forcing the growth of our populations to support government entitlement programs? I suspect we should have abandoned this dubious method of “solving” our problems a long time ago.

Why? Our environmental problems are obvious enough. The environmental impact of increasing the population in developed countries is substantially greater than similar increases in less developed countries. As for the wisdom of tolerating unlimited immigration by culturally alien foreigners, you might want to ask the Serbs how that worked out for them in Kosovo. For that matter, we have legions of subject matter experts right here in the United States who are quite capable of analyzing the potential outcome of the complexities of population dynamics in such cases. You will find them on any Indian reservation.

It would be wise for the developed nations to severely curtail immigration, accept the natural declines in their populations, and reduce entitlement benefits to sustainable levels. If they don’t now, they will eventually be forced to under much less favorable conditions, and that in the not too distant future. So much seems obvious to me. However, I realize that, at least in the United States, there are powerful blocs of opinion on both the right and the left that, whether they worry about possible declines in our economic and military power, or are concerned their “progressive” social programs will be threatened, are prepared to deny the obvious indefinitely as we stumble into an uncertain future. As a result, for the time being, rational action along the lines I’m suggesting is probably out of the question. One can only hope that Japan, fortuitously protected from the worst of these threats in spite of herself by miles of ocean and cultural taboos, will serve as a role model for the rest of us in the way she solves her demographic problem. Perhaps her solution will be sufficiently elegant to convince the rest of us to follow her example rather than continuing to risk cultural and environmental suicide.

German anti-Americanism Watch: All About Bush?

Hat tip Medienkritik

There’s been little change in the incidence of anti-Americanism in the German media since Obama took office. In fact, it was a great deal more subdued at the end of the Bush Administration than it was back in 1999 under Clinton. As in this case, it often took the form of the classic double standard, so it could be fobbed off as “objective criticism,” that had merely been “reprinted from the New York Times.”

Under Clinton, Spiegel went off the deep end with foaming-at-the-mouth attacks over such cause célèbres as the US Echelon System. There was big dough in promoting anti-American hate in Germany, and the rest of the media soon followed the money trail. Quasi-racist Amerika bashing could be found everywhere, from the sensational tabloid headlines of Stern to the stuffy feuilleton columns of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. International leaders like Tony Blair, who seemed to support us, were berated as “poodles” and “vassals.” Eventually, decent German citizens began pushing back. I will always be grateful to these people. I wish more Americans knew about them. If nothing else, it would show them there’s a lot more to Germany than the Third Reich. Some of them were very articulate, and they condemned the pervasive hate peddling where they could, in blogs and Internet forums. Their only reward was a torrent of abuse from the anti-American zealots.

Finally, a few Americans started to notice the anti-American tirades as well. They were hard to miss. One occasionally had a difficult time finding any news about Germany on Spiegel’s website among the anti-American rants. Eventually, the editors realized that, lucrative as it was, they couldn’t keep up such blatant hate peddling if they wanted to win any more international prizes for “objective journalism.” The allergic reaction in Germany and the US to the “wretched excess” of the last years of Clinton and the first of Bush was growing. The tone of the propaganda became more subdued. Eventually, it took the form we see today. It’s now just a shade of what it was in days gone by.

Still, as today’s zinger shows, the narrative still lives. Spiegel and the rest will occasionally throw out bits of red meat to the America hating crowd. Money talks, anti-American propaganda still pays in Germany, and they don’t want their circulation figures to drop too low. They try to cover their tracks, but, like the racists in the United States, their stench is unmistakable. One can still smell them. I will continue to draw attention to their antics as I see them.

Consequences: Life after Death

If Meslier and I are right, and God does not exist, there are consequences. One of them is that there is no life after death, or at least not in the normally understood sense. However, there is a problem with this conclusion. It seems completely illogical that creatures as complex as ourselves should come into existence, live a while, and then disappear without a trace. In fact, from nature’s point of view, that’s not really what happens. The apparent irrationality of it all derives from our identification of our selves with our conscious minds. But nature has played a little trick on us. As far as she is concerned, “we” are not our conscious minds. “We” are the genetic material that has created our conscious minds. Our minds are merely ancillary tools of the essential “us,” like our eyes, hands, and feet, which exist because they have promoted our survival. In other words, the idea that “we” are our conscious minds is merely an egocentric illusion of one of the features of our phenotype, a feature that the essential “we,” our genetic material, has generated over and over again during the course of its existence, sloughing it off over and over again as each physical body carrying that material ages and dies. The essential part of us, the real “we,” has not died since it came into existence about three billion years ago. It has existed without interruption, passing from physical carrier to physical carrier as those carriers evolved over the eons. Our genetic material must not necessarily die, but is potentially immortal. Our conscious minds only exist for a short interval because they have been useful in promoting its survival.

I know that, for some, the conclusion above will always be unacceptable. They will refuse to accept the truth because the truth doesn’t satisfy them. It seems to me, however, that such people are selling themselves short. We have been called out of oblivion and given the opportunity to experience a truly astounding, improbable, wonderful world. Under the circumstances, would it not be best to accept the truth of what we really are and enjoy the ride? Does it really make sense to be miserable the whole time we are here because the ride doesn’t last forever? If it really bothers you so much that there will be nothing left of you after you’re gone, have children. I can’t give you an absolutely valid, objective reason why you should have children. As for myself, I don’t like the idea that I might be a dysfunctional biological dead end. Therefore, I have had children. I have certainly not regretted it.

I will close this post with some words of the great Meslier:

Consent, then, to leave without regret this world, which causes more trouble than pleasure to the majority of you. Resign yourselves to the order of destiny, which decrees that you , like all other beings, should not endure forever. But what will become of me, you ask! What you were several million years ago. You were then, I do not know what; resign yourselves, then, to become again in an instant, I do not know what; what you were then; return peaceably to the universal home from which you came without your knowledge into you material form, and pass by without murmuring, like all the beings which surround you!

and some verse from Edward Fitzgerald’s version of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat:

And fear not lest Existence closing your
Account, and mine, should know the like no more;
The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour’d
Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.

Does God Exist?

Jean Meslier

Why fundamental? Because our conclusions about the nature of good and evil, the reasons for and purpose of our existence, and the logical basis for our goals in life must depend on whether we believe in God or not.

We often see discussions about whether belief in God has been useful to society or not, whether it has lead to destructive behavior or not, whether it has been responsible for one historical disaster or another or not, or whether it is necessary to motivate people to act morally or not. All these are moot points. The question we must answer is not whether belief in God is useful, but whether belief in God is true.

For most people, religious beliefs are not based on logical thought. So much is obvious if we look at the differences between different countries. The population of one might be mainly Moslem, and of another mainly Christian. The disparities do not depend on the ability of one group of citizens to reason more accurately than the other. Rather, they reflect prevailing customs and traditions. Based on this evidence, we must conclude that the majority of people, whether they think more or less about the matter, end up adopting the beliefs of the society or group to which they happen to belong. This behavior is hardly surprising, given what we know about the nature of human beings. However, given the consequences, it is probably not something we should wish to emulate.

For example, most Christians believe, at least nominally, in the Trinity. According to the Koran, those who believe in the Trinity will burn in hell for quadrillions and quintillions of years, and more. In fact, they will burn in hell forever. I take a less drastic view of the matter. I don’t think that either Christians or Moslems will burn in hell forever because they disagree with me. I simply believe that it is better to base ones actions, goals, and the way in which one relates to others on that which is true rather than on that which is false.

Why do I reject belief in the supernatural? There are a great many reasons. I found some of them on my own, but most of them are not original. In the beginning I may have thought they were, but since then I’ve found many others who’ve thought the same thoughts, had the same ideas, and come to the same conclusions. These include Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, and Sam Harris, who’ve all recently published books rejecting religious belief. However, of the many I’ve found whose ideas reflected my own, the greatest thinker of them all was a simple French priest named Jean Meslier. When he died in 1729, he left three copies of his Testament, in which he set forth what I consider the most thorough and the most profound rejection of religious belief ever written. Voltaire admired Meslier and did much to circulate and preserve his work, but commented that he wrote “in the style of a carriage horse.” His condescension was ill-considered. I am grateful to Voltaire. He probably did more to liberate mankind from the shackles of political and religious obscurantism than anyone before or since. However, I consider Meslier the more powerful of the two thinkers. Voltaire was a deist, and somehow found in Meslier’s work a confirmation of his own beliefs. In fact, Meslier demolished deism as thoroughly as the rest of religious belief. Somehow, Voltaire missed the point.

Meslier’s style may have been unpolished, but his case against religion was clear, concise, and thorough. His work includes virtually every argument that has ever occurred to me, and many more. I have read many apologies for religion, but none, in my opinion, that could even begin to stand up against Meslier’s logic. One feels a sense of awe when one recalls he wrote more than 100 years before the publication of “The Origin of Species.” One can occasionally find English versions of his work published under the rather affected title, “Superstition in All Ages.” I will have more to say about Meslier in future. In the meantime, do yourself a favor: read his book and think about it. Here are a few excerpts:

“What is God? What is spirit? They are causes of which we have no idea. Sages! Study nature and her laws; and when you can from them unravel the action of natural causes. Do not go in search of supernatural causes, which, very far from enlightening your ideas, will but entangle them more and more and make it impossible for you to understand yourselves.”

“Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God; that is to say, in order to explain what you understand so little, you need a cause which you do not understand at all. You pretend to make clear that which is obscure, by magnifying its obscurity. You think you have untied a knot by multiplying knots.”

“I would admit without question that the human machine appears to me surprising; but since man exists in nature, I do not believe it right to say that his formation is beyond the forces of nature. I will add, that I could conceive far less of the formation of the human machine, when to explain it to me they tell me that a pure spirit, who has neither eyes, nor feet, nor hands, nor head, nor lungs, nor mouth, nor breath, has made man by taking a little dust and blowing upon it.”

“According to the notions of modern theology, it appears evident that God has created the majority of men with the view only of punishing them eternally. Would it not have been more in conformity with kindness, with reason, with equity, to create but stones or plants, and not sentient beings, than to create men whose conduct in this world would cause them eternal chastisements in another? A God so perfidious and wicked as to create a single man and leave him exposed to the perils of damnation, cannot be regarded as a perfect being, but as a monster of nonsense, injustice, malice and atrocity.”

“But if the choicest work of Divinity is imperfect, by what are we to judge of the Divine perfections? Can a work with which the author himself is so little satisfied, cause us to admire his skill?”

“Does it depend upon man to accept or not to accept the opinions of his parents and of his teachers? If I were born of idolatrous or Mohammedan parents, would it have depended upon me to become a Christian? However, grave Doctors of Divinity assure us that a just God will damn without mercy all those to whom He has not given the grace to know the religion of the Christians.”

“In calling mortals into life, what a cruel and dangerous game does the Divinity force them to play! Thrust into the world without their wish, provided with a temperament of which they are not the masters, animated by passions and desires inherent in their nature, exposed to snares which they have not the skill to avoid, led away by events which they could neither foresee nor prevent, the unfortunate beings are obliged to follow a career which conducts them to horrible tortures.”

“Their (the animals) peaceable ignorance, is it not more advantageous than these extravagant meditations and these futile investigations which render you miserable, and for which you are driven to murdering beings of your own noble kind?”

I am in awe when I read things like this. It boggles the mind to think that “my” reasons, and many more, for rejecting religion were all written down by this genius who lived more than 280 years ago. I will discuss some of those not touched on above in future posts.

What is the consequence of my conclusions regarding religion? Everything else I write here; my ideas concerning good and evil, human nature, the purpose of life or lack thereof, everything. Religious beliefs or the lack thereof matter. There are consequences for getting it right and consequences for getting it wrong, and they are very weighty consequences as far as our lives are concerned. For that reason, we must be particularly zealous in guarding freedom of speech concerning matters of religion. We simply cannot afford to suppress the critical discussion of religious belief because we are afraid of hurting someone’s feelings, or “insulting” their beliefs. There can be few better proofs that an idea is false than its proponents’ fear of criticism. The truth should not be afraid of confronting falsehood.

“Overselling Science” at Chicago Boyz

Shannon Love has an interesting post entitled “Overselling Science” over at Chicago Boyz. I suspect her history may be a little shaky, but she makes some good points. Excerpts:

The problem with polling “scientists” is that there is a wide divergence in the predictive power of different fields of study that we lump together as “science”.

“Scientists” definitely come in a wide assortment of shapes, sizes, and credibilities. There’s nothing magical about “science.” It’s just a way of getting at the truth. The term “scientific” has been so oversold it’s almost meaningless. Think “scientific Marxism/Leninism.”

Non-predictive sciences are highly vulnerable to social and political fads and scientists often get swept up in them. For example, a hundred years ago you would have found a wider agreement on the validity of eugenics than we see today on global warming.

I’ll buy the comment about social and political fads. Environmental scientists are having a particularly tough time of it these days. It doesn’t help their credibility when they shoot themselves in the foot, as they did when Bjorn Lomborg published the “Skeptical Environmentalist.” It would certainly be a travesty to call the abject creatures who sat on the so-called Danish Committee of Scientific Dishonesty, a kangaroo court of politically motivated hacks who smeared Lomborg and declared his book “dishonest,” by any name as honorable as “scientist.”

However, I doubt that there was ever such “wide agreement” on eugenics. It just wasn’t politically incorrect to discuss it before the Third Reich. Intellectual heavyweights spoke out on both sides of the issue, and there was no lack of them on the “con” as well as the “pro” side. Maybe one of these days I’ll post some examples.

Imperial German militarism, Marxism, communism, fascism, eugenics, etc. were all based on this flawed model (orthogenesis) of evolution which the vast majority of scientists of the day nevertheless pushed onto the public as settled science.

Hmm, I thought they were all invented by Sarah Palin.

Hegel and the Pitfalls of the Abstract

Hegel

For a long time (during the third decennium of the present century, and even later) the Prussian Government patronized the system of Hegel as a kind of state-philosophy, and those persons who adopted the terminology of this system were regarded as good subjects, and were readily promoted. Hegel’s system, however, was then very unpopular amongst the Constitutionalist party of south-western Germany, whose leaders for the most part were practical men, or belonged to the older school of Kant or Fichte. But when Frederick William IV succeeded to the throne of Prussia, the system of Hegel was abandoned for a kind of romantic pietism of the middle ages, whilst the Hegelist school assumed a decided attitude of antagonism against religion and the state. Some few years before Hegel had been regarded as the philosophical defender of Crown and Altar. Now the New Hegelians proved, by philosophic deductions, the necessity of abandoning all religion; they utterly scouted the principle of faith; they attacked the Prussian system, and went beyond the most extravagant lengths in liberalism.

Writing about the same time, Herzen fills us in on what happened to Hegelian philosophy once the leftists hat gotten hold of it:

They discussed these subjects incessantly; there was not a paragraph in the three parts of the Logic, in the two of the Aesthetic, the Encyclopaedia, and so on, which had not been the subject of desperate disputes for several nights together. People who loved each other avoided each other for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the definition of “all-embracing spirit,” or had taken as a personal insult an opinion on “the absolute personality and its existence in itself.” No one in those days would have hesitated to write a phrase like this: “The concretion of abstract ideas in the sphere of plastics presents that phase of the self-seeking spirit in which, defining itself for itself, it passes from the potentiality of natural immanence into the harmonious sphere of pictorial consciousness in beauty.”…Perevoshchikov, the well known astronomer, described this language as the “twittering of birds.”

Far be it from me to pretend to a more perfect knowledge of Hegel than Herzen’s dueling intellectuals. I merely point out that, when ideas become so abstract and obscure that no one can agree on what they mean, they are of little practical value. In looking at our history, one cannot escape the conclusion that we are creatures of limited intelligence, liable to wander off into intellectual swamps unless we keep things simple. If at all possible it behooves us to check our speculations against experiment as we go along. Unfortunately, we can’t always do this. Not all of our ideas are subject to experimental confirmation. Religious beliefs, or the lack thereof, are a notable example. Yet even when our knowledge isn’t perfect, sometimes we must act regardless. Then, it seems to me, we should base our actions on what is most probable. Keep it simple, and apply Occam’s razor.

That’s why thinkers like Ardrey appeal to me (see my earlier post). He writes on human nature, a subject that has always invited speculation leading to conclusions as disparate as those of Marx and Freud. Unlike them, and many another thinker before and after him, Ardrey avoided the pitfalls of the abstract. He presented profound ideas clearly, illustrating each step along the way with copious examples from nature while citing the related ideas of others, both pro and con. He was no more infallible than any other human being, but he made his points. One could agree or disagree with him based on the merits of the evidence he presented, but one didn’t have to try and follow him as he disappeared into a mist of jargon, or lost himself in the swamps of the abstract. Today he lacks the intellectual gravitas of others with similar ideas, such as Konrad Lorenz and Edward O. Wilson. No matter, I still suspect his “pop ethology” comes closer to the truth than Lorenz’ German abstractions in “On Agression,” or Wilson’s high falutin’ “Consilience.”

Spiegel Anti-Americanism Lite

I had to laugh when I saw this less than subtle image of an evil corporation draped in American flags in an article about those naughty boys at Goldman Sachs at Spiegel Online. Alas, the editors can’t throw out the kind of in-your-face red meat to the legions of Amerika haters among its readers that they used to rake in the coin with a decade ago. Times have changed, people across the pond are watching, and one must keep up at least some threadbare remnant of the appearance of respectability. Don’t worry, though. Its readers get the drift, even if Spiegel now has to leave the blatant hate mongering seen in these images to the lesser rags.

Update: Iran and Twitter

Here’s something from Debka that adds point to my earlier reservations about Twittered revolutions. Some excerpts:

Part of the reason (the Iranian demonstrations petered out) was their organizers’ heavy reliance on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social sites to orchestrate their protest movement. They did not at first appreciate that Iranian intelligence Internet experts, operating from secret headquarters established months ago, were using their communications to shoot them down…

The high-end apparatus, installed in late 2008 by the German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia Corp. cell phone giant, gave Iranian intelligence the most advanced tools anywhere for controlling, inspecting, censoring and altering Internet and cell phone messaging. Those tools were being used weeks before the poll to identify penetrations by alien spy services, their local agents and dissident activists…

Within a few days of their protest, Mir Hossein Mousavi and the bulk of his supporters, realizing their electronic campaign had been taken over by the regime to hunt them down, disappeared from the streets of Tehran.

Debka is occasionally too quick to credit rumors in its zeal to scoop the mainstream news organizations. I suspect they’re right on the money this time, though. The Internet was never designed to be secure. It can be a great mobilizer in a democracy. In a dictatorship, it’s more likely to be a trap.

Will the Turkey take a Swan Dive?

According to this article in the Washington Post, NASA is planning to “de-orbit” the International Space Station in 2016. As I mentioned in an earlier post, scientists can actually be fallible. I don’t know what they were thinking when they approved this $100 billion white elephant. We could have done a lot of good science with that kind of money. Instead we got a high-flying albatross.

I rather suspect this rather shocking announcement is meant more as a scare tactic than anything else. After all, the people who thought it was such a brilliant idea to put it up there to begin with will want to “protect our investment.” I’ll believe in the swan dive when I see it.