As a new year approaches it is natural to think of years past and years ahead. But on any given day when asked to look forward or back, a year's span would come most naturally to mind.
Mentally, we have evolved to measure "long term" time in years.
One might challenge this notion and say for the sake of argument that the calendar year is a cultural artifact, that we have been trained by society to parse time in annual installments.
I would feel embarrassed for anyone so ignorant of human cultural development. The annual cycle has been obvious since the earliest hominids started recognizing the cycle of seasons. We don't require calendars for us to know a year has passed. The Earth tells us this with irrefutable clarity.
The cultures of the first agricultural societies expanded their vigilant watch of the seasons' progress by charting the skies. It was useful to know when to plant crops in expectation of spring, and this knowledge was fundamental to holding power. Culture has expanded upon, not imposed, the year as the basic unit of long term time.
Our biological clock is tied to the circadian rhythm of earth's rotation. That is as clear as night and day, so to speak. Time beyond the moment, time that stretches years into the distant future, or reaches back into the distant past, is not so clear. Counting the years ahead or behind, we walk into a mental mist.
When rulers and conquerors sought divination of how their exploits would fare, oracles were at a psychological advantage in knowing what the powerful wanted to hear. I doubt the oracles would have considered answering such a vague and tricky question as, what is the empire going to be like in ten years? "Absolutely great, dear emperor, but please pay me now."
Traditionally, ten years was about the outside reach of foresight. But businesses don't have ten year plans anymore, and five years could be a perilous overreach. Too many unpredictable events arise too fast for a five year plan to supply much more than a statement of ambition. Almost all grand business headquarters, like skyscrapers and Googleplexes, have to be built within five years, lest the company be stuck in hard times with an unfinished edifice.
When the Millennium turned over, there were few who seriously shouted, Happy New Millennium, or even Happy New Century. A century is still a hundred years and a millennium a thousand, five and fifty generations in duration, respectively. Both are much too long to encompass any planning horizon. Human minds are trapped in the now and envision even next year with great difficulty.
The designer of the 10,000 year clock wrote that our concept of time is so limited that we must even segment our own personal existence into episodes to make sense of development and aging, and that we are truly many different successional selves throughout the course of our lives, not just one self living out an allotted span.
To speculate with any probity what humanity will do about climate change, we must consider humanity's limited perspective on time. We are mentally ill equipped for the challenge. A scope of awareness measured in years isn't going to do the job.
We have to start thinking in terms of decades and centuries and millennia. We have to transcend with our imaginations the limitations of our counting in years.
Perhaps with the recently approved international climate agreement, we have embarked upon a cultural shift in the way we regard time, so that the prospects for every child born are considered over the whole span of that person's lifetime. We have put ourselves on a proactive clock. We have given ourselves goals that transcend generations, declaring that we must measure up to those goals through the actions of our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren.
Perhaps the tick tock of the human mind has now become the pacekeeper of a long journey forward.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
A Lasting Impression
What institutions have endured for millenia and left a lasting impression on human thought and practice?
I'm interested only in the secular endurance of institutions here, with no comment or judgment about their premises.
I'll jump to the answer before even properly defining what I mean by "institution". There is only one category: the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions.
Please keep in mind, I'm not considering theologies, only organizational structures, the essence of an institution. So, why am I asking about the endurance of organizational structures over recorded history?
The answer is, I'm interested in the future, the very long term future, a future possibly stretching out as far ahead as history stretches out behind. The Long Now puts that at about 10,000 years. One example of the Abrahamic religions, The Holy Roman Catholic Church has lasted about 1,700 years, if its organizational beginning (apart from its theological claim) is dated back to the time of Emperor Constantine. Say two millenia if you like, I won't quibble. Will it last ten millenia hence?
Again, and I'll be repeating this later, theology is not my focus here. The importance of the central belief system in my analysis is its function in assuring perpetuation of the institution.
Time for some heresy: I think the significance of core beliefs to a religion's longevity has been indirect at best, and possibly irrelevant. The success of the Abrahamic religions has depended more on biology than on theology.
It is all about marriage. Within devout populations, the marriage ceremony is conducted by their religious institutions. The family unit thus becomes the caretaker for belief and the crucible for organizational recruitment. A religious institution rides on the back of the biological imperative through its dominance of marriage rites.
Much emphasis on religious expansion is placed on proselytizing. Not so long ago, conversion by conquest played a major role. I have no research to cite that will back up my supposition, but I strongly suspect that procreation alone will do the job of sustaining and growing the believer base. Proselytizing and conquest are just a way to burn off the steam of youthful restlessness, which can be very dangerous when it has nothing to do.
Again, it bears saying that despite relegating the longevity of the monotheistic Abrahamic desert religions to an association with biological urges, I give them credit for containing that urge within a theological construct. This construct is pretty much the same between the religions, and it has evolved to mostly shun polygamy and sanctify monogamy, apace with the development of a secular commercial economy.
People have to make their way in the modern world, and religions have been mostly wise about accommodating this reality, else they lose young people who would justifiably feel their religion is irrelevant to their needs. Thus, perhaps much of what we now perceive as rigidity in religious belief will change. The bottom line for a religion is to keep the family structure as an adjunct to the institution, and I think religion will either adapt to make this so, or fade away for lack of adherents.
Yet, my purpose in raising the question of institutional endurance is not to make a case about religion, per se, but about the importance of biology. I'm interested in how an institution that is essentially new, perhaps not even yet formed or perhaps a fresh adaptation of what is very old, could reasonably hope to endure for the next ten thousand years in order to serve as a caretaker for the Earth.
Its perpetuation would likely need the same procreation component as religion. Nothing else but procreation would pass the torch, forge links in the chain, keep the fire alive. Accordingly, this institution would have to incorporate marriage rites and family support, even if it accommodates new concepts of family.
Can the institution of Science do the job? I wonder. Science is habitually skeptical and iconoclastic and contentious. Good science questions everything. A love for science is often inherited from family experience. There is no affiliation with marriage rites in science, however
I'm coming to the conclusion that this Earth Caretaker institution might even have to BE a religion if it is to endure as long as religions have. But unlike the religions we know today, it would have to always be looking forward, not back. It would have to cherish the Earth, not long to leave it. It would have to celebrate inquiry as the proper engagement with life, not shut down questions with dogma.
And it would have to perform marriage rites.
I'm interested only in the secular endurance of institutions here, with no comment or judgment about their premises.
I'll jump to the answer before even properly defining what I mean by "institution". There is only one category: the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions.
Please keep in mind, I'm not considering theologies, only organizational structures, the essence of an institution. So, why am I asking about the endurance of organizational structures over recorded history?
The answer is, I'm interested in the future, the very long term future, a future possibly stretching out as far ahead as history stretches out behind. The Long Now puts that at about 10,000 years. One example of the Abrahamic religions, The Holy Roman Catholic Church has lasted about 1,700 years, if its organizational beginning (apart from its theological claim) is dated back to the time of Emperor Constantine. Say two millenia if you like, I won't quibble. Will it last ten millenia hence?
Again, and I'll be repeating this later, theology is not my focus here. The importance of the central belief system in my analysis is its function in assuring perpetuation of the institution.
Time for some heresy: I think the significance of core beliefs to a religion's longevity has been indirect at best, and possibly irrelevant. The success of the Abrahamic religions has depended more on biology than on theology.
It is all about marriage. Within devout populations, the marriage ceremony is conducted by their religious institutions. The family unit thus becomes the caretaker for belief and the crucible for organizational recruitment. A religious institution rides on the back of the biological imperative through its dominance of marriage rites.
Much emphasis on religious expansion is placed on proselytizing. Not so long ago, conversion by conquest played a major role. I have no research to cite that will back up my supposition, but I strongly suspect that procreation alone will do the job of sustaining and growing the believer base. Proselytizing and conquest are just a way to burn off the steam of youthful restlessness, which can be very dangerous when it has nothing to do.
Again, it bears saying that despite relegating the longevity of the monotheistic Abrahamic desert religions to an association with biological urges, I give them credit for containing that urge within a theological construct. This construct is pretty much the same between the religions, and it has evolved to mostly shun polygamy and sanctify monogamy, apace with the development of a secular commercial economy.
People have to make their way in the modern world, and religions have been mostly wise about accommodating this reality, else they lose young people who would justifiably feel their religion is irrelevant to their needs. Thus, perhaps much of what we now perceive as rigidity in religious belief will change. The bottom line for a religion is to keep the family structure as an adjunct to the institution, and I think religion will either adapt to make this so, or fade away for lack of adherents.
Yet, my purpose in raising the question of institutional endurance is not to make a case about religion, per se, but about the importance of biology. I'm interested in how an institution that is essentially new, perhaps not even yet formed or perhaps a fresh adaptation of what is very old, could reasonably hope to endure for the next ten thousand years in order to serve as a caretaker for the Earth.
Its perpetuation would likely need the same procreation component as religion. Nothing else but procreation would pass the torch, forge links in the chain, keep the fire alive. Accordingly, this institution would have to incorporate marriage rites and family support, even if it accommodates new concepts of family.
Can the institution of Science do the job? I wonder. Science is habitually skeptical and iconoclastic and contentious. Good science questions everything. A love for science is often inherited from family experience. There is no affiliation with marriage rites in science, however
I'm coming to the conclusion that this Earth Caretaker institution might even have to BE a religion if it is to endure as long as religions have. But unlike the religions we know today, it would have to always be looking forward, not back. It would have to cherish the Earth, not long to leave it. It would have to celebrate inquiry as the proper engagement with life, not shut down questions with dogma.
And it would have to perform marriage rites.
Failure: experience does not equal expertise
I should know a lot about failure but I don't. Failure is really the story of my life but I'm none the wiser for it.
Accomplishment does not count if it doesn't provide further opportunities, and by that reckoning, I've achieved only dead ends, a long list of failures, like seeds that never sprouted.
One is supposed to make an assessment after failure so it won't be repeated. In a sense that has worked for me; all my subsequent failures were fresh and original, not replays of old mistakes. Or so I'd like to think.
Nothing about a rational analysis of one's failures is really rational or analytical. It is more like an inquisitor looking for reasons that he is sure to find.
The fundamental assumption of post-failure analysis is there was a cause that can be identified and corrected. In truth, whether one succeeds or fails, one has no inkling why. Something worked or did not work. Could be random luck. Who would own up to that?
There is an American tendency to find fault with ourselves, usually concluding that we didn't try hard enough. So, one trains harder or studies harder or just grunts harder, and tries again. We hear only about the success stories, which encourages us to think that trying harder always works. But for every three medaled finishers on the awards stand, there were many more also rans. Failure, repeated failure without ultimate success, is the common experience which we never like to admit to others, least of all to ourselves.
I could come up with a lot of reasons for my own failures, but they would all be made up, not at all scientific, certainly rationalized but hardly rational. If the bottom line of honesty is to admit ignorance, I really don't know why I have failed. The leading contender is that once I concluded a project, I wanted to move on to something different and thus didn't diligently capitalize on what I had just accomplished; in other words, I didn't try to build a career. But that may be just a story I tell myself.
The reason we need to take pride in the small things in life that are common to the human experience is that most of us have little else to esteem. You are a parent who raised pretty good kids. You are a worker who gave good value. You are a decent person who took care of his or her friends. You are an activist who contributed time and money to your causes. All these little attainments, hardly unique, buoy up our self esteem.
As for the really big stuff performed before millions, most of us have to be content with saying, I gave it everything I had, and I'm proud to have tried my best.
Accomplishment does not count if it doesn't provide further opportunities, and by that reckoning, I've achieved only dead ends, a long list of failures, like seeds that never sprouted.
One is supposed to make an assessment after failure so it won't be repeated. In a sense that has worked for me; all my subsequent failures were fresh and original, not replays of old mistakes. Or so I'd like to think.
Nothing about a rational analysis of one's failures is really rational or analytical. It is more like an inquisitor looking for reasons that he is sure to find.
The fundamental assumption of post-failure analysis is there was a cause that can be identified and corrected. In truth, whether one succeeds or fails, one has no inkling why. Something worked or did not work. Could be random luck. Who would own up to that?
There is an American tendency to find fault with ourselves, usually concluding that we didn't try hard enough. So, one trains harder or studies harder or just grunts harder, and tries again. We hear only about the success stories, which encourages us to think that trying harder always works. But for every three medaled finishers on the awards stand, there were many more also rans. Failure, repeated failure without ultimate success, is the common experience which we never like to admit to others, least of all to ourselves.
I could come up with a lot of reasons for my own failures, but they would all be made up, not at all scientific, certainly rationalized but hardly rational. If the bottom line of honesty is to admit ignorance, I really don't know why I have failed. The leading contender is that once I concluded a project, I wanted to move on to something different and thus didn't diligently capitalize on what I had just accomplished; in other words, I didn't try to build a career. But that may be just a story I tell myself.
The reason we need to take pride in the small things in life that are common to the human experience is that most of us have little else to esteem. You are a parent who raised pretty good kids. You are a worker who gave good value. You are a decent person who took care of his or her friends. You are an activist who contributed time and money to your causes. All these little attainments, hardly unique, buoy up our self esteem.
As for the really big stuff performed before millions, most of us have to be content with saying, I gave it everything I had, and I'm proud to have tried my best.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Civilization In Eclipse
The care usually given to crafting these essays will yield tonight to a deadline set by a cosmic event. A lunar eclipse is in progress and I am rushing to complete and post before the moon emerges from Earth's shadow.
The shadow had begun munching on the moon before I could reach the dark alley for the view. I had been making herbal tea to keep me company (mint and chamomile, if you must know) but the tea bags broke open, requiring some time-consuming improvisation to strain the liquid clear.
Yes, you are ahead of me. The episode started me wondering about how the Tea Party people regard this event, and how the long, telling history of eclipses both lunar and solar, powered much early progress in science.
Rushing outside again just now, when the moon was closest to the center of the shadow, I saw that a gradient pointed the way toward the core of darkness, a shading illuminated by what little light bent round the Earth's shoulders by edge diffraction and atmospheric refraction, darkest where the least light falls.
In such details is so much revealed. From such nuance is the grand structure comprehended, the mechanisms and objects assembled by the brightest minds into a model of how things work, tested for accuracy by measuring its predictions. For the eclipses of the moon and the sun, this process required many brave thinkers to observe and ponder over many centuries.
The obstacle they faced was not the phenomenon itself, but the resistance by the times they lived in to the acts of observing and thinking. We are still living in such times.
My broken tea bags did not prevent me from making a clear beverage, they just made the effort take a little longer, and I enjoyed the challenge of being resourceful.
We are experiencing in our time an avalanche of broken tea bags, a willful cluttering of scientific clarity that seeks to overthrow the rule by reason which was hard fought and won through centuries of conflict with oppressive institutions that had no compassion or vision, that sought only everlasting power.
We are being inundated by a self righteous tidal wave of foolish piety that undermines that very bedrock of modern times: the ever accumulating knowledge that builds the made world we live in, and disrupts the natural world we depend upon, and strives optimistically for a reconciliation between the two.
We are a civilization in eclipse, as the fearful seize the reigns of power and the rich deceive themselves that the alliance they form with the fearful can be rescinded at will. It can, yet it will be the fearful who rescind it.
But the moon is growing brighter every minute now, casting an emerging light of shame upon the arrogant greed that sought to command ignorance and convert it into power. The moon reemerges to rule the sky on its appointed night of fullness, undiminished from traveling through the Earth's shade.
All eclipses end. All eclipses teach. All eclipses make us thankful. The heavens will not submit to human foolishness, and neither should we.
The shadow had begun munching on the moon before I could reach the dark alley for the view. I had been making herbal tea to keep me company (mint and chamomile, if you must know) but the tea bags broke open, requiring some time-consuming improvisation to strain the liquid clear.
Yes, you are ahead of me. The episode started me wondering about how the Tea Party people regard this event, and how the long, telling history of eclipses both lunar and solar, powered much early progress in science.
Rushing outside again just now, when the moon was closest to the center of the shadow, I saw that a gradient pointed the way toward the core of darkness, a shading illuminated by what little light bent round the Earth's shoulders by edge diffraction and atmospheric refraction, darkest where the least light falls.
In such details is so much revealed. From such nuance is the grand structure comprehended, the mechanisms and objects assembled by the brightest minds into a model of how things work, tested for accuracy by measuring its predictions. For the eclipses of the moon and the sun, this process required many brave thinkers to observe and ponder over many centuries.
The obstacle they faced was not the phenomenon itself, but the resistance by the times they lived in to the acts of observing and thinking. We are still living in such times.
My broken tea bags did not prevent me from making a clear beverage, they just made the effort take a little longer, and I enjoyed the challenge of being resourceful.
We are experiencing in our time an avalanche of broken tea bags, a willful cluttering of scientific clarity that seeks to overthrow the rule by reason which was hard fought and won through centuries of conflict with oppressive institutions that had no compassion or vision, that sought only everlasting power.
We are being inundated by a self righteous tidal wave of foolish piety that undermines that very bedrock of modern times: the ever accumulating knowledge that builds the made world we live in, and disrupts the natural world we depend upon, and strives optimistically for a reconciliation between the two.
We are a civilization in eclipse, as the fearful seize the reigns of power and the rich deceive themselves that the alliance they form with the fearful can be rescinded at will. It can, yet it will be the fearful who rescind it.
But the moon is growing brighter every minute now, casting an emerging light of shame upon the arrogant greed that sought to command ignorance and convert it into power. The moon reemerges to rule the sky on its appointed night of fullness, undiminished from traveling through the Earth's shade.
All eclipses end. All eclipses teach. All eclipses make us thankful. The heavens will not submit to human foolishness, and neither should we.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Smackdown: Civilization versus Evolution
Evolution proceeds through the natural selection of traits within a species' genome, traits that favor the reproductive success of individuals possessing and passing on those traits to their surviving progeny. The individual is a link in a lineage; the traits are what persist through the generations, the traits are what evolve.
That's a mouthful, and it is difficult to grasp. So consider in contrast the antithesis of evolution: civilization.
Civilization strives through the intervention of technology to favor the survival and reproductive success of everyone who has access to health care. Ideally, there is no selection of traits, no bias toward any set of characteristics inherited or learned.
That's a mouthful, too, but in a different way. The idea is easy enough to grasp although it is proving quite difficult to fully implement. It is a mouthful of promise yet to be delivered.
The starkest contrast between evolution and civilization is not about death, but about life. People die invariably, inevitably, inexorably, regardless of their health care, because we all are mortal. We evade that truth, mostly, hoping that the ultimate achievement of medical research within our lifetime will be the attainment of affordable immortality, preferably with some restorative component, so that we will not only live forever, but enjoy eternity in the bodies of 30 year olds.
The ideal of individual immortality is what most distinguishes civilization from evolution, the prolongation of the person rather than the persistence of traits passed on through a lineage of persons.
Bear in mind that evolution results in the longevity of traits which favor reproductive success as they are passed on through the generations. The elderly, well beyond their reproductive years, don't matter to evolution except for what they contribute to, or detract from, child rearing. The opportunity to pass on traits concludes with the end of fertility, but through the assistance of grandparents, those traits in grandchildren have a better chance of being passed on again. The altruism of kin is likely a self perpetuating trait.
Consider that civilization, in contrast to evolution, seeks the longevity of the person, the actualization of the self through the whole arc of life. Civilization at its most idealized, is the negation of evolution, even the negation of lineage, through the elimination of natural selection as a threat to individual lifespan and wellbeing.
For example, pandemic diseases, left to their own devices, can create natural selection events. The survivors whose traits, whether behavioral or physiological, confer better odds of survival will pass on to their offspring their resistance to the disease.
But diseases are not left to their own devices. Civilization has waged a seemingly successful war against disease through the eradication of pathogens. Generations which have never been exposed to a given disease have no resistance to it without vaccination. And if vaccination succeeds spectacularly, as it did with polio, people assume they don't need resistance to a pathogen that no longer exists.
But if a war against a pathogen achieves less than eradication because there are strains of the bug with resistance to the treatments used, then the surviving strains persist and rebound. Nosocomial infections contracted in hospitals are notorious examples of how evolution and civilization can be at loggerheads. It is fair to say that the intensively antibiotic environment of hospitals has bred badder bugs. We are selecting only the resistant pathogens, we are not selecting for the humans with natural resistance.
On the whole, we seem to be exerting no selective pressure on our own species.
Wars and the hazards of place (like living in the path of a tornado or on a flood plain) do not count as selective pressures because they do not differentiate between inheritable traits. A total nuclear war might create a bottleneck effect, with a few survivors providing a restricted genome for the recovering population, the survivors' traits becoming the dominant features. But while natural selection would be at work for the generations hence, the catastrophic narrowing of the human genome to a bottleneck would sort victims and survivors by chance alone; luck is not an inheritable trait.
Surveys of the human genome show that the genetic variation of the species is expanding. Selective pressure has not acted recently upon the human genome to winnow our traits to a subset favoring reproductive success. We can take this as evidence that modern civilization has triumphed over evolution, at least for now.
Evolution made us what we are. Now that we have halted human evolution in its tracks, it is not clear that anything is making us into something else. We are yet the same species we were as the last glaciation melted away and we went on to till the soil, building from the first agricultural societies ten millennia ago the global civilization of today. Any early example of homo sapiens, if robbed from the cradle and transported through time, would fit into the modern world quite naturally.
Evolutionary forces are alive and well, but leaving humanity alone for awhile. Meanwhile, we have just begun tinkering with ourselves, engineering our genome and melding flesh with non biological materials, fusing our brains with computers. None of these chimera have the time-tested durability of what evolution can produce, but they might add something important to the genome for natural selection to work with someday.
I wish for a selective event that steers the human species toward empathy as a dominant trait. I cannot imagine what kind of event that would be, as nothing recorded by history has had that effect. As much as people of a certain sensibility might value empathy, it is more known for its rarity than its prevalence. And yet, empathy is encountered frequently enough to provide some hope for humanity. Someday, an instinctive, compulsive empathy might be just the trait we need in order to squeak through a narrow scrape with extinction.
That's a mouthful, and it is difficult to grasp. So consider in contrast the antithesis of evolution: civilization.
Civilization strives through the intervention of technology to favor the survival and reproductive success of everyone who has access to health care. Ideally, there is no selection of traits, no bias toward any set of characteristics inherited or learned.
That's a mouthful, too, but in a different way. The idea is easy enough to grasp although it is proving quite difficult to fully implement. It is a mouthful of promise yet to be delivered.
The starkest contrast between evolution and civilization is not about death, but about life. People die invariably, inevitably, inexorably, regardless of their health care, because we all are mortal. We evade that truth, mostly, hoping that the ultimate achievement of medical research within our lifetime will be the attainment of affordable immortality, preferably with some restorative component, so that we will not only live forever, but enjoy eternity in the bodies of 30 year olds.
The ideal of individual immortality is what most distinguishes civilization from evolution, the prolongation of the person rather than the persistence of traits passed on through a lineage of persons.
Bear in mind that evolution results in the longevity of traits which favor reproductive success as they are passed on through the generations. The elderly, well beyond their reproductive years, don't matter to evolution except for what they contribute to, or detract from, child rearing. The opportunity to pass on traits concludes with the end of fertility, but through the assistance of grandparents, those traits in grandchildren have a better chance of being passed on again. The altruism of kin is likely a self perpetuating trait.
Consider that civilization, in contrast to evolution, seeks the longevity of the person, the actualization of the self through the whole arc of life. Civilization at its most idealized, is the negation of evolution, even the negation of lineage, through the elimination of natural selection as a threat to individual lifespan and wellbeing.
For example, pandemic diseases, left to their own devices, can create natural selection events. The survivors whose traits, whether behavioral or physiological, confer better odds of survival will pass on to their offspring their resistance to the disease.
But diseases are not left to their own devices. Civilization has waged a seemingly successful war against disease through the eradication of pathogens. Generations which have never been exposed to a given disease have no resistance to it without vaccination. And if vaccination succeeds spectacularly, as it did with polio, people assume they don't need resistance to a pathogen that no longer exists.
But if a war against a pathogen achieves less than eradication because there are strains of the bug with resistance to the treatments used, then the surviving strains persist and rebound. Nosocomial infections contracted in hospitals are notorious examples of how evolution and civilization can be at loggerheads. It is fair to say that the intensively antibiotic environment of hospitals has bred badder bugs. We are selecting only the resistant pathogens, we are not selecting for the humans with natural resistance.
On the whole, we seem to be exerting no selective pressure on our own species.
Wars and the hazards of place (like living in the path of a tornado or on a flood plain) do not count as selective pressures because they do not differentiate between inheritable traits. A total nuclear war might create a bottleneck effect, with a few survivors providing a restricted genome for the recovering population, the survivors' traits becoming the dominant features. But while natural selection would be at work for the generations hence, the catastrophic narrowing of the human genome to a bottleneck would sort victims and survivors by chance alone; luck is not an inheritable trait.
Surveys of the human genome show that the genetic variation of the species is expanding. Selective pressure has not acted recently upon the human genome to winnow our traits to a subset favoring reproductive success. We can take this as evidence that modern civilization has triumphed over evolution, at least for now.
Evolution made us what we are. Now that we have halted human evolution in its tracks, it is not clear that anything is making us into something else. We are yet the same species we were as the last glaciation melted away and we went on to till the soil, building from the first agricultural societies ten millennia ago the global civilization of today. Any early example of homo sapiens, if robbed from the cradle and transported through time, would fit into the modern world quite naturally.
Evolutionary forces are alive and well, but leaving humanity alone for awhile. Meanwhile, we have just begun tinkering with ourselves, engineering our genome and melding flesh with non biological materials, fusing our brains with computers. None of these chimera have the time-tested durability of what evolution can produce, but they might add something important to the genome for natural selection to work with someday.
I wish for a selective event that steers the human species toward empathy as a dominant trait. I cannot imagine what kind of event that would be, as nothing recorded by history has had that effect. As much as people of a certain sensibility might value empathy, it is more known for its rarity than its prevalence. And yet, empathy is encountered frequently enough to provide some hope for humanity. Someday, an instinctive, compulsive empathy might be just the trait we need in order to squeak through a narrow scrape with extinction.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Help Me Choose My Topic
The deadline is fast approaching for applications to the Fulbright - National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship program.
Applicants may submit only one entry, addressing one of the identified topics: Biodiversity, Cities, Climate Change, Cultures, Energy, Food, Oceans, and Water.
It is pretty clear from the program description that the selection process will favor proposals that are both journalistic and personal, and which require investigation outside the US, while chronicling this quest for understanding in real time using digital tools. In other words, they want the ingredients for a good story.
I have one core point of view, which infuses all topics: Time. I ask myself, how do the various contributing factors with different rates of change interact? For which factor is time the constricting limitation? Time rules over all phenomena, from the quick to the interminable, with sweep hands of all speeds ticking simultaneously. If I can understand how time works with a given subject, I think I can understand the subject very well.
Bear with me in this post, as I open my thought processes for your examination, evaluating what my submission to the fellowship program should cover. Let's look at each of the topics in the program from the perspective of time, and then consider the appeal of each question and how credible I would be as the person to pursue it.
1) Time and biodiversity?
Species are going extinct at a faster rate than since the comet impact that killed off the dinosaurs. I want to see and record as many doomed species as possible before they are gone.
(A race against time to capture documentation of soon-to-be-lost species is poignant rather than hopeful. Such fatalism would not be favored by the selection committee.)
2) Time and Cities?
Most of the world's population lives in cities, and many large cities are at water's edge, making them vulnerable to sea level rise. Is this a design opportunity or a dystopian curse? Thinking constructively, is there enough lead time, inventiveness and public resolve to build new urban areas designed for climate change?
(A journalistic question, where experts in contention can only voice their own opinion. This could be favored.)
3) Time and Climate Change?
The perceived rate of change is the ultimate determining factor for the pace of policy adoption. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation seems on track to maintain global air temperatures at their current level for another two decades, and then boost the rise in air temperatures relentlessly for thirty years or so thereafter. Can countries make a commitment to policies before the need for them becomes frantically urgent?
(The issue is way too abstract and not photogenic, although it is the most fundamental question one could ask. It would not be favored as a subject for public consumption, even though it is about how the pace of climate change affects public attitudes.)
4) Time and Cultures?
Global commercial culture infiltrates every human niche, poured upon and seeping into all the various local cultures of the world, including indigenous cultures whose origins predate globalism. Do the "old ways" of indigenous cultures have anything to teach global modernism about sustainability?
(Really requires an anthropological point of view, but one expressed by a person who carries none of the considerable baggage from the discipline. I would not be thought the person to address it. This would not be favored coming from me.)
5) Time and Energy?
Fossil fuel dependency is thoroughly built into the modern way of life, a melding of what is demanded and how those demands are supplied. A complete transition to an industrial alternative energy system with the capacity to serve modern consumption would require considerable fossil fuel and other resources for its construction, and may not even be realistic. Is there time to grow self sufficient alternative energy production systems with a matching low consumption alternative energy usage culture? Or will a new world of energy have to grow from the ruins of the old?
(Another fundamental question, that verges on being rhetorical. Of course we can't pull this off, no one is even proposing such a course of action. As I believe the modern way of life will first have to fail utterly before it can be replaced, I would not be conducting an investigation so much as making a case for the desirability of collapse and the need to start planning now for the aftermath. This would definitely not be considered favorably by the selection committee.)
6) Time and Food?
I have begun a quest to find locations where a society is able to live comfortably from the food it produces nearby, and where both the ecology and the infrastructure will be robustly adaptive to climate change in the decades to come. Is such a place possible?
(A quest by its very nature is both highly personal and journalistic. This could be favored.)
7) Time and Oceans?
The rise of sea level, over the decades and centuries, will create a changing interface between oceans and land. One type of natural habitat will experience tremendous expansion: estuaries. Where in the world are the estuary restoration efforts conducted, that might be adapted to cultivate this highly productive habitat expansion into a food producing resource?
(Original, and thus better served by having a reputation for expertise and inventiveness in the particular field. Such a submission would not likely be favored coming from me. I can cover this topic from the quest for food perspective, when searching for innovations.)
8) Time and Water?
The availability of fresh water for all uses has always been quite variable. Modern water exploitation is based on assumptions about variability that no longer hold, if they ever did. The duration and frequency of drought, the intervals between flood extremes, the type and seasonal pattern for winter precipitation—all these have been mistakenly characterized across the globe because studies were based on short time samples and an insufficient understanding of how the global weather system works. New variability regimes are being established in a warming global climate and no one knows where they will take us. What does long term water planning and development look like in a world of climate change, when we can no longer count on the supposed regularity of the seasons, which perhaps was always a myth perpetuated to serve development of water projects?
(My background in water conservation writing lends marginal credibility to asking this question, especially as a good supply-side answer has not yet been put forth and demand-side answers have not yet been fully considered. This is a journalistic approach, and it could be favored by the selection committee.
Reviewing my chain of thought, it seems I'm talking myself into choosing between #2, #6 and #8. Perhaps some recasting of the questions will narrow the field. Or perhaps I'll go with what I most desire to do, even if it is the least likely to be favored.
Your feedback is welcome.
Applicants may submit only one entry, addressing one of the identified topics: Biodiversity, Cities, Climate Change, Cultures, Energy, Food, Oceans, and Water.
It is pretty clear from the program description that the selection process will favor proposals that are both journalistic and personal, and which require investigation outside the US, while chronicling this quest for understanding in real time using digital tools. In other words, they want the ingredients for a good story.
I have one core point of view, which infuses all topics: Time. I ask myself, how do the various contributing factors with different rates of change interact? For which factor is time the constricting limitation? Time rules over all phenomena, from the quick to the interminable, with sweep hands of all speeds ticking simultaneously. If I can understand how time works with a given subject, I think I can understand the subject very well.
Bear with me in this post, as I open my thought processes for your examination, evaluating what my submission to the fellowship program should cover. Let's look at each of the topics in the program from the perspective of time, and then consider the appeal of each question and how credible I would be as the person to pursue it.
1) Time and biodiversity?
Species are going extinct at a faster rate than since the comet impact that killed off the dinosaurs. I want to see and record as many doomed species as possible before they are gone.
(A race against time to capture documentation of soon-to-be-lost species is poignant rather than hopeful. Such fatalism would not be favored by the selection committee.)
2) Time and Cities?
Most of the world's population lives in cities, and many large cities are at water's edge, making them vulnerable to sea level rise. Is this a design opportunity or a dystopian curse? Thinking constructively, is there enough lead time, inventiveness and public resolve to build new urban areas designed for climate change?
(A journalistic question, where experts in contention can only voice their own opinion. This could be favored.)
3) Time and Climate Change?
The perceived rate of change is the ultimate determining factor for the pace of policy adoption. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation seems on track to maintain global air temperatures at their current level for another two decades, and then boost the rise in air temperatures relentlessly for thirty years or so thereafter. Can countries make a commitment to policies before the need for them becomes frantically urgent?
(The issue is way too abstract and not photogenic, although it is the most fundamental question one could ask. It would not be favored as a subject for public consumption, even though it is about how the pace of climate change affects public attitudes.)
4) Time and Cultures?
Global commercial culture infiltrates every human niche, poured upon and seeping into all the various local cultures of the world, including indigenous cultures whose origins predate globalism. Do the "old ways" of indigenous cultures have anything to teach global modernism about sustainability?
(Really requires an anthropological point of view, but one expressed by a person who carries none of the considerable baggage from the discipline. I would not be thought the person to address it. This would not be favored coming from me.)
5) Time and Energy?
Fossil fuel dependency is thoroughly built into the modern way of life, a melding of what is demanded and how those demands are supplied. A complete transition to an industrial alternative energy system with the capacity to serve modern consumption would require considerable fossil fuel and other resources for its construction, and may not even be realistic. Is there time to grow self sufficient alternative energy production systems with a matching low consumption alternative energy usage culture? Or will a new world of energy have to grow from the ruins of the old?
(Another fundamental question, that verges on being rhetorical. Of course we can't pull this off, no one is even proposing such a course of action. As I believe the modern way of life will first have to fail utterly before it can be replaced, I would not be conducting an investigation so much as making a case for the desirability of collapse and the need to start planning now for the aftermath. This would definitely not be considered favorably by the selection committee.)
6) Time and Food?
I have begun a quest to find locations where a society is able to live comfortably from the food it produces nearby, and where both the ecology and the infrastructure will be robustly adaptive to climate change in the decades to come. Is such a place possible?
(A quest by its very nature is both highly personal and journalistic. This could be favored.)
7) Time and Oceans?
The rise of sea level, over the decades and centuries, will create a changing interface between oceans and land. One type of natural habitat will experience tremendous expansion: estuaries. Where in the world are the estuary restoration efforts conducted, that might be adapted to cultivate this highly productive habitat expansion into a food producing resource?
(Original, and thus better served by having a reputation for expertise and inventiveness in the particular field. Such a submission would not likely be favored coming from me. I can cover this topic from the quest for food perspective, when searching for innovations.)
8) Time and Water?
The availability of fresh water for all uses has always been quite variable. Modern water exploitation is based on assumptions about variability that no longer hold, if they ever did. The duration and frequency of drought, the intervals between flood extremes, the type and seasonal pattern for winter precipitation—all these have been mistakenly characterized across the globe because studies were based on short time samples and an insufficient understanding of how the global weather system works. New variability regimes are being established in a warming global climate and no one knows where they will take us. What does long term water planning and development look like in a world of climate change, when we can no longer count on the supposed regularity of the seasons, which perhaps was always a myth perpetuated to serve development of water projects?
(My background in water conservation writing lends marginal credibility to asking this question, especially as a good supply-side answer has not yet been put forth and demand-side answers have not yet been fully considered. This is a journalistic approach, and it could be favored by the selection committee.
Reviewing my chain of thought, it seems I'm talking myself into choosing between #2, #6 and #8. Perhaps some recasting of the questions will narrow the field. Or perhaps I'll go with what I most desire to do, even if it is the least likely to be favored.
Your feedback is welcome.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
The Hunger Game, 65 Million Years Ago
During my weekly volunteering in the Past Worlds Gallery, I'm often asked what happened to the dinosaurs. Of course, I give the answer that most paleontologists and geologist agree upon today, that a comet or meteor impact killed them off. As I grew up with this hypothesis and enthusiastically watched it mature into a substantiated scientific theory, I have a personal interest in explaining it.
Visitors clearly are not satisfied with this pat answer, however, because they can't grasp the mechanics of it. I think most people know there are always survivors from every catastrophe, and that the survivors recover their numbers and restore what was lost. The Impact Theory does not explain why some species that survived the impact made it through the hard times thereafter, and other survivors of the initial disaster eventually perished. That puzzle makes the Impact Theory an incomplete answer, unless it is elaborated.
People also have a hard time grasping how a local impact can have global consequences, even when the explosion is huge. We all know from news headlines and history books that a volcanic mountain can blow its top, but if we are not near that mountain, we do not fear the consequences. So how did an impact on the Yucatan affect life in all the oceans, and life on land areas far away?
What follows is the response I generally give, phrased here as exposition rather than the Q/A style I like to use in conversation.
To begin:
How much energy was available for the impact event that caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction?
A consensus ballpark estimate, based on the object mass and speed required to make the Chicxulub crater, is that the kinetic energy available before impact was 130,000,000 Megatons, using the unit for quantifying nuclear weapon energy yield.
A Wikipedia article on the history of nuclear weapons estimates that, in round numbers, about 130,000 nuclear weapons have been produced by all the world's nuclear powers over time. The yield of these weapons was quite varied, as they were designed for delivery by different systems to different targets. A reasonable guess for the average yield of all the nuclear weapons ever produced would be somewhere between 1 Megaton and 10 Megatons per weapon. A ten Megaton weapon would vaporize an entire metropolitan area.
For comparison purposes, the high side estimate is most useful, ten Megatons. Thus, the high side estimate of total Megaton yield capacity, cumulative for all nuclear weapons, is 1,300,000 Megatons.
This would put the impact energy available before atmospheric entry at 100 to 1000 times the explosive power of all the nuclear weapons ever produced. Upon entry and impact, this energy was converted to blast shock waves traveling through the atmosphere, the ocean and the earth's crust, a fireball of vaporized rock and superheated steam, ejected volumes of rock and water, an immense tidal wave, radiant heat, and seismic waves traveling through the earth.
The most significant contributor to extinction was the amount of small particle debris thrown into the air that stayed there for months, perhaps years, and was distributed around the globe. The impact cloud chilled the global climate by reflecting more sunlight back into space, and it reduced the sunlight available to plants, the base of food chains for land and ocean life. These are the effects of "Impact Winter", a term borrowed from studies of the global effect of total nuclear war, "Nuclear Winter". Most of the dinosaurs that survived the impact explosion starved to death or died of exposure soon after, even if they were far away from the impact site. In the chilled environment beneath darkened skies, there was little food to fuel them against the killing cold.
At this point in the narrative, kids raise their hands. Why didn't the bird branch of dinosaurs also go extinct? Why didn't the mammals? Why didn't all the world's oceanic fish die off for lack of sufficient phytoplankton to support the food chain? Let's rephrase the questions into one central question. Why did some species squeak through and most species did not?
It is probable that there were individual survivors of the impact across all the species on earth 65 million years ago, including the dinosaurs that today are extinct. But a new world had been created in the aftermath of the impact devastation, and the animals that were most adaptive to the drastically changed circumstances were favored.
An animal that cannot compete with other animals for the same food resources will rapidly dwindle in number until no more are reproduced. An animal that adapts to new opportunities will survive and evolve. This is the way nature heals itself from global extinction events; the fossil record bridging the five major global extinction events provides testimony.
An animal that cannot compete with other animals for the same food resources will rapidly dwindle in number until no more are reproduced. An animal that adapts to new opportunities will survive and evolve. This is the way nature heals itself from global extinction events; the fossil record bridging the five major global extinction events provides testimony.
Flowering plants, such as the grasses, had evolved and proliferated late in the dinosaur age; classic dinosaurs ate them as part of their diet but had not evolved to exploit them fully. By contrast, insects, mammals and the avian dinosaurs had co-evolved with flowering plants. As flowering plants recolonized the land after the impact, the animals that could best utilize them were favored, and consequently they out competed the few remaining classic dinosaurs, who were ill suited to an environment in recovery.
Here's the coda to the narrative, in scientific terms: The classic dinosaurs that survived the impact and its aftermath, eventually died off anyway because their long established success deprived their species of the genetic variation necessary to exploit drastic environmental change through adaptation by natural selection. One hundred, seventy million years of fairly stable ecological relationships did not prepare their genomes for a global catastrophe that gave the world a fresh start.
Of all the dinosaur families, only some species of birds made it through. Along with the mammals, they evolved to fill niches left empty by the absence of classic dinosaurs. Their genomes had the breadth of variability to diversify across generations of natural selection.
Here's the coda to the narrative, in scientific terms: The classic dinosaurs that survived the impact and its aftermath, eventually died off anyway because their long established success deprived their species of the genetic variation necessary to exploit drastic environmental change through adaptation by natural selection. One hundred, seventy million years of fairly stable ecological relationships did not prepare their genomes for a global catastrophe that gave the world a fresh start.
Of all the dinosaur families, only some species of birds made it through. Along with the mammals, they evolved to fill niches left empty by the absence of classic dinosaurs. Their genomes had the breadth of variability to diversify across generations of natural selection.
That's one story, consistent with what we know today. The job of science is to examine such stories, and find new facts that either support or refute them.
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