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Our secret blackberry patch is gone

I have no sympathy for people who accidentally cause incredible destruction. Humans are fundamentally, across the entire planet, an invasive species. Our ability to dramatically evolve within a single generation has taken us outside the world governed by ecosystems. We do not play ball with the world. We control it, outcompeting everything around us. Like all invasive species, we will live high until we have consumed the entirety of our environment. And when there’s nothing left, we too shall die. 

If we manage to survive what Carl Sagan called our adolescence, our descendents will look back on us with scorn. We triggered one of the planet’s great extinction events, all because people needed something to do, because we decided that people having something to do was a precondition for participating in society. We even realized what we were doing, and then we did it anyway. 

That 15 year old kid who threw the firecracker that destroyed the Columbia Gorge: I hope deep guilt and shame haunt him for the rest of his life. His is the great human sin writ small. Forgiving him means forgiving ourselves for what we’re doing to the world. We don’t deserve it.

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The Science of God

It drives me crazy. If, for some reason, you find yourself in a scientific argument with a biblical liberalism, well, first of all you’ve probably done something wrong or made some kind of mistake somewhere, but should it happen, the ultimate brick wall you’ll always hit is: God willed it, and the Bible is the correct and authoritative source of God’s history and intent.

It’s an appeal to authority. In other subjects of argument that can be a fine thing to do sometimes (I guess) but in matters of science, it’s lazy and delusional. It’s passing the buck. In addition to an argument that God is responsible for an action, it also contains a subtle second assertion: because God is responsible for something, there’s really no point in even thinking about it, because, really, who knows, right?

Let’s accept that, relative to what we know about the universe, God has an independent will and magical powers to change what he desires. This is stated to be true.

Sorry, God just became part of science. Continue reading “The Science of God”

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Nutrition: The Hot New Thing!

From the Wikipedia page on vitamins:

In east Asia, where polished white rice was the common staple food of the middle class, beriberi resulting from lack of vitamin B1 was endemic. In 1884, Takaki Kanehiro, a British trained medical doctor of the Imperial Japanese Navy, observed that beriberi was endemic among low-ranking crew who often ate nothing but rice, but not among officers who consumed a Western-style diet. With the support of the Japanese navy, he experimented using crews of two battleships; one crew was fed only white rice, while the other was fed a diet of meat, fish, barley, rice, and beans. The group that ate only white rice documented 161 crew members with beriberi and 25 deaths, while the latter group had only 14 cases of beriberi and no deaths. This convinced Takaki and the Japanese Navy that diet was the cause of beriberi, but mistakenly believed that sufficient amounts of protein prevented it.

It’s amazing how much we take modern knowledge for granted. I can’t read that without thinking about how obvious it is that only eating white rice is going to make you sick, since it’s nothing but simple carbohydrates. But even the idea of a carbohydrate only dates back to around the same time. Nobody actually had any solid idea of how these things worked. A great deal of practical heuristics developed over the course of history through trial and error and tradition (a power formula over a long enough span of time! One wonders how many poor saps died before anyone figured out which mushrooms were actually safe to eat).

Now we take vitamin supplements in the hope of living healthier, even though evidence is racking up that it’s a useless practice. And as science marches on, in 50 years we’re going to look like complete idiots. As usual.