Jeff Schweitzer's Blog, page 8

China: Asia’s Toothless Paper Tiger

As North Korea’s creepy regime blusters and threatens, China proves powerless to reign in its crazy uncle.  We should not be surprised at this impotence; but are however because almost every aspect of conventional wisdom about China is wrong.

We have short memories, and as a consequence we keep perpetuating the same myths and mistakes as if the past is nothing but a black void offering no lessons for the future.  The unquestioned assumption that China will be the next economic superpower is a case in point.  In making that claim we have clearly forgotten “The Japan That Can Say No.” In making that claim, we clearly ignore the impacts of environmental degradation on future economic growth. We ignore basic realities of macroeconomics.

I come to this discussion having lived in Japan for two years in my youth.  Later in life, I participated in multiple negotiations with the governments of Japan and China as Chief Environmental Officer at the Agency for International Development and during my time in the Clinton White House as the Assistant Director for International Science and Technology.  I offer that background because the confluence of science, technology, economics and the environment has much to say about the future of Japan and China, and how those economies will impact the United States.

Panic Attack

Wild assertions about Asian economic dominance have had cyclical rises in popularity for decades.  We can learn important lessons about China from the previous high point in the 1980s, if only we would glance back.  Do we not remember our fears of the Japanese economic tsunami that threatened to envelop the United States? Japan was buying up iconic American real estate like the Rockefeller Center, Columbia Pictures and the Pebble Beach golf course, creating angst about our patrimony. Hawaii became an extension of Tokyo. The Japanese business model was crushing American industry. The Japanese economy was expanding while ours was contracting. The trade imbalance with Japan was exploding. Japan became the world’s biggest creditor just as the United States earned the dubious distinction of being the world’s biggest debtor. Japan was the very image of high quality and efficiency that the whole world wished to emulate, while American industry had a growing reputation for making sub-standard products considered second-rate in the global economy. Japanese companies became industry leaders in fields previously dominated by American businesses. Japanese ascendancy was assumed, unquestioned, accepted as inevitable, a juggernaut unstoppable by a weakened United States.

In this heady environment, the Japanese grew to believe that their country and people were superior.  This arrogance was captured perfectly in 1989 in The Japan That Can Say No, co-authored by Sony co-founder Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo’s former mayor (governor).  The authors boldly claimed that American workers were lazy, and that Japan benefited from a huge advantage with its highly educated workforce.  The book went further to claim, in a fit of xenophobic racism, that Japanese character was innately superior to Americans, who have been contaminated by the problems of a multiethnic and multicultural society.

Yet this panic and hysteria are barely mentioned in polite circles today.  We do not discuss the breathless headlines about Japan buying America.  We bury the memory of the most prominent Asian experts pontificating ominously about a new world order.  We do so out of a sense of embarrassment, because all the talking heads and prognosticators were simply wrong.  Chalmers Johnson, perhaps the best known of the Japanese experts, later confessed with amazing understatement, “In retrospect I probably did overstate the nature of the Japanese challenge.”

Lessons from Japan

And now we are repeating the exercise with China, perpetuating the same myths that we foolishly did with Japan. Astonishingly, Chalmers with no embarrassment ignores his poor vision of the future for Japan, and with no hesitation has predicted a similar dominant rise for China. I feel there may be a credibility problem here…

We have clearly learned absolutely nothing from our experience in the 1980s. Yes, China’s meteoric rise has a different genesis than Japan’s and significantly different implications for the United States. But the heavy breathing about China is wrong, just as the experts got Japan wrong.  To understand why we misjudge China, we first have to examine our misunderstanding of Japan’s false rise.

Cultural Limitations

The economic prosperity of the Clinton years, and a decade of stagnation and burst bubbles in Tokyo, proved beyond doubt that the hypothesis put forth by Morita and Ishihara represented nothing but insular racism rather than any fundamental truth about Japanese greatness. But how did all the pundits get so spectacularly off track before the reality of Japan’s fallibility was exposed by world events? They simply did not look deep enough at Japanese culture.

America’s economic might derives directly from an infrastructure that encourages individualism, innovation, entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Japan’s economic growth resulted from the focused determination that derives from uniformity, conformity, risk-aversion and group-thinking. The Japanese approach has great merit, but severe limitations. Those limitations were reached in the 1990s.  In the midst of our collective panic about Japan, I said to anybody who would listen, and I am sure nobody did, that we just needed to take a deep breath, and let Japan’s methodology play itself out.  The school system crushes individualism, punishes severely any attempt to innovate, and demands a degree of social conformity unthinkable in the United States.  That fundamental constraint was missed by the experts – in a world driven by innovation.

Limits of Uniformity and Rigidity

Also missed were the structural limitations of Japan’s “keiretsu” or cartels, most of which are illegal but exist as an open dirty secret.  The Japanese economy was then, and in many ways still is, highly “cartelized” in manufacturing, farming and trade.  This model of rigid uniformity in a school system that feeds automatons into a semi-monopolized command-control economy works well for an emerging economy, but is not suitable for global leadership.  A culture and economy so hostile to individualism simply cannot outgrow a system dedicated to the entrepreneurial spirit. We have witnessed this truth.

We can see Japan’s problem with a political analogy. A dictator has certain advantages over an elected president in a democracy.  An absolute ruler unencumbered by negotiations with opponents can move by decree and react quickly.  But while that model has certain short-term advantages, the limits can be seen by the results of history.  The more flexible, messy, democratic approach has proven superior.  Likewise, the American economy, which is messy, multicultural, scrappy and individualistic, is ultimately more powerful than the rigid, neater, uniform, and tidier Japanese model, in spite of the latter’s short-term advantages.  What we really ended up with is the Japan that can say maybe.

China

Just as we overlooked the structural flaws in the Japanese economy during Japan’s rapid rise, so too are we blind to limiting and deep-seated constraints in China that will prove to be inherent brakes on growth.  What pundits today fail to recognize is that China’s economic expansion is more illusory than spectacular.  The fundamental constraint on future growth imposed by severe environmental degradation in China is the story line that is not being read, even as the populace chokes on dense smog and drinks contaminated water.  Multi-decadal double-digit expansion has been achieved at the terrible cost of unprecedented levels of pollution, irreversible damage to ecosystem functions, and depletion of critical non-renewable natural resources.  China has sustained unprecedented growth by stealing, not borrowing, from future generations.  That debt must be paid, and when the invoice comes due, the economic expansion will come to a grinding halt.

Environmental Destruction and Natural Resource Depletion

The magnitude of the environmental waste and destruction in China is so staggering as to be hard to comprehend.  Sixteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China.  The country recently admitted to having “cancer villages.” Nearly one-third of all Chinese lacks access to potable water, with a per-capita supply about one-quarter the global average.  China admits that 90% of its groundwater is polluted.  More than 70% of China’s rivers, lakes and streams are heavily contaminated.  Every year, nearly 6000 square miles of grasslands and forests are lost to desertification.   Desert sands claim an area equivalent to New Jersey every five years. One impact among many is an unprecedented number of choking sandstorms, more than quadruple the number compared to just ten years ago.

Chinese air is now a nasty brew of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone.  Many regions of China can now lay claim to the most polluted air in the world.  The situation is only getting worse, because automobiles are now the leading cause of dirty air, even though China imposes emissions and mileage standards that well exceed those in the United States.  If China achieves parity with the United States on per-capita automobile ownership, China alone would have 1.1 billion cars compared to the global fleet today of 800 million.

Acid rain is so pervasive and severe that crop yields have declined in about 30% of the country, and buildings are being seriously damaged in every urban area.

A projected population of 1.5 billion by 2031 will impose ever-greater demands on dwindling supplies of scarce but vital resources.  At that population level, China itself would need to consume resources at a volume now being used by the rest of the world combined.   For example, a Chinese population of that size would, with reasonable projections of per capita consumption, require about 100 million barrels of oil per day, compared to global use today of about 85 million barrels daily.  They will soon exceed the oil consumption of the United States.  China is already the world’s leading consumer of tropical hardwoods, grain, meat, coal and steel.

Health Crisis

The impact of air pollution on human health is enormous. Journalist Deng Fei said, “If things continue like this, we will all be doomed. If the issue [of ground water pollution] is not properly solved, not only will it kill people but it will also drag down the entire healthcare system because of the number of cancer patients it causes.”

From 2001-2006, a study conducted by Nanjing University showed that air pollution caused an increase in birth defects by an astonishing 50%, affecting 1.2 million babies.  Respiratory diseases are now a leading cause of death in adults.  A report from the United Nations in 2002 concluded that 23,000 respiratory deaths, 13,000 fatal heart attacks and 15 million cases of bronchitis were directly attributable to air pollution.  The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution kills 656,000 Chinese each year.

The remainder of the animal kingdom is not immune, either, to pollution or habitat destruction.  According to the IUCN Red List, China is a tenuous home to 385 threatened species. Some are familiar to the West, including the giant panda, South China and Siberian tigers, Asian elephant, and Yangtze River dolphin, but they are joined by many lesser-known species essential to normal ecosystem functioning.

Social Destabilization

The environmental crisis is not the only burden the Chinese must overcome.  Social issues like the spread of AIDS, a disparity between numbers of men and women creating a restless and socially destabilizing “bachelor class”, unchecked urban migration, and widespread racism will diminish prosperity and hamper economic growth as well.

China is fighting a losing battle between resource depletion, pollution, population growth and fragile political stability.  Only by eating their seed corn have they been able to promote growth and maintain order, giving a false sense of progress that is not sustainable.  The granary is rapidly approaching empty, and when the degraded and polluted land can no longer support the mirage, the miracle of the Chinese economy will be exposed for the myth that it is.

Economic Myth

In spite of fiscal hysteria, China does not own the United States, any more than Japan did earlier at its peak. This is true for three very different reasons.  First, when you owe a bank $100,000, they are in control; when you owe the bank a few billion dollars, you are.  China is simply too heavily invested in the American economy to make any move to endanger that investment.  Second, the nature of China’s financial relationship with the United States makes the idea of being too heavily indebted to them a bit silly. The U.S. government raises money, among other means, by selling treasury bonds.  Buying those bonds is not equivalent to buying corporate securities.  With stocks, you become part owner of the company in which you invested.  Not true with treasury bonds: you don’t buy “ownership” of the United States by investing in such bonds.  You have lent the government money and expect a return (however small) on that investment, secured only on the good faith of the government.  The U.S. did not sign over title so you can foreclose if you do not receive payment.  In spite of claims to the contrary, borrowing money with only the promise to repay does not shift the balance of power between lender and borrower.  Third, China’s investment is exaggerated, representing only 7.5 percent of the $16 trillion in outstanding debt.  The vast majority of the remainder is held by Americans and American institutions. Yes, I have just grossly oversimplified what is a complex macroeconomic relationship, but the bottom line message is valid. We have nothing to fear from China’s investment in the U.S. economy.  They need us more than we need them.

Take a Deep Breath

But the pundits keep babbling on. The New York Times published an article in 2005 opening with the paragraph:

“Not even 20 years have passed since the apparently unstoppable Japanese economic juggernaut struck fear in the hearts of Americans, and now China has emerged to be seen as the new economic menace threatening the nation’s vital strategic interests.”

Mercifully, the forecasts have been tempered a bit since then, but still talk ominously of a rising China.  The very same expert who warned us about the land of the rising sun now says, yes, but “China is several orders of magnitude different from Japan.”

When you hear experts talk about the economic threat posed by an ascending China, remember Japan.  They are ignoring the obvious, just like in the 1980s.  China is in deep trouble.  I predict now for China what I did for Japan at its peak:  China is simply facing too great of a burden of gargantuan social, economic, health and environmental disasters.  They have nowhere to go but down.

Highways, Flyways and Personal Freedom

Most Americans have long forgotten that the roads we all take for granted have a rich history that reverberates even today in the current budget debacle and fight over sequestration.  We equally give little thought to the extensive and complex air control systems that allow for tens of thousands of departures and arrivals daily. Nor do most of us realize how in forgetting our transportation history we are in danger of eroding our personal freedoms and our constitutional rights to privacy.   To understand the seemingly odd connection between highways, flyways and a threat to privacy, we need to review (mercifully briefly) the history of how we got here today.

Interstate Highways

This story does not begin with Eisenhower. As far back as 1815, a national road was built between Cumberland, Maryland and St. Louis, which at the time was both the most ambitious road project in the United States and the pathway for immigration to the west. To put this in a timeline perspective, Congress approved construction in 1811, but work did not begin until 1815 because of the intervening War of 1812. The road was built, but eventually fell into disrepair. Many sections were abandoned, as were any lingering thoughts of a comprehensive national highway system.

That is, until a second more ambitious attempt to create a national system of roads began with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938. The original idea was to create toll rolls to support construction and maintenance of a triplet of super east-west and north-south highways. But the Bureau of Public Roads eventually concluded the system could not be self-sustaining; so they suggested instead building a network of public roads totaling about 27,000 miles.

Building on those ideas, Congress passed a revised Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944, which for the first time contemplated the creation of a true “National System of Interstate Highways” extending to 40,000 miles. But in the absence of any specific routes to build, little progress was made.

Now enter Eisenhower. Upon becoming president, Ike knew firsthand the strategic importance of improving roads. As a lieutenant colonel in the army in 1919, he was on the first motorized military convoy from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco.  The trip took nearly two months, and extracted casualties that included 21 men and nine vehicles.   This deficit in transportation infrastructure was more striking to Eisenhower than most because he saw during WWII the military advantages of the autobahn in Germany.

With that motivation, Ike pushed for the next iteration of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1954.  The original act optimistically set aside $175 million for the project.  Soon that become obviously and woefully inadequate to the task, and Eisenhower pushed in 1956 for an expanded budget of $25 billion, of which 90 percent would come from the federal government. That is $215 billion in today’s dollars. At the time, the U.S. debt was $273 billion, which today would be about $2.3 trillion. What we bought for that money, during a time of deep debt following world war, was a system that now boasts about 47,000 miles of road, not far from what was imagined in 1944.

National Air Traffic Control System

Think of our airways as a system of national highways in the sky. In fact, the history of building the aviation infrastructure in the United States finds many parallels with its terrestrial counterpart.  In 1930, Cleveland opened the country’s first radio-equipped control room; by 1932 the Commerce Department had installed a national array of 83 radio beacons to guide pilots on transcontinental flights. Soon after, advances in two-way radios allowed controllers on the ground to communicate with pilots, and air traffic control towers started popping up all over the country. By 1936 the Commerce Department had three operational Air Route Traffic Control Centers in Newark, Cleveland and Chicago.  But with increased commercial air traffic, even that soon proved to be inadequate.

In 1938, Congress passed legislation to create the Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA), putting under one roof the growing body of federal aviation regulations. Just before WWII, the CAA had its authority expanded beyond just airways to include departures and landings, which finally united control towers and enroute traffic control centers into an integrated whole.

WWII then brought radar to aviation traffic control, the next big technological advance.  Following the first installation in 1946, almost all departure and approach control used radar, but the systems did not extend much beyond airport boundaries. That changed in 1956, when two airplanes collided over the Grand Canyon. Congress funded a $250 million effort to upgrade the national airway system to include advanced radar coverage. That crash also motivated Congress to pass in 1958 the Federal Aviation Act creating the Federal Aviation Agency, which evolved into the now-familiar Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). That set the stage for everything we see and take for granted today, as new technologies with transponders, computers, GPS and glass cockpits integrated with ground control improved the safety and capacity of the system. The FAA now safely moves 70,000 flights per day.

Eye in the Sky: Gird Your Loins and Cover Them Too

Federal money built and continues to support our transportation infrastructure in the air and on the ground. So what if I suggested to you the following rather absurd idea: because these are public throughways supported with taxpayer dollars, every car and truck in the country must install a GPS to allow the government to track every vehicle driving on an interstate. Furthermore, the government will publish the tracking data in real time so that anybody can see where every car, your car, is driving at all times. The data will also be stored so anybody can see a complete history of your driving record. Your spouse can track your car going to work; your friends and co-workers can see where you’ve gone on vacation. Advertisers can know what stores you drive to. Your enemies can know where you are at all times. Crazy, right? Completely insane.

And yet this is precisely what the government does with airplanes flying between any two airports — all airplanes, small, big, commercial and private. Just as you would object to the crazy program of publishing a tracking record of your car for all to see, individuals and small business owners of airplanes object equally to publishing a record of their flights, for exactly the same reasons.

If you harbor the idea that this issue does not matter to you because you do not own a private airplane, I have one word for you:  drones. If you do not fight for others to keep their right to privacy, you could be next to lose yours. Consider the potential for invasive abuse by drones ranging in size from high-flying full size aircraft to insect-size prototypes now in laboratories looking down into your back yard. Giving up the precious right of privacy is a steep and slippery slope. Give away one right and the next is not far behind. So read on. This issue matters to you whether you own an airplane or not.

To stop the outrageous practice of publishing for all to see every flight of every airplane, the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) lobbied for a program, which they ran for the FAA, allowing aircraft owners to opt out of public tracking. The FAA still tracked all flights of course, but removed the exempted flights from the database released to the public.

But this caused a public furor, and the program ended after a short time.  Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies explained the objection thus: use of airspace is public information because taxpayers fund air-traffic controllers, radar and runways. Collins said, “It belongs to all of us. It is not a private preserve.”

Okay, let’s take that same logic and apply it to our highways:

Use of interstate highways is public information because taxpayers fund road construction, bridge building and highway maintenance. “It belongs to all of us. It is not a private preserve.”  So if Collins’s logic is correct, we either must install those GPS units on every car and truck and start publishing their tracking records; or stop the madness and stop publishing the tracking records of airplane owners who wish to keep such information from the public. You can’t have it both ways — look at the history of highways and flyways — you can’t claim the mantle of taxpayer privilege for one and not the other. The fact of taxpayer funding does not result in a de-facto loss of all rights to privacy, on the ground or in the air.

Flying is not the domain of rich celebrities flying their Gulfstreams to opening night, even if that gets all the press. General aviation (GA) is the lifeblood of our economy. Here is just a small sample of what owners of small airplanes do for us:

•After the Haiti earthquake, more than 40 percent of all relief flights were GA. In addition, GA flights were able to get into small airports, grass strips and even roads, which were inaccessible to larger airplanes.

•The United States has more than 230,000 private airplanes that operate out of 20,000 public- and private-use airports.  Compare that to the 565 large airports available to the airlines.  To put this in perspective, small airplanes fly 166 million passengers every year, making GA effectively the nation’s largest airline.

• Then take those facts and consider where American businesses would be if GA were not available to transport people and goods to every corner of the country.  Community airfields provide local access to the entire country:  “a mile of highway gets you one mile, but a mile of runway can take you anywhere.”

• Small aircraft are used by farmers and ranchers to such an extent that without GA crop yields would drop 50 percent or more. And without GA, high value crops would not be brought to market except to a narrow geographic range around the producing farm.

• Without GA we would not have Medevac flights, volunteer transportation for cancer and burn victims.  Organ transplants would be virtually impossible without GA, which is used to transport recently harvested organs to patients around the country in most need.

• Our entire power grid would never be built, and would collapse today, without GA.  Power lines and transmission towers are built using helicopters, and airplanes are used to constantly monitor the multiple thousands of miles of power lines.

Sure, some rich people own big airplanes and fly them to exotic locales.  But that is not the core of GA, nor does that give us an excuse to invade the privacy of every airplane owner.  Forget the class warfare angle – this is strictly a matter of privacy invasion at a grand scale.  Individuals and small businesses moving by air have the same right to privacy that you do when driving your car.

Fiscal Sanity and Responsibility

Potentially lost in the privacy debacle is another important issue associated with our transportation history that warrants further mention here:  the balance between spending for upkeep and expansion and our rapidly growing public debt.   Due to sequestration, the FAA will close 149 control towers in April.  This is a classic case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.  Commercial aviation contributes $1.3 trillion to the economy, and comprises 5.2 percent of our GDP.  Aviation supports more than 10 million jobs with total earnings of $394 billion.

Cutting aviation services to reduce our debt makes little sense in current context or from a historic perspective.  In 1946, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio was 122 percent. In 2011, that figure was about 100 percent, which puts into some perspective the hysteria over the current fiscal problems we face.  Yes, we absolutely must get debt under control; but we must also take a deep breath and look at our history to understand our current predicament.  The greatest generation had no problem with deficit spending during and after the war to grow the economy.  As we extract ourselves from more than a decade of war and trillions of dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, we face a period in our fiscal history analogous to the end of the WWII.  The fundamentals of what Eisenhower knew in 1956 remain true today.  As our bridges collapse and roads crumble, as we absurdly close control towers, we should learn from the past and invest in our future.  And in doing so, we should never yield an inch in protecting our right to privacy.

Response to CPAC Extremism: A Liberal Manifesto

As the CPAC crowed cheers and offers standing ovations to the growing extremism of right wing idealism, the time has come to offer a comprehensive alternative to the politics of hate. Marc Rubio, the new darling of the right, harked back to the old and tired idea that only Republicans were patriots. He also said silly things like, “There is no tax increase in the world that will solve our long-term debt problem.” Sure, but also there is no spending cut in the world that will solve the problem either. The whole point, and Obama’s focus, is a balanced approach that includes both ideas. Listening to CPAC speakers is an exercise is frustration, like hearing an old LP stuck in one place just repeating over and over and over the same old tired refrain. Spin the record in reverse and you hear not only that “Paul is dead” but NRA’s LaPierre ranting about gun regulation.

If any one line of any speech embodies the sclerotic stagnation of right wing ideology, it is this from Rubio: “We don’t need new ideas. The idea is America and it still works.” The line got huge applause. Of course only their idea of America is valid; and everything in that world is so perfect that they need no new ideas to solve modern problems.

Rand Paul went all in on libertarianism, with the limp quip that “for liberty to expand, government must shrink.” Paul and Rubio were like two rats fighting over the last scraps of food on a sinking ship. It was like passing the remains of a terrible car accident; you don’t want to watch but just can’t turn away from the carnage.

As a healthy counter to the creepy insular jingoism of CPAC, I offer here fresh view of the world from the liberal perspective. Here is my liberal manifesto.

Self-evident Truths

We the people of rational thought and sound mind in middle America, in order to establish a more perfect union , establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the benefits of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Liberal ideology in the United States of America.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal with no special status of birth, and that all life on Earth began as a contingent event based on standard laws of physics and chemistry involving no magic spark or divine act.

We further hold these truths to be indisputable facts of our biology and a clear demonstration of our humble place in the biosphere, which is a fundamental foundation of our political philosophy: 1) Evolution is an undirected process with no purpose, intelligence, or foresight. Humans, who evolved under the same laws of nature as all other creatures on earth, hold no exalted status in the pantheon of life. 2) All species exploit the environment to the maximum extent possible, until either competition, resource depletion, predation, disease or other constraints limit growth and expansion. Like every other animal, humans have followed this natural path of using all available resources in our struggle to survive. One critical difference, however, is our technological advantage. Our species has successfully co-opted a significant percentage of the planet’s bounty as we fight to pass our genes to the next generation. This unique reliance on technology to exploit the environment, and to threaten each other using weapons of war, has had global effects over a short time period. As a result, while we act no differently than other animals in pursuit of survival, our actions may cause our extinction, either through the degradation of the resources on which we depend, or more directly through the use of weapons of mass destruction. 3) The large brains that gave us technology, prosperity, myths and war also give us the ability to choose, personally and collectively, to be concerned with the fate of distant generations, and to behave for the greater good. Humans are special, not because we are made in god’s image, and told to rule over the Earth, but because people have the amazing ability to choose a future in which we will thrive and develop in a just society while coexisting with a healthy natural world. If humans fail to seize this opportunity to create such a future, we will be no more than bacteria with e-mail accounts.

Inalienable Rights

Liberals are committed to the development and adoption of policies, programs and laws that will help guide humankind toward a just future in which we celebrate our deep connection to all things living as a minor twig on the vast four billion year old ever-branching bush of life.

To secure the inherent rights consistent with our biology and evolutionary history, governments are created as human institutions that derive their just powers solely from the consent of the governed. No government so formed can claim to be favored by gods of their own making. The mythical god of Abraham is not Republican, Democrat, Independent, Progressive or American.

The various powers of the earth are entitled to a decent respect as to the opinions of humankind contingent on a demonstrable fidelity to the rightful laws of nature and ability to secure for all citizens the inalienable rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A government formed by the people for the people can survive only through open debate, free exchange of ideas and reliance on verifiable facts to arbitrate disputes. Liberals are therefore dedicated to rooting out hypocrisy, myth, appeal to faith and bigotry in political discourse. We vigorously reject pious calls: to balance the budget, but only when a Democrat holds the nation’s highest office; to protect the Constitution while advocating to alter the document for trivial purpose; to end “runaway government spending” when the party making that demand is responsible for the nation’s greatest debts and deficits; to repeal “government-run” health care while reaping the benefits of Medicare; to stop tax hikes that are in fact nothing but repealing temporary cuts that led to record deficits and debts; to promote energy reform that is a cloak to hide continued subsidies for the fossil fuel industry; to agitate to “take back America” without articulating who exactly America is being taken back from; to get “government off the people’s back” while advocating government intrusion into our most personal and intimate choices, including who we marry and a woman’s right to choose her own reproductive destiny; to promote limited government while urging the federal government to “do more” whenever a crisis or natural disaster occurs; to promote education while foisting upon our children superstitions and myths appropriate to the 15th century; to promote the inherent advantages of capitalism while legislating “free market” regulations that subsidize and foster corruption, harm individual investors and squeeze small businesses. This hypocrisy must end.

Role of Government

We call for a government that is as big as necessary, but no bigger. The ideals of small government, balanced budgets and lower taxes are shared by all in theory but diverge in implementation. While conservative agitators attempt to paint of a picture of stark differences in fiscal ideology between the left and right, the facts tell a different story. We call on the Congress to debate federal spending on facts rather than ideological fiction. To promote such a debate, we note the following facts about the 2010 federal budget (we take this year to examine because it incorporates the worst impact of the recession beginning in 2008; the conclusions are the same using 2012 numbers):

National defense ($718 billion), Health and Human Services (including Medicare; $900 billion) and Social Security ($780 billion) combine to a sum of $2.4 trillion out of a total federal budget of $3.8 trillion. The sum all of these government programs comprise 63% of the entire spending package. The National Science Foundation ($ 6 billion) and law enforcement, including border patrol ($60 billion) add $66 billion more. Farm subsidies, which mainly go to red states, add another $17 billion. Those total $83 billion. The government is also paying $200 billion annually in interest on debt created under President Bush.

This package of federal spending has widespread and deep backing from conservatives. That brings total government spending that has Republican backing to $3.2 trillion, out of a total budget of $3.8 trillion. We note therefore that Republicans actively support and defend 84 percent of the big government they so thoroughly disdain. We conclude that opponents of liberalism believe a budget of $3.2 trillion is virtuous but are outraged by a budget of $3.7 trillion. Even if liberals supported 100 percent of the federal budget (they do not), gathering up righteous indignation about the remaining 14 percent hardly constitutes an ideological divide between big and small government. Let us lose this false debate and focus on the issues of greatest importance to our future well-being.

National Security

Liberals believe that we can and must protect American citizens against terrorism without sacrificing the very rights we are fighting to protect. We have faith in the strength of our Constitution, and believe that we can work within the constraints of our founding document to protect the Republic and secure a prosperous future.

Republicans scoff at the idea that “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both” (multiple variations, usually attributed to Ben Franklin). Instead, conservatives believe that our safety can only be secured by sacrificing our rights; the same ones our founders thought were inalienable. In the name of national security, conservatives advocate that the government (which they distrust in all other arenas) be given the extraordinary power to detain any American citizen and that the suspect be denied the right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus, denied access by families and denied legal representation. In condoning torture, disdaining Miranda rights, and dismissing the right of the accused to meet his accuser, conservative ideology has become one of the greatest threats to liberty.

Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Recovery

Faced with the choice of a catastrophic depression or federal debt, President Obama prudently even if reluctantly chose the latter. We applaud his precipitous actions to prevent an economic calamity with emergency stimulus money. As with health care, we acknowledge as well his leadership in getting the Congress to pass meaningful if imperfect Wall Street reform.

Eight years of conservative rule left the economy of the United States in shambles with double-digit unemployment festering in a deep recession, on the verge of a great depression, with record annual deficits and a ballooning national debt. Eight years of an almost religious zeal for deregulation left Wall Street drowning in a sea of massive corruption, failed banks, and collapsing brokerage houses. Conservatives have exhausted all credibility on the subject of fiscal responsibility. Whenever a Republican is President, the Party quietly buries the mantra that we are “living off the backs of our grandchildren” to rail against government spending, but brings the phrase back into use when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. Enough. The time has come, finally, to kill once and for all Republican hypocrisy on this subject.

While declining significantly under President Obama, unemployment remains persistently higher than desirable, a personal tragedy for millions of Americans. The real daily suffering this causes for families across the land can never be minimized. But we also call on the American people to exercise some realistic if painful patience as the economy walks back from the brink of collapse. Unemployment continues to decline, even if too slowly. We note that President Bush inherited from President Clinton an unemployment rate of 4 percent, but left office bequeathing to Obama an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent and growing monthly. Bush was losing 700,000 jobs per month, a number that has declined and then reversed under Obama. Blaming Obama for reversing the economic nightmare caused by Republican incompetence because the momentum of the recovery is too slow feels good but makes little sense. It also ignores a housing industry on the rebound, Wall Street hitting record highs, manufacturing growing and inventories shrinking and exports expanding.

Education

Our educational system is in shambles, and our children lag far behind by every international standard. But we dither, focusing on “vouchers” instead of underlying problems. In the meantime 75% of our kids do not know that George Washington was our first president or that the east coast of our country borders the Atlantic Ocean. Rather than face the real issues, conservatives simply attack the Department of Education as a favorite foil. We are dooming entire generations to second class status in the world. While the rest of the world eagerly provides children with a sophisticated curriculum of science and technology, the United States lags behind under the weight of antiquated debates forced upon us by the religious right.

Health Care

We fully endorse Obamacare. In doing so we acknowledge that the president of the United States is not a dictator, and must work with a divided Congress, and therefore any legislation will be less than perfect. We applaud President Obama for his success. He acted in the face of a growing crisis: our health care system is an embarrassment, but is defended through gross ignorance as “the best in the world.” We spend twice as much per capita as any other wealthy democracy but get a poor return on that investment. The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not offer universal health care. In the industrial world we are ranked 26th in infant mortality. We are 24th in healthy life expectancy. Overall our health care system is ranked 37th globally, behind third-world countries like Oman. Only the United States has the embarrassment of medical bankruptcies. The health care reform recently implemented is an important step in bringing the United States back up to the standards of a developed country.

Clean Energy

Now is the time to create the renewable energy equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. We need to push our transition to green energy technologies quickly, massively, with unwavering commitment. This is our opportunity.

“Drill baby drill” is not a national energy policy, yet remains a tired refrain on the right. Fracking does not solve our long-term problem. We must invest heavily in research, implementation and infrastructure development: research to discover new technologies; implementation to ensure wide adoption of the technologies in play now; and a restructuring of tax incentives to promote clean growth, discourage waste and accelerate the development of the extensive infrastructure changes necessary to widely adopt clean energy technologies. While the predominant emphasis must be on the private sector, we will also need direct government investment in certain areas beyond research, such as modernizing the electric grid. This is how our national interests will be secured. This is where jobs will be created. The United States should rightfully lead this charge.

Climate Change

Climate change is real, exceeding natural background rates, and is caused by human activity. We have run out of time for debate, and need to act quickly now. Cap and trade is a flawed mechanism to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but better than doing nothing and certainly a reasonable intermediate step. We call on the Congress to overcome conservative resistance and re-introduce this legislation.

Conservative denials of climate change are tragic on many levels. We are condemning millions to an unfortunate future of coastal flooding, mass migrations, agricultural disruptions, exposure to the northward march of tropical diseases, and inevitable wars over shifting and scarce resources. When these tragic events unfold, we will face of millions of unnecessary deaths and the preventable disruption of hundreds of millions of lives.

Environment

The world every year is losing 40 million acres of tropical forests, which now cover only 6% of the globe’s surface, down from 14%. More than half of all coral reefs are dead, dying or endangered. Humans have depleted 90 percent of all large fish from the world’s oceans. We are losing up to 50,000 species each year to extinction, a rate 1000 times natural background levels.

We have no luxury in time as we ponder a response. The false dichotomy between growth and the environment is an anachronism born from the failures of conservative thought. Conservatives believe that growth is only possible at the expense of the environment, and that any and all efforts to protect our resources impede growth and cost jobs. That philosophy is wrong on every count and has proven so by history repeatedly. Environmentalism is not the ideology of socialists, but instead the true engine of all future economic growth.

We need to protect our forests and biodiversity, reinvest in clean air and clean water, sustainably manage our marine resources and improve efficiencies at all levels of production and consumption. We accomplish these goals with strict enforcement of existing regulations, improved laws to accommodate advances in our knowledge of ecosystem function and the development of a truly level playing field in which green technologies can compete fairly with traditional industries. Economic incentives, tax laws, enforcement of environmental legislation, implementation of international treaties, and government support for sustainable resource use are necessary to create the milieu in which individuals can rationally act to promote the greater good.

We, therefore, the representatives of the rational electorate of United States of America, appealing to natural law and reason, do by authority of the good people here gathered, solemnly publish and declare that Liberals hereby establish a rational approach to solve America’s problems. For the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of human dignity, we mutually pledge to each other our fortunes and sacred honor.

Being Intelligent About Intelligence

Chimps once again triumph. Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a researcher at Kyoto University, showed that a chimpanzee named Ayumu clearly out-performed humans on some working memory tests, a category of short-term recall. What is surprising is that anybody finds this surprising. We continue to be blinded by our hubris and conceit, so sure are we that human beings are better and above all other animals. As Ayumu shows, we will continue to be disappointed. Let’s take a look at the score board.

Intelligence

Without a doubt, human beings possess a level of intelligence, self-consciousness and self-awareness greater by degree than is found in any other animal. Evidence suggests that no animal besides the human kind is aware of its own mortality, the ultimate expression of self-awareness. (Elephants might be an exception). Only humans bury their dead ceremonially. Chimpanzees do not visit their lawyers to make out a will in anticipation of impending death. For centuries, philosophers have taken this highly developed sense of self in humans to mean that intelligence does not exist at all in other animals. Descartes was convinced that animals completely lacked minds, and his influence is felt even today. Even Stephen Jay Gould, no species-centric chauvinist, concluded that consciousness has been “vouchsafed only to our species in the history of life on earth.”

With all due respect to the late Professor Gould, perhaps one of the greatest evolutionary biologists of our time, and to Descartes, the issue is not so simple. As with almost all aspects of comparative biology, intelligence, self-consciousness and self-awareness are elements of a continuum, rather than phenomena with sharp boundaries between species. Intelligence and self-awareness do not belong exclusively in the domain of humankind.

A rough hierarchy exits among the concepts of “intelligent,” “self-conscious,” and “self-aware.” One must be intelligent to be self-conscious, and in turn, self-conscious to be self-aware. So let’s begin with intelligence, the first ingredient in the recipe for self-awareness, in order to explore how these “human” capabilities are distributed throughout the animal kingdom.

Intelligence can be thought of as the ability to learn from experience (acquire and retain new knowledge), and to subsequently apply that new knowledge with flexibility to manipulate or adapt to a changing environment. Or intelligence can be seen as the ability to create abstract thought, beyond instinct or responses to sensory input.

The primary difficulty in defining and measuring intelligence precisely is that mental acuity is situationally dependent. While dolphins are clearly smart you would be severely challenged to teach one to climb a tree. An animal’s intelligence, or more precisely, its ability to manifest its intelligence, is tightly correlated with its natural environment, and its evolutionary adaptations.

Intelligence, no matter how we define the concept, is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Animals have diverse adaptations that define the context of intelligence, making interspecies comparisons almost meaningless. Intelligence is found by degrees across the animal kingdom, and not in some nice neat linear correlation with some other trait like the development of mammary glands. Being smart seems to be a trait unique to human beings only when we artificially designate our particular suite of characteristics as the definition of intelligence, proving that circular logic is not too intelligent.

All of the references given here are cited in an extensive bibliography of Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World.

Self-consciousness

For most of human history, people were convinced that no animal could be self-conscious, with Descartes representing the poster child of this viewpoint. Our ability to be conscious of our own existence was seen to endow humans with something special. Self-consciousness was considered the ultimate expression of humanness. That is until we learned more about our animal cousins. Some animals indeed exhibit this most “human” of traits; in fact, self-consciousness is probably widespread in the animal kingdom.

The idea of self-consciousness is not without controversy; the scientific community is not unified in defining the concept. For example, some scientists use the term “self-conscious” in the sense that others use the term “self-aware” (as I do here): an animal’s thought about thought, in which an animal has a “second order representation” of his own mental state. That means an animal not only thinks, but also thinks about thinking. Some scientists call the ability to “think about thinking” self-consciousness, and others call it self-awareness. This academic parsing is why cocktail parties at a professor’s house can be so stimulating.

But the two concepts of awareness and consciousness are quite distinct, and should not be confused one with the other. Self-awareness represents a further refinement of self-consciousness. A simple definition of self-consciousness can be distilled to: understanding that you as an individual are distinct from the external environment, and at the same time recognizing that others are similarly aware of you as an individual. I can only recognize Ralph as a unique person if I first understand that I too am an individual. With this meaning then, the ability to recognize other individuals is perhaps the most important indication of an animal being self-conscious. The notion of self-consciousness is therefore amenable to experimental investigation because we can test for individual recognition. We have a window into the mind!

In the animal kingdom, individual recognition, and therefore self-consciousness, would most readily be found in highly social animals where survival depends on recognizing dominant individuals, and in turn, dominating those lower in the social hierarchy. (Remember high school)? Animals that pair-bond for life, and therefore can recognize a mate among many conspecifics, are also more likely to be self-conscious, at least by the definition given here.

For sticklers of logic, one implication here is that an animal can be self-conscious without being self-aware. That is, an animal can recognize itself as an individual among other individuals, without knowing anything deeper about its own mental state. But at the same time, gregarious animals would also have evolutionary pressures to recognize not only the dominant animal in the group as an individual, but also his emotional state and that of others in the hierarchy. You might get more food if you know when to approach a kill when the big guy is in a good mood. So while it is possible to be self-conscious without being self-aware, the development of one trait might typically lead to the other.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is a further refinement of the concept of self-consciousness (while some scientists invert this relationship), in that you not only recognize yourself as an individual relative to others and the physical environment, you are also aware of your own mental state, including your own internal thoughts independent of the external world. Your thoughts are unavailable to anybody but you until you decide to expose them to the external world either through behavior or some type of communication. Self-awareness depends on no other creature but you. You would be self-aware even if you were the last person on earth, with no other sentient being to recognize your presence. Self-awareness is your brain acknowledging its own existence.

Place a chimpanzee, let’s call him Alessandro, in a room in which he finds a large mirror. After a brief period in which Alessandro has become familiar with the room and the mirror, anesthetize him. While he is asleep, paint a dot of yellow paint on Alessandro’s forehead, and gently place him back in the room. After waking up, most animals will not notice or react to the dot, continuing to treat the reflection in the mirror as another animal. But Alessandro, and his fellow chimpanzees and orangutans, will recognize the image in the mirror as themselves, touching their foreheads and examining the dot. That demonstrates that Alessandro knows the forehead in the mirror is his, and that he normally does not have a dot on his head.

One could object that this experiment in fact only demonstrates self-consciousness, rather than self-awareness, proving that Alessandro recognizes himself as an individual. This is a gray area. We cannot state with certainty from this particular experiment if Alessandro is aware of his own mental state even if the results hint in that direction. Nevertheless, we have from this and other observations at least an indication that primates like Alessandro might be truly self-aware. We also have evidence that mammals other than primates share this talent with humans. Using a modified version of the dot-on-the-forehead procedure, mirror self-recognition has been demonstrated in bottlenose dolphins, magpies and elephants.

Dolphins and porpoises have also demonstrated originality and creativity, both tangential indicators of self-awareness. An animal can only be creative in context of understanding its own behavior and intent, something that requires a level of self-awareness. Likewise, the act of creating something new, the capacity for originality, usually requires a deep understanding of one’s own internal representation of the world as it now exits, also a feature of self-awareness. Animals that clearly demonstrate originality and creativity are likely self-aware, at least to some degree.

At the Makapuu Oceanic Center in Hawaii, trainers working with a female rough-toothed dolphin named Malia praised or fed her fish only for behaviors that had not been previously rewarded. Within a few days, Malia began performing novel aerial flips, corkscrews, new tail flaps, new twisted breaches, and other never-before-seen behaviors. Malia learned early on that the trainers were looking for new acts, not repetitions of previously demonstrated talents. As her repertoire expanded, she needed to create ever more unique combinations of movements to get a reward, which she did with aplomb, performing stunts so unusual that trainers could not have otherwise encouraged the behavior through standard training techniques. This propensity for originality and creativity (signs of self-awareness) was not a fluke unique to one individual.

Intelligence, self-consciousness and self-awareness would not seem to be uniquely human. Ayumu is not impressed.

Of course humans are unique, as are all species by definition. But nothing about our biology or evolutionary history makes us special. We remain a short-lived biological experiment with too little time to know if having a big brain is adaptive. Sure we have complex language and mathematics, but we also have weapons of mass destruction and the ability to destroy the resources that sustain us. The jury is out. We should be a bit humble about our position in the biosphere.

Science and Religion: Never the Twain Shall Meet

A recent HuffPost blog authored by Max Tegmark claims that religion and science are “closer than you think.” The statistic provided as support to the claim is an MIT survey that shows only 11 percent of Americans belong to religions that “openly reject” evolution or modern cosmology, specifically the Big Bang theory. But the report draws a false conclusion by asking the wrong question. The real problem is that 89 percent of Americans wrongly believe that evolution and cosmology are compatible with religious teachings. They are forcing a round peg into a square hole. Curiously, the 11 percent are closer to a fundamental truth: religion and science can never be reconciled, any more than oil can be made miscible in water. You can try by creating ultrafine oil and water mixtures, but you still have an emulsion, not a solution. Equally, no matter how much effort you put into reconciling religion and science the best you’ll have in the end is an incompatible mixture.

How and Why

Here is the fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the two: science searches for mechanisms and the answer to “how” the universe functions, with no appeal to higher purpose, without assuming the existence of such purpose. Religion seeks meaning and the answer to “why” the world is as we know it, based on the unquestioned assumption that such meaning and purpose exist. The two worldviews could not be further apart.

Unlike scientific claims, beliefs cannot be arbitrated to determine which is valid because there is no objective basis on which to compare one set of beliefs to another. Those two world views are not closer than we think; they are as far apart as could possibly be imagined.

Religion and science are incompatible at every level. The two seek different answers to separate questions using fundamentally and inherently incompatible methods. Nothing can truly bring the two together without sacrificing intellectual honesty.

For centuries people have attempted in vain to reconcile faith and reason. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences was founded in 1936 by the Vatican to promote scientific progress compatible with the Church’s teachings. Here on the pages of the Huffington Post, Jeffrey Small argued that science and religion have common ground. Others writing for the Post make similar appeals, including the most recent by Tegmark. Jonathan Dudley claims the Christian faith requires accepting evolution. Dudley says that “Christians must accept sound science, not because they don’t believe God created the world, but precisely because they do.” The sentiment is similar to what famous geneticist Francis Collins said: “When something new is revealed about the human genome, I experience a feeling of awe at the realization that humanity now knows something only God knew before. I am unaware of any irreconcilable conflict between scientific knowledge about evolution and the idea of a creator God; why couldn’t God have used the mechanism of evolution to create?”

But these appeals to reconcile science and religion are utterly hopeless, just wishful thinking and faith that the absurdities of religion can be shoehorned into the realities of science. It is not possible. As science explains ever-more complex natural phenomena, the need to invoke god to understand daily events and the physical world diminishes. God becomes confined to “gaps” in scientific knowledge, diminishing in stature with each great advance of human knowledge. Forget not that for 1500 years the faithful were told that god made earth the center of the universe, and that the sun orbited our planet. People were burned alive for questioning this orthodoxy. The “god of the gaps” has become an increasingly trivial figure as science narrows the space in which the ignorance that supports god can thrive. The proper response to the overwhelming evidence for evolution is to accept that the ideas of religion have failed, rather than to try desperately to bridge an ever-widening chasm. God has been reduced to what Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins don’t know.

Science can tell us that the Earth rotates counterclockwise (if we’re looking down on the North Pole from space). No purpose exists in that fact. The “why” here answers a mechanical question based on history; that particular direction of rotation is a consequence of how the original gases and debris were orbiting the sun prior to coalescing into our planet. Religion might ask “why” God had a yen for counterclockwise, but that question is outside the realm of and irrelevant to the science in question, if such a question is valid at all.

Those who attempt to reconcile religion and faith often appeal to two ideas: 1) without religion the search for objective knowledge using reason and science is an empty pursuit, devoid of meaning and morality; and 2) science is not infallible and scientists disagree among themselves. Let’s tackle the first one first.

Morality, Religion and Science

Science can postulate and study the hypothesis that morals are not derived from religion, nor god’s grant of free will, but instead arise from inherent characteristics embedded in human nature as a consequence of our sociality. What we view as moral behaviors — kindness, reciprocity, honesty, respect for others — are social norms that evolved in the context of a highly social animal living in large groups. The evolution of these social norms enabled a feeble creature to overcome physical limitations through effective cooperation. Perhaps morality is a biological necessity and a consequence of human development. Perhaps religion has masked and corrupted these natural characteristics with a false morality that converts intrinsic human benevolence and generosity into cheap commodities to be purchased with coupons for heaven. Good behavior is not encouraged as a means of advancing our humanity, but instead is enforced with threats of eternal damnation.

One prominent characteristic of human beings is sociality. Functioning as a group in many circumstances conveys significant advantages on members of the group. Associated with sociality is altruism, which is sacrificial behavior that in some way promotes the propagation of the genes of the altruistic individual, usually by aiding the survival of a close relative sharing some common genetic stock. The ultimate altruistic behavior would be dying for the sake of another’s survival. An uncle getting in harm’s way to protect a nephew is an example. Social cooperation and altruism are significant factors in the success of our species, a fact that underlines the biological basis for a natural morality as a defining and adaptive human characteristic.

In contrast, a religious code of ethics based on personal reward for behaving morally or eternal punishment for not doing so leads to a flawed morality with long-term and serious consequences for humankind. Many of society’s ills, including violent intolerance of our fellow humans, result to a considerable degree from religious morality based on fear of the unknown and hopes for immortality. Behaving morally for no reward and in no fear of punishment, but because we have the capability of being moral creatures, is one of the traits that can define humanity. Pursuit of such a natural ethic is a means of augmenting what is good in humans and minimizing elements of our darker side.

Christianity has had a 2000 year run to prove itself an effective means of teaching morality. The experiment has failed. We need another approach. We can choose a path unique to humans by elevating ourselves above the common fate of other species. We can choose a natural ethic. Those who do embrace a natural ethic will find a certain satisfaction derived from knowing one’s place in the universe. Amazing clarity is achieved in realizing that life is not controlled by some unseen and mysterious god, but by an individual’s power to make decisions, and a personal choice to be moral. There is tremendous joy in understanding that purpose and meaning in life are self-derived, and that these precious commodities are not some gift from above that can be taken away arbitrarily by a wrathful deity working in mysterious ways. With a natural ethic we are the masters of our own fate. Nothing is more powerful, or more satisfying.

Perhaps theses idea are wrong; time, advances in knowledge and further investigation may eventually tell. But the same cannot be said for religious claims about morality. Those cannot be investigated. For those who believe that morality is derived from god, there are no further investigations to the question. And therein we find the biggest and most obvious irreconcilable difference between faith and reason.

Science and Fallibility

We are told that since science and faith are both fallible, both are equally valid approaches to understanding the world and ourselves. Here is what Jeffrey Small says about this:

“Bias, preconceived ideas, academic politics, ego and resistance to change are ever-present in scientific and academic communities and often result in institutional opposition to new theories, especially ground-breaking ones. Many scientists initially resisted Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo because they presented a new paradigm of the universe.”

Well, exactly! What this proves is that over time, science is self-correcting while faith is not. While we all know now, due to science, that the earth orbits the sun, the Church is still fighting the battle with Galileo. Even today in the 21st century, the Church claims that Galileo shares blame because he made unproven assertions. Unproven assertions! The best the Pope could muster was that he regretted the “tragic mutual incomprehension” that had caused Galileo to suffer. As the new millennium settles in, the Church still claims that Galileo was wrong. The dissonance between Scripture and fact is not a problem relegated to earlier centuries, but remains relevant today. Science is indeed fallible, and scientists suffer from all the usual human foibles. But reproducibility, scrutiny from other scientists, the drive for new knowledge, the glory of overturning orthodoxy, all drive science to a better understanding of an objective truth or our best approximation of it; this method of understanding the world is inherently incompatible with faith. Faith cannot be contested: I believe, therefore it is true. All scientific claims are by nature contestable. Those differences cannot be reconciled.

In reality we need to turn this argument about fallibility on its head. Science never claims to be infallible. There would be no need for more research if scientists believed they had all the answers, and all of them right. But god by definition is infallible. And yet. The Bible’s clear statement about age of the earth, off by more than 4 billion years, is one example of an important factual error. Sure, maybe this is a mistake of human interpretation of divine will. But with each new discovery proving a Biblical assertion wrong, the Church retreats to the safety of errors in interpretation or dismissing the discrepancy as unimportant. Yet the ever-accumulating factual mistakes must call into question the certainty with which the Church claims that god, or the Bible, is infallible, since their previous insistence has proven unsubstantiated with glaring factual mistakes. These doubts about infallibility apply, too, to the Church’s teachings on morality. If the bible is the literal word of god, then god has clearly blown it. If the bible is a flawed interpretation of god’s will, then the conclusions about morality can be equally flawed. The issue of fallibility is a problem for the faithful, not for science and reason.

Religion and Politics

The incompatibility between faith and reason come into full glory in the political arena. And nowhere is that made more clear than the rush toward willful ignorance in the on the Republican right. A potential presidential candidate cannot be taken seriously by the right unless one questions evolution, denounces the idea that climate change is real and human-induced and attacks the protection of our natural resources as a liberal conspiracy. The fight against evolution is just the modern day version of the Church’s attacks on Galileo. We can demonstrate evolution in a Petri dish; it has been proven across multiple fields of science including genetics, biogeography, and paleontology. Even the Pope in 1996 grudgingly admitted that evolution is “more than just a theory.”

With faith unconstrained by reason, we suffer a House Science Committee led by and populated with representatives who openly question evolution and climate change. Vice Chair Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) dismisses climate change as a “massive international scientific fraud” which is an example of “scientific fascism.” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) believes “dinosaur flatulence” might explain global warming. Outgoing chairman Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) said, “I’m really more fearful of freezing. And I don’t have any science to prove that. But we have a lot of science that tells us they’re not basing it on real scientific facts.” The new chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), called scientists “global warming alarmists.” Let’s be clear: this is faith, unshackled from the inconvenience of reality. This is belief, and belief cannot be challenged – if I believe it, it is true, no matter how much contrary evidence is presented. That is incompatible with reason.

That Dog Won’t Hunt

So, you still want to try to reconcile faith and reason? All monotheistic believers reject all gods, except one. Christians, Muslims and Jews are united in rejecting all the Greek elder gods Cronus, Gaea, Uranus, Rhea, Oceanus, Tethys, Hyperion, Mnemosyne, Themis, Iapetus, Coeus, Crius, Phoebe, Thea, Prometheus, Epimetheus, Atlas, Metis, and Dione. All deny the existence of the Greek Olympic gods Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Hera, Ares, Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite, Hermes, Artemis, and Hephaestus. All major religions today dismiss as nothing but myth the Roman gods Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto, Apollo, Diana, Mars, Venus, Cupid, Mercury, Minerva, Ceres, Proserpine, Vulcan, Bacchus, Saturn, Vesta, Janus, Uranus and Maia.

Yet this roster of gods was real to multiple thousands of people for thousands of years, every bit as real as the one god worshiped by Christians, Muslims and Jews today. As Stanislaw Lec said, all gods were immortal — that is until they were no longer gods worshiped by the masses. These Greek and Roman gods were the subject of daily pleas, prayers and sacrifice, and the guiding force for much daily ritual. These mighty powers stood for millennia, ruling over their followers for a period of time that greatly exceeds all of Christianity. Yet these gods are now demoted to nothing more glorious than a good story. The Lec quote beautifully captures the reality that the one uniting us all is our atheism. Like all believers today, the Pope, every Evangelical Christian, every Catholic, every Jew, every Muslim rejects the existences of Zeus, Cronus, Jupiter and all the other Greek and Roman gods. We all agree completely that those gods don’t exist; we only differ by one god. They reject 100 gods, I reject 101 gods. Using their exact logic to deny the existence of Zeus, I apply to their one remaining god. We’re just quibbling about numbers.

And yet the inherent conflict between science and religion will not allow us to accept this simple reality: the god of Abraham is no more real than Zeus. Science need not prove god does not exist, any more than we must prove Zeus is not real. Theists must prove that he does exist. If someone claims there is an invisible pink elephant in the room, I am not obliged to prove him wrong; he is required to prove his claim correct. But being faith bases, religion can offer no such proof. Hence the irreconcilable incompatibility between science and religion. Science and religion are not closer than we think; they are as far apart as possible.

Telling God, “Ciao, I’m Out of Here”

How does one resign from a divine appointment? We just learned that Pope Benedict XVI is resigning his position as the voice of the Catholic Church, the Bishop of Rome, the leader of the Holy See, and the head of state of Vatican City. Let us not forget that throughout most of history, Popes have claimed to be divine, the successor of Peter, infallible as a representative of god on Earth and the right and ability to judge and excommunicate angels. The act of resigning seems inconsistent with such awesome power. If the position is filled as a mandate from god, how does one walk away from that mandate?

The answer is: you don’t, if we go by the idea that the exception proves the rule. Church law, in spite of the Pope’s direct link to god, in fact allows for papal resignation, but only two in history have taken advantage of the possibility. Natural death or assassinations are the usual means of departure. The last to resign was Pope Gregory XII in 1415. Before him was Pope Celestine V, who flew the coop in 1294.

My thoughts when I heard Ratzinger was resigning? First, yet another hypocrisy from the church in flouting supposedly divine law for convenience, and second, the more than 10,000 children known to have been violated by Catholic priests. Both call into question the Church’s dissonant claim to a higher morality based on a special relationship with an almighty power. In that grating contradiction lays a central problem with the Church, and more generally, with religion: any embarrassing challenges to divine claims can be dismissed as the consequence of human frailties. The Church can claim simultaneously to be the arbiter of a morality inspired by god while offering the excuse that they can be expected to be no better than the general population when it comes to abusing children because it is a “human institution.” Rather than holding itself to a higher standard based on its own claims to divine insight the Church offers the rather sad defense that other institutions suffer the same problem.

Our resigning Pope Benedict XVI said “just as the church is rightly held to exacting standards in this regard, all other institutions, without exception, should be held to the same standards.” That is a clear statement that the Church should not be held to any standard higher than any secular institution, but precisely to the same standard. He willingly surrendered any claim to a higher moral standing, an astonishing admission for the head of the Church. This very surrender makes his resignation that much easier, and more sense.

Oddly the Pope is resigning because of age and health, rather than why he should. In March 2010, he said in response to the damaging stream of breaking news stories about pedophilia in the Church that, “From God comes the courage not to be intimidated by petty gossip.” Petty gossip. Factual news accounts of this horror are reduced to petty gossip. But the Vatican did not stop there. The attack on the media was in fact two-pronged: beyond spreading unsubstantiated rumors and gossip, the media was also said to have exaggerated the extent and depth of the problem as a means of persecuting the Church.

The second idea of unfair coverage plays into the rationalizing and sickening argument that the Church is no worse than any other institution, just under greater scrutiny. But coverage of the Sandusky scandal proves that idea a bit silly. Can anybody claim the media did not cover Penn State with great zeal and excess to the point of obsession? In fact that wall-to-wall coverage could be considered disproportionate since Penn State has a few tens of thousands of interested enthusiasts while the Church as over one billion. The media are not the problem; they are equal opportunity sensationalists. Nor is such lurid coverage new; during the 1980s the news was salivating for the McMartin preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California. The claim that the media unfairly targets the Catholic Church, or exaggerates the extent of the problem through excessive or overzealous coverage is simply not substantiated by the facts. The McMartins were innocent yet the media frenzy went on unabated. The Church has no unique claim to media bias.

Perhaps knowing the media argument was weak, blaming biased coverage for exaggeration or printing gossip was just one arrow in the papal quiver. Next up: society is to blame for encouraging a sexual revolution. A five-year $1.8 million study, initiated in 2006 by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop’s, concluded that an all-male celibate priesthood, or homosexuality, were not to blame for the sex scandal. Instead, the report concluded that priests preyed upon children because the sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s put priests unprepared for the cultural shift “under stress”. Society, not the Church, was to blame. This all under Ratzinger’s leadership.

At one point the Vatican floated the idea that the Church was the victim, equating the uproar over the sex scandal to the persecution of the Jews. I’ll let that one speak for itself, other than to note that such a claim reeks of desperation. The logic behind that claim is evidence of a moral compass spinning out of control.

More damning for the Church than disingenuous misdirection and wild claims of victimhood is the revelation of a secret Vatican edict that rejected an Irish Catholic Church proposal to report pedophile priests to local authorities. Most of us would consider the proposal reasonable and self-evidently the right course of action. Not the Vatican, nor its leader Ratzinger, who in rejecting the proposal created according to an Irish bishop “a mandate to conceal reported crimes of a priest.” The Vatican’s take on this goes back to a 1999 meeting in Rome where bishops were admonished to remember that they were “bishops first, not policemen.” Official doctrine to look the other way. The Church tried to explain away this embarrassing document by noting sex solicited in confessionals had to be dealt with in secret according to church law.

Well, while no institution is above the law let us take for a moment that argument as valid. How well did the Church police its own according to its own laws? With an amazing and callous disregard for its innocent victims. As with many crimes, the cover up became a crime in many ways as bad as the original transgression. This is why the Pope should resign.

The great crime here is not the existence of pedophiles within its ranks of priests, although that is bad enough, but the fact that the Church as a matter of policy transferred known pedophiles to unsuspecting parishes. Allow me to list just a few cases. Father John J. Geoghan was accused in the mid-1990s of abusing 130 grammar school boys, one who was just 4 years old. Horrifying in its own right – but worse is that Cardinal Bernard F. Law knew about Geoghan’s predatory sexual habits in 1984, yet approved his transfer to St. Julia’s parish. Archdiocesan records reveal that the archdiocese did not view as “serious” the repeated abuse of seven boys in one extended family. Not surprisingly the transfer to St. Juilia’s did not go well, resulting in yet more complaints of sexual abuse.

The problem is not isolated to a few rogue priests. Here is what the Boston Globe concluded in 2002:

Church documents, official testimony, and victim interviews gathered over the past year paint an extraordinary picture of secrecy and deception in the Boston Archdiocese; a culture in which top church officials coddled abusive priests and permitted them to molest again, while stonewalling or paying off the victims of that abuse.

Nor is the problem confined to Boston. The scandal spread to Canada, Ireland, Italy, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland and Germany; and continues to spread around the world to Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Kenya, Tanzania, the Philippines and Australia.

Let us look at one more specific case. Father Peter Hullerman was a known pedophile, sent to therapy by the Vatican in 1980 to treat his disease. He was returned to pastoral work within a few days of beginning his psychiatric treatment. It is hard to be shocked to learn that Father Hullerman was later convicted for molesting boys in another parish. I end with this particular example because the case has broader implications. Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was copied on a memo that approved this specific course of action for Father Hullerman. The Vatican denies that Ratzinger ever saw the memo… Perhaps, but at a minimum the memo establishes there was in place an ugly and indefensible Vatican policy of putting known pedophiles in new parishes with no warning to the new congregation. Let us be unambiguously clear about this: the Vatican intentionally put children at risk to protect its priests. That is a fact. That is a crime. That is a subversion of moral values. Putting a child in harm’s way, exposing a little boy or girl to the sick yearnings of a pedophile priest who the child is told to trust completely as a representative of a higher power, is a crime unique to the Church, not an invention of the media and not the fault of society. Sick priests are one problem; Vatican policy is another, one not explained away by human frailty. The problem has shifted from sex abuse to the crime of covering up sex abuse; the latter a greater crime because it perpetuates the former. Ratzinger promoted this culture of deceit from on high.

For the sake of argument, let us remove from the equation the notion that the Church, as a self-proclaimed arbiter of morality, must hold itself to a higher standard than society at large. Given that, does the assertion that pedophilia in the Church is found in the same proportion as in the general populace have any merit?

The way statistics are compiled there is no way to answer that question definitively. But we can get toward an answer tangentially. Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a Web site that compiles reports on abuse cases, noted that the records show, “…there’s a vast gap, a multiplier of two, three or four times, between the numbers of perpetrators that the prosecutors find and what the bishops released.” There is clear evidence the problem is underreported as a matter of Vatican policy; no such organized policy exists in the general population. One could reasonably surmise therefore that the amount of underreporting is greater within the Church than in society at large. But the question itself is wrong: even if true that pedophilia was found in the Church at rates equivalent to society at large, that offers no excuse for Vatican policy of covering up the crime and transferring known pedophiles to new unsuspecting congregations. The argument itself reveals unconditional surrender to moral decay. That is why the Pope should resign.

The Church cannot be defended. Even if we could explain way pedophilia in the ranks of the priests as typical of the general population; even if we could blame the media for exaggerating the problem or society for creating stress for clergymen; even if the Church need not hold itself to a higher moral standard than secular institutions based on its own claims of divine insight; nothing can defend the Vatican’s practice of systematically covering up the crimes of sex abuse within its ranks or sending pedophiles to new parishes to prey anew on a fresh batch of young men.

Being Christian does not bestow upon anybody a higher degree of moral depth or any greater propensity for honesty. After all, we are reminded that priests and laity alike are only human, and will suffer the same moral failures as the non-Christian population. That is what the Church itself argues: Christians are no better than anybody else, and cannot be expected to be so. Exacting standards must be equally applied to secular and non-secular alike. So Christians by the Church’s own admission will be equally prone to crime, deceit and all the moral failures attributed to human frailty. They might be absolved of their sins through confession in the eyes of the Church, but victims still suffer the consequence of their human failings. The Church and its apologists can’t have it both ways by making the self-contradicting and absurd claim that Christians are more honest and more moral, but no different from anybody else. Ratzinger never exhibited the courage to tackle the moral decay within the Church, and in this absence of leadership, allowed abuse to continue. And this is why the Pope should resign.

The Dangerous Myth of ‘Fat but Fit’

In a recent public spat, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told former White House physician Connie Mariano to “shut up” about his weight when she expressed concern that he might die in office if he were elected president. Christie openly acknowledges that he struggles with his weight but claimed that he is “remarkably healthy.”

Christie might be right, but if so, he would be a medical miracle. The governor said that unless Mariano gave him a physical exam or learned his family history, she could make no judgment about his health. He is wrong, because any casual observer can see that Christie is obese, as he would himself admit, and the reality is that obesity is known to lead to an increased risk for premature death. Most Americans die sooner than necessary by stroke, heart attack or cancer, and obesity increases the risk for all of these. Christie should remember that the Titanic was a healthy ship just before hitting the iceberg.

Yes, in rare circumstances we can point to a few obese individuals who do not appear to be at increased risk for heart disease; few things are absolute with biology. But that should offer no consolation to Christie or anyone else carrying excess weight. Just because a neighbor won the lottery does not mean you will.

We know absolutely that obesity creates an increased risk of diabetes. (The data below are from publicly available government sources, summarized and cited in Calorie Wars: Fat, Fact and Fiction). In 1990 about 11 million Americans had type-2 (adult onset) diabetes, a disease of insulin resistance that commonly coexists with obesity. Just nine years later the number was 16 million, or about 6 percent of all Americans. Then, from 1999 to 2003, we saw a 41-percent increase in diagnosed diabetes. Since then obesity has ballooned to an astounding 64 percent of all Americans, and the number of diabetics continues to explode. Note too that the insulin resistance syndrome associated with obesity has other dire consequences, including hypertension and the increased risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

Another problem with “fat but fit” is simple mechanics. The human body evolved from a period of deprivation where food was scarce and difficult to obtain. Our ancestors were almost certainly lean. In any case, we are not engineered to bear excess weight on our joints. Obesity leads to arthritis and can lead one down the path to knee replacement, not only because of the mechanical stress it can cause but because fat produces chemicals that attack cartilage. Think of it this way: If you stuff 20 people into a Volkswagon Bug, the suspension will wear out faster and the engine will have to work harder, ultimately reducing its useful life.

If you still believe fat can be fit, consider the following realities:

About 400,000 deaths per year are attributed to obesity; individuals with a body mass index (BMI) over 30 have a 50-percent to 100-percent increased risk of premature death from all causes compared with lean people with lower BMIs.
High blood pressure is twice as common in obese adults than in those with a healthy weight; obesity is associated with elevated blood fat (triglycerides) and decreased good cholesterol (HDL).
A weight gain of only 11 to 18 pounds increases the risk of developing type-2 diabetes; over 80 percent of people with type-2 diabetes are overweight or obese.
Obesity is associated with an increased risk of cancer of the uterus, colon, gall bladder, prostate and kidney, and with postmenopausal breast cancer.
Sleep apnea is more common in obese people, and some recent studies have indicated that a lack of sleep might affect hormone levels to a degree that could indeed cause weight gain.
Obesity during pregnancy is associated with a greater risk of birth defects, including spina bifida.
Every increase in weight of two pounds increases the risk of arthritis by 9 percent to 13 percent.

We can see why Christie’s claim to be “remarkably healthy” should be greeted with some skepticism.

One final consideration on the idea of being fat but fit: Obesity can affect quality of life through limited mobility, decreased physical endurance and social stigmatization. While we know we should not judge a book by its cover, most of us do, at least to some extent. Yes, you should be comfortable with and love yourself for who you are, and you need not look like a fashion model. But that truth is no excuse for adopting the dangerous myth that fat can be fit.

Tool Use, Culture and Human Hubris

Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, demonstrate something awfully close to culture, once considered uniquely human. Chimps toy with cultural evolution through tool use, also once regarded as exclusive to our species. A study published on January 30, 2013, in the journal PLOS ONE demonstrated how a cohort of chimps wise in the ways of using a straw to suck juice out of a container can pass on that knowledge by demonstrating the technique to naive chimps.

We humans have always thought of ourselves as particularly intelligent, special, above all other animals. Religion tells us that only we were made in the image of god. The son of god comes in the form of a man, not chimp or weasel. We proudly note our compassion, humor, altruism and impressive capacity to generate language, mathematics, tools, art, and music. In citing this self-serving list to bolster our claim to exalted status, filtered expediently to our benefit, we assume that humans possess, and other animals utterly lack, these honorable traits or capabilities. We ignore the inconvenient fact that we choose to define and measure intelligence in terms of our greatest strengths. We arbitrarily exclude from the definition of intelligence higher brain functions in other animals. We make bold claims of our uniqueness and divine status, only to find over time that each claim ultimately fails as we advance our understanding of animal intelligence and behavior. There is no better example than tool use and culture. (All the examples below are from numerous scientific journals and books, all of which can be found in the bibliography in Chapter 3 of Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World).

Tool Use

Tool use at one point was indeed long considered solely the providence of human ingenuity. But in fact non-human primates and birds commonly use tools, mainly to gather food. Chimpanzees, for example, regularly use stems as tools and can even pound stones with purpose, although they have never mastered flint-making. Chimps also use leaves as toilet paper. Egyptian vultures will search up to 50 yards for a rock to use to smash an ostrich egg. Green herons drop a small object onto the surface of the water to attract fish, which are fooled into thinking prey is nearby. The heron then turns the table and makes a meal of the unsuspecting fish.

If an elephant is unable to reach some itching part of his body with his trunk, the nearest tree often serves to relieve the problem. Just as often, however, an itchy elephant will pick up a long stick and give himself a good scratch with that instead. If one stick is insufficiently long he will look for one better suited to the task.

With what appears to be clear intention, elephants have been observed to throw or drop large rocks and logs on the live wires of electric fences, either breaking the wire or loosening it such that it makes contact with the earth, thus shorting out the fence. Elephants are undoubtedly clueless about electron flow, but have mastered the use of a tool to avoid its unpleasant consequences.

Some animals have graduated from tool use to tool fabrication. On the Galapagos Island, one of the many finch species made famous by Darwin uses a cactus spine as a spear to pry grubs from tree branches. Once this woodpecker finch has procured his shish kabob, he holds the skewer under foot to munch on the tasty snack. The bird will then carry the spine to another tree looking for the next meal. This finch, though, is not always happy with what nature provides, and improves the cactus spine for its purpose. One finch was observed shaping a forked spine into a single spike, and others shorten the spine to just the right length for probing and holding. Some finches can learn to use the tool by watching others do so.

These feats are noteworthy, but provide only examples of one animal using one tool for one purpose. Even more impressive is the learned use of a tool set. Chimpanzees in East and West Africa sequentially use four tools to obtain honey, all gathered together for that specific purpose. They start with a battering stick, then a use a chisel-like stick, followed by a hard-pointed stick, finally ending with a long slender flexible dip stick to pull out the honey. Each tool is used in a specific sequence, and sometimes made to order by clipping, peeling, stripping or splitting the wood to the desired specifications.

New Caledonian crows are famous for their ingenious tool fabrication, both in the wild and in captivity. Betty, a female crow, was filmed taking a piece of wire and trying to use it to grab some food at the bottom of a narrow tube. After several unsuccessful attempts, she removed the wire, fashioned a hook on the end, and subsequently used her new weapon to grab the food with ease. In the wild, these crows make an impressive variety of tools using a wide range of materials for diverse purposes. These birds actually shape different hooks for different tasks. This is tool use by any definition.

Culture

Until recently, the transmission of information through culture, or socially learned tradition, was thought to be found only among humans. Many considered this the “last stand” in proving human uniqueness. Culture seems to be clearly a uniquely human invention. In some human cultures, two people greeting each other will bow, where in others the two will shake hands. Some kiss once or twice on the cheek. Some societies prefer vodka over wine. Culture defines the context of our lives.

But in the 1950s, a few brave researchers demonstrated that culture was indeed found in other species, although this conclusion was resisted for several decades.

On the small Japanese island of Koshima, researcher Kinji Imanishi observed one day that a young female macaque named Imo took some precious sweet potatoes that were inconveniently covered with sand to a nearby stream to wash them off before eating them. That alone was interesting because the behavior had never before been seen. But more impressive, over time the entire colony adopted the innovation, and their descendants wash their potatoes even today because mothers continue to pass down the new tradition to the next generation.

Imo and her colony are not just an isolated example. In 1963, in the Nagano Mountains of Japan, another young female macaque named Mukubili waded into a hot spring to get some food that had been thrown in the water. The warm water was apparently a delightful respite from the bitter cold mountain air, and a few other young monkeys climbed in. Much as in human cultures, at first the behavior caught on only with the youth, but the old folks eventually got hip. The behavior is now well established in the entire troop, and has been passed on through many generations. In another example of youth-driven culture, some juveniles learned to roll and throw snowballs. That has no survival value, but is fun. The practice spread to others in the troop and is now a common play behavior.

The indisputable conclusion that other species have culture, however, is not the result of a few casual anecdotes or isolated case studies. Instead, presence of culture in other animals is seen as the result of carefully recorded observation by disparate scientists over many decades. In 1999, a group of researchers got together to compare notes from their years of field work with chimpanzees. Eventually they documented 39 examples of behaviors present in one group of chimps but not another, even when the groups lived in similar environments and had access to the same foods and potential tools. Cultural differences were seen in courting behavior, hunting strategies, tool use, social grooming, medicinal plant use and vocalizations. The behaviors were passed on from one generation to the other within a social group, and not reinvented anew with each generation. More recent work with orangutans has shown similar examples of culture and social learning. The difference in behaviors between groups was even more striking in orangutans, which interact with neighboring groups less than chimpanzees.

In the final blow to the notion that culture is somehow uniquely human, various forms of social learning within and between generations have been demonstrated beyond primates, including in birds, rats, elephants, whales (in addition to composing), and perhaps even in fish.

Get Over Ourselves

In defining our uniqueness, we are using a bizarre circular logic, working backward from a desired result. We look at all of our capabilities as humans, and then declare that those very sets of capabilities are what make us better than other animals, if not the image of god himself. But even when we give ourselves a big handicap by creating self-serving definitions that we know beforehand will prove advantageous, the categories of “uniquely human” talents are shrinking rapidly as we learn more about other animals and their adaptive behaviors. Characteristics previously considered special to our species have eventually been found, at least to some degree, and often with some humor, elsewhere in the animal kingdom. We see in the animal kingdom examples of impressive brain development, intelligence, self-awareness, empathy, social organization, even some ability in mathematics, as well as of course culture and tool use.

We are faced with the need to combat a fierce bias. People tend to believe that our species is superior to and separate from the animal kingdom, that we are the end point of the evolution of life on earth. That notion is not only false but extraordinarily dangerous. It is this hubris and arrogance that drives much of our most unsustainable behaviors. If we are special we need not respect natural resources put here by god for our use; nor must we protect animals we believe to be our inferiors. Yet biological reality on the ground is quite different from this species-centric view: human are nothing but a normal consequence of natural selection, and certainly not the pinnacle of evolution. We are nothing special, and bacteria are the proof. We desperately look for traits only we possess, like tool use and culture, only to be thwarted by animal ingenuity. It is time we got over ourselves and adopted a more humble attitude about our role in the biosphere. The chimps are watching as they sip their juice.

Space Faces, Causality and the Origin of Religion

The human brain manages to make sense of a chaotic world by picking out patterns from the noise bombarding our senses.  We don’t see the trillions of photons coming into our eyes as pointillist smears of colors; we see trees and forests.  We process all of that incessant sensory input and come up with a familiar scene filled with grasses, animals, lakes and mountains.  In addition, we are extraordinarily good at matching cause to effect so that we can quickly learn the behaviors necessary for survival.  Burning your hand quickly teaches that fire causes pain.  Understanding patterns, combined with correlating cause and effect, will save your life.

Unfortunately, this incredible talent for seeking patterns and linking cause to effect has a dark side, too.  Humans see patterns where none really exist and cause where only chance reigns supreme.  We cannot seem to turn off our pattern-seeking or cause-effect neurons.  Sometimes the results are benign:  We identify animal shapes in cloud formations or see a human face in a rock cliff or in an outcropping on the surface of Mars.   A baseball player wears the same underwear during a hitting streak, believing that the underwear is the cause of his good fortune.  These are silly, if smelly, manifestations of our mental abilities, but with no consequence.

Rain and the Bear

The dark side appears when we attribute cause and effect falsely in a way that has long-term impacts on our behavior and society.  Let’s look at our sophisticated cave-dwelling ancestors.  During one particularly bad drought, our friend (let’s call him Charles) draws a picture of a bear on his cave wall, something he has not done before.  The next day the skies open up with a welcomed rain.  Charles immediately sees cause and effect and now believes that the act of drawing a bear causes rain. He knows that is the case with absolute certainty, because, after all, he drew a bear, and the next day the rains came.  What could possibly be clearer?

During the next drought Charles of course takes matters into his own hands and goes up to what is now a sacred cave to draw a bear.  Hmmm, no rain the next day.  Never does Charles question the causative effect of drawing bears; he knows without question that bear drawing causes water to fall from the sky.  With that conviction, but with no rain, the only possible conclusion is that he has somehow drawn the wrong bear, or done so at the wrong time of day, or used the wrong color.  Or maybe he did not chant the right words while creating his artwork.  Not sure of the problem, he develops an elaborate ritual to cover all the possibilities.  In a few days, lo and behold, water comes from above, providing yet more evidence — in fact, incontrovertible proof — that his actions cause rain.  Charles now has developed a sophisticated ritual of drawing, dancing and chanting as a means of ending a drought.

Hunger and the Hunt

But lack of rain is not Charles’s only problem.  He needs to eat, and hunting has not gone too well lately.  The pangs of hunger are growing stronger.  He is desperate for a successful kill, and his family is depending on him.  Fortunately, his luck is about to change.

To ward off predators on the first night of a full moon, Charles dresses up in a bear suit to perform the bear dance, a tradition in his clan for many generations.  While dancing, Charles cannot help but think how hungry he has become.  Much to Charles’s relief, the hunting party the next day kills two antelope and a hyena that had been previously wounded by a lion.  Clearly, putting on the bear suit the night before not only kept predators at bay, the original purpose of the dance, but was the cause of this huge success following almost a month of bad hunts.  Cause and effect could not be more obvious.

Oddly, though, the next hunt is a complete bust in spite of the ceremony performed the previous night.  Something is clearly wrong, but at no time does Charles question the value of the pre-hunt dance.  That has been proven and must not be jeopardized by doubt.  Even the mere thought that the ceremony does not work might anger the invisible powers.  Each night subsequent to the next series of failed hunts, small variations are added to the ritual in a hopeful attempt to find just the right mix, making for an ever more elaborate event, with more chanting, dancing, smoke waving and stick pounding.  Finally, the newly designed dance number precedes a big kill, cementing forever the idea that a hunt will be successful only if a supremely elaborate ritual is properly performed the night before.  You must get the ceremony exactly right; even the slightest variation seems to result in a bad hunt.

Curing Life’s Ails

Life in the cave is not easy, and Charles soon has other problems.  After one good outing Charles returns to camp to find his current mate, the mother of three of his eight surviving children, violently ill.  Many plants and flowers are known to help cure sickness, and he tries them all.  None works, and his mate’s health continues to decline.  He feels helpless, as if some unseen force were striking down his poor companion.  Charles then does what comes naturally: He asks this unseen force to help him, to stop torturing his woman.  Charles beseeches this mysterious force, he begs, he pleads, every day.  Then, miraculously, his partner suddenly improves.  Unbeknownst to them, her attack of malaria has run its course.  Charles, however, knows that the real explanation for his mate’s recovery must be his successful connection and communication with the unseen force that had caused her so much grief.  The mysterious force understood his pleas and actually granted him his wish.  His partner, smiling by his side, was all the proof he needed that his appeal to the mysterious force on her behalf has resulted in her newfound health.

Such cause and effect is so powerfully obvious that he does not question why the mysterious force would make his woman sick to begin with, only to return her to health upon his request.   Charles just knows that he is no longer a helpless pawn to fate; he now has a potent means of manipulating and controlling the events in his life, by requesting the intervention of a mysterious and unseen force. He can cause rain and ensure a good hunt with various rituals and ceremonies by soliciting the help of something vastly more powerful than he.  He simply needs to ask.

A New World of Hope, a False Sense of Security…

This revelation opens up for Charles an entirely new world, giving him a tremendous sense of control over the unknown.  Yes, the force is mysterious, but he can communicate with it, ask the force for favors.  Sometimes, amazingly, the mysterious force will comply with his request.   He just needs to figure out a way to please the mysterious force, to understand why his pleas are sometimes ignored, sometimes answered.    The force operates in enigmatic ways.

Charles knows there must exist more than one force, because surely the power that saved his wife would be different from the one ensuring a good hunt or providing a needed rain.  What if he can find a way to ask each force, properly and consistently, to help him maintain his health, sire more children, bring home plentiful meat and end all droughts?  How comforting that would be, how powerful the thought, that he could control his fate simply by talking to these forces.  Perhaps, even, a mysterious force, like the others, watches over those who died.  Maybe some of those who die become the mysterious forces!

…and the Origin of Religion

Charles now has ceremony, ritual, extravagant superstition and an unyielding belief in the power of inexplicable forces to guide him through life and help him gain control over the unknown. Charles has found… religion.

Given the limited vocabulary of the cave-dwelling ancestors, a monosyllabic word was probably used to describe the powerful and mysterious forces that helped control everybody’s fate.  Perhaps the word sounded something like “gott,” “deus” or “gud.”

Religion was born of fear of the unknown, of the drive to control the uncontrollable, of the need to have mastery over one’s fate in the face of an uncertain world.  The first ideas of religion arose not from any awe of nature’s wonder and order that would imply an invisible intelligent designer but from concerns for the events of everyday life and how the vast unknown of nature affected daily existence.  To allay fears of disease, death, starvation, cold, injury and pain, people fervently hoped that they could solicit the aid of greater powers, hoped deeply that they could somehow control their fate and trusted that the ugly reality of death did not mean the end.  Hope and fear combine powerfully in a frightening world of unknowns to stimulate comforting fantasies and myths about nature’s plans.

The human brain is extraordinarily adept at posing questions but simply abhors the concept of leaving any unanswered.  We are unable to accept “I don’t know,” because we cannot turn off our instinct to see patterns and to discern effect from cause.  We demand that there be a pattern, that there be cause and effect, even when none exist.  So we make up answers when we don’t know.  We develop elaborate creation myths, sun gods, rain gods, war gods and gods of the ocean.  We believe we can communicate with our gods and influence their behavior, because by doing so, like Charles, we gain some control, impose some order, on the chaotic mysteries of the world.  By making up answers to dull the sting of ignorance, we fool ourselves into thinking we explain the world.  Religion was our first attempt at physics and astronomy.

Of course, the biggest and most wrenching unknown served by religion is that of our fate upon dying.  As a matter of survival, we are programmed to fear death, but perhaps unlike other animals, we have the cruel burden of contemplating this fear.  Religion is one way we cope with our knowledge that death is inevitable.  Religion diminishes the hurt of death’s certainty and permanence and the pain of losing a loved one with the promise of reuniting in another life.

But fear of the unknown, fear of mortality and hopes for controlling and understanding nature’s course do not represent the only foundation on which religion stands.  Another is social cohesion.  We are social animals, gregarious by nature.  Cooperation is what makes the human animal — a weak, slow and vulnerable creature — a powerful force on Earth.  But cooperation becomes more difficult with increasing numbers. Some means of maintaining social order is necessary.  Early societies soon learned that rules of behavior imposed in the form of rituals enabled large groups of people to live in close proximity.  Rituals create norms against which people can readily judge the behavior of others in diverse social settings.  Any deviation from the norm is easily spotted and can be quickly addressed.  In this way order can be maintained.  Notice that modern-day teenagers express their rugged individualism by dressing identically.  Any nonconforming outlier would be easy to spot.  Religion offered, and offers still, an obvious means of enforcing societal rules by promising a joyous afterlife for conformers or eternal punishment for those who misbehave.  Religion is used as a bribe to induce good manners.

Finally, religion was eventually transformed into an important source of raw political power, divorced from any role more benign.  If religion is used as a tool to control individual behavior, someone needs to develop those rules and ensure their enforcement.  Who better to act as behavior police than religious elders, shamans or high priests?  What better way is there to manipulate and bend people to your will than by making up the rules by which they must live?  With that influence over the daily lives of every citizen comes power traditionally reserved for city-states and empires, with all the normal trappings, including armies, treasuries and palaces.

Fear of death, the need to explain away the unknown, hopes for controlling one’s destiny, a desire for social cohesion and the corrupting allure of power are the combined masters of all religion.  We see all of that in the face on Mars.

Big Brain Bravado

When it comes to our brains, we have it all wrong.

A little background:  a study published recently in Current Biology and summarized in a HuffPost article seeks to understand why more animals do not have larger brains.  In my field of neurobiology this has been a long-standing mystery:  since big brains are assumed to be beneficial, why are they so rare in the animal kingdom?  As the recent article explains, the most commonly proposed explanation is the “expensive tissue hypothesis.”  The idea is that the high metabolic cost of maintaining a complex central nervous system exceeds the benefits of flexible and adaptive behavior that comes with a big brain. In the case of humans the brain constitutes two percent of our body weight but consumes 20 percent of the energy.  The Current Biology article indeed shows that as guppies grow larger brains their guts shrink in size, making them more metabolically inefficient compared to their smaller-brained brethren.  This has serious consequences: The smarter fish had almost 20 percent fewer little guppies to call their own.

None of this is terribly surprising; evolution is an endless struggle between cost and benefit.  A large brain is an energy hog.  In addition, the bigger the brain the more important its protection becomes, requiring even more energy for thick skulls, protective tissue, specialized blood vessels, and host of other adaptations.  Somewhere along the line this high cost has to be paid, as humans clearly show: fewer offspring, long periods of infant nurturing, and the demand for a constant source of calories to feed the central energy consumer.

Asking the Wrong Question

Sure, big brains extract a high cost.  That line of reasoning is convincing, and I am confident this tells part of the story.  But here is where I break from many of my colleagues:  the high metabolic cost of a big brain is largely irrelevant to the big picture.

I propose that big brains are rare in nature not because they are an expensive tissue to maintain, but because the consequences of complex thought are not adaptive.  Being smart is a dumb survival strategy.  The study in Current Biology starts from the premise that big brains are beneficial; I believe that assumption to be fundamentally wrong.  The question should not be why big brains are rare in nature but why they can persist at all; the answer is that they do not.  Our little blip of existence for 100,000 or so years proves nothing other than a bad trend toward self-destruction.

As are all creatures, humans are a genetic experiment resulting from selective pressure, random mutations, and pure chance that our ancestors avoided extinction from catastrophic events, such as meteorite impacts.   Our ancestors made it far enough to yield us, but the prospects for our future survival are not particularly bright.  Extinction is the biological norm; so far at least the pattern of evolution for humans is no different from the rest of the earth’s fauna.

Human Hubris

The unquestioned assumption that big brains are good comes from a deep-seated human arrogance that our species is special.  We are taught that evolution reaches a pinnacle with our species, and that our intelligence sets us apart.  Religion tells us only we are made in god’s image.  This perspective is deeply wrong.  By understanding why, we can gain perspective on how having a big brain is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Without a doubt, human beings possess a level of intelligence, self-consciousness and self-awareness greater by degree than is found in any other animal.  But as with almost all aspects of comparative biology, intelligence, self-consciousness and self-awareness are elements of a continuum, rather than phenomena with sharp boundaries between species.  Intelligence and self-awareness do not belong exclusively in the domain of humankind.  No universal measure of intelligence can be meaningful, because animals have diverse adaptations that define the context of intelligence, making interspecies comparisons suspect. A cat under water would not look too intelligent, but a porpoise might.  On the other hand, you would be severely challenged to teach a porpoise to climb a tree.  You may well be able to solve math problems, but your dog will learn more quickly and more effectively than you ever could to sniff out the drugs in your colleague’s suitcase, and to notify you of the contraband.  An animal’s intelligence, or more precisely, its ability to manifest its intelligence, is tightly correlated with its natural environment, and its evolutionary adaptations.

No matter how much we want to think ourselves special, intelligence is found by degrees across the animal kingdom, and not in some nice neat linear correlation with some other trait like the development of mammary glands.  Being smart seems to be a trait unique to human beings only when we artificially designate our particular suite of characteristics as the definition of intelligence, proving that circular logic is not too intelligent.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Other animals, like elephants and dolphins, have big brains.  Some bird species have proven to be extraordinarily intelligent.  So how then can I claim that having a big brain is maladaptive?  By having too much of a good thing: in the case of humans the endless evolutionary struggle between cost and benefit may well have tilted toward too great a cost in growing a big head.  Some intelligence is good; too much is destructive.  Somewhere along the continuum of intelligence in the animal kingdom the balance tilts: on one side the costs and benefits of intelligence balance favorably; on the other, the consequences of intelligence become too great to be outweighed by the many advantages.

A Bad Outcome

Every species exploits the environment to the maximum extent possible, until competition, predation, resource depletion, disease or other constraints limit growth and expansion.  Social animals, from insects to mammals, find equilibrium between cooperation and competition.  Human survival strategies are no different from those pursued by other species, except that we have a huge technological advantage (a consequence of our big brains). In struggling to survive, humans have successfully co-opted a significant percentage of the planet’s available resources.  We have waged war at a scale only possible in a species with a brain big enough to contemplate such actions.  Our reliance on technology to exploit resources, and each other, has had global effects over a short time period, unlike other species similarly striving to survive.  Having a big brain has extracted disastrous costs.   As a result, our efforts to survive and prosper may have the paradoxical consequence of causing our extinction, either directly through the use of weapons of mass destruction, or through the degradation of the resources on which we depend.

Short History

In spite of our hubris, humans are nothing but a short-lived biological aberration, with no legitimate claim to superiority.  As a minor branch on a vast evolutionary bush, modern humans have been roaming the earth for no more than a few hundred thousand years of the earth’s 4.5 billion-year history. Ours has been a brief presence, with too little time to demonstrate if the evolution of large brains is a successful strategy for long-term survival of the species.  Our self-anointed position to exalted status has blinded us to the reality that our big brains might not be our savior but the potential source of our demise. We claim we are special, but there is a loss of credibility when you choose yourself for an award.

If evolution had a pinnacle, bacteria would rest on top.  While it hurts our ego, we live in the Age of Bugs, not the Age of Humans.  These single-celled germs are the most successful of all life forms, and have been dividing away for more than 3 billion years.  Bacteria have been found to live in virtually every conceivable environment at extremes of pressure, temperature, salinity, radiation, alkalinity and acidity.  A spoonful of good quality soil may contain ten trillion bacteria representing more than ten thousand different species.  More than 1 million bacteria are found in 1 milliliter of seawater, and these constitute most of the ocean’s biomass.  Our self-promotion to the image of god is simply embarrassing in the face of this biological reality on the ground.   When the human species is a distant memory, bacteria will be dividing merrily away, oblivious to the odd bipedal mammal that once roamed the earth for such a brief moment in time.

And so we come full circle to the question about brain size.  In life’s history on Earth, only a few animals have developed large brains, and only one species the largest.  In elephants and dolphins we are probably witnessing the upper limit of adaptive growth of big brains, the point where cost and benefit roughly balance; beyond that we are likely observing the odd reality that brains too complex lead to behaviors resulting in extinction.  The answer to the mystery of the paucity of large brains is found in behavior, not metabolism.

Of course on Earth we have just a sample size of one; so my idea about big brain rarity is difficult to test.  A few million years from now the answer will be clear, even if we might not be around to appreciate it.  Or perhaps sooner than that we’ll discover an abundance of life elsewhere and we’ll have a great sample for comparison.  In the meantime we can surmise that any brain smart enough to develop a weapon capable of destroying itself, or depleting its sustaining resources, is not too smart.