Evolution and humility

One of the arguments against evolution is that the incredible complexity and diversity of life could never emerge from randomness in any conceivable timespan. I would suggest this reflects more on the limitations of our ability to conceive of time quanity than on the possibilities of evolution.

Humans are terrible at understanding large numbers and time - much less the two combined. Let's take the second point first: "It seems like just yesterday..." "Every second seems like an hour when you're gone..." ""Where did the time go?" Our memory and time sense are not designed to let us really understand that a year is 365 times as long as a day (for that matter the concept of 365 is beyond us; see below). Even less are we able to understand what a million years is. Yet opponents of evolution blithely decry that it could occur on that kind of timeframe, generally without any evidence other than their own intuition.

People also lack intuitive understanding of even moderately large numbers, much less the huge numbers involved in evolutionary timespans. Do you really have a sense, for example, of how big a hundred is? If a bag of jellybeans spilled on the floor, could you say whether there were 100, 75, 150, or 200, just by looking at it? If not, I argue, you don't really understand what a hundred means. You may be able to use the number, compute with it, make judgments using it, but you don't really understand it in an intuitive way, like you do, say, five.

Now imagine a hundred bags of jellybeans - that's 10,000. Would you have any clue how many were there? Now imagine a hundred of those 10,000-jellybean spills - that's a million. So, sez me, you can't even come close to understanding the numbers involved in evolutionary timeframes.

Penicillin and evolution

To those who deny evolution: next time you have pneumonia, why not ask your doctor to prescribe penicillin? It's not as though the resistant bacteria would have survived long ago and perpetuated new strains of drug-resistant germs. That would be evolution.

Yup, penicillin should be fine for you.

What good is space?

One of the big arguments for publicly funded space exploration is that it leads to all kinds of technological advances that are used in other areas.

I'm sorry, but that just is not borne out by the evidence. If the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on space have returned benefits to the tune of millions or even billions, that doesn't exactly seem a good investment. Similarly, the argument that all kinds of riches await us in space seems not to have worked out either. There has yet to be developed a blockbuster money-making enterprise that requires human space travel. Economics just won't make the case for space exploration.

Someday, maybe commercial space travel will be self-sustaining and realistic. In a tiny way, it's already starting. OK, great. But do we really need government-sponsored programs to provide a "boost"? Maybe, assuming we care that they succeed. But why should we care? Do we expect it to make our lives so much better that it's worth all those tax dollars?

If we really wanted to do something for the country or the world, there are many better ways we could be spending those hundreds of billions of dollars. For example, real education reform, reintegrating the inner cities into the mainstream economy and culture, developing and implementing effective ways to impact child abuse and neglect, creating cross-country mass transit systems that actually work...

Now, there is a more effective point about space travel. To argue for space exploration in the name of pure science makes much more sense. There is nowhere else but space to do a lot of the science that gets done there. But let's be clear: again, the cost-benefit ratio would seem to accrue from unmanned missions - think Hubble and the Mars missions of the past 20 years.

Manned spaceflight, as near as I can tell, has been mostly make-work. Build a space station - and do exactly what on it that you couldn't do on a two-week mission? Build a fleet of space shuttles, which can't launch reliably, and send people into orbit to do what? Even if there are a small number of long-term experiments that need a human right there every second, are they worth hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars?

To argue convincingly for the value of manned spaceflight from a fiscal or scientific perspective is very difficult, to say the least. If people are going to go into space, let's be honest - the main reason we want to do it is because it's cool! OK. I won't argue with that. I agree. I might be willing to spend an extra $100 on my income taxes for that. Just don't try and jerk me around with rationalizations.

Driving, trust, egoism, violence

There is a tendency, when driving, to sit inside your 3000 pounds of metal, plastic, glass, and music, and forget that each of those other 3000-pound blobs out there is a person. You have a relationship, of sorts, with the people driving around you.

If you're going the speed limit on a 35-mph road, you are trusting the person coming toward you at a relative 70 mph to act in a very predictable way - with a lot at stake if you are wrong! Yet you don't even know him or her - or even whether it is a him or a her. Would you let a stranger serve you food, without even seeing what he or she looked like first? I'd say the risk is much higher driving on the same road with him, wouldn't you?

While sometimes we trust, at other times we feel so violated, so enraged, at others' behavior. I can't believe he cut me off! How dare he honk at me! Is it simply because we've been frightened by unpredictable and dangerous behavior? Sometimes. But I think another frequent reason is that, somehow, we feel victimized - not physically endangered, but emotionally attacked, taken advantage of. Cars can become a vehicle for expressing something ugly and primitive, that somehow feels OK to let out when we are insulated from the person of that person behind two layers of steel, plastic, glass, and music.

Our relationship with others on the road is really cut down to the basics - there is no language, no negotiation, just simple one-time encounters. And our emotions seem to mirror this simplicity, this primality. Without language to help mediate these relationships, are we stripped of some of our ability to reason, to modulate our responses?

Often, from the "perpetrator's" point of view, I think, pure selfishness and/or obliviousness to the needs of others is behind nasty driving. Why else sit in the right lane at a red light with no one else there and a car behind you with its turn signal on? It doesn't take much effort to change lanes as you come to a stop.

I guess what troubles me about my last observation is the implication for other social situations. I worry that the people who stay in the right lane, or who slow down, glide right, and then suddenly turn left with no signal, are the same ones who, walking behind you, see you drop $10 and pocket it, or take advantage of a very drunk freshman at a frat party.

If so, they are legion. What are the implications for the world? Have they always been there, only now they are more evident because driving puts us into contact with so many more people? Are they really not that bad, and the unique factors involved in automotive relationships bring out the worst? What do you all think?

Questions I wish someone would ask... part 1, politics 2008

This is not always going to be a political blog. I want to write about science, healthcare, my family, society, books I like, whatever. But politics is the issue that's pushed me over the top and got me ready to set the blog up. So here we go...

Maybe it's just me, but aren't we missing a couple of basic things as we follow the presidential race? Amid all the advertising technique, it seems to me there are some basic ideas that don't get discussed enough, or clearly enough.

Here's one... I have a neighbor, a really nice guy, a Christian, who happens to be a self-described conservative Repubican. He's a great guy. He's always ready to help, he listens respectfully to others' views, treats everyone with gentle kindness, loves kids. But, when the conversation turns to the Middle East, he starts saying things like, "you can't reason with those people."

There is a disconnect there, as if there's one way to treat Arabs, and another for the rest of the world. When people say we shouldn't dialog with terrorists until they stop being terrorists, I always think, what would Jesus do? It's hard for me to see him deciding not to talk to someone hateful. After all, if you'd like them to change their attitude, why not give them some information to start with? Who has more need to talk with people different from themselves, than someone who hates others so strongly he wants to kill them? How are they going to change their attitudes toward someone they can never know, who is only an abstraction, a distorted symbol?

Do these people not understand that others' actions and attitudes don't exist in a vacuum? People aren't anti-American because they're evil or wrong-headed or stupid. Let me say that a different way: It's not automatically evil not to like us. If I want someone to feel more positively toward me, it would seem appropriate for me to try and learn what his/her experiences and attitudes are. Why does he or she hate me? Have I done something wrong? Has he/she misunderstood something? I'm not enough of a historian to flesh out the answers to these questions, but I'm comfortable acknowledging we have manipulated, often bloodily, the third world and the Middle East, for our own political, economic, and ideological purposes.

Here is a second question I wish someone would ask. Does anyone remember how the Bush administration justified the war on Iraq? Colin Powell went to the U.N. and provided evidence that Iraq was building nuclear weapons. He showed pictures of vehicles used in the process. That was what convinced me, anyway. I disagreed with a lot of my liberal friends, but I felt we had adequate information to suggest we should stop Iraq. Oops. Turned out Bush was such a poor leader everyone was afraid to tell him the truth, and the story was actually not so overwhelmingly true - well, actually it was wrong. Too bad for Colin Powell, not to mention Iraq.

Nobody seems willing to admit that the war was literally misbegotten. For whatever reason, it was pushed forward, not only in the face of inaccurate evidence about Iraq's dangerousness, but also despite clear predictions from every quarter that there could be no quick and easy victory. (Continuing this line, by the way, victory was actually declared years prematurely - remember Bush appearing before the "Mission Accomplished" sign?)

In any event, we went into Iraq, where Al Qaeda wasn't, and now Al Qaeda is there. Not to mention, due to the Iraq war, we didn't have the forces to catch Bin Laden in Afghanistan when the time was right. Oops.