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A journal of sorts to record Jonathan Sturm's (and others') thoughts and observations on things worth thinking about. Feedback welcome, but be aware that unless you prominently say you want your communication kept private, I may publish it. |
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Wednesday, 31 August 2005
Roy Harvey writes:
Dear Pompous,
"The Git has been sucked into participating in the sci.bio.evolution newsgroup, though he's not sure how long he will continue to participate. He needs time out for watching awesome Aurora Borealis displays, gardening and working for a living, too..."
Is it possible that The Git is in the northern hemisphere and I did not notice that transition in his Diatribes? Or has The Git a philosophical objection to the term australis being associated with the phenomena? Certainly it takes only the simplest of googling to reveal that using the word borealis is not unknown when referring to the phenomena in the southern hemisphere:
http://www.astrographics.com/GalleryPrintsIndex/GP1422.html
Perhaps The Git will forgive my impertinence if (1) the web site from which the URLs listed below turn out to be from a site with which The Git is not yet familiar, and (2) one of them proves to be of some use to The Git.
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapS.html
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapN.html
Annoyingly yours,
Roy Harvey, picker of nits
(Who first addressed you as Mr Git in correspondence during the erection of the ferrous domicile, and did not wish to repeat the upset to The Git's equilibrium that being so addressed seemed to induce.)
Beacon Falls, CT
Roy, it is never annoying to have errors detected in order for them to be corrected. The only excuse The Git can offer for a litter of small errors recently is the relative lack of time for proof reading compared to the early days. One tends to read what one thinks one wrote. As is usual with The Git, observing things leads to introspection about them and this spurs reading about them, too. Unfortunately, in his reading about the phenomenon, the repetitive use of "Borealis" in the scientific documents displaced the "Australis" in what passes for The Git's Brain.
Mark Frank writes:
Jonathan
I have now semi-retired and have time to look at your excellent web-site. I am happy to make a small subscription via PayPal but there seems little point in getting US dollars involved. What do you need in Australian?
A few of my own ramblings below -- respond to any part that takes your fancy -- or none of it if you like.
On species.
As you say there are a number of definitions of a species and there are many borderline or confusing examples -- but in practice 99.9% of the time we have no difficulty with the word and the concept -- certainly for current sexually reproducing species. The word "species" works in practice although there may not be a single definition that covers everything we want to call a species -- think of Wittgenstein on games and family resemblances (PI 66 and 67 for example).I think you are somehow relating the difficulty in providing a crisp definition of species to the difficulty in providing an account of speciation through Darwinian methods. But actually the looseness of the definition and particularly the existence of borderline cases such as ring species really helps us understand the process. Robert's point about ring-species is spot-on. If the intermediate species died off then this would be an example of allopatric speciation which, according to my text book, is what most biologists believe to be the commonest way sexual species are created. If it were possible to create three or four non-interbreeding populations then that would indeed be three or four species -- as appears to have occurred among Galapagos giant tortoises for example. So we can observe speciation happening for complex organisms -- it is a slow process but wherever we see two geographically separated races that are growing more and more dissimilar then that is likely to lead to speciation.
On random mutation and natural selection
I think you are saying there are no observed cases of the natural selection process causing innovation, only examples of increasing the frequency of what already exists. Well in one sense of course that's true. It is one of the principles of natural selection that it is selection -- it selects from what already exists. What is interesting is where the variation comes from. You seem concerned that we have not observed variation or innovation happening. But how do you know this? There have been plenty of examples of organisms developing features and behaviour that we have not observed before. For example, bacteria evolving resistance to new antibiotics. How do you know this was simply selection of something that existed already rather than a new response resulting from mutation? We know that fruit flies will develop quite dramatic innovations such as extra wings when their DNA is knocked about with X-rays.What does random mean in the context of random mutation? I don't believe that Darwin or biologists in general are thinking of a strict mathematical definition -- hard to know how to define that anyway. I have no doubt that some types of mutation are more likely than others (you give some examples), and I suspect that mutations that are potentially useful are more likely than obviously disastrous mutations, and that mutation rates may speed up when the organism is under stress. This isn't surprising if you accept that the reproductive system has itself evolved. The important point is that the variation has not been designed by an external agency -- it is the result of the internal mechanism of the organism and its response to the environment.
In fact what does "design" mean? I don't think the ID guys are suggesting that some external agency is getting involved with each and every reproduction/mutation as it takes place. The mechanism, whatever it is, runs by itself and does not need something to run it. So the "design" is confined to the initial setup. Well what makes that setup something that has been designed? If we found some evidence of something's intention (e.g. a cosmic plan) then that would be good evidence. But otherwise we have to fall back on the old argument of how unlikely this is to happen by chance -- in essence similar to arguments about the universe being finely adjusted to support life. This is familiar territory and not very productive -- maybe there are an infinite number of universes and this is the only one producing life capable of reflecting on the problem -- whatever. The fact is we have a mechanism, it works, and we are beginning to understand how it works although there is a long way to go -- the word design adds nothing at a practical level.
The related idea that I think you once put forward is that all variation is somehow inherent in life and that it has always been there. Again it is tricky to know what this really means. You are not denying evolution are you? You do accept that life was once much simpler -- just prokaryotes -- and that all life was derived from this? So in this sense even the strictest Darwinist also accepts that the first life on earth had the potential for all the complexity we now see.
<snip> But see the Post Scriptum
Enough - cheers
Mark
The Git is profoundly suspicious of the reductionist approach to biology. That is not to say he thinks it is incorrect, just that it's not the only path to understanding things. So the story goes, biology is reducible to chemistry, and chemistry is reducible to physics. That's not to mention psychology being reducible to sociology and sociology being reducible to biology. Here's the classical imagery:
Species (specific kinds of something) in chemistry are readily identified: hydrogen has one proton, helium two protons, lithium three protons... Claiming that while iron was a species because its atomic number is 26 and that there are other, different elements with the same atomic number, or that some elements are defined without regard to their atomic number. Yet in biology this is precisely what we do in order to "make sense" of species. Be aware that The Git isn't arguing against any concept of species in biology, just that there are several different ways and that each has its merits and faults. On that account, we can for the purposes of a particular intellectual exercise adopt one or another, rather than insisting on a one-size-fits-all approach. This is likely what Kim Sterelny means and The Git certainly means when advocating pluralism. It seems that this is just because biology, unlike physics and to a lesser extent chemistry, is an infant science. Geology is also burdened by a plethora of conflicting theories and definitions. It's notable though that geologists seem to be far less wedded to their theories and seem to welcome, rather than reject, forthcoming better theories!
The example of the Received View you give, the Galapagos tortoises, is far more "spot on" than Robert's example of the herring gulls. It has been shown mathematically that a variant gene will tend to be rapidly lost from a large gene pool. In a restricted gene pool, gene variants have a much better chance of spreading throughout the population and surviving. The two criteria, reproductive isolation and a small gene pool, are met by the Galapagos tortoises. Thus the claim that they are well on the way to speciation is better grounded than any such claim for a group as large as the herring gulls. Here's a map of the distribution of the world's most numerous gull:
Gould and Eldridge invoked the small isolated gene pool for their notion of punctuated equilibrium, an attempt to explain the lack of gradualism in the fossil record predicted by Darwinism. It remains the case that species tend to remain static for millions of years without any noticeable speciation. New species arise suddenly in the fossil record, not gradually. This is explicable if the isolated population remains very small while it undergoes evolutionary change by accumulated mutations. Environmental change then allows the new species to take advantage of the change and rapidly increase in population.
A further problem with the herring gulls is that their reproductive isolation appears to be due to behavioural differences; i.e. mate choice. While mate choice has to be at least partially genetically determined, it is by no means the case that it must be entirely genetic. It seems reasonable to assume that like many other species of animal, the young are imprinted by their parents. Any animal failing to sufficiently resemble the parental imprint would be rejected as a potential mate. An example of this sort of behaviour occurs with livestock kept for milking. There was something very touching about being groomed by the goats we milked. They clearly perceived us to be at least kid-like, though not necessarily identical to their biological offspring.
The herring gull population because it is so large and spread over a diverse range seems to be a prime candidate for stasis, rather than being in any process of speciation. The variations between different groups of herring gull appear to be directly analogous to those between varieties of dog. The Git notes here that even very small isolated gene pools do not guarantee speciation. There are at least two separate colonies of that rather rare fish, the coelacanth, for a long time believed extinct. Any explanation of speciation based on small, isolated gene pools must also explain the coelacanth and any other similar static species.
It's problems such as we are discussing that lead to phylogenetic species concepts as a solution. Unfortunately, that leads to yet another can of worms. The problem is that it has proven just as difficult to define what a gene is. While researchers after Mendel had shown that certain phenotypic characteristics were linked to particular gene sequences, many are not. Some are the result of interactions of genes. Some genes are activated, or inactivated by the cell environment. Genes are defined by the nucleotide sequence between start and stop codons, but the relationship between them and phenotypic characteristics is not one to one, or even one to many. It's many to many.
Let's consider Susumu Ohno's explanation [borrowed from Brig Klyce] of how random genetic mutation leading to new genes must occur. He wrote that for a new gene to evolve by mutation, an existing gene must be duplicated, become silent for a time, and undergo what he called "forbidden mutations". The reasoning is that when we have pushed up the random mutation rate for organisms by artificial means, such as the many experiments with the fruit fly (drosophila), the results have generally been deleterious. Bizarre even: drosophila can be induced to grow fully formed legs from their eyes and, as you point out, extra wings that impede flying. Clearly, an organism cannot forego the utility of a gene while it mutates into something useful.
While silent, a gene cannot be improved, or even maintained, by natural selection. Rather, natural selection might tend to weed such silent genes out because they have no value to the organism. Remember that there's nothing about random mutation to suggest that a single nucleotide substitution must take place. It seems just as likely that nucleotides could be lost, or added. If nucleotide sequences have any tendency to spontaneously grow in size, there appears to be little evidence for it.
Lenski's Phenotypic and Genomic Evolution is a fairly accessible account of a 30,000 generation experiment with Escherichia coli, though only 20,000 generations had been analysed at the time of publication. The results were that the bacteria adapted to their environment, but there's no evidence of evolution of novel characteristics that might indicate a progress toward more complex organisms. In other words, they remained staunchly Escherichia coli.
To arrive at a substantially different nucleotide sequence, many mutations are needed. These mutations would have to randomise the original sequence of the gene such that it loses its original meaning in order to qualify as having a new meaning. Ohno's hypothesis sidesteps the problem of how a mutating gene would have to retain meaning while transforming into something with new meaning.
As everyone knows, a random nucleotide strand as long as an average gene has an absurdly high number of possible sequences. Assuming an average gene is 1,000 nucleotides long, the number of possible sequences it can have is 4^1000, or about 10^600. The chance of finding any gene currently expressed anywhere in biology in that sequence space, in even 10^50 trials, is less than 10^-500.
There are arguments to circumvent this problem, but they entail making stasis in organisms (such as the coelocanth) difficult to explain. It's not clear how a gene can go silent, remain unaffected by natural selection while it undergoes a series of random mutations that just happen to randomly generate a novel and useful characteristic that then fortuitously becomes expressed. The recent research indicating rapid evolution of the human brain poses an even greater problem when it involves hundreds, or thousands of such nucleotide sequences all undergoing change virtually simultaneously. Clearly it's not impossible, but anyone with an understanding of chance must find this all very hard to swallow. It's not impossible for The Git to win first prize in the lottery several weeks in a row, but he's not holding his breath waiting for such an occurrence...
There are at least four possible explanations here:
- It's all just down to an amazing long streak of lucky events. We Know The Truth. Live with it. [neoDarwinists]
- This is not the explanation for evolution. Evolution involves whole nucleotide sequences (horizontal gene transfer). [Panspermia advocates/Margulis et alia]
- There is some undiscovered mechanism/mechanisms operating to skew the odds. That is, the process is not random at all. [Prigogine et alia]
- God done it.
Typically, the evidence for the neoDarwinist explanation takes a form similar to this:
"Peter and Rosemary Grant, two British-born researchers who have spent decades where Charles Darwin spent weeks, have captured a glimpse of evolution with their longterm studies of beak size among Galapagos finches."
[Was Darwin Wrong? NO, the evidence for Evolution is overwhelming by David Quammen, National Geographic November 2004]
And because Natural Selection affects beak size within a species, it must therefore also be responsible for the differentiation between the formation of feather, human skin cells, or reptilian scales, i.e. marks of speciation. There is a huge difference between the rate at which a process takes place and the generation of new, previously non-existent functions. One wonders about how stupid they think we are.
During the last four billion years, or so, life evolved from prokaryotic single cells to eukaryotic single cells, to multicellular plants and animals. The increasingly complex suite of organs, systems, and features required an increase in the size and complexity of the genetic code. It should be clear that the evolution of new organs, systems, or features requires new genes, not ever-so-slightly mutated versions of existing genes.
Speciation though the introduction of new genes by horizontal gene transfer is well documented. HGT also explains what would otherwise be the "miraculous" invention of the C4 photosynthetic process in over thirty unrelated plant species in the neoDarwinist dogma. For example, "in August 1996, Carol J. Bult et al. reported sequencing the complete genome of the archaebacterium M. jannaschii. Among the genes it contains are, surprisingly, five histone genes (Morell). Histones are known to be used by eukaryotes as scaffolding for their complex chromosomal structure. Prokaryotes' chromosomes do not have this structure and do not use histones." While it might barely be possible for a bacterium to generate a single gene for which it has no use through random mutation, five such chance occurrences stretches credulity to the limit.
We might be tempted to ask whether there are any known examples of non-random mutation. Escherichia coli bacteria, it seems, do precisely that according to B G Hall, Department of Biology, University of Rochester, NY:
"Selection-induced mutations are nonrandom mutations that occur as specific and direct responses to environmental challenges and primarily in nondividing cells under conditions of intense prolonged selection. Selection-induced mutations have been shown to occur at six loci in Escherichia coli, but their existence has not previously been demonstrated in any eukaryotic organism. Here it is shown that selection-induced mutations occur at the HIS4 locus in the eukaryotic microorganism Saccharomyces cerevisiae."
Some of the evidence at least appears to point toward bacteria being a source of new genetic codes and that bacteria can generate new codes through non-random mutation by as yet unexplained processes. Note that the bacteria were mutating at specific loci for a specific response to the environment in which they found themselves. While we can shun the term design, it certainly looks and smells purposive, and the very opposite of chance.
Some researchers believe that many biological processes have a quasi-mathematical relationship with non-living, self-organising processes. Self-organization refers to a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases automatically without being guided or managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems typically (though not always) display emergent properties. Biologist Jack Cohen's co-writer, Ian Stewart has written a book about the mathematical aspects of biology: Life's Other Secret. The Git is about to get stuck into their book: The Collapse of Chaos and hopes it is as intriguing as their later tome: Figments of Reality.
Susumu Ohno's collaboration with his musician/wife Midori opens the door to some intriguing speculation:
The Music Of The Genes
In 1986, at 58, S. Ohno made one of his most interesting and popular discoveries. He published a paper in Immunogenetics examining the relationship between patterns of genetic sequence data and musical structure. He argued that using this similarity, the flood of genetic data since humans find meaning in music, but not in (seemingly) random sequences of letters. Basically, he found that when music was set to genes or genes set to music some strange things happen.
"The SARC oncogene, a malignant gene first discovered in chickens, causes cancer in humans as well. When Ohno translated the gene into music, it sounded very much like Chopin's Funeral March. "An enzyme called phosphoglycerate kinase, which breaks down glucose, or sugar, in the body revealed itself to Ohno as a lullaby."
He translates genes into music by assigning notes according to molecular weights. His ultimate goal is the discovery of some basic pattern (melody?) that governs all life. Not too long ago the motions of the planets were supposed to conform to an esthetically pleasing Music of the Spheres.
Ohno found a way to express the Music of the Genes. do to cytosine, re and mi to adenine, fa and so to guanine, and la and ti to thymine. Then, having assigned musical notes to each base, Dr. Ohno chose a particular key and timing, as well as the duration of each note. The result was a melodic composition that was finally fleshed out with harmonies by his wife, Midori, a musician. When completely transcribed, the scores were then performed by professional musicians on instruments such as the piano or organ, violin and viola.
Dr. Ohno notated over fifteen songs of the DNA of a variety of living organisms. He finds that the more evolved an organism is, the more complicated is the music. The DNA of a single-cell protozoan, for example, translates into a simple four-note repetition. But the music transcribed from human DNA -- e.g., the body's receptor site for insulin -- is much more complex. Listeners knowledgeable about music have taken these DNA-based compositions for the music of Bach, Brahms, Chopin and other great composers.
As any dairy farmer can tell you, cows respond to music, becoming calmer when certain music is played in the milking shed and that the "wrong" type of music has unwanted effects. The Git also finds much Post-Modern, random music irritating. This should not be construed as a criticism of all Post-Modern composers. Philip Glass, Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman all appear to create non-random and pleasant Post-Modern music.
The Git's a bit too busy reading about self-organisation and the history of artificial intelligence at the moment to follow today's intriguing musical discovery.
It has been suggested that The Git must provide an explanation for giving any credence whatsoever to the possibility of Intelligent Design. He searched in vain for any online account of Richard Swinburne's Argument from the Fine-Tuning of the Universe. It relies on a Bayesian statistical analysis of the Anthropic Principle. But he did find the following by the Christian physicist, James Hannam:
In Defense of the Fine Tuning Design Argument (2001)
James Hannam
The Internet Infidels have long been interested in publishing a theistics defense of the fine-tuning argument against our criticisms, which are collected among our many essays on the Design Argument in general. James Hannam is the first to oblige, and the following essay is his defense of the Fine Tuning Argument for a creator. The Internet Infidels will respond in a forthcoming essay by Richard Carrier.
Of the traditional arguments for God, the teleological or design argument has recently enjoyed a new lease of life after many years out of favour. The classical formulation comes from Natural Theology, a book by William Paley published in 1802, in which the author asks us to compare living things to a watch he has found on the common. Because we can all agree that a watch is purposefully designed to tell the time, we should be equally able to conclude that plants and animals are purposefully designed to survive in each of their particular habitats. The argument is far older than that and appears in different forms in the work of both St Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes. Charles Darwin put paid to this formulation of the argument in 1859 with his theory of evolution which explained how living things came to be. All was quiet on this front for some time, but today teleology is back in fashion as an argument from the fundamentals of physics and, less successfully perhaps, biology. This essay outlines the new argument from design based on the fine tuning of the laws of physics.
One thing a design argument must not do is look for a 'God in the Gaps.' That is to say, we must not try and find theological explanations for scientific phenomena that science itself has not yet explained. The classic example of this is the origin of life on Earth. Many Christians have been beguiled by the idea that because life is so improbable, God must have actually stepped in to have created it. I reject this for two reasons--the first is that I do not think God, having created the universe for living creatures to live in, would have done such a bad job as to make it near impossible for such creatures to arise. Secondly, we are held hostage by the possibility (in my opinion, probability) that one day a science will create life in a test tube. Hence I feel Christians should avoid the origin of life in apologetics especially as I believe that many efforts in this field are misinformed.
And here is the rebuttal:
Response to James Hannam's 'In Defense of the Fine Tuning Design Argument' (2001)
Richard Carrier
In his essay "In Defense of the Fine Tuning Design Argument" (2001) published here on the Secular Web, I do not believe Hannam has addressed the full range of issues and problems with the Fine Tuning Argument as discussed in our essays against the Design Argument. As but one example, he dismisses Victor Stenger's "Monkey God" program as little more than "a bit of fun," but this is a serious research product, defended at length in a technical article, "Natural Explanations for the Anthropic Coincidences," Philo, 3:2 (Fall-Winter 2000) [click here for Acrobat/PDF version]. Hannam does not interact with this work at all. He thus does not consider that Stenger's model varies all constants dynamically, not just one while keeping the others the same, and thus Monkey God generates a far more inclusive information space from which to judge relative probabilities. Hannam also criticises it for only addressing four rather than six constants, but in fact only four constants are relevant for generating long-lived stars, whose existence makes the conditions for life highly probable, regardless of what the other constants turn out to be, as Stenger argues in the above-mentioned paper. There are certain unjustified assumptions in Stenger's argument (e.g. see point 3 below), but they are the very same assumptions Hannam and other creationists build upon.
However, Hannam correctly dismisses a great many theistic fallacies that our other essays have also refuted in more detail, and thus his position is more sound than most, and worthy of careful attention. But rather than pick on more specific examples like the Stenger case above, this essay will focus on some of the general, sweeping problems that Hannam's essay does not resolve.
Quoting from further along in the refutation:
Framed this way, we see that Hannam has not made an adequate case for theism from the proposal of 'fine tuning', since we have no direct evidential support for any theistic hypothesis (all we have is the datum in need of explanation) and no evidence falsifying the nontheistic alternatives, which are not illogical, and whose improbability cannot be observed or known. Even if we reject the claim (made by many an expert) that we have direct evidential support for some nontheistic hypotheses, agnosticism (i.e. the conclusion that we do not know who is right) is still the only justified position, and that means Fine Tuning cannot support any argument for the existence of a Creator without commiting the fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam.
And a similar criticism applies to the case of neoDarwinism: "all we have is the datum in need of explanation... agnosticism (i.e. the conclusion that we do not know who is right) is still the only justified position."
Mark Frank wrote:
On a completely unrelated matter. You make an interesting point about the very large amount of deaths caused by secular states (by the way I think you mean Richard Dawkins, not John). I would lump together religious fundamentalism, communism and fascism in one larger category which you might call fundamentalism -- a belief that you know the answer and the end justifies the means (Animal rights activists are a small group that clearly belongs. I fear that neo-conservatism could join the list.). I suspect the only reason that secular fundamentalism outnumbers religious fundamentalism in the misery stakes is that the 20th century was a secular age and there were more people around to suffer and more efficient technology and organization for inflicting misery. If religious fundamentalism had the same opportunity for horror then I am pretty sure it would practice it -- as we may be about to find out.
Yes, The Git meant Richard, rather than John who is a loathsome Australian politician.
The Git certainly agrees with you that the secular/theistic dichotomy espoused by Dawkins is unsupported by the facts.
Mark further wrote:
Jonathan
I think you have missed the point. Although 340 deaths/year appears relatively minor it became apparent on 9/11 that we have now have a form of terrorism that given the opportunity would be prepared to kill an almost unlimited number of people -- quite possibly including nuclear. Our real problem is that technology is making it possible for small groups of people with limited resources to kill very large numbers of people and this will get easier as the technology advances. There will always be nutters with the desire to use this technology. So society has created an immense problem for itself. You can call it international terrorism or whatever. I am not sure the answer is invading countries but the problem is very serious.
PS The British didn't invade Palestine. It was ruled by the Ottoman empire. After the first world war we took that territory off the Turks as part of the terms of capitulation -- hardly an invasion -- just a change of ownership. Our real mistake was simultaneously promising it to the Arab population and also offering it as a home for the Jewish Diaspora. This exposed us to Jewish terrorism which proved very successful -- the leaders became leaders in the new Israel -- thus setting a precedent for the area.
Cheers
Mark Frank
To which The Git replied:
Terrorists: 340*100 = 34,000
Governments: 180,000,000
Governments kill ~5,300 for each death due to terrorism.
The Git is 5,300 times more frightened by governments than international terrorists...
The Palestinians refer to the British as invaders...
Furthermore, The Git notes that despite GW Bush claiming no prior warning for the New Orleans disaster, the following appeared in the October 2004 National Geographic:
But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however -- the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level-more than eight feet below in places -- so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
When did this calamity happen? It hasn't -- yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.
Of course, a "mere" 10,000 appear to be dead, but that's still some three times greater than the probably unrepeatable WTC disaster. Now, tell me again, why we should fear international terrorists more than the "protection" provided by our own governments.
The Git can notify you by email when a new post is ready. Just email him to be put on the list, or removed if you are on the list and don't want to be.
Thoughts for the week:
"The successes of molecular biology are so beguiling that we forget the organism and its physiology. Schrodinger's disciples, who founded the church of molecular biology, have turned his wisdom into the dogma that life is self-replicating and corrects its errors by natural selection. There is much more to life than this naive truth, just as there is more to the Universe than atoms alone -- grandmothers live and enjoy the shade of Lombardy poplar trees not knowing that they and the trees are deemed by this dogma to be dead." -- James Lovelock
-oOo-
"I have to concur with the critic who, responding to post-modernist criticisms that Derrida's words were taken out of context, replied 'Derrida in context is worse than Derrida out of context.'" -- Steven Dutch
-oOo-
"Some years ago I heard a radio talk on religious affairs in which the speaker, a prominent Churchman, said that in his experience of answering questions about religion he had encountered three distinct types of people; firstly, there are those who are all for religion; secondly, there are those who are all against religion; and thirdly there are those who take religion seriously! Perhaps I should warn my readers that the discussion in this book of the religious dimension of science is intended simply and solely for people in this third group. We live in a culture which, while dependent on science for its material welfare, is largely ignorant of the new ideas and perspectives, some quite startling, on which that science is based. Like the visitors to Narrabri [astronomical] Observatory, our society knows so little about science that, apart from the enquiry as to how much it costs, the only question usually asked of scientific research is -- what use is it? That is a reasonable, if shallow, question and in my view scientists should be able to answer it, not only for their own particular branch, but for science in general." -- Hanbury Brown
Current Listening:
Bob Dylan -- Hurricane and A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall
Paul McCartney -- Hands Across the Water
Led Zeppelin -- When the Levee Breaks
Neil Young -- She is Like a Hurricane
Billie Holiday -- I Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans
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