Do the religious worship nature?

One of my students has begun her project work on the disconnect between humans and the natural world.  "This disconnect from nature conflicts with human’s quality of life, physical health, psychological well-being, food sources, drinking water, our awareness of the natural world, and many more factors," she writes.

I am glad that younger people are thinking about these issues.  But then this is Oregon, and it is a rare Oregonian who is not in tune with nature.  I hope that kids and youth all over the world are thinking about these, so that they can undo the mess that we older folks have created for them.

The following is a slightly edited post from a few months ago:
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The undergraduate years gave me the time and space for me to figure out how I viewed many aspects of life, including religion.  Like a pendulum that violently swings, suggesting instability and the entire structure falling apart, the violence within was also reflected in my words and action.  In retrospect, I am immensely glad, and relieved, that I did not suffer a breakdown.

The internal tensions related to religion and the various daily practicalities of life resulted from the years of brainwashing.  I had yet to start any serious reading and thinking about how screwed up other religions might be.  Graduate school provided me that opportunity too.

While I did not take courses on religions, many of the books and articles that I read, and the lectures that I listened to, gave me insights.  One of those was about the relationship between god, nature, and humans.

In the traditional approaches in the various strands of Hindu faith, there is plenty of nature worship.  Mountains are sacred as are rivers and trees.  And, of course, even killing the damn roaches troubled the really faithful ones.  But, apparently not so in the Judaeo-Christian framework.  Why?  The Bible said so:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

God rules over man, who rules over nature.  A relationship that is very different from what the faith in the old country told me.

Of course, just because people say they are religious does not mean they truly mean it. Many devout brahmins, for instance, devour meat.  And there are nature-worshiping hippies among Christians.  But, the broad framework suggests that the faithful might look at nature differently because their views stem from what their religions brainwashed them.

Do evangelical Christians in the US then put into practice a view that man rules over nature?  And, therefore, do they think differently from many of us who are worried about environmental crises and climate change in particular?

The following excerpt should settle that, it seems:

Here, for example, is what a church youth minister had to say about environmental care: “If we have the opportunity we should help take care of this planet that we’ve been given. Having said that, I also believe that the value of human life is higher than the value of a whale, or a species of monkey.”
It’s not that evangelicals don’t care about the environment. It’s that they care about people more.

Of course, the people that evangelicals care about don't live in shitholes--but, that is a post for another day!

Meera Subramanian worked on a series to find the middle ground in these environment discussions.  In one, she talked to a bunch of students at the Harvard of the evangelicals--Wheaton College.

While many evangelicals are preoccupied with the long-term state of human souls and the protection of the unborn, Diego and the other students I met at Wheaton are also considering other eternal implications and a broader definition of pro-life. They are concerned about the lifespan of climate pollutants that will last in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and about the lives of the poor and weak who are being disproportionately harmed by the effects of those greenhouse gases. 

But, as much as I found the world a challenging place back when I was a teenager, these students also are in a tough spot:

It can be tough to be an evangelical who cares about climate change, Chelsey said, "because the environmental activists don't trust you and the evangelicals hate you." Or they could hate you

If only we could engage in serious and sincere discussions all over the world on the relationship between humans and the natural world that envelops us.  If only!

Trading places

Over the years, I have come to appreciate John Rawls's "veil of ignorance" a lot.  I mean, a lot.  (Click here if you need a ninety-second briefing.)

Unlike Rawls's theoretical structure of an original position, we have the real world to deal with.  It is this world, not a hypothetical scenario, that we have to work with.  Which means, we need to figure out how to understand what it might mean to be a person of the type that we are not.  The "other" could be a different gender from us.  A different religion.  Different skin color.  Different upbringing.  Different whatever.

If we begin to understand the circumstances in which the others might find themselves, then, well, we are beginning to have that wonderful aspect of what it means to be human: Empathy.

It is not the emotional empathy that I am referring to, like when we see the stereotypical photo of a fly buzzing around a poor kid with a runny nose.  Nope. As Roman Krznaric explains in the video that I have embedded in this post (or you can watch here) it is cognitive empathy.

We imagine what the people in Aleppo are going through.  We imagine what the homeless in the nation's capital experience when they are only a few blocks away from the President's palace.  We imagine what the hijab-wearing Muslim is worried about as a result of the elections.

Krznaric referred to Adam Smith, which, of course, intrigued me.  Smith, is often hailed by the free market and the pro-business people.  (Pro-business is not the same as being pro-market.)  However, that is cherry-picking from what Smith had to say.

Smith not only wrote about the invisible hand and the power of self-interest, but was a moral philosopher.  Krznaric quotes Smith about empathy.  The think-tanks and the business lobbies conveniently forget that Smith was quite a philosopher.  Either they forget, or they are not even informed about it--perhaps the latter!

Krznaric quotes from Smith's other book, A theory of moral sentiments: " ... by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels."

By changing places with the sufferer ... in our imagination, not literally.  We then imagine what it might mean to be that other person.

When the President says all the horrible things that he says on a daily hourly basis, it reflects an utter lack of an ability to "fancy with the sufferer"--a complete and total lack of empathy.

It is not any surprise when he makes even tragic situations only about himself. Or, talks about the most nonsensical things like how a boat ended up in some guy's yard.  A lack of empathy means that the asshole-in-chief can never behave like the comforter-in-chief that Presidents are expected to be in the face of tragedies. 

When he lacks empathy ... progress will stall.  Huge steps backward as we hopefully wait for the long arc of the moral universe to bend, again, towards justice.

Dance like a monkey!

Right from when I was a kid, I loved elephants.  And then there is that vague memory of having watched the movie Maya, of which the only thing that I remember is that the plot had something about a white elephant.

As much as I loved those massive but somehow gentle animals, I always, always, felt bad that they were under a mahout's control and that they were not free.

It was also why I have never enjoyed going to zoos.  An animal locked up in a space, away from its natural habitat, bothers me a great deal.  A few years ago, when I was in Washington, DC, for a conference (and to also interview for the journal editor position, which I finally did not get) I walked into the National Zoo.  But, I quickly exited--I could not handle watching the caged big cats.

Which is why when it flashed in my news-feed that a gorilla was shot dead in a zoo after a kid fell into the enclosure, I was less interested in the details of the incident, but was bugged by one question: Why the hell do we have these zoos that cage in the animals?

There is at least one person who knows something about animals who has taken up that very question.  In this essay at the Scientific American, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology asks,  "Why Was Harambe the Gorilla in a Zoo in the First Place?"

Harambe was in the zoo because he was captive born, and breeding animals who are going to live out the rest of their lives in cages raises numerous issues. However, that is precisely why Harambe was living in the Cincinnati Zoo. Being a zoo-ed animal, Harmabe lost all of his freedoms – the freedoms to make choices about how he was to live, what he would eat, when he would sleep and go to the bathroom, where he would roam, and if he were to become a father. While some might say Harmabe had a “good life” in the zoo, it doesn’t come close to the life he would have had as a wild gorilla, with all its attendant risks. Indeed, one might argue that the animal people were seeing was not really a true western lowland gorilla, surely not an ambassador for his species.

A gorilla was bred in captivity so that we humans will have gorillas to keep in zoos.  How awful!  Why do we have to do this?  Are we not content with photos and videos of gorillas in the mist?  Is the US founded on an idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and a gorilla for every zoo?

For people who want to know more about what was going on in Harmabe’s head and heart, think about your companion dog, for example. How do they respond when someone trespasses into where they feel safe? I like to ask people to use their companion animals to close the empathy gap because people get incredibly upset when a dog is harmed because they see dogs as sentient, feeling beings. So too, was Harambe.
So, would you allow your dog to be put in a zoo? If not, then why Harambe and millions of other individuals who languish behind bars?

Exactly.  This is seriously messed up.

A gorilla's life was traded off because a human child was in danger.

As simple as that.  If the kid had fallen into a cheetah enclosure, we would have killed the cheetah.  We would have killed any animal in the zoo.  Those animals had no choice on whether they wanted to be there in the first place!

Captive breeding by zoos to produce individuals who are going to live out their lives in cages, in the name of entertainment and possibly in the name of education and conservation, raises many challenging questions. Did people who saw Harambe learn anything about what the life of a male western lowland gorilla is really like? ... Did they learn something about these fascinating animals that would help Harambe or his wild relatives?  ... Did people learn something about these gorillas that would help wild relatives?

The answers to those questions range from definitely not to most likely not.  We put those animals in cages because it is entertainment for us.  As simple as that.  An entertainment that says "fuck you" to those animals who deserve much, much better treatment.  We humans are being beastly! :(

Horsing around about Chernobyl

My car is old, and the odometer shows quite a few digits.  The dishwasher at home has problems, but it works.  A couple of undershirts (the banians, in the old country language) are a tad frayed.  The pair of brown shoes that I wear to work has the beginnings of holes on the under side.

But, I have no plans to replace any of these, and more, unless the situation compels me to.  For a simple reason--I am crazily concerned about the environment in my own way.

As long as the car gets me around reliably, as long as the dishwasher works, as long as ... replacing them will simply mean material consumption, which is one of the biggest threats to the environment for the future generations.  As I often joke with students, it is really not my problem but theirs, yet I am doing my best to make sure I don't worsen things for them and their children.

On Earth Day, I read this short commentary in the Scientific American about nuclear energy.  The subtitle says it all: "How an award-winning filmmaker who created the definitive Earth Day documentary learned to love nuclear power in an age of global warming."  Of course, I have blogged in plenty that summarily excluding nuclear power from the energy discussions was a huge mistake. But, that ship has sailed, as they say.

The opposition to nuclear power ramped up after the disaster at Chernobyl.  The accident happened thirty years ago--on April 26, 1986.  To mark the thirty years, and in time for Earth Day, National Geographic has a lengthy report.

This year will mark the half-life of cesium-137, one of the most widespread and dangerous of the radionuclides released. That means the amount of cesium has dropped by about half in the 30 years since the accident, decaying into the short-lived barium-137m.

An important milestone in understanding what happens the day after.

Marina Shkvyria watches for animal tracks as she walks toward an abandoned village in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the area sealed to the public after a nuclear power plant exploded here 30 years ago, on April 26, 1986. Spotting one, she crouches and runs her finger over the toes of a wolf print in the loose sand.
It may seem strange that Chernobyl, an area known for the deadliest nuclear accident in history, could become a refuge for all kinds of animals—from moose, deer, beaver, and owls to more exotic species like brown bear, lynx, and wolves—but that is exactly what Shkvyria and some other scientists think has happened. Without people hunting them or ruining their habitat, the thinking goes, wildlife is thriving despite high radiation levels.

In our popular imagination, the forbidden zone is not one that we would think as something that supports plants and animals, right?  Yet, it is now a thriving wildlife refuge.  Radiation "is not holding back Chernobyl wildlife populations."

The combined territory of the exclusion zones in Ukraine and Belarus caused by the Chernobyl disaster is a little more than 1,600 square miles, making it one of the largest truly wild sanctuaries in Europe.
But what it means for animals to be rebounding in Chernobyl has become the scientific equivalent of a boxing match, with the latest blow delivered Monday when Beasley put forward a study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Beasley's following comment is pretty darn interesting:

“I would argue that for many of those species [the effects of radiation], even if they’re there, probably aren’t enough to suppress populations to the point where they can’t sustain themselves,” says Beasley. In the zone, “humans have been removed from the system and this greatly overshadows any of those potential radiation effects.”
Essentially, this means that human populations have a bigger negative impact than radiation.
... While Beasley stops short of calling the landscape “ruined” by radioactive contamination, he knows that it will be there for centuries or millennia, in the case of plutonium. But, without humans around, his findings show that the wildlife seems to be doing all right.

We humans are a much bigger threat to the wildlife than radiation is!  Now, that's plenty to think about on this Earth Day.

Caption at the Source:
The Przewalski's horse nearly went extinct, but in an effort to save the species it was introduced into the area around Chernobyl in 1998 and to other reserves worldwide. Without humans living in the area, the horse population has been increasing.

If robots write, will we read?

Yes, we will.  In fact, we already do.

We are speeding towards that singular moment when machines will think like humans that we won't be able to spot the difference.  Yes, some ways to go, but don't put your feet up and relax because the bots are coming.  Some are already here.  Especially at the one place with which we are all familiar: Wikipedia!

Bots have long been used to author and edit entries on Wikipedia, and, more recently, an increasingly large amount of the site's new content is written by bots. Their use is regulated by Wikipedia users called the "Bot Approvals Group."

Did you know this already?  I sure did not.  News it is to me!  And a "Bot Approvals Group"--is it run by humans or bots? ;)

That WSJ piece reports that using bots, Sverker Johansson, a 53-year-old Swede, has authorship credit  for "2.7 million articles, or 8.5% of the entire collection" at Wikipedia.  News to you, too, right?

Mr. Johansson says his bot could be an inspiration to future authors who have knowledge outside the typical interests of standard Wikipedia contributors. He says a computer program can't write about everything.
"Wikipedia also needs writers to describe sentiments, literary quality, those kinds of things—my bot won't ever be able to do that," he says.

I suppose it is all a variation of what I routinely tell students, when it comes to their term papers--I am not looking for factoids, but for evidence of thinking through.  

Now, most of the news is facts, right?  So, bots beat journalists?  

The Associated Press announced last month that “the majority of U.S. corporate earnings stories for our business news report will eventually be produced using automation technology.” In the coming weeks, its first machine-written articles—written with software supplied by the Durham, North Carolina­–based startup Automated Insights and corporate earnings data from Zacks Investment Research—will go live on the AP’s global news wires.

So, the next time you read an AP story, you might wonder if Wall-E that wrote that.

Given the proper algorithms, they can turn inputs (like a 40-page spreadsheet) into outputs (like a 150-word news brief) faster than a human reporter can say to her editor, “Oh, hey, maybe I should write something on this.” One more thing: Once you’ve built the software, the marginal cost of producing each story approaches zero. That’s how Automated Insights churned out 300 million reports last year for its various clients—a rate of 9.5 reports every second. This year it’s aiming to more than triple that output.

Holy crap!

We--humans--for now have an edge over these software agents, whether in journalism or at Wikipedia: 

The human-written earnings story feels more natural, and it weaves the “why” into the lede, whereas the bot’s report is limited to the “who,” “what,” “where,” and “when.”

How long can we maintain this advantage?  I am pretty confident that singularity will not be within my lifetime, and certainly not before I become useless in my profession.  I am safe!  As for the youth, maybe I should remind them to get ready to serve our computer overlords--and then I will wonder why enrollment further decreased!

If only such news reports make us reflect more on what it means to be human ... no such luck, when seemingly everybody, from a five-year old to a 75-year old, is keen on chasing the almighty money when not sitting stupefied in front of a digital display of one sort or another!

Balls to you!

Way back, as a married man and when the daughter had yet to leave for college, and in a life that also involved two dogs at home, one of my many jokes, which I found to be very funny, was about how the difference between me and the dogs was that I was not castrated in a world of women!

I was never at ease at having the dogs castrated.  It seemed unnatural and cruel. I imagined the situation being the other way around, like in the Planet of the Apes.  It seemed awful that I would have to live a castrated life in a cage or as a pet.  The intellectual discussion of the presumed supremacy of humans over other forms met a real life situation, and the intellectual argument was nowhere to be found.  The dogs lost their balls, and more.

I thought about those dogs, especially the long-haired chihuahua, Congo, who was the kindest dog ever, when I read this essay, authored by an animal doctor.  An essay that is like a contemporary equivalent of the animal (and people) stories that James Herriot made us think about.   The author, John Brooke, had one crazy week, it seems:

I review this week with some disturbance at the remarkable number of animals I have sterilised. I counted the castrations: 40 calves, two colts, three dogs, one cat, one ferret and a coatimundi (a raccoon-type thing from South America that has very long teeth). I counted the ovariohysterectomies (spays): two cats, two bitches and one rabbit.
All of these mutilations were elective, mostly for behavioural rather than medical reasons.

We need to note here that these were pretty much for the same behavioral reasons that I, like a gazillion other pet owners, got the two dogs neutered.  Because, once the testicles are gone, well, so is the testosterone:

The behavioural benefits of castration are enormous: dogs do not thrust themselves on anything that passes by; queen cats do not try to break out of the house when they are in season/oestrus; geldings will graze peaceably in fields, while a colt will jump fences to clamber on top of any mare that winks at him; rabbits will not mate with their siblings and those of the same sex are less likely to try to maim each other.

Some cojones we have to do what we do!

But what sort of brave new world is this in which we practise? If an animal’s sexual activity is problematic, it is either sterilised or euthanised. Animals are tied to our social contract. The development of dog breeds shows how natural selection has been undermined: some breeds can give birth only by Caesarean section; many have inherited disorders that can now be treated. The breed of the dog is an easy indicator of what conditions are likely to affect it.
So it is that many mutilated creatures with inherited defects roam the country.

I often remark in classes that many issues we can relate back to one question: what does it mean to be human?  And depending on the context, we can think through what it means to be human.  In this case, does being human mean that the entire world of living and non-living things is at our disposal for us to do whatever pleases us?  Or, does being human mean that we treat them all humanely.  Does treating non-humans humanely mean that we should not neuter or spay the animals--that we should treat them more than as if they are our toys?

It often feels like we have given up raising such questions anymore.  When secular groups like PETA address animal rights, they wildly make their point, no differently from how the uber-religious make their own points.  When religions address this, well, the answer depends on the religion, and it is then choose whatever answer that appeals to you.  The Judeo-Christian traditions seem to validate to their followers that god made humans in his image and told humans that everything on earth is for them to rule over. (Yes, I am simplifying.)  Jains disagree with this view. The Hindu tradition treats some animals as sacred and some are treated like, well, dogs!  The dog is always referred to in the Vedic texts as the impure one, writes Wendy Doniger (when will I be able to get back to that one!)

So, yes, there are multiple answers possible, it seems.  But, wouldn't it be awesome to raise such questions and have everybody discussing their own answers than not raising the questions at all?

Synthetic life. Biochemistry. Genomics. And my ignorance of it all!

"Life's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get" said the philosopher Forrest Gump.  Well, I never know what I will get on the television.

I flicked to ABC.  It was the last quarter of the USC-Stanford game.  With the Cardinal's football ranking competing with the university's academic status, and the Trojans still reeling from the NCAA sanctions, it was a surprise that the game was tied at 17.  Every once in a while, a match is that way--it still has to be played out for the win, and the higher ranked player or team is not guaranteed a victory.  For a while, it appeared that neither team was able to breakthrough, until USC played for it all with a gamble on a fourth down. The rest, as they say, now belongs to the fabled Trojan history.

Oh, did I mention that I earned my graduate degrees at USC? ;)

After pottering around for a while, I returned to my favorite weekend channel: BookTV.  One of the best channels ever in the lineup.  The number of hours that I have logged in front of BookTV!

It was Craig Venter talking about his research work.  I watched it as if I was a registered student in a course that Venter was teaching.  I made mental notes to myself. I learnt a lot.  I thought about them.  And then went to the BookTV website and even extracted a 15-minute video clip and tweeted about it.  I was that pumped up!

Here is a clip from the Book Discussion on #Venter's "Life at the Speed of Light" that I watched thanks to @BookTV http://t.co/3USBLw2ItH
— sriram khe (@congoboy) November 17, 2013

It was only thanks to Venter's lecture that I understood how urea, and synthesizing it--back in 1828--was itself an important and revolutionary step.  In the slide that Venter put up was this sentence:

The Wohler synthesis is of historical significance because for the first time an organic compound was produced from inorganic reactants.  

I am confident that we never got to know this from high school chemistry, when we spent those couple of months on organic chemistry.  What is worse is this: we lived in a town where a fertilizer factory produced urea; how could they have missed out on conveying to us the significance of urea synthesis from such a perspective too!

Venter and his team of researchers, and other scientists all over the world, have now come a long, long way from that first step of organic chemistry.  His talk was mostly about the key steps over the years, which finally led to the publication of their research in Science, on "providing proof of principle for the production of cells from digitized sequence information," which was the cover story as well in July 2010:

Source

When Venter got into talking about the applications, it felt like it was science fiction.  But, some are already underway.  Some are already happening--like creating vaccines from the digitized sequence information.  Essentially to cook up the vaccine based on a recipe.  No need to wait for months for the egg-based vaccine production process that we now have!

The futuristic scenarios were impressive, and a tad scary as well.

Similar to how in 3D printing we can send the details as electronic ones and zeros and then print the object wherever, Venter offers the possibility of vaccine production labs spread all across the world, which will produce the vaccine from the digital information that will be delivered to them.

Even better was his description of the possibility (though it might be highly regulated) of us sitting at home by our computers and medical dispensing machines--like how we have printers now--and prescriptions like insulin or vaccines will then be sent over to the machine, which will then create them for us at our homes.  (Check out this video clip from his talk)

Or how it might be possible for something like a Curiosity Rover to digitize a life form on Mars (should it find one there) send across the sequence to the ground-station here on Earth and we then assemble it--a biological teleportation!

Even more reasons for me to wonder what it means to be human.

Those were all over the weekend.  This morning, I read this in the news:

Frederick Sanger, the British biochemist who twice won the Nobel Prize, has died at the age of 95.

My first thought was this: there was a British scientist who was awarded the Nobel twice?  In the same field? How come he is not a highly celebrated figure?  Why isn't he a household name?  Ballplayers get venerated as gods, and this scientist was condemned to obscurity among the public?

Turns out that his work is intimately connected to the Venter research stories; what a coincidence!

The first came in 1958 for developing techniques to work out the precise chemical structure of proteins.
Proteins are made up of amino-acids. Dr Sanger was able to determine which amino-acids and in what order were used to build the hormone insulin.
He then turned to DNA and its building blocks, bases.
Dr Sanger's group produced the first whole genome sequence, made up of more than 5,000 pairs of bases, in a virus.
He was awarded his second Nobel Prize in 1980 for developing "Sanger sequencing" - a technique which is still used today. 

How fascinating!

But, even more impressive was this:

"He remains the only person to have won two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry - recognising his unique contribution to the modern world.
"Yet he was a disarmingly modest man, who once said: 'I was just a chap who messed about in his lab'.

What an old-fashioned virtue--modesty!

On the failure to understand the urgency of "what is it to be human?"

Last night, I got to watch Prometheus.  The movie is about that question that has dogged us forever: how did we humans get here?

It is by no means a simple question, and the answer(s) we accept then correspondingly influence even the most mundane aspects our lives.  For instance, pork is avoided by Jews and Muslims because of the narrative that is given as the answer to how we got here also tells them to void pork.  The Crusades were fought as a response to the clash of two narratives.  Even the atrocious caste system in India was/is be justified with yet another answer to the question of how we humans got here.

The rapid developments in our scientific understanding and technological capabilities might even make us look like gods to people who lived during the times when those old religious narratives were drafted.  The old movie cliche of a Westerner flicking a lighter and creating fire that impressed the cannibals who were preparing to cook him alive can now be replaced with any of us walking around with a smartphone that can do wonders that are beyond the wildest imaginations of the generations that preceded us.

The tremendous advancements in technology prompts us to further banish to the dark background any systematic inquiry into what it means to be human.  Formal schooling in the humanities and the social sciences are often considered to be wasteful spending.  In doing so, we don't seem to feel the importance, more than ever, of helping students and the general population inquire into and understand what it means to be human.

As much as religious narratives of how we got here provided people with rules on how to behave towards fellow-humans within the religious tribe and fellow-humans of other tribes, our modern day constructs of what it means to be human will then have its implications for our collective public policy responses.  Here in the US, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, spending on wars, education, illegal immigrants, ... all could potentially be viewed differently depending on how we define what it means to be human.  When we routinely rain bombs from drones and kill children and yet pay no attention to it, that action is itself a statement of how some humans are more important than other humans.  When we think it is important to prevent abortions but not important to provide support for children growing up in disadvantaged contexts, those public policies reveal a different interpretation of what it means to be human.  It is the same case with practically every single public policy.

Yet, not only are we neglecting the need to provide students with the ability to conduct such inquiries, we are also seemingly on the drive to further marginalize the humanities and the social sciences.

I was not keen on my undergraduate studies in electrical engineering, and did not care about pursuing that field as a career, because it didn't directly address the question of what it meant to be human and, therefore, how to respond to the human condition.  On top of that, science and technology has contributed--in a big way--to dehumanize humans.

I have always wondered whether the scientists and technologists who work on developing yet another fancy way to kill people, for instance, ever ask themselves whether they are doing good for humanity.  Perhaps they are no different from the lobbyist Nick Naylor in Thank you for smoking.  The libertarian in me does not want to tell others what they can or cannot do, yes.  But, the humanist in me wonders whether all the people, especially the educated ones, whose work generates nothing but harm for fellow-humans, ever clearly articulated for themselves answers to how we got here and what it means to be human.  

Like most atheists, I, too, find the question of how we got here and what it means to be human not only highly fascinating but also extremely challenging.  More so when I don't need any reminders on how mortal I am.  As Susan Jacoby says:

We have our time on this earth, we have to use it in the best possible way, because it is limited.

Within that limited time, wouldn't it be worth it to educate ourselves so that we can think about what it means to be human?

We do too little for the place we all should call home: Africa

Register Guard, Dec 27, 2009

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — When students asked me about my winter break plans, my favorite reply was a simple one-liner: “I am going home.”

Their typical response was something along the lines of, “Oh, how long will you be in India?” That is all the opening I needed to engage them in a discussion of how Africa is the “home” for all humans. The “roots” of Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte are connected to our own collective narrative as well.

Tanzania offers a compelling argument for why it is home to humans — going back to hominids, who were human-like precursors to our kind. The evidence, in this case, includes the well-preserved footprints of hominids in northern Tanzania, estimated to be 3.75 million years old.

Further, with coffee having originated in Ethiopia, the stretch of Africa that includes Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia is an important ancestral home to this avid coffee drinking human.

Tanzania is merely one country in the African continent, and at almost a million square kilometers, Tanzania has about four times the area of Oregon. Yes, four times — that is how large the country is. Dar es Salaam, the capital city, and its neighboring region has a population roughly equal to that of the entire state of Oregon. One can, therefore, easily imagine the challenge at the very early stages of planning the trip — how choose the parts of Tanzania to visit over the three weeks I will spend here. Of course, I am here to focus on a research question, but more on this later.

As I continued to work on my going-home travel plans, I brought in Africa and Tanzania as examples at the appropriate moments in my classroom during the recently concluded fall term. For instance, during a discussion on global climate change, I used maps to point out that the electricity consumption in New York City alone was equal to the consumption in all of sub- Saharan Africa, with the exception of South Africa. Yes, it caught the students’ attention.

Students’ response has been the same over the years: They are excited to learn about the continent of Africa when provided with the chance, and utterly disappointed if there is nothing presented despite their genuine interest in learning more. I remember one African-American student in particular who was visibly disappointed that there was nothing about Africa in the schedule of social science classes.

Even if the rest of us are not like that student, who was innately driven to understand Africa, the post-Sept. 11 world in which we live requires us to give Africa the attention it deserves. I hope that we have not forgotten the significant pre-Sept. 11 incidents in Africa. First, in 1998, came the near- simultaneous bombings at the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Kenya, the work of al-Qaeda. Responding to these incidents, President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes on precise locations in Sudan in an attempt to neutralize Osama bin Laden. Ten years later, al-Qaeda sympathizers have yet another safe haven in Somalia. Its capital, Mogadishu, has earned notoriety as the world’s most dangerous place.

From an economic perspective, Tanzania and most of Africa seem to be falling behind the rest of the world. Globalization, which columnist Thomas Friedman popularly refers to as the world getting flatter, has delivered a double whammy to Africa. On the one hand, the trend of globalization has further pushed the heavily populated nations of China and India closer to the United States and Europe. On the other hand, most African countries rarely register a blip in our academic and journalistic radars. The economic playing field does not seem to have been leveled for Tanzania and most of the rest of Africa.

Yet we continue to marginalize Africa, even though doing so serves neither our academic interests nor the geopolitical interests that govern our realpolitik. I suppose the election of Barack Obama as president has given us a wonderful opportunity: Instead of arguing over where he was born, why not channel all that energy into understanding Africa?

Wouldn’t we want to know more about our roots? 

We come in peace. Really!

In my intro classes, when I discuss demographic transition, I point out that as much as we like to think that humans are large-scale killers, well, the more time progresses, it seems like wars and the like kill fewer percentage of humans than in earlier centuries. Life is, by and large, quite peaceful for most humans on the planet.

Steve Pinker begins his essay on that very note. He writes:

Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

So, what is the reason for this decline in violence, while we walk around thinking that life is getting worse? Hmmm ..... can you do some work and read his essay? Pinker concludes:

We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.

But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" If our behavior has improved so much since the days of the Bible, we must be doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.

Thanks to A&L Daily for the link.

Out of Africa: tracking human migration

From the Scientific American:

The route humans took from Africa to the Americas over the course of tens of thousands of years can now be tracked on the map as if the travelers were moving, albeit extremely slowly, on a series of interconnected superhighways. Alphanumeric route signs, such as I-95, can be recast as alphanumeric genetic markers. In the case of the Y chromosome, for instance, cross the Bab el Mandeb on highway (genetic marker) M168, which becomes M89 when heading north through the Arabian Peninsula. Make a right at M9 and set out toward Mesopotamia and beyond. Once reaching an area north of the Hindu Kush, turn left onto M45. In Siberia, go right and follow M242 until it eventually traverses the land bridge to Alaska. Pick up M3 and proceed to South America.

Mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome remain powerful analytical instruments. The National Geographic Society, IBM and the Waitt Family Foundation have joined in a privately funded $40-million collaboration through 2010, research that is primarily devoted to using these tools. With the help of 10 regional academic institutions, the so-called Genographic Project is gathering DNA from up to 100,000 indigenous people worldwide. “What we’re focusing on is the details of how people made the journeys,” says Spencer Wells, who heads the project. In a recent report its researchers found that the Khoisan people of southern Africa remained genetically separate from other Africans for 100,000 years. In another study, they demonstrated that some of the gene pool of Lebanese men can be traced to Christian Crusaders and Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula