Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony

Posted on Thursday 2 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This was the third collection, published in 1983, of Lewis Thomas’s elegant, mostly short, essays, following The Lives of a Cell (which I blogged about last week) and The Medusa and the Snail. I read (or reread, I’m not sure) this volume over the past week.

The title essay isn’t about Mahler per se; it’s about how the author hears the final, melancholy, elegiac movement of this symphony, traditionally heard as an accepting, almost consoling acknowledgement of death, completely differently in this age – he’s writing in the early 1980s – of imminent nuclear doom. That’s the theme that pervades the book, in at least four essays. The opening essay, “The Unforgettable Fire”, is a review (in very relaxed sense) of two books documenting the horrors of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Thomas’s flabbergasted outrage at the military planners currently anticipating the worst, as they busily maintain the latest nuclear arsenals. Another essay addresses how the medical community – the nation’s hospitals – will be of absolutely no use in such a conflict; the hospitals, in the major cities, will be gone first, and in any event the casualties will be so enormous there will be no possibility of helping any immediate survivors.

This was the early 1980s, and this sense of imminent doom, of a worldwide catastrophe to end them all, possibly the near-extinction of the human race, was still very much in the air. (A book-length consideration of the subject was Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth in 1982, which meditated at great length and in highly mannered prose how we got to that point and how awful awful it would be for the nuclear conflagration to happen.) I say ‘was’ in the air, since it isn’t so much now, compared to relatively localized incidents of terrorism, even though the potential threat is nearly as great, isn’t it? Don’t both the US and Russia (no longer Soviet Union) have nuclear arsenals? And several other countries? And if some terrorist organization manages to hijack even one bomb, couldn’t that trigger the end just as surely as a Soviet/US battle in the 1980s?

Here’s a taste of Thomas in the essay about hospitals (p119.5):

How is it possible for so many people with the outward appearance of steadiness and authority, intelligent and convincing enough to have reached the highest positions in the governments of the world, to have lost so completely their sense of responsibility for the human beings to whom they are accountable? Their obsession with stockpiling nuclear armaments and their urgency in laying out detailed plans for using them have, at the core, aspects of what we would be calling craziness in other people, under other circumstances. Just before they let fly everything at their disposal, and this uniquely intelligent species begins to go down, it would be a small comfort to understand how it happened to happen. Our descendants, if there are any, will surely want to know.

But the whole book is not like that, fortunately. As with two previous volumes of essays, most items here are short, as few as three pages, and address striking insights about the complexities of biology, the relationship of science and the humanities, and the urgencies of current issues concerning science and society. A few random notes and quotes:

  • p20b: “As we learn more about the fundamental processes of living things in general we will learn more about ourselves, including perhaps the ways in which our brains, unmatched by any other neural structures on the planet, achieve the earth’s awareness of itself.”
  • p26.7: “The age of science did not really begin three hundred years ago. That was simply the time when it was realized that human curiosity about the world represented a deep wish, perhaps embedded somewhere in the chromosomes of human beings, to learn more about nature by experiment and the confirmation of experiment. The doing of science on a scale appropriate to the problems at hand was launched only in the twentieth century and has been moving into high gear only within the last fifty years. … It is not as easy a time for us as it used to be: we are raised through childhood in skepticism and disbelief; we feel the need of proofs all around, even for matters as deep as the working of our own consciousness, where there is as yet no clear prospect of proof about anything. Uncertainty, disillusion, and despair are prices to be paid for living in an age of scence.”
  • p27b: “Instead of coping, or trying to cope, with the wants of four billion people, we will very soon be facing the needs, probably desperate, of double that number and, soon thereafter, double again.” (cf my Kolbert summary)
  • He’s asked to imagine seven wonders of the modern world, and suggests 1) the bacteria that exist in hot ocean vents; 2) a certain kind of beetle; 3) the scrapies virus; 4) olfactory cells, brains cells on the lining of your nose; 5) termites, how individuals are useless but mass aggregates form an amazingly complex social structure; 6) a human child, for which childhood is about the learning of language; and 7) and the Earth, “a living system, an immense organism, still developing, regulating itself, making its own oxygen, maintaining its own temperature, keeping all its infinite living parts connected and interdependent, including us.”
  • He discusses the side-effects of amazing drugs for treating schizophrenia: that the mental hospitals closed down, leaving victims on the streets, and advocates restoring them.
  • Addresses altruism, and the then current sociobiological explanation, then goes on to propose that *all species* have a kind of social obligation to each other, and wonders if some new word might do better at describing this. P107: “But at least we should acknowledge the family ties and, with them, the obligations. If we do it wrong, scattering pollutants, clouding the atmosphere with too much carbon dioxide, extinguishing the thin carapace of ozone, burning up the forests, dropping the bombs, rampaging at large through nature as though we owned the place, there will be a lot of paying back to do and, at the end, nothing to pay back with.”
  • An essay, “Falsity and Failure”, p108, about incidents of scientific fraud, and how villains can never get away with it; the system works. Another issue in the news today that really isn’t news; this kind of thing has always happened, and the system works.
  • A relatively long (13 pages!) essay on “Humanities and Science”, recalling Lord Kelvin’s insistence that nothing matters unless it can be quantified, and how, at the end of the 19th century, he declared that physics was about done. Similar attitudes persist… p150: “Science, especially twentieth-century science, has provided us with a glimpse of something we never really knew before, the revelation of human ignorance…”
  • And an essay on the “two cultures”, in which he suggests a shared bewilderment, considers various things we don’t understand, including music: “The professional musicologists, tremendous scholars all, for whom I have the greatest respect, haven’t the ghost of an idea about what music is, or why we make it and cannot be human without it… It is a mystery, and thank goodness for that. The Brandenburgs and the late quartets are not there to give us assurances that we have arrived; they carry the news that there are deep centers in our minds that we know nothing about except that they are there.”

A nice note to close on.

Posted in Book Notes, Culture, Music, Science | Comments Off on Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony

Links and Comments: Philosophical principles; social programs; narrative; FDS; religious conflict and the gullible

Posted on Wednesday 1 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve belatedly added a link to Adam Lee’s Statement of Principles, a set of philosophical positions that I mostly endorse (I reserve the right to quibble), in the intro to my Provisional Conclusions.

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And speaking of Adam Lee, this post makes an interesting point about why the religious right is against government social programs:

It’s no coincidence that some of the fiercest opposition to Obamacare has come from the religious right: they want to shred the social safety net, so that people have no option but to turn to churches when they need help. There’s plenty of research to establish that in societies that are prosperous, peaceful and secure, people see less need for religious consolation; and I don’t doubt the religious right knows this as well. Their defeat has weakened their influence and made us a more just and humane society, and that’s very much worth celebrating.

(He’s responding to the latest Supreme Court decision upholding the intent of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.)

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Via Mary Anne Mohanraj on Facebook, another citation about the overarching human mindset to think in terms of narrative:

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

–from The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall

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I’ve not been keeping up with Jeffrey Tayler’s weekly (on Sundays!) column challenging religious verities at Salon.com, but I wanted to note this one from a couple weeks ago, Antonin Scalia is unfit to serve: A justice who rejects science and the law for religion is of unsound mind, not so much for his commentary about Scalia, but for his description of FDS, Faith Derangement Syndrome:

Sufferers of faith-derangement syndrome (FDS) exhibit the following symptoms: unshakable belief in the veracity of manifest absurdities detailed in ancient texts regarding the origins of the cosmos and life on earth; a determination to disseminate said absurdities in educational institutions and via the media; a propensity to enjoin and even enforce (at times using violence) obedience to regulations stipulated in said ancient texts, regardless of their suitability for contemporary circumstances; the conviction that an invisible, omnipresent, omniscient authority (commonly referred to as “God”) directs the course of human and natural events, is vulnerable to propitiation and blandishments, and monitors individual human behavior, including thought processes, with an especially prurient interest in sexual activity.

Secondary symptoms exhibited by sufferers of FDS comprise feelings of righteousness and sensations of displeasure, even outrage, when collocutors question, reject or refute the espousal of said absurdities. Tertiary symptoms, often present among individuals self-classifying as “evangelicals”: Duggar-esque hairdos and Tammy Bakker-ian makeup, preternaturally sunny dispositions and pedophiliac tendencies, sartorial ineptitude and obesity.

A definition worth capturing, for future reference.

This past Sunday’s post by Tayler is about Sean Hannity, very bad critic: Fox News, Sony, Sarah Palin pal help hit movie prey on the gullible, about how those laughably bad “Christian” movies about how heaven is real prey on the gullible.

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Yet, won’t there always be the gullible? The latest issue of The Atlantic is an “ideas” issue, with many diverse ideas about the modern world summarized sometimes very briefly (the trend even in print journalism these days). Here’s a quote from one, by Graeme Wood, about Why Global Religious Conflict Won’t End.

The conviction that every sacred text is a long-winded paraphrase of the Golden Rule requires, among other things, a rather low regard for those texts—and not much understanding of them, either. As the events of the past year suggest, they all contain recipes not just for peace but for conflict, which means that as long as there are literal-minded people, religion will likely remain as much a force for the latter as for the former.

Won’t there always be the gullible and the simple-minded, whose trust in literal readings of ancient writings drive religious wars and denial of the humanity of people unlike themselves? I’m reminded of this quote by H.G. Wells, which I need to highlight somewhere on this site: History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Posted in Narrative, Philosophy, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Philosophical principles; social programs; narrative; FDS; religious conflict and the gullible

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction

Posted on Tuesday 30 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction (and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). I finally got around to it on my plane flight back east a month ago. The title refers to five prominent mass extinctions that have occurred throughout the history of the Earth, as evidenced by the fossil record (there’s a graph on p16), the fifth of which was the event 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. The book focuses what seems to be going on right now (i.e. over the past couple hundred thousand years, but especially *right now* this century) – a sixth mass extinction, caused by the successful dominance of our planet by the human race.

Each of the book’s thirteen chapters focuses (sometimes incidentally) on a particular species that’s already gone extinct or that’s threatened, describing each with a combination of historical perspective and personal narrative – the author’s visits and interviews with scientists working in the field — and knits them together with an overarching narrative thread that sketches out the history of the human race, and the history of our ideas about other species and how we affect them.

The book starts strikingly in its first three pages with a thumbnail account of humanity’s spread across the globe and impact on the planet, starting in a slice of eastern Africa…

The members of the species are not particularly swift or strong or fertile. They are, however, singularly resourceful. Gradually they push into regions with different climates, different predators, and different prey. None of the usual constraints of habitat or geography seem to check them. They cross rivers, plateaus, mountain ranges.

…

The process continues, in fits and starts, for thousands of years, until the species, no longer so new, has spread to practically every corner of the globe. At this point, several things happen more or less at once that allow Homo sapiens, as it has come to call itself, to reproduce at an unprecedented rate. In a single century the population doubles; then it doubles again, and then again. Vast forests are razed. Human do this deliberately, in order to feed themselves. Less deliberately, they shift organisms from one continent to another, reassembling the biosphere.

Meanwhile, an even stranger and more radical transformation is under way. Having discovered subterranean reserves of energy, humans begin to change the composition of the atmosphere. This, in turn, alters the climate and the chemistry of the oceans. Some plants and animals adjust by moving. They climb mountains and migrate toward the poles. But a great many – at first hundreds, then thousands, and finally perhaps millions – find themselves marooned. Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life change.

I like the conciseness and sweep of this account: e.g. doubles again, and then again. In the perspective of the history of life on Earth, all of this has happened in a flash.

The first chapter highlights an effect that has occurred just in the past century: the advent of airplane flight around the globe has, inadvertently, allowed species to come into contact that had previously been completely isolated. The case study is how species of frogs in Central America have disappeared, victims of a fungus spread by humans.

The second chapter, ostensibly about the American mastodon, is a historical sketch of how the very idea that species could go extinct did not arise until a couple centuries ago. Until then, the discoveries in the 1700s of the skeletons of huge animals (e.g.) that had never been seen alive was passed off as due to the many areas of the planet that had not yet been explored. Cuvier in France, around 1800, was the first to suggest that species had become extinct. Ironically, he opposed the idea of evolution, or transformisme in French [this was before Darwin, but the idea was in the air].

The next few chapters advance the historical context: the ebb and flow between ideas of catastrophes or uniform trends throughout the Earth’s history. Darwin applies Lyell’s ideas to animal species in his ideas of natural selection. Both ideas were correct. The idea of a meteor impact on Earth that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs, first put forth about 1980, was ridiculed at first, until mounting evidence supported it.

However earlier extinction events had their own causes, some variations of climate change.

Currently the idea we are living in the Anthropocene epoch – successor to the Holocene – that, as subsequent chapters explore, may have begun hundreds of thousands of years ago, as humans moved out of Africa, spread across the globe, and killed off the numerous large animal species that had survived the last ice age (many examples). This trend accelerated in the past century as our airline flights have inadvertently mixed previously isolated species around the globe together again, leading to deaths of many species of frogs and bats, and most recently to the effects of climate change, which already portend the deaths of coral reefs and other ocean ecosystems, while humanity’s spread across the globe is leading to the imminent extinctions of large mammals like rhinos, elephants, and our fellow large primates in Africa.

In a chapter about the Neanderthal, and the possible DNA analysis of how our species differed from theirs, author quotes a scientist with the idea that humanity has a sort of ‘madness’ gene that led us to seek out and explore.

It’s only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don’t see land. Part of that is technology, of course; you have to have ships to do it. But there is also, I like to think or say, some madness there. You know? How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous. Any why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop.

And at the end the author summarizes and philosophizes:

What I’ve been trying to do is trace an extinction event – call it the Holocene extinction, or the Anthropocene extinction, or, if you prefer the sound of it, the Sixth Extinction – and to place this event in the broader context of life’s history. That history is neither strictly uniformitarian nor catastrophic; rather, it is a hybrid of the two. What this history reveals, in its ups and downs, is that life is extremely resilient but not infinitely so.

She describes an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History of all six big extinctions. And asks, will we be the victim of our own extinction event? Or might our species have the cleverness to prevail, via atmosphere re-engineering, or even relocation to other planets? P268b:

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will be forever closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

Posted in Book Notes, Evolution, Science | Comments Off on Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

Posted on Friday 26 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Lewis Thomas was a pediatrician and doctor, who became president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and who wrote a series of short essays which were first published in New England Journal of Medicine in the early to mid 1970s.

His first book, The Lives of a Cell, was a collection of some 30 of these essays. (I don’t have the original first edition hardcover; I have the first 1975 Bantam paperback reprint, imaged here.) It won a National Book Award. The essays mix detailed understanding of the intricacies of the biological world with profound insights about the position of humans amidst that biological world.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the opening, title, essay:

We are told that the trouble with Modern Man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature. He sits in the topmost tiers of polymer, glass, and steel, dangling his pulsing legs, surveying at a distance the writhing life of the planet. In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.

But it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia. Nor is it a new thing for man to invent an existence that he imagines to be above the rest of life; this has been his most consistent intellectual exertion down the millennia. As illusion, it has never worked out to his satisfaction in the past, any more than it does today. Man is embedded in nature.

Thomas went on to publish at least two more books of similar essays, including Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which I need to revisit, and two or three additional books. He died in 1993.

Posted in Book Notes, Personal history, Philosophy, Science | Comments Off on Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

The Arc of History: The Expansion of Marriage

Posted on Friday 26 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

So much reaction to today’s Supreme Court decision I hardly need to chime in, except perhaps to note how this, of course, supports my Provisional Conclusion #7,

Another, social, arc of human history has been a gradual expansion of allegiance from immediate social groups to larger social groups, from families and tribes to states and nations, with the social inclusion and equal treatment before the law of more and more people previously marginalized or demonized as ‘the other’. This arc is largely an effect of the growing world population, recent social media, and the consequent coming into contact of previously isolated groups. It involves recognition of the common humanity of children, former slaves, women, of other ‘racial’ and ethnic groups, of sexual minorities, those who adhere to other ideologies and religions, and even other possibly intelligent species.

It’s fun to watch the religious reactionaries squirm, and make threats about civil disobedience or wholesale abandonment of the US for other shores, threats they will never follow-through on. They will get over it. It really is the arc of history, and progress, as has happened again and again, despite conservative resistance (Provisional Conclusion #8).

(If anyone is still obsessed by the so-called ‘traditional’ definition of marriage, see this cheeky Matt Baume video, linked at Huffington Post and many other sites, about the wide variety of historical ideas of marriage, especially from the Bible, which people today no longer endorse.)

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Progress, The Gays | Comments Off on The Arc of History: The Expansion of Marriage

Revisiting Carl Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection

Posted on Friday 26 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

The Cosmic Connection, published in 1973, was the first popular book by Carl Sagan, after some academic tomes and an anthology of essays about UFOs, who later gained much fame as the author and host of the 1980 book and TV series Cosmos (recently remade with Neil deGrasse Tyson as host, and Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan as author), and who wrote numerous other books, including the novel Contact, before his premature death in 1996 at the age of 62.

It was a foundational book in my own experience, likely the first nonfiction book I read aside from those by SF authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, certainly the first (aside from those authors) that explicitly evoked the vastness of the universe and humanity’s place in it. And it was one of the first hardcover first editions I acquired, in days when I bought mostly paperbacks and SF book club editions.

(I had requested the book as a birthday gift from my grandmother, in fact. Thinking back, I can reconstruct how I heard of the book in the first place (since the bookshops I frequented did not carry hardcovers at all). In Fall 1973 I began college at UCLA, and soon discovered the original Change of Hobbit bookstore a few blocks away in Westwood, and at that store, copies of a (then) biweekly newsletter (it was mimeographed and stapled together, not yet a magazine) called… Locus. And Locus, in due time, reported the winners of the second annual (1974) John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which included a special award for Nonfiction Book to… The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan. The awards were made in April, and likely reported in Locus in May. I had never heard of or seen the book, but made a birthday request to my grandmother on the basis of the Campbell win. My grandmother had to special order it from a local bookstore (in Apple Valley CA), which entailed waiting for 2 or 3 weeks for it to be shipped by the publisher from New York. That’s how those things worked in those days. She got it in June, and went ahead and gave it to me, even though my birthday wasn’t until August. (Knowing nothing about the content or subject of the book, she was a tad mortified to see that back dust jacket depicted the Pioneer plaque, which included line drawings of a nude human male and female.)

The Cosmic Connection, subtitled “An Extraterrestrial Perspective”, has an unusual co-author credit, “produced by Jerome Agel”. I gather “producer” is some combination of editor and packager; Agel’s earlier credits included The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, a fat paperback compilation of background material, reviews, and commentary on that film (which I read obsessively after seeing the film twice on its initial release in 1968), and the Sagan book was apparently commissioned by Agel. The contents of Sagan’s book, some 39 chapters in three sections, are shortish essays on related themes, but semi-independent as if composed in response to (I’m speculating) a list of specific topics Agel developed with the author…. and which can mostly be read in any order.

So how does the book hold up 40 some years later? There’s still lots of inspiring stuff. The entire middle section, on The Solar System, is understandably dated, concerning then current discoveries about Venus and especially Mars, via Mariner 9. There is a certain you-are-there historical thrill in the chapters about Mars, as observers decipher various kinds of data and realize for the first time that there are some *really big* volcanoes on Mars…

The opening section, Cosmic Perspectives, and the final section, Beyond the Solar System, are mixtures of casual thoughts, provocative insights, and profound speculations. Here are some highlights:

  • From the first chapter, “A Transitional Animal”, describing the 5-billion year history of Earth.
     

    In Man, not only is adaptive information acquired in the lifetime of a single individual, but it is passed on extra-genetically through learning, through books, through education. It is this, more than anything else, that has raised Man to his present pre-eminent status on the planet Earth.

    We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow, biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

    (Note the outmoded, déclassé use of the word ‘Man’ to refer to the human species; this was 1973.)

  • Three chapters explore motivations for space exploration on three points: scientific interest, public interest, historical interest. Pages 51-52:
     

    The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it.

    The planets are no longer wandering lights in the evening sky. For centuries, Man lived in a universe that seemed safe and cozy — even tidy. Earth was the cynosure of creation and Man the pinnacle of mortal life. But these quaint and comforting notions have not stood the test of time. We now know that we live on a tiny clod of rock and metal, a planet smaller than some relatively minor features in the clouds of Jupiter and inconsiderable when compared with a modest sunspot.
    …
    These realizations of the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are profound — and, to some, disturbing. But they bring with them compensatory insights. We realize our deep connectedness with other life forms, both simple and complex. We know that the atoms that make us up were synthesized in the interiors of previous generations of dying stars. We are aware of our deep connection, both in form and in matter, with the rest of the universe. The cosmos revealed to us by the new advances in astronomy and biology is far grander and more awesome than the tidy world of our ancestors. And we are becoming a part of it, the cosmos as it is, not the cosmos of our desires.

    Page 53.6:
     

    A fundamental area of common interest is the problem of perspective. The exploration of space permits us to see our planet and ourselves in a new light. We are like linguists on an isolated island where only one language is spoken. We can construct general theories of language, but we have only one example to examine. It is unlikely that our understanding of language will have the generaltiy that a mature science of human linguistics requires.

    And as an aside, topics that are controversial today are not new, they’ve been around for decades, e.g. p57:
     

    But we live in a time when the atmosphere of Earth is being strongly modified by the activities of Man. It is of the first importance to understand precisely what happened on Venus so that an accidental recapitulation on Earth of the runaway Venus greenhouse can be avoided.

  • Chapter 9, about the historical interest of space exploration:
     

    But it is remarkable that the nations and epochs marked by the greatest flowering of exploration are also marked by the greatest culture exuberance. In part, this must be because of the contact with new things, new ways of life, and new modes of thought unknown to a closec culture, with its vast energies turned inward.

    Followed by historical examples, especially how the age of European exploration to the ‘new world’ coincided with Montaigne, Shakespeare, the authors of the King James Bible, Cervantes, et al.

    And this striking observation about our current era (p69). As long ago as I read this and have not reread it until now, you can see echoes of these thoughts here in my blog commentaries.
     

    In all the history of mankind, there will be only one generation that will be first to explore the Solar System, one generation for which, in childhood, the planets are distant and indistinct discs moving through the night sky, and for which, in old age, the planets are places, diverse new worlds in course of exploration.
    …
    A human infant begins to achieve maturity by the experimental discovery that he is not the whole of the universe. The same is true of societies engaged in the exploration of their surroundings. The perspective carried by space exploration may hasten the maturation of mankind — a maturation that cannot come too soon.

    He’s being optimistic about the pace of interplanetary exploration, perhaps, but the principle is valid.

  • Chapter 10 is a cute account of giving a talk to first-graders who do, to author’s surprise, understand why we know the Earth is round.
  • Chapter 11 describes the crank mail the author receives, from all manner of crazies, and a case study about a man in an asylum and how he was certain the planets are inhabited. (Because of his personal encouter with “God Almighty”.)
  • Other chapters in Part II involve the incompetence of the CIA and/or Air Force Intelligence; Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels as the inspiration for so many; more comments about humanity’s influence on the environment (p142b); a restatement of the passage from p69, on p155 (“There is a generation of men and women for whom, in their youth, the planets were unimaginably distant points of light…”); and Sagan’s ‘belief’ that there would be semi permanent bases on the Moon by the 1980s.
  • Section III includes chapters about dolphins, concerning John Lilly, how the author was ‘propositioned’ by a dolphin, and how our disregard for dolphins and whales parallels the dehumanization of human enemies to make them easier to kill, and what this implies about potential contact with extraterrestrials; one about Sagan’s advice to Stanley Kubrick about depicting the aliens in 2001 (don’t depict them, imply their presence indirectly, advice which seems to have been taken)… and Chapter 26, the title chapter, “The Cosmic Connection”, which contrasts the presistent interest in astrology (“In his vanity, Man imagined the universe designed for his benefit and organized for his use” and p186.7, “It satisfied an almost unspoken need to feel a significance for humans beings in a vast and awesome cosmos…”) with the reality of our heritage, as a species on a planet of relatively heavy elements, elements the result of stellar evolution:
     

    The fate of individual human beings may not now be connected in a deep way with the rest of the universe, but the matter out of which each of us is made is intimately tied to processes that occurred immense intervals of time and enormous distances in space away from us. Our Sun is a second- or third-generation star. All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff.

    The last sentence a central quote which made it to the dust jacket.

  • Other chapters concern extraterrestrial life as an “idea whose time has come”, focusing on the likelihood of other planetary system [he would so gratified by the recent Kepler discoveries]; a dismissal of the idea that UFOs are evidence of ETs having visited us, mostly on statistical grounds…. artifacts put forward as evidence, especially by Erich von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods, a bestselling book that has since languished into obscurity (I still own the paperback edition depicted on the Wikipedia page), of visitations by alien astronauts in ancient times… p207:
     

    These artifacts are, in fact, psychological projective tests. People can see in them what they wish. There is nothing to prevent anyone from seeing signs of past extraterrestrial visitations all about him. But to a person with an even mildly skeptical mind, the evidence is unconvincing. Because the significance of such a discovery would be so enormous, we must employ the most critical reasoning and the most skeptical attitudes in approaching such data. The data do not pass such tests.

  • Sagan contemplates what it would mean if we succeeded in contact with ETs, via radio signals, even considering the likely decades-long pace of the exchange. p218:
     

    The scientific, logical, cultural, and ethical knowledge to be gained by tuning into galactic transmissions may be, in the long run, the most profound single event in the history of our civilization. There will be information in what we will no longer be able to call the humanities — because our communicants will not be human. There will be a deparochialization of the way we view the cosmos and ourselves.

  • Final chapters expand into considerations of astroengineering (Dyson spheres), classifications of cosmic civilizations, how long it would take for a ‘galactic cultural exchange’ to happen [always assuming the speed of light limitation for communication and travel], and speculation that (the then recent idea of) black holes might serve as a kind of cosmic transportation system.
  • The last three chapters are expansions on the idea of “starfolk” — histories and projections of the universe and mankind’s place in it. Here’s the last paragraph of the second of those chapters (p262).
     

    The births of stars generate the planetary nurseries of life. The lives of stars provide the energy upon which life depends. The deaths of stars produce the implements for the continued development of life in other parts of the Galaxy. If there are on the planets of dying stars intelligent beings unable to escape their fate, they may at least derive some comfort from the thought that the death of their star, the event that will cause their own extinction, will, nevertheless, provide the means for continued biological advance of the starfolk on a million other worlds.

And that is what I was reading at age 18.

Posted in Book Notes, Evolution, Personal history, Quote at Length, Science, Space | Comments Off on Revisiting Carl Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection

Links and Comments: Lucky Numbers; Paleo diet; Narratives about Charleston; Pinker on violence, and the news media

Posted on Wednesday 24 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

First, keying off my earlier post today about the Alan Lightman book, here’s an essay by George Johnson in the New York Times about Humankind’s Existentially Lucky Numbers.

Four fundamental forces rule reality, but why is the number not three or five or 17? Matter is built from a grab bag of particles whose masses differ so wildly that they appear to have been handed out by a punch-drunk God. The proton weighs 0.9986 as much as the neutron, and each is more than 1,835 times as massive as the electron.

These values, like all the others making up the spec sheet of the universe, seem so arbitrary. Yet if they had been slightly different, theorists tell us, the universe would not have given rise to intelligent life.

Rejecting the possibility that this was nothing more than a lucky accident, physicists have been looking for some underlying principle — a compelling explanation for why everything could only have unfolded in this particular way.

With references to Philip K. Dick and Douglas Adams.

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Today on Alternet, from The Conversation: Paleo Diet Only Makes Sense If You Don’t Understand Human Evolution

Because humanity has in fact adapted over the past few hundred generations to adapt to agricultural sources of food. We are no longer paleolithic cave-men.

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At Psychology Today, David Niose associates the Charleston tragedy with the history of anti-intellectualism in America: Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America: Social dysfunction can be traced to the abandonment of reason.

He may be overthinking it. (Not that anti-intellectualism isn’t a long-recognized trend in the US; the famous book on this subject is Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, from 1963.) But people have a tendency to interpret events in the context of their personal narratives. Especially those whose narratives rule their world-views and are resistant to counter-evidence, i.e. the religious and the ideological. Thus, from this essay at Salon:

Fox provides a support system for hatred, and in this instance its collaborators include people like Rick Santorum, who in a craven act of opportunism turns a racist attack into an attack on, what else, himself and his political base, the religious right; Lindsey Graham, who argues the same and defends flying the Confederate flag as a sign of Southern pride and defiance; Rick Perry, who called the shooting an “accident” (OK, he has now corrected that — he says he meant “incident,” but what an interesting Freudian slip); and those in the NRA who make this about their cause, the right to own arms. Apparently it’s about everything except race, and, more specifically, white supremacy.

Never mind the shooter’s explicit statements about trying to incite a race war; for Santorum and Graham, it’s all about *their religion*.

As Dan Savage summarizes,

Christians are under attack. Nothing has anything to do with race. Guns don’t cause problems that more guns can’t solve.

Of course the best examples of this tendency to contort every current event into predisposed narratives are those religious scolds who see every tornado and mass shooting as due to God’s wrath because of things those scolds personally disapprove of – typically abortion or homosexuality. Daily examples at Right Wing Watch.

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To conclude on a more optimistic note, here’s an interview with Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), at Vox: Steven Pinker explains how capitalism is killing war

[The US is] an outlier among Western democracies along a number of dimensions: the US has a higher rate of violent crime, it gets involved in more wars, it continues to have capital punishment, [and] has high rates of religious belief compared to other Western democracies.

Now, the US is a complex, heterogeneous country. But the more populist southern and southwestern areas are less shaped by the Enlightenment and more by a culture of honor: there are threats, and moral virtue consists in having the resolve to deal with them. A “manliness versus cowardice” mindset.

On top of that American peculiarity, the general style of punditry and analysis both in journalism and the government is event- and anecdote-driven, rather than trend- and data-driven. And we know from cognitive psychology — Daniel Kahneman and others — that people are overly impressed by big, noisy, memorable events as compared to slow, systemic trends. The natural tendency is to go with what you read this morning.

The United States is also in the unique circumstance of having such outsize military power that it has the dual demands of protecting its own interests globally but also being seen in the role of “global policeman.” It’s the only single country that can do that, but it has no official mandate for doing it.

I’ve mentioned the issue of journalism a couple times on this blog. Right-wingers like S**** P***** dismiss the “lamestream media” as politically motivated, but I’m not sure that the media’s most insidious effect. (The public subscribes to whatever media source that confirms their political views, to a large extent.) It’s that ordinary news focuses on outlying events, the occasional mass shooting or horrible traffic accident; no matter how rare such events might be, if there’s one in the world on any given day, the nightly news will focus on that, giving the viewer the repeated impression that things continue to be horrible. Polls have shown that people believe crime is as bad as ever, despite statistics that show major crimes have reduced substantially over the past decade or two… to tie back to Steven Pinker’s book.

This is not to condemn the news media, but to suggest how to understand it. In the long run, however, I’m not sure how this might be resolved. If we reach any imagined utopia, won’t there still be reporters who attract attention (make a living) by identifying the rare events that confound the norm? If not murders and traffic accidents, insults and slights? Imagine a society so perfect, devoid of violence and accidents, where the lead news story is about a subtle insult by one person to another at a dinner party. Utopia indeed.

Posted in Cosmology, Culture, Evolution, Narrative | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Lucky Numbers; Paleo diet; Narratives about Charleston; Pinker on violence, and the news media

James Morrow: We’re not tourists on this planet, we’re citizens

Posted on Wednesday 24 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Many thoughts resonate with me in the James Morrow interview in the June issue of Locus, which I excerpted here.

E.g.,

That’s the great gift of the 18th-century Enlightenment, that insistence on a conversation that must never stop, a conversation that must never be shut down by theistic fantasies about the workings of the uni­verse. Absolute certainty is the great malaise of our species, all those clerics and political thinkers who say, ‘Please ignore this pile of bodies over here while I tell you how the world works.’

Here are some other passages that didn’t make it into the posted interview excerpts:

One of my favorite writers and philosophers, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, invented an athe­ist hero for her recent novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, and I’m waiting for someone like that to appear on the scene in modern America. Cass Seltzer becomes a culture hero, because he’s charming and charismat­ic, and he doesn’t irritate people, and yet he’s a rig­orous thinker. He’s called ‘the atheist with a soul.’ Today’s atheist movement needs a real-life Cass Seltzer, and we don’t have one. If I were the kind of person who could become a media celebrity, I like to think I might fill that role. We have no really fa­mous, bestselling public intellectual who champi­ons atheism from a philosophical, theological, and literary perspective, who loves his fellow humans and loves those theists and wants to talk to them, and knows that their way of being in the world is neither privileged nor ipso facto delusional.

And:

In Mem­phis I’ll deliver a talk titled ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Charles Darwin,’ keyed to my new novel, Galápagos Regained. I can’t remember all seven right now. ‘Darwin killed God,’ that’s one of the sins. He didn’t kill God, of course, but he certainly made hash of the teleological argument, the argu­ment from design, which for centuries was the most satisfying of all the proofs of God. Darwin’s real sin was not so much that he killed God but that he replaced God – replaced him with the Tree of Life, which is something far more magnificent and sublime than anything you’ll read about in Scrip­ture. Here’s another sin: ‘Darwin confiscated our passports,’ by which I mean our passports to Heav­en. After Darwin, it’s difficult to believe the human race is on a trajectory to eternity. Ah, yes, but he gave us something in return. He gave us citizenship papers. Darwin tells us we belong here. We’re not tourists on this planet. We’re citizens. The Earth is our home.

And regarding this passage in the post:

In one of his essays Stephen Jay Gould makes the point that William Jennings Bryan and his fellow fundamentalists weren’t the big losers in the Scopes trial. In the decades that followed, there was a resurgence of Evangelical­ism, and a rise in textbook censorship. When I took biology in ninth grade, not a word was said about the theory of evolution, the Tree of Life, or the in­sights of Darwin. It was all about taxonomy.

Through the vagaries of a family move half-way through high school, I never did take a high school biology course. But it doesn’t surprise me that a high-school biology course could easily avoid the topic of evolution. The high school biology texts I’ve seen focus on things like the cell, and the carbon cycle, and human anatomy, and so on. And the threat of fundamentalist objections shies textbook publishers away from confrontations. I did however take a college ‘breadth’ course on some biological subject (the history of infectious diseases, if memory serves), at UCLA, and do remember the instructor advising the class that while some of them may not ‘believe’ in evolution, it was bound to come up in a biology class and they would just have to live with it.

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Evolution, Personal history, Quote at Length | Comments Off on James Morrow: We’re not tourists on this planet, we’re citizens

Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe

Posted on Wednesday 24 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Alan Lightman’s THE ACCIDENTAL UNIVERSE (2014) is a short book of seven essays, most previously published, on various ways the universe is not obviously what it appears to be, or is at odds with what humans might prefer. (Lightman is both a scientist and a novelist, and has served both at Harvard and MIT.) As he says in the preface (p. x),

We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is. Why try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.

The first, title, essay concerns how the history of science has can “be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once accepted as ‘givens’ as phenomena that can now be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.” The goal was a ‘Theory of Everything’, in which all the known forces and particles could be ‘explained’ in terms of a small number of basic principles, and perhaps a few arbitrary values (like the weight of the electron).

This ideal may be unreachable; ideas of string theory and inflation imply ideas of a ‘multiverse’, an infinite number of universes, perhaps each with different sets of physical laws. We just happen to live in one that has physical laws suitable for the existence of stars, and life. Other universes would not. That means in a sense ours is ‘accidental’, not necessary in terms of some fundamental principles that drives our set of physical laws.

“The Temporary Universe” has a touching passage about how the author watches the marriage of his daughter and wish she could have remained 10 years old, or 20, forever. (p23b). Humans long for permanence, despite the evidence of the universe that everything passes. “To my mind, it is one of the profound contradictions of human existence that we long for immortality, indeed fervently believe that something must be unchanging and permanent, when all of the evidence in nature argues against us. I certainly have such a longing. Either I am delusional, or nature is incomplete.” (p34.2)

“The Spiritual Universe” is the author’s attempt to understand how both science and religion can coexist in so many minds. He concludes that science, with its central doctrine that all properties and events in the physical universe are governed by laws, is consistent with the religious idea of a God who is unrestricted by such laws (and has a purpose and will, and so on), as long as God stepped to the sidelines once the universe began.

Yet some scientists apparently reject that central doctrine, believing in a God who does continue to intervene in the world–Francis Collins, Ian Hutchinson, Owen Gingerich.

Author stipulates that he himself is an atheist, but understands that we take some things on faith: what is right or wrong, why certain artworks affect us the way they do. [[ I think this is a very loose use of the word ‘faith’ compared to how most people use the word… ]]

He goes on to discuss kinds of scientific knowledge, and kinds of religious knowledge. The former are subject to rational analysis; the latter are matters of personal experience. We need both, he says; both share a sense of wonder. [[ But he’s sidestepping the issue of religious claims to knowledge about the world that are inconsistent with scientific observations… a key theme of Jerry Coyne’s new book and therefore why religion and science are not really compatible. ]]

“The Symmetrical Universe” wonders why we are so attracted to symmetries — perfect roundness, and symmetry of a six-sided snowflake. Symmetry is highly prized as a guidance in physical theories. He supposes that we crave order amidst a chaotic existence… as long as it’s not boring, which is why we also often prefer a slight bit of asymmetry.

“The Gargantuan Universe” concerns how our conception of the size of the universe has gotten so much larger in recent centuries. The size of the Earth was deduced in the 3rd century BC; the size of the solar system and stars, not til nearly two millennia later. We no longer believe that heavenly objects, or living objects, are made of some different kind of matter than everything else. “Science has vastly expanded the scale of our cosmos, but our emotional reality is still limited by what we can touch with our bodies in the time span of our lives.” p99.8 As Kepler identifies more and more Earth-like planets, we can calculate, even being very generous, what fraction of the universe might be alive: an infinitesimal amount (p101t). If the universe was ‘created’, it seems life was an afterthought.

“The Lawful Universe” begins with the Greek notion of atoms, and how Lucretious used the idea as a defense against the idea of the capriciousness of the gods. Yet God remained a viable hypothesis even until Newton’s time; Newton imagined that God was necessary to keep the planets in their courses. Later, Laplace dismissed that hypothesis.

Scientists remain deeply committed to the lawfulness of the universe, with the example of how, when the discovery of beta particles in the early 20th century seemed to violate the conservation of energy, Pauli had the audacity to propose an as-yet-undiscovered particle, a neutrino, to balance the books (rather than abandoned the idea of the conservation of energy). The neutrino was finally observed in 1956.

Finally “The Disembodied Universe” describes Foucault’s demonstration that the Earth really does rotate — something no one can see or feel, except indirectly.

Since Foucault, more and more of what we know about the universe is undetected and undetectable by our bodies. What we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we feel with our fingertips, is only a tiny sliver of reality. Little by little, using artificial devices, we have uncovered a hidden reality. It is often a reality that violates common sense. It is often a reality strange to our bodies. It is a reality that forces us to re-examine our most basic concepts of how the world works. And it is a reality that discounts the present moment and our immediate experience of the world.

Maxwell’s equations implied ‘invisible’ light, demonstrated by Hertz’ radio wave apparatus. Einstein overturned conventional ideas about time. And quantum physics revealed that matter can be both particles and waves at the same time.

The irony, says the author, is that as science has revealed more of nature than we were aware of, its consequences in technology (cell phones, etc) have separated us from the nature we have access to; we become self-involved, our experience of nature mediated through our devices. People in a nature preserve staring at their phones; a dinner with 25-year-olds, ditto. Just as the author seems to going into get-off-my-lawn! mode, he admits that this is an old story; cultures have long rebelled against changes in the relationship of humans and nature. And there will always be pockets that rebel, becoming disconnected from the human world, and the natural world, in different measures.

Posted in Book Notes, Cosmology, Philosophy, Science | Comments Off on Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe

The Human Impact on Earth; About Book Culling

Posted on Monday 22 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

A nice Slate photo gallery, a couple days ago, which is not unrelated to the issue of the Sixth Extinction:

Gorgeous, Stunning Satellite Images of the Human Impact on Earth.

I especially recommend watching the video linked at the end, about how astronauts, from Apollo to the Space Station, have had their perspectives expanded by seeing the Earth from space.

Personal angle: I was certain I had a copy of the the book by Frank White alluded to, The Overview Effect, somewhere in my stacks. But I have not been able to find it, even after reorganizing my garage last Friday to sort all the books that haven’t been able to fit into our current house. I’m sure I did have a copy, but I suspect I must have culled it in one of my periodic library reductions. Again and again, I have learned, whenever I cull my collection and dispose of books I think I will never need to see again — something always turns up, something I realize retroactively I am desperate to look at. (I am tempted now to order an expensive copy of The Overview Effect via any number of websites, because I now realize its theme informs my grand provisional narratives…)

Posted in Evolution | Comments Off on The Human Impact on Earth; About Book Culling