Children of the Tree of Life

I’ve never been to Pakistan, though my father, who was born before the country’s birth, saw it as his homeland and after raising a family here in the US, returned to pass away on its soil. Americans (all kinds) think me Pakistani or Indian. It’s a strange American custom – to consider anyone outside their sense of the “American ordinary” to be non-American.

“Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“No, I mean, where were you born?”

“San Francisco.”

“No, I mean, where are you from?”

Sadly, I’m just an American, though I’m tempted to say something exotic, like “The Seychelles,” in a thick French accent. I’ve never been there, but then, I‘ve never been to Pakistan either.

Oddly, Pakistanis seem to think me Pakistani too, as though I’m a branch off an ancient tree of humanity that’ s rooted in Pakistan, though the country was only created in 1947. It’s interesting to me how often I am approached to be brought into the fold of something I really do not know – no matter that I was born here, have never been to the country and don’t speak Urdu.

Years ago, I realized that the only sensible answer to questions about one’s identity and allegiance is simply “I am from the Tree of Life, a citizen of the Biosphere, kin to 8.7 million species; my trade is biogeochemistry, the universal trade of all organisms.”

That sounds nerdish, Lovelockian, or Earth Motherish, however. Safer to say, “The Seychelles.”

By dodging the question of “where were you born?” I’m really trying to avoid tribalism, something I feel is an unfortunate and destructive trait of mankind. To ask the question “where were you born?” is to reveal subscription to tribalism – that we belong to some kin, clique, or clan, no matter that we are all one species. In fact, our species is only a couple hundred thousand years old – still a twiglet, in evolutionary terms. A miniscule twiglet of a 3.5 billion year old tree made up of millions and millions of branches.

On the spectrum of finding human tribalism wondrous to finding it abhorrent, I cannot find where best to stand, so I avoid the issue. Some folks are obsessed with their “roots.” But they tend to stop once they identify with some monarch or emperor. Logically, if they kept going, they would wind up with Mitochondrial Eve, the mother of us all, who was born of non-Homo sapiens sapiens primates in East Africa some 200 thousand years ago. But I don’t understand why one would stop there? Personally, I like going back to the cyanobacteria who gave us oxygen, but I’d be happy to go back to the first cell, maybe even the first microscopic lipid bubble that contained the RNA, DNA, proteins, and carbohydrates necessary to replicate itself.

What’s wrong with tribalism, seeing oneself as a branch or twig or twiglet of humanity rather than as just another member of the living world?

Tribalism is the engine of human disparity, inequality, and inequity, and ultimately why the living world is facing an uncertain future.

My Facebook friends from Pakistan do not understand why the world seems to have already forgotten the slaughter of 135 children in Pakistan by deranged people motivated to murder by a pathological form of tribal exceptionalism, by which I mean seeing one’s tribe as exceptional, superior to others, to the point that one can mistreat or even kill those of other tribes. In this case, the tribal exceptionalism is Taliban supremacy.The Pakistani Taliban, self-confessed perpetrators of the slaughter, having previously bombed or burned more than a thousand schools, vow to do more. It is beyond comprehension, and beyond humanity. How could it have happened?

In writing on the wanton killing of endangered bustards by a Saudi Prince hunting in Pakistan, I was reminded of how complex Pakistan is as a small country bordered by the much larger India, Iran, Afghanistan, and the complex and troubled Kashhmir and Jammu lands in the north. It is embedded in a turbulent mix of cultures, ideologies, politics, history, economics, and now, environmental change. Amidst such complexity, the unthinkable can happen. With so many endogenous and exogenous forces at play, inevitably something terrible will happen in spite of Pakistan’s best efforts. In spite of the turmoil and complexity surrounding Pakistan, it is also home to the first woman leader of an Islamic country (Benazir Bhutto) and home to this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner (Malala Yousafzai, the girl who survived being shot by the Taliban for the audacity of going to school).

The more complex and turbulent the environment we live in, the more exogenous forces are likely to get the upper hand.

Slaughters, mass killings, genocide, the outcome of complex and turbulent environments, are all too common in our species, but we are outraged by the murder of children – no matter the tribe.

When we mourn the death of children at the hands of men, we mourn the loss of children of the Tree of Life.

And yet, in spite of outrage, in 2012, around the world, 10 million children were forced into prostitution. More than 168 million children were exploited as laborers, often under terrible and hazardous conditions. 5 million died from hunger and malnutrition, and the gruesome numbers go on.

In the US, 1,640 children died from abuse and neglect, 88% under the age of 7. Between 2005 and 2009, 1,579 children were murdered here. And though hunger and poverty have been rising at a steady clip (1 family out of 10 struggles to put food on the table in our country), in the most recent US budget, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, designed in part to insure child welfare, was slashed by 8.6 billion dollars.

Of the 150 gun laws proposed in the US since the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children by a deranged gunman (note frequent use of the word “deranged”), only 109 laws have been enacted, but the vast majority (70) of them loosen gun restrictions. We want our guns allegedly to protect our family, kin, clan, and tribe (oh yes, and to hunt).

Today in our country it is easier than ever before to kill children with guns.

There’s no overcoming tribalism, and my friends and colleagues think it wondrous (they term it “cultural diversity,” but that is the manifestation of tribalism), the suffering of children being an unfortunate outcome that needs to be redressed. I love cultural diversity, one of the reasons I love New York City as a home, but if cultural diversity can only be generated by tribalism, then it isn’t worth it. I would rather see people in love with one another and their children than in love with their tribe.

Globally, most of the trends in child welfare are in the right direction – declining child labor, increasing child health, fewer girls killed or genitally mutilated, and in our country, greater awareness and lower tolerance for the abuse and slaughter of children. But increasing economic disparity and environmental disequilibrium make sustaining positive trends difficult. This is why the greatest champions of the welfare of children are those who work tirelessly to build broad environmental sustainability and insure that the world remains a robust home for all of us, especially children, who are the first to suffer when food, water, and energy becomes scarce, as climate changes, diseases emerge, and conflict arises.

On Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, children learn about bee diversity. Germans and Tanzanians are working together to preserve biodiversity so that they may better survive upcoming climate change.

Bee diversity; what the kids are looking at in the box.

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Waterboarding America

I like the idea that an executive summary can be 524 pages long since I famously go on too long about most things. Perhaps it was not possible to distill the six thousand page Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. It’s terrible that this Report has so much to say about our country’s torture – 119 people “detained,” a quarter of whom were wrongfully held.

The centerpiece of the Report is waterboarding. Much of the outrage, however, concerns the fact that people whom we entrusted with our national security lied to us, took the law into their own hands and otherwise abused the trust we gave them. It seems the CIA, at a time when the country seemed willing to give up all its freedoms and break every rule to fight terrorism, became dysfunctional, disorganized, incompetent, greedy and deceptive – at least that’s the New York Times’ synopsis of the Report.

Waterboarding is drowning without the killing part – the waterboarded detainees were physically and psychologically scarred for life, but they were never drowned. If any had actually been drowned, there would be much more outrage. The one who died, Mr. Gul Rahman, died of hypothermia – he died shackled, nude, alone on a concrete floor, the officer responsible considered one of the agency’s best. In hypothermia, you pass out, some say even experience euphoria in the final moments before you die. When you drown, suffering is horrible and the last moments are violent and desperate. But no one was drowned.

When I think of innocents drowning, I think of Hurricane Sandy – 117 died, which is close to the number of CIA detainees – a third of the deaths were from drowning. Hurricane Katrina was much worse – 1,300 died, almost half from drowning.

But wait a minute; they died because Congress, when it comes to climate change, is dysfunctional, disorganized, incompetent, greedy and deceptive. Why no kerfuffle?

The Senate Report, on the other hand, has created quite the kerfuffle. Those who wilfully ignored the fact that torture does not work (as, ironically, determined by the CIA in its own 1989 report), ignored our commitment to never torturing prisoners. It’s our domestic and international policy. It’s international law. Yet, officials we trusted knowingly stood by and let torture happen, or feigned ignorance and let it happen, or let their ideology dictate their action and let it happen – those who betrayed our trust should be brought to justice!

Heads will roll!

Well, of course, not literally. That would be cruel and inhuman, which is forbidden by our Constitution.

It’s a bit uncertain whose heads will metaphorically roll. Who will be brought up on criminal charges? Some think President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice should be charged. Maybe George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Mike Haydon, former directors of the CIA and John Brennan, current director? John Yoo, John Rizzo, Jay Bybee, Alberto Gonzales, Cofer Black, and maybe Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, psychologists who helped with the methodology. That’s well over a dozen.

But I keep thinking of those who drowned in Katrina and Sandy. Held hostage by poverty, discrimination, and a government who knowingly and wilfully ignored what climate change science has been telling them for 20 years. If seventy percent of the public and 97% of scientists agree that climate change is real and our officials were entrusted to represent us, then they abused our trust – just like those named in the Report. The arguments of climate deniers are contrived, chaotic, ever-changing, and many deniers are supported by money from industry or the Koch brothers, which reflects influence by ideologues, politics, or just plain greed.

Senator Imhofe sanctioning the waterboarding America and Vice President Cheney sanctioning waterboarding.

Senator Imhofe sanctioning the waterboarding America and Vice President Cheney sanctioning the waterboarding of CIA detainees.

The World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 people are currently dying every year from climate change – although the causes are quite varied – only some of them are death due to drowning from extreme weather, like hurricanes and floods.

It seems that climate deniers in Congress and their backers reflect dysfunction, disorganization, incompetence, greed and deception. But wait a minute, this is exactly what everyone is upset about concerning the CA waterboarding detainees.

So doesn’t this make climate change deniers, like Senators Imhoff, Cruz, Enzi, Johnson, McConnell, Vitter, Coryn, and the majority of the Republican Party (only 8 are not climate change deniers), the same as those who condone waterboarding? Too many to list. Desmogblog.com list over 260 prominent climate change deniers – a lot bigger list than those condoning CIA waterboarding

It seems like climate change deniers are waterboarding America – only in this case, people actually drown.

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Bustards, Beetles, and Viagra

My spouse told me that a Saudi prince, with a huge, expensively kitted out entourage, went to Balochistan, Pakistan not long ago and killed 2,100 endangered houbara bustards – 2,000 more than his permit allowed. The web was filled with shock and outrage, in part because many believed that this beautiful bird, on the verge of extinction, was killed because they are considered by some to be aphrodisiacs. “Is there any more ridiculous reason to kill an animal?” asked Naeem Sadiq, a Pakistani activist with a name uncannily similar to mine.

Posted widely on the web, a picture of a bustard hunting - the modern way.

Posted widely on the web, a picture of bustard hunting – the modern way.

That’s a great question! The answer is easy when you consider stimulants, experiencing a romantic evening, blister beetles, and penile erection.

OK – let’s start with stimulants.

Stimulants are amazing! When an electrical impulse triggers a neuron to fire, it releases a chemical message to other cells. The chemical signal, however, has to leap across a gap to get to the other cells. This gap, or synapse, is the slimmest of spaces imaginable – it’s roughly 30 nanometers across or about one three thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper. Yet it’s in this impossibly small space that stimulants, like coffee and crack cocaine, slip in and mess with nerve signals. This means that when the brain processes all the signals it gets from the surrounding world (sights, sounds, smells and so forth) and creates what we experience, stimulants can alter that experience even though the surrounding world hasn’t changed.

Consider the experience of a romantic evening. If the sights of an attractive partner, the warmth of a crackling fire, the sounds of Nat King Cole on a muted MP3 player, and a complex milieu of culturally and socially tuned behaviors all align themselves just right, one might experience a romantic evening … which can mean sex, which, if at least one guy is involved, often means an erect penis. I know that’s rather unromantic, but that aside, suffice it to say that romance and erect penises are not necessarily easy things to engineer. Stimulants, at least in theory, can change this. Add to the mix of evening activities imbibing alcohol, eating oysters, chocolates, ginseng, the testicle of a bull, snake meat, bark of the yohimbe tree, Brazilian potency wood, MACA root, the penis of a tiger or dog, eating penis- or vagina-shaped mushrooms sautéed in butter, ground horn of a rhino, the meat of a pangolin or gecko, and possibly hundreds of other stimulants, and the experience is altered even though the surrounding world was not – same partner, same crackling fire, same music, different experience.

Now, enter the blister beetle and the bustard.

The Spanish fly is actually a blister beetle ( Lytta vesicatoria) whose noxious defensive chemical is toxic to people and bustards, but its toxin, cantharidin, in small amounts, is believed to be an aphrodisiac.

Blister beetles are famous for blasting attackers with cantharadin – a toxin strong enough to cause blisters on contact and to kill if ingested. Weirdly, blister beetles are believed to be aphrodisiacs, commonly known as “Spanish flies,” even though they obviously are not flies. The way it works is that a sub-lethal dose of cantharadin induces vascular inflammation of the genitourinary tract in men and women – it’s hard to imagine inflamed penises and vaginas as romantic.

So all this got me to thinking. In October, Carolina Bravo and colleagues published in PloS One, a leading scientific journal, a study suggesting that great bustards eat just enough blister beetles to ward off gut infections and parasitic worms. They also noticed that males eat more blister beetles than females and that females check out the anus of males during courting, which is where you’d look (if you were a female bustard or, in this case, a scientist) to see if there were worms or any signs of a poorly functioning gut. The authors suggest, though they really didn’t prove it, that male bustards eat extra blister beetles to self-medicate and show their healthiness so when a female comes to check their anus out – bingo!

So here’s my completely unsubstantiated scientific hypothesis – maybe the houbara bustard, like the great bustard, also eats blister beetles and that’s why it supposedly has aphrodisiac-like properties. It’s much safer to eat a bustard that ate blister beetles than it is to eat blister beetles. And while inflammatory irritation of the penis and vagina is not exactly romantic, death certainly wrecks a romantic evening.

The Prince, however, most likely claims that they are not aphrodisiac seekers. Rather, they are falconers like their nomadic ancestors, the Bedu, who would capture falcons, hunt bustards to supplement their meager diets, and then release the falcons and move on.

Now we can answer Sadiq’s question.

Yes, killing bustards to allegedly keep a tradition alive is more ridiculous. According to one account, the Prince and entourage fly in on private jets, have roads and luxurious accommodations built, bribe government officials to kill vastly more birds than they are permitted, enjoy lavish meals, satellite telephones and wi-fi, and drive luxury SUVs. This is not keeping the Bedu tradition of falconry alive. It is simply indulgent, repugnant “sport”.

That’s not to say that killing bustards for their aphrodisiacal properties isn’t ridiculous. It’s just a tiny bit less ridiculous.

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Interstellar’s environment – in IMAX!

IMAX is expensive, but it’s great to see a movie on a giant screen with big sound, especially sci-fi movies like Interstellar, where space travel takes you across vast vistas of space and there are lots of ear-shattering sounds of space ships crashing and exploding. Interstellar champions itself as a novel sci-fi movie that will make you think about physics – time, gravity, multiple dimensions – it’s a very cosmic movie. Kip Thorne’s book, The Science of Interstellar, written in anticipation of the success of the movie, is supposed to help moviegoers whose interest in physics is piqued by the movie. Thorne has co-authored with Stephen Hawking about black holes and time warps and was a consultant for the movie.

Interstellar ’s physics may have been carefully constructed with the benefit of expert input, but its environmental “science” is just awful. This horrifically bad environmental science is odd because the whole premise of the movie is that Earth is dying, which is an environmental issue. While there are millions of ways one could imagine, scientifically, how our Earth might die, the Nolan brothers who wrote the movie (the brothers are known for their Batman movies and mind teasers like Inception and Memento), seemed to have consulted no one on getting the environmental science right.

The environmental science may lacking, but its environmental ideology is all too apparent and is passed off as science. The movie’s environmental ideology is what I often refer to as anthro-exceptionalism – the belief that we are an exceptional species. I blogged about this earlier when considering Intelligent Design and Creationism – the idea is that the purpose of 14 billion years of cosmic history was to produce us – sentient beings capable of understanding and therefore appreciating how wonderful the world is. The core ideas of anthro-exceptionalism are:

the more babies, the better – it’s biological, it’s natural, it’s not subject to question;
humanity’s prime directive is the prevention of its extinction – that’s what evolution is all about;
the environment is out to get us – nature and the cosmos are bastards and set against us;
physics and engineering are vastly more interesting than ecology and evolution – we can bend the laws of physics (as in Interstellar), but ecology and evolution simply catalog the unfortunate, dull, immutable facts about life; and
no matter the global crises, we will find a way out – even though the root cause of modern global crises is usually us.

I don’t take issue with subscription to these beliefs; indeed many of my friends and colleagues subscribe to this ideology. What one has to watch out for, however, is when subscribers to anthro-exceptionalism mistake their beliefs for science or worse, allow their ideology to influence their research.

It’s hard to maintain the willing suspension of disbelief when the movie’s explanation for why the Earth is dying has to do with agricultural blight (caused by deadly pathogens of crops), dust bowls, and the loss of oxygen, all portrayed as if we lost our struggle against a cruel and indifferent world. It never occurs to the Nolan brothers that the problem lay in the fact that we allowed our population to reach extraordinary numbers that were wholly dependent on a handful of fragile and vulnerable crop species. It was a formula for disaster. That’s why the Earth was dying in Interstellar, not because nature had conspired against us.

In Intersteallar, halcyon times are portrayed as times when fields were green, we could play baseball and eat hotdogs rather than popcorn, and we had large families. But the dying Earth was due to that being our vision – the dying of Earth was our doing, not something inherently flawed in nature. The absurdity of Interstellar’s new world is that it seems to be exactly the same as the one that died – a world made up solely of monocultures, baseball, and large families.

While the environmental science is rubbish, Interstellar is still immensely entertaining and because its environmental ideology reflects popular beliefs, few are likely to be bugged by its nonsensical environmental science. The human drama (love between a father and daughter), imagined technology (cool robots and spaceships), suspense (will they survive?), and the astrophysics (space travel, exoplanets, worm holes, and the 5^th dimension), are what draws the big crowds.

Still, what if Interstellar considered how amazing our Biosphere is and imagined its demise because of accidental mismanagement and mass extinction and then attractive, smart people scoured the universe for solutions, found them, and came home to rebuild. That would make for an incredible IMAX experience.

In the movie, "Interstellar," the physics was inventive, but carefully thought out while the environmental science was environmental ideology.

The environmental consequences of agriculture. In the movie, “Interstellar,” the physics may have been inventive, but it was carefully thought out. The environmental science, on the other hand, was poor. There are many reasons Earth may one day no longer sustain us – ironically, agriculture, our primary way of sustaining human growth, is one of them.

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Horses and Insurgents

I came across this recent paper published in Nature Communications on the Cambaytheres, a group of mammals I have to confess I had not heard of before, but the article made me think about horses and insurgents.

In the paper, Kenneth Rose and his co-authors claim that 50 million-year-old fossils found in an old mine in Gujarat, India tell us that horses, rhinos, and tapirs, or the Perissodactyla, originated in India. What’s interesting is that 50 million years ago, India was an island, adrift at sea, heading for a horrific, slow crash with Eurasia.

India adrift. Cruising from the south after her split up with Africa and Australia and her abandonment of Madagascar, she crashed into Eurasia. The mountains to the north are the crumpled regions of the crash. Part of her western region is known as Pakistan.

It’s hard to fathom – but India began as a massive chunk of land squeezed between Africa and Australia in the Southern Hemisphere a half a billion years ago. She broke free and fled across the sea, leaving Madagascar behind but taking Sri Lanka with her until she crashed violently into Asia – the Himalayan mountain range is like massive, rumpled bumper of the crash.

When I close my eyes, I see India cruising at top speed across the ocean, breaking waves, leaving a huge wake, but, of course, the actual trip took a couple hundred million years, so I doubt any of the creatures on board noticed or felt even mildly seasick.

What Rose and his colleagues tell us is that some of the creatures on board were the evolutionary ancestors of the Perissodactyla. The fossils they examined are bones of Cambaytherium species, mammals from the Indo-Pakistan region dating back to the Eocene, some 56 to 33 million years ago. Since the Cambaytherium share a common ancestor with the Perissodactyla, and India was an island at the time, the evolutionary roots of horses, rhinos, and tapirs must be Indian.

It’s hard now, when looking at the horses in Central Park or the police horses in Times Square, to not want to go up and ask them what it’s like to be of Indian ancestry – I always felt a kinship with them, as I do with all creatures, but now I feel a little closer. My bacterial cousins go back 3.5 billion years, but my horse cousins go back a mere 50 million years – that practically makes them siblings rather than cousins.

I’ve been to Gujarat. My student, Meha Jain, worked in Gujarat, so I went to see her doing her dissertation work. I had a fantastic time during my visit. I didn’t have time to go see the last remaining population of the endangered Asiatic Lion and the endangered Asiatic Wild Ass that reside in reserves in Gujarat. When I travel, I try to visit nature, but there wasn’t time and the reserves were far away. The rural farmscape, however, though devoid of natural habitat, had a beauty of its own.

Like many, of course, I knew Gujarat for the 2002 massacre of hundreds of Muslims and the displacement of thousands more. A center for Hindu nationalism, a violent history, and the complicity of its Governor, Narendra Modi, in the violence, seemed contrary to its warm and gracious people and its intricate culture. In spite of Modi’s dubious past, he was immensely popular in Gujarat, his portrait was everywhere, and today, he is India’s Prime Minister. When he visited here in late September, he was greeted as if he were some sort of hero – at Madison Square Garden, an audience of 19,000 cheered.

When I think of Gujarat, I think of India and about its extraordinary geological and biological history that generated amazing natural wealth – some of the most unique and diverse flora and fauna in the world are found in India. When we, by which I mean our species, arrived in India, out of Africa and on our way to South East Asia and eventually to Australia and New Zealand, many of us must have stayed in places that must have seemed like the fictional Shangri La.

Out of Africa and into India happened only 50 to 70 thousand years ago, yet, in that short time, and particularly in the last 100 years of colonialism and postcolonialism, we have spent down the natural wealth of the region. With the spending down of that natural capital, as economists call it, to make built capital, another economics term, we now have farms that barely support their people and cities that lack the resources to provide the kind of infrastructure necessary to make urban environments work well for many. Some 270 million people live in poverty in India – how did that happen?

Then (50 thousand years ago) and now. The center shows a satellite image of Khana National Park (green area above the diagonal which is the park boundary) vs. agricultural transformation (whitish areas left of the boundary). Pictures on top and left are from the park, while pictures on the bottom and right are of the surrounding landscape. I took all these pictures on a single day in August, 2009 and the figure was published in an article.
Naeem, S. and R. DeFries. 2009. La conservation des espèces, clé d’une adaptation climatique durable., Institut du développement durable et des relations internationals. Sciences Po., Paris, France.

I’m not a political scientist and have no particular authority on social or humanist matters, but it seems to me that the end result of the loss of nature’s capital is a rise in insurgency. In the general region, Sunni insurgents attack Iran, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, Harakat ul-Mujahidin and Lashkar-e Tayyiba fighters fight with the Pakistani government, the Taliban attack Afghanis, Sikh insurgents in Punjab attack their fellow citizens as do Naxalite Maoists in Eastern India. In the grand scheme of things, these violent conflicts are small compared to the hundreds of millions who reside peacefully in the region, but that is cold comfort to the innocent killed or injured in the struggles. Worse, insurgency is a source of omnipresent fear and often an obstacle to tackling other issues, such as poverty, income inequality, and environmental degradation – the very things that breed insurgency. In the US, for example, we invest less and less in the environment, but out of fear and distraction, we have spent 2 – 5 trillion dollars on fighting insurgents since 9/11.

I know my thinking is often pretty circuitous, to say the least, but that’s what the paper by Rose and his colleagues does for me. Now, when I see horses, I think of India and its extraordinary biogeographical history and how, in the geological blink of an eye, we transformed the very places within which we and biological diversity prospered, to landscapes that, in the absence of any ecologically sensible stewardship, lead to poverty, inequality, and the autocatalysis of insurgency.

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We’re here after all, thank God.

The Big Bang – it happened, thank God.

I was worried, as I am from time to time, that we’re not here in spite of all appearances – all this extraordinary diversity of life on Earth, the sun, the moon, us – none of this really exists. Thanks to Herranen, Markkanen, Nurmi and Rajantie, in their piece just published in Physical Review Letters, I feel reassured, at least for the moment.

Herranen and co-authors theorize that it does not take any new kind of theory to explain why the universe didn’t collapse some 13.8 billion years when the Higgs boson appeared.

Phew!

Remember the big splash the Higgs boson made in the summer of 2012? It’s is one of those subatomic particles that the Standard Model of physics suggests should exist and, in 2012, after some $13.25 billion dollars of research, a bunch of scientists confirmed that indeed the thing exists. Not bad – about a dollar a year, every year, since time immemorial.

The Higgs boson was given the popular name, the God Particle because it is the particle that gave mass to the other subatomic particles. Without it, we’d be massless. The problem is that cosmologists working at a different facility, one called the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2, or BICEP2, provided data that, in combination with what we learned from the Large Hadron Collider about the Higgs boson, suggested that shortly after the Big Bang (like less than a second!), the universe should have collapsed.

Proof of the Higgs boson.

In other words, the God Particle was a capricious little thing that, though it made the universe interesting by giving its particles mass, in the act of so doing, it destabilized the universe. Our baby universe should have collapsed back into itself. The Big Unbang should have followed the Big Bang.

Thank God it didn’t.

The fact that the universe did not collapse must, for some, confirm the existence of God, and the fact that the God Particle is not a capricious little thing that could have destroyed the baby universe, is a great relief to them. It’s a bit convoluted, this thinking, but it goes something like this. Scientific Creationists believe in the exceptionalism of our species – God loved us most out of the all the millions of species ever created. Like any group of people that think themselves exceptional, they are terrified by any idea that may prove them not to be exceptional. Thus, to be related to and on equal footing with birds, morpho butterflies, monkeys, and whales is a terrifying thought.

It’s hard, when you have lots of siblings and you thought you were your parents’ favorite, to discover that you’re not. Creationists are so mad at this fact of unexceptionalism revealed by evolutionary biologists, that they go through incredible lengths to try to dismiss evolution – but they never win this “debate” they invented. This constant defeat is doubly frustrating to them, I’m sure because not only can they not win the very debate they invented, they must also accept that their parents love all 8.7 million of their children equally.

Personally, that’s a kind of love I find much more comforting than exceptionalism. Parentally-invoked exceptionalism creates huge pressures on kids. I speak from experience.

Since Scientific Creationism was struck down by evolution, creationists have been working to make the alternative view, known as Intelligent Design, scientifically prove human exceptionalism. The basic idea is that if something in the long history of the universe should have snuffed us out and it didn’t, then there is nothing random or capricious about the universe – it’s all part of an intelligently designed plan.

For them, the fact that the God Particle did not destabilize the cosmos serves as further proof of Intelligent Design. God made all the particles and forces to have just the right properties so that the universe did not collapse shortly after creation. Then, 10 billion years later, starting with the primordial ooze on the baby Earth, birds, morpho butterflies, monkeys, whales, and some 8.7 million other species now exist. They built a magnificent, robust, vibrant and beautiful biosphere, though it took a while – over 3.8 billion years. God’s endgame was clearly to create an exceptional species that would appreciate His work.

To subscribe to Intelligent Design does mean having to give up Scientific Creationism and give up tilting at evolution, but perhaps this is a small price to pay to feel like God loves us most.

So, thank God for our investment in the Large Hadron Collider and BICEP2! They proved the God Particle exists and the Big Unbang did not happen.

It is convenient, of course, from time to time, to come to the conclusion that what surrounds us isn’t real. Maybe I have no committee meetings this week. Maybe all those things I’m supposed to do, but haven’t gotten to, aren’t real. Maybe these bills I have to pay are an illusion.

Alas, to put it simply, as Herranen and colleagues explained, though it is terrifying that “If H ≫ 109 GeV, the inflationary fluctuations of the effectively massless Higgs field immediately trigger a transition to the false vacuum as the probability density at the barrier scales as P ∼ expð−8π2Vmax=3H4Þ,” they found that “for a high inflationary scale H ≫ Λ¯ max ∼ 108 GeV the UV-induced (subhorizon) curvature corrections alter the SM Higgs effective potential significantly during inflation.”

OK, I’ll be honest. I look at it this way – they say that the more you think you understand the Standard Model, the more you can be certain you don’t, so I’m proud to say I really don’t think I fully understand Herranen and Co., which means I get what they’re saying – the universe didn’t necessarily have to become unstable and collapse once the Higgs boson entered the scene.

So maybe God has been watching over us since the beginning and all this is real and I do have to go to meetings and I do have to make those deadlines and I do have to pay those bills. It also should mean, for the Scientific Creationists and subscribers to Intelligent Design, we could very well be an exceptional species. If you believe that, then we should be saving the living world that supports us, just as God would.

Wrecking the Biosphere – not what an exceptional species would do. Red represents fires we set.

Uncategorized

Now, where’re those chocolates?

It’s hard to remember everything.

A study came out that says chocolate improves memory!

Well, not exactly.

I bought a sack of “fun”-size Mars Bars because their on sale this time of year – post Halloween and all. Not sure where I put them. I think I got them at Target. Or maybe I’m not supposed to shop there? Or was it Walmart I’m not supposed to shop at? Doesn’t Walmart help to preserve one acre of wildlife area for every acre it converts to megastores? “Acres for America,” or some such program – I think they’ve helped preserve 690,000 acres. But then, that must mean they converted 690,000 acres of land to stores, no? I think they were going to convert 88,000 hectares of pine rockland, an endangered habitat in Florida, to a store. Cannot, for the life of me, remember if I’m supposed to shop there or not.

Doesn’t seem like I should support something that destroys endangered habitat if I care about the environment. And I do. As an ecologist, I think about my actions and try to help protect and preserve our living world. But it’s hard to keep all these facts in mind. Especially when we have to worry about Ebola, which made it here in New York City, or all those horrific kidnappings in Nigeria by Boko Haram. What a scary world! Who needs Halloween?

But if there wasn’t Halloween, there wouldn’t be chocolates on sale after the holiday.

What was it I was writing about?

Oh yes! Chocolate, memory…right…got it.

It’s interesting that this study, supported by the Mars chocolate company, found that a specially prepared drink high in chocolate-derived flavonols, organic compounds found in chocolate and other foods, improved a specific kind of memory. It’s interesting because cocoa processing apparently often destroys flavonols, which is why the Mars company had to specially prepare the drink for the researchers since, most likely, any of its 29 brands of chocolate, like M&Ms, Mars Bars, and Snickers, wouldn’t have enough of the stuff to be useful for a clinical trial.

Mars truck.

I’ll bet the media will have a blast with this finding!

I love the stuff. Chocolate. I got a lot for my birthday, though I thought as one gets older one’s love of sweets declines, if I remember correctly. Not with me. I love the stuff even though I’m getting old!

I also seem to recall that 70% of chocolate is grown by smallholder farmers in developing countries in biodiversity rich areas like Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and NIgeria. I’ve been to a bunch of these places, although I don’ think I’ve been to Papua New Guinea. I’ll have to look through my 35 mm photographic slides, though I don’t have a slide projector any more – I keep forgetting that I’ve got to get around to converting those things to pics.

Birds and cocoa plantations, Costa Rica, studied by CATIE.

Guinea has Ebola. But that’s not Papua New Guinea. Phew!

Wait, I’ve not been to either place. So, no worries. Double phew!

Stunning biodiversity in all these cocoa-growing countries, however! Millions of species of plants and animals and beneficial microorganisms. Beautiful people! Agro-forestry areas are so much nicer than plantations and pastures or worse, cornfields. But I think child labor happens in some cocoa production areas and there’s a lot of violent conflict, poverty, malnutrition, and disease in some of these places. Boko Haram, Ebola … it’s in New York now (I already mentioned that, right?), Ebola that is, not Boko Haram (at least so far as we know – this is a diverse city). They’re in Nigeria – Boko Haram (not Ebola, so far as we know, but it’s a biodiverse country so the disease could be there).

Shade-grown chocolate, I hear, isn’t so bad, in terms of agriculture, however, which I suppose is some sort of consolation. Maybe I should look for shade-grown, fair-trade, and organic stickers on Mars products – must be somewhere on the package. I mean, the company has a net worth of something like five billion dollars. (Did I already say that?) It would be awesome if they were fair-trade and sustainably-grown.

And it’s better for climate change, agroforestry that is, as opposed to fertilizer and pesticide drenched cocoa plantations. That’s what my student, Vivian, who studies coffee agroforestry in Chiapas, says. Coffee’s another issue. I also love that stuff too, coffee, and mocha is the best, a mix of both coffee and chocolate – excellent!

Some say that growing a pound of corn on a fertilizer and pesticide drenched cropland releases a pound of carbon into the atmosphere. That’s terrible for global warming!

A pound of chocolate releases about a third of a pound of carbon into the atmosphere – so that’s better, right? – well… still bad, but better.

So what about Cocoa Puffs – corn puffs with chocolate?

There’s something like 5 – 6 million cocoa farmers worldwide and something like 40-50 million people whose livelihoods depend on cocoa. If one combines coffee, cocoa, oil palm, and other agroforestry systems, I think 43% of Earth’s agricultural land is agroforestry, something totaling to around 2.5 billion acres with some 900 million people living in these landscapes. Agroforestry is particularly prevalent in Southeast Asia, Central America, and South America with over 50% of area under agroforestry. There’s lots in Sub-Saharan African tropical countries too, like Nigeria.

Funny, only about ten million acres of forest are protected (sort of) worldwide. Not so funny, I guess – but I can never remember numbers. Seems sort of miniscule – what’s protected versus what we turn into mochas.

Oh, here’re my chocolates! Right where I left them, after all that scattered thinking about forests, biodiversity, people, agriculture, carbon in the atmosphere and global warming, Ebola and Boko Haram.

Hope these chocolates can help my memory so I don’t forget all this stuff.

Now, where’s my coffee?

Uncategorized

Exhilarating but Draining

The train is pulling into the city, or more accurately, under it. I’m looking forward to getting home after a few days of working with others at the National Science Foundation – exhilarating but draining.

Looking out the train window, it looks like converging rivers of red or white lights. Everyone is heading home after a week of hard work. I wonder how their week was – exhilarating but draining? I would like to ask each passenger; where they are coming from, where they are going, what’s their job? I’d like to ask the million people stuck in traffic on the road the same questions.

I, myself, teach about and study the living world, but today, if anyone asked, I was coming back from the National Science Foundation.

It’s all confidential, but I cannot help but reflect on what we did for the last few days. We were deciding which, roughly, five scientists out of a hundred would get to do their work.

it’s amazing to me to consider what these scientists were hoping to do – work in countries where Ebola is on the rampage; climb the steep slopes of Andean mountains to understand how climate change is ravaging the delicate; beautiful communities of plants and animals that live there; traverse deserts to study fire, drought, mammals, birds, and lizards; wear bug suits to protect themselves from the swarms of mosquitoes in the tundra; and use 3-d printers, analyze images from satellites and use lasers and radar to look deep into forests, fly drones with sensitive sensor arrays to measure nature in great detail, and run complex mathematical and computationally intensive simulations.

That’s the exhilarating part. There were so many brilliant ideas, whacky ideas, clever ideas, new views and new theories and perspectives and new thoughts about life on earth.

None of it, however, was funded. That’s the draining part.

I’d like to tell you what was funded, but that’s all confidential too. What was funded was brilliant work, but not much different from the ton of stuff that wasn’t funded.

I asked the head honcho – why is it that out of 8.7 million species, half of which will go extinct by the end of this century, we spend next to nothing on nature. We fund practically none of the young, intrepid, brilliant scientists who are willing to risk life and limb to study our world.

Brain science, on the other hand, is one of the most well-funded sciences in the world. Campuses around the country, my own included, are having enormous buildings and well-funded institutions erected or being erected to study the brain.

The National Institute for Health announced a 4.5 billion dollar Brain Initiative.

The ENTIRE budget for biology in NSF is just a fraction (16%) of that NIH brain-science Initiative.

NSF’s whole budget, for which biology is just one part, is something like 7.6 billion while NIH, which funds medical research, is over 30 billion. As if, somehow, all of science has just one quarter the value of health science.

One does not, of course, get straight answers from head honchos – the usual claim is that you have to talk to Congress – that’s where the initiatives come from.

I wonder if, one day, we will look back and ask, how could the Foundation have spent so much money on studying us and spent so little on studying the world we live in?

I imagine we’ll know enough about our brain by then to figure out the mystery.

Till then, we’re pulling into Penn Station, time to get off, and we all have a lot of work to do, though today is Friday, and it’s been a draining week.

shahidnaeemblog

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Children of the Tree of Life

Waterboarding America

Bustards, Beetles, and Viagra

Interstellar’s environment – in IMAX!

Horses and Insurgents

We’re here after all, thank God.

Now, where’re those chocolates?

Exhilarating but Draining