The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert – book review

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Elizabeth Kolbert, Human caused extinctions, review, The 6th Extinction

Were all going to die; and as grim as that sounds, all of our living species are going to more than die, they are going to go extinct. In the very long run that is a simple fact, but many species are going extinct TODAY, and our species is the one killing them. We Homo sapiens as a group have a hundred-thousand-year history of driving other species into oblivion. Whenever we come into a new habitat things happen fast, very fast in the geological sense, and that geological record has consistently revealed in the fossil record that we are the perpetrators of extinctions.

It’s been sixty-six million years since an asteroid struck Chicxulub, Mexico, and brought the age of the dinosaurs to an abrupt end. That is called the fifth extinction. That event made a temporary ecological space for the survivors to expand into, and some of the rat-size mammals were our ancestors. The five major extinction events in Earth’s four plus billion year history, since life permanently established itself, were all caused by mega geological events. This sixth extinction now in progress is being caused by those cute little rats grown up into us. We are a super successful one-time-use fossil-fuel-based species that is unsustainable. We currently have a population a hundred times greater than that of the early Roman agriculture period, that was permanently sustainable.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert takes us visiting some of the scientists working in remote places in the world who are documenting the progress of this sixth extinction. One of these visits was to One Tree Island where researchers are monitoring the death of the world’s greatest reef system. You can see their camp in the Google Earth photo below.

One Tree Island near the southern end of the 1000 mile long Great Barrier Reef, Australia lat/lon -23.508, 152.091

Kolbert travels to many places where research is being conducted. There are only twenty species of trees in all of the huge country of Canada, but in the tiny tropical country of Belize there are over seven hundred species of trees. The tropics are way more diverse than the temperate areas and the arctic regions. With climate change it will be the tropics where the greatest species extinction will take place, but at the moment it is the polar bears that get the news coverage. Cute furry things that are easily viewed always get people’s attention, but it’s the nearly invisible biota in the thick tropical forests that are in the process of going extinct. That is because the tropics have few extremes of temperature and over geological time species tend to fill ever narrower niches, thus with what seems to us to be a minor change, those tropically adapted species are stressed beyond their ability to cope.

The impressive thing about humanity creating this world-wide sixth extinction is that, “we are doing it without even trying.”

The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans DeWaal – Book review

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Animal morality, Bonobo morality, Chimp morality, Human morality

This book is loaded with references to The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, so click the picture below and study it for a while. The painting shows an evolutionary trend from the early non-moral garden on the left, with a few creatures just lounging about and frolicking in the water, through the heavily populated middle painting of partying people proffering fruits and berries, and the right panel loaded with morally challenged monsters holding man-made musical instruments and knives moving toward pain and fiery darkness. The few people in the painting with clothing are religious figures. The message in 1504 seems to be the non-moral past was peaceful, the present is frolicking fun, and the future is technological advancement and horror.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, painted in 1504, click to enlarge

The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, by Frans de Waal is about morality and the origins of morality. It moves through many examples of how animals are moral in their relationships with their own species members, and sometimes with their personal friends, even if those friends are of another species. We would call their behavior moral if it were human behavior. Some other moral artworks discussed are The Triumph of Death by Pieter Brueghel and a work by Damien Hirst, (a google image gallery,) for a modern comparison.

The book begins with, “Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for a livable society, is built into us?” on page 2. Then De Waal for 240 more pages discusses animals, mostly chimps and bonobos, and gives observed examples of their well-developed behavioral morality. However, there doesn’t seem to be a discussion of the forcing factors that brought humans to our higher state of inherited morality, or at least the inherited ability to easily learn our group’s morality. That is strange omission for a world-famous biologist. If you are curious about how human morality came into being read, Human evolution was controlled by emergent human women. And, Gossiping women created human morality. Although De Waal talks about morality as being generated by natural selection he generalized that thought to: it is there because it works; but that isn’t saying anything informative, nor does it give a clue as to how we should be creating better morality. He leaves that to the philosophers, but anyone who has been in philosophical discussions knows, morality isn’t created in graduate school seminars. Morality is created in normal people during their social interaction with other normal people.

 

You can’t cure stupid, especially Detroit stupid, stupid, foolishness.

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automobile, Darwin Award for Detroit, Detroit, Detroit-stupid, evolution, Ford GT, policy, reviews, You can't cure stupid

Detroit is getting worse and worse. Back in January 2009 I posted a contentious article “You can’t cure stupid, especially Detroit stupid.” Then the American auto industry had been repeatedly rescued by the government, which means the average American taxpayer. The pitiful irony is that those average Americans are the ones paying for the Detroit playboy’s ongoing stupidity. The rich dudes in charge of the industry are still promoting their childish fantasies of power and prestige. Here is a prideful example of their latest effort from the article, Supercars Steal The Detroit Show. Also, a walk-through Geek Beat video at the show.

The new Ford GT. The founder Henry Ford would be horrified to see his name on this wasteful thing.

At a time when foreign industry is rapidly passing the US in production of needed products, and simultaneously building a better infrastructure, these Detroit people are wasting American reserves of resources on this hideous extravagance. These Ford executives deserve a shower of Darwin Awards, because they are taking themselves and America out of the future successful gene pool. This odious thing will consume one-time-use natural resources, like oil and gas, at a prodigious rate, and that will bring on the end of civilization as we know it. The car above and its copies will bring famine to the world sooner by destroying humanity’s ability to produce food. Food is created by using those same resources that this car will destroy. The fields of food crops are cultivated with equipment using oil, and they are fertilized with oil-based products, and the food is brought to you by trucks using oil, and you probably get to the store in a vehicle using oil. When that oil is gone, or becomes too expensive, you and your family will starve to death.

A vulture waiting for a starving child to die.

How can it be made more clear than this picture, that extravagance wastes resources, and when resources are gone starvation is the result? The problem is not that Detroit designers are stupid, because that word implies low intelligence, and obviously it takes great intelligence to create those cars. So perhaps the snarky, “You can’t cure stupid, especially Detroit stupid.” should be replaced with the more optimistic –

You can’t cure stupid, but sometimes fools can cure themselves with forethought.

Imagine There’s No Heaven by Mitchell Stephens – book review

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Atheism, Heaven, Hell, Meslier, Voltaire

This book makes the shocking statement that Jean Meslier, an unknown Catholic priest in a tiny town of Étrépigny, is the founding father of modern Atheism. His “Testament” to his parishioners denounces all religion. It was published in 1729, after his death, and had a terrific impact on the French reformer Voltaire. Meslier refers to a hypothetical man who “…wished that all the great men in the world and all the nobility could be hanged, and strangled with the guts of the priests.” “If God is incomprehensible to man, it would seem rational never to think of Him at all.” “Religion is a fatal source for trouble.” “On the pretext of being willing to drive you to heaven, they prevent you from enjoying your life on earth in any way; and finally pretending to keep you away in some other life from the imaginary pains of a hell that does not exist … they compel you to suffer in this life, which is the only one that you can claim to, the pains of a real hell …” p. 112.

Jean Meslier, a French Catholic priest who wrote the first uncompromisingly atheist book.

 

This seems to be the same church that Meslier administered. lat/lon 49.685 4.753

Another prominent atheist was Baron d’Holbach, who inherited great wealth and used it to support a salon in Paris from 1750 to 1780, where the great and famous European intellectuals gathered. It was in his salon that much of the great Encyclopédie was discussed and created. These people were key in creating our modern view of reality and our view of religion.

d’Holbach used his fortune to promote the French Enlightenment.

Chapter 13 was mostly about Madalyn Murray O’Hair and her struggles with the American legal system. Her son William Murray, when a student, didn’t like saying prayers at school, and Madalyn pursued his cause all the way through a successful challenge to the United States Supreme Court. Prayers are no longer required or permitted in public schools. The book doesn’t give Madalyn nearly the praise given to the French Enlightenment fellows, and yet her struggles did result in substantial change to the enforcement of religious principles in America. Bill was a personal friend in 1968, and a wonderful companion, but even then he spoke of the dark side of atheism from personal experience. Ten years later, after his mother, brother and daughter had been murdered by atheists, Bill Murray found Christ. My inclinations were of the form that God and spiritualism were supernatural and didn’t relate to the reality that I live within. My spiritualist friends say I will transition into that other reality after I die. I doubt that, but if it turns out that way, I will make the best I can of that new arrangement.

 

Julian by Gore Vidal – book review

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A complicated life, Book review, Julian Emperor of Rome

Gore Vidal makes this history of the Roman Emperor Julian come alive, and he makes it clear that being on the fast track, by birth, to that role in life wasn’t pleasant. There was a short life expectancy for the Emperors of that time and Julian only made it to age thirty-two before being killed. From birth through adolescence  and young adulthood, there were daggers pointed at him from his own family, and when Emperor there were plenty more from everyone. That was just part of the job description for being Emperor.

Vidal makes a portrait of an intelligent young man with the finest teachers of the world as his personal tutors, growing up within a protected palace. But the staff soldiers were more his captors than his protectors. Julian grew to adulthood being trained as a scholar and priest. His inclinations brought him to Athens to study philosophy, which seems innocent enough, but it brought him into direct conflict with the newly created state-sanctioned Christian Church. The state religion was then only some thirty years old. Even though he was being trained for a lead position in the Christian hierarchy he was personally inclined to revert to the Classic Greco-Roman traditions and philosophy. Because of that reversion he is now known as Julian the Apostate by Christians. It seemed no matter which way he turned his world was filled with enemies. The Roman world was in a state of turbulent transition, and the Christians were being successful taking over the power of the state. In that political situation a person is compelled to choose one side or the other and stick with it, but that inevitably alienates many of the people.

It was a difficult situation and Julian, like many heads of state, reconciles himself to the fact that he can be assassinated at any moment no matter what he does and no matter how careful he is. Vidal portrays Julian as an increasingly superstitious man performing more and more of the ancient traditions of ritual slaughter of animals and then reading their entrails for omens as to what decisions he should be making on profoundly complex political situations. All goes relatively well until, after defeating a Persian army and being granted a liberal division of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, he declines and continues the war in hopes of gathering all the world to India under his domain, like the area Alexander the Great had captured some five hundred years earlier. From that decision everything goes badly, and soon Julian was killed, possibly assassinated, and the Christians take over.

Julian: A Novelby Gore Vidal was my book club’s book of the month, and we are going to discuss the religious implications of how Julian’s behavior affected Christianity and the Western world for the next one thousand seven hundred years. It might be argued that with Julian’s death the Classic Greco-Roman world view ended, and what is known as the dark ages began.

Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham – review

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An offset autobiography, Book review, Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham

Bedtime reading was great this last month. Falling asleep to other people’s silly growing-up problems can be comforting. It’s probably because with some distance from their problems we can be objective as to what they should do, because it is reasonable, and what they actually do because it is emotionally appealing.

We begin by following Philip through his traumatic childhood when his mother dies, and his father had passed before the narrative begins. He is sent to live with his kindly aunt and her husband, a small-town church vicar who is a decent man but doctrinaire and distant. Philip has a club foot and it ruins his social life at school because whenever anyone is angry with him they always make some nasty remark about his foot. Thus his foot cripples him emotionally as well as physically while he is growing up.

Fortunately his father had been a doctor and left Phillip with a tiny sum of money, and yet that sum called small later carries him through several years of art school, a couple years of business training and then a couple years of medical school, while much of the time supporting a fallen woman and her baby. He could have made it through his medical degree on the money, but he made a risky investment in a South African gold mine, lost it all, and ended up starving and sleeping on park benches in London. Of course there are some other idealistic women along the way that matched his naiveté, and they consumed quite a lot of his inheritance too. Phillip never got over the nasty women, and the only lady friend that ever treated him well, a successful novelist, he rejected because … well for no particular reason, and went back to the floozy mean one. That one started off physically sickly and then turned to prostitution and got even sicker but still Phillip supported her and loved her and her baby in his pathetic way.

He is saved from suicide and starvation by a family man who has a large family and squeezed just one more into his home, and then got Phillip an entry-level job. He works at that for two years and was making some small progress and finally earning a bit more than destitute wages. He was hoping his vicar godfather would die and leave him some money, but the vicar holds tenaciously to his miserable life because he is terrified of dying despite his religion. Eventually the vicar dies, and Philip inherits enough money to finish his medical school degree, and quickly lands a temporary job that turns into a potential permanent one as a partner in a successful medical practice in a beautiful fishing town. But he is still filled with a lust to travel the world so he turns down the offer, and appears to be sliding off again into an inane chase after meaningless phantoms. He finally becomes temporarily involved with a young woman he has known since her childhood, but who now has fully matured. She is robust and taciturn but very practical and loving, and she says the reason she has turned down proposals of marriage from some very respectable prospects, is because she will have no other than Phillip. This is a revelation to him, and of course he rejects her. She is pregnant and so he is going to do the right thing, but then she isn’t and so he is free to flutter off into the world of his fantasy travel around the world as a ship’s doctor. But then he has a moment of future reflection,  and realizes he will be much happier with a warm and loving wife as a respected small-town doctor. They look out of the National Gallery over Trafalgar Square, and walk out of our view betrothed to a happy new life.

It is a slow and often painful book but the characters eventually grow into what we wanted them to become from the beginning.

 

TIME – Person of the Year 2014 – Popularity list

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Probaway Person of the Year, TIME Person of the Year 2014

Below is TIME Magazine’s list of their candidates for Person of the Year 2014. They will announce their choice on December 10, 2014. Their choice appears to be based on whom they thought was the most newsworthy person of the previous months. Below is a popularity list created by a poll of public respondents. I have created links to Wikipedia where possible, and have added a comment based on 500-year memorability. See “Probaway Person of the Year” for my previous choices. [Bold is an update of TIME’s choices]

1. Narendra Modi – 15th Prime Minister of India – Economic and population growth
2. Vladimir Putin – 2nd and 4th President of Russia – TIME #3
3. Malala Yousafzai – Pakistan women’s rights activist – Nobel Peace Prize
4. John Kerry – United States Secretary of State -
5. Ebola Doctors and Nurses – Volunteers who fought the Ebola epidemic – TIME #1
6. Laverne Cox – American TV actor and LGBT activist -
7. Elon Musk – Creator of SpaceX, PayPal, Tesla Motors, Hyperloop, Solar City -
8. Ferguson Protestors – Protest against the shooting of Michael Brown – TIME #2
9. Boko Haram Girls – 276 Nigerian school girls kidnapped for conversion -
10. Pete Frates and Pat Quinn – Sponsor the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS awareness -
11. Hillary Clinton – Potential President of the United States -
12. Taylor Swift – American singer-songwriter -
13. Tim Cook – CEO of Apple Inc. -
14. Pope Francis – Head of the Catholic church -
15. Barack Obama – 44th President of the United States -
16. Jennifer Lawrence – American actress action heroine -
17. Joko Widodo – President of Indonesia -
18. Xi Jinping – President of China -
19. Joshua Wong – Hong Kong student activist founder of Scholarism -
20. Beyoncé – American singer and actress -
21. Reed Hastings – CEO of Netflix board of Facebook -
22. Bashar al-Assad – President of Syria since 2000 -
23. Tom Frieden – Director of the US Center of Disease Control (CDC) -
24. Dilma Rousseff – First female President of Brazil -
25. Shondra Rhimes – American screenwriter, director and producer -
26. Angela Merkel – Chancellor of Germany for 14 years -
27. Jack Ma – Founded and Chairman of Alibaba. International B2B – TIME #5
28. Rand Paul – American Senator, Presidential hopeful -
29. Jeff Bezos – Founder and CEO of Amazon -
30. Rick Perry - Governor of Texas, Presidential hopeful -
31. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi – President of Egypt -
32. Benjamin Netanyahu – Prime Minister of Israel -
33. John Oliver – Serious TV news commentary pitched as comedy -
34. Travis Kalanick – File-sharing company Red Swoosh, and Uber
35. Kanye West – American rapper, songwriter, fashion designer
36. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – Caliph, of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)
37. Elizabeth Warren – US Senator Mass – consumer protection advocate -
38. Hassan Rouhani – President of Iran, and politically moderate -
39. Christopher Nolan – Film director, screenwriter, procucer -
40. Kim Kardashian – TV personality, socialite, fashion designer, model, actress -
41. Janet Yellen –  Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System -
42. Recep Tayyip Erdogan – President of Turkey -
43. Thomas Piketty – author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century –
44. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – Supreme Leader of Iran -
45. Harvey Levin – Founder of celebrity gossip website TMZ -
46. Mary Barra – the Chief Executive Officer of General Motors.
47. Mitch McConnell - Senate Majority leader
48. Not on the list but chosen TIME # 4 – Massoud Barzani

This is a list of amazingly productive people, but when considered from a 500-year fame perspective, who begins to compare with Neil Armstrong? There were many heads of state, but in 500 years there will have been thousands of those, so a famous head for last year would have had to have done something spectacular. Competence isn’t enough for that level of memorability.

Elon Musk has created many amazing companies and is a contender for Probaway Person of the Year, but on that parameter Jack Ma’s company Alibaba was the shocker, although companies come and go and it is hard to imagine one lasting for 500 years. Xi Jinping took part in creating the most explosive economy in the history of humanity, and may be remembered as the founding father of a Chinese dynasty. Putin’s takeover of Crimea was bold and important, but in the long run isn’t memorable. The Ebola doctors and nurses are to be praised, but lasting fame will pass by any single individual. If fame comes to any from that epidemic it will be the 1st victim, two-year-old Emile Ouamouno.

Perhaps the most lasting event of this year will be the discovery of predicted effects of the first trillionth of a second existence of our Universe. It was predicted by Alan Guth decades ago in his expansion theory of the Big Bang. That seems even more memorable than the discovery of the Higgs boson, but not as important to the scientists. They are very close in time to the same event.

Are US magazines in trouble?

Tags

Does advertising measures value?, Popular Science, WIRED magazine

WIRED magazine is growing in heft, at 124 pages. It has ads for high-end watches, cell phones and cars, and perfume, HBO, one cigarette ad, so it is a safe assumption they are doing well. Popular Science’s October 2014 issue is only 92 pages, counting the covers, but what is disturbing is the conflict between the purported useful content and the advertising. In the past PS had an eye for unusual scientific anomalies that sometimes I had missed, but this issue’s presentations were about marginal technical innovations. The article on 10 young innovators was short on the how, what and why they were succeeding at their innovations, and I would have appreciated links to more thorough information.

The weird things in Popular Science were the ads, as most of those pages were devoted to sybaritic pursuits. Pages 2,3 and 4 were ads for Viagra, 11 making sports safer, 14, 15, 16 clot drugs, 19 car ad, 23 electronic cigarettes, 26 fancy cars, 29 car insurance, 31 ceiling fans, 33 e-cigarettes, 35 e-cigarettes, 37 fancy pick-ups, 42 pinch tobacco, 45 a reasonable car, 46-67 articles, 68, 69 tool coupons, 70 understanding stuff classes, 73 spring shoes, 74 class action settlement opportunity, 81 genuine US gold coins, 82 water cures, 83-89 partial pages of similar stuff, 91 cigarettes, 92 phone ad.

It isn’t out of touch with reality claiming these products in Popular Science are of marginal value for living a better life when many of them have legally required warnings that these things are dangerous to your health. WIRED is filled with healthier stuff, but very expensive stuff, and much more profoundly important articles.

Is the quality of advertising a magazine is willing to use a measure of the quality of the material it is willing to publish?

Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates.

Tags

Book review, Book review Heidegger and a Hippo, Daniel Klein, Thomas Cathcart

I am uncertain if Heidegger And A Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates is philosophy posing as a joke book, or the reverse. I am certain this is a joke book functioning as a philosophy book, but it’s doing a passably good job on both counts. Anyway, I enjoyed having Debbie read this book to me as my bedtime snoozer. It’s good reading material when going into the short death, as the subtitle implies it intends to “Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between.” Thus sleep is a perfect in between.

The great American philosopher Woody Allen seems to get the best lines in this book: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying,” “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment,” and “the soul embraces the noble aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, while the body has all the fun.” He gets 9 citings in the index, whereas the title character Heidegger gets only 4, although H’s are more verbose. Incidentally, the hippo doesn’t get any cites, and that’s a bummer, because an alternate point of view from a heavyweight would add some gravity to the levity.

The book ends with the hippo not getting in a single grunt, but Saint Peter says to him, “Today’s your lucky day, Hippy!”

Escape from Evil by Ernest Becker – book review

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Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

Escape from Evil is a book about the mental mindset of societies and how their mindset puts the people of that society into a condition of subservience to their generally accepted world view. The view that has brought humanity from its pre-agricultural existence up to our modern world is the concept of the hero, which Becker claims dramatizes personal power and exploitation of the members of the group for its aggrandizement over other groups. By exalting a hero the group gains cohesion, develops an identity of self, defines the enemy, and gives the individuals absolute rights over the lives and bodies of the alien groups. Also it gives protection of the group’s people to walk among enemies, because those others will be afraid of the power of retribution of that person’s potent backup group. The blow-back of this style of social formation is that the individual becomes a slave to their group and must endure its constrictions and punishments. On average the members of groups consider it a good bargain, but it is at a price of incursions into their personal liberties.

The individual’s fear of personal injury and death is soothed by being a member of a grandiose social entity, because they become more than their own perception of a puny self, they are an entity of great respect. This identification forms an unending quest for safety of body, security of selfhood and ultimate meaning of the universe while living within an apparently uncaring world. Try as we might to create an emotionally satisfying being out of the vastness of the Universe it remains obdurately consistent to its own obscure principles of behavior. Our supplications to it are not even met with a cold stare of conscious contempt; they are met with complex rules of actions and reactions that soon become so intertwined as to appear malicious and unpredictable, in other words our supplications are met with reality.

Men behave as human beings, but that includes the possibility, in the long run the inevitability, that some of their actions will be hideously inhumane. And yet, we humans seek solace in the workings of the universe and propitiate postulated gods in an effort to ease our fears, but it is, and should be, fears of other humans where our concern for malice should be placed. And thus it is we generate our heroes whom we hope and expect to protect us and guide us to a happier new world, even one of an uncaring world populated with enemies.

Becker’s book “Escape from Evil” was an effort to transcend his “Denial of Death.”