2009-07-31 2130: The next book on my queue is 1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Kaplan. This book was apparently written to appear now, 50 years later, to tell the story of an interesting year when the foundation of the modern world was being laid. I thought this might be an interesting book, partly because I expected the stories he will tell will be interesing, and partly because of my personal curiosity about the year I was born. Some of the stories he tells I've read elsewhere (in particular, in the Halberstam book on the 1950s), such as the invention and social impact of birth control. Some of the stories I do not know much about, such as the story of the jazz albums Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, and David Brubeck's Time Out; or Hermann Kahn's lectures on the winnability of thermonuclear war. But I would like to know more about an era which had a strong regard for science and an optimism about the future (cold war anxieties aside).
This brings to mind an interesting conversation I had with my Ph.D. advisor, Kenneth Ross, when I was finishing my dissertation at Oregon. In my weekly meeting with him, I quoted the Tom Lehrer line, "sliding down the razor blade of life." He lit up, and said that he didn't think people my age would know Tom Lehrer (who was a humorist and song writer popular in the 1950s and 1960s). I had to admit it was my parents' Tom Lehrer albums I had heard. We had an interesting conversation about sick 1950s humor (e.g., 'dead baby' jokes); but this prompted Ken to express nostalgia for an era when the public held science in high regard, as opposed to the mid 1980s, when New Age superstition and ignorance held sway.
The next day, by the way, Ken surprised me: He had four Charles Addams cartoon books for me to read. Addams was a New Yorker cartoonist whose morbid art inspired the Addams Family television show. I was not familiar with him or his cartoons (except for the T.V. show, which I watched as a kid). But in a stressful time in my life, Addam's humor was very therapeutic. For example: A woman chasing the shadow of an enormous bird, which appears to have a person in its bill. She is shouting upwards, "George, drop the car keys!" Another example: A stock broker is telling his client, a middle-aged woman, that he does not want to be alarmist, but there are certain financial signals that cannot be ignored. Through the window, one can see businessmen standing on the ledges of the building across the street. Years, later, I was overjoyed to find a new anthology of his cartoons in a bookstore. Addams remains my favorite cartoonist.
2009-07-31 2100 (rewritten in part on 2009-08-01): I read a little book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. As someone in higher education, I thought this might be interesting. It was interesting, but it was short (132 pages, not counting extensive endnotes), and often sketchy if not incomplete. They describe a public uninterested in science, unengaged with science, and often profoundly ignorant and often hostile to science. (E.g., 40% of the public subscribes to young-Earth creationism.) Some of this is due to active and well-funded PR campaigns by industry (opposed to the science of global warming) and religions (opposed to the theory of evolution), but they do not consider these in any detail. (Mooney is the author the book The Republican War on Science, and they refer the reader to that and other sources for more detail on this.)
Instead, they give a history of the relationship of science and the media, from the post-war atomic and space-race eras when science was held in high regard, through the spectacular success of Carl Sagan and others to popularize science in the 1980s, to the present era where newspapers and other news sources are throttling back their science coverage.
Their discussion becomes more interesting when they consider the responsibility of the scientific community for the present breakdown in public relations of science. They identify two problems in the scientific community: One is a very public hostility towards religion by some outspoken scientists. The other is the lack of engagement with public education and popularization of science by scientists who are used to only communicating in highly technical language with fellow researchers in their own narrow specialties. They highlight the unfortunate treatment of Carl Sagan by the National Academy of Sciences, which apparently resented his public pop-star profile. They also highlight the politically-disastrous anti-religion activism by certain scientists, such as P. Z. Myers (author of the popular blog Pharyngula), who desecrated a Catholic communion wafer; and Richard Dawkins, with his "tin-eared" attempt to popularize the word 'brights' to describe his fellow atheists. The authors assert that this opposition to religion is unnecessary and unfair; they say that religion and science can co-exist, as religious leaders as well as leading scientists have affirmed. (At this point, the authors refer to certain influential 19th century writers, who promoted the idea of a war between religion and science, and say Dawkins et al are furthering that agenda. But the authors don't mention an interesting detail: These writers bent the truth to promote their anti-religious agenda. In particular, the erroneous notion that the Church believed the world is flat at the time of Columbus appears to have originated with these writers.)
In the latter sections of the book, the authors present their idea for a solution to the crisis. After mentioning the 2005 National Academy of Sciences report Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which claimed a critical need for more scientists and engineers to maintain national competitiveness, the authors then instead document how competitive and dismal a scientific career can be, for scientists who spend years in low-paying post-docs with receding prospects for a tenure-track position. They then propose a solution: scientific education that includes training in communication, writing and other skills that would help reach the public, and prepare the scientist for alternative careers. Here is a place where I found the book to be disappointing. These broader skills should already be provided by a scientist's undergraduate education—this is the point of a B.A. degree (or a B.S. degree with decent "general education" distribution requirements outside of the major). However, they ask the scientific community to take the lead, through new media such as blogs, to popularize and engage the public in science. This is a fine idea, but I think part of the problem is that universities should strengthen science education at the general education level. Not by increasing the number of credit hours required for science necessarily, but making sure that the science courses students take are highly relevant. Too many university graduates, particularly in subjects such as business, are too credulous when it comes to the widespread disinformation from industry PR firms on topics such as global warming.
2009-07-26 2300: Yesterday, I saw the documentary Food, Inc. This is a feature-length look at the modern agricultural/food industry, co-produced by Erich Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and featuring interviews with Michael Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food). It covers a lot of perhaps familiar ground—factory farming, treatment of animals, the concentration of the food industry into the hands of a small number of corporations, the transformation of farming into what amounts to a chemical industry based on corn and soy beans, and food-borne pathogens such as E. Coli O157:H57 described as the result of factory farming practices. This makes its treatment of some subjects seem incomplete or sketchy. For example, they feature William Salatin of Polyface Farm (familiar to readers of Omnivore's Dilemma), and show the mobile chicken sheds on his farm. But they do not explain the point of these (the chickens are moved from cow pasture to cow pasture, where they eat bugs and parasites, which benefits the cows as well as the chickens). However, one story they do detail that is very disturbing is the pressure on independent farmers caused by the genetically-modified Monsanto soybean seeds: According to the documentary, Monsanto employs 75 full-time investigators who seek farmers who illegally plant seeds from the previous year's crop instead of buying new seeds from Monsanto. The problem is that farmers who do not use Monsanto seeds often have plants with Monsanto genes in them, from neighboring farms that use the Monsanto seeds—and Monsanto will sue these farmers. If the documentary is correct, this is nothing less than extortion. One telling detail: The Supreme Court justice who wrote the majority opinion legalizing the patenting of living organisms (such as genetically-modified soybeans) was Clarence Thomas—who was at one time an attorney for Monsanto.
The documentary concludes with advice to its viewers: Buy organic food. (While much of the documentary seems calculated to ruin one's appetite for meat, it isn't an animal rights or vegetarian manifesto; Schlosser, Pollan and Salatin are not vegetarians.)
2009-07-24 1815: Yesterday's NY Times had sad news: Heinz Edelman, the art designer for the Beatle's movie Yellow Submarine, passed away at 75. When I was young, this was my favorite movie, along with 2001: A Space Odyssey. I still have a fond place in my heart for the movie, but of course I've always been an ardent Beatles fan.
2009-07-19 2245: I managed to solve the Sunday NY Times crossword puzzle—every letter correct. (Of course, I use Google as needed.) The puzzle was titled "YOU ARE THERE," and I eventually picked up on what was going on: Certain clues were cliches with the letters "UR" inserted, to form brain-damaged puns. One was a "Pumpkin-grower's cry of surprise?" (OHMYGOURD). Another was "Greetings from Smokey the Bear?" (URSINEWAVE). But my favorite was "Triumphant spicy meal for the Three Little Pigs?" (CURRIEDWOLF).
2009-07-19 2000: I've been reading an interesting book, Robert Wright's The Evolution of God. Wright considers several questions as he sketches a history of Western religion: Where did monotheism come from? Is monotheism inherently more violent and less tolerant than the polytheistic religions it replaced? More generally, he examines political, cultural and economic factors that led to the key developments in Judaism and Christianity: an abstract ethical monotheism and later, the idea of universal brotherhood. (He then asks similar questions of Islam and its development, to see if the doctrine of Jihad is inherent in that religion.) In each case, he outlines current scholarly conclusions that traditional explanations of these developments are not tenable—in the case of Judaism, the story told in the Hebrew Bible of an early origin of monotheism in the second millennium BCE is the result of mid-first millennium writers rewriting earlier, polytheistic mythology or histories. In the case of Christianity, he argues that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who expected the vindication of Israel by God rather than universal brotherhood; teachings of tolerance came later to in effect serve the needs of a minority religion as it sought acceptance in the Roman Empire. (He says that the parable of the Good Samaritan was a later addition to the Gospel of Luke.) While Wright offers often-convincing mundane explanations as to the origins of these religions, and he indicates that he is agnostic, he does point to the possibility that the evident "arrow" of history—humankind's clear progress in overcoming violence and intolerance— might point to a God behind human history.
Wright gives some interesting and often telling details. One such detail is his discussion of Psalm 74, where God is praised for defeating Leviathan and for subduing the sea. It happens that there is an ancient hymn to the god Baal in which he is praised for destroying a dragon named Lotan, and subduing the god Sea. The name Lotan is etymologically related to the Biblical name Leviathan; and the writers of the psalm evidently reworked the older hymn, by in effect rendering the word sea as a noun instead of a proper noun. By doing so, they helped to move God from being an anthropomorphic character in mythology and closer to our abstract notion of a transcendent God.
As a modern, liberal Christian, I still find it jarring to see evidence of the mundane origins of the scriptures and of Christianity itself. But I no longer worry about the origins of the religion; even if its origins are entirely contingent or even outright fiction, we now have a religion that teaches the sacredness of charity, tolerance and peace-making; a religion that teaches God's love. These values are critical as our global civilization works to achieve universal amity. And as I read Wright, I couldn't help but to think that a religion that understands its scriptures as literature, an abstract religion of wholesome values of love, is a religion that is far more appropriate than the mythologies of the past to a civilization in possession of quantum mechanics and molecular biology.
2009-07-19 1930: I enjoyed seeing the latest Harry Potter movie this afternoon, Half-Blood Prince. It's terrific, equal to the best of the franchise, but with a darker tone as befits the novel. The special effects are of course outstanding, with a brief but amazing Quidditch match, and extensive use of CG to create suitably magical surroundings in scenes not ostensibly involving (active) special effects. But the acting is very good too; one highlight for me being an adorably love-besotted Ron Weasley. Young Draco is also convincing, and Harry's increasing confidence at spy craft makes it easy to believe he will eventually succeed in his career goal as an Auror. Many little details are spot-on—Ron's father's basement workshop filled with odd muggle gadgets (such as an old phonograph) that he's disassembled; the Half-Blood Prince's personally annotated copy of the textbook on Advanced Potions. The cover of that book is wonderful: like something from the early 1950s, with a charming retro-future design. (I would love to have a look at one of his math books!)