REMEMBERING KENNETH ANDERSON (1928-2015)

REMEMBERING KENNETH ANDERSON (1928-2015)

I learned with sorrow that my friend, Kenneth Anderson, died on June 9, 2015.  He was born December 3, 1928 and lived somewhat more than 87 years. I first met Ken Anderson at Stony Brook University when I was teaching my second year there.  He asked if he could audit my course.  I learned from him that he was one of the first African Americans to work as a nurse anesthesiologist in Suffolk County and to serve on the University’s outreach programs to recruit black faculty and staff. Ken had served in the US Army in Germany after the end of WWII and sang for the troops and on good will missions because of his beautiful baritone voice.  I also learned from him that it was a struggle for him and other minorities to find housing in Suffolk County.  To facilitate change, Ken joined civic organizations like the Boy Scouts and met many of the leading officials in the County.  He was friendly and persistent, two qualities that made him successful in bringing about change.  He also was a frequent target to vandalism or threats of violence during those turbulent years of the late 1960s to the 1980s.  A cross was burned on his lawn in Port Jefferson.  Over the years I attended many concerts given by Ken to the Unitarian-Universalist churches in Nassau and Suffolk County where he was frequently invited.  He had begun a serious study of Negro spirituals and worked out Paul Robeson’s schedule of performances and the playbills with the songs he sang in his distinguished careers.  He would sometimes take on the persona of Robeson to give an account of his life and he used to borrow my Phi Beta Kappa key because Robeson proudly wore it.  When I was on the Stony Brook Phi Beta Kappa chapter’s board, I proposed Ken for the Phi Beta Kappa award because of his scholarship on Robeson’s musical career and his efforts to enlighten the public about Robeson’s many talents as an all-star collegiate athlete, a musician, an actor, and an activist for human rights.  I was pleased when he was unanimously elected to the Stony Brook chapter.

  Many times Ken would invite me to meet civic leaders he knew so I could discuss issues of higher education with them.  When Ken retired and moved upstate, he would stay at our home on Mud Road in Setauket while visiting friends or giving performances.  It was to the delight of my mother-in-law who was living with us, that Ken would always sing her a song at supper.  Once Ken took me to the veteran’s cemetery in Suffolk County where his wife was buried and it was very moving as I saw him sending his thoughts and prayers for her. When Nedra and I moved to Bloomington, Indiana in 2009, I corresponded with Ken as he moved around upstate New York and later in Delaware.  He was always eager to learn about black history and I shared items I found for him when he asked me about contemporaries of Robeson or leaders of the abolitionist and civil rights movements of the nineteenth century.  We also spoke on the phone about once a month to get updates on our lives.  Ken became friends with Pete Seeger and the two of them sometimes sang together.  For the last 20 years of Ken’s life he was in pain from arthritic degeneration of his bones and from congestive heart failure. Ken inspired me.  He tried to bring out the best in people he met. It was that love for humanity that poured out in his songs and it was a privilege to know him.    

THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE PRODUCES WINNERS AND LOSERS

THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE PRODUCES WINNERS AND LOSERS

I met my friend Foley at the Starbucks near Bloomington High School South.  It was a warm day so I ordered a vanilla bean frappachino.  Foley stayed with a mocha latte.

“Did you watch the debate last night?”  I asked.

“All of it.  Both the failed four and the main event,” replied Foley

“Were there any clear winners, Foley?”

“Trump by far.”

“Why so”, I asked.  “He seemed poorly informed on issues.”

“The others ganged up on him so he got to reply more than any of the others. Jindal sounded like a jilted lover.  Fiorina was like a harpie.  Bush was too busy defending his brother.  Walker was too busy busting unions and bragging about it.  Only Trump talked about making America great again.”

“I thought he was thin on specifics for foreign policy.”

“That’s because policy wonks are useless for foreign affairs, Elof”

“So who should make those policies?”

“Deal makers.  Trump has a play book, Art of the Deal. That and the Bible are the only books you need to make America Great Again.”

“Why the Bible?”

  “Simple”, Elof, “to let heathens know that the Book is on our side.”  

“I thought Fiorina was more informed than Trump, didn’t you, Foley?

“I was too busy trying to listen to her between her whistles to know what she was saying”.

“What about Huckabee?”

“Saying the Bible is important, like Trump does, is like saluting the flag, it’s an OK thing.  But quoting from the Bible makes you a minister.  You don’t do that as President, you do that as a pastor in church. “

“What about Cruz?”

“He’s like that Hungarian in My Fair Lady.  He oils himself across the floor.”

PATRIOTISM IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

PATRIOTISM IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

I was walking in the Mall and greeted my friend Foley and we decided to have lunch at Applebee’s. They had about a half dozen TV sets on.  Foley and I watched a military honor guard lead a singer to sing the National Anthem.

“Why do sports events start with the national anthem?” I asked

“It’s patriotic,” said Foley.

“Should that apply to all large gatherings?”

“You better believe it” Foley asserted.

“How about a movie theater before each film is shown?”

“That doesn’t count.”

“How about a beach on a hot day?”

“Nope, wrong occasion.”

“A funeral?”

“No, again”.

“So being patriotic is something to celebrate?”

“You got it.”

“Can you criticize the government and still be patriotic?”

“Not in my book,” said Foley.  

“So if Republicans criticize President Obama, they’re unpatriotic?”

“No, because they’re telling the truth.  It’s Obama who is unpatriotic”.

“Why is that?”

“He doesn’t stand up to our enemies.  He is destroying free enterprise.  He is inviting 10  million illegals to a path to citizenship.”

“ Would it be patriotic if I criticized Republicans for buying elections, depriving citizens of their right to vote, allowing the rich to escape paying taxes, and rushing into wars based on deceptive claims? “

“No, Elof, that’s just sour grapes liberals spew”. 

“So where does that leave the patriotic motto ‘My country right or wrong’?”

“That applies to me, not you.  Get your priorities straight, Elof.”

THE SCARY PARALLELS BETWEEN DONALD TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN AND DICTATORIAL PERSONALITIES

When I taught at UCLA I got to know a psychiatrist, Maurice N. Walsh, MD (1905-1991) who was in the Neuropsychiatric   Institute.  He developed an interest in psychiatry and war when he was a medical resident at the Mayo Clinic and was asked to see a patient.  It was Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator who had syphilis but who also was psychotic.  Soon WWII broke out and Walsh found himself in the Pacific helping pilots to carry out missions to bomb Japan with a high probability of crashing at sea before they could return to their base.  At the war’s end he was asked to examine Rudolph Hess for the Nuremberg trials.  He found Hess to be psychotic and his report was stamped secret and not allowed to be used in the trials.  Walsh wondered why it was that highly narcissistic persons who might be classified as megalomaniacs had such an appeal to the public and why they rose to power as dictators.  He became an advocate for the scientific (rather than political or economic) study of war.  He edited a book (1971) War and the Human Race gathering dozens of articles on medical, psychiatric, anthropological, biological, and other approaches to the study of war.   

              Every time I listen to one of Donald Trump’s interviews or speeches, I think of Maurice Walsh.  He said of Trujillo or Hess, why is it that if we heard this person on a soapbox we walk away and consider this person a nutcase but if he ran for office we would treat him as a serious candidate?  But Walsh also asked another question: Why are so many people charmed or attracted by these narcissistic personalities?  He argued that they appeal to people who are tired of nuance, complexity, inconsistency, compromise, and failure in the political world in which they live.  The narcissistic leader is decisive, admits no wrong, is good at fault-finding in others, and is willing to take the risks to set things right that is part of our own wish fulfillment. 

              I wish some of our political commentators on TV news shows would call attention to the striking similarity of Trump’s rhetoric and those of past bullying dictators like Hitler and Mussolini and Trujillo.  Those with a dictatorial personality like to preach macho values of war or the threat of war instead of diplomacy.  They disregard legalities in favor of executive authority as their first choice for governing. They have overblown confidence in their intelligence or knowledge of how the world works.  The dictatorial personality likes to give orders, likes to be surrounded by “yes men,” looks at criticism as a form of treason or lack of patriotism, and likes to have others fight their wars which are rarely responses to massive attacks or declarations of war.  

              I regret the disappearance of psychological and psychiatric research on war, aggression, and the narcissistic personality.  In mid 20^th century there were books like Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and Carlo Levi’s Fear of Freedom.  In the last half of the 20^th century, I believe, the wrong approach was used, stressing evolutionary models of innate aggression or human nature making war seem inevitable because it is fixed in our genes.  I doubt that.  War is a disease of society. Diseases can be prevented but we need to do research that is not stuck in the traditional economic, political, and human nature arguments for its causes.  Those have not worked in the past and a fresh look is much needed.     

TRUMP APPEALS TO A FAN WHO LIKES A STRAIGHT SHOOTER (TAKE COVER)

I hadn’t seen my alter ego, Foley, in several weeks and was glad to see him at the Post Office. ”Who do you like among the Republican candidates?” I asked.   

“Trump, by far.”

“What’s attractive about him?

“He tells it like it is.  I like his building a wall across the southern border of the US and Mexico.”

‘Would it be like the Berlin Wall or like the Great Wall of China?”

“It would be better than both.  It would be impregnable.”

“You mean like the Maginot line?”

“No, no. It will be about 30 feet tall and five feet thick with detectors for anyone trying to dig a tunnel under it. And every fifty feet there will be huge letters on it saying TRUMP.”  That will scare them off."

“Wouldn’t that money be put to better use for our infrastructure repairs and expansion?” 

“No way. Trump is a businessman and he knows how to make deals. Besides he’ll make America admired again.”

“Isn’t that what the Republican Presidents, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover said when they ran a campaign of ‘Back to Normalcy’ and ‘The business of America is business?’ And didn’t their policies of unregulated laissez faire lead to the excesses that caused the Wall Street crash of 1929?”

 “Not at all,” said Foley.  “These are just natural adjustments to the market, like weather cycles. It’s like Adam Smith’s invisible hand.  Usually it guides us to everyone’s benefit but sometimes it gives us the fickle finger. Humans can’t prevent these cycles from occurring but we know to respond to them.”

“And how do we do that?” I asked.

“Let the market remain unregulated and when a bust occurs have the government bail out the biggest banks and corporations.”

“Why bail out them and not the smaller investors and corporations?”

“Because billionaires are too big to allow to fail.  Ask any billionaire.”

READING HISTORICAL FICTION – NOAH GORDON’S THE PHYSICIAN

  

         I read The Physician by Noah Gordon.  It is a huge book, 750 pages in paperback, but well worth reading.  It follows the life of Rob Cole, an eleventh century orphan in London who becomes a barber surgeon and travels with his mentor throughout England selling potions and entertaining crowds by juggling. He has the gift and calling of a healer and hopes to learn real medicine.  At that time King Canute ruled England and life for most of the British Isles was harsh with high mortalities for all age groups.  Cole learns from a Jewish patient that the only decent medical school is in Persia. They don’t take Christians but they do take Jews, so he pretends to be a Jew and begins the long trek to Persia where he manages to get accepted so he can study with Avicenna.  Gordon studied medieval history, history of medicine, and the cultural and political histories of Persia and Great Britain to provide the background and feeling of authenticity for his novel.  It is a wonderful novel because it has so many subplots and events, like reading a Russian novel by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

   

        Most of my knowledge of medieval history came from courses as an undergraduate with Wallace K. Ferguson at NYU who focused on the renaissance or, as he preferred to call it, the transition from medieval to modern society.  I’ve read several books on medical history so I could check the novel against what I knew.  I know some scholars who never read historical fiction because they feel they would be deluded into believing that the history of that time is accurate when it is more likely that an author will project the present dressed up in the past and that past would be a mixture of guesswork and reality.  There is that risk, of course. But I would not shun reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace just because the author did not fight in the Napoleonic Wars. The satisfaction I get from historical fiction outweighs the errors that might creep into my understanding of past societies. A good novelist spends time in the library or doing web searches for authentic detail and broad overviews of the places and times that are described in the novel. The reader benefits by getting a general overview of a piece of history of biographical knowledge, or cultural awareness that would otherwise be absent. In some cases a good historical novel stimulates interest in reading more about that period.  I know I shall check out the life of Avicenna, the great Persian physician and scholar whose works gradually found their way into later medieval learning and the first medical schools in Europe. 

THREE NATION STUDY SHOWS LEUKEMIAS ARE INDUCED BY EXTREMELY LOW DOSES OF RADIATION EXPOSURE

                An important study was reported in the July 2, 2015 issue of Nature, a publication read by scientists.  It was written by Alison Abbott.  She discussed a report carried out in the US, France, and the UK involving 300,000 nuclear industry employees over a 60 year period whose radiometer badges were used to study the radiation received and this was then matched against their health records.  It showed that as claimed by H. J. Muller for low doses of ionizing radiation (mostly x-rays) to produce mutations and by Ed Lewis for Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors of atomic bombs, the linearity of dose to mutation or dose to incidence of leukemia is maintained with no threshold at lower doses.  Those in the nuclear industry, governments engaged in making nuclear weapons, and some health professionals using radiation for diagnosis and treatment of a variety of diseases have sometimes claimed that below a certain low dose there are no mutations induced or no cancers induced by exposure to low doses regardless of many times a person is exposed.  For most of the nuclear industry workers they have an annual exposure of about 1.1 mSV (or in the older terminology O.11 roentgen) above the natural background rate asll humans experience which is 2 to 3 mSv (or 0.2 to 0.3 roentgens).  In this study, the total accumulated dose of each worker was calculated and the medical history for cancers was studied.  The report also supports what Muller and his colleagues found in the 1930s and 1940s – that whether the total dose was received acutely or spread out daily or interrupted by intervals of working with radiation and years of not being exposed, it was the total dose that counted.  The risks, of course are low, compared to high dose exposures of 1000 mSv (100 roentgens) that accidents and nuclear bombs inflicted on relatively few humans over the past 75 years. 

              The study appeared in Lancet Haematology http://doi.org/5s4;2015    The lead author is K. Leuraud.  I have never appreciated the logic of deniers of low dose effects of radiation. The linearity holds for experiments with fruit flies (and many other organisms from bacteria to mice) from doses of 50 to 12,000 roentgens (500 mSv to 120 Sv).  Deniers may fear a public rejection of using radiation for diagnosis and cancer treatment.  During the Cold War, it was the military that tried to convince the public that small doses of radiation (such as worldwide fall out) were harmless or that contaminated soils from nuclear testing grounds were safe to live in if the doses were low.  Physicians quickly recognized the need for safety of both patients and practitioners and they found more effective ways to take x-ray pictures at even lower doses than in the 20^th century. I have welcomed x-rays at such low doses for my own family and myself.  It is a question of weighing risks.  I’d rather have x-rays to rule out an ulcer or cancer in my intestinal tract than keep my fingers crossed that maybe I’ll be lucky and there is no serious problem that gives me symptoms.  At the same time, I celebrate those in the health professions who seek to use the least amount of radiation needed for diagnosis. When tens of millions of people are exposed at low dose there will be a few losers with induced mutations or leukemias.  But if no one had diagnostic x-rays there would be hundreds of thousands of people who would die prematurely because their diseases would not be diagnosed until they are terminally ill.   

     

              

WHY DO THOSE WHO BARELY GET BY BELIEVE RIGHT WING LIES?

Here are seven lies told by right wing candidates which are frequently accepted as truths by those whose lives are barely beyond poverty.

1.       There are makers and takers. In this version the makers are hard working people who live by the work ethic and create jobs. The takers are those who get subsidies like welfare, food stamps, aid to dependent children, those on disability benefits, and those getting “free” health care or social security.  All such benefits have been labeled by the far right as demeaning to those who work for every penny they earn. Mitt Romney used this in his campaign.

2.       The poor have themselves to blame.  According to this view the middle class and wealthy have worked hard and sacrificed to reach their status.  The poor are lazy, waste their money on alcohol and other vices, don’t do well in school because they don’t care, and they only live for the moment and don’t save and don’t plan the way successful people do.  This was commonly used by the eugenics movement of the 1910-1940 era citing families like the Jukes or the Tribe of Ishmael as examples that should be sterilized to prevent spreading “the unfit.”

3.       Recipients of welfare or other benefits from the government are cheats. President Reagan used the “welfare queen” as one of his campaign themes and I still hear people use it. They claim that cheats apply to every program available and then drive around in Cadillacs. 

4.       The myth of the self made man.  There is a romantic view of the rugged individualist.  He is the hero of Horatio Alger stories.  He is a Teddy Roosevelt type of outdoors, gun-loving, God-fearing man who takes no hand outs and meets every set back through hard work.  Roosevelt, of course, was not a “rags to riches” person. Unfortunately many self proclaimed self-made men are like the character Bounderby in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times,  who brag of their struggles but are phonies using fake stories to keep workers from protesting about low wages and poor work conditions.

5.       Libertarianism in the Ayn Rand version condemns all other forms of capitalism as corruptions. Ayn Rand advocated a laissez faire capitalism very different from that of Adam Smith who was a moral philosopher and who never believed in exploiting workers.  Rand’s libertarianism was a “winner takes all” system with winners (hard workers with ideas) and losers (shiftless masses and conformists with no incentive to better themselves). For Ayn Rand types, any deviation from her Libertarianism is socialism or communism.  That smear has been used against labor unions and any federal program attempting to help those who are victims of hard times or just being unlucky because they were born in slums or economically deprived neighborhoods.

6.       Trickle down economics is the only way to spread wealth.  This argument is trotted out by billionaires and millionaires claiming any money used to subsidize the poor or middle class leaves little money to trickle down to the poor in the form of new jobs.  Conveniently omitted are the hiding of their wealth in foreign banks which of course prevents any trickling down from that stash of wealth. Also omitted are the never refused subsidies to the rich in the form of depletion allowances, start up exemptions from taxation, and tax cuts largely benefitting the wealthy and rarely the poor.

7.       Giving employees raises is a job killer. Except of course to the top management where it is applauded. Have you heard any billionaires and millionaires applauding Henry Ford for giving a hefty salary to his factory workers so they could afford to buy his cars?  Ford adopted that outlook because rather than making a few cars for fellow rich cronies, he made millions of cars so virtually everyone could buy a family car. I’d call that a “trickle up” economic philosophy and it worked far better than his contemporary competitors who felt they would go out of business if Ford paid his workers so generously.

These seven lies will be repeated at every election campaign.  Why do those who most could benefit from a government that served their interests believe that a government that allows Ayn Rand type economics is what they should support?  I am talking about working class people who believe unions (not their bosses) are the takers.  Why do so many blue collar workers think criticism of the people who are cheating them or exploiting them is communist propaganda?  Some may feel that they have no hope of ever getting out of their lower class status and resent those who do, such as unionized workers. Some may be told that it is not this life that is important but an afterlife in Heaven that counts so they consider this their cross to bear.  Rarely do you hear churches that support the status quo question the double standard of the wealthy.  Let us hope Pope Francis has more luck in raising concern for the injustices done to those struggling to get by. 

The next time you hear one of these seven lies, send that person a copy of this.

CREATION SCIENCE IS AN OXYMORON (AT LEAST TO SCIENTISTS)

I was nursing a croissant and a cup of coffee at the Barnes and Noble Starbucks in Bloomington, Indiana, when my alter ego, Foley showed up.  “What are you reading, Elof?” he asked.

“A new biography of August Weismann,” I replied.

“What did he do?”

“He was a major contributor to biology in the nineteenth century. He promoted Darwin’s theory of evolution in Germany.” 

“You still believe in that, Elof?  Don’t you know that Creation Science demolished the theory of evolution?”

“And how, Foley, did it do that?”

“It found an eye witness account of the Creation.”

“Really?  Who was that?”

“God.  He dictated the Pentateuch or Torah in the Old Testament to Moses”.

“Foley, the oldest known written Bible was written about 800 BCE. If Creation Science claims the universe is only 8 to 10 thousand years old, how did Moses get all of those books of the Bible transmitted for the next eight thousand years?”

“No problem, Elof.  They used griots.”

“Griots?”

“Yeah, you know those guys in Africa who passed on centuries of genealogy so Alex Haley in Roots could write about his ancestors who came over as slaves.  There were Hebrew griots, too.  The Greeks did the same thing for the Iliad and the Odyssey.”

“Foley, I could say the same is true  for the history of the Gilgamesh epic. Do you accept that fight between Gilgamesh and Enkidu actually happened?”

“No, because God is real and Enkidu and Gilgamesh are myths.”

“What makes you claim that?”

“God.  He won and nobody worships Gilgamesh or those Greek and Roman Gods. Winner takes all says I. And that means the Book of Genesis is an eyewitness account of Creation.  Evolution loses”.

“Doesn’t it bother you that Genesis says plant life (including seed-bearing vegetation and fruit trees) is created on day three and that the sun, moon, and stars are created on day four?  Do you really believe that the earth is older than the sun and the stars?”   

“Your problem, Elof, is that you’re stuck with a theory of evolution by natural selection, and a theory of cosmology that has stars forming from nebulous gasses.  You have theories.  I have the facts.”

“How can you call that biblical sequence factual, Foley?  Angiosperms on day three before all the animals existed?  The fossil record shows that angiosperms were among the last of the plant groups to evolve long after the earth was crawling with animals. The sun and stars after the earth is formed?  Among 100 billion stars in our galaxies each with one or more planets, our earth was the first object to be created  in what became the Milky Way?  And no mention that the Milky Way is just one of 100 billion galaxies in the universe!   And you call that Creation Science?”

“Sorry Elof.  You lose.  In a court of law, I would have an eyewitness, God.  And He is the one unimpeachable witness.  You swear on His book, don’t you, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!

 

  

THE LINE UP BEGINS FOR PRESIDENTIAL MUG SHOTS

I was surprised to see my friend Foley at this week’s Freethinkers meeting that I attended at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Bloomington.  “What’s on your mind?” I asked.

“The 2016 elections worry me, Elof”

“Do you expect the Republicans to lose?”

“No, at least I hope not.  But my favorite candidate might not get the nomination.”

“Who is your favorite candidate?”

“Governor Christie.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said.  “Christie is a union-busting bully.”

“That’s good,” Foley smiled.

“He’s an obnoxious loud mouth.”

“The better to square off with European wimp leaders and Dictators who hate America,“ Foley  pointed out.

“He’s corrupt and under several investigations for criminal behavior as a governor, dispensing financial favors and meting out illegal punishments to critics,” I counter-pointed out.

“What’s he supposed to do?  Kiss his enemies and blow off his friends?  Politics is not for sissies.”

“His fiscal policies have depleted New Jersey of income and caused damage to its credit rating.”

“Elof, those who sponge off the government seeking handouts don’t like being told to get off their rear ends and find a job.”

“What about the Democrats, Foley, which candidate do you fear most?” 

“I don’t fear any of them.  Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren are out because guys don’t want to salute a skirt.  Joe Biden is out because a cloud of doom is always hanging over his head. Bernie Sanders?  Are you kidding? A socialist has less chance of being elected than a fascist in this country.”

“If Christie is indicted before the Republican convention, who is your next choice?  Donald Trump?”

“Nah, he comes across as a snake oil salesman.”

“Bobby Jindal”?

“No, he acts like a frightened deer staring at headlights”.

“Rick Santorum”

“No, he takes his orders from the Vatican”.

“Jeb Bush?”

“Too many Bushes, ask his Mom”.

“Mitt Romney?”

“Never repeat a loser”.

“Scott Walker?”

“No way.  He takes his orders from the ghost of Ayn Rand.”

“Rand Paul?”

“Ditto, he’s cursed with her name.”

“Ted Cruz?”

“Who’s going to vote for a guy who looks like Dracula?”

“So, Foley, what will you do after 2016 if Christie isn’t President?”

“I guess I’ll be saluting a skirt.”

UNDERSTANDING LIFE FROM MOLECULES TO ECOSYSTEMS

              Before the twentieth century, if you asked a biologist what life was, you might have gotten several answers.  Some biologists believed that is something only God could answer because he created life and no science would be able to duplicate this.  Life, for those scientists, involved vitalism in which a non-material essence, soul, or spirit-like supernatural component was introduced to make living matter.  Most biologists in the 1890s would have rejected this.  They would argue that the organisms we see on earth, plant and animal, are composed of cells and that cells contain a nucleus with chromosomes and a surrounding cytoplasm that contained organelles.  They would argue that studying the cell’s organelles would reveal a lot about how life worked. They would also argue that events in the nucleus suggest a mechanism for cell division and for the formation of reproductive cells—sperm and eggs.

               In the first half of the twentieth century biologists studying heredity identified genes as units of   inheritance found in chromosomes in the nuclei of cells and mapped them.  They knew some of the properties of genes and the mutation process.  What they did not know was the way genes functioned at a biochemical or molecular level nor did they know the chemical composition of genes and chromosomes.  That changed in the last half of the twentieth century.  Genes were shown to be composed of nucleic acids, especially DNA in chromosomal genes.  They worked out the structure of DNA and worked out the way nucleotide sequences in DNA specified corresponding sequences of nucleotides in RNA and in the proteins that the genes made.  The making of proteins took place in organelles of the cytoplasm.  Science became very specialized for biochemists and molecular biologists so most of the public has little understanding of how genes work. 

              But understanding molecular genetics was not enough.  Additional findings showed how genes were turned on or off.  They showed how RNA could enhance or diminish the activity of genes.  They showed there was a category of genes that led to body plan symmetry or to the shape and location of organs.  In addition to DNA activity governed by these genes and by mutations, there were RNA molecules that enhanced or diminished the activity of genes.  New fields of epigenetics and genomics opened as the century came to an end. For epigenetics genes could be silenced or activated by coating genes with methyl groups.  This was often reversible.  As the twenty first century began, epigenetics was supplemented with a variety of small RNA molecules acting as regulators of gene activity especially for timing when genes go on or off in the cell and how much product a given gene puts out. The genomics started in the late twentieth century has created evolutionary histories of the complete sequence of all genes in a species and comparative genomics allows biologists to study evolution at a molecular level. 

              What is not known is the composition, organization, and function of the cytoplasm and nuclear fluid that are not associated with membranous organelles in the cells. In the nineteenth century this would be called protoplasm.  How it works and how it differs from species to species is not yet worked out.  In all likelihood it will be worked out first in bacteria which have very few cellular organelles. The history of biology has been a retreat for vitalists who moved from the whole organism, to the organs, to the cells, and to the organelles as the bastions of vitalistic life.  They are now embedded in the non-organelle protoplasm hoping science will not work out the complex and dynamic system that surrounds the organelles and which is essential for the functioning of these cellular components.  If you are a holist but not a vitalist, you will accept a material basis for protoplasm but you will argue the complexity of life is beyond human capacity for analysis.  If you are a reductionist you will believe it is a matter of time, very likely in this century, when this last bastion of ignorance will fall.

              

PERSONHOOD IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

              My alter ego, Foley, showed up at a park bench in front of the Great Tabernacle in Ocean Grove, New Jersey.  “Hi, Foley,” I greeted him.  “What’s new to talk about?”  Foley grumped, “Personhood.”  “What about it?” I asked.

              “It begins at conception,” he said.

              “Do you mean implantation into the endometrium of the uterus from the oviduct or do you mean fertilization in the oviduct?” I asked.  “Don’t get smart,” Foley said.  “You know what I mean -- when an egg gets poked by a sperm.  That’s when a soul enters and personhood begins.”

 “Oh,” said I, “So that means identical twins, who form after the egg gets ‘poked’, sometimes as late as implantation in the uterus, have identical souls?” 

 “Damn you, Elof, you always try to twist a simple clear answer into these nutty situations.” 

              “I’m sorry, Foley.  I just don’t think of personhood as an event.  I think of it as a process.”

              “What’s that supposed to mean?”

              “A baby slowly acquires a vocabulary in its first year.  It also begins to recognize parents and others in the household. The personality of a toddler differs as much from the newborn, as the child shifting into pre-school.  The seven year old differs from the teenager. I am almost 84 and differ from myself at 21 when I was a young adult.”

              “Tell me, Foley, if personhood is an event that occurs at fertilization, how do you respond to the Supreme Court that conferred personhood on corporations?”

              “That was a good thing, Elof.” 

  “Why so?” I asked. 

 “Because corporations should have the same political rights as individual citizens,” he replied.

              “Isn’t that stacking things in favor of the corporation’s power over the individual’s power?” I asked. 

              Foley scoffed, “That’s your liberal problem Elof.  You just don’t respect the intelligence of people. If you don’t like the candidates that corporations support, don’t vote for them.  It doesn’t matter if it’s one ad or one hundred ads, you’ll still vote who you prefer.”

              “And tell me Foley, how does the individual distinguish distortions and lies from facts presented in political ads?”   

              “That’s the voters’s choice.  The voters can go the library and do their own fact checking.”

              “And how, Foley, does a candidate run for office if the candidate represents the people’s interests over the corporations interests?”

              “You liberals want it handed to you on a platter, don’t you?  Why don’t you just ring a lot of doorbells and get your message across?  Don’t pick on corporations.”

              “So let me get this straight.  Personhood begins with fertilization for the individual and personhood begins when incorporation takes place for corporations.  For individual people you say that personhood is identified with the soul. Is there a corporate soul that coexists with the personhood of a corporation?”

              “Why should I bother answering that, Elof?”

              “I thought you might claim that corporate souls are endowed with original sin.” 

             

             

               

RELIGION IN AMERICA IS A BALANCING ACT BETWEEN WHAT UNITES AND DIVIDES US

I would describe my own religious beliefs as being a theological atheist, a Unitarian Universalist, a Humanist, and a Freethinker.  By claiming myself a theological atheist I am simply stating that I was raised without a God concept and have no interest in a God concept.  I am not an anti-theist (against God) but live my life without a need for a God concept. I have been a Unitarian Universalist since 1960 because it is a religion that has no formal creed and asks its members to explore what gives meaning to their lives and justice to the world, especially through movements that promote tolerance and improve the lot of humanity.  I am a Humanist because I believe we have only one life to live on earth governed by a biological life cycle that for our species is rarely more than 80 to 90 years for the vast number of all who have ever lived.  I believe that life should be lived as productively as circumstances allow giving our lives a sense of self worth and harming as few people as we can.   I am a Freethinker because I believe tolerance, education, and respect for diversity allow us to care for our neighbors and discover our human strengths and weaknesses.

Too often in human history religion has been used to divide people into believers and non believers.  It has led to wars between religions (Hindus versus Islam, Christians versus Jews, Christians versus Islam, Catholics versus Protestants) with millions of casualties.  Religions have also suffered from lack of faith and have been demoted to myths as is true for the polytheistic religions of ancient Greece and Rome or the polytheistic religions of Meso and South America.

Religions have also confused people by contradictory claims and acts.  A loving God wipes out almost all of humanity in Old Testament scripture. We can be taught to love our neighbor as ourselves but we can also be taught to reject our families if they do not believe as we do.  We can be told by the Ten Commandments that we shall not kill. But in the Same Old Testament God tells Moses to kill the Amalekites even their women and children.   The same contradiction appears in hymns invoking “Onward Christian soldier, onward as to war” but at the same time we are told “God is love” and that Christ is “the Prince of peace” and “Blessed are the peace makers.”  

The United States was founded on the religious principles that the state should make no preference for any religious creed. It allowed Protestants and Catholics, Jews, Theists, Deists, and atheists of that era all enjoying the benefits of society without the coercion of demanding a single state religion or set of religious beliefs. Our laws on religion that have been taken to the Supreme Court have tried to clarify attempts by non-believers to keep a wall of separation between church and state and by believers to breach that wall and allow their views to prevail for all. When I read Facebook commentary I often wince at the harshness expressed by people who believe so strongly in their particular faith that they would come to blows if they were facing each other. That is not a message of love.  That is not a message of compassion.  That is not a message of tolerance. It conveys to me, instead, a message of insecurity --  that unless we believe together we cannot get along.  That is not America.  That is the fury of the past witnessed in the 30 Year’s War in central Europe as Protestants and Catholics killed each other.  That is Ireland for three centuries before a peace agreement was worked out.  That is the Middle East today with its intolerance on all sides.  That is Pakistan and India fighting over the future of Kashmir.  Where is love in those wars?  Where is redemption in those hatreds of otherness?  Where is the Golden rule?  How can America be a land of tolerance for diversity if it excludes tolerance for the religious beliefs of others?  Believe what you want but don’t impose your particular interpretation on everyone.   

REFLECTIONS ON OBAMA’S EULOGY FOR THE MURDERED NINE

             Nedra and I watched President Obama’s eulogy as it was taking place and we were both very moved by it.  He used a language familiar to those who go to black AME churches.  He used the term grace to express the wonderful response (forgiveness) of the relatives of those slain and the response of many elected officials to take down the Confederate battle flag from state buildings.  He also put in an alternative to the idea of God’s grace by saying we all had a “reservoir of untapped goodness” within us that emerged. I prefer that to God’s grace because grace is a gift of God that cannot be petitioned by prayer or given as an award for behavior or belief. Grace also shifts positive change in society from individual and collective responsibility to something like a miracle over which we have no control or access. I also have problems with a “reservoir of goodness within us.”  Is goodness innate?  If it is acquired, what about those children raised in homes where the parents are bigots?  I would have invoked something different to explain the sudden shift in southern responses to their Confederate symbols.  I would say that we all have a capacity for empathy.  We see it in toddlers.  If one cries the others cry.  It might be genetic because there is a spectrum disorder of autism where such a response of empathy is diminished or absent. Governments can terrorize or brutalize their citizens as Nazis did when they beat up, humiliated, or killed Jews and many Germans looked the other way out of fear of being visited by the Gestapo if they protested.

           I have long believed that aggression, brutality, torture, and war crimes are issues that need honest research.  All governments duck this because they depend on spying, lying, misinformation, unexamined patriotism, secrecy, and justifying the harm they do as “collateral damage.”   It is easier to blame economics, ideology, religion, politics, or some other social process than to admit that our capacity for harming others or suppressing our empathy for others has an outlet at the governmental level.  It is also easier to rationalize that the wrongs of society are due to original sin, innate aggression, or human nature than to do the hard work of finding out why some people are decent, prefer peace to war, help others, avoid harming others, practice virtue as its own reward, and seek social changes to bring about equality of opportunity for all.  I am grateful that President Obama appealed to our “better natures” even if he called it an act of grace. I am hoping that psychology departments, psychiatry departments, and even the National Institutes of Health will do serious academic research on empathy, mass behavior, and the suspension of humane values that pervade so much of state and cultural practice. 

THE PLEASURE OF READING LAUGH OUT LOUD, WHACKY HUMOR

                Nedra and I have participated in a book discussion group since the early 1960s so we have had quite a range of fiction and non-fiction to read over the past half century. I was given a gift of a paperback by Richard Janda, a linguist who is now on sabbatical leave with his family in France.  It is a novel by Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel.  Its title is LUNATICS. I had not read any of their works before but I have occasionally read satirical novels (Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World are classics).  A more recent satirical novel is Jonas Jonasson’s The 100 Year Old Man Climbs Out of the Window and Disappears.

              Lunatics uses alternate chapters to describe shared experiences of two characters, one a pet shop owner and the other a “forensic plumber.” The pet shop owner, Stephen Hortman, and the plumber, Jeffrey Peckerman, hate each other.  Jeffrey believes Stephen made a bad call in a girls’ soccer game.  The two chase each other and create chaos that escalates into bungled traffic accidents, a downed helicopter, a blocked bridge, and a belief that terrorists are at work.  Things get worse at the Central Park Zoo as they are pursued by real terrorists and the police.  They escape and their actions lead to the beaching of a cruise liner in Cuba.  Their actions somehow get them out of trouble only to create more trouble as they go from Cuba to the Middle East and to China.  They become celebrated as international heroes and end up at the Republican National Convention and that chapter brought tears of laughter and bouts of uncontrolled giggles.  They reminded me of Zero Mostel at his best. For old timers like me, it was like a revival of the slapstick comedy of Laurel and Hardy, the Keystone Cops, and the Marx Brothers. 

TWO WELCOME DECISIONS BY THE SUPREME COURT ON DIVERSITY AND OPPORTUNITY

            For biologists evolutionary change is usually measured in hundreds or thousands of generations.  For our species, social change is measured in decades or a few generations.  I will be 85 in mid July so I have lived about four generations.  My memory of each of these generations is reasonably vivid.  I grew up when it was illegal for a white person to marry a person of any other race.  I grew up when it was illegal for a black person to sit in the front of a bus.  I grew up when it was illegal for persons to buy contraceptives for birth control.  I grew up when it was illegal for same sex couples to engage in sexual activity.  I grew up when it was still legal to sterilize women for having children out of wedlock.  I was conceived when it was illegal for a divorced person to remarry in New York State.  In 1940 my mother had to be repatriated as an American because although born in Bound Brook, New Jersey, her first marriage was to an immigrant born in Chernobyl in Russia (women were then considered the property of their husbands). Those were just the law.  Add to that the social view that blacks were banned from major league baseball and rarely admitted to medical schools, the law, engineering, or other professions considered white occupations.    Add to that women were routinely excluded or limited by quota to medical, engineering, and other professions considered as masculine fields.  Add to that Jews were excluded by “gentlemen’s agreement” policies from buying homes in non-Jewish areas of Long Island.

             When I was young I tolerated many of these injustices.  As I experienced diversity in my work, in school, and reading the newspapers, I changed.  It was incremental.  One piece of unexamined bias after another was expunged.  I wish I had had Promethean foresight to recognize all of these as injustices.  I did not.  I never thought of myself as a bigot or deluded myself with an idea of white male superiority. But I did change as each injustice resonated in my being.  For the individual, progress is slow.  For the historian, progress is incredibly rapid compared to the millennia long history of human injustices.  I am grateful for those who protested injustices to their families and who took up the cause of equality for others. I recognize that even with the Supreme Court decisions recognizing LGBT marriage and extending the grounds for bringing discrimination cases in housing that there is still a long way to go for social equality, equality of opportunity, and a respect for diversity in American social life.  Let us rejoice that another barrier has fallen and that equality of opportunity is a goal worth striving for and diversity of religious belief, but not imposition of that religious belief on others, is a goal worth preserving.  

OCEAN GROVE, NEW JERSEY -- NEDRA’S QUILTING RETREAT

              Nedra’s sister Sonya and her husband, Ted Weiss, bought a Victorian “ginger bread” house that used to be a bed and breakfast residence in the early 1900s.  It is in Ocean Grove New Jersey on a street called Pilgrim Path about four houses west of the Great Tabernacle.  Ted Weiss was born in Hungary, raised in South Amboy, NJ, and served 16 years in Congress representing the west side of Manhattan.  This was their “get away” house from Manhattan where they could relax on vacation and invite family for holidays.  Ocean Grove was a Methodist meeting grounds and the Great Tabernacle invited Chautauqua circuit speakers and famous preachers to stimulate the hundreds of weekend or summer visitors.  It was a dry town and so strict for its behavior that no motor cars were allowed to enter, leave, or be driven on Sundays.  One of my colleagues at Stony Brook University said in his youth it was called “Ocean Grave.”

              Now it is like most small towns and has its gay community, its revelers, its secular attractions linked to a gorgeous Jersey Shore, a board walk, and numerous musical performances at the Great Tabernacle.

              Nedra and I go at least twice a year to Ocean Grove because Sonya hosts Nedra’s quilters from Long Island, NY.  About 11 of them come and they call themselves “The off the wall quilters.”  They enjoy each other’s company and use those twice a year week of quilting to work on their projects.  I have been the resident drone because I use that opportunity to read books and write.  In this latest retreat I read and wrote reviews of two books for the Quarterly Review of Biology, one a biography by George Brownlee  of two time Nobel Prize winner Fred Sanger and a book by Nessa Carey on Junk DNA.  I then read Frank Close’s biography, Half Life, a scholarly study of Bruno Pontecorvo’s contributions to atomic physics (especially slow neutrons to induce nuclear fission and neutrinos and their role in cosmic events).  Pontecorvo is more popularly known for his defection to the USSR in 1950 and his possible role as an atomic spy.  I also read Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Flight Behavior, which uses global warming as its theme.  I also read Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel’s comic novel, Lunatics.  In my spare time I wrote a few Blogs for my bloggerelof site.  It is nice to read in the parlor or sit on the porch and read.  It is also nice to sample a different cook for each meal. Two are assigned each day.  Nedra and I prepared chicken Jerusalem for our culinary contribution.   

MISPLACED FAITH IS NOT LIMITED TO RELIGION: THE STRANGE LIFE OF BRUNO PONTECORVO

              I was given a copy of Frank Close’s biography of Bruno Pontecorvo (1913-1993) entitled Half Life (Basic Books, 2015).  Dr. Shari Cohn Simmons, a former student who now lives in Edinburgh sent it to me.  She remembered talking with me about Muller’s life when he was in Edinburgh (1937-1940) after fleeing the USSR where two of his students were executed as alleged Trotskyites and genetics was condemned as a science.  One of the students getting a PhD with Muller was Guido Pontecorvo, the oldest brother of Bruno.  I knew Guido Pontecorvo professionally and interviewed him in London when I was writing Muller’s biography.

              I also knew, from newspaper accounts, that Bruno Pontecorvo defected to the USSR and was considered an atomic spy who passed on nuclear weapons secrets in Canada, the US, and England. Close writes a history of both the Pontecorvo family and Bruno’s involvement in the working out of atomic physics, a story that begins in the early 1930s.  Bruno was one of eight children born in Pisa to a wealthy manufacturer of textiles.  Their father was a non-observant Jew whose wife was Protestant.  The children were raised without a religious identification. Of the eight children, Guido became a geneticist, teaching and doing research mostly in Glasgow.  Bruno became a physicist and Gillo became a motion picture director (The Battle of Algiers is his most famous picture).

              Bruno studied physics in Rome with Enrico Fermi, but after Mussolini formed an alliance with Hitler, Jews were no longer permitted to hold university positions because Jews were defined by fascist ideology as a biological condition and not a chosen religious belief.  Bruno went to Paris and worked with the Joliot Curies until Paris fell to the Nazis.  Bruno escaped and found his way out with other refugees to Lisbon and to the United States.  He worked in Tulsa, Oklahoma devising instruments to detect atomic signatures in drill holes for the presence of radioactive heavy elements that were found in oil shale but not in limestone or sandy rock formations.  Bruno Pontecorvo was well known among physicists in the US for his discovery that slow neutrons were effective in inducing fission in atomic nuclei and for his skills in devising instruments to detect the products of nuclear fission.

              Bruno worked in Chalk river in Canada in the early 1940s.  He was interested in nuclear reactor construction, an idea developed by his mentor, Enrico Fermi.  One product he hoped to study from the use of nuclear reactors was the production and detection of neutrinos.  His theoretical work on neutrinos was widely known. While his work was considered secret, it was not in weapons development.  Bruno was a pacifist who opposed scientific applications to war.  His experiences in Italy and France led him to believe the USSR was the only country where people would be treated as equals and where peace, and not war, was its goal.  This became his religion. He had become a communist party member while in Paris.

              Was Pontecorvo a spy?  Frank Close believes he was but there is no direct evidence to prove this.  Close believes most of Pontecorvo’s spying was done after the end of World War II and involved passing on information on nuclear reactor design and not on weapons manufacture. Nuclear reactors, of course, were a major source of enriched Uranium and Plutonium, both of which entered into weapons making. 

              In 1950 Pontecorvo and his Swedish wife and his three sons took a vacation from their home in Harwell, England (the British equivalent of Los Alamos) and never returned.  They disappeared.  It took five years before Pontecorvo made contact with the western world releasing a statement that he left England to do research on neutrino in the USSR and to avoid “persecution” from western governments.

              I much enjoyed the history of atomic physics that Close provides and the scholarly analysis of both Pontecorvo’s career and his troubled life.  Only after the collapse of the USSR did Pontecorvo admit to his colleagues that his defection was a mistake and that his faith in communism was wrong and that he “must have been a cretin” for his naïve embrace of Stalin’s speeches.  

THOUGHTS ON FREE WILL AND BEHAVIORAL RESPONSIBILITY

              Each of us has a self-perception of uniqueness.  It is built out of the unique experiences we have had since birth that shape our identity as an individual, a family member, a community member, a citizen of the nation we call our country, and as a member of the species called Homo sapiens which differs genetically and psychologically from all other species.  This does not mean we do not share lots of common understandings with others or with other cultures or with other nationalities.  Nor does it mean we share nothing with other species. The reverse is true. We share more with those species closest to us. Virtually all infants develop a sense of self that distinguishes the world outside our bodies and the persons populating it as not the same as ourselves.

 

When we make choices we do not make them randomly.  We are constrained by what we know.  A child who has experienced a burn by touching something hot will have an awareness to avoid doing that again.  A child of the same age who has not experienced that pain from a hot object may require more time to get that experience unless that child is instructed by parents not to go near certain objects (like a fireplace).  The more knowledge and experience we accumulate the fewer are the random acts we make.  The knowledge does not have to be true. A person in a particular family may have an intense exposure to something like a religion shared by the parents and the child will believe what the parents say is true. There is nothing innate about these attitudes.  In order for a community to function it has to have some shared beliefs. Most of us pick this up at home, at school, and from religious instruction.  In a secular society where religious practice is optional, the bulk of shared values come from the neighborhood and from school.

Societies hold the individual responsible for acts that harm others or harm society. Children learn not to bully, not to lie, not to cheat, and not to hurt others.  With rare exceptions children have learned these values at home, school, or in church.  Free will does not mean that a child weighs carefully punching someone younger and weaker or stealing from that other child.  We often make quick decisions without reflection on the consequences.  We could argue that a person was destined to act in an anti-social way but that does not exempt the person from punishment if the act results in physical harm, theft, destruction of property, or some other serious act that society defines as a criminal act.  The measure of response depends on age, mental aptitude, or circumstances unique to the situation. In an ideal society an informed judge would assign the punishment.  In some societies there are fixed mandatory sentences.    It would be more accurate to say we act out of “constrained will” than out of “free will.” Our psychological state evolves as we experience and learn more things through aging and the circumstances that surround us.  At the same time we are not determined to behave in a certain way for any of our actions.  That is because what we may think appropriate one day may change some weeks or years later.  By the time we are adults we have had millions of acts that have led to a sense of well being or disappointment.  We tend to avoid the acts that disappoint us.  We tend to repeat the acts that work successfully for our own well being and for that of society.  As the person I call “me” or “I” and that others call “Elof Carlson”, I recognize that what others call free will is only a narrow range of all possible behaviors I have experienced because the vast majority I have rejected if they harm others or if they lower my self esteem.     

WHO SHOULD PAY FOR THE THINGS WE TAKE FOR GRANTED?

I am puzzled by the number of people who comment on news items on Facebook, Blog sites, and other resources on the web. A considerable number of these comments reflect what I would classify as Libertarian (or Conservative) thinking.  It may be about something like unions and teacher’s salaries and the protections given teachers from being fired. The comments are often dismissive of such organization for collective bargaining.  They argue that people should pay for what they get, follow their bosses’ rules, and not expect government to pay for their needs such as medical insurance, retirement, or unemployment insurance.   Libertarianism and conservatism appeals to those who see themselves as self-made or self-reliant.  They like being rugged individualists and I do not doubt their strong work ethic. But consider this. To have a civilization like the US enjoys requires the activities of thousands of different occupations.  Let us say government paid for nothing but a standing military.  You now take your monthly paycheck and have to pay for the following: health insurance, accident insurance, car insurance, house insurance, lawsuit insurance. You have to pay for fire department protection; you now have to pay for police protection; you have to pay for sanitation to remove trash; you have to pay for clean safe chlorinated water to drink and  bathe; you have to pay for snow removal of the streets; you have to pay for repairs of pot holes in the streets taking you to work; you have to pay for scholarly books (500 dollars each) if the press is to make money when publishing is not subsidized; you have to pay for the research that gives you the modern medicines and drugs you and your family will need; you will pay for the airports, harbors, RR tracks, new highways.  The list will mushroom on all the hidden costs—mail delivery, weather forecasting and reporting, maintaining the internet, providing passports for travel to other countries, seeing to it that the meat and foods you eat are not contaminated, seeing to it that your children do not play in a haze of pollutants, inspecting bridges so they don’t collapse, keeping records of who owns the land your house resides on so that you can eventually sell it.  I don’t individually have to pay for all these hundreds or thousands of errands to keep society working.   Private volunteer work or profit making organizations might not work because not enough people even know about these things that make urban life possible.  And if they defaulted and did not pay up, streets would be filled with abandoned homes, burnt out houses, and impassable streets because no one was paying for the constant upkeep necessary for hundreds of services. 

  Libertarianism downplays the social contract that is necessary for everyone to have hundreds of activities that would bankrupt most of us if we had to write a hundred or more checks a month to pay for them.  At the same time you would be at the mercy of lawsuits for your neglect to do all the repairs and protections that government agencies and services provide. Since ignorance of the law is no excuse, you would have to be aware of hundreds of potential liabilities because you would be responsible for everything that can possibly go wrong. We have to organize to get things done.  Telling those who earn little that they should seek private charity (mostly from churches) is a bad idea because when people are stressed financially they will cut back on their charitable giving especially during depressions or setbacks in the economy.  Democracies with some mixture of private and public funding work better than pure laissez faire capitalism or pure socialism.  

THE WHOLE AND THE PARTS: A COMPARISON OF PEOPLE AND SOCIETIES

        I am one person, with a name given to me at my birth.  I am unique because no one else has lived my life exactly as I have.  I arose from a single cell and now am composed of some 20 trillion cells. I learned as an undergraduate that my cells are capable of forming four types of tissues—nerves, muscles, connective tissues, and epithelial tissues.  The connective tissues form a matrix around them like blood, bone, or cartilage.  Epithelial cells form the lining of organs like skin, or the insides of guts or blood vessels.  When I signed up for a course in histology (the study of tissues) at NYU I was given a box with 100 slides in them.  Each had different representatives of the four types of tissues.  We had to learn to recognize all of them. As I reflected on what I learned about biology, I realized that while I am one person, I am a community of cells.  I am a cooperative community of cells because I can move with the use of my muscle cells.  I can secrete digestive enzymes because of my epithelial cells.  I can receive oxygen for my tissues because red blood cells do that.  I can think because I have nerve cells.  Each tissue has its own collection of cells modified for a special function.  Muscle can be voluntary like those in our hands or feet.  They can be involuntary like those in our blood vessels or intestines. Heart muscle forms a third type of muscle that can pump away for a life time without prolonged rest. By contrast imagine doing billions of pushup exercises without tasking a rest! There are no rugged individualist cells that can transform themselves as they wish.  Tired of being an epithelial cell?  Try being a nerve cell or a muscle cell. Sorry, you can’t.  The closest thing to being a rugged individualist for one of my cells would be if it became a tumor cell. It would respect no boundaries; it would spread out and metastasize.  It would from colonies. But it would also kill me if it got away with being an unregulated or untreated cancer.

        Now shift mental gears.  Think of society, our own American society.  We have over 300 million people living here.  To make society work we become wage earners (white collar or blue collar), we provide services (teaching, law, medicine, banking, and ministry).  We also provide governance (elected and appointed officials and self appointed plutocrats who purchase influence).  We provide entrepreneurs (from Mom and Pop shops to major corporations or cartels).  We farm. Unlike a living person like me, a society is not an individual entity.  There are states with regional differences.  There are differences between rural and urban living. There are inequalities of wealth at birth (some born poor and others born rich). There is mobility for some (or going from rags to riches as we like to believe).  Rugged individualists are numerous.  Some are like cancers and they leave a wake of ruin from those they oppress, exploit, or destroy (economically). Others are just extremely talented as artists, performers, writers, or investors. All the cells of a human body require roughly the same amount of oxygen, metabolic nutrient, and waste removal.  Humans in society vary enormously in attaining both basic needs and opportunities. When societies have too much of inequality, discrimination, elitism, neglect, or sexism, societies can suffer and experience revolutions or cease their influence like fallen empires. This is why “the body politic” is a mischievous term.  This is why calling a corporation an individual person is troublesome. Analogies have their values for teaching but they should not be confused with the complexities of communities that science and reason reveal about their composition and functions.          

HOW MUCH OF REALITY HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED?

Roughly I divide the real world into myself and the external world.  I have seen x-rays of my chest, counted my pulse, consciously know I am breathing, chewing, swallowing, walking, and nodding off to sleep.  I am aware of the input of food and the output of my excreta.  I have seen my blood, bruising, hair distribution, pores, and the contours of my limbs and body.  I know what I look like mostly from seeing my face and body in the mirror.  Of my 20 trillion cells I have only seen a few hundred of my red and white blood cells from a slide I prepared from a drop of my blood at NYU when I was an undergraduate and learned how to stain, prepare a slide, and look at my blood cells under the microscope. I have not seen any of my other cells.  I saw my chromosomes when they were prepared by Nedra’s cytogenetics laboratory and they are mounted as a photo (with Nedra’s chromosomes facing them on a framed snapshot diptych portrait). I got to look into my lower intestine while having a lower colonoscopy at Stony Brook University and the MD allowed me to look at my inside, the intestine resembling a cave with its farther entrance like a black olive. I saw an NMR of my brain after I fell down stairs in 2008 at my home on Mud Road in Setauket NY and wanted to rule out a tumor as the cause of my falling. My senses, now somewhat impaired with age, made me aware of sounds, experience visual colored views of the external world, aware of pressure and pain, aware of tactile pleasure, and aware of a large variety of tastes.  I know my teeth, tongue, lips, oral cavity.  I am aware of my kidneys and ureters from the passage of kidney stones about a half dozen times in my life.  I am aware of my duodenum from once having an ulcer when I was at UCLA.  I can feel my heart beating when I place my hand on my chest.  Much of my internal anatomy I infer from the many dissections I did in comparative anatomy courses that I either took or visited as a teaching assistant at Indiana University and got to see 90 or more specimens of fetal pigs, cats, frogs, salamanders (mud puppies) or dogfish sharks. 

Of the external world, the portion I have seen is laughably small.  There are 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and the sun is most familiar to me.  There are hundreds of stars I can discern at night through their association with an earth-based perspective that we call constellations.  There are thousands more that are like pinpoints in a black cloth at night. I  have seen more galaxies and stars as pictures in books than I have seen through a telescope. I am aware that other than the sun, all the other stars I see are light years away from me, the galaxies hundreds of thousands to billions of light years from me.  This means through telescope or printed photos, the celestial reality I see is an illusion because where those objects have moved as stars or galaxies is probably different than this light that was emitted so many light years ago. The very small is also largely hidden from me.  I do not see individual atoms.  Some molecules can form crystals and I can see the relation between the atoms that compose them and the shape that crystals take.  As a geneticist I have seen photos of DNA revealed by x-ray diffraction studies.  I have seen gene sequences revealed by gels that have a bar code like distribution that makes them readable to biochemists.  I have looked at the region of the second chromosome of fruit flies that bore the dumpy gene whose physical structure I helped analyze.  I have induced mutations in that gene.  On an earthly scale, I have flown around the world once and sailed (on a cruise liner) twice around the world while teaching at Semester at Sea.  I have been in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America and have seen the North pole through an airplane window.  I am almost 84 years old so I have experienced four generations of human life.  I have fathered six children, have 12 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.  I have been married twice. The oldest person I have met whose time on earth overlapped mine was born about 1850.  He was a 100 year old Hoosier and visiting his son who worked as a lawyer at 217 Broadway in Manhattan where I was a 19 year old elevator operator.  

USING MUDDLED LANGUAGE TO DESCRIBE REALITY

       There are some phrases that on first reading sound profound but after a few moments reflection are self-contradictory and give a false impression of reality. Take the sentence, “Nothing is true and everything is possible.”  Is it true or false that the water we drink is composed mostly of hydrogen and oxygen in a ratio of two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen atom?  I find that pretty consistently true and can’t think of a way to falsify it. Is it true that 2 + 8 = 10 on a base ten system (1 to 10)?  Again, I would have difficulty faulting this. On the other hand if you said there is a gene for red eye color in fruit flies and it is dominant over white eye, I could show that the red eye color is actually a product of the action of numerous genes falling into one biochemical pathway producing a brown eye color and an independent biochemical pathway for an orange eye color.  There is at least another system that involves proteins that bind the pigments into the compound eyelets of flies.  Thus the term a gene for red eye is false if one tucks the entire color into a single gene.  Science doesn’t seek truths.  It seeks interpretations that fit the known facts about a process or thing or theory.

      How about the second part of that phrase.  Is everything possible?  How about recreating me and all my thoughts and experience after I am cremated and bringing me back to July 1958 when I got my PhD?  Could you do that?  No.  Why not?  First you’d have a hard time replicating every molecule in my body.  Second you haven’t a clue how to reconstruct my memory, the way I speak, my personality, and my desires, guilts, and fantasies. While you’re at it, bring back my first cat Buddy who lived at the Gnome Bakery on 59^th street at the foot of the Queensborough Bridge in 1940.  

So in a literal sense the two claims don’t make sense to a scientist. If I were to take these as meditative themes to enrich my spirituality, perhaps I could say that nothing lasts, even the universe will eventually age and die, and whatever we believe is everlasting in our culture (even the God or gods of today’s hundreds of religions) may not be so hundreds or thousands of years from now (think of Shelley’s poem Ozymandius).  Or how about saying it’s possible that Hitler was right and Aryan supremacy is a scientific fact and all other races should be eventually replaced by Aryans?  It is also possible to try to rescue that second part of that phrase by invoking the limits of today’s knowledge and many things thought impossible today may be part of a future reality, hundreds or thousands of years from now.

       The problem with both rescue operations is that they can’t be proved today.  But if you have to use tortured reasoning to rescue that phrase, what good is it?  One reason science papers are difficult to read for those not in that science is the ambiguity of our language.  That is also a reason we ask lawyers to write our wills or contracts. What we mean and what we say or write may not be comprehensible to others in the way we intend them.