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.