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Humility and the scientific method

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In the Fall of 1990, on a whim of the gods, I was in Tunisia, touring the ruins of ancient Roman colonies with some Italian students.  Saddam Hussein had just decided to reclaim Kuwait (believe it or not, he had some historical precedent) and the long litany of dares and double-dares had begun.  Most of the Arab speaking world backed Saddam in this, albeit halfheartedly, because they thought of Kuwaitis as selfish and spoiled.  Poor people rarely like rich people.

In any event, Americans, such as myself, were viewed warily, especially unusual ones.  First of all, I stood literally head and shoulders above most of the population.  Secondly, I was traveling with Italians, and it was clear that I spoke Italian.  Everyone knows Americans don’t speak Italian unless they’re up to no good.  It was obvious to discerning Tunisians that I was a CIA operative, in Tunisia during the Gulf crisis to – what?  The fact that no one could imagine what such a person might be up to there only confirmed their suspicions.  Lucky for me, they are, for the most part, a gentle and amicable people, but it did take awhile to get accustomed to knowing smiles and the occasional glare.

All things considered, I was left a bit dubious of the critical thinking skills of the hoi polloi.  And so it happened that, on a break from run-down Roman baths and fora. we visited Douz, once the fabled trailhead for Timbuktu and points beyond, nowadays a hive of hucksters and tourists longing for a one or two hour Lawrence of Arabia experience.  Typically, one wanders out into the Sahara on a camel led by a guide on foot, has lunch, and returns for an extended photo op.  I thought the camel ride seemed pointless, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching the friendly clash of cultures.

Suddenly, my pondering was interrupted by the loud and repeated braying of a camel.  Camels, of course, are among the rudest animals humans associate themselves with, but this outburst had an unusual urgency about it.  I looked over and saw that four or five men had wrestled a camel to the ground, and were holding it down.  Nearby, a wood fire burned, with a long iron rod reddening in the heat.  I walked over and asked one of the camel drivers standing nearby what on earth was going on.

“Ah,” he said, “this camel refuses to eat.  He will die soon, unless something is done.”

As he said this, a man pulled the iron, now white hot, out of the fire, walked over to the prostrate beast, and began searing three parallel lines on the animal’s throat.

“This will make him hungry, and he will eat, and all will be well,” my new friend cheerfully informed me.

Poor benighted bastards, I thought.  If only they had access to modern veterinary practice, instead of relying on this absurd medieval ritual!  I wondered what they would do when they realized this wasn’t working, maybe exorcise demons?  The men concluded their torture and let the camel stand on its own.

Whereupon it immediately walked over to a clump of grass, and began enthusiastically devouring it.

The nature of nature

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You’re a nature lover; you find it revitalizes you, sweeps away the cobwebs (never mind the natural nature of cobwebs).  Alright, then!  Where to find it?

Perhaps you like to leave the city behind, get out where the air seems fresh.  Climb the mountain that refused Mohammad, go on a surfin’ safari, that sort of thing.  The thing is, all this artificiality gets you down, bro.  I mean like, wires, concrete, dump trucks, horns .. it just makes your head hurt.  Well, okay, not literally, most of the time, but it’s bad for the soul, right?  It’s not right, right?  It’s .. we’ve screwed it all up, the ecosystem, and we need to get back to..

To what?  The Ecosystem, the grand, immutable, capitalized Ecosystem?  Which one was that?  A hundred years ago?  Two seconds ago?  It’s a dynamic system, meaning there is no ecosystem to get back to, because we’re in it.  Now.  Maybe you don’t like it right now; that’s another issue.

The whole distinction between nature and artifice is wrong.  A Massey-Ferguson combine is no less natural than the stripped-down twig used by a bonobo to get at termites.  The mound built by the termites is the same, in essence, as the Sears Tower.  The differences we see are matters of degree, not kind.

Does that mean I don’t believe there’s an environmental crisis?  Not at all.  But it’s not Mother Nature that’s in danger.  It’s humanity, one of her least understood offspring.  The Earth doesn’t need saving; it will be just as fine as barren, acid-scarred rock as it is covered with what amounts to a thin slime of life.  Does Venus complain?  Does Mars feel inferior?  Who really cares about the current state of a lump of matter in the great nowhere?

Well, we do, because we care about the existence, or not, of our kind.  We mourn the passing of creatures we’ve never seen precisely because we might be next; we show no such compassion  for those closer to us: mice, cockroaches, wasps.  But these, too, are our kind, our mushy, pushy, boisterous, gustatory kind: living beings.

I see the value of greenery and what we call wildlife.  We’re changing our circumstances much faster than we evolve.  That’s our nature, after all.  It’s just that we don’t have much of a chance at surviving it all if we insist on seeing ourselves as apart from it all.

You want nature?  Look around you.  Cars.  Trees. Mountains.  Molehills.  Look inside that fortress skull in which you think you live.  That mushy gray stuff is as natural as sunsets and gamma radiation.

A report on alien life

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At first we thought those were their bodies, with hard sleek exoskeletons of various sizes.  The shapes were roughly the same, although variations were plentiful.  The larger ones, which we assumed to be adults, were two to three times the length of the smaller ones, with much greater volume.  As we began to gather more information, however, we realized the ratios were not quite right, and there were too few intermediate forms for this to be a juvenile/adult distinction.  And yet, there were intermediate forms, so we were forced to rule out a larval stage.  Quite puzzling.

A few days into our study, one of us noticed one that seemed to have split in half; furthermore its exoskeleton was entirely missing.  Was this a beginning stage in reproduction?  We were very exited about the prospect of seeing such an event so early in the project, not to mention the opportunity to study the infra-skeletal structure.  I was fortunate to be assigned to head up the investigation of this new phenomenon. while the rest of the team continued as before.  On the first day of intensive investigations there was a most interesting occurrence;  one of the half-entities came further apart.

Needless to say, I was beside myself.  Nothing like this had ever happened in the history of these explorations.  Furthermore, it appeared that the quarter-entities that resulted  had quite differing characteristics: one retained its rigid form, but the other was revealed to be soft and worm-like under enhanced magnification.  Further, as magnification was increased, more and more of the worm entities became apparent, and were even seen associated with the larger, singular exoskeletons.

As you can imagine. the next few weeks were a turmoil of activity, as discovery followed discovery.  Complete data are coming under separate cover, but here is a summary of the astonishing conclusions to which we came.

1.  The “exoskeletons” are not skeletal at all, but are shells.  We came to this conclusion because they appear not to move unless associated with a worm entity.

2.  It is the worm-like forms that are the real entities, displaying volition and spontaneous motion, although very little outside their shells.

3.  The shells are nevertheless useless as protection, as they crumple easily, and exude a reddish liquid that appears deadly for the worms.

We hope to generate a more thorough report within a year upon returning home, which should be soon.  We will be leaving Earth orbit as soon as practical.

Life on the Mississippi

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In a dusty, fading memory of a National Geographic of my youth, among the bare-breasted African ladies and stripe-shirted Parisians, there is a sunny picture of a lad on a raft, his toes swirling the Mississippi River.  His father had taken him out of school for a year of rafting on that mythic Father of Dreams, if not waters.  Why could not I have a father like that, I grieved.

My own father thought peace, not adventure, was the greatest gift.  He was born and grew in Latvia, in a forest of kin, as much a part of his place as the oak trees planted for the native sons.  A small stone house, a well, three oaks and a horizon of fields.  A burial ground nearby sheltered his ancestors on both sides; their names are gone now, weathered away like the wooden crosses that marked their graves.  But he was there, where he belonged, in the embrace of family, living and dead.

When I was a boy, I would stand in front of the door of my house, looking outside, wishing and wondering.  I think he was like that.  Bye and bye, whatever was beyond the fields of oats and rye beckoned, and he answered.  In a fit of irrational exuberance, he joined the army.

Not bad, really, at least at first.  It was a free country, for that brief period between the great wars, and nothing for soldiers to do but dream of dying under foreign skies, all brave and noble.  They certainly had the songs for it.  He went off to Riga, to the War College.  It was a blast.  Bright lights, big city, no way to keep him down on the farm after that.  He married a girl with an eighth grade education and a mind that was quicker than a hare chased by two foxes and an alley cat.  No slouch himself, he thought she was normal.  They had a couple of children.  You know that feeling, in a dream, when you’ve climbed to the highest peak to look at the world, and you turn around to discover the mountain has disappeared while you weren’t paying attention?

Russians.  Germans, then Russians again.  The world was in one of its fits.  This part of the story is a haze of half glimpsed hopes and fears, mostly projections on my part.  Like one of those stunts on a magician’s stage : a loud noise, a lot of smoke, and when it all clears, everything is different.    In a camp in Germany, full of shattered dreams, I was born, much to the chagrin, I’m betting, of my brothers.

The father I knew had had enough adventures, thank you.  He had made some promises to God when all else had crumbled; he did his best to see that his children fulfilled them.  Keep this in mind when you promise things to God: don’t involve others.  Faust probably had a better deal.

These days, I live near the Mississippi, and occasionally, when I drive upriver, I see that kid on the raft in my mind.  I’m older now than my father ever got.  I hope I’ve done as well as he did.

Lizards and the English

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Let’s say you’re an Englishman, and from a long line of them.  As far back as you can reckon, your ancestors, on both sides, were from England.  None of this mucking about in Scotland or other foreign parts  One of your ancestors was there to greet the Angles when they arrived.  Another shoved his pike up poor Richard’s bum at the Battle of Bosworth.  You speak the Queen’s language, drive on the left side of the road, and you think Majorca is too damned hot, Brighton is fine, thanks.  In other words, you are bloody well English.

Another guy is decidedly not. He’s from Tiko-Schmiko somewhere south of the Solomans.  Not only are all his ancestors also from there, but no one has ever been known to leave there.  He worships crabs, and pours lizard piss on sacred stones to make it rain.  In short, he is a typical Tiko-Schmikian.

“Holy cow!” you say (your religion is sometimes amusing), “we are so different, I cannot even grasp the magnitude of the difference!”

Indeed.  In what sense are you so different, then?  Not genetically; you are probably about 99.9% the same genetically.  Of course, you’re about 60% the same as a chicken, but we’ll leave that aside for now.  Culturally, then?  After all, it’s not what you’re born with, but what you do, dammit!  England has art, religion, music, the conservative party.  What have they got down there in god-forsaken Tiko-Schmiko, for Chrissake?

Well, they have art, religion, music, and .. well, okay, not the conservative party.  They do have a rather prissy old fart, though, who’s always ranting about how the kids these days don’t know lizard piss from lemonade.

The English, at least, do know that.