Altruism and The Ethics of Reciprocity – “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You”

“Do not impose unto others what you do not desire yourself.” – Confucius

This phrase mirrors phrases in countless other scriptures, holy books and self-help guides. The ethics of reciprocity is a moral fundamental born from social interaction itself. It also illuminates the biological and hence, psychological ability for empathy.

It is degrading to say that any wise man was wise for having thought of it. Nor is it meaningful to label such a fundamental as exclusive to one’s religion.

It is as simple as, feeling sad when another fellow is grieving for his deceased loved ones. As straightforward as feeling indignant when a friend is incarcerated on false accusation. As fundamental as understanding punishment, pain and suffering, that we revolt at its use (even our own) towards another human being.

In this sense, this particular moral, is not a learned moral, but is typical and universal of human beings, and probably of all social animals others than ourselves.

You could also see this particular moral as being a social tool, to weed out selfish individuals who might be leeching from the benefits of the group. Knowing who does not reciprocate is hence a useful gauge of one’s cooperation, trustworthiness and personality. In social groups where this is a universal fundamental, it would therefore be most advantageous for all members of the group to exhibit reciprocation. “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours”, so to speak.

Allow me to broaden your perspectives further, biological entities are typically selfish, or euphemistically, act upon self-interest. This is a truism. Because if we had evolved to not be selfish (excluding animals in social groups for the moment), then we would have died out long ago, for we would be outcompeted by our rivals quite simply. True altriusm, is not an Evolutionary Stable Strategy (forgive the biology jargon), because if selfish individuals arose in  a population of selfless beings, the selfish individual will outcompete, outlast and reap all the benefits from all the suckers around it.

In this sense, the selfish individuals will breed and proliferate in much greater number. And the selfless individuals who are short-changed, breed and proliferate to a smaller degree. Through generations of differential reproduction, the selfish individuals will start to overtake and become the predominant group of the population. Eventually, the last sucker might be short-changed so badly, that it might eventually perish under the competition.

You might be thinking, how does selflessness manifest then? Why are certain people constantly being portrayed as selfless, friendly and exceedingly helpful? Surely, that couldn’t possibly exist, if my explanation were true.

My explanation still stands because of two things.

I assumed the earlier population to be that of a non-social animal. Social groups deal with adversity in a different way. The group works in favour of both the individual’s needs balanced with the group’s. It might seem valuable, in certain situations to have one’s own needs to be fulfilled with the compromise of “social tribute” to the group in the form of reciprocations, sharing etc, than if one worked alone, and risked not satisfying one’s own basic needs due to the lack of help.

Also, while being selfish would certainly be a winning strategy in a group of friendly people, that might not really sit well with the members of the group. We all recall incidents or experiences with people where our friendliness or help have been taken without reciprocation, or even more preposterously returned with a stab in the back, or more mildly, taken for granted.

Equity, justice, fairness. These values arose from simple social and biological interactions such as empathy and reciprocation.

Secondly, and of more controversiality, is the different kind of reward that reciprocation brings – happiness. We couldn’t have relied on such a complex moral issue on pure rationality only. We must definitely have evolved a neurological (biological) way of rewarding our brain whenever such behaviour is carried out.

This might seem blasphemous that altruism and selflessness are performed in self-interest or pleasure, but allow me to explain. Many biological and social functions are dealt with biochemically. Thirst and hunger are biochemical. Libido is dealt with by the sex hormones. Happiness is biochemical (Recent studies have shown that an addiction to alcohol, smoking, exercise is due to an increasing de-sensitivity to the “happy chemical”, otherwise known as dopamine, which gives us the feeling of euphoria and temporary happiness). Empathy is a mixture of both neurological and biochemical inputs. How these are exactly elicited, is still being studied.

So, quite simply, the feeling of happiness and contentment associated with altruism and all those happy volunteers proud to have done their part is an adaptation to ensure that we keep to this social function. Morality seems so much less sacred as it is philosophy. It is biology.

In a nutshell, we are selfless, because we are selfish but sacrificed a bit of the reward for more certainty in the success of survival

How do social groups form then?

Obviously, social groups are exclusive entities, in that the members satisfy a certain list of club entry requirements. For humans, we might be at the extreme end of the spectrum, when it comes to the club entry requirements, but we’re not alike from other social animals in other respects. Most groups are formed out of this mutual cooperation or altruism. But what are the criteria?

In biology, there exist two hypothesis to explain altruism - Kin Altruism and Reciprocal Altruism. Kin Altruism is straightforward. Our family, or closely related family members, share many genes in common, due to our relatedness. Hence, it would be advantageous, for the gene (and the individual carrying it) to help members of one’s own family. This may appear to dilute familial love, but as I mentioned, familial love might be similar to how happiness manifests – as a biochemical, psychological and neurological phenomenon, for purposes I have already mentioned. If my body didn’t tell me via this means, that familial love is such a wonderful thing, I might end up treating family members as competition, which fundamentally, really is. It’s either a social family group helping the whole bunch of the same combinations of genes, or the chance that the entire group may be outcompeted by others or by each other and perish. Again, it’s perhaps a trade-off of probabilities.

Reciprocal Altruism has already been elaborated earlier. To summarize once more, it basically means, that I would “scratch your back, if you will scratch mine”. It can also be put in more crude terms, that one is selfless, only in one’s self-interest, and in the case of groups, in the group’s interest, as well.

So, in summary, social groups probably formed from reasons of increased survivability relative to the hardships of individual survival. They evolved in species that found it increasingly difficult to manage at the level of an individual and might be due to kinship, or simple benefits of mutual cooperation. Society or social groups is merely one of the many strategies that the biodiversity of this Earth has employed. Co-evolved with social behaviour is biochemistry, neurology, psychology, all of which manifested in our ability for emotion, empathy, sympathy, which then doubled as social “tools”.

Ultimately, I hope this essay does not put you off, because of various reasons relating to personal beliefs, religion or disagreement. You are welcome to ask me should you have questions. You are also welcome to argue with me, and point out logical flaws in this essay I might have missed out. My case is that morality and most, if not all morals, has a evolutionary origin. It is as I mentioned, degrading to say that any wise man were wise to have stumbled across moral truths, and self-righteous to give credit to religion for these values. It is also ignorant, to not accept or discuss or research further, into this, to understand ourselves, as a species, better.

Paper Bags or Plastic Bags? Everything You Need to Know

by Colin Dunn on 9th July 2008 for treehugger.com

Paper or plastic bags: which is better?
It’s an age old question, when it comes time to check out when grocery shopping:paper bag or plastic bag? It seems like it should be an easy choice, but there’s an incredible number of details and inputs hidden in each bag. From durability and reusability to life cycle costs, there’s a lot more to each bag than meet the eye. Let’s take a look behind the bags.

Where do brown paper bags come from?
Paper comes from trees — lots and lots of trees. The logging industry, influenced by companies like Weyerhaeuser and Kimberly-Clark, is huge, and the process to get that paper bag to the grocery store is long, sordid and exacts a heavy toll on the planet. First, the trees are found, marked and felled in a process that all too often involves clear-cutting, resulting in massive habitat destruction and long-term ecological damage.

Mega-machinery comes in to remove the logs from what used to be forest, either by logging trucks or even helicopters in more remote areas. This machinery requires fossil fuel to operate and roads to drive on, and, when done unsustainably, logging even a small area has a large impact on the entire ecological chain in surrounding areas.

Part way between trees and paper bags. Photo credit: Sally A. Morgan—Ecoscene/Corbis

Once the trees are collected, they must dry at least three years before they can be used. More machinery is used to strip the bark, which is then chipped into one-inch squares and cooked under tremendous heat and pressure. This wood stew is then “digested,” with a chemical mixture of limestone and acid, and after several hours of cooking, what was once wood becomes pulp. It takes approximately three tons of wood chips to make one ton of pulp.

The pulp is then washed and bleached; both stages require thousands of gallons of clean water. Coloring is added to more water, and is then combined in a ratio of 1 part pulp to 400 parts water, to make paper. The pulp/water mixture is dumped into a web of bronze wires, and the water showers through, leaving the pulp, which, in turn, is rolled into paper.

Whew! And that’s just to make the paper; don’t forget about the energy inputs — chemical, electrical, and fossil fuel-based — used to transport the raw material, turn the paper into a bag and then transport the finished paper bag all over the world.

Paper recycling plants, like the one shown above, is the best place for bags to go when you’re done with them.

Where do paper shopping bags go when you’re done with them?
When you’re done using paper shopping bags, for shopping or other household reuses, a couple of things can happen. If minimally-inked (or printed with soy or other veggie-based inks) they can be composted; otherwise, they can be recycled in most mixed-paper recycling schemes, or they can be thrown away (which is not something we recommend).

If you compost them, the bags break down and go from paper to a rich soil nutrient over a period of a couple of months; if you throw them away, they’ll eventually break down of the period of many, many years (and without the handy benefits that compost can provide). If you choose the recycle paper bags, then things get a little tricky.

The paper must first be re-pulped, which usually requires a chemical process involving compounds like hydrogen peroxide, sodium silicate and sodium hydroxide, which bleach and separate the pulp fibers. The fibers are then cleaned and screened to be sure they’re free of anything that would contaminate the paper-making process, and are then washed to remove any leftover ink before being pressed and rolled into paper, as before.

How are plastic bags made?
Unlike paper bags, plastic bags are typically made from oil, a non-renewable resource. Plastics are a by-product of the oil-refining process, accounting for about four percent of oil production around the globe. The biggest energy input is from the plastic bag creation process is electricity, which, in this country, comes from coal-burning power plants at least half of the time; the process requires enough juice to heat the oil up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit, where it can be separated into its various components and molded into polymers. Plastic bags most often come from one of the five types of polymers — polyethylene — in its low-density form (LDPE), which is also known as #4 plastic.

How does plastic bag recycling work?
Like paper, plastic can be recycled, but it isn’t simple or easy. Recycling involves essentially re-melting the bags and re-casting the plastic, though, according to the U.S. EPA, manufacturing new plastic from recycled plastic requires two-thirds of the energy used in virgin plastic manufacturing. But, as any chef who has ever tried to re-heat a Hollondaise sauce will tell you, the quality isn’t quite as good the second time around; the polymer chains often separate break (thanks to reader MaryBeth for noting the difference between “separate” and “break” — the former implies that the chains can come back together, which they can’t), leading to a lower-quality product.

What does that mean to you? Basically, plastic is often downcycled — that is, the material loses viability and/or value in the process of recycling — into less functional forms, making it hard to make new plastic bags out of old plastic bags.

What about biodegradable plastic bags?
Biodegradable plastic is a mixed bag (pun intended) as well; while biopolymers like polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) and Polylactide (PLA) are completely biodegradable in compost (and very, very, very slowly — if at all — in a landfill) and are not made from petroleum products, they are often derived from our food sources.

The primary feedstock for bioplastics today is corn, which is rife with agro-political conflict and often grown and harvested unsustainably; because of these reasons, and because it competes with food supply, it is not likely to be a long-term solution in the plastics world.

Plus, some bags marked “biodegradable” are not actually so — they’re recycled plastic mixed with cornstarch. The cornstarch biodegrades and the plastic breaks down into tiny little pieces but does not actually “biodegrade,” leaving a yucky polymer mess (if in small pieces). The only way to avoid this? Look for 100% plant-based polymers, like the two mentioned above.

So, while it’s good to have the alternative (and to recognize the innovation it represents), bioplastics aren’t quite ready to save us from the paper or plastic debate.

Paper bags hold more stuff, but plastic bags use less energy during production and recycling. Photo: Getty Images

Paper or plastic: A look at the facts and numbers
Further insight into the implications of using and recycling each kind of bag can be gained from looking at overall energy, emissions, and other life cycle-related costs of production and recycling. According to a life cycle analysis by Franklin Associates, Ltd, [pdf] plastic bags create fewer airborne emissions and require less energy during the life cycle of both types of bags per 10,000 equivalent uses — plastic creates 9.1 cubic pounds of solid waste vs. 45.8 cubic pounds for paper; plastic creates 17.9 pounds of atmospheric emissions vs. 64.2 pounds for paper; plastic creates 1.8 pounds of waterborne waste vs. 31.2 pounds for paper.

Paper bags can hold more stuff per bag — anywhere from 50 percent to 400 percent more, depending on how they’re packed, since they hold more volume and are sturdier. The numbers here assume that each paper bag holds 50 percent more than each plastic bag, meaning that it takes one and half plastic bags to equal a paper bag — it’s not a one-to-one comparison, even though plastic still comes out ahead.

It’s important to note that all of the above numbers assume that none of the bags are recycled, which adds a lot of negative impacts for both the paper and plastic bags; the numbers decrease in size (and the relative impacts decrease) as more bags are recycled. Interestingly, the numbers for paper bag recycling get better faster — the more that are recycled, the lower their overall environmental impact — but, because plastic bags use much less to begin with, they still ends up creating less solid and waterborne waste and airborne emissions.

Paper and plastic bags’ required energy inputs
From the same analysis, we learn that plastic also has lower energy requirements — these numbers are expressed in millions of British thermal units (Btus) per 10,000 bags, again at 1.5 plastic bags for every one paper bag. Plastic bags require 9.7 million Btus, vs. 16.3 for paper bags at zero percent recycling; even at 100% recycling rates, plastic bags still require less — 7.0 to paper’s 9.1. What does that mean to me and you? Plastic bags just take less energy to create, which is significant because so much of our energy comes from dirty sources like coal and petroleum.

The best way to go? A reusable bag, not a plastic bag. Anya Hindmarch’s wildly popular “I am Not a Plastic Bag” tote is helping give the reusable bag some sex appeal.

Paper bags or plastic bags: the conclusion
Both paper and plastic bags require lots and lots of resources and energy, and proper recycling requires due diligence from both consumer and municipal waste collector or private recycling company, so there are a lot of variables that can lead to low recycling rates.

Ultimately, neither paper nor plastic bags are the best choice; we think choosing reusable canvas bags instead is the way to go. From an energy standpoint, according to this Australian study, canvas bags are 14 times better than plastic bags and 39 times better than paper bags, assuming that canvas bags get a good workout and are used 500 times during their life cycle. Happy shopping!

Plastic bags are getting banned more and more. Read on in TreeHugger…
TreeHugger Picks: Ban the Bag
IKEA Bans Plastic Bags for Good
China Launches Crackdown on Plastic Bags
China’s Plastic Bag Ban is Working, So Far
San Francisco To Ban Plastic Shopping Bags
Whole Foods Bans the Bag
Bag Ban Phase 2: All Retail Stores
Wait for Us! Australia Wants to Ban Plastic Bags Too
Ban or No Ban: The Debate over Plastic Bags in LA (UPDATED)

More about reusable bags and shopping bags
Q&A: Retail Carry Bags – Paper or Plastic?
I’m Not an Ethical Plastic Bag
Anya Hindmarch’s Carrier Bag
The Mini Maxi Shopper: the Reusable Bag you won’t Forget
Reusable Shopping Bag Madness in Australia
Bring Your Own: Reusable Bags , Cups & More
Minimalist/Modernist Reusable Tote Bags
Bags of Change: Carrot Better Than Stick

Disclaimer:

This is not my work, I’m merely disseminating must-read info. I also must say Colin did a very great job with this article. I might put my time into writing articles of this exhaustiveness, detail and length. Not until I’m out of National Service though.

The Cosmic Perspective

The Cosmic Perspective

© Neil deGrasse Tyson
From Natural History magazine, April 2007

________________________________________________________

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [ their ] low contracted prejudices.

—James Ferguson, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, And Made Easy To Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics(1757)

Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest large galaxy lies two and a half million light-years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or whether atoms exist, James Ferguson’s enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true. Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday.

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker . Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity’s place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated. By those measures, most citizens of industrialized nations do quite well.

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God kill in the name of their nation’s needs or wants.

When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land, with consequences that our children and our children’s children will witness and pay for with their health and well-being.

And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves.

I occasionally forget those things because, however big the world is—in our hearts, our minds, and our outsize atlases—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: a broken toy, a scraped knee, a schoolyard bully. Adults know that kids have no clue what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective.

As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Apparently not. And the evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.

Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered each other because of them.

* * *

Back in February 2000, the newly rebuilt Hayden Planetarium featured a space show called “Passport to the Universe,” which took visitors on a virtual zoom from New York City to the edge of the cosmos. En route the audience saw Earth, then the solar system, then the 100 billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy shrink to barely visible dots on the planetarium dome.

Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was things that make people feel insignificant. I never knew one could specialize in such a field. The guy wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. “Passport to the Universe,” he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness he had ever experienced.

How could that be? Every time I see the space show (and others we’ve produced), I feel alive and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three-pound human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe.

Allow me to suggest that it’s the professor, not I, who has misread nature. His ego was too big to begin with, inflated by delusions of significance and fed by cultural assumptions that human beings are more important than everything else in the universe.

In all fairness to the fellow, powerful forces in society leave most of us susceptible. As was I . . . until the day I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who—or what—is actually in charge.

From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly 4 billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.

* * *

I know what you’re thinking: we’re smarter than bacteria.

No doubt about it, we’re smarter than every other living creature that ever walked, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that? We cook our food. We compose poetry and music. We do art and science. We’re good at math. Even if you’re bad at math, you’re probably much better at it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours. Try as they might, primatologists will never get a chimpanzee to learn the multiplication table or do long division.

If small genetic differences between us and our fellow apes account for our vast difference in intelligence, maybe that difference in intelligence is not so vast after all.

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee’s. To such a species our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door. These creatures would study Stephen Hawking (who occupies the same endowed professorship once held by Newton at the University of Cambridge) because he’s slightly more clever than other humans, owing to his ability to do theoretical astrophysics and other rudimentary calculations in his head.

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we’re distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.

* * *

Need more ego softeners? Simple comparisons of quantity, size, and scale do the job well.

Take water. It’s simple, common, and vital. There are more molecules of water in an eight-ounce cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world’s oceans. Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth’s observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were. That means the universe acts like a giant time machine: the farther away you look, the further back in time you see—back almost to the beginning of time itself. Within that horizon of reckoning, cosmic evolution unfolds continuously, in full view.

Want to know what we’re made of? Again, the cosmic perspective offers a bigger answer than you might expect. The chemical elements of the universe are forged in the fires of high-mass stars that end their lives in stupendous explosions, enriching their host galaxies with the chemical arsenal of life as we know it. The result? The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.

* * *

Yes, we are stardust. But we may not be of this Earth. Several separate lines of research, when considered together, have forced investigators to reassess who we think we are and where we think we came from.

First, computer simulations show that when a large asteroid strikes a planet, the surrounding areas can recoil from the impact energy, catapulting rocks into space. From there, they can travel to—and land on—other planetary surfaces. Second, microorganisms can be hardy. Some survive the extremes of temperature, pressure, and radiation inherent in space travel. If the rocky flotsam from an impact hails from a planet with life, microscopic fauna could have stowed away in the rocks’ nooks and crannies. Third, recent evidence suggests that shortly after the formation of our solar system, Mars was wet, and perhaps fertile, even before Earth was.

Those findings mean it’s conceivable that life began on Mars and later seeded life on Earth, a process known as panspermia . So all earthlings might—just might—be descendants of Martians.

Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.

Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the “ multiverse ,” in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos.

* * *

The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it’s more than just what you know. It’s also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.

The cosmic perspective is humble.

The cosmic perspective is spiritual — even redemptive — but not religious.

The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.

The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told.

The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.

The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.

The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.

The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.

The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.

The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

* * *

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.

Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.

During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it’s fun to do. But there’s a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their “low contracted prejudices.” And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective.

________________________________________________________

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. His most recent book, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries (W.W. Norton, 2007), is a collection of his favorite Natural History essays from the past dozen years.

Here’s the URL: http://research.amnh.org/~tyson/18magazines_cosmic.php

The Age of Scientific Ignorance: Evolution (Part 1)

I write this with utmost concern for mankind’s progress in science, technology and ultimately, our future. As such, I shall attempt, the best I can, as balanced as I can, as logical as I can and as knowledgeable as I can to answer very hmmm significant questions in Evolution.

First up, the most classic of all creationalist arguments,

1. Evolution is merely a theory, and not fact.

Science is a rigorous methodology. A scientist would start off by hypothesizing, speculating about a certain phenomenon or event, and comes up with an experiment that would be most suitable to testing his hypothesis. However, this by no means secures the validity of the evidence! There could well be other unknown processes that could be at work that may not have been taken into consideration by the scientist in the planning of his experiment, due to his ignorance, which may cause his results to be flawed or inconclusive. Alternatively, there could be known processes that could be at work that play a more complicated, complex influence on the results than previously known; an influence that could be as of now still poorly understood. Should a hypothesis be proven wrong by the results, the scientist would have to make another one accordingly. Often, the failure of a certain experiment’s results to confirm the hypothesis yields as much information as the converse. It is the very nature of this methodology that allows scientists to come up with reasonable, if not excellent, results from their experiments and therefore, sound, logical, careful, insightful implications as to how a particular process or thing works.

As Richard Feynman, a renowned physicist, described science: imagine the entire universe as a gigantic, but invisible, chess game. At first glance, the moves that the pieces make do not make sense at all. However, through continued observation and the process of trial-and-error and hypotheses. The rules of the game slowly become elucidated. The Bishop moves diagonally, while the Rook …etc etc. Occasionally, a move is made that is totally unexpected, for example, castling. If there is no contradiction to the discovered “laws”, then this discovery would merely be an add-on to the rules. However, if there is a contradiction, then the rules are re-written. As you can see, theory is not as uncertain as people expect. Scientific theory is the culmination of decades or even centuries of scientific trial and error, and progressively closes in on the true nature of things. While Science may never finally grasp in its hands, absolute certainty, just as how it would be impossible to know of the phenomenon of Castling if it wasn’t observed directly or had no observable influence on other processes that can be observed relatively easier (second-degree), it provides us with an answer that is the closest to the truth, based on logical, well-reasoned, evidential intellectual process.

In the case of the theory of Evolution, it is a hard-standing theory that has withstood the test of continual evidence. Microevolution has been replicated in the laboratories. Evolution of the peppered moth towards increased melanism and back has occurred within human lifetimes. “Missing links”, otherwise known as transitional fossils, for example, the Tiktaalik (a lobed-finned fish which had basic wrist and finger bones; a transition between a fish and an amphibian) and more renowned, the Archaeopteryx (a feathered, winged dinosaur), are constantly being found at paleontological sites worldwide. If, suddenly, a hugely contradictory and valid source of evidence against Evolution, and Natural Selection for that matter, were to appear, then a better theory would have to be concocted to accommodate the new evidence, the evidence would have to be better scrutinized for its validity and its true implications or/and the evidence would have to be refined or interpreted in a different ways.

Theory may not be absolute fact in that is inherently not absolutely certain. However, it does not negate its validity under certain, if not most or all, circumstances. Every facet of human technology is based upon such theories. Medicine, engineering, electric applications, nuclear energy etc. It would be entirely ignorant to say that all the miracles of science that has been exploited to the whim of man is working on a non-factual basis, for how else would it work in the first place?

I shall be refining this article as I learn more and think more about it.