He Kept Us Safe, Redux

In these crisis filled waning days of the Bush 43 administration, among the manifold efforts to assess his legacy are a dwindling number of brave little recruits in his willful ignorance army sifting the debris of his multiple catastrophes for a few scraps of anything that could even remotely be considered positive.

One of the shiny nuggets they have turned up and repeatedly pointed out is that “he kept us safe.” It’s trivial to point out, as many have done, that this claim is a grossly misleading interpretation of his record. In fact it is a baldfaced lie: one of the considerations that the responses to the “he kept us safe” chorus fail to point out strongly enough is that as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, a title he and his disciples seem to have fetishized without absorbing its implications, he is responsible for placing U.S. troops in harms way and for the casualties suffered by those troops (in Iraq alone, over 4200 dead and over 43,000 wounded, with no official tally for civilian contractors).

It has been vigorously argued, of course, that those casualties prevented much worse consequences, an argument slipping ever deeper into solipsism and fantasy as the harsh reality and colossal scale of the Iraq debacle solidifies. Nevertheless, as Commander in Chief, he is responsible for the safety of those he leads - that is the nature of the military chain of command, its ultimate meaning, its special hell (for those with a conscience), the reason for those salutes as he struts down the tarmac.

Bush elected to place those troops in harms way, many of them young and idealistic, and with limited background to judge the virtues and shortcomings of the orders they followed, and they died or were wounded under his command. He (presumably) considered the costs and benefits and chose to risk their lives.

They were boys and girls and husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and most of them would have fit right in on the 90th floor of the World Trade Center. They were Americans. They were us. I am sickened at the apparent willingness to consider the issue of their safety as somehow deeply discounted because they had 18 weeks of training, or deposited a signing bonus, or knew the ins and outs of an armored Humvee, or were gung-ho. Their military commitment especially obligated their military chain of command: “I will trust you with my safety so that, in turn, those that I protect will be safe”. They were Americans and their commander knowingly put them in harms way and whatever else you say about him and his motivations, whatever history eventually says about him and the quality of his decisions, they were us and he did NOT keep them safe.

Is PEOTUS Obama THAT Smart?

What I see as one of the brilliant and remarkable accomplishments of Republicans, picking up momentum with Ronald Reagan and extending at least through the election of George W. Bush and a Republican dominated legislature in 2004 and the continued reddening of a swath of the deep south in the 2008 election, is persuading an enormous sector of the electorate to, demonstrably, vote against their own interests.

Republicans did this in many ways including standard outright misrepresentation of their policies (lying), but I would suggest also primarily by methodically establishing a misleading (a charitable assessment) kneejerk association between a series of social icons and symbols and their party and candidates. In essence, many Republican candidates were campaigning with an invisible twin (e.g., the white baby Jesus driving a 4WD pickup truck loaded with stacks of tax-free cash, swaddled in the American flag, cradling a handgun in His lap, and reciting the pledge of allegiance – you get the idea). In the voting booth, it was the twin for whom the lever was pulled (now that’s an anachronistic metaphor, eh?).

How does one change this situation in which much of the electorate has become comfortable with and habituated to voting against their own interests, in which this type of voting has become structural? The evidence of the past 30 years unfortunately and perversely strongly suggests that it cannot be addressed effectively by simply developing, articulating, and running on a platform that is in the interest of the majority of the electorate. I think it is an enormous understatement to say that PEOTUS Obama is very smart, but in the face of the unprecedented array of converging long-term crises and disasters that the Bush administration is bequeathing him, a big part of his job has to be to convince a majority of the electorate to vote in their own interests over the short term while these crises and disasters play out. As obvious as this sounds, those structural iconic and symbolic associations by much of the electorate will make it extraordinarily difficult to achieve.

Enter the current brouhaha over PEOTUS Obama’s selection of Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. Now as a lifelong devout agnostic I admit I have a visceral negative reaction to Pastor Warren and his noxious brand of evangelism. And many others also have very good reason to find Pastor Warren an appalling choice for this role. I suspect that you’ll now see where I am going with this: what I wonder is whether that very smart PEOTUS Obama is cleverly and strategically working to coopt some of that iconic and symbolic association, to put it into the service of having the electorate vote in their own interests again. Is he THAT smart?

In Which I Channel Malthus

It might be relatively easy to dismiss mockery of President George W. Bush, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and their ilk for episodes of apparent “airborne fact finding” (or aff as I prefer to call it) as simply taking these events out of context for either political or comedy fodder. (The archetypes of making an aff of oneself are Bush’s flyover of New Orleans, and Rumsfeld’s August 2006 take on the Iraq security situation). I can’t help but wonder, however, whether there is more to this than isolated incidents, or even broader evidence of a flyover presidency. Rather, I am beginning to suspect that there is a wholesale willful ignorance afoot here, mixed with a dim recognition that the common experience of aircraft vistas can serve as a useful means to transmit hollow messages brimming with naught but ideology. Exhibit B is Linda Chavez’ stunningly moronic AFF-based analysis of population statistics on Weekend America in December 2007.

A more recent example that seems to me to be consistent with aff analysis is advanced by Michael Anissimov and bolstered by Tsteel. Basically these arguments, arguments that I have seen in nearly limitless and infuriating permutations, are little more than, “whoa, look out the window of my plane, all that empty land, all that sunlight. Dude, it’s all cool!” Tsteels agreement with Anissimov’s claim that concern about overpopulation is a selection effect based on people living in crowded cities, is patently and quantitatively unsupported by his aff argument. Showing that there are regions of this country where population density is higher and regions where it is lower, imagining that somehow all the population might be spread out so that both yellow and blue regions turn green, and from that sunnily concluding that there are enough resources on this finite planet to support six billion, rushing headlong to ten billion, people is sophomoric at best.

Randomly selected from among a vast list of issues this conclusion ignores are the additional resource impacts of those formerly yellow regions turned green (shouldn’t our experience with the suburbanization and exurbanization of America have at least a bit of a role in considering how this might work out?), studies showing that dense urban areas can be more resource efficient in many ways than less dense communities, and a quantitative and scientifically/technologically grounded consideration of the many, many parameters beyond map colors that determine the population carrying capacity of the earth and the quality of life of its inhabitants.

Technology, ah yes technology. It has been a wonder at, for instance, delivering porn to your desktop, engineering Segway scooters to search for a problem, developing Humvees that can lay siege to nearly any landscape, and distributing obscenely large high definition television screens to homes across our great nation. At reducing the consumption of finite resources, um, not so much. In my own view, this is only partly due to the market failures that many other commenters have identified. It is also due in large part to the second law of thermodynamics – an inviolable principle that so many of the technology pollyannas have chosen to ignore, the brick wall to end all brick walls, dead in the path of all those schemes that propose to replace, joule-for-joule, the extraordinarily low entropy and high energy density, and efficient and easy to transport energy source of fossil fuel with high entropy and low energy density, low efficiency and difficult to transport energy alternatives. It’s all so reminiscent of that long ago watershed, when a president came before a nation in crisis and asked, not for sacrifice, but shopping. Our resource pollyannas tell us that we’ll be able to shop ourselves out of this one as well, that we can plan on consuming in the same gluttonous way we have for the past century, that by buying more we’re saving more, that we live in a Wal-Mart biosphere whose shelves will be miraculously stocked and pennies knocked off the price while we sleep, a more absurd and fundamentally flawed prospect than President Bush’s own prescription.

The elephant in the room as the Hubbert peak passes, as ocean fish stocks collapse, as fresh water becomes a battleground, as media and corporate interests design, spread and buttress a culture of consumption even for the impoverished, as ugly anitbiotic resistant strains of microrganisms multiply, as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations relentlessly exponentiate, as the global arms market continues to boom, as extinctions accelerate, as the economics of global food supplies continue to undermine the meager foundation that has kept many millions just this side of starvation (not to mention the many millions it has abandoned to that horrific fate) really IS becoming how many people is too many? As the most extraordinarily successful large life form that has ever existed on the planet, we had better start asking the very painful question whether it is possible to be too successful. I still remember what I learned over the course of a few days from a little jar of nematodes and pablum with a tight fitting lid, a failed science project from many years ago: the problem with biological systems and finite resources is that they always ask that question about success – and then answer it - if someone else doesn’t ask it first.

AUMF

A modest proposal: let's name the Wall Street bailout legislation in a more illuminating fashion. I think a good fit is "Abandonment of the US to Monetary Fraud", or AUMF for short. It really is all of a piece now isn't it, just bookends on eight years that have unravelled a country?

Supply Side Follies

I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just stand back and marvel at an apparently inexhaustible supply, a veritable white hole of folly. As the current phase of the mortgage related asset hurricane gathered strength, as I watched my 401K hemorrhaging like a stuck pig (albeit, sans lipstick), and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced the need for a bailout plan, I thought to myself:

"OK, surely, during the last year and a half that this crisis has been brewing and building, some very smart, conscientious people - I mean there have to be a FEW of those, surreptitious competency insurgents in the Bush administration's political hack/ideologue corps, somewhere in the government, right? - had seen the same storm clouds on the horizon that I'd seen, and had been spending brutal hours piecing together contingency plans for a spectrum of potential crises that could arise."

I anticipated that Paulson would roll out a mildly modified version of one of these ideas, perhaps tweaked a bit to a few finer details of the storm's actual landfall. That is, a plan presumably pretty well thought out and pretty much fully formed.

The next frackin' paragraph:

And then I read it. All three pages. Three frackin' pages! Three frackin' pages that asked for $700,000,000,000 and provided not one frackin' word about how this plan would be implemented! Three frackin' pages that a frackin' presidential candidate, a frackin' presidential candidate who insisted that he was playing a vital role in addressing the crisis, a frackin' presidential candidate who insisted on sticking his big frackin' presumptuous presidential nose into negotiations on the proposal and gumming them up, hadn't bothered to READ, though he was flapping his big frackin' presumptuous presidential gums about it. Three frackin' pages that included an unconscionable, unconstitutional "no oversight" provision. Three frackin' pages! I've written frackin' proposals for $500 that were three times as long as Paulson's Nigerian email scam and which required explicit implementation and oversight plans.

Seven hundred billion dollars! OK, you know when I buy a cup of coffee, and let's say its a liberal elitist frou-frou four dollar cup of coffee, I might get a penny back in change and I'll leave it in the little penny cup on the counter. The penny equivalent on seven hundred billion dollars is $1,750,000,000; that is, the penny cup change on what this proposal asked for is over a BILLION dollars.

Ooh, ooh, and then WHY, exactly, seven hundred billion dollars? OK, there's this funny scene in the movie Twins (I've also been told there's a somewhat similar scene in the series Taxi) that's set up when Danny DeVito’s character accidentally comes into possession of a complicated device. DeVito’s character has no idea what the device is or its value but nevertheless hatches a scheme to extort money in exchange for it. Sitting in front of a phone preparing to place his extortion call, he writes down and auditions a series of wildly varying numbers, quickly crossing them off as he attempts to home in on the best sounding "right" extortion amount. Very amusing fiction, right? Then, THIS is what a treasury department spokesperson actually, honest-to-god, said about the seven hundred billion dollars:

“It’s not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Um, what about 39 biggity-big fatillion galillion? Isn't that a really large number? God help us.

So anyway, all this and much more to be disgusted with, to be nauseated by in the mortgage related asset crisis has already been noted by other commentators and in most cases much more articulately and humorously. Yet for a week or so I still had a vague and nagging sense that I was missing something, that there was something hiding in plain sight in all this. And finally, it dawned on me: the Paulson proposal left out the budget it needs for pallets and shrink wrap!

Maybe Roy is on to something.

Update: Roy Zimmerman has taken down his song from YouTube that was linked above. It was his "Impeachment Song" and I suspect his attorneys counseled him to remove it, touching on the subject of beheading as it did. Find it and listen to it!

Drill baby drill

“Drill, baby, drill!”, perhaps the most memorable slogan of the Republican convention. How odd that those conventioneers so blithely and enthusiastically chose to evoke the horror movie title, “Kill, baby, kill”! IMDB.com lists two movies associated with that title, the first a movie also known as “House of the Living Dead”, the second whose plot is initiated by an unmistakable symbol of greed, an autopsy that reveals a gold coin imbedded in the heart of the deceased. Can it possibly be a mere accident, an unfortunate coincidence, that these messages were broadcast to the attentive by their mindless chant? I think not: I suspect these were uncontrollable howls from their very foundations, from deep in their souls. Would that we were paying attention.

Oil: A Bleak Vision

The critiques of my position on the current oil crisis at pandagon - positing that we have trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure dedicated to an oil-fueled civilization and so imagining essentially immediate and drastic change in our oil consumption patterns is both imprudent and unthinkable - while possibly correct, a point I would love to be able to concede (I desperately want my daughter to grow up in a world that is not a nightmare of privation and desperation), depend significantly on a basic assumption. I find that assumption inconsistent with a detailed understanding of the fundamental principles governing the systems we are discussing. First, I'll give you my punch line and then make the argument, so that if you decide you'd rather go get rickrolled on another website you don't have to continue reading this:

The mathematics of exponential functions are ruthless.

The assumption that the critiques make is that there are some capacities in our system that will allow us to undergo a slow transformation (slow being one or two generations) from the unsustainable oil-fueled culture we have built. For example, some of the capacities that have been referred to include rapid spin-up of alternative oil equivalent fuel sources, corporate self interest that controls oil supplies in a prudent fashion, and what I would characterize as moderate conservation efforts. And perhaps the more important point is that these capacities are very likely an inescapable requirement for a slow transformation. Evidence strongly suggests that the situation we are currently encountering is consistent with the peak oil model - the infamous Hubbert's peak. In this analysis an exponentially increasing demand for a limited resource produces an exponential decay - a crash - in the availability of the resource. Notably, this crash depends simply on an interaction between supply and demand - it doesn't for instance take into account potentially disastrous external events, for instance, conventional - or, God forbid - nuclear military conflagration in the Middle East. The only way to cushion the ruthless mathematics of such a crash is through capacities external to the resource such as those identified above.

Since slow transformation may ultimately depend on the external capacities, these should be critically examined.

1. There are currently no obvious technologies that can be used to produce alternative oil equivalent fuel sources. The unforgiving and unassailable principles of physics strongly suggest that developing them at a level sufficient for a slow transformation is unlikely, at best. We have a long history of imagining that pressing problems will yield to relatively quick technological fixes, only to be repeatedly disappointed: unmetered electrical power from nuclear plants? fusion? corn ethanol? Energy principles are extraordinarily well understood in the scientific and engineering communities and there just isn't a lot of low hanging fruit waiting to be picked.

2. Imagining that corporate self interest will play a significant role ignores that corporations are probably singularly incapable of addressing issues such as these. Our free-market model rewards corporations based on criteria that almost without exception do not include thoughtful long-term stewardship of resources. Is there any more evidence necessary than the fuel-efficiency obstructionist history of U.S. domestic automakers, now facing bankruptcy? The sub-prime mortgage debacle? Corporations are at least as likely as individuals to act in fundamentally irrational ways that prove their own destruction.

3. Conservation. Aye, that's the rub. Assuming my analyses above are correct (obviously, debatable), can conservation play a key role in a slow transformation? That becomes simply a question of whether the conservation rate is sufficient to offset the exponential crash associated with Hubbert's peak, and that is the heart of my argument. From what I understand about the mathematics of these principles the rate of conservation suggested by slow transformation (people being more careful about when and how they use their cars, people replacing 25 mpg vehicles with 50 mpg vehicles over the next decade, redesigning and rebuilding a less oil-dependent infrastructure) is insufficient to offset the rate of collapse predicted by Hubbert's peak.

The critics of my argument point out that because of deep infrastructure investments we cannot expect a drastic and immediate change from our current oil-dependence, that we need to approach this in a gentle and orderly fashion . The problem with this critique is that those prehistoric forests that produced the oil fields we are currently sucking dry just don't care that you live in a suburb 50 miles from your workplace, that your food supplies need to travel an average of 1500 miles to reach your plate. The solar constant of 1340 W/m^2 just doesn't care that our agriculture, our food supply, depends on climate conditions in the mid-west grain belt and the Asian rice belt, that much of agriculture depends on fresh water supplied by a slowly melting summer snow-pack. The second law of thermodynamics just doesn't care that you have to pay 5 dollars for a gallon of gas or 10 dollars, or 100 dollars, that you are wishing or praying as hard as you can for a miraculous new source of energy. And guess what? Those players win by default: they are inescapable principles and they JUST DON'T CARE.

I understand my vision is a very bleak one. I hope against hope that it is deeply flawed. But it is insufficient to argue against it simply because it would prove problematic for those who are now ensconced in an oil-dependent infrastructure. The models and principles underlying the vision are orthogonal to those considerations. The black plague that killed perhaps 75 million people simply didn't care that the civilizations of the 14th century were built on an infrastructure that fed the devastation, and oil simply doesn't care that our civilization is built on an infrastructure that has some potential to surpass that horrific history. The mathematics of exponential functions are ruthless.

Boumediene v Bush

The Boumediene v. Bush decision has been denounced for a variety of reasons, but perhaps most viscerally through maintaining, as Justice Scalia put it, “It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” I understand that for a variety of practical and political reasons, and because of the utter irrationality of the electorate on matters of life and death as well as its mathematical/statistical ineptitude (ala the lottery is a tax on people who don’t understand statistics), no-one in a position of public responsibility can afford to become Vice President Cheney’s alter ego on this matter, thus I have decided to speak the unspeakable: “So?”

Americans currently die at a rate of somewhere in the neigborhood of 3 million per year and among those are a whole range of preventable causes: traffic related deaths ~50,000; gun-related homicides ~20,000; smoking related deaths ~500,000; alcohol related deaths (though, admittedly, it would seem to a casual observer that this category has significant overlap with the preceding categories) ~ 250,000; obesity; medical errors; industrial accidents; and on and on. The terrible events of September 11, 2001 – knock on wood, to date, the ne plus ultra of terrorist acts - caused around 3,000 deaths. Our military response to it has cost well over 4,000 deaths of American soldiers and a toll so staggering to Iraqis that some Panglossian supporters of the Iraq policy stake out their position with sunny low end estimates of “only” 100,000.

Now, lets briefly consider that extraordinarily straightforward policies could immediately be implemented that would save many times the number of lives lost in the terrorist incidents on September 11, 2001: for instance, impose a national speed limit of 35 miles per hour. The statistics on this are unequivocal, unassailable. But, of course, that would be considered an utterly absurd proposition. What is it about our out-of-whack psyches that makes those thousands of bloody, violent and needless traffic deaths and the many more crippling injuries something less than terrorizing? I’m serious: really, what is it?

My point, if somehow you’ve missed it, is this: yes, perhaps – perhaps - some Americans will die because of Boumediene v. Bush, but we always accept tradeoffs between safety and other considerations, like getting to Wal-Mart five minutes sooner. Notwithstanding the intractable corner into which the Bush administration insisted on painting the country in its determination to go to the dark side in its treatment of prisoners in the Global War on Terror and that ultimately led to this Supreme Court decision, and notwithstanding the hypocrisy of neoconservatives expounding on the the hale and brave character and willingness to sacrifice of the American public while simultaneously advocating for cowardly anti-democratic policies that, in the end, cannot assure their fetishized absolute “safety” from the carefully cirumscribed forms of terrorism that involve melanin bearing perpetrators, doesn’t preserving one of the most fundamental rights in the historical development of the rule of law warrant some tradeoffs? Come on Americans – lets reach down deep and show a little of that “home of the brave” for a change. Just a little.

Coping With High Gas Prices

So, NPR , you want to know how I’m coping with high gasoline prices. When there was a frenzy to buy into the suburban fantasy of the country micro-estate that coincidentally requires commuters to drive 25 or 50 or sometimes, insanely, 200 miles a day, I quietly declined and settled for a house that was less “perfect” but that is very convenient to my workplace and shopping. When so many of those in my community seemed to be Hummering-up in some sort of ritual of purification by gasoline consumption, I made an effort to get in the habit of walking or bicycling for as many of my errands and trips as possible. When I understood the enormity of our trade and federal budget deficits and the economic risks inherent in those, I wrote to my representatives and legislators asking them to address the issues (clearly, the least effective of my coping strategies). When RV’s and four-wheelers and snowmobiles and speed-boats were all the rage, I cultivated interests and recreational activities that didn’t require the combustion of fossil fuels. I taught myself to be satisfied with the slightly unkempt look of a lawn after it is cut with a push mower and I thought of the chore of lawnmowing as part of my exercise regimen. When I needed a new car, I made sure the one I selected had at least reasonable fuel efficiency. I steadfastly supported and voted in favor of public transit, and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure in my community and region. My coping was over years ago.

As much as it sounds as though I am gloating, in fact I am not and, indeed, I am by turns, dispirited, more than a little scared, and contrite. I understand that our fates -mine and the Hummer driver's- are entwined and, you see, it was obvious to me many years ago that the day of reckoning with our oil consumption was coming very quickly. I think we are in for a long and perhaps very painful readjustment to this new reality and that we have been terribly betrayed - betrayed by the selfish indifference of our policy makers, captains of industry and agriculture, national leaders, media, including you, NPR , and, finally, by people like me who were troubled by what they saw but just not quite sure enough of themselves to genuinely sound the alarm. That betrayal lost us the opportunity to really do something about the situation - to do something when there was time and it might have softened the blow. And I have no illusions but that now we will all of us pay a very dear price for our gluttony and our silence.

Bailouts and Myths

Following the Bear-Stearns bailout by the Fed this week, never again, never again, can I possibly hear the arguments of America’s free-market corporatocracy (AFMC) without the deepest sense of their utter hypocrisy and lack of anything even remotely approaching a reflective outlook, or for that matter, a conscience.

During the last 14 years Bear-Stearns CEO, James E. Cayne, led that company to the brink of disaster. The precipice is so deep that a panicky federal reserve board determined that a Bear-Stearns plunge could drag much more than just that one assemblage of greedy bastards over the edge with it, and warranted what is, at its root, a multibillion dollar publicly funded bailout.

Forbes reported in 2007 that the 5 year compensation for James E. Cayne was more than 150 million dollars. It is not unreasonable to estimate that during his tenure as CEO, a tenure in which his leadership set the groundwork for the ruin that prompted the Fed response, Mr. Cayne was compensated to the tune of about 300 million dollars: $300,000,000; 3x10^8 greenbacks! The standard argument of the AFMC for CEO compensation like this at a level of about 500 times the median household income, is the “extraordinary value” they create for their companies and the economy in general.

Where is that “extraordinary value” now? Where’s the perfection of the free market that “punishes” economic inefficiency? Where are the demands that business operate free of government intervention? I’ll tell you where: greedily reaching into the public pocket for a post hoc endorsement of business decisions that were ruinous and that, not incidentally, ballooned the obscene fortunes of executives who pursued policies that not only threatened their companies, but the entire economy.

I understand why the Fed had to do what it did – desperately scrambling to avert, or at least moderate the looming economic disaster, and that failure to act threatens the economic well-being of so many more than the 14,000 Bear-Stearns employees – but PLEASE, PLEASE, can’t we finally stop this stupid charade that recklessly unregulated American business practices, that obscene executive compensation, is in everyone’s interest. Can’t we please see that business, far from wanting no government intervention, desperately seeks government intervention on behalf of the rich and powerful. Can’t we please finally dispense with the myths of American business and on the way work toward something that does actually operate in the public interest?

Whence Oil

So now Karl Rove opines that the policies of his political opponents may push oil to $200/barrel specifically because of their possible Iraq policies:

Rove:

"If we were to give up Iraq with the third largest oil reserves in the world to the control of an Al Qaida regime or to the control of Iran, don’t you think $200 a barrel oil would have a cost to the American economy?"

But it's important to recognize that oil did NOT cross the $100/barrel threshold simply because of the Iraq disaster. A range of reasons, including the inevitable peaking of the logistic function and the blind eye that has been turned to that issue by government, industry and consumers alike, and a deficit-crippled, reeling US economy coupled with exploding competition for oil resources from other economies while the dollar is deeply sagging are contributing to send oil in the $200/barrel direction NO MATTER what happens in Iraq.

At EVERY juncture the willfully ignorant policies of this administration and its enablers in the legislature and the electorate have relentlessly pulled us into this death spiral with our addiction to oil. Rove and his desperate band must know this and must understand at some level their abject complicity in, if not active pursuit of so many aspects of this situation. I suspect and as always, they are trying to lay the ground so that when the worst inevitably happens and the associated suffering ensues, he and his fellow hacks can blame their political enemies. Sic semper propagandists.

Sand Dunes and Science

Part of what has angered me so much about the “Intelligent Design” (nee Creationism) movement, is their willful and ruthless exploitation of the general public’s weak or non-existent scientific literacy. There is plenty of blame to go around why this strategy can be effective, not least the somewhat careless and historically established jargon scientists use (a common thread revolving around the meaning of the term “theory”, which is baldly misrepresented by IDers, but also not as clean as some of the scientist rebuttals suggest), but that is not the purpose of this comment. Rather, it has occurred to me that the idea of scientific principles (laws, theories) and their relationships with data, experiments, and observations desperately needs an analogy that frames for the scientifically illiterate the nature of the critiques that that are mounted by the IDers against the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

The analogy of the type of scientific theory represented by TENS that occurs to me is a sand dune. Just as a sand dune is composed of many grains of sand, so TENS is a broad structure composed of a vast array of data, experiments, applications, observations, confirmed predictions, and dependent relationships with other well established branches of science. Just as moving, or removing a few grains of sand among the million billion that compose a sand dune does not change its fundamental nature, so changing our understanding or interpretations of some of the data (a fossil here, a species there) or, pointing out one circumstance (a flagellum, for instance) that is not yet contained in the framework of TENS does not even remotely suggest the imminent collapse of the entire structure.

If I might, the analogy goes further: Scientific theories of the form represented by TENS can shift their shape over long periods of time as very large amounts of data are amassed, just as sand dunes can grow or shrink as wind adds and steals sand. And over long periods of time, grain by grain, dunes can merge to become larger structures just as theories can be subsumed by those that are more fundamental (A real sore point with me is the gross misrepresentation of the Relativity/Quantum Mechanics revolution at the beginning of the 20th century – these new scientific theories emphatically did not cause the abandonment of the physical theories of Newton, Maxwell and Boltzmann. Rather, those older theories were subsumed as special cases of the new more fundamental theories, as they had to be because they had been so well established with an array of data, experiments, applications, observations, and confirmed predictions) . But such a massive structure is persistent in the landscape, just as TENS must persist because of its extraordinary ability to organize our understanding of living systems.

Taking a teaspoon of sand from the side of a sand dune and flinging it into the wind doesn’t change the fundamental nature of a sand dune, and pointing out the biochemical complexity of the flagellum in a small class of organisms does not change the fundamental structure that organizes a profound understanding of living systems. It’s important to point out the scale of the critique ID has mounted to TENS and the sand dune analogy does that: they are picking out one or two grains of sand and ignoring the sand dune looming on their horizon. That’s not science.