The Risk of Progress, a Hypothetical Problem

Imagine you had a solution you believed could indefinitely supply energy to all of humanity at 1/1000 of today's cost for alternative energy sources. The only problem was that you believed there was a fifty/fifty chance that when initiating the solution, it might instantly destroy a vast swath of life on earth, potentially setting us back thousands of years. Once initiated, the energy source would be just as safe as wind power. Would you flip the switch? If not, at what odds would you?

In Defence of the Brontosaurus

Brontosaurus or apatosaurus? The great question that mystifies us all. Have you ever been corrected and told "brontosaurus is the old name, now its called apatosaurus!". 20 or so years ago this happened to me and I thought, fine ok, so it's apatosaurus. Just the other day, my 5 year old son and one of his friends were engaged in the same conversation. My, oh, my, I thought, the brontosaurus still lives on!

My curiosity was peeked. Why was brontosaurus the "incorrect" name? The brontosaurus, probably lacking any sophisticated system of symbolism and extinct since...oh...150 million years, couldn't care less. So what popular misconception were paleontologist fighting in their insistence it should be named apatosaurus? It must be some great misconception since apatosaurus falls off the tongue like an old piece of jello and brontosaurus thunders from the guts. At least in most Germanic and Romance languages, brontosaurus seems just the right name for a herbivore the size of this ancient beast.

Wikipedia...tack, tack, tack...ah...bronotosaurus an obsolete synonym of apatosaurus. Obsolete? Well, it can't be that obsolete given the discussion between two 5 years old kids anno 2010. After a little further reading, I find out that the controversy surrounds an issue of incorrect differentiation. Apparently a specimen named Apatosaurus ajax was hypothesized in 1877. 2 years later, another species is described under the name of Brontosaurus. But in 1903, it was deemed that the two were so similar that they aught to be considered the same genus. Therefore the Bronotsaurus was renamed Apatosaurus excelsus. The Apatosaurus might even have simply been a juvile Brontosaurus.

The Principle of Priority, article 23 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature dictates that the name first used for a taxon (a group of organisms judged to be a unit) in a published piece is to be considered the senior synonym. Other names are deemed junior synonyms and should not be used. The case of the Brontosaur versus the Apotasaur seems to clearly fall under this rule. Case closed! I mean, If I go along and name something Jabberwocky and the next day someone else decides to name it the Cheshire Cat, just to grab the glory. That's just not proper! And we need some kind of rule after all to remain taxonomically sound. Right?

Hold on. Further reading reveals that both specimens were assembled and named by the great but sometimes careless paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. So the fairness argument goes out the window. And honestly, the fairness argument is weak anyway. If someone manages to find a word which sound qualities better captures the thingness of a thing, that's the word to go for. We don't call a thump a pling after all. Thingness may we ambiguous, but clearly that massive heap of bones, that lumbering quadropede is best described as a thunder lizard (Brontosaurus), not a deceptive lizard (Apatosaurus).

I'm a software engineer and I don't take taxonomy lightly. Accuracy and clarity in class structures are important. We need guidelines for how to name things. But sometimes an ornery beaurocratic stick-to-the-rules attitude can cause more damage than good. Brontosaurus was on the level of T-rexity in capturing our imagination. For kids all around the world the Brontosaur was the emblem of the plant-eating giants. The name packed it all in and and expanded like a Lost World when whispered over yet-to-be-written essays and stories. I'm sure that in some the Brontosaurus even brought out the potential paleontologist. Give us back our Brontosaurs!

So what can we do? How can we, without espousing scientific confusion, get our daughters and sons to not stumble confusedly around the neighborhood with their aplaplapoposaurus toys, but to rumble and thunder to the beat of their mighty Brontosaurian friends? The answer, in my view, is simple: rename the entire genus from Apatosaurus to Brontosaurus. Let the mighty Bontosaurus excelsus be the measure of the taxon. If a fossil is deemed sufficiently deviated, let it be known under some other less spectacular name.

I believe the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature has the authority to overrule the Principle of Priority. How about it ladies and gentlemen?

New START, Another Flawed Disarmament Treaty?

Though I haven't yet ready the New START Treaty itself, it would appear that we have another flawed bilateral treaty. According to Keith B. Payne's article in the Wall Street Journal, the treaty could in fact lead to an actual increase in nuclear warheads. And the disagreement about the obligations New START imposes on the two parties already began, even before it was signed.

Further reading: Nuclear Stewardship Treaty

Nuclear Stewardship Treaty

We have to come to terms with the awesome responsibility of being able to split and fuse atoms. There's simply no choice. And it's pollyannish to think we can just eliminate and disallow the production of explosives based on fission and fusion with the stroke of a few more bilateral treaties.

Looking back...at the Future.
Elie Wiesel is asked in 1988 the impossible question: If you had to choose whether you would do with the science of the 20'th century and its atrocities, or without the benefits of the science of the 20'th century and its atrocities, which would you choose?'

And the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the main multilateral treaty to control nuclear arms, although noble in its intent to safeguard us against this frightening and yet fascinating knowledge, did not provide us with the societal mechanisms needed to bridle these sub-atomic abilities of ours. The NPT was simply an attempt to freeze the world in a 1960's state and work backwards from there. Humanity never works backwards, if it can help itself. Humanity is hopelessly progressive. Which is why I have proposed a new treaty which takes into account that, despite our best efforts at disarmament, nuclear weapons will be part of our human condition for some time to come. I have called this new treaty the Nuclear Stewardship Treaty.

The treaty would still embrace the reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear weaponry as safeguards for national sovereignty. But, unlike the NPT, it would establish criteria for being a worthy steward of this dangerous technology; an incentive for not being a steward of nuclear explosives to begin with; foster cooperation among those who despite such incentives harbor nuclear weaponry; and establish the goal of eventually integrating all arsenals into a tightly safeguarded joint operation.

Its preamble would acknowledge the dangers posed by nuclear technology, whether peaceful or military. It would then state that those who choose to use and develop such technologies have awesome responsibilities for all of humanity. And that its military use poses a threat not only to those engaged in any given conflict but to all nations of the world.

The treaty itself would state that those who have chosen to be so called stewards of nuclear explosives must have appropriate national structures to prevent the use of nuclear explosives except under the most extraordinary of circumstances. Such threats would be defined as acts or events that truly threaten the very existence of humanity as such. There would be no mention of nuclear explosives as legitimate means to simply defend national sovereignty.

The appropriate national structures would be defined as:

• A military and civilian infrastructure that can effectively safeguard its nuclear technology against those intent on harming others
• A military that is under the command of a civilian government
• A civilian government that has been chosen by the people through fair, honest and regularly recurring elections

The treaty would require stewards to cooperate in securing and safely deploying their nuclear explosives and formally establish an organization that oversees such cooperation. This organization would be the seed for a joint military command that provides not local but global security.

The last part of the Nuclear Stewardship Treaty would impose a form of tax on the stewards of nuclear explosives: stewards would be obligated to supply high grade fissionable material that can be used for civilian purposes to a common pool. Signatory nations that are not stewards would be entitled to a share of that pool based on some formula that takes into account their population and other relevant factors (such as GDP and capacity to produce energy). This last aspect of the treaty would establish a clear incentive to not develop and maintain nuclear arsenals.

Such a treaty would still embrace disarmament but recognize the reality that we live in an often extremely hostile universe . The ability to cause explosions through fission and fusion will not disappear from our body of knowledge without some catastrophe of cataclysmic proportions. And, yes, I recognize that a self-inflicted nuclear holocaust could be such a cataclysmic event. But this is the conundrum that we must live with as long as we continue to deepen our scientific investigations of the microcosm.

Why international trust and disarmament is not enough – The real threat of human insanity:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Religious perspectives on nuclear weaponry:

Watch the full episode. See more Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Assessing the threats and the constant uncertainties:

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

What Sustains Cultural and Ethnic Aggression?

I've been thinking about what I said in my last article about cultural and ethnic aggression. I claimed it was not a "root cause" for social turbulence. In some way I hate the term "root cause". It's a very deterministic notion. It seems to presume that everything can be neatly explained with great mathematical certainty. I don't dismiss that there are events that are clearly initiated by other events (i.e. that cause exists as a phenomenon). I'd be silly if I didn't believe that! Some aspects of our world are phenomenally predictable. But I'm convinced the universe is at its lowest level inherently random, including the "laws" by which events link into a chain. Root cause is about tracing a chain of events to a point where potentials approach a maximal uncertainty of 50/50. But most events don't have one single cause but many causes. You can't neatly lay everything out into a linear series of unfortunate events, as Lemony Snicket might put it. A tragedy is more like Kuala Lumpur, a muddy confluence of rivers. Cultural and ethnic aggression is sustained by prejudice. It's irrelevant what "caused" the prejudice. What is relevant is what sustains it. And I think the mechanisms that sustains prejudice can all be explained in terms of cultural membranes.

Think of society as an living organism. At the lowest level we have the family unit, a cell surrounded by protective membranes. The membranes regulate what comes into and out of the family. Above the family we have a complex overlapping structure of organizations that have their own protective membranes: religious groups, social clubs, corporations, national governments, etc. Every social unit has two types of cultural membranes: material and informational. The material membranes regulate what physical resources flow between units. The informational membranes regulate the information that flows.

The world, from the micro- to the macro-scopic, is filled with resources and consumers. In a perfectly balanced eco-system there are enough resources for every consumer. And if there's an overabundance of resources, consumers will eventually evolve. An imbalanced system is where the right resources cannot flow to the right consumers. The consumers start to starve (metaphorically speaking) and the resources begin to decay (though such decay may at the macro-level sometimes be measured in billions of years). Eventually, with a sufficient amount of death and decay, an equilibrium is established again (their are sufficient consumers for the given resources).

It's important to note that everything is a potential resource, including all consumers. It's simple food-cycle structures: the grass consumes the minerals, the rabbit the grass, the hawk the rabbit, the hawk's corpse the bacteria, and so on. A healthy balance is not about maintaining stasis. It's about maintaining a healthy flow. And these flows are regulated by simple physics, chemistry and organic membranes. At the societal level, the organic membranes become more and more abstract. They are, unlike our skin, no longer tangible entities. But they are just as real. They are the laws of our governments, the protocols of our corporations, the morals of our society.

Thinking about it, I realize that there's distinction between informational and material aspects of a membrane even in the microscopic world. A cell membrane contains protein transport channels (which exchange materials) as well as receptors (to which signaling molecules such as hormones attach). When a signaling molecule attaches to a receptor, it "informs" the cell about a condition in the surrounding world and triggers a response from the cell. The response may be to begin a "material exchange" through its protein co-transport channels. How a cell behaves is obviously determined by what types of receptors and transport channels it has. The same is true for our society. How we respond will depend on what "antennas" we have and what our overall infrastructures are like. If I don't understand what is signalled to me, how can I react to it? But even if I can understand the signals, it doesn't mean that I have the means to react appropriately.

People talk about breaking down cultural barriers. But I think it's unhelpful to use the term barrier, since it implies a blocking. What separates us are not barriers, but complex, sometimes useful membranes. In my view, cultural and ethnic aggression is caused by diseased membranes that cannot appropriately control the flow of information and materials to maintain a peaceful balance. In fact, perfect impenetrable barriers would be preferable. If nothing can pass between two entities, it's as if they did not exist to each other! The problem is that there are no perfect barriers. However high we build our walls, some information will always slip through the cracks. And if the information tells us that there's an imbalance in material resources on the two sides of the wall, we will want to tear down those walls (because of one of the fundamental aspects of nature regarding resources and consumers).

The most fundamental informational membrane is, of course, human language itself. I spent quite a bit of my child hood in countries where I didn't first speak the language. It was difficult to understand the cultural quirks of these foreign places without knowing the locution of the people around me. My exchange with my environment was limited to the bare surface of human exchange. Misunderstandings were frequent. And it took learning the language of the region to not only overcome pre-conceived and often incorrect notions about the locals, but also to make my emotional and physical needs known so that they could be fulfilled through mutually beneficial interchange.