The Questioning Christian

Let's end adolescence: Newt Gingrich

From former House speaker Newt Gingrich (emphasis is mine, paragraphing edited):

It's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us .... American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.

The solution is dramatic and unavoidable: We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It's time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society.

Prior to the 19th century, it's fair to say that adolescence did not exist. Instead, there was virtually universal acceptance that puberty marked the transition from childhood to young adulthood. ... it was understood you were either a child or a young adult.

... Benjamin Franklin was an example of this kind of young adulthood. At age 13, Franklin finished school in Boston, was apprenticed to his brother, a printer and publisher, and moved immediately into adulthood.

John Quincy Adams attended Leiden University in Holland at 13 and at 14 was employed as secretary and interpreter by the American Ambassador to Russia. At 16 he was secretary to the U.S. delegation during the negotiations with Britain that ended the Revolution. ...

Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males.

... By trapping poor people in bad schools, with no work opportunities and no culture of responsibility, we have left them in poverty, in gangs, in drugs, and in irresponsible sexual activity. ...

And for too many middle-class and wealthier young Americans, adolescence has been an excuse to delay work, family, and achievement—and thus contribute less to their own well-being and that of their communities.

... Fortunately, innovations in technology and in financial incentives to learn offer hope.

The Information Age makes it possible for young people to learn much faster than our current failed bureaucracies and obsolete curriculums permit. ...

In science, the most exciting expression isn't "Eureka!" It's "Huh?" - NY Times

Here's yet another illustration of how many things we don't know about the universe:

The silicon wafer looked black to the naked eye. But when Dr. Mazur and his researchers examined the material with an electron microscope, they discovered that the surface was covered with a forest of ultra-tiny spikes.

At first, the researchers had no idea what they had stumbled onto, and that is typical of the way many scientific discoveries emerge. Cellophane, Teflon, Scotchgard and aspartame are among the many inventions that have emerged through some form of fortunate accident or intuition.

“In science, the most exciting expression isn’t ‘Eureka!’ It’s ‘Huh?’” said Michael Hawley, a computer scientist based in Cambridge, Mass., and a board member and investor in SiOnyx.

Black silicon has since been found to have extreme sensitivity to light. It is now on the verge of commercialization, most likely first in night vision systems.

John Markoff, Intuition + Money: An Aha Moment, NY Times, Oct. 11, 2008 (emphasis added).

And of course, much of what we think we know could turn out to be wrong - see, e.g.,  Ulcer Docs' Nobel Prize Illustrates the Dangers of Dogma.

Evidence trumps hunches in medicine - and in theology

The most popular item on the TIME magazine Web site at the moment is a survey of how evidence-based medicine is starting to displace doctors' hunches. The article implicitly illustrates how (to use religious language) we're far better off when we give priority to the reality that God actually wrought, rather than clinging to our limited conceptions of that reality. To paraphrase the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor's definition of 'faith,' it's a Very Good Thing to remain open to the truth, no matter what the truth turns out to be.

Excerpt:

Increasingly, doctors seeking to provide their patients with the best possible care are exploring what is known as evidence-based medicine--a hard, cold, empirical look at what works, what doesn't and how to distinguish between the two. It's not enough to prove that a particular blood test or CT scan really spots cancer, for example. You also need to know whether early detection of that cancer would make a difference in your ability to respond to treatment or it merely means that you would die at the same point but learn about your illness earlier than you would have without the test.

Evidence-based medicine, which uses volumes of studies and show-me skepticism to answer such questions, is now being taught--with varying degrees of success--at every medical school in North America. It has been extraordinarily successful in shooting down some of the most cherished beliefs in health care, like the idea that long-term hormone-replacement therapy would help prevent heart disease in women. And it has clearly saved lives. Many doctors used to give anti-arrhythmia drugs to everyone who experienced irregular heartbeats after a heart attack because severely irregular beats could rapidly prove fatal. But then came the results of a randomized trial showing that patients with only mildly irregular heartbeats were more likely to die if given the anti-arrhythmia medication than their untreated counterparts were. Doctors now prescribe more judiciously, though treatment still saves lives in the case of severe arrhythmias.

[...]  Physicians who encouraged their female patients to take hormone-replacement therapy to prevent heart problems later on were practicing a kind of evidence-based medicine, since the best available evidence at the time--observational studies and the like--suggested a benefit. Of course, when a randomized controlled trial showed otherwise, the advice changed. Even at that, the case is not entirely closed. Some researchers now believe there may be a window of opportunity right around the years of menopause during which hormone-replacement therapy could help the heart. Proving that would, naturally, require another study.

All the same, few people deny that the trend in medicine is increasingly to be guided, if not governed, by the data--an idea that is spreading to other fields as well. Evidence-based practice is now being taught in nursing, general education and even philanthropy, thanks to the influence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a results-based group if ever there was one. You could see even the political fights over global warming as the birth pangs of the new practice of evidence-based policy.

Christine Gorman, Are Doctors Just Playing Hunches? in TIME, Feb. 15, 2007

The evolutionary pros and cons of promiscuity

If you're interested in the biological bases of morality, and in particular how pressures of natural selection have resulted in monogamy being more or less the norm for humans, you'll want to read the discussion in the comments here.

It seems that humans are by nature monogamous, more or less.  This suggests that perhaps the 'laws' of biology and sociology were set up in a way that happens to promote what we now regard as 'morality' — which is consistent with the concept of a Creator.

Monogamy vs. promiscuity: Competing selection pressures

In one respect, natural selection tends to favor promiscuity:

• On average, promiscuous males are likely to have more children than monogamous ones.

• Promiscuous females also have a certain evolutionary advantage:  As commenter Ross TenEyck points out, a female who is mated long-term to one male has the advantage of economic support from him, but she also bears the evolutionary risk that his genes will not be optimal for her own reproductive success. So it can be in her reproductive interest to cheat on her mate by secretly mating with another male to acquire his genes, if she can do that without jeopardizing her economic support.

But that’s not the end of the natural-selection inquiry.

The $64 question: Who is more likely to have grandchildren?

Another, crucial question is: How many of a given male's or female's children will survive to reach reproductive age themselves?  In other words, are promiscuous males or females more or less likely to have grandchildren than monogamous ones?

Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have noted that the children of monogamous males, whose fathers stay with their mothers, tend to have more economic resources devoted to their survival and well-being than the children of promiscuous males.  (We see traces of this even today in the poverty statistics concerning single mothers.)  As a result, on average the offspring of monogamous males have a greater chance of surviving to reproductive age and producing grandchildren.

There's another, related phenomenon:  males of many species tend to object, often violently, to supporting the offspring of other males.  (It's said that a newly-dominant male lion in a pride often will immediately kill all the cubs, which were fathered by his predecessor.)  For a scriptural take on this type of phenomenon, see this comment by a sociobiologist, 'Catholic Mom.'  Even unmated human females often had (and have) fathers and brothers who would kill males who 'dishonored' their daughters or sisters.  So a philanderer has a non-trivial chance of having his genetic contributions wiped out, suggesting that monogamy might be a safer evolutionary bet.

'Social' genetic pressures for monogamy: Group cohesion

Natural selection doesn't operate on a genetic basis alone. Group dynamics also create selection pressures, some of which favor monogamy. 

Any group has a survival interest in preventing internal strife. A group that can keep the peace among its males is more likely to be able to collaborate successfully in, for example, hunting and warfare.  The members of such a group are more likely to successfully raise children who in turn produce grandchildren than a group that is constantly riven by internal strife between competing males.

(I get the impression that in arguing about natural selection, a lot of people completely overlook the effects of kin- and group selection. The above-referenced sociobiologist agrees, but says that group selection is now thought of by most biologists as a type of kin selection; that may be true from a purely-genetic perspective, but it doesn't seem to take into account the fitness implications of cultural practices, or 'memes'.)

Net result: We're naturally monogamous - well, mostly

All these different, and sometimes conflicting, selection pressures, both genetic and cultural, have probably resulted in a real melange of motivations in our poor psyches.

Scientists conjecture that during humanity’s evolutionary lifespan, men who happened — or could be persuaded —  to be monogamous, and females who preferred to mate with monogamous males, were more likely to have grandchildren than others. 

We’re likely always going to have actual- or would-be philanderers. But there seems to be a strong case for thinking that monogamy as the norm — more or less — among humans is strongly influenced by biology.

Where is God here?

The above analysis doesn't mean the Creator had nothing to do with our morality. Quite the contrary: Our biology and sociology appear to follow 'laws' that result in our being more or less monogamous.

That's quite a trick, if you ask me, and another reason for awe at the Creator's handiwork.

Apollo 1's Fatal Errors Helped Put Us On the Moon

It was 40 years ago yesterday that astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died in the Apollo 1 fire during a plugs-out test on the launch pad.  I'll always remember when I first heard about the fire:  it was on the car radio as my dad was giving me a ride home from a Boy Scout meeting, a few hours after it happened.   Those brave men died because of avoidable human errors, as recounted by former launch-pad technician Stephen B. Clemmons in a recent interview. 

But that's not the end of the story.  It was NASA's identification and correction of those and other errors — the extensive learning derived from that awful experience — that enabled later astronauts to complete the mission instead of themselves dying on the pad or being lost in space.

If the Apollo 1 fire hadn't happened when it did and where it did — if those three astronauts had not died horrible deaths — humanity might still not have reached the moon.  Who knows how the course of history might have been changed.

This is a familiar pattern.  For tens of thousands of years, bad stuff, terrible stuff, has happened, all too often of our own doing.  But somehow, using our gifts of memory, reason, and skill, we manage to collectively learn from our mistakes.  Gradually, stumblingly, in fits and starts, we make things better than they were before.  On a regular basis, this melancholy mixture of evil and learning leads to progress. 

Thus we play our bit parts in the ongoing creation of the universe.

Requiescat in pacem, Grisson, White, and Chaffee.

*  *  *

Here's an excerpt from the Clemmons interview; emphasis is mine.

[Interviewer:]  In your opinion, would we have successfully reached the moon had Apollo 1 not occurred?

[Stephen Clemmons:]  No, because there were too many things wrong, both with the spacecraft and NASA operations, which were discovered during the investigation of the fire. There were fatal errors, most hidden from view that would have surfaced if we had continued. It's very possible that we would have had a catastrophe on the ground, possibly the destruction of the Saturn V with many deaths or we could have left men on the moon and in orbit.

 UPDATE:  Great minds think alike:  Jeff Nolan at Venture Chronicles did a similar post within minutes of this one.

Failure Is a Good Thing

From NPR Morning Edition's This I Believe series, a piece by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll:

Morning Edition, October 9, 2006 · Last week, my granddaughter started kindergarten, and, as is conventional, I wished her success. I was lying. What I actually wish for her is failure. I believe in the power of failure.

Success is boring.  Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do, or doing something correctly the first time, which can often be a problematical victory. First-time success is usually a fluke.  First-time failure, by contrast, is expected; it is the natural order of things.

Failure is how we learn. I have been told of an African phrase describing a good cook as "she who has broken many pots." If you've spent enough time in the kitchen to have broken a lot of pots, probably you know a fair amount about cooking.

NPR : Failure Is a Good Thing.

Green Revolution Feeds World, Confounds Neo-Malthusian Doomsayers

From the Better Living Through Learning desk, a book review in today's WSJ reminds us how much progress has come via the tools of memory, reason and skill with which humanity has been blessed:

[Nobel Peace Prize laureate] Norman Borlaug, 92, is the father of the "Green Revolution," the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s.  He is now the subject of an admiring biography by Leon Hesser, a former State Department official who first met Mr. Borlaug 40 years ago in Pakistan, where they worked together to boost that country's grain production.  "The Man Who Fed the World" describes, in a workmanlike way, how a poor Iowa farm boy trained in forestry and plant pathology came to be one of humanity's greatest benefactors.

*  *  *

[...] Mr. Borlaug and his staff spent nearly 20 years breeding the high-yield dwarf wheat that sparked the Green Revolution. [...]  They also changed the architecture of the wheat, from tall gangly stems to shorter sturdier ones that produced more grain.

It was an achievement that made Mexico self-sufficient in wheat by the late 1950s and, when later deployed throughout much of the developing world, forestalled the mass starvation predicted by neo-Malthusians. 

In the late 1960s, lest we forget, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions of people would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in "The Population Bomb," his 1968 best seller. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

As Mr. Ehrlich was making his dark predictions, Mr. Borlaug was embarking on just such a crash program.  Working with scientists and administrators in India and Pakistan, he succeeded in getting his highly productive dwarf wheat varieties to hundreds of thousands of South Asian peasant farmers.  These varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than traditional varieties.

*  *  *

[Dr. Borlaug] also laments the unnecessary suspicion with which biotech is treated these days. "Activists have resisted research," he notes, "and governments have overregulated it."  They both miss the point.  "Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy: starvation is."

From The Man Who Fed the World ($), by Ronald Bailey, WSJ Online, Sept. 5, 2006 (paragraphing slightly edited). 

Read more about Dr. Borlaug and his achievements in his Wikipedia entry.  Pictures of him from recent years depict a man astonishingly vigorous for his age.

The Opposite of Faith is Fear - Verna Dozier, RIP

Susan Russell notes the death of Episcopal laywoman Verna Dozier with links to the Washington Post obituary and a wonderful quote from one of her books, The Dream of God:

Doubt is not the opposite of faith: fear is.  Fear will not risk that even if I am wrong, I will trust that if I move today by the light that is given me, knowing it is only finite and partial, I will know more and different things tomorrow than I know today, and I can be open to the new possibility I cannot even imagine today.

I've ordered the book and will be eager to see what Ms. Dozier has to say.

What It's All About

A reader, Scott, suggests that I believe in "the glorious triumph of humanity."  He argues that I've fallen prey to what he called "the Enlightenment project's fatal weakness," namely "a too-optimistic evaluation of humans' ability to perfect themselves and the world (in rough terms)."   In responding just now, I managed to capture some things I've been thinking about for a long time.  It needs a lot of work and elaboration, but I thought I'd throw it out here, slightly edited, to see what reaction it garners.

I make no claim that we humans can perfect either ourselves or the world.  I do claim some other things:

1.  Whether we know it or not, we're all serving as part of a cosmic construction crew, as workers laboring in the continuing creation of the universe we inhabit — a creation that appears to be a project of a Creator.

2.  I surmise that the Creator puts to use, not just our successes, but also our failures.  I say this in part because we have been given the ability to learn, and to pass along lessons learned to others.

3.  We don't really know the purpose(s) of the project.  It's not unreasonable to hope, however, that the Creator won't just dismiss us when our service is over, but instead will let us share in the project's fruits.

Rejuvenation on the Horizon

From the Progress-in-the-Universe Department here at QC Plaza (with apologies to Click and Clack):  In two posts today, FuturePundit notes that (i) we're starting to see the same power-dive of costs in biotechnology as we did in electronics, and that this is going to lead to unimaginable improvements in medical capabilities, including the ability to rejuvenate aging bodies — along with other consequences such as a rising retirement age:

[From here:]  Genizon has used improvements gene chip technology to speed up their genetic studies by more than an order of magnitude. ... [Researchers] can now collect more data and more quickly. These boosts in productivity are going to produce discoveries and effective treatments for diseases which have long been incurable.

[From here, quoting junk bond king Michael Milliken:]  In 1974, it cost $100 million to sequence a gene. Today, it cost $3, and by 2013, it will be 3 cents.

... The electronics revolution is being repeated in biotechnology.

Just as the discovery of antibiotics made many infectious diseases suddenly curable the same will happen with diseases aging.  Got a bad heart?  Grow a new one or send gene therapy in to instruct your cells in how to repair themselves.  Bad liver or bad kidneys?  Again, grow replacements or fix them.  All the problems that must be solved to reach that point are solvable. Therefore we will solve them.

People who do not see this biotechnological revolution in rejuvenation on the horizon are akin to someone in 1965 saying that of course computers must take up whole rooms and that we'll never have desktop computers which are many orders of magnitude faster than 1965 mainframes.  We are going to gain the ability to manipulate cells and genes on a level that will allow us to repair our aged bodies.  There's nothing about the nature of physical reality that precludes our developing the ability to do this.

Some traditionalist Christians think humanity is "depraved" and that we live in a "broken" world.  I'd like to see their explanation for this.