Anthropocene

Early versions of the syphilis microbe ripped through their human hosts savagely and quickly.  Too quickly, in fact, which meant that frequently the parasite killed its host and itself in the process, before it could replicate beyond that host.  Natural selection being what it is, a “gentler”, slower-acting version of syphilis emerged that is now the most common form of this particularly unpleasant STD.

Odd way to start a chapter of geologic ages, you say. Bear with me.

The International Commission on Stratigraphy are the gate-keepers for the definition - and dating - of the various geologic epochs. This keeps self-absorbed geologists for naming a geologic age after themselves, among other things. The responsibility they have also assures that everyone worldwide is referring to the same thing when they say, for instance “Eocene” (the period ranging from 55.8 to 33.9 MY ago). This stratigraphic boundary-marking is normally done by looking for a marker bed - some particular layer that is seen all over the world that marks some profound change in climate or animal populations.  

Here's an example: the end of the Permian Epoch and the start of the Triassic Epoch (251 MY ago) is marked by a mass extinction: about 95% of all life forms disappeared from the geologic record.  This is called the Permian Extinction (for obvious reasons) and geologists are still trying to figure out what caused it.  

For the end of the great Cretaceous Epoch, there actually is a “smoking gun”: a huge crater in the northern part of the Yucatan Peninsula (it runs offshore into the modern Gulf of Mexico) that marks the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs.  Think of it: a rock about 10 km (just six miles) in diameter made a crater ~170 km to ~300 km in diameter (depending on which scientific paper you read) and scooped debris into a sub-orbital trajectory that came down in Montana.  The marker bed for this event is a thin layer of clay that is distinctive worldwide: it is loaded with iridium, a “sidereal element” similar to platinum, and not normally found on earth - but commonly found in asteroids. There are also huge tsunami deposits on Haiti and elsewhere in the proto-Caribbean. 

About 10 years ago, a Nobel Laureate chemist named Paul Crutzen suggested the name “Anthropocene” for the Age of Man. Yes, it’s pseudo-Greek, but most of these things are. This was intended to spur debate over human influences in the world, and they are substantial.

To put things in perspective: 

* We are presiding over the largest and most rapid mass extinctions of animals in millions of years.

* We are seeing the beginning effects of major climate change: a dramatic increase in atmospheric carbon that if left unchecked will acidify the oceans, destroy coral reefs, and drown cities like Miami and New York by the middle of this century.

* There are land features on Earth now that can be discerned from space - human-made features.

Major and abrupt changes to soils worldwide (you can count the Walmart parking lot asphalt acreage) might meet the traditional definition of when a geologic boundary is crossed. When do you date the change to the Anthropocene, however?  There is ice-core evidence for accelerating changes in the atmosphere dating to roughly 1800 - when the Industrial Age began to roar. However, there are radio-isotopic changes in soils dating from 1945, when nuclear weapons began to detonate in the atmosphere. 

Which would you choose?

Man is now the Top Predator on the Earth. In fact, with the ice-free Arctic coming on we are killing off even the polar bears. To human over-hunting we apparently owe the extinction of the Mammoths and Mastodons, the North American Camel, the Ground Sloth, and other “Charismatic Megafauna” in the past 12,000 years. To human over-fishing we also owe the collapse of the world Cod population and the imminent collapse of nearly all large fish stocks in the oceans that humankind depend on for protein.  

In that sense, we could say that humankind “owns” the Earth because of our enormous and highly visible impact in its surface.... but we still are not as important to the planetary biosphere as, say, microorganisms. Destroy all microorganisms, and everything on the planet stops. Not so if H1N1 killed off most humans.

We certainly don’t control the Earth, however.  Virtually all governments recognize that the uncontrolled and accelerating growth of fossil fuel burning will cause terrible changes to our world, from monster hurricanes and continental-scale wildfires to drowned coastal cities.  But humankind seems unable to do anything about it. 

Which gets me back to the syphilis analogy. If we are an infection that is destroying the Earth as we know it... will we “evolve” fast enough politically to keep from poisoning our planet?  LDS people are fairly unique in that we recognize the Earth to be a living thing.  Since 1978 (at least) we have been told that we must not “mess it up” - we cannot continue to consider the Earth’s bounty to be limitless, or to pollute it.  In 1834, Joseph Smith instructed the Saints that it wasn’t necessary to kill a Massassauga rattlesnake that they encountered near one of their camps on the Zion’s Camp march. That was quite an interesting first step in an environmental movement that most people attribute to Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring.”

We were getting instructions more than a century before that.  Have we been listening?

~~~~~

Skeptic

That's really code for "Atheist."  When someone doesn't want to be painted with the absolutist label "Atheist", they call themselves a "skeptic."

Being a real skeptic isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as one is honest about it. Any good scientist must be a skeptic - you have to be willing to look at faulty or circular logic in someone's interpretation and call it that. You must also always be willing to scrutinize data when it seems a bit too clean, a bit too good. The scientists who provided the latest value for the Hubble Constant - the relationship between the Red Shift and how far away something was - initially came up with 42... and paused and re-checked every calculation multiple times:

LONDON (Reuter) - Scientists searching for one of the fundamental keys to the universe found they had been beaten to the answer by the comic cult novel ``Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''; and the answer was 42.  In the British novel and radio serial by Douglas Adams, an alien race programs a computer called Deep Thought to provide the ultimate answer to understanding life and the universe.
In the novel, seven and a half million years later Deep Thought comes back with the result: 42.
Astronomers at Britain's Cambridge University took a little less time - three years - to calculate the Hubble Constant that determines the age of the universe. But the answer was the same.``It caused quite a few laughs when we arrived at the figure 42, because we're all great fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide,'' Dr. Keith Grange, one of the team of Cambridge scientists who worked on the project, said Friday.

But you can take anything to extremes, including skepticism. If you're not honest and even-handed, you can't call yourself a scientist, and that includes admitting when you have insufficient information or data to make a call. It includes admitting that your current scientific paradigm is not permanent.

Under the guise of skepticism, Atheists commonly review each other's books promoting Atheism. Does that sound in-bred to you? Does it sound any different than Believers praising books by Believers? 

Skeptics promote magazine columns with that word - and as part of the devious game some of them play, they will lump Believers with the most bizarre and narrow cults and beliefs... Painting everyone with the same tar-brush is an old pseudo-logic trick, closely related to an ad hominum attack. They also make heavy use of another emotional tool: ridicule. I've seen this done by professors to their own students. 

Shame.

To me, it's just another manifestation of a substitute religion for belief in a Supreme Being. As I said in an earlier blog/chapter, everyone has a religion. There are Atheists and there Proselyting Atheists, but they are all guilty of the same blindered data-selection that they accuse Believers of. 

Hypocrisy. 

I sure hope they enjoy the uplifting help and support provided by their god. I'm sure their god will take great care of them at their end.

~~~~~

Intelligence, Part III

 “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.”  (D&C 93:29)

That single verse has 5 qualifying links or footnotes.

There is a totally different take on the word intelligence – I would first capitalize it, and then pluralize it: Intelligences.

Almost everyone I have talked with about this will agree on one thing: they know things from somewhere that they can’t explain. It typically manifests by my mentioning, say, the concept of marriage that lasts beyond death, or the idea of a Pre-Existence. They all say something like “yeah, I know that…” even when I point out that it is inconsistent with the formalities of their particular faith (if they aren’t Latter-Day Saints).

Now there’s a thought – pre-existence - that my Jesuit friend could never explain:

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. “(Jeremiah 1:5)

Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? – the only really important questions.

As I understand this, we’ve been in existence for billions of years - a Pre-Existence. The difference between a million and a billion is really not critical here since I can’t count high enough to reach either. It certainly would explain that pre-existing memory that everyone seems to have.

Intelligence was not created or made (D&C 93:29).

The first time I heard this in a class it surprised me, but again, that pre-existent memory said “yeah – of course.” So we weren’t created, we were organized into existence as thinking individuals. At some point we were given agency. We had already existed. Now there’s something to occupy your thoughts for a few commuter bus trips to downtown Washington, DC.

How? I haven’t a clue – at least not in any detail – but the existence of Dark Matter and Dark Energy (and Vacuum Energy and quantum entanglement) commonly come to my forebrain sometime around Arlington on I-66.

I have this abiding sense that I – we – are almost at the point where we can understand and tie all these cosmology and tantalizing scriptural pieces together. For me, at least, it’s another reason not to fear death. Beyond that door, this learning thing just has to speed up considerably. I won’t need sleep or sugar, for one thing.  AND we will have full access to all of those pre-existent memories.

~~~~~

Intelligence, Part II

1 Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts.

 2 But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap:

 3 And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness. (Malachi 3: 1-3)

When I was 11 years old, my mother remarried after 7 years struggling as a working single mom. I entered 7^th grade shortly afterwards, and to my parents’ surprise (a bit after the fact; they were not asked beforehand), we were all given an IQ test upon entry.  I had no idea what that was, but did note that the Christian Brothers, who ran Garces Junior High School, used the results to divide about 60 of us 12-yr-old boys into two classes. It was made abundantly clear that the “other class” was for “dummies”.  In the class where I ended up, we were initially arrayed in five rows of six chairs each according to this IQ result. I decline to share where I ended up, but it astounded my new step-father, and led to huge changes in my life that would begin about two years later.

My new step-father badgered my mother for 20 months into letting me go to a public high school, and more importantly, THE public high school in Bakersfield, California, that had a college prep program (all grades had a “.4” after them), and an advanced college-prep program (called “point five). This was in the Elitist Age, before people figured out that it was probably not wise to discourage growing children by classifying them. It was also before educators really came to grips with the fact that there are many, many different forms or manifestations of intelligence.

Why did my mother resist? She had been taught from childhood as the daughter of an Irish Catholic dad (my grandfather) that if she didn’t raise her kids Catholic, she would go to Hell. She understood that to be literally the case. It wasn’t until after I earned a PhD in geophysics that my Mom confided to me that when she married my step-dad, they both thought I was mildly retarded. They correlated grades with brains. My worst grade was nearly always “Deportment”, where a good grade for me was a “C-minus” and a typical grade was a “D-minus.” Bored and always in trouble is the long version.

Over time I took other ‘qualifying’ tests; from one of these I gleaned a number off of a file on a counselor’s desk. I knew enough by then to realize that this was a good number. For a short while, I reveled in this number.

“If a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience … , he will have so much the advantage in the world to come” (D&C 130:19).

But the difference in intelligence between 11 years old and 27 years old could be measured in light-years. When my PhD committee came out of the discussion room, each shook my hand and said “Congratulations, DOCTOR Wynn.” The seventh and last one was Cam Mosier, who sauntered out of the conference room slowly, shook my hand with a smirk, and said: “Now you can finally start learning.”

Boy, ain’t that the truth.

As time went on, I realized that I was smarter in some things than most people, but dumber on most other things than almost everyone. My wife can zang through a word-scrambler or crossword puzzle before I can write anything on paper. My youngest son and I can tangle in Randori – the Jujitsu slow-motion random fighting used in training ground-fighters – and he moves like flowing water. I have to resort to dirty tricks (a distinguishing characteristic of Jujitsu) to have even half a chance with him. The comparison list grows asymptotically with time.

But here’s a secret: that intelligence initially gifted you can and will increase in quantum steps. The downside is that you have to go through the worm-hole to get to the next quantum state. That’s another way of saying you get there by spending months to years in Hell.  It’s called the Refiner’s Fire. You can delay some of this, you can even waste much of your life trying to avoid it, but a loving God will be very persistent in allowing you opportunities that, once past, you will be grateful for. If you’re like me, however, you wouldn’t willingly go back and go through those experiences again.

I once visited a mine in Saudi Arabia called Mahd ad-Dhahab. There I watched the hard-rock blasting, the ore transport, the milling and grinding process, the huge, yellow-hot smelter - and finally held a brick of Dore in my hands: a block of ~97% pure gold. It took both hands, too, because something the size of a red building brick weighed about 30 kilos (70 lbs). 

I traced back in my mind the process to get to this point and saw a metaphor for my life.  Every crucible I was poured from left me a better, smarter person: smarter in empathy, smarter in patience, smarter in science, smarter in parenthood.  

That last one has made me smarter at understanding who I am, why I am here, and Who will welcome me back Home.

~~~~~

Intelligence

I think most of us have met the brilliant professor type who can’t ever seem to find his keys. I knew a professor when I was a student at Berkeley who was a Nobel Laureate.  Each day his wife would drive him to uphill end of the campus (she didn’t trust him to drive himself). He would get out and she would yell “Downhill, Owen, downhill!” and the campus security guard would pick up on this and kindly direct him towards nearby Leconte Hall.  Owen Chamberlain had an incredible gift for making sense of the many particles being discovered in high-energy physics during the last century. He had real trouble finding his office, however. This may be an extreme example, but it makes a point: we all have gifts, but no one has all the gifts.  One gift that Owen Chamberlain had in abundance was intelligence.

There is intelligence, and then there is intelligence.  Actually, there are also intelligences, which I will write about tomorrow.  1 Corinthians 12 talks about many different gifts given to human beings, but I’d like to discuss variations on that one gift - intelligence - that I see frequently as a scientist.

There is "IQ", which is supposed to be a broad indicator of quickness of mind. I've given keynote lectures at Oregon MENSA meetings and it's not so much talking to an audience as engaging the audience. They are equally quick to admit to anyone who has patience that they are almost all nerds, and say that with evident pride.

I’ve seen mathematical intelligence, and I’ve seen verbal intelligence – these are measured by the SAT exam you may have taken in high school.  My wife can unsramble word puzzles in milliseconds - I don't even bother to try, it's just too frustrating. I’m guessing that what is measured in the SAT represents perhaps 12% - 15% of all forms of intelligence. 

I’ve also seen geographic intelligence – you probably know someone who can navigate in cities or in a wilderness with apparent ease.  A young Navajo boy would quietly sit through my quorum lessons and never say a thing.  Get him out in Aravaipa Canyon, however, and the kid would light up - and seemed to be able to walk sideways on the canyon walls.

There is emotional intelligence – the famous “EQ” – that is a measure of how sensitive a human being is to other peoples’ feelings.  A famous dictum of the Federal Executive Institute is this: no matter how smart you are, if you have a low EQ your stint as a manager will end in a train-wreck. 

There is practical intelligence – I have a son-in-law without a college degree who can figure anything out, and can fix any thing. This goes hand-in-hand with mechanical intelligence, and is closely related to geometric intelligence – some people can easily see things in three and even four dimensions, while I may stare at the car and wonder why it died suddenly in the middle of the I-205 bridge.

There is language intelligence – one son learned to speak, read, and write Mandarin in about 18 months, the equivalent of someone going to school in Taiwan for 15 years. All his siblings, incidentally, speak at least two and up to five languages in addition to their native English.  Don’t look at me - it comes from their Mom, who can also read 10,000 words per minute (I read about ~200).

There is also physical intelligence – the things we see in great athletes.  Baseball players who bat .400 is one hard-to-explain example.  I can generally tell pretty quickly that one of my new Jujitsu students is going to get to Shodan – 1^st degree black belt – quickly and easily.  She’s a “natural.”

There are many more manifestations of intelligence, and I've just barely scratched the surface here.

Where is this going? If you saw the movie “Rainman” you will understand what an Idiot Savant is: someone who may not be able to do most things you and I take for granted, but who has an incredible gift down inside just waiting to be discovered.  

And this is my point: when you see or work with someone who seems “slow”, be very, very careful about making a dismissive judgment.  I have known people who speak slowly, measuring their words, and if you err is discounting them, you will make a grave mistake. They are probably smarter than you.

Instead, it seems that we all have several forms of intelligence to varying degrees. Look, then, to discover the hidden gem in the people around you. Someone you’ve been married to for 40 years may be a genius – and you have just overlooked it all this time. If so, shame on you.

~~~~~

Akrasia vs. Arete

Aristotle is by general acceptance one of the greatest minds of all antiquity. From Aristotle we have the foundations of scientific reasoning and experimentation - the foundations of modern science. Sadly, virtually nothing he wrote himself has survived; all we have are translations of what we would now call class notes - translated from Greek into Arabic and then into Latin and Romance languages during the Enlightenment in Western Europe.

I'll address just two of Aristotle's words in this blog/chapter, words that clearly indicated an anticipation if not inspired glimpses of LDS Doctrine: Akrasia vs. Arete.

The conventional 19th Century English translation of Akrasia means something totally different in 21st Century English, so I don't even want to repeat it here. Fundamentally, Akrasia means lack of self-control. Someone may know what is right, but has a weak will and no sense of long-term goals (Telos). Aristotle generally accepted Socrates' belief that few people voluntarily do evil, but instead most who do fall into it out of lack of self-control - typically to give in to immediate pleasure. This was not vice - which is deliberate evil - but instead something a bit less "bad." It can nevertheless lead to immense and long-term damage to many other people as well as themselves. We see Akrasia afflict far too many otherwise demonstrably intelligent people in our world. The word sounds like 'crazy' - which would be a good description of some recent catastrophic falls from public esteem of certain American and French politicians lately. A few minutes of illicit sexual contact commonly leads to destroyed families and disfunctional children for a far longer period of time than the initial mistake involved. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation.

In my mind there has always been different kinds of intelligence, and political intelligence, or mathematical intelligence, or verbal intelligence do not equal Arete, do not equal moral intelligence.

I'm reminded of a former Director of the USGS, talking about Matrix Management, saying "WHAT could they possibly have been thinking?!??"

The other word is Arete, usually translated as "virtue." For Greeks, Arete included more than just moral and intellectual virtues, but covered a much wider range of things - including, for instance, the sharpness of a knife. Perhaps a partial translation would be "excellence." If someone or something is functioning properly, then it was exhibiting Arete. To function correctly as a human, of course, meant that you were behaving in a moral and rational way. A good person has the wisdom (Phronesis) to know how to act and comport her/himself in life as if they could see the consequences for more than a single day - and more than a single generation.  

This was an important point for Aristotle: a good person will feel pleasure in doing good things. A Latter-Day Saint might reword this to say that living in conformance with God's will is the only form of long-term personal satisfaction available. In a meeting this morning, my Bishop used these words: "...that we might align our will with Thine."

To this I added a heartfelt Amen.

~~~~~

Death by Accountability

Accountability seems essential - even moral, right?  EVERYONE should be accountable for their acts.

However, moderation in all things - especially moderation.  For instance, most people agree that water is good. It's possible to drink too much water, however - this even has several names: water poisoning, hyper-hydration, etc. You can kill yourself with too much water, and I'm not even counting drowning here.

Before Ronald Reagan, government employees were known to be hard-working, not particularly well paid, and dedicated to their country. Well, Federal employees haven't actually changed. From Reagan onward, however, government has been described as not the solution to the problem, but that government is the problem.  He then proceeded to use government to build up a 600-ship Navy and double and triple our national debt. Go figure. Except for political leverage by unscrupulous politicians, I really can't see why government has been targeted. Why not Bear Sterns? Why not Bank of America? And except for people who have never seen a federal employee and what they do, I can't see why anyone would believe government was a bad thing. After all, who protects us from volcanic or earthquake crises? Provides us weather information and warnings? Delivers our mail? Guards our country? Cuts our Social Security checks? Chases down fraud (well, everywhere except Wall Street, anyway). 

The inevitable consequence of this broad and unjustified negative categorization has been to demand more accountability: prove to us that you aren't wasting taxpayers' dollars! One addresses this by demanding more and more reports, setting greater and more complex rules. Who actually does this?  Congress usually dumps at least 10 loony new regulations on Federal employees and businesses every year.  Who enforces these? People in cubicles.  We call them The Bean Counters.

I'll emphasize that it's not just happening in the Federal government. I've watched this trend towards ever-greater accountability expand from almost nothing 35 years ago to what we see today in many different domains.  Scientific journals now frenziedly game the rating system to increase an artificial number called a Citation Index or Impact Factor. My performance as a scientist is rated every 6 months. This is largely good, but also partly bad, because how do you rate someone doing a discovery process?  It's complicated and largely artificial, and the current process requires at least a person-day each time for each scientist. It's like the technology that counts how many times people click on an internet ad - it is artificial and leads to strange, illogical behavior, like Content Farms.  

Let me give an example I'm familiar with:

Before I moved with my family to Venezuela in 1987, the USGS National Center was a hustling, busy place crammed with scientists and technicians. The building is a series of stacked 8-sided stars nearly a third of a mile (half a kilometer) long. In 1987 it produced maps, energy and mineral resource assessments, and was a world leader in developing new geophysical technology. The "A" stack of the 3rd floor was Administration, the "B" stack was devoted to chem labs, the "C" stack geology, etc. 

When I got back from Saudi Arabia in 1995, all the chem labs had been gutted from the "B" stack - and it was now filled with cubicles for all the administrative assistants required by ever-growing additional rules, regulations, and reporting requirements. These people were not bad - but they were bean-counters, not contributing anything to the products of the USGS. They also cost money: salary, building space, etc., and this was taken at the expense of doing what the USGS was tasked to do: map our nation and its resources - and international resources that we are so critically and strategically dependent upon, such as the Rare Earth Elements now controlled (97% of world production) by China.  

This cancerous growth was all driven by Congress, which gives us several new bills each year that demanded ever-greater accountability, to make sure that taxpayer money wasn't misspent. Republicans and Democrats are equally well-intended - and equally guilty - for the accountability cancer. Never mind what banks and investment firms get away with (and still scream about too much oversight). The burden on the USGS Administrative Officers can be characterized in an amazing and very tangible way: 2 to 3 meters (10 feet!) of shelf-space were necessary to keep all the regulations in 5-cm/2-inch binders. The first time I saw this, it was mind-boggling. More boggling than this was the way that this reportage and accountability burden increased every single year since then. Now there are so many rules and regulations that they must be kept online. At least it saves cutting down another forest for the paper needed.

Accountability has had a huge effect on scientific productivity. Publications and maps - despite the availability of computers and plotters and The Cloud - is less than half what it was 10 years ago, and it is declining.

Bloated accountability has also had a huge effect on the people charged with managing it. As a chief scientist, fully 60% of my time was taken up with all the required reportage. My work-week was routinely about 55 hours long - because I felt I had to help the scientists get work done and product released. In a science team of ~120 people, we have an Administrative Officer who routinely works a 60-hour week - and she still can't keep up even though she works from dark til dark. She could not function without the 9 assistants to do all that reportage and accountability checking. That's an astounding overhead.

From one admin officer needed per 100 scientists and technicians in 1987, today it is now almost 9 per 100 people.  

~~~~~

When there is suspicion and distrust, the public demands accountability, and this is generally not a bad thing. However, it is possible to stifle research and business productivity almost to a halt with too many accountability demands - mandated reports and constantly-evolving rule-sets for how to do even basic things.

Death by accountability is possible, and I've been watching The Monster's growth actually accelerate in the past 10 years.  It's like a tumor: it demands greater and greater resources, and imposes its priorities on you no matter what else might be important. Already there is far too little Operating Expenses (OE) to get anything meaningful done in the USGS anymore.

Death by Accountability affects not just federal employees, but private businesses and university researchers, too.  We are all being nibbled to death by the flock of accountability geese.

Is there a solution? YES - and it's surprisingly simple.  All new regulations and reporting requirements should have a maximum time-limit - a Sunset Clause. After five or six or even 10 years, they should expire. If they are still necessary, they will inevitably be renewed. But we most stop the permanent add-on increase and growth of The Monster.

~~~~~