Archive for September 15th, 2009
Fundamental error: talking evolution instead of speciation
Scientist/writer David Horton describes it as a mistake that we have talked about “species evolving” when discuss evolution. He considers this “an easy mistake to make, and you can see why we made it, but it has proved fatal.” He argues that biologists have unwittingly confused the creationists with talk of species evolving.
So if I was writing biology text books for use in Texas or Kentucky or Missouri schools I think I would join their education authorities in demanding that the word evolution not be mentioned. Instead I would put all of my effort into explaining speciation. Show how that original bacterium could become 2, 4, 8, 20, 30, 60 … species. Could become, even after losing tens of thousands of species along the way, the tens of thousands of species, including humans, chimps, and bacteria, we see today.
Instead of focusing on natural selection, which Horton considers “too obvious,” he would stress the importance of allopatric speciation:
Allopatric speciation is simply this – if one part of a species becomes separated by a geographic barrier (a mountain range forms, sea level rises, a desert comes into being, a river changes course, a landslide falls, a continent moves, a glacier extends), and stays separate long enough, then its members will no longer be able to breed with the other part of the population and it will therefore have become a different species. Doesn’t matter why it becomes different – just an accumulation of mutations might do the trick . . .
Garrison Keillor describes his stroke
What’s it like to have a stroke, then get really lucky? Garrison Keillor tells it like only Garrison Keillor can tell it:
[A] neurologist shook my hand and said: “I hope you know how lucky you are.” That was pretty clear as I walked down the hall, towing my IV tower, and saw the casualties of serious strokes. Here I was sashaying along, like a survivor of Pickett’s Last Charge who had suffered a sprained wrist.
What’s it like to get world class treatment for your stroke when you have a strong sense of social justice?
Rich or poor, young or old, we all face the injustice of life — it ends too soon, and statistical probability is no comfort. We are all in the same boat, you and me and ex-Gov. Palin and Rep. Joe Wilson, and wealth and social status do not prevail against disease and injury. And now we must reform our health insurance system so that it reflects our common humanity. It is not decent that people avoid seeking help for want of insurance. It is not decent that people go broke trying to get well. You know it and I know it. Time to fix it.
Ideology Be Damned!
This is the reason we need healthcare reform in this country. Crystal Lee Sutton has died at age 68 because her insurance company diddled and dawdled over whether or not it would pay for the medicine necessary to save her life.
Don’t know who Crystal Lee Sutton was? She was the real-life inspiration for Norma Rae, Sally Fields’ excellent portrayal of a small-town union organizer who went to bat for workers’ rights.
This kind of thing should not happen. When profit—or overhead, however you wish to consider the problem—is placed ahead of life, those arguing against reform should hang their heads in shame. They cling to an ideology about free markets and consumer choice as though such things are part of the Ten Commandments (which most of them don’t follow either) and always at the expense of lives.
Dammit, people, we’re talking about a system which should operate for people’s benefit, not for its own. A system is simply a method of approach, a way of doing something, and if it can be changed once, it can be changed again if the reforms are found insufficient! It is no argument to reject reforms on the basis that the reforms might cause harm, since the present system is already causing harm.
It is a foulness to our present system that many people find that in order to vouchsafe their own health or the health of their loved ones they must fight for the very thing they were told they had purchased in the first place. This is in no way different from lending predators who lied to people in course of borrowing money to buy a home. The average person has neither the time or expertise to understanding every clause and addendum in a complex contract and must rely on what he or she is told. Either you have insurance coverage or you do not. It should not come as a surprise after you are already sick and discover that there are codicils which protect the insurance company from having to pay out what in principle they obligated themselves to do if not by the letter of the policy then by the spirit of agreement with a customer. Yet thousands, millions of consumers daily learn to their dismay that they don’t actually have what they thought they had bought.
This is not a game. If the private sector is more concerned over profit margins than providing service, then they should lose the privilege of offering said service.
Dark days and “Green Shoots”
“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” –Supreme Court Justice Lous D. Brandeis
For all the discussion of “green shoots” and an economy on the mend, there’s plenty of data and commentary to the contrary. What’s interesting to me, is that recent developments only highlight the extent to which Main Street economics have become irrelevant to Wall Street.
The administration is claiming that the crisis is largely over, and that it’s time to breathe a sigh of relief. President Obama yesterday argued that “we can be confident that the storms of the past two years are beginning to break.” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner discussed last week beginning to wind down some of the programs that were implemented in the heat of the crisis late last year. The value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen from its July low of 8146, and is now trading around 9600. Everything seems well and good in the world of high-finance.
But others see it differently. Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argued this week that nothing has been done to address the underlying banking problems that created the mess in the first place, adding that “the problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.” Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, echoes that sentiment, and points out that the real issues underlying the crisis have not been addressed at all. He lays out 4 areas of concern:
- The big banks need to be made to be dramatically smaller.
- Executives need to have a great deal of their personal wealth tied up in their banks to prevent a reckless focus on short-term results.
- An end to the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, DC. “There is no way people should be able to go directly (or even overnight) from a failing bank to designing bailout packages to benefit such banks. In any other industry, in any other country, and at any other time in American history, this would have been seen as an unconscionable conflict of interest. “
- The financial elite is aware that they are able to exploit the Federal Reserve and use it as a “bailout machine”.
How peak oil affects food and everything else
Media Education Foundation has released a new documentary called “Blind Spot” which
explores the inextricable link between the energy we use, the way we run our economy, and the multiplying threats that now confront the environmental health and stability of our planet. Taking as its starting point the inevitable energy depletion scenario known as “Peak Oil,” the film surveys a fascinating range of the latest intellectual, political, and scientific thought to make the case that by whatever measure of greed, wishful thinking, neglect, or ignorance, we now find ourselves at a disturbing crossroads: we can continue to burn fossil fuels and witness the collapse of our ecology, or we can choose not to and witness the collapse of our economy. Refusing to whitewash this reality, Blind Spot issues a call to action, urging us to face up to the perilous situation we now find ourselves in so that we might begin to envision a realistic, if inconvenient, way out.
You can watch a ten-minute excerpt here. By watching it, I learned that:
- The U.S. now has more prisoners than farmers.
- Corn ethanol is energy negative (making it uses more energy than burning it).
- It takes 30 calories of energy to bring one calorie of lettuce from California to the average plate.
- The average item of food travels 1,500 hundred miles to your plate.
- The concept of peak oil (essentially, that we are running out of cheap oil), is still ignored or rejected by most businesses, governments and individuals.
See the related posts for more information on peak oil, as well as here and here.
Financial crisis: NOT fixed
Have we “fixed” the problem that lead to the financial collapse of the U.S.? Not at all, according this article in Bloomberg.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”
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