Who elected British Petroleum to be our government?

No one elected BP to run any level of American government. But we are a government by the money, not the People, so that is a big invitation to British Petroleum to control entire beaches to prevent the news media from from reporting the full extent of the damage resulting from the Gulf of Mexico oil leakage. Mother Jones reports. In the meantime, most Americans passively sit and watch, along with our politicians, giving a well-documented irresponsible company endless opportunity to operate in relative secrecy while 65 miles of delicate Gulf Coast ecosystem has been ruined by oil. If a "terrorist" with brown skin from the Middle East had caused all of this immense damage, we would have declared yet another "war." But it's a bunch of Caucasian men wearing suits who crapped up the Gulf waters and beaches, and they have given huge amounts of money to Congress, so it's all so very very different . . . And keep in mind that this disaster does not simply affect the Gulf Coast. Did you see the photos of the oil-soaked pelicans? The "White Pelicans" aren't simply "Gulf Coast" birds--they migrate all the way from the Gulf Coast up to Minnesota--it has been quite the spectacle to see them passing through St. Louis twice each year. We'll see how many survive to fly next year. And that's merely one species. There is no reason for trusting that BP will do the clean-up job correctly, putting the environment before its profits. From the Mother Jones article (above), we've seen that BP will "fix" the problem by hiding information. News is now breaking that the oil has now penetrated 12 miles into the Louisiana marshes. I'm feeling sick about this disaster and sick about the lack of action by our federal government--Why is the Obama Administration continuing to defer to the "government" of British Petroleum? As soon as the first drops of oil escaped into the Gulf waters, this was no longer BP's disaster; it became an immense American tragedy. You've heard of "too big to fail." Lots of bank money is making sure that we will continue to have "too big to fail banks." If these Gulf oil rigs are too dangerous to fail, we shouldn't have them either (here's the obvious alternative). But no logic, no evidence and no earnest well-directed passion to preserve the environment will overcome huge corporate election contributions. I'm feeling the frustration of Chris Matthews:

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Rand Paul and the Libertarian Wrong

Rand Paul, senate hopeful for Kentucky, made a fool of himself with remarks about the 1964 Civil Rights Act and racism and affirmative action et cetera et cetera so on and so forth. If Kentucky votes him into office, they get what they deserve. There was a brief moment when I thought Ron Paul was worthy of some respect—he seemed willing to speak truth to power. I found that I disagreed with him on specifics, but it is useful (and rare) to have someone doing the Emperor’s New Suit schtick. However, anyone who names a child after an ideological demagogue has some serious problems with reality. (To be clear, Rand, under the circumstances, can only refer to Ayn Rand, the patron non-saint of the Libertarian Movement.) Rand’s pronouncements about the rights of business owners to deny service to anyone they see fit is perfectly consistent with Randian philosophy and politics. Basically, it says that the person whose name is on the title owns what the title describes outright and has, by dint of absolute moral dictate, dictatorial command over said property and ought to be allowed to do with it what they wish. Without explanation to anyone and certainly without anyone else’s permission. Sounds good, doesn’t it? I mean, you worked for it, you sweated, earned the means of acquisition, put your name and fortune on the line to own it, worked to make it do what you intended, you should therefore enjoy all rights and privileges in the say of what to do with it. Your home, your rules. There’s a feel-good quid pro quo to it that appeals a basic sense of fairness, suggests a rough equivalence between work and risk and rights. This is fundamental to Ayn Rand’s whole premise, that the creator, the mind behind creation, the one who brings something into existence is the one who has the only natural say in what that thing so created can and will do and who it shall serve. For an avowed atheist, Rand had a very mythic, godlike attitude toward life. And I suppose if you could somehow make the case that a single individual did indeed create something from whole cloth and by virtue of his or her singular efforts sustained it and drove it and made it successful, there might be a good and valid point to this view. But is that ever the case? Rand’s famous tome, Atlas Shrugged, makes the argument that the movers and shakers, the people who Do, are absolutely vital to the world. Nothing would exist without them and if they should withdraw their talent and genius and effort, the world would come to a halt. She makes the case for the Indispensible Man. And in the novel (for those of you who have not read it), a man named John Galt, fed up with the growing People’s Movements around the world, which he sees as essentially parasitic, calls a strike of the truly important people. He convinces the men and women who truly matter to leave the world, retire, disappear, and when they have all left, it seems no one can do what they did, and everything falls apart. The final image shows them emerging from their high-tech hideaway to assume command as the true and rightful aristocracy of ability. It is, in her narrative, a very small group. [More . . . ]

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The human edge: our ideas have sex

In the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley argues that human beings haven't flourished because of anything we do individually. Rather, it is our ability to share and to building upon previous ideas of others--it is our "collective intelligence":

The notion that exchange stimulated innovation by bringing together different ideas has a close parallel in biological evolution. The Darwinian process by which creatures change depends crucially on sexual reproduction, which brings together mutations from different lineages. Without sex, the best mutations defeat the second best, which then get lost to posterity. With sex, they come together and join the same team. So sex makes evolution a collective and cumulative process in which any individual can draw on the gene pool of the whole species. And when it comes to gene pools, the species with gene lakes generally do better than the ones with gene ponds—hence the vulnerability of island species to competition with continental ones.

It is precisely the same in cultural evolution. Trade is to culture as sex is to biology. Exchange makes cultural change collective and cumulative. It becomes possible to draw upon inventions made throughout society, not just in your neighborhood. The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex. . . . So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange. . . . Prosperity consists of getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty.

Ridley concludes that this inexorable building upon prior ideas by sharing them is ultimately a "cheery" one (he points to reduced child mortality and increased per capita income worldwide), despite the occasional setbacks.

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Your Neandertal Ancestors

Scientific convention used to be that modern humans came out of Africa and completely replaced Neandertals (also spelled "Neanderthals") without interbreeding (for example, see here). New evidence suggests that this hypothesis is incorrect, according to an article by Ann Gibbons called "Close Encounters of the Prehistoric Kind." The article appears in the May 7, 2010 edition of Science (available online only to subscribers). An international team has now completed the draft sequence of the Neandertal genome, which includes more than 3 billion nucleotides collected from the bones of three female Neandertals who lived in Croatia more than 38,000 years ago." The analysis described was astoundingly complex, and the consequences of this analysis are startling:

By comparing this composite Neandertal genome with the complete genomes of five living humans from different parts of the world, researchers found that both Europeans and Asians share 1% to 4% of their nuclear DNA with Neandertals. But Africans do not. This suggests that early modern humans interbred with Neandertals after moderns left Africa, but before they spread into Asia and Europe. The evidence showing interbreeding is "incontrovertible," says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the work. "There's no other way you can explain this."

Therefore, many people living outside of Africa carry "a small but significant amount of DNA from these extinct humans." The consequences of this amazing finding are not lost on anyone:

In a sense, the Neandertals are then not altogether extinct, says lead author Svante Paabo, a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig Germany, who is surprised to find out he was part Neanderthal. "They live on in some of us."

The Science article presents the following list of things we now know about Neanderthals:
  • The genomes of modern humans and Neanderthals are 99.84% identical.
  • The scientific data don't support interbreeding when scientists had most expected it (between 45,000 and 30,000 years ago in Europe).
  • Neanderthals coexisted with modern humans in Europe from 30,000 to 45,000 years ago, and perhaps in the Middle East as early as 80,000 years ago.
  • The amount of admixture is tiny, even among Europeans and Asians, but Neanderthals "are significantly more closely related to non-Africans than Africans on average.
  • The new data fits with the discovery of fossils and stone tools from Israel caves about 80,000 years ago (modern humans and Neanderthals both used these caves and had much in common--they used similar tool-kits and under the same animals). One Neandertal skeleton from the Middle East looked "less robust than Neanderthals in Asia and Europe.
  • Despite the ability to sequence some Neanderthal DNA, there is no possibility of cloning a Neanderthal.
  • "The isolated DNA was in pieces typically about 50 bases long, and there were many missing stretches. Further, despite the story one often hears in the mass media, DNA is not completely responsible for the appearance of an animal. "Chemical modifications to the genome, the way chromosomes arrange in the nucleus, and maternal components in the egg all play a role in translating a genetic blueprint into a viable individual." None of these are available with regard to Neanderthals. As soon as you substitute another oocyte (e.g., that of a modern human) for that of a Neandertal, you would change the resulting organism.
Despite the fact that there was some interbreeding, it did not happen much. This article quotes evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff, who asked "Was it a cultural barrier?" We are cousins with every living thing on planet Earth (including trees and see here), but many of us are both cousins and descendants of Neandertals. Therefore, for those of you who have had ancestors from anywhere outside of Africa (keeping in mind that all of us have ancestors from Africa), you are African and you are Neandertal. I'm planning on having a bit of fun the next time a bureaucratic form requires me to designate my "race."

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Saving Africa’s Witch Children

I am often asked, "Why do you fight against religion?" Today my answer would be best expressed by this article from the New York Times. A new documentary called "Saving Africa's Witch Children" will be airing Wednesday May 26th on HBO2. The documentary follows Gary Foxcroft...

...founder of the charity Stepping Stones Nigeria, as he travels the rural state of Akwa Ibom, rescuing children abused during horrific “exorcisms” — splashed with acid, buried alive, dipped in fire — or abandoned roadside, cast out of their villages because some itinerant preacher called them possessed.
One of the main subjects of the documentary is Helen Ukpabio.
At home in Nigeria, the Pentecostal preacher Helen Ukpabio draws thousands to her revival meetings. Last August, when she had herself consecrated Christendom’s first “lady apostle,” Nigerian politicians and Nollywood actors attended the ceremony. Her books and DVDs, which explain how Satan possesses children, are widely known. So well-known, in fact, that Ms. Ukpabio’s critics say her teachings have contributed to the torture or abandonment of thousands of Nigerian children — including infants and toddlers — suspected of being witches and warlocks.
If ever there was a reason to continue to strive to undermine the authority of religion, this is it.

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