Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "science"

Are Humans the Only Animal With A Passion For Revenge?

In my opinion, Mark Twain’s Third Horrendous Commendation of the Human Race as inferior to all other animals is Simply Wrong. Quotes cited below are from Mark Twain’s Letters From the Earth: Uncensored Writings, the letter entitled “The Damned Human Race, Section V. The Lowest Animal.”

In this ten-page article, Mark Twain (MT) lays out the evidence as he saw it at a terrible time in his life. Perhaps we should excuse him, but on this point I can’t agree. Personal experience with dolphins has told me that revenge is not unique to the human animal.

This is third in the Mark Twain blog series on my personal web site caryneeper.com dealing with Mark Twain's 13 reasons why humans are the lowliest of the animals.

That's why I recommended Frans DeWaal's "Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor" as a good read for all my friends interested in Science, Non-fiction and Psychology.

Louis Neal Irwin and Dirk Schulze-Makuch do a thorough job of reviewing the environments of the planets and their moons in our solar system. Are any of them friendly enough to harbor life? What kind of life? How many probably house internal oceans under a cap of ice? Those are the most likely candidates for microbes, maybe even swimmers or crawlers on three types of environment--an internal ice ceiling, an ocean floor over a warm core, and the internal ocean itself. The authors consider all the chemical ifs, ands and buts of such environments.

I'm most eager to see what the flybys that will pick up samples from the leaking moon Enceladus in 2030? Actually, it's spurting icy water and organics several hundred kilometers into space from its south pole. It there is an internal ocean there, it could be very interesting--and we won't even have to drill through kilometers of ice.
Meanwhile, come visit my blogs on astronaut.com. Here's the latest-- http://astronaut.com/whos-good-news-l...

Wild Heritage by Sally Carrighar, illus. by Rachel S. Horne, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
In her Foreword to Wild Heritage, Sally Carrigher, author of One Day At Beetle Rock addresses the problem of “anthropomorphism—the attributing of human emotions to animals.” When she was writing in the early 1960’s—and until long after the 1980’s when Frans deWaal began to attribute words of emotion to primates—some ethologists (animal behavior scientists) refused to acknowledge that “human beings behave like the simpler creatures.”

Recent careful studies have now established a large body of knowledge that answers Carrighar’s question, “What similar impulses (if any) move both animals and men?” Wild Heritage is a treasure, summarizing many extensive studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, that confirm the anatomical and biochemical evidence that we are all closely related.

Her section tracing the history of anthropomorphism from Victorian sentimentality to the careful studies of her time is an interesting study in the human growth, maturation if you will, in rational scientific thinking.

Carrigher also offers insights into the concepts of instinct, imprinting, song and play that are still valid today. And her detailed accounts of lemming behavior and animal painting are revealing in what have become clichés.’

The Law of Parsimony—“...denying animals any qualities except those of reflex mechanisms” is dead at last. See also another book attacking that notion: Theodore X. Barber’s The Human Nature of Birds. And, of course, don’t neglect the work of Frans de Waal.Frans de Waal
Sally Carrighar

Oxford, W. H. Freeman , 1992

Author of a widely used 1978 text in physical chemistry, P.W.Atkins treats the lay reader with marvelous English in describing the wonder he sees in all that was learned at that time—about time, space, the origin of the universe, dimensionality, and why mathematics works.

His understanding of complex systems and their emergence from chaos drive his thesis that we can understand creation and will, eventually, describe its beginning in terms so accurate that our religious concepts will no longer be necessary.

Unfortunately, this kind of presumption has driven the recent split between science and people of institutional faith, so that the honest, invaluable approach of science—which leaves all conditions open to additional evidence and testing—is lost, as is the awe scientists feel for the complexity they find in nature.

Since this book was published, there has been a growing awareness of the several sources of unpredictability in complex systems. Ilya Prigogine called the choices at chemical bifurcation points “irreducible randomness.” Unpredictable phenomena may arise when many agents interact in nonlinear ways, which is nearly everything, from our bodies to electrical grids.

Atkins, however, neglects the concept of mind as the unpredictable emergent activity of our extremely complex brain with its 86 billion neurons, each with up to 10,000 connections. But his most egregious error is his failure to recognize the difference between science and religion. As Jeffrey Lockridge puts it so eloquently in Grasshopper Dreaming, science explores and suggests how things work, while religion invests in questions that ask why things are as they are, including the universe and our lives. What is our purpose or reason for being, the meaning of life itself? Science doesn’t ask those questions.

The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities by Caleb Scharf, New York, ScientificAmerican/Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014. Astrophysicist Caleb Scharf’s Science Book of the Year 2014 wins my award for a vibrant, readable and enjoyable history of astronomy and a comprehensive overview of the current finds that suggest answers to the “ultimate” question, “Are we alone in the universe?”

Schaft begins by reminding us of old-world answers to that question. Then he takes us beyond Copernicus and his problems with a heliocentric solar system to the Kepler telescope and its exoplanet zoo.

What delighted me were Scharf’s forays into all the difficult sciences that serve as tools for studying the universe. These include statistics, constants necessary for life, relativity, chaos, the complex nature of life, biochemistry and its requirements, as well as Rare Earth geoastronomy, requirements for Earth Equivalence, and remote clues that suggest life elsewhere.

Scharf does not dance around the facts. Space is enormous, as are energy and time requirements for traveling to other stars. He does suggest that Earth orbits in a rather special solar system, special because most of our fellow planets sail around in orbits within 10% of circular. At the same time, our Milky Way galaxy is richly endowed with other solar systems, some unexpected, some thought impossible or surprisingly different, but overall not too different from computer models of possible varieties.

The author charges ahead in covering all the possibilities for finding an answer to the big question. In the end, he stays true to his realism when suggesting two choices we will have to make, if we do find evidence of life elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy. I heartily recommend this book if you have ever wondered who we are and where we seem to be.

New York, Henry Holt, 2015

The author, founder of Skeptic Magazine, makes a good case for the rise of human morality over human history. The reason? Increased understanding due to the finding of science, information confirmed by being open to testing. Presenting precise definitions and detailed analysis, Shermer reviews ancient religions and morality, explores cognitive dissonance and the principle of interchangeable perspectives, animal rights, free ill, the death penalty , and prospects for future city-states and new technologies.

After all this convincing precision and analysis, Shermer claims that in the past 1000 years we were living in a zero-sum economics. Now its a nonzero world, when technology means "the gain of one often means the gain for others and ...an abundance of food and resources."

Seems to me he's got it backwards, given the current knowledge of resource limits, water shortages, global warming, and population overload. Shermer also gets carried away painting the future--forgetting the time, space, and energy required when he makes the outdated scifi case for the human colonization way beyond Earth throughout the galaxy and beyond. I hope this section doesn't turn readers away from his uplifting conclusions.

He makes a powerful case for his moral arc, convincing the reader with many examples and lots of data, how our ethics are truly realized at a higher level than ever before in history, because we depend now on good, tested information, not superstition and ancient thought patterns.