Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

Newsweek and the Washington Post are hosting a dialogue on the subject of faith and the possibility of coexistence between religions. Contributors so far include the Dalai Lama and Mohammad Khatami. Interesting to hear them speak, and to see people’s responses.

There has been significant progress towards sequencing Neanderthal DNA, and there are hopes of having an almost complete sequence in a year or so. This opens all kinds of doors to looking at what, genetically, makes us human.

On a related note, Slate is running an article about cross-species mating, and in particular why humans could or could not breed with other species. (This was prompted by a recent paper suggesting that humans and Neanderthals may have mated, and that’s the origin of some of our modern cranial capacity genes)

Back in the land of geopolitics, a Chinese sub managed to sneak up on a US carrier group. Apart from ‘s comment that someone O4+ is going to be in seriously deep shit over this, this suggests that they’ve been doing quite well on the technology needed to make highly silent motors and so on. (Whether they did so on their own or “acquired” this technology from elsewhere is an interesting question. China’s military has certainly never suffered from not-invented-here syndrome.)

There’s really a lot having to do with China going on right now. China and Iran are cementing an alliance, with Iranian oil getting ready to flow east. (Question: Anyone have some info as to what the routes are going to be? It looks like every possible path is going to involve some combination of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, which could make for some very exciting places to put oil pipelines. Don’t forget what happened to Russia’s Caspian -> Turkey pipeline, that once upon a time went through Chechnya…) Iran may well have had observers at N Korea’s nuclear test. (Unconfirmed rumors, but wouldn’t be all that surprising if true; those countries have been working hand-in-hand on this for a while.) China is similarly making alliances with a lot of other dubious places that have useful resources, like the Sudan and Zimbabwe, but that the West by and large wants nothing to do with. This certainly makes the notion of sanctions as a weapon pretty much infeasible, since that depends on some sort of unity, and could bring us back towards a bipolar world — if, that is, China’s “burn through the environment as fast as needed to get economic progress” algorithm doesn’t hit a really nasty obstacle in the near future. Which is not something that I would bet against. (Side note: They’re burning through this a lot faster than the US or Europe ever did, because they have a much higher population, and they have old systems in place which turn into a huge social unrest risk if they don’t keep the economy flowing. Add to this an almost total willingness to sacrifice the countryside to protect the cities, again because of unrest risk, and there’s a real problem brewing in China. Not that this would be useful to the furthering of US interests or anything.)

Really, China is in an interesting fix. They got where they are today by being the cheapest producer of all sorts of things. Now other Asian countries, especially in SE Asia, are thinking about competing with them; so what will China do? Keep trying to undercut them, or move into higher-end markets? The latter is more sustainable in general, but it doesn’t necessarily scale to a huge population quite as smoothly, and China has been moving so fast that it hasn’t really had time to transfer the benefits from its previous wave of growth to the population as a whole, so the moderating factor that that would create isn’t available. And trouble from the countryside, local riots, complete collapses of regions due to ecosystem failure, and so on, keep happening more and more often, while people keep streaming into already-overloaded cities. It reminds me a bit of the USSR: it looks awfully menacing on the outside, but if you look at their underlying logistics and infrastructure, there’s a very different thing going on.

Dammit, I’m not nearly enough of a China expert. Perhaps I’m going to need to start on that.

Apparently, our President wants equal time for intelligent design in American schools, saying that “both sides ought to be properly taught” so “people can understand what the debate is about.”

It’s probably not really worth too much discussion in this forum, but it’s fascinating to see how this culture of false debate has emerged. If a public figure were to go out and say that the sky is green, the press would simply report it, and then ask someone else what color they say the sky is, satisfied that by presenting “both sides” of the issue they’ve discharged their duty, and (seeing that there are clearly two sides who disagree) now being able to describe it as a disputed issue. What you won’t hear is the press actually checking the facts themselves; such things are “not their department.” This is especially true when there are a large number of people who, for one reason or another, feel strongly about backing whomever it was who made the false statement; the media are really averse to flat-out contradicting someone when that may alienate readers.

But if a political movement grows, and out of fear of contradicting them nobody ever says they’re wrong, where do we end up?

The rather simple problem with the “debate” over the teaching of evolution, which nobody ever seems quite willing to say, is that the reason we don’t teach “intelligent design” or other forms of ersatz creationism in school isn’t because there’s a secular humanist bias, or because we don’t want to favor one religion over another; it’s for the rather simple reason that these things are false, and known to be false. The fact that one group strenuously advocates for them doesn’t make them any more true, and no matter how loud these groups are, the fact that people are out there saying something does not make it true, nor does it make the debate legitimate or worth people’s time; if a thousand people claim the sky is green, even by divine revelation, the sky will still be blue, and trying to convince them will still be an elaborate waste of time.

Or to say this in a more religious context, we are given senses and a faculty of reason, and we do not derive our laws and our sense of the universe from omens and signs. As R. Jeremia said, the Torah has already been given at Sinai; that is, the set of divine interventions needed to create this world was done at the creation of the world, and so the world is complete within its own context: we can study it in its own right, without having to resort to revelations “explaining” for us things which our own senses can understand on their own. (Baba Metzia, 59a-b) (Yes, I realize that making a religious argument in this context seems odd, but I don’t believe there’s any fundamental contradiction between religion and reason; only when people start misunderstanding the difference between stories and the world around them, to the extent that they reject the evidence of their own senses.)

And now, our president has decided that he needs to weigh in on this issue, because without his wisdom and guidance, where would we be?