Elements - the rest of the stories

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, chemistry, physics, elements, stories

A perfectly ordinary spoon. It looks and feels like aluminum, just a bit heavier…unless you hold it too long. But the person who handed it to you urges you to immediately mix your coffee with it. In a matter of seconds, you have in your hand only the handle, which soon begins to melt and also drip into the coffee cup! What is this?

Gallium, which is chemically very similar to Aluminum, is nearly twice as dense, but still much less dense than stainless steel or silver. A spoon made of it feels light. Its melting point is 85.6°F (29.8°C), and your hand is several degrees warmer than that (unless you've just been outside throwing snowballs with bare hands). If you had held the spoon in your hand more than a few seconds, it would have begun to melt. Gallium and Mercury are the only two metals that you can touch when they are molten without getting a serious burn. There are hundreds of YouTube videos showing gallium spoons, and other objects, melting in warm water or into the hand of someone. It is not toxic, while mercury is very toxic.

Stories about gallium and other elements—all of them, in fact—fill the pages of The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements, by Sam Kean. "The Periodic Table!" you say, perhaps with a shudder. Shades of Junior-class Chemistry in High School rise up to haunt you.

The Periodic Table of the Elements isn't (only) an instrument of teen torture. It is very useful. Just to lay some groundwork, and to get it out of the way, here is a simple version as seen in the Gallium page of Wikipedia:

The version you most likely remember (or try to forget) probably had 18 columns, not 32, with a separate pair of lines below with elements running from La to Lu and Ac to Lr (or maybe only as far as Cm or Bk with the rest of the boxes blank). This table incorporates all the elements into a single table and adds the convenience of color coding of elements with similar, or related, chemical properties. Gallium (Ga) is highlighted, right below Aluminum (Al).

The chemical similarities between certain elements led to the development of the first Periodic Table by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869. He was not the first to notice the similarities, but he was the first to use the "periods" (the columns in the table and their repeating nature) to predict the placement and chemical properties of several new elements. As these elements were discovered, one after another, the table was established, as was Mendeleev's fame.

Early chapters of The Disappearing Spoon outline Mendeleev's discovery and that of the first handful of elements, including the ones that confirmed that his table was trustworthy. Other chapters group the elements by the kinds of stories that swirl around them (or did when they were newly known). For example, Chapter 9, "Poisoner's Corridor: 'ouch-ouch'", begins with the sad story of cadmium (Cd) in a Japanese mine. Waste material rich in Cd and zinc (Zn) was a byproduct of the precious metals that the Shogun desired. Later, when Zn was found useful, the waste tailings were re-mined, of course without any protective measures. You'll see Cd in the table above, just below Zn, which is next to Ga. Being chemically similar, Cd is found with Zn, but it is not totally identical so acid roasting can separate the two metals. Cd-rich waste, now in water-soluble form, was cast away and got into the streams. People downstream who drank the water got "Itai-itai!" disease. "Itai" is Japanese for "Ouch!" Cd weakens the bones and later causes the kidneys to fail. Early death was nearly universal, either because of infection from compound fractures, or from kidney disease. Thallium (Tl) and Bismuth (Bi) have their own stories to tell, of chemical "improprieties". Strangely, in the right compound, Bi is not toxic, and is the basis for Pepto-Bismol! You can drink it to help an upset stomach. Tl, on the other hand, is horrific! Read about it.

Two other elements, Thorium (Th) and Americium (Am) poison in a different way. They are radioactive. They bracket the range of the more common radioactive elements. The most stable isotope of Thorium, Th-232, has a half-life of 14 billion years, nearly three times as long as Uranium-238. As metals, Th and U are safe to handle for short times (I have done so). Am-241 is much more dangerous than radium (Ra). Its half-life is 432 years, while that of Ra-226 is 1,600 years. However, while radium decays to radon (Rn), the radioactive gas that we try to keep out of our basements, americium decays to other metallic elements, which stay put. Thus it can be used in smoke detectors, so you probably have a few micrograms of Am-241 in your house!

Chapter after chapter, the author tells us story after story of how elements were discovered, and/or how they are used, and curious facts about them. The phrase "Mad as a Hatter" (and the Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland) indicate the gradual insanity caused by using mercury (Hg, for "hydrargium" or "liquid silver") to process felt for hat-making. And some new elements have been tried as love potions, with universal lack of success.

So, maybe you hated high school chemistry, or maybe, like me, you loved it. Regardless, the stories behind the elements, and their arrangement into the Periodic Table, are enjoyable. The book is well worth a read.

I have to close with a quibble about near-homonyms and their misuse. Referring to metals such as Cd being dissolved into ground water, the author uses both "leech" and "leach", where only "leach" is proper. The other word refers to a parasitic animal, or your cousin who is always borrowing from you. Then, he describes the damage and illness caused by some elements as being "ravished". The right word is "ravaged". To ravish is to rape, though the word has other uses, but it is definitely not a synonym for ravage. And finally, describing physical characteristics of some animals, "waddles" appears. The author meant "wattles", the folds of skin on the neck of a turkey or an elderly person or dog. "Waddle" is a verb, not (or very rarely) a noun, and describes walking with a distinct swaying motion.

Well, let's forgive Sam Kean for such minor crimes. His writing is enjoyable and the stories he has unearthed are fascinating. I bought this e-book as part of a three book set, so it won't be long until I review the third (I already reviewed The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons).

Verbal beauty – in the ear of the listener

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, dictionaries, phonaesthetics, word lists

I bought Dictionary of the Strange, Curious, & Lovely, by Robin Devoe, on Amazon, as a way of adding a low-cost purchase to my Cart to push it over $25 and get free shipping. I am one of those odd people who can read in a dictionary for pleasure. Since the title included the word "lovely" I first looked for "cellar door", which has a long history of being considered the most beautiful-sounding word (or phrase) in English. The lovely sound of "cellar door" has been remarked upon by such literary lights as H.L. Mencken and  J.R.R. Tolkien, who coined the word "phonaesthetics" for the interest in lovely-sounding words.

"Cellar door" is not found in this collection. Neither is "tintinnabulation" (coined by Poe), one of my favorites. And while I'm at it, a collection of my own would include "surfeit" (the S-R-F series is quite pleasing; ask any surfer!) and "flabbergasterisk", which describes a step beyond the ordinary "!" by replacing the dot with an asterisk.

However, this book was written by Robin Devoe, not by me, so it's author's choice. Not all the words are necessarily "lovely". It's clear he (or she?) was more devoted to "strange" and "curious". Also rare.

After that first peek, I found that the book is entirely without apparatus. No table of contents nor page numbers; an index would be superfluous and useless, so none of that; but I'd like to have seen a preface or introduction. But No: After a page of non-introductory introduction and the requisite copyright page, the book is a word list with scanty definitions (and no more than a couple of dozen scantier etymologies), followed by a supplementary word list; also, thankfully, a few blank endpapers, which I used for record-keeping. 

Being rather geeky, I added page numbers as I went and made my own table of contents, seen here. There was room for it on the copyright page. Sampling several pages I found that the 143 whole pages included about 24.5 words each, and the 144th page had four words, ending in "zymurgy", another word I like. That comes to just over 3,500 words. So far so good.

Beginning on page 144 we find a list of Supplementary Words of Beauty or Interest, about 600 of them. And it is just a list, of five or six words per line.

As I went I marked each word I knew already. This copy of page 32 shows an example. The little "q" next to "culex" indicates that I had a question. I knew that Culex is a genus of mosquito, one of 112 mosquito genera. Gnats are not mosquitoes, being in a different subfamily of the Diptera (two-winged flies). It didn't take long to be certain that the author had got this one wrong. This is not quite a blunder, because culex is the Latin word for "gnat", chosen by Linnaeus to distinguish a genus of small mosquito species, in his original classification of "all life" in 1758.

I kept track of how many words I'd marked on each page. They added up to 1,017 of the 3,500+ words, or 29%.

I considered checking the supplementary list of 600 words; a quick skim showed that I know more than 90% of those. I didn't go further.

I did find myself wondering how the author gathered the words. Was it a years-long endeavor? Was there a session of hunting through the Oxford English Dictionary for the least-used words (those with the shortest entries)? A little of both?

The copyright page shows the book is not copyrighted by the author, but by Rob Earl. Another mystery. The page lists a website, www.cloudskiing.com, which doesn't exist (maybe it did in 2017).

Of course, unless you share my logophilic affliction, this isn't a book to read, but one to browse. Who knows, maybe we can add a word or two to our working vocabulary, except then when we use a new word and get a blank stare in reply, we have to explain it.

The human brain from molecules to mind

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, neuroscience, neurosurgery

If you've never heard of Phineas Gage, it's time you did. He was a railroad construction supervisor. In 1848, at age 25, he was using a custom-made tamping rod to pack gunpowder in a drilled hole. He was very good at it, but this time he struck a spark. The rod was blasted upward: Entering at his right cheekbone, it went right through his head, exiting out the top where a baby's soft spot is, and landed about 25 yards away.

Although the 16-pound rod performed a hemi-lobotomy, destroying his left frontal lobe, he never lost consciousness. He needed a lot of a doctor's care to recover, physically. His personality changed, but not so much as one might think. He was a neurological wonder for a couple of years, but moved to South America for a few more years, where he worked as a muleteer. Returning to the U.S. to his family in California, at age 34 he weakened and died. This Daguerreotype was made when he was about 28. He carried "his rod" with him at all times, and it was buried with him.

So little is known about him that apocryphal stories abound, based on no more than one or two statements by family members, that "he wasn't Phineas Gage any more." Yet in many ways he still really was Phineas Gage, a Phineas who had lost certain planning abilities, and a lot of "stick-to-it-iveness", but his memories were continuous. He had no amnesia, in contrast to many victims of traumatic brain injuries.

One might say that his mind was more intact than the body of a quadriplegic is. We don't say, after someone has lost the use of both arms and both legs, that "he isn't so-and-so any more." We actually expect a certain and significant change of personality due to the loss alone; at least some depression. Was Gage's loss any greater?

Let's go back to the beginning. At what level are we to look, in the brain, for the "seat of the mind"? In The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery, by Sam Kean, while he starts with a story a few centuries older than Gage's, he then takes us from the small to the large, in a search for what makes our minds tick. The opening chapter, the title chapter, tells the story of a horrible injury suffered by Henri II of France in 1559, during a joust. When his opponent's wooden lance splintered against his shield, a large piece entered below his eye, slammed to a stop at the back of his skull, and broke off.

During the eleven days until his death, the king was attended by the two best brain surgeons of the day, his own surgeon Ambroise Paré, and the famed anatomist Andreas Vesalius. The two doctors had different backgrounds, but they didn't really "duel". Each following his own experience and learning, they came to the same diagnosis, which agreed with the sketchy autopsy that was allowed after the king's death. Sam Kean begins with this story because its details foreshadow all of the significant developments in neuroscience over the following 450+ years.

I would love to dwell on the details brought out in all the twelve chapters of the book. But let us allow the author to tell his own tales. The chapters subsequent to the story of Henri II do indeed begin small, and advance to larger and larger structures and systems. The earliest debate was between those who believed the brain's signaling was entirely electrical (the "sparks") and those who believed it was primarily chemical (the "soups"). It turned out to be both, and the experiments that winkled out the various neurochemicals are worthy of a book or two of their own (I haven't looked, but I suspect that such books already exist).

Then, are the stringy things that make up so much of the brain a continuous network, or cells with long "wires" that connect them to other cells? The latter, but it took some silver nitrate solution spilled by Camillo Golgi to settle the matter. Although the consistency of the brain is about like ripe avocado, when one is extracted whole and toughened up chemically, to be more like well-set jello, various structures can be discerned, that have names like Thalamus, Hippocampus, Cerebellum, and the various lobes of the Cortex. It seems obvious to me that the physical structures indicate certain functions. Further, once the columns in the cortex were discerned microscopically, one would think they at least hint at a certain amount of specialization. But a debate raged for years between "functionalists" and those who insisted that the brain is a tabula rasa, a blank tablet, on which experience alone impresses its marks. The reality is a bit of both. Not just functions but proclivities of many sorts are with us from before birth, but there is lots of room for "writing" to be done; without the latter we'd have a hard time making memories.

The author has put a Rebus in each chapter, as a puzzle for readers to work out. This is one of the simpler ones (here he cheated, using a phonetic clue). I'll put its meaning at the end of this review.

Step by step, system by system, we traverse the realms of neuroscience, until the great question is asked: What of consciousness? It was once thought to be embodied in the Pituitary Gland. Later, in the frontal lobes. Most parts of the brain have had, and still have, their proponents. The author brings us this bit of clarity from V. S. Ramachandran, from his book Phantoms in the Brain: Consider any episode of a popular TV show such as Baywatch. Where is it located?

On the beach where the actors were filmed? In the camera that recorded the drama? In the cables pumping bits into your television? In the television itself? … in the storm of photons arriving at your eyes? Perhaps in your brain itself?

The best phrase of the book has the only answer we can discern: 

Consciousness is not a thing in a place but a process in a population.

I once said in a sophomoric speech that "the mind is the program that runs in the brain." That's synonymous to the prior statement, just not as well put.

Here is a fact that surprised me when I first learned it, no more than a few years ago: We read in many places that the human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. I asked one day, of Google, for a breakdown of the brain's neuron count by brain structure or system. It wasn't easy to dig through the returns for something useful! This article (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/) tells me this: the total brain contains about 86 billion neurons, including 14-16 billion in the cerebral cortex ("gray matter"), and most of the rest in the cerebellum, the "little brain" at the back, that controls our body. It seems about a billion neurons each are to be found in the brainstem and limbic system.

That means the vaunted "higher brain functions" that make us human use less than 20% of the neurons in the brain. Throw in the "reptile brain" and the "rat brain" in which our emotions and reflexes lie, and the total is very close to 20%. Nearly 70 billion neurons (~80%) take care of running the body. In all this, I don't know where the "subconscious" lies, and I don't think anyone else knows for sure.

Also, there is no singular brain location "for" any particular skill or function or even memory. SPECT and fMRI scans taken while a person is reading, playing music, adding 3-digit numbers, or whatever, display activity in widely spread regions throughout the cortex and underlying structures. Yes, you can touch someone's brain with an electrode and evoke, for example, the taste and smell of chocolate ice cream, as first experienced "that day on Coney Island". But ask the person to re-evoke that memory without the electrode while in a scanner, and not only does that spot light up, but so do several others. This holographic character of the brain, and memories in particular, must underlie the ability of Phineas Gage and others to lose big chunks of brain without necessarily losing any significant amount of memory.

On the other hand, an area such as the hippocampus, which is seen to be in use no matter what memory we evoke, seems to be a switching center. Lose it, and profound amnesia can result. Other regions are equally specialized. Some stuff is local, and some is not.

Stepping back, we seem to have produced something similar to the brain, at least as regards organization, in the Internet itself. It is not found in any one place; it is delocalized. Big chunks of it can be disabled (such as by a denial-of-service attack on a set of servers), but the rest just keeps ticking along. Can the Internet become conscious? I don't know. (Sam Kean doesn't go there). For those who think it already became conscious, the burden of proof is on them to show us the initiative we'd expect of a conscious entity.

Meanwhile, our brains are still the most complex items in the Universe. If all but one human were killed, and there were no aliens anywhere, that person's brain would contain more than half the complexity of the entire universe. We have a huge way to go towards understanding more than just a little. The "just a little" we know already is fascinating, and this book uncorks a lot of it for us.

The Rebus:

Limbic System

Atheism is as atheism does

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, polemics, atheism, theism

In a long email conversation with a prominent physicist, I made the case that atheism was of necessity incomplete. He understood that science is also of necessity incomplete (discussed below). He eventually had to concede that agnosticism is a more logical stance than atheism. Of course, I had hopes that he would become a theist, even a Biblical theist; that is, a Christian. But we take what we can get.

Stephen Hawking, probably out of irritation that so many people would ask him about God, spent the last decade or two of his life trying to prove mathematically that universe needed no beginning and no God. Oh, he had to acknowledge there was the Big Bang, and it was a beginning of sorts. But he tried to make it a natural consequence…but of what? Knowing only what came after, and nothing that might have come before, he could only rely on what we observe. His various, and hard-won, hypotheses about an "origin without an origin" were all seen to be circular reasoning.

In graduate school I had a fellow student, an atheist, who liked to talk about philosophy and religion (perhaps "obsession" is a better term than "like"). He believed firmly in science, and, using the term "believe" in the common sense, not theologically, so do I. I showed him passages in the Bible that outlined an "experiment" he could perform. The result of the experiment would be certain subjective experiences that could be had no other way. Should the experiment fail, he could then claim that the Bible was false. I won't go into "the experiment" here; it is based on the Gospel booklet, A Simple Way to Touch the Lord. My friend was very resistant. The integrity of his worldview was on the line. Months passed. In a desperate moment, he tried "the experiment". He became a Christian as a result. A year later he struggled against his faith. He even claimed to me that there was a different method to achieve the same results. Later he confessed that he had lied, and settled into his Christian life. Helping me share the Gospel with someone, he once said, "This is very real!"

Before discussing the book at hand, I must give some definitions in practical terms:

• Theist – Someone who believes there is a God to whom we can relate personally.
• Deist – Someone who believes there is a god who is indifferent about us.
• Nontheist – Someone who doesn't believe in any god, and makes no big deal of it.
• Atheist – Someone who knows, if there is a God, this God doesn't like the atheist's lifestyle; therefore the atheist claims there is no god, and that neither can there be.
• Militant Atheist – Also "Evangelical Atheist"; someone who demands that theism (and perhaps deism) be abolished.

As an aside, the Beast of Revelation, often called "the Antichrist" (a term the Bible never uses), is going to be a militant atheist, even the chief of all militant atheists. And he'll have real power to back it up.

Ravi Zacharias, formerly an atheist and now an ardent Christian, evangelist, and apologist, wrote The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists to rebut the claims made in a small book by Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation. Mr. Harris sees himself as the spearhead of a movement to defy, deny, and destroy the faith of Christians, and of people of any faith. He claims to use reason to combat faith. Ravi Zacharias shows that Harris's "reasons" are unreason, his claims are false, and his arguments hollow.

I won't go into much detail here. It is best to read it for yourself. The End of Reason is small, just 77 pages, including six or seven pages of notes. However, I cannot resist touching a few of the points the author makes.

Firstly, regarding morality: There is a question that Zacharias would have asked atheist philosopher Bertrand Russel (known to other philosophers as "dirty Bertie"), "In some cultures people love their neighbors, and in others they eat them. Do you have a personal preference either way?" (paraphrased from p.29). We know "culture" is composed largely of customary behaviors that members of the culture understand. But people in one culture may find practices in another culture immoral or reprehensible, or even evil. Is cultural relativism the only standard for morality?

I recall the great struggles of "the Sixties" on American college campuses. A common watchword was, "You can't legislate morality!" If you only think of morality as regards who sleeps with whom, there is a little bit of a valid point there. However, is stealing immoral? Is cheating on a test immoral? Is perjury immoral? Properly speaking, we legislate nothing but morality!

Who decides what is moral or immoral? Who decides between good and evil? The story in Genesis about the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is instructive. Before partaking of that fruit, the couple had relied on God to learn what to do. They had the Tree of Life, and their standard of behavior was to spread more Life. They were barred from the Tree of Life after they partook of "the other tree." One imagines God saying, "If you fall out of fellowship with Me, you are on your own, to determine what is good or evil." The later delivery of the Ten Commandments set up a standard even for those who are "on their own."

The cultural morality of the United States was originally based on the Ten Commandments, particularly on the matters of conduct in Commandments 6 through 10. In American society in general, that was mostly overthrown after 1970. Even though economic prosperity has been generally increasing (with some notable hiccups!), emotional and spiritual hollowness has followed right along. In this moral vacuum, churches, synagogues and other religious institutions retained moral teaching based on their faith. Now Sam Harris and others want to complete the hollowing-out of American moral fiber. But without God's commandments, who decides what is good, what is evil? Of course, for Harris, religion is evil. Hardly anything else is.

Zacharias makes these points beginning on page 30 (again I paraphrase and condense):

• To say such-and-such a thing is evil presupposes there is something good.
• To say there is good and there is evil presupposes a moral law to distinguish evil from good.
• A law must have a lawgiver.

Knowing by long experience that people are inconsistent and fallible, where are we to find a consistent and righteous lawgiver? It must be God. Harris argues against just this point, but his reasoning is circular, as Zacharias shows clearly. Then Zacharias goes on to show that we can't have free will without suffering. I see free will as "the stone so heavy even God cannot move it." We can choose to follow God, or not. The consequences are our responsibility.

As Dennis Prager puts it in several places in both volumes (so far published) of The Rational Bible, "The theist has to account for the existence of evil. The atheist has to account for the existence of everything else." The Genesis story shows free will in action. The rest of the Bible shows what God does to restore fallen humanity to unfettered fellowship with Him. The last two chapters of Revelation describe the glorious result.

A final moral point: use and abuse of power, which is a big political football today in America, being the basis of a feeble attempt at the impeachment of the President. On page 34 I find this:

"Isn't it ironic that when Islam is in a position of power, Islamic beliefs are forced on everyone, and when atheism has the upper hand, atheistic beliefs are enforced on everyone? Only in Christianity is the privilege given to both believe and to disbelieve without any enforcement."

From this and many evidences we must conclude, not that Biblical faith is more moral than other religious attitudes, but that Biblical faith, both Jewish and Christian, is the only route to moral living.

A second big issue is human worth. The Old Testament is the first scripture to assert that all persons have equal value to God. In the basic Noahide Law (before the Levitical Law), it is stated, "Whoever sheds man’s blood, / By man shall his blood be shed, / For in the image of God / He made man." Our worth is based on our origin as the image of God. Thus whoever murders must be judicially killed. Human worth is not imparted by other humans, but by God. The slogan "Black lives matter" of recent ilk is based on the perception that, in the eyes of some, not all lives have equal worth. Setting aside the Marxist organization that uses this slogan to terrorize America, we who belong to God respond, "Yes, indeed, all black lives matter, along with all the rest." When we also say, "So do all unborn lives," though, we run afoul of the great evil of legalized abortion. Zacharias touches on this, but it is not his main point. To follow his lead, I will only say that abortion is not an appropriate method of "family planning." To assert otherwise is to be complicit in millions of murders every year.

The primary indicator of a culture's view of human worth is the matter of war and mass murder. Atheists point to the Crusades, during which much slaughter resulted from supposedly "Christian" knights and princes attacking Muslims and Jews in and around the Holy Land. Hardly anyone pays attention to the actual character of medieval Catholicism, which hid behind the banner of Christ, but was dramatically anti-Christian. Popes were typically atheists under a Christian cloak, the "wolves in sheep's clothing" that Paul warned of in Acts 20:29. Boniface VIII was a little worse than most, of whom it was said, "He entered like a fox, ruled like a lion, and died like a dog." Another Pope signed a death warrant for an entire province in France because of the Waldenses ("valley men", a non-Catholic Christian tradition) that lived there.

The Twentieth Century has been unparalleled in its pursuit of warfare. Who started the two World Wars? Don't just say the easy thing, "The Germans." It was German rulers who had assumed an atheistic, or at least, antisemitic worldview. What Kaiser Wilhelm II began (gas chambers for Jews was his idea), Adolf Hitler tried to complete. Both sought extermination of all Jews. Hitler also sought extermination of Christians; it is little known that as many Christians died in the death camps as Jews. The total dead in the Holocaust comes to 17 million.

Who else was officially atheist? Stalin and his successors, Mao Tse-Tung, and Pol Pot, who are responsible for 15-20 million, 60-100 million, and 3 million deaths, respectively.

So I close with this question. If Sam Harris were made Emperor of North America, what would result? Very possibly a holocaust to end all holocausts! Almost 75% of Americans claim to be Christians. That's 240 million. If they won't kowtow to official atheism, must they be killed? The Bible has an answer: when The Beast of Revelation comes to power, everyone must renounce every other god and take his mark, or be barred from buying or selling. Why build gas chambers when you can simply deny the "universal credit card" to anyone who won't swear fealty to you? They'll all starve soon enough.

These matters just touch on a few things in The End of Reason. The atheist worldview is shown to be not just immoral, as we've discussed above, but inconsistent. I'll end by touching on the limits of scientific knowledge, all of which were discovered in the Twentieth Century, though there were hints earlier.

1. Quantum Uncertainty. Often called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In its simplest version, the more accurately you know the location of any object, the less accurately you are able to measure its velocity, and vice versa. This is why there is diffraction of light through openings, for example. It is also why you can't have a computer program that simulates exactly what any portion of the Universe will do, because, firstly, you can't make the measurements needed to set up the simulation.
2. Quantum Superposition. Originally called Schrödinger's Undecidability, exemplified by the thought experiment of the Cat in a Box. A quantum event that has a 50% chance of happening in the next hour will result in the death of the cat. Just before the end of the hour you are asked, "Is the cat alive?" How do you decide? You cannot without opening the box.
3. Systemic Incompleteness. Two principles proved by Kurt Gödel showed that it is possible (usually easy) to ask questions under the aegis of a mathematical system, which cannot be answered adequately using only the tools available within that system. The entire structure of science, which is based on mathematics, is thus incomplete and cannot be made complete. So far, when scientists have run up against a "wall" in their mathematical understanding, someone has ingeniously produced an extension of mathematics that increases the size of the system and allows problems that were formerly unsolvable to be solved; answers that could not be answered, became answerable (by the way, this is a good argument for the immaterial Soul). Soon or later this will come to an end. At the moment, of 23 "questions" stated by David Hilbert in 1900, eight have been resolved, some in the "no you can't prove that" direction; nine are "partially resolved"; two are too vague for anyone to make any progress upon; and and the remaining four (plus a 24th discovered in Hilbert's papers after his death) are so far quite mysterious and unresolved. But, hey, only 120 years have passed, No?

Faith in science alone is less reasonable than faith in a God who made us and made science possible.

Should evolution matter to evangelicals?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, evolution, debunking, polemics

My wife is Japanese. She came to the US at age 25. Prior to age 30, she lived in California, though she made one brief trip to another state to visit a friend. Japan's total land area is slightly less than 90% of that of California, and California's land area is 5¼% of the area of the "lower 48" states. This is background for this story:

Just before our first anniversary I was sent on a temporary assignment to Texas. We planned to drive, and I told my wife that we would do some sightseeing along the way. She said she preferred to go to Texas as quickly as possible. I said, "We can't go past the Grand Canyon without stopping to see it." Our first day's driving took us from southern California to Williams, Arizona. The driving time is only about seven hours, including a meal and a pit stop. After a night in a motel we drove north; it is about an hour's drive to a side road and a parking lot right on the South Rim. Most of the way the road slowly climbs a tilted plateau, flat in all directions. About halfway there she asked, "Where are the mountains?" I innocently asked, "What mountains?" She asked, "How can there be a canyon without mountains?" I said, "This is a different kind of canyon." We parked next to a railing. Only after we got out of the car and went to the railing could we see the canyon. She didn't make a sound. She just stood there, for a long time, hanging on tight (the railing really was very close to the edge).

From that location, one can see to the North Rim, which is 14 miles away in three directions, to the northwest, the north, and the northeast, and is 21 miles away to the north-northeast. After many minutes of looking back and forth at the wonderful Grand Canyon through the clear, June air, she said in a small voice, "How long can we stay?"

Until she saw the Grand Canyon, my wife could not imagine it. I don't know if she had even seen pictures of it. It didn't fit in her mind. The four national parks in central Japan are each about half a square mile in area. The largest one on-land, in Kyushu, encompasses 13 square miles of land and a much larger area of surrounding ocean. Compare that with Yellowstone at 3,471 square miles and Grand Canyon National Park, with 1,902 square miles. The main canyon of the Grand Canyon is more than 200 miles long, and it simply can't fit in Japan.

We are limited by what we are used to. Until seeing the Grand Canyon, followed by the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, my wife had no room in her imagination for such things.

This concept applies to time as well as space. Until we are adults and have lived twenty or thirty years, most of us cannot really imagine a century, let alone a millennium. If we have been lucky enough to get acquainted with a grandparent or great-grandparent who is 80-100 years old, and listen to some of their stories, a century can come to have some meaning for us. This underlies a crevasse of understanding between those of us who have studied a natural science such as geology or astronomy, and everyone else. I made a telescope, with much help from my father, at age 11. It is small but works well and I still use it. My mother had studied geology and we were rockhounds together. She also taught me of The Gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 2:2 (I read the Bible through for the first time at age 12-13).

With my small telescope I can see a dozen or more globular clusters and several galaxies. By the time I entered college I was comfortable with the great distances of these objects, and had learned clearly how such distances are determined. The closest globular cluster, M4 in Scorpio, is 5,500 light-years away. Another that is even easier to see, being much larger and brighter, is M3 in Hercules, which is nearly 34,000 light-years away. These are objects within our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The easiest galaxy to see outside the Milky Way is the great galaxy in Andromeda, at a distance of two million light years. The Whirlpool galaxy in Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs), not too far from the Big Dipper, is 23 million light years away. In my (smallish) telescope I can see this one also.

A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, about 63,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The Sun's light gets here in about 8 minutes. The light we see from the Whirlpool galaxy started on its way to us 23 million years ago. So by practicing amateur astronomy for many years I became comfortable with great spans of time.

I earned two-and-a-half degrees in geology (The "half degree" is known as ABD, "all but dissertation," because the results of my work contradicted the beliefs of a powerful professor on my dissertation committee. He took offense, and I left without my PhD. My work was later shown to be correct by others' work. That professor died without admitting he'd been wrong). I almost majored in paleontology, but went for geophysics instead. I still love paleontology, which is the study of fossils. For one of my summer field camps, I worked in Nevada on ancient reefs, aged about 300 million years. The semi-cliff I climbed almost daily was a sequence of reefs that covered a time span of several million years. The point is, I grew comfortable with time spans thousands of times greater than the kind of time that fits in most people's imagination.

During my time in graduate school I led a fellow student to Christ. He wanted to believe in Jesus but he didn't know what to do with the idea he'd heard from other Christians that the Earth "had to be" no more than 6,000 years old, "…or at most, maybe 8-10 thousand years," as some would say. He was as familiar as I was with Specimen Ridge in Wyoming, a series of more than twenty petrified forests, on atop another. They record this series of events: a forest would grow for several hundred to 1,000 years. A volcano would cover the area in twenty-to-200 feet of ash and kill the forest. A new forest would grow in the mineral-rich ash. This happened over and over. Tree rings can be counted in the petrified standing stumps. The total sequence covers more than 20,000 years. There is no room for Specimen Ridge in the imagination of a Young Earth Creationist. When I explained The Gap to him, and some other concepts that indicate Scripture can "handle" deep time, he received Jesus and was a good spiritual companion for several years, until we moved elsewhere.

Of course, along the way I also became very familiar with evolution. Fossils show that life has changed over time, which is the definition of the Fact of Evolution. Life is still changing, which means that evolution, as a process, continues, even affecting humans. Two books I reviewed recently, The 10,000 Year Explosion and Before the Dawn, demonstrate this.

Many may be guardedly okay with recent evolutionary processes, but don't care at all for the idea that all the millions of species arose by the same means. It is a hard pill to take when one's biological imagination is limited to occasional visits to zoos. People ask about mutations, and how a rabbit can turn into a horse. It can't. But some early animal had descendants that had descendants, and so forth, and one line became rabbits while another became horses. That "early animal" probably lived 100 million years ago. You don't make rabbits or horses overnight.

Such notions are the fruit of popular media, in which "Mutants" such as the X-Men or the Fantastic Four are radically changed in an instant. Hardly anyone knows that every one of us is a mutant, carrying DNA in our cells that is different from what we were born with, because of many small, "silent" (or near-silent) mutations that occur in us daily. Among all those, only the ones that occur in our germ cells (sperm or ova, depending on our sex), have a chance to make it to the next generation, but our children are born with 50-100 such small mutations that we were not born with.

Such small mutations, which occur with great frequency overall (but only affect a very tiny percentage of our total DNA because there is so much of it), can have several causes. These include chance copying errors, because the DNA copying machinery is very, very good but not perfect; and damage caused by radiation or free radicals, for example. We are a little bit radioactive. About 1/85 % of the potassium in our bodies is the radioactive isotope K-40. All the rest is either K-39 or K-41, which are stable.

Where such a mutation is not silent, it is usually because it changes the function of a protein, which is usually bad, but not always. In severe cases, the cell in which that mutation arises will die, and we never know it. There are lots of reasons cells in our bodies die by the millions daily; this is only one.

Larger mutations, with possibly greater effects, are rare, and usually harmful, but not always. They can include losing a small chunk of DNA (from a few "letters" to a few thousand), or the duplication of a little DNA, or a piece getting "loose" and being put back in place backwards or somewhere else. Very rare events include the duplication of a whole chromosome; Downs' Syndrome is the result of such a duplication. In the past, changes in the number of chromosomes have occurred with sufficient frequency that the various creatures on Earth have as few as two or as many as a thousand chromosomes.

A study of the DNA of many organisms of many types shows that all are related by common machinery to reproduce DNA, which is the first step to biological reproduction. All mutations, properly understood, that get into the germ line and are inherited, have the potential to change an organism's descendants, and if that organism's progeny multiply, over time a whole species can change a little.

The fact of evolution is plain to see. The process is not. The paragraphs above just touch the surface of the way mutations arise. How do they either increase to become common, or die out? Enter the prevailing theory of evolution, natural selection. When Charles Darwin proposed the mechanism of natural selection as a theory of evolution a century-and-a-half ago, he didn't know how new characteristics arose, nor what mechanism might "record" our characteristics. His original theory was a theory of how different characteristics could be favored or disfavored because of environmental factors, and thus give rise to disparate groups of animals from a population that once were all about the same. 

A classic example is a certain English moth that is usually light gray with dark spots, which make it hard to see on tree bark. During the early Industrial Revolution, the coal smoke in the air darkened tree bark in forests near the cities, and the moths were easier to see. Most of them. Some were darker and harder to see. Birds ate the light gray moths, so the darker ones became more common, and some of those had offspring that were even darker. As the smog got worse and trees got darker, eventually in some areas one could only find dark moths, and farther from the cities the lighter gray moths were still to be found. After the English quit using so much coal and more natural gas and liquid fuels, the bark of the trees gradually got lighter in color, and the darker moths became rare again. In this case, no new species was formed, but it could have been so had the burning of coal gone on for hundreds or thousands of years (and the average life span of an Englishman would have become shorter also).

Now that we know what DNA is and how mutations work, we have a mechanism for new characteristics to arise. They arise gradually, over long spans of time. But the example of the English moths shows that "long" can be measured in decades or centuries; it doesn't have to mean millions of years. But it is definitely numerous generations.

So here are the pieces that make natural selection work:

• Variation in a population of interbreeding organisms (a species) arises because of mutations in the DNA, mostly small but not always.
• Among the offspring of these organisms, for nearly all species, most die without reproducing.
• If a variation in the DNA of one organism makes it less likely to die young, and more likely to reproduce, that variation is more likely to "make it" into the next generation.

Consider some animals that live in grasslands near the edge of a desert, but not in the desert. They will vary in many characteristics, including the efficiency with which their bodies retain water. Some will be able to tolerate forays into the desert better than others. Over time, some number will be able to spend most of their time in the desert, and less in the nearby grasslands. Furthermore, prey animals in the desert will be different from those in the grasslands, and variants that can catch and eat "desert critters" will have a little advantage among the desert tolerant ones. Give it more time: a desert-dwelling species can be produced, leaving behind the grassland-dwelling species. They are very similar, and for a time they could even hybridize, but eventually that also will end. Now, it is not likely that the entire suite of characteristics that allow the new species to live full-time in the desert were present in the original species. Some variations were developed over time by the accumulation of small and smallish mutations. For animals with a life span of several years, this can all occur in 1,000 to 10,000 generations, say between 5,000 and 50,000 years.

If you read some books on anthropology, you'll find out that "early modern humans" were different from modern people in a few subtle ways, such as having thicker skulls and stronger bones. They lived as recently as 14,000 years ago. And, assuming they are our ancestors (anthropologists put us and them in the same species, Homo sapiens), in that time they underwent the changes that produced "modern humans". Counting four or five generations per century until rather recently, they lived 600-700 generations ago. The species Homo sapiens arose about 48,000 years ago, or 2,000 to 2,400 generations back.

Some who may have read this far, who are evangelical Christians, who have been taught that evolution is the greatest heresy, will have been poo-poohing this all as I went along. That's okay. This is leading up to my contention that whether evolution happened, and whether its mechanism was natural selection or not, has no effect on Biblical truth or the faith of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. No effect. None.

I am a scientist. I am also an ardent Christian. I learned long, long ago (half a century) that these are compatible. Sadly, there is a large and vocal cadre of evangelicals who claim the opposite. Or, at most, some of them will say that science, compatible with (their interpretation of) the Scriptures is acceptable; otherwise it is not and is even nonsense.

I wrote this piece after reading a certain book written by a young-earth creationist, a book intended to give younger Christians ammunition to shoot down evolution wherever they find it. I have decided not to name the book or its author, not to censor it (it is one of a great many), but to protect my brother, a man nearly my age whom I greatly respect as a teacher of the Bible and Biblical truth. However, in this area, he is quite incorrect, yet I don't care to pillory him publicly. So I'll just call him Bob.

The book is around a dozen years old. A lot can happen in a decade or so. For example, Bob makes a big deal about feathers. His discussion of how feathers are thought to have developed from scales (as he imagines it being thought of) is not Darwinian, it is Lamarckian. That is, he describes scales getting frayed in certain environments, and then this fraying is found to be beneficial, and is somehow passed on to descendants (that is, he thinks evolutionists think that). 

The Darwinian explanation is different: Scales come in many variations. Some of these have ribs or bumps. Ribbing can be very pronounced, or less so. In a particular sort of lizard, the ribbing was so pronounced that over many generations it resulted in scales with parallel sections, like a fan palm leaf. This was beneficial so the process continued. Later developments included cross-ribbing, and stage by stage a downy feather was produced. Maybe at first it wasn't "that downy", but wherever it was useful for retaining heat, in generation after generation these former-scales-now-downy-feathers became more like the goose down used in down jackets and sleeping bags. Once feathers of any sort arose, they could be modified over time to become the great variety of feather types we see today. 

A dozen years ago, the very few fossils that showed feathered non-avian dinosaurs were hotly contested and hardly known among the public. After 2007, a host of discoveries have resulted in a better understanding of feather evolution, which apparently started more than 200 million years ago. The first feathers were for thermal insulation. Developing feathers with aerodynamic properties, leading to flight, took tens of millions of years.

Another aspect of Bob's discussion is the "God of the Gaps" dilemma, or the problem of intermediate forms. See this illustration:

Let's consider this vaguely illustrative of the family tree of the apes, with its "root" some 25 million years ago. The tree on the left represents knowledge of paleoanthropology when I was in college; that on the right, something closer to current knowledge. The topmost orange block in each tree is Homo sapiens. The topmost blue blocks are Bonobos and Chimpanzees. The green block would be the common ancestor of all three, although we have no fossils of it at present. The purple blocks are various species of Australopithecus; one on the left, a few on the right. The orange blocks are various species of Homo. On the left, below sapiens, we have H. neanderthalensis, H. erectus, and H. habilis. I don't know how many fossils are currently included in the genus Homo, so I just added a few small blocks (small so they wouldn't overlap) at the right, with the Neanderthals replaced by two blocks to include the Denisovans.

Are the species on the "orange" branch all our ancestors? Some are and the rest are close cousins to our ancestors. Are they transitional forms? A paleoanthropologist would say Yes, as I do. But the strong creationist argument is, "Where are the transitional forms in between?" The complexity of this tree is probably less than the complexity of the actual situation through time with all the apes. What would it take to find "all" the transitional forms?

Terrestrial fossils are much more rare than marine fossils. There are tons and tons of fossil shells and corals for each person on Earth. The total number of fossils of genus Homo would fit in a footlocker. Someone like Bob (or at least like Bob a dozen years ago) will not be satisfied if we can't fill in every blank. Otherwise, he would say we haven't proved the case. Remembering that a time span of 48,000 years in human history represents as many as 2,400 generations, Bob is asking us to find a fossil to represent every generation over a span of millions of years; perhaps as many as a quarter to a half million generations from the time genus Homo split from genus Pan (chimps and bonobos). The number of fossils of early humans so far found represent 6,000 individuals. There are a lot of gaps to fill!

It's best to not belabor these points further. Where do these things fit in the Bible? God didn't inspire His prophets to write the books of the Bible to generate a natural history textbook. Moses was inspired to write for bronze age herdsmen at a time 3,000 years before it was even known that the shell-shaped things in rocks represented animals that died long ago. God's intention is to develop a relationship with people. The two "creation hymns" found in Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 show different characteristics of God and different aspects of His relationship with the first humans. Most importantly, if they are to be taken as word-for-word literally and scientifically accurate, both cannot be true. Important things happen in different orders. But we can discern a few key items:

• In Genesis 1, God created man in his image, "Male and female He created them." This creation was of a number of persons.
• In Genesis 2, The Lord God "formed man of the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils the spirit (or breath) of life, and man became a living soul." The woman was "built" from a portion of the man and brought to him later.

Taken together, these show that the created part of man is not the body, which was "formed", but the spirit. The word "living" in Genesis 2:7 is emphatic, indicating that without the spirit, the soul is dead, not able to contact God.

Numerous Bible students have written about "pre-Adamic men". Some have written pretty crazy stuff. But the best, including G.H. Pember, consider that there were non-spiritual humans on Earth in the distant past that rebelled against God along with Lucifer, and were punished by God when Lucifer was defeated and became Satan. After that God put a spirit in some, or all, remaining men to become "man" with a living soul. This makes sense to me. 

Is the foregoing literally true? I don't know. Here is the point, though. If the Adam of the Bible was an individual person (some Bible teachers consider that Adam represents a corporate group of men living in God's presence six or more thousand years ago), he lost direct fellowship with God because of a sin of disobedience. The Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 20 is the result: God working through the generations to gain people who will fellowship with Him and become His bride, described as the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21.

The origin of the pre-Adamic men, if they existed, is not described. The fossils of Earth indicate that they did exist, and that they came about by evolution. Other geological work shows that the Earth is indeed a few billion years old (4.543 billion, according to the most recent work). The universe has a definite origin, which was about 13.7 billion years. It's nice to think that "Let there be light" refers to the Big Bang, which was indeed a burst of unimaginably bright light. However, that verse refers to the first step of God's re-ordering the Earth after the primordial battle with Lucifer.

The Bible tells us that Lucifer was originally the Archangel, the leader of all the angels. In Job an enigmatic passage (38:4-7) tells that the angels were present when God "laid the foundations of the Earth", singing their praises. Did God wait until there were men on earth before putting Lucifer in charge? We don't know.

For God to have a relationship with us, however, little of this matters at all. Evolution is a part of the history before Adam, long before, and although its processes continue, they don't affect us or our relationship with God. At least when the book was written, Bob was of the opinion that one could not be a faithful Christian and believe that any part of evolution is true. This is not so.

Rather, the notion of evolution as heresy is a red herring, successfully used by Satan to keep myriads of ardent children of God distracted from the important work of bringing closer and closer the Kingdom of God, of being built up as the Body and Bride of Christ (see Ephesians in particular), and casting aside all doctrinal and personal divisions so that the longest prayer of Jesus Christ, recorded in John 17, can at long last be fulfilled. He prayed, "…that they may be perfected into one, that the world may know." Jesus prayed this three different ways within this long prayer. It has never been fulfilled. The world does not yet know. This is the great shame of Christianity. How can we be one if we let such matters divide us?

Among the saints with whom I fellowship, I am a rather rare bird. Most of those who were raised as Christians would look askance at my understanding of evolution and the great age of the earth and universe. I seldom mention it because I don't care to fight with them. If it comes up, I try to keep things thus, "It doesn't matter. Whether evolution happened or not has no bearing on the Bible or on our salvation." It takes someone quite persistent to get more than that out of me.

So why go into it at such length here? Because I am comparatively anonymous in this blog, for reasons that are as valid now as they were 15 years ago when I started it. Those who care enough can find out who I am.

If you can stomach it, learn this as a slogan worth keeping:

Evolution doesn't negate any truth of the Bible, nor does it threaten our salvation.

If the ground had not been cursed

kw: musings, patriarchs, biblical chronology

I take much of the Bible literally. Some portions, particularly in the Revelation to John, are specifically stated to be "signs", that is, symbolic. Others that are in poetic form tend have symbolic sections. Theologians of all stripes argue endlessly over which portions are "most literal" or otherwise. But whether a section is best understood poetically or literally, the outline of action has moral and spiritual meaning for us. Being a number-oriented sort of guy, I return again and again to the puzzle of the great ages of the patriarchs before Moses.

Did people, or at least some people, really live nearly a thousand years, in the time before the great flood? Perhaps. I am not a "young earth creationist". I accept "the Gap" between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, as described by G.H. Pember in Earth's Earliest Ages. I understand that this century-old book is again being reprinted. Thus, whether the various lists of "begats" in Genesis actually add up to put Adam's creation at about 4000 BC, or are not as connected as they appear, I look to the stories to find lessons for today.

I obtained this list of the ages of the Patriarchs up to Moses from an essay in a site called Is That in the Bible? . The first dark horizontal line represents the era of the Flood and the second represents the era of the Covenant with Abraham.

Most people who have heard of the Bible have heard of "the Fall." There are actually four Falls, and each led the LORD God to respond with a curse. The numbers in this chart indicate the effects of these curses.

The first Fall was when Adam and his wife ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Whether this story is literal or figurative is less important than the lesson embodied in the curses which followed. Only one of those is pertinent here, the curse on the ground (Genesis 3:17b-19):

Cursed is the ground because of you;

In toil will you eat of it all the days of your life.

And thorns and thistles will it bring forth for you,

And you will eat the herb of the field.

By the sweat of your face you will eat bread

Until you return to the ground,

Because from it you were taken;

For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

The second Fall followed a few decades later, probably not more than 20-25 years. Cain and Abel were born, and when they were grown, Cain killed Abel. There is plenty of meaning in that story, but I am interested here in what follows. God reprimanded Cain, and then uttered this curse (Genesis 4:11-12a):

And now you are cursed from the ground,

Which has opened its mouth to receive 

your brother's blood from your hand. 

When you till the ground, 

it will no longer yield its strength to you.

I cannot tell whether this curse was on Cain only, or Cain and his descendants, or on all the ground. Since Cain, who was a farmer, went on after this to build a city and set up a godless civilization (which led to the Flood), it is most likely that this curse pertained to Cain and his descendants. After Abel was killed and Cain left, Seth was born, and named "Seth" because he was the replacement for Abel.

Most likely, until the flood, for Seth's descendants the ground still "yielded its strength", supporting their great lifespans.

By the time of Noah, "violence filled the earth" (Genesis 6:11). This was the third Fall. The flood was an acted-out curse on everyone except Noah's family, safe in the Ark. It must also have reduced the fecundity of the ground, as evidenced by the life spans of the post-flood patriarchs after Shem (did you know Shem outlived Abraham?). There are three generations that lived between 400-500 years, and then four of the next five generations, including Abram's father Terah, lived more than 200 years.

What happened at the time of Peleg? The fourth Fall. "Peleg" means "divided". Until his father's generation there was one language, until the people presumed to build a great tower to "make a name for themselves" (Genesis 11:4). God confused their language and the people scattered, and the nations were divided, shortly before the birth or Peleg. The "tower of Babel" had been a declaration of independence from God, and the scattering was the curse. From that time idolatry became almost universal. I might consider that a further Fall, but it is part and parcel with the fourth Fall. Nonetheless, between the time of Abram and Moses we find a further shortening of life spans to the limit of 120 years. (Shortly before the Flood, when God said man's days would be 120 years (Genesis 6:3), it may have been with this in mind, or as He foresaw. Only one person, a French woman named Jeanne Calment, has lived more than 120 years in the modern era.)

God called out Abram to found a new nation that would follow Him. This nation, set up in the name of the grandson of Abram/Abraham, became Israel. Abraham lived about 4,000 years ago and Moses lived about 3,500 years ago. Although disease and violence kept average lifespan as low as 35-40 years for much of the time after Moses, small numbers of people lived into their seventies and even eighties. Only after the discovery of antibiotics and the establishment of good public health measures in most countries after about 1930 did average lifespan increase past sixty years and then to about eighty years, as it is today, at least in the more developed nations. But even now only a small number live beyond eighty years. 

Here is the question I have been pondering: What if the ground still "yielded its strength," and other limits to human life, apparently established by God, were removed? What if people could confidently expect to live a comparatively healthy life about ten times as long as we are used to?

Firstly, the ground would need to yield its strength in a superlative way, because nearly everyone who was born in the past 900-1,000 years would still be alive! 

In my family tree, the most distant ancestor I care to keep track of is Edward I king of England, born in 1239. Were he alive today he'd be 781 years old, and could expect to live another century or two. He is 23 generations back. Would he still be king? Would his living so long (along with billions of others) be a good thing?

One other aspect to the lists of "begats" in Genesis is that most of the men had children starting at about age 100. Were that to continue until now, the descendants of Edward I living today would be not 23 generations removed, but about eight. That could still pose a problem if some of them were too impatient to wait for the "old king" (or maybe his father or grandfather) do die of "natural causes", and led a patricidal coup.

But let's look at Edward. His engineers developed the first large trebuchet, or counterweight catapult. It was capable of throwing stone missiles weighing 200-400 pounds, which could break through castle walls. That's why he was called The Hammer of Scotland (and he took on Wales, also). He was a brute, and I suspect none of us would find him a pleasant companion. However, longer generation times might mean slower cultural changes. We might also be brutes, and get along with him just fine.

All this makes me wonder, how many people would there be? Without getting long about it, I find that from 1300 to 1800 AD world population rose from a third of a billion to about a billion. Generation times probably averaged 25 years. If we roughly count half a billion times twenty generations, that's about ten billion people born in those five centuries. Since 1800, the number of people born is another thirty billion. If all of them were still alive, that's forty billion. If only half of them were alive, that's twenty billion. Either way, the earth has to produce a lot of food for such a population!

I considered, what would life be like for a couple who marry at about age 30 and expect to live another 800-900 years? Would there still be menopause for the woman at age 50, or would women be like female birds, that may slow down a bit, but seem to remain fertile as long as they live? A small bird such as an American robin can live 12-14 years, although there are lots of predators out there and few live past age three or four. Humans have few predators besides bacteria and viruses; what if robins were the same?

We recently had a brood of robins raised on our kitchen window sill, so I looked into their lives. In our area robins first breed at age one and raise two or three broods each summer. Each brood averages four chicks. The eggs incubate two weeks and the chicks spend another two weeks in the nest. They receive follow-up help for another week, then the parents fly off and start another nest. Now stretch the ten years of a long-lived robin couple to a thousand years, a factor of 100:

At age 100, a couple marries and has four children. The five weeks a robin couple cares for their eggs and chicks stretches to 500 weeks, or ten years. For humans, we like to hang onto our kids for about twenty years instead, and space them a year or two apart. That's OK. At age 125, the nest is empty, and a couple might relocate for new horizons, and start another "clutch". After the third batch of kids is grown and gone, the couple is about 175-180. They take a break, just as robins take a winter break until the next spring. Proportionally, let's assume this couple takes off 50-80 years. That's time enough for travel, learning some new skills, maybe attaining new hobbies like making pianos or painting murals. Around the age of 250, it's time for another round or three of childrearing.

Let's suppose this cycle repeats about every 150 years until they get too old after the sixth set of three "clutches" of about four kids, and are ready for the long sleep, being around 900 years old. Their children, if all are still living, number about 72. Of course, there are hundreds of grand- and great-grandchildren and so forth.

That kind of fecundity would soon lead to a population not of billions, but perhaps trillions! Even if habitats were built to cover the oceans, it isn't possible to fit more than five trillion people, with only one square meter each. Nobody could go anywhere! There's nowhere to grow food. I conclude that couples would need to stop after one or two "families" were raised, and just enjoy themselves for the next 700 years or so. That takes very, very effective conception control (or an innocuous way to end the sex drive).

These are just a few considerations I have. It seems the way things work now is actually pretty good. I may return to the subject…

Presenting CWWN v14 – The Spiritual Man (3)

kw: book summaries, watchman nee, christian ministry

Having finished reading volume 2 of The Spiritual Man in April 2020, I soon began reading volume 14 of The Collected Works of Watchman Nee, which has these sections:

• Section Eight: The Analysis of the Soul (2): The Mind
• Section Nine: The Analysis of the Soul (3): The Will
• Section Ten: The Body

As I reported for the prior volumes, reading the first was stressful and the second was arduous. This volume was excruciating! However, I had some guidance from Witness Lee regarding the matters included here. He shared with a number of us that the sections of The Spiritual Man regarding spiritual warfare were primarily drawn from the writings of Jessie Penn-Lewis (1861-1927) and others who themselves were relating matters learned from Evan Roberts (1878-1951) about his experiences during the Welsh Revival of 1904-1905. Many of Evan Robert's experiences are recounted in his book War on the Saints. Roberts emphasized the necessity of prayer companions, but this was not fully appreciated by those who wrote about him. Furthermore, there was not a clear view of the Body of Christ as God's agent of warfare, as seen for example in Ephesians 6, prior to the mid-to-late Twentieth Century. We know now that to fight spiritual warfare without strong spiritual companions is a recipe for being deceived.

Mrs. Penn-Lewis in her later years became spiritually peculiar: she would claim demons caused the slightest things—someone who coughed during her speaking, or anyone who seemed sleepy—which created distractions greater than the incidents themselves. This was a deception on its own and her later ministry suffered as a result.

Watchman Nee describes writing while "in the jaws of Satan," but he did not experience spiritual warfare of the intensity described by Penn-Lewis or Roberts. Nee's spiritual battles were undertaken alone, although a number of close co-workers of his were praying for him during the writing of The Spiritual Man, because he was badly ill with tuberculosis at the time. Brother Nee was divinely healed of his tuberculosis after the book was published.

A more clear unveiling of the Body of Christ awaited a later generation. So even though at one time brother Nee said of this book that it was "too perfect", in these three sections in particular, its perfection was limited to what God had revealed to His people prior to 1925.

To summarize the crucial point of Sections 8 and 9, the human mind is the battleground between the human spirit and Satan's forces; and the human will is the instrument by which we fight. We do so by choosing to line up our will with the will of God, by the power of the Spirit in our spirit. We know today that we need reliable spiritual companions for this, even as Daniel had three companions.

Brother Nee emphasizes frequently the dangers of having a passive mind or a passive will. The kind of teaching that says, "You cannot do anything for God. Only God can do the things of God," is one-sided. It ignores the principle of incarnation, that in human affairs God always acts through certain persons whom He has chosen for their mission. Make that "almost always", with the "almost" being something like 99.99999%. We see in Acts 9 that God acted directly to gain Saul of Tarsus. Thereafter, the Holy Spirit acted exclusively through Saul, who became known as Paul, and through Paul's co-workers, in the mission field allotted to them. God sent an angel to Cornelius to direct him to send for Peter (the angel could not preach the gospel). 

There is a sad strain in fundamentalist theology that leads the children of God to feel they have no value and are useless. Yet if we properly interpret the parables of the Pearl of Great Price and the Treasure Hidden in a Field, we find that God values us greatly. However, this value is brought out by our experiences and transactions with God through the discipline of the Holy Spirit. The Pearl symbolizes preciousness through sufferings, and the Treasure (mainly precious stones) symbolizes persons who have been transformed (e.g. Romans 12:2). Such a one was Daniel, called by the angel a "man of preciousness" (Daniel 10:11). If we remain passive, our value is only in potential, and is not realized until we actively labor with God to obey His will.

Therefore, we must realize our need to work with God—not to work instead of God, nor to passively wait for God to work instead of us—; we realize our need to coordinate and collaborate with God, for the work of God to be carried out. Further, to be rather strong about it: If we had no value to God, there would be no Universe!

Having read this volume, I understand better what brother Lee was warning us about. Jessie Penn-Lewis, in particular, believed it possible and even likely for a believer in Jesus to be demon-possessed. Most of Section 9 is based on this, stating that to be passive is to give ground for demon possession.

I would agree that a passive Christian is easily deceived. I do not believe that a person in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, whose body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19) could also host a possessing evil spirit. Neither does any brother among those who follow the ministry of brothers Nee and Lee, with whom I have spoken regarding this matter.

Finally, I was quite concerned about the one-sided presentation in Section 10: The Body. Its basic premise is that disease ought to be foreign to Christian experience. Of course, we cannot remain sinless, so sometimes God will allow disease to remind us we are sinful and to discipline us. While this is so in general, to make it a fixed doctrine for every case is actually just blaming the victim: it says we are sick because we don't have enough faith. It says it is a failure to consult a doctor (though that is what brother Nee did on numerous occasions, both before and after publication of this work).

The first antibiotic, Penicillin, was discovered in 1928, the year after this book was published. The family of Sulfa drugs appeared in 1935. I am among many that consider these and numerous ensuing medical advances as gifts of a good God. I deal with God when illness or injury occurs, but if I don't have clear leading that the matter is related to discipline for a definite sin or failure, I thankfully accept what medical science can offer. I know I live in a world of suffering and misfortune, and that I am subject to the vicissitudes of life like anyone else. Without a skilled surgeon and a very wise medical oncologist, I would have died in 2000 or 2001 of a very serious cancer. I thank God for those doctors. If time were shifted even twenty years earlier, I would have died at age 53. Therefore I consider Section 10 to be close to a century out of date. 

Perhaps brother Nee would agree. He was 24 when The Spiritual Man was first published. He lived until 1972, though he was imprisoned by the Chinese Communists in 1952 and died in prison. His ministry grew and matured during the quarter century that elapsed after publication. I look forward to reading the volumes of CWWN from 15 onwards, to observe that maturation and, I hope, to experience further spiritual maturity as a result.

For Christians in general, I can recommend only the first two volumes of The Spiritual Man. Should you wish to read volume 3, do so along with your spiritual companions, or discuss each subject with your companions so you will be protected by fellowship in the Body of Christ and not fall into spiritual peculiarity.

If you hate President Trump you will hate this book

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, polemics, treason, presidents

My father had a good friend, a doctor, a few years older, named Henry. He and his wife were cheerful and usually optimistic. Being Austrian, one might think he'd be conservative; he remembered the Nazis, after all. But his politics were left-wing. When George W. Bush was elected, Henry freaked out. He hated President Bush. Soon he was sleeping poorly, staying up late at night, pacing in his living room, thinking hateful thoughts about the President. He would even groan and gnash his teeth. My father said to him, "Henry, nothing you can think or do will cause George Bush to lose a single night's sleep. Your anger is killing you, but you can't hurt him." It did no good. Henry's last years were bitter and cramped by hatred.

Today we have a President who has a devoted following of two kinds. Firstly, those who voted for him remain devoted to him and his policies and the promises he made, a great many (most?) of which he has been able to keep. Secondly, we have those who hate him and fear him in equal measure, some of whom actually can do him some harm because they have political power, and by their misuse of that power have thwarted his ability to keep some of the promises he made.

Today we have a party with the name Democratic, and millions of voters who identify as Democrats, but the party has a leadership who are fanatically devoted to utterly anti-democratic policies and measures. Although the Democratic party originally favored a combination of liberal (pro-agrarian and labor) and conservative (small government and anti-elitist) policies, the party had become staunchly conservative (in a negative way) and pro-slavery within a generation, and it came to dominate the slave-dependent South. Only under the influence of William Jennings Bryan in the 1890's did leading Democrats pivot to embrace and appropriate the liberalism and progressivism of the young Republican Party (Republican Theodore Roosevelt was the first influential progressive). Even then, this took time.

Compared to today, the Democratic Party of the mid-1900's was conservative, in spite of the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. President John Kennedy was conservative; he initiated the largest tax cut in history, up to his time, and he faced down Russia and Cuba at a critical time. Lyndon Johnson moved the party to the left, and soon many radicals of "the sixties" became Democrats. It is these who have largely taken over the Democrat party of the early 21^st Century. Riding the coattails of Kennedy's popularity, but being utterly opposed to his policies, these neo-Democrats charmed most media outlets, which were already left-leaning.

Fast-forward two generations. The media of today, both TV, radio, print, and podcast, are mostly beyond liberal; they are leftists. The stories and reports they disseminate about Democrat party leaders are 90-95% fawningly positive; the stories and reports they disseminate about Republicans and about conservatives in general are 90-95% negative, and typically contain more innuendo than fact. These media have become the propaganda wing of the Democrat party.

The Democrat party is led by former leftist activists of "the sixties" who seek to break down everything that is unique and good about the United States of America. They are the kind of people who tried to kill me and conservative friends of mine when we heckled them as they harangued students on college campuses during "the sixties" (I survived two potentially lethal attacks).

Today many registered Democrats, particularly younger ones, self-identify as Liberals. On another occasion I'll write at more length about this: Listen, Young Democrats, none of the visible leaders of the Democrat party are liberals. Liberals favor people being liberated (like freeing the slaves and giving the vote to blacks and women); Leftists are all about controlling people, aiming to enslave the entire US population. Liberals believe in people being free to make their own choices; Leftist want to make every choice for you. The Bill or Rights is a Liberal document, designed to counterbalance excessive Federalism; Leftists hate the Bill of Rights.

Leftists were well on their way towards taking over America, probably with near-permanence, when they chose Hilary Clinton as their Presidential candidate in 2015. Her job was going to be to nail down the "leftist lid" on American conservatism, to push through legislatively the measures enacted by more than 250 executive orders issued by President Obama. She was such a poor campaigner, she lost to someone who is called "the orange clown". President Trump ran a well-crafted campaign, based on a better understanding of the Electoral system, and it is most accurate to say, not that he won, but that she lost. The Left will never forgive Trump for beating their anointed champion.

The Left began a campaign to destroy Donald J. Trump the day he announced his candidacy. Amazingly, CNN was once guardedly favorable to Mr. Trump. When CNN was founded in 1980, Donald Trump was already a celebrity. He was already well known for his hype; he loved superlative adjectives like "lovely", "wonderful", "the best". He was also well known for keeping promises, and for adhering to the letter of the law (something he is blamed for by the Left!). He had this in common with wealthy people of any political persuasion: he donated to prominent Democrats and Republicans both. He was a friend of the Clintons, being seen in public with them from time to time. During the past forty years, he has been registered as a Republican, a Democrat, "none", and a Republican again. After his latest party switch, CNN led the leftist media in lampooning him every time they could. After his candidacy announcement, CNN led the leftist media to become part of "the Resistance".

It is these leftist media that President Trump calls "fake news." One of their own published an article in the Washington Post last year that purported to show that Trump had told 10,000 lies in three years in office. A closer look by both left-ish and right-ish fact checkers showed that 75%-90% of the "lies" were actually true, just using "hyped" adjectives at worst. The rest were mostly made up out of whole cloth by the "journalist", who is seen to be a bigger liar than the President. And in fact, counting TV, Radio, podcasts and print media, more than 10,000 lies against candidate Trump and President Trump have been told every day since mid-2016 (and perhaps earlier).

The focused media and political hatred of candidate, then President Trump is outlined in some detail in a new book by David Horiwitz, Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win. Do take note that the subtitle doesn't begin with "How" or "Why". The author is too canny to fall into that trap. Why write a manual for your opponents to use against you? Author Horowitz has considerable credibility as a convert to conservatism, having been a strong proponent of the New Left prior to 1975.

The author details the numerous avenues by which the Left has tried to derail the Trump presidency and cripple his work. Quite frankly, nearly all the leading members of the Democrat party, and of the "never-Trump" Republicans, and of the entrenched bureaucracy, are guilty of treason. 

I could go into detail about the content of the 14 chapters, or some of them at least. I'd rather you read the book, at least if you aren't a Trump-hater. To the Trump-haters out there: I could exhort you to read it, but I wish to spare you further heartburn. You are probably going to suffer Henry's fate anyway, but why make it worse? I would only wish for those people to read it who are moderately anti-Trump; it may convert some.

The only chapter I'll discuss is 13, "What Trump Did". The Leftist media would have you believe he is a failure. So what has he done? More to the point, of the things he promised, what has he accomplished?

• He promised to "drain the swamp". This is the hardest, and he has only begun. All but a handful of the elected Senators and Representatives are corrupt to the core. Removing them requires exposing their corruption to the voters in their states. The entrenched bureaucracy includes tens of thousands who cannot be fired, who don't care who the President is, only how to retain their power and control over as many people as possible. But the "fireable" ones are being fired, starting with James Comey, John Brennan and Andrew McCabe. Their replacements may not be able to fire the swamp creatures that work for them, but they can curtail their evil.
• Prior Presidents of both parties, and the Congress with them, have engaged in a series of very unfavorable trade treaties and other unfavorable relationships. Candidate Trump promised to do away with the treaties. President Trump did so. In no special order, President Trump:
• terminated TPP
• initiated tariffs against China for intellectual piracy
• removed the US from the Paris Agreement (which favored China and India and punished the US)
• exited the Iran deal
• withdrew from UNESCO (Obama had already cancelled US funding for it)
• terminated NAFTA, which had sucked numerous industries offshore
• pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council, which is blatantly anti-human-rights and particularly anti-semitic
• stopped supporting UNRWA, which "aids" Palestinians, thus enabling more anti-Israel terror
• President Obama halfway defunded the US military. President Trump restored that support, and more. In fact, President Trump has shown more overt support for the military than the four prior Presidents combined. How many know that when military casualties are brought to Dover Air Force Base, he is nearly always there to pay homage? To give credit where it is due, most prior Presidents have gone to Dover for this purpose, at least at times, as did President Obama, just once.
• President Trump persuaded 26 of 27 NATO countries to increase their financial support of NATO, closer (but not all the way) to their agreed-upon obligation.
• He enforced the "Obama red line" against Syria's use of chemical weapons, which Obama had not enforced, by bombing a Syrian air field. A year later, when Syria used chemical weapons (against Syrian citizens) again, Trump ordered another missile strike, in conjunction with France and England. This time Syrian chemical weapons production was crippled.
• He signed a measure that directed relief efforts in Iraq and Syria to specifically help Christian and other religious minorities.
• He hasn't winced from using the terms "jihad" or Islamic terrorism" or "war on terror", which were eschewed by President Obama.
• He placed sanctions on Hezbollah.
• When Pakistan became openly non-cooperative with anti-terrorism efforts, President Trump withheld nearly $1.5 billion in promised aid.
• Obama created ISIS. Trump destroyed it.
• The book describes several measures intended to give heartburn to Russia and V. Putin. My own research has uncovered more than 50 such measures. A quarter of these are economic sanctions of various kinds. He also withdrew from the IRNF nuclear treaty.
• The Trump administration approved the export of lethal arms to Ukraine (more heartburn for Putin…and the Left claims Trump is working for Putin!).

Let's see. I am halfway through the chapter. He has used his "signing pen" a great deal! Is that enough to set aside the notion of a "do nothing" President? This thought sits side-by-side with a view of him as "doing tons of dangerous things". Both can't be true. In fact, neither is true.

To see more, check out 

https://www.promiseskept.com/, where hundreds of actions are gathered under 14 headings.

I wonder: What might have been accomplished had there not been such determined opposition and insurrection against the Trump administration? He seems to have what I call Glacial Inertia. It may not seem like he is moving very fast, but on a broad front, he cannot be stopped, and a lot gets done.

A great value of the book is showing the treasonous behavior of the Left that falsely calls itself a Democratic Party. What might ensue in the next few months (just four, as I write)? Look how quickly the coronavirus scare transformed the country in the past four months. Consider the effects of the rioting that consumed much of June, 2020—though I think it will be seen as a flash-in-the-pan within another month or so.

Will Donald Trump truly smash the Left in the coming election? I sincerely hope so.