The American Liberal And Progressive Idea is a blog that engages discourse and discussion on information that appears in the media and in historic artifacts that reflects The American Liberal And Progressive Idea on topics that range from: American constitutional government, civics, civil rights, culture, democracy, humanities, history, human rights, jurisprudence, peace, philosophy, politics, systems of belief, and the sciences.
Ask any group of common American citizens about what they think about evolution and the odds are quite high that 46% of those polled will completely reject the tenets and existence of evolution. In fact, some of those polled may be so bold as to indicate that they believe that the facts for evolution espoused by Darwin and his later day followers make this group of scientific eggheads hard boiled and tools of the devil.
Roughly the same sized group of contemporary Americans, I'm not talking about those who lived sometime in the early nineteenth century, would also contend that the Earth is actually less than 10,000 years old. If you will remember from an earlier posting I made this week the actual age of the Earth is really closer to 4 billions years old.
Why are so many people so dumb one might wonder? Well there's plenty of blame to go around and a lot of it has to do with the way science is ignored by the popular media. No. I'm not talking about that next shuttle mission launch; that's important and newsworthy because you never know when one of those overused old workhorse shuttles might explode on launch or upon reentry into the Earth's atmosphere - that's your media in action; covering the spectacle while ignoring the every-day occurrences of science and its intertwining with the strength of our fledgling democracy.I'm talking about the plain fact that over the past several decades, weekly science sections in daily newspapers has shrunken by an astonishing 2/3 of what they once were. Current debates over such significant topics as global climate change have been shifted from a discussion of scientific facts and theories and place into the arena of political bigotry. In addition the voice of scientists have been muted by those of popular religious leaders and opinion makers, groups who do not rely on scientific findings to base their views but on the means and methods of propaganda to support their agendas.
An important insight into the morass in discussing scientific subjects was predicted in the famous 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge University by C. P. Snow, a scientifically trained writer who uncovered the existence of the competition between "two cultures" that was distinguishable by a "gulf of mutual incomprehension" that pitted humanists against scientists. As the holders of power and the decision makers in western society humanists held sway over the way science would be viewed. In comparison to the humanists, the members of the scientific community were marginalized and held little prestige; they were the 'specialists' who provided the means, such as nuclear weapons for the humanists to be the agenda setters. Meanwhile, the humanists had little practice understanding of what the scientists were capable of producing; they only knew that what ever might be produced could and would be put to use in the plans the humanists had assembled. With numerous threats facing humankind, from climate change;
to pandemics; and the spread of nuclear weapons; each of which are laden with scientific fundamentals that few if many non-scientists understand.
What is the connection to democracy you ask? It lies with the free and unimpinged flow of information and knowledge. The simple matter of the fact is that we live in an age increasingly dominated by science and scientific principles which constitute nothing but meaningless jargon not only for most of the population but also for our political, cultural, and legal gatekeepers as well as the leaders of capitalist enterprises. it is time we integrate a much more precise and meaningful understanding of the necessary integration of the scientific understanding of human affairs as an integral part of civic discourse. In other words the construction of a civics that welds a scientific understanding of worldly affairs with democratic principles that involve all citizens in this undertaking.
Karl Rove is a traitorous pawn of the most right wing extremists who live in our nation. After eight years at the central switches of power which controlled the machinations of lies and scandal that have come to characterize the George Bush the Younger Administrations from 2001 until 2009; we as a nation simply cannot allow Rove to continue to spread lies and coverup the abuses of power purpetrated by Bush when he was in office.
In an editorial in the mouthpiece publication for right wing zaniness, The Wall Street Journal, Rove launched into a venomous attack on the Obama economic recovery efforts which have pledged $787 billion to sy=timulate the lower reaches of the economy back to a semblance of order as a part of an overarching plan to return prosperity to the lower and middle classes of the United States.
Yet here was Rove, full of vindictive disdain for any politician who might actually try to undo the numerous shackles that the Bush the Younger administration had so carefully put into place to ensure the maintenance of of class system based on plutocratic overlords diverting America's riches into their onw coffers of wealth.
Rove attacks Obama for presiding over an economy that is currently witnessing a 9.5 % unemployment rate - as if the previous Bush administration stands guilt-less for creating the economic policies that have resulted in such huge numbers of Americans out of work. Tongue in cheek, Rove quotes "Keith Hennessey, who worked at the Bush White House on economic policy, has noted that unemployment is now higher than the administration said it would be if nothing was done to revive the economy." Rove gleefully recites that "there are 2.6 million fewer Americans working than Mr. Obama promised."
In Rove's dutiful bow to the corporate powers that hold sway over the nation's economy he cites: "The Blue Chip consensus is an average of some four dozen economic forecasts. In January, the consensus estimated that GDP for 2009 would shrink by 1.6% and that unemployment would top out at 8.3%. Team Obama assumed both higher GDP growth (it counted on a contraction of 1.2%) and lower peak unemployment (8.1%) than the consensus." Rove continues his preprogamed remarks by complaining of Obama: "Instead of relying on the Blue Chip consensus, Mr. Obama outsourced writing the stimulus to House appropriators who stuffed it with every bad spending idea they weren't previously able to push through Congress. Little of it aimed to quickly revive the economy. More stimulus money will be spent in fiscal years 2011 through 2019 than will be spent this fiscal year, which ends in September."
Rove then sets up his straw man and complains that: "On Sunday, Mr. Biden, backpedaling from his drop-kick comments, said that "no one anticipated, no one expected that the recovery package would in fact be in a position at this point of having to distribute the bulk of the money."
In Rove's diturbed corporate confused mind he goes on to say of Obama's plans: "This fits a pattern. The administration consistently pledges unrealistic results that it later distances itself from. It has gotten away with it because the media haven't asked many pointed questions."
Turning to health care Rove sputters out more industry propaganda by charging: "The Obama administration wants a government takeover of health care. To get it, it is promising to wring massive savings out of the health-care industry. And it has already started to make cost-savings promises.
"For example, the administration strong-armed health-care providers into promising $2 trillion in health savings. It got pharmaceutical companies to promise to lower drug prices for seniors by $80 billion over 10 years. The administration also trotted out hospital executives to say that they would voluntarily save the government $150 billion over 10 years.
In Rove's warped vision of truth he explains: "None of this comes near to being true. On the promised $2 trillion, everyone admits that the number isn't built on anything specific -- it's an aspirational goal. On drug prices, a White House spokesman admitted that "These savings have not been identified at the moment." It is speculative that these cuts will actually be made, when they would begin, or whether they would reduce government health-care spending.
Rove claims: "None of this will stop the administration from arguing that its "savings" will pay for Mr. Obama's $1.5 trillion health-care plans. By the time the real price tag emerges, it will be too late to do much more than raise taxes and curtail spending on urgent priorities, such as the military."And then in clasic Rovian distortion of reality he claims: "The stimulus package is a clear example of how Mr. Obama operates. He is attempting to employ the same tactics of bait-and-switch when it comes to health care, only on a much larger scale." Rove ends by shifting all of the possible blame for the economies poor performance onto the current administration; never making any attempt to discussthe policy shortcomings of Bush the Younger's administration: "Mr. Obama has already created a river of red ink. His health-care plans will only force that river over its banks. We are at the cusp of a crucial political debate, and Mr. Obama's words on fiscal matters are untrustworthy. His promised savings are a mirage. His proposals to reshape the economy are alarming. And his unwillingness to be forthright with his numbers reveals that he knows his plans would terrify many Americans."
Why doesn't this purpettraor of endless corporat/evangelical voodoo economics just go away. There is something to be said for mortality and advancing age. may that day come sooner rather than later.
For much of modern science's existence, the question of how life originated on Earth has vexed researchers and scientists alike. One of the most followed theories has been extraterrestrial in nature and has been placed at point in time some 3.9 billion years ago. That was when the orbital patterns of the gas giant planets of the solar system (Saturn and Jupiter) changed and allowed a swarm of comets, asteroids and other small celestial bodies to plunge into the gravitational attraction of the sun.
As these chunks of solar system debris fall toward the sun, they collided with the inner planets and moons that were in their path causing violent collisions that left huge craters in their wake, and in regards to the Earth; the impacts had a devastating effect. The Earth lost its primordial oceans as the surface of our planet was turned into a moltant cauldron of liquefied rock and debris.
With the cessation of the celestial impacts, the Earth cooled and rocks formed a global crust of silicic rocks embedded in a basaltic crustal layer. Oceans quickly formed and weathering produced the first sedimentary rocks worldwide. Protocontenents took early shape from a process of metamorphosis and the melting of accumulated debris. Plate tectonics began to shift the early continental structures and an atmosphere made up mostly of nitrogen, with some carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, and water took shape.
The combination of all of these materials and ingredients could have possibly resulted in the formation of organic molecues. And amazingly life began to stir some 3.85 billion years ago when primitive single-celled bacteria appeared. This startling development has lead intrigued observers of the Earth's past in deep time to question how and why life was able to develop so quickly.
Although scientists feel comfortable with the time frame for the development of life outlined above, they have been unable or unwilling to agree on the source of the organic molecules that came together to form life. Leading the proponents that suggest that life had extraterrestrial origins has been such noteworthy scientists such as Francis Crick who is credited with discovering the structure of DNA. These theories have developed because there has yet to exist a plausible explanation that links the formation of life on Earth to terrestrial sources.
Among those who have worked to discover a terrestrial origin to life; recent developments have surfaced that give plausible reasons why Earth is where the origin of life occurred and break down into four component parts.
The first part of this terrestrial theory concerns the existence of fatty chemicals available on our primordial world and their relationship to the co-development of a 'genetic system' and a 'cell membrane.' Researcher Jack W. Szostak, according to the New York Times, discovered that "(s)imple fatty acids, of the sort likely to have been around on the primitive Earth, will spontaneously form double-layered spheres, much like the double-layered membrane of today’s living cells. These protocells will incorporate new fatty acids fed into the water, and eventually divide. Living cells are generally impermeable and have elaborate mechanisms for admitting only the nutrients they need. But Dr. Szostak and his colleagues have shown that small molecules can easily enter the protocells. If they combine into larger molecules, however, they cannot get out, just the arrangement a primitive cell would need. If a protocell is made to encapsulate a short piece of DNA and is then fed with nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, the nucleotides will spontaneously enter the cell and link into another DNA molecule."
David P. Bartel and P. Luigi Luisi, the other two main researchers along with Jack W. Szostak according the New York Times explained "that the way to make a synthetic cell was to get a protocell and a genetic molecule to grow and divide in parallel, with the molecules being encapsulated in the cell. If the molecules gave the cell a survival advantage over other cells, the outcome would be" as they described in a Nature article of 2001 “a sustainable, autonomously replicating system, capable of Darwinian evolution.” The researchers went on to say: “It would be truly alive.”
The New York Times explains that: "Dr. Szostak’s experiments have come close to creating a spontaneously dividing cell from chemicals assumed to have existed on the primitive Earth. But some of his ingredients, like the nucleotide building blocks of nucleic acids, are quite complex. Prebiotic chemists, who study the prelife chemistry of the primitive Earth, have long been close to despair over how nucleotides could ever have arisen spontaneously.
"Nucleotides consist of a sugar molecule, like ribose or deoxyribose, joined to a base at one end and a phosphate group at the other. Prebiotic chemists discovered with delight that bases like adenine will easily form from simple chemicals like hydrogen cyanide. But years of disappointment followed when the adenine proved incapable of linking naturally to the ribose.
"Last month, John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Manchester in England, reported in Nature his discovery of a quite unexpected route for synthesizing nucleotides from prebiotic chemicals. Instead of making the base and sugar separately from chemicals likely to have existed on the primitive Earth, Dr. Sutherland showed how under the right conditions the base and sugar could be built up as a single unit, and so did not need to be linked.
"Once a self-replicating system develops from chemicals, this is the beginning of genetic history, since each molecule carries the imprint of its ancestor. Dr. Crick, who was interested in the chemistry that preceded replication, once observed, “After this point, the rest is just history.”"
Another step in the process of understanding of how terrestrial life developed from earthly origins has been made by Gerald F. Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California who stands as a preeminent expert life's origin on Earth. Among a number of accomplishments, Dr. Joyce has most recently worked with RNA; investigating it's capacity for reproduction. In a major article in Science, Joyce announced his development of two RNA molecules that assisted each other's synthesis from the four neucleotides that constitute RNA. Joyce reacted to his acomplishment by exclaming that: “We finally have a molecule that’s immortal,” since the information has an indefinite timeframe for indefinitely passing on instructions. And even though his synthetic system is not alive it can mimic life functions such as self replication and adapting to the environment.
The New York Times explains: "Another striking advance has come from new studies of the handedness of molecules. Some chemicals, like the amino acids of which proteins are made, exist in two mirror-image forms, much like the left and right hand. In most naturally occurring conditions they are found in roughly equal mixtures of the two forms. But in a living cell all amino acids are left-handed, and all sugars and nucleotides are right-handed.
"Prebiotic chemists have long been at a loss to explain how the first living systems could have extracted just one kind of the handed chemicals from the mixtures on the early Earth. Left-handed nucleotides are a poison because they prevent right-handed nucleotides linking up in a chain to form nucleic acids like RNA or DNA. Researchers such as: "Donna Blackmond of Imperial College London have discovered that a mixture of left-handed and right-handed molecules can be converted to just one form by cycles of freezing and melting.
The New York Times explains: "With these four recent advances — Dr. Szostak’s protocells, self-replicating RNA, the natural synthesis of nucleotides, and an explanation for handedness — those who study the origin of life have much to be pleased about, despite the distance yet to go. “At some point some of these threads will start joining together,” Dr. Sutherland said. “I think all of us are far more optimistic now than we were five or 10 years ago.”
"One measure of the difficulties ahead, however, is that so far there is little agreement on the kind of environment in which life originated. Some chemists, like Günther Wächtershäuser, argue that life began in volcanic conditions, like those of the deep sea vents. These have the gases and metallic catalysts in which, he argues, the first metabolic processes were likely to have arisen.
"But many biologists believe that in the oceans, the necessary constituents of life would always be too diluted. They favor a warm freshwater pond for the origin of life, as did Darwin, where cycles of wetting and evaporation around the edges could produce useful concentrations and chemical processes."
The origin of life on Earth may forever remain an inexact proposition spread across millions of years. The most ancient evidence of fossilized bacteria has been found in the Gunflint Formation of Ontario and is estimated to be some 1.9billion years old. There also exist rock formations in Greenland that contain evidence of carbon isotopes related to 3.830 billion years old biological processes. Researchers are convinced that the 'late heavy bombardment' of celestial bodies could have left some life untouched and that is what accounts for the wide span of time across which evidence of life has been found.
The new York Times reports: "Recent evidence from very ancient rocks known as zircons suggests that stable oceans and continental crust had emerged as long as 4.404 billion years ago, a mere 150 million years after the Earth’s formation. So life might have had half a billion years to get started before the cataclysmic bombardment."
The conclusion drawn by the New York Times is that: "Chemists and biologists are thus pretty much on their own in figuring out how life started. For lack of fossil evidence, they have no guide as to when, where or how the first forms of life emerged. So they will figure life out only by reinventing it in the laboratory."
To paraphrase Charles Darwin's famous dictum used to characterize the natural world; red-in-tooth-and-claw introduces the curious to the core motivator of self-interest which acts as a type of fitness to Darwinians; however the question remains as to how and why altruism takes place.
With the entomological study of "complex insect societies" of ants, bees and wasps having recently given rise to the gaining of perspective concerning their existence as "superorganisms"-- "singular entities formed by the interactions of their constituent members — rather than as thousands of separate bugs."
Wired Science Blog reports that "Cornell University neurobiologist Ken Reeve and Bert Hölldobler of Arizona State University’s Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity," have developed a theory that posits the greater the degree in which an insect society moves toward specialized labor; the higher the probability that "individual tendencies towards inclusive fitness," occurs in the form of "altruism that increases the chance of perpetuating genes held in common with other individuals — are maximized." This occurrence increases the size of the insect society and moves individual forms of competition to reside at the higher group strata. This creates a situation in which "individual altruistic behaviors ... benefit the group" as a whole.
The application of Reeves and Hölldobler's theory when applied to hominid societies of the past may indicate the role of memes rather than of genes as some might suggest.
But back to Reeve and Hölldobler’s construct regarding complex insect societies which proposes a bifurcated set of "interlocked nested tug-of-war theories." There's the theory that stresses the effects of intragroup competition waged against a theory of intergroup competition. both theories contest one another in a complex dance which results in the creation of a superorganism.
Hölldobler posits that "the maximization of the inclusive fitness of each individual of the society"... creates "competition ... between individuals in the same society" ... which in turn "diminishes as the incipient colonial society becomes larger, better organized and contains better division of labor and ultimately, cohesiveness."
Hölldobler concludes: “Such societies in turn produce more reproductive offspring each year than neighboring societies that are less organized. Thus, genes or alleles that code for such behaviors will be propagated faster.”
Hölldobler introduces his second theory that completes his model by arguing that: “as the colonial organization of one group rises, there is a coincident rise in discrimination against members of other societies of the same species.” The result, for Hölldobler is that competition reinforces evolution. And he concludes that: “In this way the society or insect colony becomes the extended phenotype of the collective genome of the society.”
It is Hölldobler's belief that he and Reeve's explanation of "the evolutionary transition from hierarchical organizations to superorganism" is superior to competing theories because their theory "demonstrates how the target of selection shifts from the individual and kin to group selection.”
Both researchers believe their tug-of-war approach is applicable to other groups of organisms including cells and bacteria as well as primates and humans.
NASA's Earth Observatory has collected a vast array of images and videos which demonstrate the effects of large scale human activity on the Earth as compiled in Wired Science.
The first example shows the building of a number of artificial islands in the shape of a palm tree off the coast of Dubai of the United Arab Emirates. The massive amounts of sand used for the project were dredged sand from the sea floor.
The Aral Sea in Central Asia, at one time the world's fourth largest lake has shrunken to 1/10th of its original size in the half century period from the 1960s to the present.The result is now three separate, highly salinic, lakes.
For more than thirty years, the state of Rondônia in western Brazil cleared almost 35 percent of its rainforest.The NASA time lapsed video shows roads first being built with land cleared for small farms. Erosion becomes a problem that soon results in "low crop yields" and consequently pushes farmers to introduce cattle as the clearing, farming, land depletion, cattle raising process continues as larger swaths of land are deforested.
Marshlands in Iraq that had been drained in the 1990s have recently been re-flooded and consequently has initiated a rerowth of vegetation.The difficulty associated with the re-introduction of water and subsequent egrowth of marshlands has been the issue of whether the marshes will survive for long since population expansion and their attendent water needs may cause the marshes to soon wither away.
The once robust Lake Powell in Sothern Utah was once a very popular recreational resource that has suffered a devastating drought "from 2000 to 2005" when "its water level dropped from 20 million to 8 million acre-feet."Climatologists have witnessed a slight uptick in water levels but are concerned that a future drought could have a devastating impact that completely dries up Lake Powell.
