1:  Introduction  …………………………………………………………………………………………….  1

2:  A Crash Course in Revolutionary Science  ……………………………………………………………. 10

3:  An Agricultural History of the World  …………………………………………………………………  37

4:  Religion and Science  ………………………………………………………………………………….. 43

5:  The Selfish Gene Theory  ……………………………………………………………………………..   63

6:  The Gaia Theory  ……………………………………………………………………………………..   72

7:  The Laws of Thermodynamics  ………………………………………………………………………… 81

8:  The Limits to Growth  …………………………………………………………………………………  97

9:  Evolutionary Psychology  ……………………………………………………………………………..  113

10:  The Evolution of Gender Differences  ………………………………………………………………  138

11:  The Game of Probabilities  ………………………………………………………………………….  149

12:  The Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior  ……………………………………………  171

13:  The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity  …………………………………………………………….. 190

14:  The Functional Outline of a Chemical Formula for the Entire World  …………………………….. 209

15:  Science and the Death of Capitalism  ……………………………………………………………….  217

16:  An Autopsy for our Government  …………………………………………………………………… 223

17:  The Environmental Crisis and the Future of Politics  ………………………………………………  255

18:  A Redefinition of Scientific Political Neutrality  …………………………………………………….  268

19:  An Education Revolution  …………………………………………………………………………..  272

20:  The Neo-Anarchist Movement  ……………………………………………………………………..  280

The Planetary Biology Library  …………………………………………………………………………   309

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Welcome to Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution.  I’m Ezra Niesen, and I write science text books for revolutionaries.

Global environmental unsustainability was discovered in 1968.  The scientists who discovered it have been saying from the very beginning that if global environmental disaster is going to be prevented, radical social change in humanity’s economic relationship to the environment is necessary.  Now with the global Anti-Capitalist Revolution that began with the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico in 1994, real-life politics has caught up with abstract scientific predictions.

Now with the War on Terror, the American public has been duped into equating radical social change with terrorism.  Now a lot of progressive activists, like the SHAC 7 and eight organizers of the Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee, are being branded terrorists for supposedly threatening the values America was founded upon.  In a sense, they are.  But America was founded by people who had never heard of evolution or thermodynamics.  In a much bigger sense, the so-called terrorists are putting the concept of secular government of, by, and for the people into practice more effectively than U.S. politicians are.

This isn’t a book about current events.  This is a book about how to win.  This is a book about where to find the reference sources you need to teach yourself  more about environmental science than any U.S. president has ever known, and how to use your self-education to systematically destroy the Capitalists’ stranglehold  on the public education system by targeting the scientific falsehoods that are being taught to children.  This is how to destroy the empire’s education infrastructure perfectly legally with books you can check out of your local public library.

Let me put it this way.  I have extremely few peers when it comes to science.  A lot of people, including a lot of the most radical of activists, confuse science for the way Capitalists use science.  But the Capitalists pick out the scientific discoveries that help them make money and control people, and ignore the rest.  That isn’t science.  At best, that’s propoganda.  At worst, it’s a form of religious fundamentalism.

Science depends on democracy, and democracy depends on science.  Science depends on people being able to talk to each other, being able to disagree with each other, being able to debate with each other, and having access to information and education.  Democracy depends on personal empowerment.  Personal empowerment depends on people being able to make informed decisions.  People being able to make informed decisions depends on their having accurate information.  Discovering accurate information is the whole point of science.  Manipulated ignorance is not democracy.

Anyone who claims to know for a fact that the universe works in a way no one but he can perceive, doesn’t believe in democracy.  That’s even true for people who consider themselves progressive activists.  If you claim to know for a fact that the universe works in a way that no one but you can perceive, you are deciding that the universe works in a way requires you to expend no further effort to think about it, and you are trying to discourage anyone from questioning you.

I know that’s hard for a lot of progressive activists to swallow, but if your feelings of personal empowerment depend on your claiming to know for a fact that the universe works in a certain way and discouraging other people from disagreeing with you, you’re trying to sacrifice democracy for the sake of your feelings of personal empowerment.

We all live in the same universe.  The universe is the common ground we all share.  The universe works the way it works, and as mortal humans, all we can do is to try to figure out how to cooperate with the universe.  Scientists have figured out a way to study the universe that doesn’t depend on anyone, at any point, claiming to know something for a fact that no one else is capable of discovering.  And some people, like me, are very, very good at it.

The Capitalists are pitting their economic and political system against fundamental laws of the universe.  They measure economic success by economic growth.  Economies require energy to function.  By definition, unending economic growth would depend on an infinite supply of energy.  But it was discovered, back in 1868, that it isn’t physically possible for an infinite supply of energy to exist, anywhere in the universe.  It’s not like Capitalists haven’t had time to do their homework.

So here’s something the Capitaists don’t tell you about science.  People who study real science have been saying for 40 years that world-wide radical social change is necessary.  The end result will be Green Anarcho-Socialism.  If we are going to survive the environmental crisis, we will have to recognize the environment as our highest prority, and we will all have to work together, free of authoritarian oppression.   To you, anti-Capitalism is a revolution.  To me it’s just math.  Suicidal economic system + oppressed people = revolution.

A lot of anti-Capitalists right now are protesting how corrupt the United States government has become.  A lot of them are saying that it’s already gone beyond the point of no return.    It’s easy to assume that, because on the surface that is indeed how it appears.  But there’s just one little thing you overlooked.

We have a certain group of nine people here in the United States who call themselves the Supreme Court.  Other groups of people call themselves the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Administration.  Another group of people is called the Shadow Government.  Supposedly, these groups decide what people can and can’t do.  But despite what they want to believe, it’s the universe, not mortal humans, that decides what people can and can’t do.  The laws of physics are the government that rules the world.  Unfortunately, a lot of people who can only understand money and power have forgotten that.

The solution to that was simple enough.  All I had to do was to compile a reference book to science that any thoughtful person with a partial high school education could read and use to rain scientific hell-fire down upon the heads of government officials.  If you can read this book and locate a few expert witnesses, you can walk into the Supreme Court, the House of Representatives, the Senate, or even the Oval Office, and start telling those people what to do.  Once you know how to get all the science on your side, it’s against the law for them to disagree with you.

Like I said, democracy depends on people having accurate information.  In an anti-democratic political system, learning about science is an act of political insurrection.

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1968 was a big year in the United States.  It was the year some of the world’s greatest scientists started studying the effects humanity was having on the environment on a global scale, and it it was the year Dr. King was assassinated, and it was the year some Anarchists shut down the Democratic National Convention.  On one side, scientists were saying that if we were going to escape a global environmental disaster, radical social change would be necessary, and on the other side, some people were making radical social change happen.

That year my dad was going to college to be a mathematician.  The environmental scientists began studying humanity’s relationship to the global environment mathematically.  The fact that the population of the world kept growing but the land area of the world stayed the same was their first big warning sign that we had a problem.  Feeding people requires farmland, and there was a physical limit on the amount of available farmland in the world.  If we didn’t stop our population growth ourselves, it was only a matter of time before famine would stop it for us.  That’s just math.

My dad realized that one more mathematician wasn’t going to solve the problem, and radical social change isn’t taught in college.  So he dropped out of college to go learn what his college professors weren’t telling him.  That was how he met my mom.  So I can say that I owe my birth to the environmental science movement.  And now I’ve got a score to settle.

I’m descended from four generations of engineers.  My great great grandfather was one of the five architects who helped Pierre Eiffel design the Eiffel tower.  My grandfather designed airplanes back in the early days of aviation before there were computers—which is to say, back in the days when the engineer was the computer.

My dad was an architect for a long time, which is really just a combination of carpentry, math, physics, drawing, and sculpture.  But he also personally built everything everything he designed, which means that in his company, the workers (namely, him) controlled the means of production.  In his company, the workers only built energy efficient houses.

He was also a teacher for a long time, and later a sociologist.  Teaching is really mental engineering, because in order to teach anyone anything, you have to figure out how to assemble the right combination of ideas in their brains that will make them learn what they’re supposed to learn.  Teaching in public high school didn’t suit him very well, because he soon discovered that he was required by law not to assemble an effective combination of ideas in his students’ brains.  The law didn’t actually say that, but that’s what they resulted in.  That’s what happens when people who graduated from white-collar colleges design education programs for kids from blue-collar backgrounds who have no interest in going to college.

Then he and my mom spent the latter half of their working lives working as foster parents for kids who had been confiscated by the Department of Human Services, because their parents were severely negligent, abusive, alcoholics, mentally ill, or whatever.  The way these kids were learning to interact with the world, they were going to end up homeless or in jail.  The administrators who ran that program at least could see that the things these kids needed to learn were so fundamental and so critical that the foster parents were going to have to figure out for themselves what each kid needed to learn and how they needed to learn it.  Undoing 14 years of child abuse ain’t easy, you know.

So now it’s 2008.  A lot of people all over the world are starting to realize humanity is in a lot of trouble.  They’re realizing that politicians aren’t doing nearly enough to solve the problem, and that some people are making a lot of money by making our problems worse.   Now a lot of people are saying that radical social change is necessary.

Here’s the big problem.  The whole reason we got into the global environmental crisis in the first place is because there are certain patterns of cause and effect that make the global environment work that have never been critical to people’s survival and reproduction before now.  Some scientists began studying human psychology as a part of environmental science about 25 years ago.  The environment works according to certain rules that we don’t naturally perceive. Scientists figured these things out because they found some clues that didn’t fit with everything else people thought they knew.  So some scientists began tugging on loose threads and have unraveled some really big mysteries.

Environmental science, including evolutionary psychology, is now compete enough as a body of information that it can be referred to as planetary biology.  The big problem is that these scientists’ discoveries are a big threat to a lot of powerful people. These scientists have been able to unravel these mysteries because they’re very good at it and they spend a lot of time working at it.  But no voting majority of Americans is every going to figure those things out on their own.  So all the politicians and Capitalists have to do to cripple the field of planetary biology is to keep the public from learning certain critical pieces of information.  Not teaching them in public school is one way they do that.  The evolution versus intelligent design debate was another way they discouraged people from learning about science.  Helping to spread the New-Age myth that all reality is subjective and that science doesn’t really mean anything and that the secret to happiness in life is to do whatever feels right to you is another.  If the majority of people do whatever they feel to be right, they’ll just make the environmental crisis worse.   If people try to have a revolution and say that everyone has to be free to do what they feel to be right, all they’re going to do is to validate the oppressors’ political system, because then the most radical activists in the world are going to be using an ideology that still can’t solve the problem.

Now politicians and Capitalists, who assume the world revolves around money and power, are meddling in science, and tampering with forces they obviously don’t understand.  They’re trying to manipulate the environment to turn it into a weapon that they can use to control everyone else.  But anyone who believes they can control the environment that well obviously doesn’t understand anything about planetary biology.

This is not to say that all politicians and Capitalists are doing this.  Some really are trying to help solve the problem, but they don’t even understand the problem well enough to realize they aren’t solving it.  Some others are trying to make some fast money and win votes by cashing in on the new supply and demand relationships that the environmental crisis is causing.  But there are a few who have been paying attention, who are really good at manipulating people, and who are playing everyone.

Who exactly those people are isn’t the point.  The point is, some people are in the position that they could be doing this, which makes it inevitable that some people are doing it.   Every social structure that makes oppression possible works the same way.

I don’t really care who those people are.  I know other people are keeping track of them, so I don’t bother with pointing fingers.

The world’s first successful atomic fission experiment was carried out by German physicists in 1938.  Albert Einstein was a German.  He could see what was about to happen.  So he warned President Roosevelt that the Nazis were trying to build the atom bomb.

A few years after that, my grandfather’s airplane factory was manufacturing bombers.  He and some of the other engineers started to wonder at one point, if they should quit their jobs and go join the air force (which was part of the army at the time).  But then someone pointed out that the only reason the United States had an airforce was because they were building it.

Now the world’s greatest scientists are scratching their heads trying to figure out why politicians keep ignoring planetary biology.  A lot of activists are trying to have a revolution for environmentalism, but don’t know about the scientists’ discoveries and are making a lot of mistakes.

The only thing the revolution is missing is an air force.  What the revolution is missing is an easy way to inflict a huge amount of damage on the Capitalists, so that all the people who have been figuring out new ways we could be doing things can get the chance to put their ideas to use.

That’s not hard at all.  All of biology is engineering, because all of biology is a collection of choices among trade-offs, energy efficiency, costs, benefits, uses, functions, and adaptations. In my family, everyone has been learning all that stuff around the supper table for five generations.

Figuring out how planetary biology works has a been a lot of hard work.  But now that it has been figured out, understanding how it works is fairly simple.  There are only three basic things you need to know to understand planetary biology conceptually, even without having any scientific background.  First, everything in the world wears out eventually.  Second, children inherit their characteristics from their parents.  Third, the universe and the Earth are very old.  The core of planetary biology follows from the interactions among those three things.  All you need after that is a basic awareness of the existence of atoms, molecules, cells, genes, heat, light, gravity, electricity, and a few other things you learn in high school.

I’ve known a lot of thoughtful teenagers who can see that they’re inheriting a world full of problems they never voted for and that they have no idea how to solve.  Once I show you how planetary biology works, at the end of the book I show you how any high school student in America who can get a biology teacher and a physics teacher in a room together can ask a series of eleven yes or no questions can prove that Capitalism can’t possibly have a future that is not synonymous with mass murder.  Not on this this planet, and not on any other planet in the universe.  There is nothing left that anyone can discover that will prove otherwise.  Any Capitalist or politician who claims that there is is claiming to know something about science that scientists have never discovered.

So how can anyone build an intellectual air force for an Anarchistic revolution?  Simple.  All I have to do is build it.  If I do that much, I know someone’s going to use it.  I don’t have to decide who that person is going to be, because the laws of physics work the same way everywhere in the world.  Anyone who can read this book can be their own air force.

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A lot of anti-Capitalist revolutionaries today are trying to find some sort of ideology to unite them into a cohesive political force.  But that raises the inevitable questions:  Who is supposed to think up that ideology?  And what are all the people who don’t agree with it supposed to do?  When you have to ask questions like that, your cohesive political ideology has already broken down before it even began.

Political ideology is inherently not cohesive on a global scale. Political ideology is, after all, just an idea.  Since people all over the world live in different conditions, there is no way that an idea that works well in one part of the world would work well in every part of the world.  The Communists tried that already, and it didn’t work.

We could all use a completely organic political system, which consisted of a simple agreement to be ourselves and get along with each other.  A lot of Anarchists are trying that, but unfortunately, that’s not working either.  We are all being conquered by the Capitalists individually.  Before we can agree to be ourselves and get along with each other, we have to figure out how to work together to make the Capitalists stop trying to conquer us.  But now we’re back the original question:  Whose ideas are we supposed to use to unite us as an effective revolutionary political force?

Luckily, if you stop thinking about ideology, there’s a much simpler solution. What anti-Capitalist revolutionaries need is not ideology, but education.  What the Capitalists desperately need is education too.

What I have to tell you about is no secret.  Everything I have to tell you about is available on the internet and at any public library in America.  The only reason Capitalism still exists is because not enough people know the right books to read or what they all mean.

By now, we know enough about how the world works that we have the choice whether to make the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive, or to make it work in a way that can’t keep everyone alive.  Right now, it’s working in a way that can’t keep everyone alive, and it’s only going to get worse.

Making the world work in a way that can keep everyone alive necessarily means environmental sustainability.  But environmental sustainability means a lot more than buying fluorescent light bulbs and riding the bus more often.  It means getting rid of all the political and economic structures that make matter and energy move through the world in a way that isn’t environmentally sustainable.  Capitalism and corrupt government are inherent parts of our system of environmental unsustainability.

Environmental sustainability depends on our building political and economic systems that make it possible for everyone to feel satisfied with their lives.   Capitalism doesn’t do that, because people who feel satisfied with their lives don’t buy as much.  An economic system based on the pursuit of profits can’t function in a society where everyone already feels satisfied with their lives.

Manufacturing things for people to buy depends on extracting natural resources from the environment.  The impact humanity is having on the environment right now is about 20% more than the environment can withstand indefinitely.  That means environmental sustainability depends on our extracting less resources from the environment.  Continuing to extract more resources is global suicide.

When you put all the science together in one place, it shows that environmental sustainability will depend on:

Everyone having enough to live—and not just in terms of material possessions.

Education, because understanding what environmental sustainability is and how it works is going to be the hardest thing anyone has ever had to learn.   Everyone is going to have to learn to be happy living within the physical limitations of the Earth.  When I talk about using science to teach people to be happy, people always accuse me of trying to be Chairman Mao.   But just because a politician couldn’t do it doesn’t prove it isn’t possible.  First scientists had to figure out what the physical limitations of the Earth are, then figure out what people perceive themselves to need, and then figure out why people perceive themselves to need those things.  Profound happiness depends on emotional health.  Emotional health depends on people being able to provide for themselves within their living situation.  So really, teaching people to be happy is simply a matter of teaching people what is and isn’t possible within the physical limitations of the Earth.

A central decision-making structure, kind of like the United Nations, to coordinate the transition to global environmental sustainability—because making the transition will depend on global coordination.  It is human decisions that are causing global environmental unsustainability in the first place, and it will be because of human decisions that we either make, or don’t make, the transition to environmental sustainability.  This necessarily depends on the people in the central decision-making structure knowing what the hell they’re doing, which currently doesn’t include any world political leaders or American politicians.

Another global social structure, for everyone else to belong to.  Making the transition to environmental sustainability will depend on everyone’s input and participation, because the global environment affects everyone.   Political inequality is a part of global environmental unsustainability.  Everyone in the world needs to be able to work together independently of government.  They also have to be able to replace the central decision-making structure if necessary.  The World Social Forum is a good beginning at all of this.  The biggest thing they’re missing is knowing how to recognize whether or not the people in the central decision making structure are doing their jobs.  And that’s what this book is about.

Over the past 40 years, scientists have studied more and more about physics, chemistry, and biology, to see how matter and energy will need to move through the world to make global environmental sustainability possible.  That includes human decision-making processes, and why our current decision-making structures aren’t working.  Basically, the world’s greatest scientists started out studying chemistry, and they ended up discovering Green Anarcho-Socialism, all on their own.

If you’re an Anarchist, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but abolishing government altogether isn’t physically possible.  Monkeys in the wild live in hierarchal societies, and we inherited our social instincts from them.  There is no action you can take to erase the idea of government from existence.  However, a dual power system is easy.  Democracy depends on people having choices, which incudes the choice to replace their old government with a new government at any time.   If the people can’t do that, their government is not democratic, no matter what anyone calls it.  I already know that politicians are going to try to co-opt my work, which is why I wrote an extended version of this book specifically for Anarchists.  The only form of government that can ever serve the interests of its people is a form of government that’s under constant, direct threat by Anarchists.  Any politician who claims that isn’t true automatically disqualifies himself from his job, because he’s claiming to know something about science that scientists have never discovered, and he’s obviously opposed to democracy.  In a democracy, the people are the government. Democracy depends on an effective balance of power. Democracy can’t survive without an effective Anarchist movement—and by that I mean a much more effective Anarchist movement than we have now.   So if anyone ever claims to found a government on my work who perceives Anarchism to be a threat to the government, shoot the worthless son of a bitch, because he’s no follower of mine.

Every anti-Capitalist revolutionary knows that Capitalism isn’t consistent with democracy.  But thanks to all this science and what it means, now it’s unmistakable that Capitalism isn’t even compatible with the words secular government of, by, and for the people.  If you’re the sort of activist who actually is interested in the fact that the United States has a Constitution, eleven yes or no questions is all it takes to prove that Capitalism is unconstitutional.

Capitalism will not survive the 21st century.  Proving that is no longer an obstacle to the revolution.    All there is left to do is to make the Capitalists understand that they’ve lost.

By the way, if you are a politician or a Capitalist who thinks you can get away with meddling in science, and who thinks the laws of physics are just one more commodity you can exploit to help you amass money and power, you’re about to learn the hard way why you never, ever get into a global war against Albert Einstein.  I don’t even need to bother building a military for this show-down.  I’m the spokesperson for destructive forces that are completely invincible to mortal humans, and that you have no idea how to control.  By extension, that makes me a spokesperson for all the rebels who are trying to figure out how to get on the side that’s guaranteed to win.   If any 16-year-old in America who has a library card and a MySpace account can smash your ideology, we’ll just see who’s playing who.

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I must warn you that talking about biology requires me to make big definitive statements about life.  Biology and other life sciences are the study of life, and some people are a lot better at them than most people.

A lot of progressive activists have the completely paradoxical and counterproductive goals of saving the environment like biologists say we need to do, and proving that it isn’t possible for anyone to make big definitive statements about life.

I know everyone has their reasons for believing that what they’re doing is right.  You probably feel that someone making big definitive statements about life is a warning sign that he’s trying to be the next Josef Stalin.

But look at what you’re doing.  You’re trying to prove simultaneously that people both can and can’t make big definitive statements about life.  If that’s your grand strategy for your revolution, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t work.  Don’t be surprised if you end up working against yourselves, don’t be surprised if you end up with a lot of conflict within your movement, don’t be surprised if a lot of people think you don’t know what you’re doing, and don’t be surprised if your opponents turn all that against you.

It’s easy to say that people should talk definitively about things we do know, and shouldn’t talk definitively about things we don’t know.  That’s reasonable enough.  But that means you’re drawing the line between things you think we know and things you think we don’t know.   That’s the best you know how to do, but as far as the pursuit of science and the realm of human knowledge are concerned, the line you’ve drawn is completely arbitrary.

Physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and every other branch of science are all points along the same spectrum.  Biology is not a separate thing from chemistry, and psychology is not a separate thing from biology.  Those different fields of study are only divided by people’s ability to study them.  Biology is the study of life; psychology is the study of how people think; sociology is the study of how people interact in groups.  Focusing on specific topics makes it easier to gather and organize information.  But that doesn’t change the fact that people think the way they think because of the way their brains work, and their brains are biological organs; and people interact with each other in groups the way they do because of the way their brains work while in groups.  That means that psychology is really just a specialized field of biology, and sociology is just a specialized field of psychology.  Ultimately, every field of science is just a specialized field of physics.

Some fields of science are easier to connect to neighboring fields of science than others are.  Atomic physics and chemistry are both the study of atoms, just on two different scales.  Studying them on different scales lets scientists study them differently, and lets them gather information that’s useful in different ways.

Making the connection between chemistry and biology has been much more difficult, because biology is made up of so many chemical reactions it’s hard for people to keep track of them all.  Making the connection between biology and psychology has been even harder, because that depends on figuring out how a biological organ creates our ideas and feelings.  That doesn’t prove it isn’t possible to do those things, but that does mean that doing them depends on exceptional talents and skills.  That means most people can’t do them, nor can they imagine how it’s possible for anyone to do them.

This means that learning about science requires you to keep an open mind to the fact that some people are a lot better at figuring certain things out than you are.

Not to put too fine a point on it, if you accuse Whites in your neighborhood of discrimination because they don’t want Blacks or Mexicans to move in next door to them, and then you turn around and say that no one can discover the origins of human consciousness just because you don’t know how to do it, you’re a hypocrite.

Your neighbors are trying to keep themselves safe from people they don’t trust.  But as you’re well aware, if they would just get to know the other people they would find that the other people aren’t villains after all.  When they do it to someone else you call it discrimination.  But when you do the exact same thing to scientists you call it spiritual enlightenment.

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Science is different from any other means of studying the world because it’s objective.  A lot of progressively minded people say science can’t possibly be objective because it’s studied by people, and people’s perceptions are inherently subjective.  It is true that people’s perceptions are subjective, but that doesn’t prove that scientists haven’t figured out a way around that.

Scientific objectivity is made up of five things.

First, observability.  If a piece of information can’t be observed by someone else, it isn’t science.   This applies to all information presented.  If you discover a piece of scientific information and then read meaning into it, the second piece of information isn’t science.  The fact that the sky is blue doesn’t prove that Jesus loves you.  The fact that rain falls from clouds doesn’t prove that magic exists.  And so on.  Some evidence, as in the case of electrons, dark matter, and birds that live in South America, isn’t observable to everyone, but all of it is observable to at least some other people.

Second, universality.  In order for something to qualify as a scientific discovery, it has to account for all related evidence.  If proving something depends on looking at most of the evidence and ignoring some of the evidence, it isn’t science.  If 98% of people are religious and 2% of people are Atheists, it doesn’t prove that people are supposed to be religious, it only proves that most people are religious.  If you can’t prove why a few people aren’t religious, you haven’t proved why most people are religious.

Third, self-consistency.  All the information has to fit together in a way that produces accurate results.  There are a number of ways this can be done.  The most well known is to use some evidence to make a prediction of something that will happen, and then waiting to see if it does happen.  Another is to fit some pieces of evidence together and see if the patterns they indicate are consistent with the rest of the evidence.  Another is to extrapolate upon the patterns the evidence indicates and see if they predict things that obviously aren’t possible.

The Theory of Evolution does all of these things.  Everything that has ever been observed about any living thing fits together in a pattern that we call evolution.  That pattern applies to all organisms living now, and to all fossils that have been discovered of extinct organisms.

That pattern also indicates that the competition between predators and prey will create a lot of animals that run very fast.  But it also indicates that each evolutionary step can only modify the existing characteristics of an animal.  That means that even though evolution produces a lot of animals that run very fast, there is a physical limit to how much evolution can increase animals’ speeds.  Then you can study the chemistry of how animals’ digestive systems extract energy from their food, and the physics of how their muscles expand and contract to make their legs move, to see that there is no way the animals could get enough energy from their food, and there is no way muscle fibers could be made strong enough, to let the animals run fast enough to break the sound barrier.  Then you can see that the pattern of evolution has produced a lot of predators and prey that run very fast, but hasn’t produced any that can break the sound barrier.  If there were no animals that could run very fast, or there were animals that could break the sound barrier, that would mean there must be more to evolution than the pattern we had discovered.  The pattern we had discovered could be incomplete, or it could be wrong.

Fourth, reproducibility.  Once you discover a pattern that produces accurate results, other people have to be able to use your patterns to produce accurate results also.  This depends on people having the abilities and skills necessary to understand how your patterns work, which not everyone can do, but all of science consists of patterns that can be reproduced by some other people completely independently of the people who discovered those patterns.

Fifth, debate.   All of science begins with directly observable evidence and patterns the evidence indicates, and builds upon them step by step to produce continuously universal, self-consistent, reproducible patterns.  As the saying among progressive activists goes, the truth fears no questions.  Science fears no questions.  Some people who are opposed to science fear the answers, and refuse to accept them, but a person’s unwillingness to accept the answers doesn’t prove they’re wrong.  Anyone who can look at the observable evidence and show why the patterns someone else discovered aren’t universal, self-consistent, and reproducible, or can find universal, self-consistent, reproducible patterns that prove something else, can disprove a scientific discovery.  Lots of scientists who studied the observable evidence of plants and animals found patterns of how all the evidence fit together to cause evolution, but all of the patterns except Charles Darwin’s turned out to be wrong, because at some point they proved not to be universal, self-consistent, and reproducible.

To this day, the Theory of Evolution, like most scientific discoveries, isn’t accepted as absolute, because the possibility still exists that someone could disprove it.  To say that the Theory of Evolution was absolute would be dogma, not science, because it would require a person to claim absolute knowledge of everything in the universe, which no one can do.  (At least, not scientifically, anyway…)

The possibility that the Theory of Evolution can be disproven still exists, but almost 150 years of debate has produced absolutely no observable evidence that contradicts it, and millions of pieces of observable evidence that support it.  The only reason the Theory of Evolution isn’t called the Fact of Evolution is because of academic technicalities that are only relevant to scientists.  I have a friend who’s an evolutionary biologist, and he makes evolution happen in fruit flies in his laboratory.  The only reason that doesn’t make it the Fact of Evolution is because no one watched the entire history of the world happen and took samples and photographs and kept written records. But as far as it relates to anyone else, millions of pieces of evidence plus real-time observation versus zero pieces of evidence constitutes a scientific fact.

As you can see, science depends on democracy.  Science depends on people having access to information and education, and on people being allowed to talk, ask questions, find answers, debate, and disagree with each other.  A revolution for democracy is a revolution for science.

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Science doesn’t seem democratic to a lot of people, but that’s only because those people are confusing democracy with humanocentricism.  In order to learn about science, you—and anyone else—have to be willing to remain open minded to the possibility that everything you believe you know about the world that wasn’t discovered objectively, could be wrong.

If you insist that something must be true just because you feel it to be true, that isn’t science.  It isn’t democracy either.  You can recognize that people don’t always agree with each other, and that much of what you’re doing is democratic.  But by refusing to believe that what someone else is saying could be true because you feel that it isn’t true, without objective information to back up your side of the disagreement, isn’t democracy, because in practice you are preventing debate by the simple act of your refusing to engage in the debate.  If you aren’t willing to change your mind about something, you and a person talking about differing points of view isn’t a debate, it’s just two people preaching at each other.  Anarchists do this to me all the time.

The problem is that if you believe in something that is incorrect, the actions you take based on your beliefs won’t produce the results you thought they would, because you will be using incorrect information in your decision making.  By refusing to remain open minded to the possibility that there might still be important things you need to learn about how the world works, you are choosing to make avoidable mistakes.  If you choose to make avoidable mistakes, other people and other species are pretty well guaranteed to be affected by your avoidable mistakes.  Then you’re calling your right to maintain your humanocentric point of view, refuse to change your mind, and make avoidable mistakes that affect other people and other species, democracy.  I shouldn’t need to point out that democracy for you and nobody else isn’t democracy.

Traditional science isn’t very compatible with traditional Anarchism for a couple of big reasons, which makes science seem to be incompatible with democracy.  First, traditional Anarchists have been making a lot of humanocentric mistakes, which I talk about a lot in this book and even more in Planteary Biology, Neo-Anarchism, and the Political Future of the World.

Second, traditional scientists have been making a lot of mistakes too.  Planteary biology is the most controversial field of science ever conceived because it depends on a lot of non-traditional approaches to science in order to study a lot of big, important things that traditional approaches to science just aren’t adequate for studying.  I take the most controversial approach ever to the most controversial field of science ever.

I refer to what I do as folk-science.  Objectivity depends on observability, universality, self-consistency, reproducibility, and debatability.  My approach to discovering objective information was to learn how science works first, and how to recognize objective discoveries, and then learning other systems of thought and recognizing discoveries other people had made that produced observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable results.  This is not to say that those people discovered what they believed they had discovered, but it is to say that the people did discover something objectively.

For one example, here in America, Pagans have faced the challenge of figuring out how to practice a non-organized religion—some would say a disorganized religion—and still be able to work together for their mutual goals.  So Pagans have discovered an observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable pattern of cause and effect that explain how metaphysics work.  In any religion, when a person wants to make something metaphysical happen, the person  has an idea for what they want, then one way or another they focus a lot of spiritual energy on it, and then the thing either happens or doesn’t happen.  It might happen the way you expected it to, or it might happen in a way you didn’t expect.  If it doesn’t happen, for some reason or another it wasn’t supposed to happen.

What Pagans discovered isn’t science, or even folk science, because they presupposed that it was possible for people to make metaphysical things happen.  Their discovery is observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable if metaphysical forces exist.  That isn’t science because the existence of metaphysical forces hasn’t been proved scientifically, and the people who discovered this hadn’t considered the possibility that metaphysical forces don’t exist.  (I should point out that there’s a difference between believing that metaphysical or supernatural forces must exist indepantly of physics, and believing that there are forces in the universe that we perceive to be supernatural because they follow laws of physics that we have not yet discovered.)  But what Pagans did discover was an observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable pattern of why and how people feel that they should be able to make metaphysical things happen.   Regardless of whether or not metaphysical forces exist, a discovery of how people believe metaphysics work that’s universal and self-consistent to every religion, is an important discovery.

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The bad news about using science is that it requires you to develop the intellectual and emotional maturity to accept that the world just doesn’t work the way you feel like it should, and that there are some people in the world who are a hell of a lot better at figuring out how it works than you are.   I am one of those people, so consider yourself warned.

As a child, you had to learn that the world doesn’t always work the way you feel like it should.  Did you think that changed when you were an adult, just because you no longer had your parents standing there telling you that all the time?  A lot of people make that mistake.  If you don’t devote a full-time occupation to continuing to figure out more about how the world works, it shouldn’t come as any surprise to you that people who do devote full time occupations to figuring out more about how the world works should’ve figured out more than you have.

One reason I had to write my special Anarchist version of this book was because for all their talk of global revolution, the most outspoken Anarchists I’ve met are so caught up in proving they can think for themselves that as soon as I start talking about science they practically accuse me of being the Anti-Christ.  All I can say to that is, if you care more about proving your beliefs are right than you care about defeating your enemies, there’s a good reason you’re not winning.

The good news about science is that, as I’ve said, it proves that Capitalism can’t possibly survive, and any thoughtful high school drop out who can read a few books can prove why.

When you take that science a step further, it shows that the greenhouse effect, the energy crisis, the war in Iraq, the immigration crisis in America, and the Zapatista revolution in Mexico are all symptoms of the same problem.  In fact, Capitalism itself is a symptom of the problem.  But Capitalism has created what’s known as a positive feedback loop.  It’s a symptom of the problem that’s also contributing to the problem.

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A lot of people tell me I can’t use science to tell everyone what to do.  This is another misunderstanding.   Scientists don’t tell people what to do.  Politicians are the ones who do that.  Scientists know that anyone’s ability to gather information is limited by their ability to perceive the situation.  If someone else can’t replicate your work, what you’re studying isn’t science.

Politicians assume that knowing more about science than someone else proves they know everything.  But that only proves they don’t understand what science is or how it works.  Then they try to apply science selectively to advance their political goals.   That isn’t science either, that’s just somebody making stuff up and pretending to use science to prove he’s right.  If you aren’t looking at all the evidence, what you’re studying isn’t science.

That brings me to the big difference between science and any other means of studying the world.  Science is the study of observable evidence, with the goal of drawing logical conclusions from that observable evidence, which can be used to make accurate predictions.  Scientists form hypotheses, which means they think of things that might be true and then look at all the related evidence to see whether it proves the hypothesis or disproves it.

Ultimately, science isn’t a college degree or a job title.  If you use that basic process of observation and discovery, you are using science as a system of thought—regardless of what your education and occupation are called.

Any other way of studying the world begins with people deciding, either consciously or subconsciously— maybe even very subconsciously—that something is true, and then looking for evidence to prove they’re right.  You could feel it to be true emotionally or intuitively, or believe it’s true because you learned it from a religion, or because philosophically you feel that’s how the world should work, or whatever.  That isn’t a hypothesis, because deciding that something is true ahead of time clouds your vision.

That includes deciding ahead of time that an unprovable belief that your new idea is founded upon must be true.  The term “Christian Science” is a complete misnomer.  It’s a co-optation of the word science.  There’s no such thing as Christian science, because Christianity isn’t science.  Accepting unprovable religious beliefs as true and then building upon them in a scientific manner isn’t science, because the information you started with wasn’t science.  The same is true for Scientology and any other scientific approach to building upon non-scientific information.

Individual scientists make mistakes, and even get emotionally attached prematurely to things they think they’ve discovered.  But science as a field of study is self-regulating, because if proving that something is true depends on preventing people from looking at certain evidence, what you’re studying isn’t science, by definition.

The world itself judges whether your logic was correct or faulty.  Logic, by definition, means using partial evidence in a situation to figure out what the rest of the situation must be.  When you use your partial evidence to figure out what the rest of the situation is, it’s the situation itself that proves whether you were right or not.

A jigsaw puzzle is a logic puzzle, because each piece fits into the puzzle in only one way.  You can hold the pieces up next to each other and try to figure out whether they fit together or not.  That’s the logic.  Then you can try to fit the pieces together.  That’s the test.  If the pieces fit together, your logic was right.  If they don’t fit together, your logic was wrong.  Period.  You can’t make puzzle pieces fit together by believing they should fit together, or feeling like they should fit together, or having the opinion they should fit together.

The universe is a giant jigsaw puzzle.  Science is the act of fitting the pieces together.

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One of the limitations of scientists’ perceptions is the situation itself.  You can mix hydrogen and oxygen together in a laboratory and see that it creates water.   That’s a very simple experiment, so the logic is easy to test.

On the other hand, if you found a species of bird living on an island and you wondered what the island’s environment would be like without the birds living there, you can’t test that by killing all the birds, because once you satisfied your curiosity, you wouldn’t be able to undo the experiment and bring all the birds back to life.  So instead you have to use what’s known as the comparative method.  You can go find another island that has the same environment but doesn’t have the birds and see what that environment is like.  It won’t be the same island, so the environment won’t be exactly the same, but you could get an idea what the first island would be like without the birds.  Then you could go look at other islands that had similar environments but didn’t have the birds, compare all the islands to each other, and get a better idea that way.  Then you could apply laws of biology, chemistry, and physics to your discoveries and get more information that way.  If the birds didn’t live on the island, the food cycles of the island would be different, because there would be more of whatever the birds ate and less of whatever ate the birds.  Now with all that information, you could make a good estimate to see how the environment would balance itself out.  This experiment is a lot more complicated than mixing chemicals in a laboratory, but this is the only way it can be done.

The effect that humanity is having on the global environment works the same way.  Humanity’s effect on the global environment is a planetary chemical experiment.  We only get to try it once, and our descendants will have to live with the results forever.   Currently, the planetary chemical experiment is being carried out by people who have no idea how our planetary environment works.  For the people who are figuring out how our environment works and how our planetary chemical experiment is going to turn out on its present course, we only have one planet to look at.  That means we can’t compare our planet to another planet where the people tried something else.  That means that we have to use what we’ve learned about physics, chemistry, and biology in other ways, and apply them to the entire world.  That means we have to use the comparative method of science on a much bigger scale, in a much more abstract way, than we did when we were studying the environment of our hypothetical island.

That makes planetary biology the most controversial field of study in history, because we can make predictions, but the only way we can test them is by living through them.  That makes it really easy for people who are opposed to science and who don’t really know anything about science to convince the public that the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about—because there’s no way to test their discoveries ahead of time.  So for anyone who doesn’t know how science works, it sounds like scientists are just a bunch of tree-hugging Communists who are making things up to try to scare everyone.

Ultimately, I’m not using science to tell everyone what to do.  You’re the ones who are thinking of what to do.  A lot of anti-Capitalist revolutionaries are trying to figure out where our societies went wrong and how to keep from making the same mistakes in the post-revolutionary society.   Where our society went wrong and how to fix the problems has been discovered, and that’s what I’m here to tell you about.  If it sounds like I’m using science to tell you what to do, that’s only because I’m not talking about abstract ideas, I’m specifically answering your big question of how to solve the problems you’re rebelling against.

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