The evolutionary origins of religion is another good example of a big misunderstanding scientists have unraveled.

I told you how people all over the world adapted to living in their environments, and how agriculture was developed in some places but not others because people were a constant and the environment was a variable.

Dr. Andrew Newberg and Dr. Eugene D’Aquili were a couple of neurologists who studied the evolutionary origins of religion by hooking neural imaging equipment up to the brains of people of different religions and seeing what happened when they engaged in their religious activities.   What they discovered was that everyone’s religion works the same way as everyone else’s religion.

In this case, people are a constant again.  People all over the world have asked the same questions about life, so that’s another constant.  People all over the world used whatever they knew about the world to try to answer those questions.  What people knew is a variable.  What they ended up with was a lot of religions that each look different on the surface but all do the same things for their followers.

Every religion in the world answers the same four questions:  What makes the universe work?  What happens to people after they die?   How can people make themselves happy?  And:  How do you get people to cooperate with each other?

Humans, and all other animals, learn about how the world works by developing a sense of cause and effect they can use to predict the outcomes of choices they make.  With every decision you ever make, you ask yourself, “Based on what I know about the world, if I do this, what will happen?”  Sometimes you ask that question consciously.  You always ask it subconsciously—which means you don’t realize you’re asking it.

Human intellect gives us the ability to perceive a lot more about the world than any other animal species.  We can imagine abstract ideas, we can remember things that have happened in the past, and we can communicate abstract ideas to each other.  Many other animals can do each of those things to some extent, but humans can do each of those things a lot more than any other animal species.

That gives humans the ability to ask questions they don’t know how to answer.  Animals need to develop their senses of cause and effect to keep track of simple things, like how to find food, how to find mates, and how to keep from getting eaten by predators.  Animals notice that the seasons change and can remember what they need to do when the seasons change.  Humans wonder why the seasons change.

At the moment anyone notices anything about the world, it raises the possibility in their minds that knowing what this thing is and how it works is going to be important to them.  When they notice that one thing has a relationship to another thing, it raises the possibility that understanding more about the first thing will help them understand more about the second thing.  When humans notice the seasons are changing, they can remember that animals are going to be migrating, and they can remember where they found some animals at this time last year.  So that makes figuring out why the seasons change seem even more important to people.

When people draw connections like that between everything in the entire world, by the time they’re done, they’ve developed a sense of cause and effect for how their entire known universe works.

This is not to say that their sense of cause and effect is correct, but it is to say that their sense of cause and effect feels correct to them.  Since people can feel like they could have a sense of cause and effect for how the entire universe works, and can feel like they need one, if they feel like they don’t have one, they’re going to feel like they’d better get one.

If people figure out a sense of cause and effect that enables them to provide for all their needs in life, then as far as they can tell, their sense of cause and effect must be right.  But all that proves is that they’ve figured out how the universe works as far as it relates to them.  Since every religion in the world was founded by people who lived at a lower scientific level than we have now, it’s inevitable that in order to complete their sense of cause and effect for how the universe works, they had to fill in a lot of gaps by thinking up answers to questions nobody could answer scientifically at the time.  So then you get a lot of religious myths about the Earth only being 6,000 years old, and stars being the spirits of the dead watching over us from the sky.

Unscientific religious mythology works fine for giving people the feeling of a sense of cause and effect for how the universe works, provided those mythical beliefs have no bearing on the people’s actions or the results of their actions.   For stone-age people living in the depths of the Amazon rain forest, or on remote Pacific islands, it doesn’t really matter what stars are or how old the Earth is, because stone age people can’t undertake any action that make those pieces of information critical.  The people still wondered about those things though, so they felt like knowing those things might be important, so they used what they knew about the world to try to figure out answers, and they figured out answers that worked as well as they needed to for any action the people could undertake—which is to say, any answer they made up would work just as well as any other answer they could’ve made up.

If people then progress technologically, or otherwise gain the ability to have effects on the world that they weren’t having before, this creates a problem.  Now people have made strong emotional attachments to the idea that the universe must work a certain way because that’s what they were taught, or because that’s how they feel it’s supposed to work.  Now you get religious leaders arguing that people shouldn’t build telescopes or study evolution, because new scientific discoveries are hurting people’s feelings, and because people have the right to believe whatever they want to believe.  Then people vote for United States presidents based on which candidate they feel knows what he’s doing because he shares their mythical beliefs that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and that stars are the spirits of the dead up in the sky, and whatever else.

Then as individuals, and as a country, we undertake a lot of actions where pieces of information like that are critical.   Then the actions we take cause a lot of effects we didn’t expect, and we can’t understand why.  Then people in other countries think Americans and our government have no idea what we’re doing, and that we’re a threat to them, and they start wanting to kill us.  And then Americans point their fingers and accuse the people who oppose them of being terrorists and anti-Capitalist revolutionaries, and saying all the problems in the world are someone else’s fault.

I’ve got a lot more to say about this throughout this book.  The End of Faith, by Sam Harris is a good reference book about ways that mythical beliefs lead people astray in making decisions in the modern world.

Knowing what happens to people after they die is important for a simple reason.   Human intellect made humans the dominant species of the world by giving us the ability to perceive more about the world than any other species.  It gave us the ability to build weapons, make plans for how to hunt other animals, cooperate in hunting other animals, and change our hunting tactics faster than other animals could evolve defenses against them.

But there was a catch.  Human intellect also made us the only species in the world that was capable of perceiving our own mortality at all times.

When other animals make decisions about looking for food, mating, or escaping from predators, they make decisions that affect their lives right then and there.  But humans have the unique ability to see that it doesn’t matter what decisions we make.  No matter what we do, each of us is going to die eventually.

Religion was an evolutionary necessity, because without it, all of humanity would’ve fallen victim to clinical depression.

Beliefs in what happen in the afterlife, in of themselves, don’t cause problems in the way that mythical beliefs about how the universe works cause problems.  Beliefs in the afterlife only become a problem when people start making decisions in this life based on their beliefs about what’s going to happen to them in the afterlife as a result of the decisions they’re making now.

Some people believe that death is just the next stage of being, and that nobody can anticipate what the next world is going to be like.  Some people believe that this life is a test, and the actions you take in this life will affect you in your next life, but no one can be sure how, so to try to prepare themselves as best they can for the next life, these people try to make the best decisions they can.  That’s fine.

When you start believing you’re going to be judged for specific actions you take in this life, that causes problems.  Then you get people believing that they’re going to burn in hell if they let their children grow up to be homosexuals, so they send their gay children away to reform schools where they’re emotionally maimed for the rest of their lives, and they start trying to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriages.

Or you get people believing that if they forsake the love of their savior they’ll go to hell, so they do all they can to prevent anyone from learning enough about science to learn that babies are made out of soil nutrients, because they believe that if everyone learns that people are made out of dirt it will turn everyone evil.   So now half the human race barely gets enough to eat every day—or doesn’t get enough to eat every day—and Americans go right on living the way they’ve always lived, because they aren’t willing to face up to the simple fact that people’s bodies are made of nutrients, nutrients come from the soil, and if people can’t get enough nutrients into their bodies, they go hungry.  Then the people start fighting over food and accusing Americans of crimes against humanity.   And Americans go right on believing that there has to be more to life than soil nutrients, and believe that some part of humanity must exist on some invisible plane of existence, and believe that if they stop believing that, they will be condemned to eternal suffering in the afterlife.  They get so wrapped up in their mythical beliefs about what’s going to happen to them in the afterlife that they end up thinking we’re better off condemning half the human race to eternal suffering in this life, because they believe that doing what it takes to solve world hunger is just too big of a risk.

As it turns out, a scientifically observable afterlife has been discovered.  It took a long time to notice—and I’m not even sure how many scientists even have noticed it yet—because it’s so obvious it doesn’t even require scientific observation to see it.

Over the course of your life, you make choices and take actions.  Your actions affect the world and other people.  When you’re gone, the effects that your life had on the world remain.  You live forever in the effects your life had on the world.

Adolf Hitler made a lot of choices in his life, Dr. King made a lot of choices in his life, your great great grandparents made a lot of choices in their lives, and the same is true for everyone who’s ever lived.  The world we live in is the world that everyone who came before us took part in creating.  The world that our great great grandchildren live in will be the world we all take part in creating.  So make your choices in life wisely.

People figuring out how to make themselves happy is important, because happiness is the feeling that your human needs are well provided for.  If you feel unhappy, you feel like something is missing from your life.  Unhappy people will try just about anything to stop feeling unhappy.  Every alcoholic, wife-beater, child molester, crack dealer, prostitute, armed robber, politician, and corporate CEO is trying to make themselves happy.   Obviously, a society full of unhappy people isn’t a very pleasant—or safe—place to live.

To be happy, you need two basic things:  to be able to provide for your human needs—and by that I don’t just mean material needs—and to feel like that’s enough.  If you feel like your life is missing something, you won’t be happy.  If you feel like you have what you need but you could have more and that you’d be better off if you did, you won’t be happy.  But even that is just a different version of feeling like your life is incomplete.

Happiness doesn’t depend on people possessing every single thing they believe they’ll ever need in life.  That’s just the overly-simplified Capitalist definition of happiness, which is impossible for anyone to attain, which is why they make so much money teaching people that.  The ability to get the things you need is also something you either have or don’t have.  If you don’t physically possess every single thing you will ever need for your entire life at this very moment, but you do perceive yourself to have the ability to get those things as you need them, you’ll still feel like you have enough.  If you want some particular thing but have no way of getting it, but you do have the emotional flexibility to adapt to the fact that you can’t get it, you still have what you need to make your life complete.  The less you need, the more you have.  No one will ever advertize this on TV, but resourcefulness and resilience are two of the most valuable things you can have in life.

(I think it’s worth pointing out here that the entire advertizing industry in America is devoted to making people feel like no matter how much they have, they would be better off if they had more.  That means the entire advertizing industry is devoted to making people feel unsatisfied with their lives.  That means the entire advertizing industry is devoted to making people feel unhappy.  That means the entire advertizing industry is devoted to trying to make society an unpleasant—and unsafe—place to live.  If you feel like you need gasoline to make your life complete, you’ll do just about anything to try to make yourself happy.  Who cares about some wildlife refuge thing in Alaska?  Who cares if we have to kill a few hundred thousand people in some country on the other side of the world?   And if some people don’t feel like they need gasoline to make their lives complete, as long as you can keep a voting majority of people feeling that way, you can get a majority of people to vote for anything you want them to vote for.)

Getting people to cooperate in a society is important for a number of reasons.  There are only three ways people can interact with each other:  they can cooperate with each other, they can compete against each other, or they can ignore each other.

Ignoring each other is only possible if both sides are completely unaware of each other’s existence.  For two groups of people who know about each other to ignore each other in practice requires them to agree to ignore each other.  They may not reach that agreement in words, but if they know about each other but ignore each other in practice, they have to reach that agreement in some way or another.  If one group knows about the other group, but the second group doesn’t know about the first group, if the first group ignores the second group in practice, they’re still cooperating with the second group by letting them go on doing whatever they’re doing.  Alternately, the first group could be competing against the second group, if the second group had fallen on hard times, and the first group was waiting for the second group to be destroyed rather than offering to help them.

Any kind of conflict that doesn’t turn into a fight to the death is a form of cooperation also.  A chess game or a soccer match is a form of competition, but both sides agree how the game is going to be played, when the game is going to end, and what happens when it does.  The people are not competing for literal survival.  Even if a soccer game turns into a riot between the fans of the two sides, as long as the people on each side feel like there are things they shouldn’t do to the other side in the riot, a form of cooperation is still taking place.  Even if a soccer game ends in a riot with dozens of fans being murdered by the opposing sides in the riot, as long as the murderers still felt that eating the bodies of their victims was wrong, there was still a form of cooperation taking place, because the two sides are still imposing their own limitations on the degree to which they’re supposed to compete with each other—murder is an acceptable form of competition, but cannibalism isn’t an acceptable form of competition.

Any society that doesn’t instantly disintegrate into civil war, continues to exist because its people figure out a way to cooperate with each other.    There are a number of different ways to use religion to facilitate cooperation.  There are many ways to get people to cooperate with each other independently of religion also, such as coercion, forced ignorance, and subconscious manipulation, like we use here in America.

Forced cooperation is peace through military superiority, and it only works as long as one side can prevent the other side from fighting back effectively—because the other side will try to fight back, every chance they get.  That didn’t work in Vietnam, and it isn’t working in Iraq.  It’s only working in the inner cities of America to the extent that the regional warlords—meaning gang leaders—are each fighting against the law individually, instead of banding together.  Even though street gangs are made up of people who have given up trying to get anywhere in the world by obeying the law, the government is still far more powerful than all of them put together, so banding together and fighting on the same side still wouldn’t do them any good.

Forced ignorance is the elimination of choices by preventing people from learning about choices in the first place.  The Communists did this very directly in the Soviet Union.  The Capitalists are doing this more indirectly here in America, by preventing the public from learning enough about science in school to see why Capitalism contradicts fundamental laws of the universe.  If they can prevent the public from learning that there’s a problem in the first place, they keep people from seeing a need even to look for alternate choices.

Subconscious manipulation is personal disempowerment.  There are a lot of ways to make people feel like there’s no point in trying to oppose authority.  There are a lot more ways to make people feel like acting in ways that won’t threaten authority is the best choice.  If you can make people feel that opposing authority won’t do them any good, even if it would do them some good, they have no choice but to cooperate with whatever you want them to do, because you’ve prevented them from thinking that even thinking about opposing authority will do them any good.  If you make one choice seem to someone else like a better idea than another choice, even though each choice was equally good or the second choice was better for them than the first, but their making the first choice would result in their cooperating with you—even though they don’t realize it—that’s another way you can trick people into cooperating with you.  It will take me the rest of the book just to scratch the surface on how subconscious manipulation works.

The religious way of getting people to cooperate with each other is separate from these other forms of involuntary cooperation.  Those other forms are used in some religions, and obviously there’s a lot of overlap, which is why I told you about those other approaches to involuntary cooperation first.

The religious approach to cooperation is religious morality.  All religions have morals, but morals can also exist independently of religion.

A lot of Christian fundamentalists love to try to claim a monopoly on morality, but that isn’t true.  They have a monopoly on their own morality, but that’s all they have.

A lot of people who oppose organized religion say they don’t believe in morals, but that isn’t true either.  They oppose other people’s morals, and they might even oppose a few people indoctrinating a lot of other people with their own morals, but that still isn’t the rejection of morality itself.  That’s only the rejection of certain morals, and certain ways of teaching morals.  If you feel that murder and rape are wrong, and you believe that other people should feel that murder and rape are wrong, you believe in morals.

Religious morals are the easiest kind to teach.  Any other kind of morals work the same way, but are more complicated.

A set of morals is a set of beliefs about how people should and shouldn’t act.  It depends on teaching people to feel that acting in certain ways is right, and that acting in other ways is wrong.  If you teach everyone in a society the same set of morals, then everyone acts in certain ways, and doesn’t act in other ways.  So all you have to do is to teach everyone to feel that cooperating with the other members of their society, not harming other members of society, acting in ways that result in cooperation with other members of the society (even if the people didn’t realize they were doing that), or acting in ways that don’t harm other members of society (again without the people realizing it) is good, and doing the opposite of any of that is bad.  All of that could be subconscious manipulation of the majority of people by a religious elite, and in some religions it is.  But a set of morals could also be reached by a mutual agreement among all the members of a group.

Religious morals are the easiest kind to teach precisely because of all the gaps the people had to fill in in the process of figuring out their system of cause and effect for the entire universe.  Teaching people morals depends on teaching them a sense of good and evil, or good and bad, or right and wrong, or whatever you prefer to call it.   Since you’ve had to invent a lot of ideas to explain things you couldn’t explain directly in the process of developing your religious system of cause and effect, it’s easy to say that some things in the world are caused by a force of good, and that some things are caused by a force of evil.   Now all you have to do is to teach people to connect in their own mind the idea of acting in some ways with the idea of the invisible force of good, and the idea of acting in other ways with the idea of the invisible force of evil.

If you wonder where spiders came from and you don’t like them, it would be easy to say they must’ve been created by a force of evil that was out to get you.  Then you could teach your kids that if they steal from people, spiders will eat them.  Or you could teach them that when they die they will get eaten by spiders in the afterlife.  Or you could teach them that if they feel like they want to steal from someone, it means an invisible spider has crawled into their ear.  You could teach them that they should knock the spider back out of their ear by hitting themselves in the side of the head until they stop wanting to steal.  You could also teach them that if they lose their favorite toy, it must mean that spiders stole it.  None of these things are true, but now you’ve gone from developing a sense of cause and effect for the entire universe that works well enough for you to make sense of your life, to a sense of how people should conduct their actions within that universe.

Teaching people a sense of morality only depends on teaching them a sense of right and wrong.  You can teach people morality independently of religion, but that’s more complicated.  You could, for instance, teach people that they shouldn’t steal from each other because they’ll increase the mathematical likelihood that the other person will try to get even with them, and that as a result of stealing the person will end up worse off instead of better off, or at the very best it will undermine your community, undermine people’s trust for each other, and decrease people’s willingness to take their chances on cooperating with each other.  All of that is true, and that’s how Atheists teach morality to their children.  That seems awfully complicated to a lot of people, which makes Atheists seem like immoral people.  But by ignoring the short-term benefits of taking simplistic shortcuts, Atheists produce better long-term results, because they never have to face the problem of their children discovering that there’s no such thing as invisible spiders.  And better still, in a country full of Atheists, no presidential candidate could ever get elected by promising voters that criminals and terrorists are evil people who will be punished by invisible spiders.

Religion gets people to cooperate with each other in another big way also.    Since religion gives people a system of cause and effect that explains how the universe works, and gives people a code of morality, it gives people a reference point for dealing with the world and with each other.  If you have a sense of cause and effect you use to deal with the world and with other people, and you know someone else practices the same religion you do, you know that they have the same sense of cause and effect as you do.  That means that you can predict what they’re going to do better than you could predict the actions of someone who practiced a different religion, because the person who practiced a different religion would be using a different system of cause and effect for making his decisions, and you don’t know as much about how that system of cause and effect works.  Since the person who practices the same religion you do believes the same things to be true about the world, when he acts upon what he believes to be true about the world, he’ll make pretty much the same decisions you would make.  Cooperation means working together, and working together depends on each person knowing what the other is doing.  If you don’t know what the other person is doing, you aren’t working together, you’re each working on your own and hoping that what each of you are doing will add up to the results you wanted.

Another important function religious cooperation has served, in addition to maintaining peaceful communities, is maintaining physically powerful communities.  When people cooperate, they add the results of their efforts together.  If the people in your country were all just doing their own thing, while the people in the country next door were all working together to produce a lot more, the people in the country next to yours could all work together to come conquer you.  So cooperation within the group has always been a political necessity for as long as people have been around, and religion has played an important role in that.

Using religion to get people in a society to cooperate with each other depends on everyone in the community following the same religion, or perhaps a few different variations of the same religion.  Social stability depends on everyone being able to predict what everyone else is going to do, and being able to plan accordingly.  Religion can only contribute to social stability as long as everyone in the society follows the same religion.  Otherwise, you get different groups of people acting upon different sets of beliefs about how the world works.

Then when one group makes different choices than the other group would make, the people in the second group are going to think the people in the first group are stupid, or that they’re trying to cause trouble, or that they’re the servants of evil, because when the people in the first group do what they feel they should do based on how they believe the universe works, they end up doing something that the people in the second group feel like people shouldn’t do, based on the way those people believe the universe works.  Then you get things like people in Texas voting to amend their state constitution to ban gay marriage, because they believe they’re going to burn in hell forever and ever and ever and ever if they allow their neighbors to be gay, so amending their state constitution is one way to help keep themselves from burning in hell.

Answering the four main questions of religion has been important to people all over the world because answering each of those questions was important all by itself. Now let’s see how the four pieces fit together.

People who don’t know how the universe works can’t figure out how to survive.  People who don’t know how the universe works will feel like their survival is being threatened, even if they are surviving for the moment.  But in the process of figuring out everything they want to know about how the universe works, they figure out how to escape their mortality permanently.

If people don’t know a way to escape their mortality permanently, they won’t be happy, because they’ll feel like they aren’t providing for their needs.  In order to provide for their needs, and consequently be happy, they have to find a way to escape their mortality.  (Of course, there are a lot of other things people need to be happy also.)

If people aren’t happy, they won’t be able to cooperate with each other very well.   If they feel unhappy, they’ll try just about anything to make the feeling go away.  If they feel like their needs aren’t being met, they’ll be too busy looking out for themselves to be able to cooperate with anyone else.

I should add here that in some religions, some of these basic elements are hard to recognize.  That doesn’t prove that they don’t exist and I don’t know what I’m talking about, that only proves that you’re not looking hard enough.

For instance, a lot of progressively minded people believe that there are some parts of how the universe works that we can’t understand.  But that in itself is a form of understanding.  First there was something that happened in the universe that you didn’t understand, and then you established in your mind some way to define how that thing worked—namely, in a way that isn’t possible for you to understand.  Instead of using the simplistic solution of inventing your own explanation for how that thing worked, you adapted your mind to your own ability to understand how that thing worked.  But either way, before there was a part of the universe that you couldn’t encompass in your mind, and now you can encompass it in your mind.

Likewise for the belief in what happens after you die.  Even if you believe that no one knows what happens to people after they die, you have still formulated some sort of a belief about what happens to you after you die, because you have formulated an idea that you can think about.  This is a very vague belief in what happens to people after they die, but you have still completed the basic process of replacing the absence of an idea with the presence of an idea—no matter how vague that idea is.

Likewise for a belief in how people can make themselves happy.  Even if all you believe is that each person has to figure out their own way to make themselves happy, you have still completed the basic process of replacing the absence of an idea with the presence of an idea.

Likewise for how to get people to work together.  Even if all you believe is that people have to figure out how to work together on their own, you’ve still completed the basic process of replacing the absence of an idea with the presence of an idea.

My point is, these questions are so fundamental to our lives that it isn’t possible for anyone, anywhere in the world, not to find answers to them in one way or another.

A lot of people say that the fact that people all over the world have asked and found answers to these questions proves they aren’t important, they can be ignored, and that it isn’t necessary to use science to study them.  But that isn’t even remotely true.  The fact that people all over the world have asked and found answers to these questions proves that these things are extremely important, and by studying them scientifically we can learn a lot of important things about people.

As you can see, people all over the world have faced the same combination of psychological and sociological problems, and have all discovered that with the same four basic pieces of information, they could solve all of them.  It’s absurd that people should still be fighting over whose religious beliefs are better than whose.

Now that people have figured all of this out, people can do two big things to solve problems in our global society.   First, everyone can see that all of these things apply to everyone else, regardless of their religion or non-religion.  Second, knowing that, everyone can adapt their religions in whatever ways their religions need to be adapted to accommodate the fact that everyone else in the world believes in the same things they do, even though they use different aesthetic details to observe them.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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Having shown you why religion has been so important throughout human evolution, now I can show you why religion is causing so much trouble in the modern world, and why it’s only going to get worse on our present course.

We can divide the life cycle of the universe up into five sections:  The beginning, the past, the present, the future, and the ending.  Science works by people studying the how the world works in the present, without any pre-conceived ideas about what they’re going to find.  Scientists can form hypotheses and then look for evidence to support or contradict them, but that’s not the same thing as deciding ahead of time that something must be true and then only looking for evidence to support it and ignoring any evidence that contradicts it.   That’s what all the people who argue against evolution do.

Once scientists figure out how the universe works in the present, they can reverse-engineer the universe to see how the past created the present.  If they know what the world is like now, and they know how it works, then they can back up to see what it must’ve been like in the past in order for the laws they’ve discovered to have created the present.  Of course, different fields of science study different things, so scientists aren’t backing up through the life cycle of the universe one year at a time; different branches of science move at different rates.  But whatever branch of science you’re studying, that’s how science works.

If you back up through time far enough, you reach the origins of the universe.  This was discovered by astro-physicists.  It’s called the Big Bang.

If you’ve ever heard an emergency vehicle drive past you with its sirens blaring, you may have noticed that it gave off a higher pitched sound when it was approaching you, and a lower pitched sound when it was driving away from you.  That’s called the Doppler effect.  When the vehicle was approaching you, the motion of the vehicle was compressing the sound waves, because each part of the sound started closer to you than the last.  Likewise, when the vehicle was driving away from you, it stretched the sound waves out, because each part of the sound started further away from you than the last.   Changing the frequency of sound waves makes the sounds either higher or lower pitched.

Light waves work the same way.  The headlights of an oncoming car have a shorter wavelength than they do when the car is stopped.  If someone has a broken taillight that’s giving off white light, that light has a longer wavelength when the car is driving away from you.  That makes the headlights of an oncoming car bluer than they are when the car is stopped, and it makes the exposed taillights redder than when the car is stopped.  The car is moving so slowly compared to the speed of light that these shifts are unnoticeable.  When you build high-powered telescopes specifically to look for this, and point them at stars, you can detect blue and red shifts.

All the galaxies are moving away from each other, spreading out from a central point.   Since all the galaxies were acting like the debris of a giant explosion, and that’s supported by a lot more physics that’s more complicated than I’ll bother trying to explain, scientists could see that the universe must’ve begun with a giant explosion.

For a long time scientists thought the Big Bang was one huge explosion—hence the term Big Bang.  But now with further evidence, it looks it wasn’t quite that simple.  It was something like a big explosion, so the scientists who first discovered it were on the right track, but now it looks like the explosion might not be over yet.  If the Big Bang was an explosion like we understand explosions, all the galaxies should be slowing down.  Instead, they’re speeding up—as though there’s some sort of ongoing explosion in the center of the universe.  This further evidence doesn’t prove the universe didn’t begin with a big explosion; with the further evidence we’ve just learned more about how the explosion worked.

In effect, the scientific version of the origin of the universe is what you would get if the Book of Genesis was an entry in the Wikipedia online encyclopedia.  As more information comes in, people are constantly revising the story of how the universe began.

It is true that sometimes scientists develop strong emotional attachments to their hypotheses and won’t give them up when new evidence comes in to refute them.  But scientists are only human.

When new evidence come along that contradicts some conclusions scientists have drawn before, a lot of scientists usually kick and scream and try to disprove the new evidence.  But that isn’t the same as religious people kicking and screaming when science disproves something they believed to be true.  Scientists devote a lot of time and energy to studying science, and they build up careers and reputations for themselves that way.  If you disprove what they thought they had proven, you threaten their careers and their reputations.  But that’s nowhere near the same thing as threatening their sense of the meaning of life and 2,000 years of doctrine and their ability to manipulate other people’s minds, or anything to that effect, which is what happens when scientists disprove people’s religious beliefs.

By figuring out how the origins of the universe created the past, and the past created the present, scientists can project those discoveries into the future and see how they will continue to unfold until the universe ends.  Figuring out how the universe is going to end is interesting from an academic standpoint, for the sake of satisfying people’s curiosity, but none of us are going to live that long, so it doesn’t seem like it would have any practical applications in life.  However, it does make a good reference point.  If you can see how laws of physics are going to play out from the beginning of the universe to the end, you can see how whatever is happening to you now fits into that, so you can see how this event began and how it’s going to end.  Of course, that sequence of events isn’t going to end for a long time, so this is, as I said, just a point of reference.

That brings us to the real value of science.  By figuring out how the origin of the universe created the past and the past created the present, scientists—or anyone else who learns how science works—can see how the chain of events that led from the past to the present will continue to unfold into the future.  That gives people the choice to make different things happen by acting differently and making those chains of cause and effect unfold differently.  This is also known as informed decision making.  Informed decision-making depends on people having information.  The discovery of accurate information is the whole point of science.

I think it’s worth pointing out here that science isn’t devoted to the control of information.  Capitalism is devoted to the control of information.  That’s called intellectual property.   But information can just as easily be distributed for free to everyone, so everyone can put it to use.  That’s why we have Indy Media.

Religions—or three really big religions that spring to mind, at least—define their own version of the end of the universe.  That renders religion completely useless for predicting the outcomes of events—meaning the outcomes of decisions people make.  Religious people begin with an understanding of how the universe works right now, just like scientists do.  But then they make up their own story about how the universe began.  Then, to explain how the origins of the universe led up to the present, they have to invent their own chain of cause and effect.  A fictitious chain of cause and effect doesn’t let them accurately predict the outcomes of the decisions they’re making now.

Instead, they write their own version of how the universe is supposed to end.  But they don’t have the information they need to make informed decisions about the outcomes of their actions, so they can’t anticipate the results of their actions and choose to act differently.  What they end up doing instead is continuing to invent their own story of the world as the present unfolds into the future (or rather, as the future becomes the present), to explain how the unexpected effects of their actions are leading up to the way they’ve already decided the universe is supposed to end.

Basically, they’ve chosen to stumble along in the dark and insist that’s what people are supposed to do, because any time anyone tries to turn on a light, people realize they don’t live in the world the religious people told them they do.

People have always felt the need to understand how the universe works, so they can anticipate the results of their actions. All animal life depends on creatures being able to make accurate predictions.   But when you grow so dependant on your religion to feel like you understand how the universe works that you have to make up your own stories to explain why things aren’t working out the way you thought they would, that’s a serious problem.  That’s religious fundamentalism. Christians and Muslims aren’t the only people who can be religious fundamentalists.  Anyone can be a religious fundamentalist.  I’ve met plenty of Pagan fundamentalists and Agnostic fundamentalists.

Religious fundamentalism is a giant socially contrived emotional defense mechanism.  In psychology, there’s a term that’s used to describe people who believe in things that aren’t real, who reject information that contradicts what they believe, and who harm themselves and other people when they act upon their fantastical beliefs.  It’s called “mentally ill”.  If a majority of people in America suffer from the same mental illness, that doesn’t prove it isn’t a mental illness, that only proves that the inmates are running the asylum.  But you probably knew that already.

All religion is inherently authoritarian.  By definition, a religion is the belief in things that can’t be proven or disproven.  People always act upon what they believe to be true about the world.  If some of the things you believe in are completely imaginary, when you act upon what you believe to be true, you’re trying to force the world to work the way you want it to work.  You could’ve developed the intellectual and emotional maturity you need to figure out how the pieces of the world fit together with each other, and then adapt your perception of the world to that (which is what scientists do), but you didn’t.  Instead, you figured out how all the things you can observe about the world fit best with your current perception of the world, and then invented your own imaginary forces to fill in the gaps and make the pieces of the world fit with each other.

By acting upon your beliefs in imaginary things, and placing a higher value on your feelings of understanding how the world works than you place on being able to predict the results of your actions, you are expecting other people, or other species, to bear the burden of the unexpected results of your actions.  You’re expecting other people or other species to pay the price of supporting your emotional weakness.   And you can’t even see why they would have a problem with that, because you can’t accurately predict the results of your actions in the first place, so you don’t even realize you’re doing this.

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A lot of people assume I’m an Atheist, but I’m not, because that would just be too easy.  I’m a Pagan.  Most of my ancestors were Celts—the indigenous people of the British Isles—so I practice their religion to give myself a sense of history and cultural identity.  That, and week-long outdoor Pagan festivals are really cool, and I’ve never heard of week-long outdoor Atheist festivals.   Sure, you could listen to biologists give lectures on plants and the environment for a week, but where do you get the all-night drum circles and the bonfires and the people howling at the moon?

People believing they have supernatural powers on their side helps to keep them optimistic.   This is a big paradox, and a huge problem for the future of the world.  Back in the days when we were still living below the physical limitations of the Earth, we could afford to believe in things that didn’t exist, use imaginary forces in our decision making, and make inaccurate predictions about the effects of our actions, because the environment could still take up the slack.

Hence the other big reason I’m a Pagan:  To prove it’s possible to practice religion Atheistically.  Religion was a way people found to try to figure out how the world worked, and it was a way they used to record important things they’d discovered and pass them along to their descendants.  It was a crude ancestor of science, which mixed facts and opinions together without distinguishing between the two.  It was an attempt at science, with emotional defense mechanisms built in to make people feel like it worked.  It was the best anyone could think of at the time, but it worked pretty well—which is why people all over the world figured out the same trick.  But now humanity’s belief in the supernatural has turned into one of the biggest threats facing the world.

There is a lot of debate within the Pagan community about what is Paganism?   What did our ancestors discover about the world, and what were they trying to teach their descendants—meaning us?

The version of Paganism I and some other Pagans practice says that the tradition of Paganism isn’t specific beliefs, but the approach to studying the world that led our ancestors to arrive at their beliefs.  The first principles of that traditional approach consist of:

Figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible;

The Earth is very big, very powerful, and very complicated;

We depend on the Earth for our lives;

So you better figure out how to cooperate with the Earth.

So simply put, the version of Paganism I practice is ancient tradition of planetary biology.   My ancestors were trying to figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible.  The only difference between their version of planetary biology and mine is that they hadn’t figured out the trick of science yet.  Science is the most efficient way to figure out how the world works.

My ancestors did what most every parent does, and taught their children about all the things they had figured out about life that worked pretty well for them.  But that doesn’t prove that they must’ve been right about everything.  Once you adopt the tradition of figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible,  because the world is very big, very powerful, and very complicated, and because you and everyone else depends on the Earth for your lives, so you better figure out how to cooperate with the Earth, you accept that the tradition you follow requires you to fix all the ideological mistakes your ancestors made.  It is still the Earth we depend on for our lives, not the approval of our ancestors at whether or not we carry on the outward aesthetics of their traditions.  I believe that my ancestors would want me to fix their mistakes and adapt their traditions as necessary to continue cooperating with the Earth so it would continue supporting me and everyone else.  I would certainly want my own descendants to do that.

A lot of people are talking right now about a convergence between science and religion.  But a lot of people are jumping the gun and equating science with religion, saying they’re both good ideas so they must be equally true, or some more complicated version of that belief.

The problem with that is that religion isn’t self-consistent.  There are a lot of religions in the world that disagree with each other.  You don’t need to be a scientific genius to see that that alone proves it isn’t possible for religion and science to be equally true, because if two religions aren’t even compatible with each other, they can’t both be compatible with science.

However, since all religions are the products of evolutionarily equal humans asking and finding answers to the same questions about life, and I’ve found a way to make the convergence between my own religion and science, that proves it is possible for every religion to make the convergence with science.  Since ever religion is different beyond their identical origins, it’s inevitable that some religions—like mine—are more compatible with science than others.  Some can converge easily with science, and some will be much more difficult.  Inevitably, some will have to be adapted a lot before they can converge with science.

A lot of people have been trying to adapt their religions to science, and a lot of other people have been trying to adapt science to their religions.  So I just want to make this clear:  Science is not negotiable.  It’s the objective study of how the universe works, and the universe works in one way and one way only.  For you to believe otherwise would be humanocentricism once again, because for you to believe that the laws of physics must make exceptions to accommodate your religion is for you, mortal human, to believe that the universe must work in whatever way is most convenient for you.

Two of the four universal questions of religion make it obvious that every religion began the same way my version of Paganism works.  What makes the universe work and how people can make themselves happy, spell out almost directly the attempt to figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, and how to cooperate with it.

The biggest discrepancy between science and religion was that science couldn’t answer every question anyone had ever asked, but religion could.  Until science caught up to religion in that regard, people would still have to use pre-scientific beliefs to try to understand how the universe worked, and that isn’t a convergence of science and religion.

The biggest obstacle to people trying to make a convergence between science and religion has been such a lack of public understanding of science.  A lot of people who know a little bit about science have been trying to negotiate on science without realizing it, because they were trying to compromise on scientific laws that they didn’t know about.

I realized both of those problems, which is why I’ve been working on planetary biology from both the ancient and modern directions at once, and now I’ve written this and my other books.  Planetary biology is possible now because various scientists have found patterns of cause and effect that encompass the entire realm of objective human knowledge, so science finally has caught up with religion.  Now all there was left to do was to compile all that science in one place in an easy-to-learn format, so that everyone could learn how science works and how much has been discovered about the universe, so everyone can finish the projects they’ve started, and converge their religions with science.

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A lot of religious people try to take advantage of the fact that there are things in the universe that can’t be observed scientifically, to hide their religions beyond the reach of science.  Two things religious people have traditionally used, before science was even invented, are what existed prior to the origins of the universe, and the existence of an afterlife as a place that the spirits of the dead go.  Two others limitations on scientific observation that some religious people have been taking advantage of recently are the depths of the universe and the minuteness of subatomic particles.  They say that the fact that their religion can’t be disproven proves it must exist in those places.  Or else they say that the fact that science can’t answer certain questions proves that their religious beliefs must be right.

Those arguments don’t prove anything.  The inability of science to disprove something that was never provable to begin with doesn’t prove the thing exists by default.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  There are some things in the world that are easy to observe scientifically.  One of them is the way matter and energy move through the world as a result of people’s actions.  Right now, matter and energy are moving through the world in a way that’s causing a lot of war, death, and suffering.   Food and medicine aren’t moving from where they are to people who need them at a sufficient rate, bullets are moving from guns into people’s bodies, and so forth.  And all the observable evidence we have indicates that on our present course those things are only going to get worse.  If all the observable evidence indicates that, why do Americans expect foreigners not to notice it?  Why should Americans expect other people to keep cooperating with them instead of fighting back to try to defend themselves?  And that would only lead to more war, death, and suffering.

The majority of Americans are Christians, which means they supposedly follow Jesus.  Jesus was the Prince of Peace, not the Prince of War, Death, and Suffering.  So why are so many Americans having so much trouble keeping track of whether they follow the Prince of Peace or the Prince of War, Death, and Suffering?

As American politicians learned the hard way during the Vietnam War, there’s no such thing as peace through military superiority.  Don’t you think Jesus should’ve been smart enough to know that ahead of time?  And what is President Bush trying to do in Iraq right now, but bring about peace through military superiority?

So the bottom line is, scientists don’t need to disprove President Bush’s religion, because President Bush has disproved it all by himself.

There is one, and only one, way for religious people to believe in supernatural powers without inadvertently depending on divine intervention to make their political and economic systems function.  I made up my own term for it just to be neutral to everyone’s religions.  I call it the Intangible Mass of Cosmic Grooviness.

It’s the embodiment of the story of the Christian whose wagon broke an axle.  The guy had been a good Christian all his life, so he decided that rather than fix the axle himself, he would pray to his god to fix it for him.  He sat there praying all day, but nothing happened.  That night, a good Samaritan came along and asked the guy if he needed help.

“I don’t understand,” said the guy, “I’ve been a good Christian all my life, and I’ve been sitting here praying all day for my axle to be fixed, but it hasn’t been.”

“Well,” said the Samaritan, “it seems to me that your god already gave you the hands and the intelligence you need to fix the axle yourself.”

The Intangible Mass of Cosmic Grooviness (by whatever term you prefer to call it) only helps those who help themselves.  If you do everything you can to take responsibility for your own actions and solve your own problems, you might set events into motion in some dimension of reality that’s invisible to us, that will make things work out even better for you than anyone could’ve predicted with the laws of physics as we know them.   However, if you expect the IMCG to intervene on your behalf, plan on it intervening, or depend on it intervening, one thing is guaranteed:  It won’t intervene on your behalf.  It won’t take pity on you, it won’t have any sympathy for you, and it won’t show you any mercy.  If you choose to be helpless, you choose to be helpless.  If you choose to make mistakes, you choose to make mistakes.  You create your own fate.

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There’s one final disagreement among religions that science enables people to solve.  Now that it has been determined scientifically that all humans are evolutionarily equal, and that the foundations of their religions are equal, it’s now possible to identify messiah figures scientifically.  I know that sounds preposterous, but it’s really so simple that you’ll wonder why I’m even bothering to tell you.

Since humans are evolutionarily equal and their religions are equal, a messiah figure is anyone who figures out how to teach a religion to a group of people.  People are a constant and religions are a constant, so that makes messiah figures a constant.  What people knew about the world is a variable, but that only makes how messiah figures taught people about religions a variable.  The fact that someone succeeded in teaching equal humans equal religions, proves that whoever taught the people those religions each figured out how to do the same job.

I know most scientists—and most people, for that matter—wonder why I think it’s possible to use science to identify messiah figures, or why I think it should even be attempted.   I’m using science to identify messiah figures precisely to illustrate why it isn’t necessary to use science to identify messiah figures.  Once you identify a messiah figure as whoever taught a religion to people, all you need to do to identify anyone’s messiah figure is to find out who taught the religion to people.

I know this sounds like an exercise in circular reasoning, but this brings me to my point.  Since we can see that every religion in the world was taught to people by someone, or by some group of people collectively, who may have figured things out over the course of generations, it proves that every religion has a messiah figure, even if the people don’t recognize their religion as having been founded by anyone—like, pre-literate people who passed their religion down through the generations by oral tradition.

Once you recognize that every religion was taught to people by someone, even if the people who practice that religion today don’t remember who that person was, you can factor Jesus right out of the equation.  Once you recognize that everyone’s religion was taught to them by someone, somehow, it renders the fact that Christians have a messiah figure completely meaningless, because every other religion has a messiah figure who did the exact same job.

You were trying to figure out how to start a global revolution in human consciousness, weren’t you?

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Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against religion itself, I just have a problem with the world being destroyed and war, death, and suffering being inflicted on people.  I have a problem with religion to whatever extent religion contributes to those things.

If you’d prefer, you’re welcome to use this definition for what I’m doing:

If you’re a Christian and you believe that your all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving god created the universe, people, and everything else, then you agree with everything I’m doing unconditionally, even if you don’t realize it.

If you’re a Christian, you believe that your god created all the characteristics of everything in the universe, and gave humans the intelligence they need to study them.  You also believe that your god sent his only begotten son to teach people to bring about Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men.

If you’re not a Christian, you still believe that the universe, everything in the universe, all the characteristics of everything in the universe, and human intelligence all came into existence somehow.  If you’re a progressive activist, you obviously believe in Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men and Women.

I don’t have a problem with the belief that Jesus knew everything.  But he obviously communicated to people in words, not by direct thought transference.  And he used his words to communicate to a fairly small number of people who lived 2,000 years ago.

What Jesus was or wasn’t able to communicate to people was not limited by what he knew, but by what his followers were capable of understanding.  If Jesus knew everything there was to know about life, then he knew everything that molecular biologists are discovering now.  But the words he needed to talk about molecular biology didn’t exist at the time.  Microscopes hadn’t been invented yet, and the people Jesus talked to had no way of knowing that cells existed.

Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men has been one of the biggest challenges in the history of the world, and certainly the most important.  Today, scientists are using their intelligence to study the characteristics in the universe.  They have discovered that the way people are acting now, something that’s essentially indistinguishable from the Battle of Armageddon is going to start within 100 years, and probably something closer to 20 years.  They have also figured out enough about how the universe works that Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men is at last within our reach, if we act fast enough.

Since Jesus was here, a lot of people have become so obsessed that Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men will happen as the result of divine intervention, that they’ve neglected to take action for that purpose themselves.  Now, thanks to the scientists who have contributed to the field of planetary biology, Jesus has returned.  Not in the flesh like you expected, but in spirit, anyway.

Obviously, one of the hardest lessons that humanity will have to learn before Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men is possible is that those things depend on people’s personal action, and we can’t depend on divine intervention to make them happen.   So maybe this is the big test of whether we can learn that lesson or not.  People all over the world value peace, and Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men is possible—but only if we take action ourselves and stop waiting around for divine intervention to save us.  If we fail, the Battle of Armageddon is our punishment.

I’m a Pagan who’s easily mistaken for an Atheist.  But if your god created everything in the universe, then he created me too.  Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men necessarily includes everyone, including the 70% of humanity who don’t practice your religion.  That means you don’t have a monopoly on the benefits of Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men, you just have a monopoly on believing that you do.  So maybe this is another test that’s being placed before you.

You might argue that it doesn’t say anywhere in the Bible that this was supposed to happen.  But then, maybe this is a surprise test.

Since you believe in Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men, and I’m telling you how people have used the intelligence your god gave them to study characteristics that exist in the universe he created to figure out how to bring it about, maybe I was sent by your god to teach you about science, and I’m just not aware of it.

You know, the funny thing about believing in things that are impossible to prove or disprove is that it makes impossible for anyone to prove that your god didn’t send me to tell you all this.

Is Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men really your highest priority?  Or is proving that what you, an imperfect human, believed to be true must be right?

Choose your answer carefully.  You know as well as I do what happens if you pick the wrong one.

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Life is the biggest mystery of all.  People have been trying to figure out what it means and how it works for as long as people have been around.  They’ve invented all kinds of religions, philosophies, and spiritualities to try to figure it out.

The first big question in trying to define life scientifically is:  Where are you supposed to start?   You can study biology, but that only gives you information and shows you how different things work together.  It doesn’t really give you a context for all the information.

A few big clues are pretty self-evident.  All of evolution is biology, all of biology is a product of evolution, all of biology is chemistry, and all of chemistry is physics.   Atomic physics is basically the study of how electrons orbit protons and neutrons, and what happens as a result.  Chemistry is the study of how large numbers of atoms interact with each other, and what happens when they do.  Biology is the study of how chemicals interact with each other to create life and to make it work the way it does.  Therefore, evolution is the study of how all those chemicals got into the arrangements they did, and how those arrangements change over time.

The jump between chemistry and physics is easy to make; chemistry is basically a specialized field of physics.  From there you can make another jump to biochemistry, and see how fairly simple biological chemicals interact with each other to make simple biological processes happen, like how animals digest protein and carbohydrates and turn it into energy and body mass, or to see how people breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.  But how do you write a chemical formula for an elephant?

Conceptually, the jump from biology to chemistry was as obvious as the jump from chemistry to physics.  Biology is just a specialized branch of chemistry.   In the entire history of biology no one has ever discovered a biological process that wasn’t made out of atoms of known chemicals or that didn’t work according to well-established principles of chemistry.  The problem was that there were so many ways that atoms joined together as molecules and interacted with each other as chemicals, that it was hard to figure out how to break biology down into units of manageable size that would yield useful information, without leaving anything out.   You could write a chemical formula for all the biochemical processes that take place in an elephant, but once you had, how would you be able to remember them all well enough to be able to use them?   And even if someone could do that, how would they make the field of biology work by trying to do the same thing for every organism in the entire world?  Biologists would die of old age before they could read that many books.

Dr. Richard Dawkins figured out one way to make a practical jump from biology to chemistry.  This was a monumental discovery.  He broke biology down to a reaction of critical chemicals.  What chemicals would you have to remove from biology to make biology stop happening?

The answer is genes.  With no genes, there is no biology.  By removing food or oxygen you can make an organism die.  But if you remove genes, the organism could never have been conceived in the first place.

This is another one of those things that seems so obvious it doesn’t even seem like a discovery.  But what it does is to create a framework for all the other biochemical reactions.

What Dr. Dawkins figured out was how genes react with each other to create biology.  Out of all the chemical reactions that happen in biology, it took a long time for biologists to sift through all the possibilities.   Biology is basically a giant jigsaw puzzle, and once Dr. Dawkins figured out the most fundamental chemical reaction of biology, he’d assembled all the edge pieces of the puzzle.  Now all the other biochemical reactions fit somewhere inside that outline.

This is a first principle.  If you’re talking about biology, you’re talking about something that happens because of that fundamental chemical reaction.  That gives you a reference point for writing chemical formulas for elephants that can never let you down.  Every biochemical reaction, no matter how big, how small, how simple, or how complex, has to attach to that fundamental chemical reaction.  That makes biology a lot simpler.

Evolution is the cumulative adaptation to environmental pressures.  Charles Darwin discovered that by studying characteristics of animals.  Richard Dawkins figured out how that worked at the bio-chemical level.  Generation by generation, genes are passed down from parent to child.  Occasionally genes mutate, and the parent passes down to their child a characteristic they themselves didn’t have.  If that characteristic helps the child to survive and reproduce in their living conditions better than other members of its species, it has more children and spreads the new gene around to more of the next generation.  If the new gene works well enough, eventually it will spread around to the entire species and the species will evolve.

The other, much simpler, way that evolution happens is by parents making different combinations of their genes in their offspring.  Whichever offspring inherit a combination of genes that suits them better to their living conditions than the other members of their species pass the genes that made up that combination on to their own offspring.  That’s a lot more complicated way for evolution to happen, but in the same way as evolution by mutation, over the generations, genes that work well in combination with other genes survive, and genes that don’t work well with other genes die out.

For instance, we still have genes for leukemia in our species because some people who carry the gene live long enough to have children and pass it on to them.  Leukemia genes also kill people though, so obviously they’re not very good at surviving or at spreading through our species.  That’s why a few people get leukemia, instead of most people, because a lot of leukemia genes kill themselves before they can be passed on.

The environment is whatever exists outside of the organism.  Pressures are whatever conditions favor some characteristics over others.  Adaptation is the change in the characteristics of a species, to fit it better to the environmental pressures. Cumuluative adaptation is continued adaptation to environmental pressures over the course of many generations.  Hence cumulatlive adaptation to environmental pressures.  This is how changes in living conditions create new species.

Charles Darwin discovered this without knowing about genes.  He figured it out by studying how characteristics are passed down from one generation to the next, and what would happen if it continued over thousands of generations.

Dr. Dawkins figured out how evolution works for individual genes at the molecular level.  He called his theory the Selfish Gene Theory, which he spells out in his book The Selfish Gene.  Emphasis on Gene.  It’s a book and a theory about the selfishness—meaning self-interest—of genes, not a book and theory about genes for selfishness.

The universe favors stable chemical reactions over unstable chemical reactions for the simple reason that stable chemical reactions keep happening, and unstable reactions stop eventually.   This is the technicality in the economic system of the universe that makes the economic system of life possible.

A river is an example of a stable reaction—not a chemical reaction, but a physical reaction.  The river exists because water molecules keep flowing along the same course.  They aren’t the same water molecules, but they are acting the same way in the same place, because water always runs downhill, and the riverbed is the lowest point of the landscape and flows downhill to the ocean.

Rain is another stable reaction, and this is a chemical reaction.  Water molecules suspended in the atmosphere are lifted by warm air rising.  When they cool to the dew point, they condense around dust particles.  Then they fall out of the atmosphere.  They’re all made out of water, and water molecules everywhere stick together in the same basic way.  That makes raindrops the same basic shape.  They might be different sizes, or they might contain slightly different chemicals in addition to the water—like acid rain, in particular—but minor difference aside, they all work the same way.  Each raindrop only exists for a little while before it hits the ground and turns into plain old water, but more raindrops just like it keep forming.  Based on everything scientists know about water and rainfall—which is a lot—raindrops as we know them have existed ever since the world began.  Not only that, but any planet in the universe that has the same size and mass as Earth, an atmosphere, and temperatures where water can vaporize and condense, has all the things it needs to create raindrops just like ours.

Biology is also a stable chemical reaction.  That’s why life continues on Earth instead of dying out.  (Or at least, that’s how it’s worked for the past 3 1/2 billion years.  What’s going to happen to life on Earth in the next century is the big question.)

Biological organisms are created by genes.  Genes are just really complicated molecules.

Genes are made by different combinations of protein molecules that bind together.  Genes are basically bigger molecules made up of smaller molecules.  (Technically it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s how it works, anyway.)

Genes then bind together into chromosomes, which are even bigger molecules.   A chromosome is a DNA molecule.  When people talk about people’s DNA molecules, they’re actually referring to 46 DNA molecules that people carry, even if they don’t realize it—in other words, their 46 chromosomes.

Each gene survives by helping the organism that carries it to survive.  Each organism passes on its genes by surviving and reproducing.

When you—or any other organism—create your sperm or egg cells, your cells break up your chromosomes into genes.  Then they recombine the genes into new chromosomes.  These new chromosomes are made up of your genes, but they’re unlike any other chromosomes in your body.

The new chromosomes work the same way as your normal chromosomes, because each of your genes occupies the same place in the new chromosome as it did in the old chromosome.  What’s changed is the combination of genes that make up each chromosome—some came from one of the original chromosomes, and some came from the opposite chromosome of that pair.

In other words, you inherited half of your chromosomes from your mother and the other half from your father, even though they themselves didn’t have those chromosomes.   Now you’ve mixed the genes from your mother’s chromosomes together with the genes from your father’s chromosomes to create new chromosomes made up of genes that came from both your mother and your father.  This is what you pass on to your children, and this is what your own parents passed on to you.

When the sex cell divides, one of each of the chromosomes ends up in each cell.  Now you have two cells that each carry one of each of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes.

When the 23 chromosomes in your sex cell combine with the 23 chromosomes in your partner’s sex cell, now you have a fertilized egg, with 23 pairs of chromosomes again.  So you’ve conceived a new human.

(And remember, we are talking about a chemical reaction here.   There is no evidence to indicate that a divine power imbues a fertilized egg with a human soul at the moment of its conception, or at any other time, for that matter.  Some people who believe in imaginary things believe that happens, but I’m not here to talk about psychological defense mechanisms, I’m here to talk about science.  Actually, when you put all the science together into one place, it indicates that a woman who is prevented from getting an abortion is being forced to reproduce against her will, which means she’s getting raped by her government.  Anyway…)

That’s how the chemical reaction of the replication of genes works, and that’s the chemical reaction that life can’t begin without.

We see genes as being a part of us, because our genes make us what we are.  We assume that life is a process of organisms passing their genes down from one generation to the next.  But that’s misleading.  We are a product of that chemical reaction; we are not the chemical reaction itself.

This is where things start to get really weird.  The easiest way to explain the next part is to back up to the origins of life on Earth.

The Earth is about 4 1/2 billion years old.  Life first evolved on Earth about 3 1/2 billion years ago.  We have no way of telling exactly what started the process, but we can tell what that process had to be.  There are various ways that scientists have hypothesized that life could’ve begun; what isn’t in question is that whatever began the process, it was some sort of stable chemical reaction that led to cumulative adaptation to environmental pressures.

The simplest explanation is called the Primordial Soup Theory.    For the first billion years of our planet’s existence, chemicals were getting mixed together all over the planet and infused with energy from sunlight, radiation, lightening, and volcanic eruptions.

At some point, somewhere on Earth, a stable chemical reaction began.  A molecule was created that reacted with other chemicals in a way that created another molecule just like itself, without turning the original molecule into something else.  That’s an unusual way for a chemical reaction to work.  Most chemical reactions don’t work that way.  But some do.  That’s how salt crystals, ice crystals, and diamonds form.

Scientists have replicated some of the steps leading up to this original biological reaction.  They have figured out how to mix some chemicals together, add energy, and create amino acids.  Our bodies are made of amino acids, and normally amino acids are created by living organisms.  Basically, these scientists have figured out how to create life out of mud.

Scientists haven’t yet figured out how to create genes out of mud, but actually that’s a good sign.  Scientists have been conducting these experiments in a few places for the past 40 years.  The original chemical reaction covered the entire surface of the Earth for a billion years, and it only needed to succeed once.  If scientists had figured out how to replicate a chemical reaction like that so easily, that would actually suggest that the Primordial Soup Theory was wrong, because if it was that easy for life to evolve out of mud, there would be so many alien life forms in the universe that we should’ve found signs of some by now.

This original biological reaction was different from salt crystals replicating themselves because this reaction used carbon and hydrogen atoms, and the whole planet was covered in those.  So the reaction could spread all over the world pretty quickly.

Sometimes things would go wrong with the chemical replications, and molecules would be created that were slightly different from the original molecules.  This happens with crystal reactions too.

Eventually, these new molecules spread all over the Earth.  That means that eventually they used up all the carbon and hydrogen that was lying around.  That means that the original chemical reaction came to an end.

By now there were numerous types of molecules in the world.  Some of them couldn’t keep replicating now that there was no free carbon or hydrogen left.  But some of them could take their carbon and hydrogen from other molecules and keep replicating themselves.  In a sense that made them the first predators in the world.  But in a much bigger sense, we are still talking about a chemical reaction here.

Now there were several new things that continued stable reactions depended on, but there were some molecules at least that could do all of them.

Molecules that could replicate faster than other molecules had an advantage at replicating themselves, because they could create more of themselves over any given length of time.

Molecules that replicated themselves accurately had an advantage over molecules that couldn’t replicate themselves accurately, because the more often a molecule created a molecule that was different from itself, the more often it would create molecules that couldn’t replicate themselves.

Molecules had to be able to eat other molecules now, because that’s where all the molecule-food was now.

And all the molecules had to be able to defend themselves against getting eaten by other molecules.

Any type of molecule that couldn’t keep its own chemical reaction going died out, and was replaced by molecules that could keep their chemical reactions going.

One of the defenses that the molecules that survived this part of the story had was the ability to cause other chemical reactions that built protective walls around themselves out of other chemicals.   So now we have the original cells.

Then some of the gene-molecules started sticking together with other gene-molecules, and improving the success of their chemical reactions that way. That let them combine their abilities, so each could benefit from the other.  We aren’t talking about cooperation here, we’re still talking about a chemical reaction that’s becoming ever more stable by a process of elimination.

The cells these original molecules were building now were basically machines they were using to build new replicas of themselves.  We could call them genes at this point, but we could just as easily call them organic nano-technology.   Not that they had to be designed by anyone, divine or otherwise.

Then some cells started sticking together after they replicated, and improving the success of their chemical reactions by doing things in conjunction that they couldn’t do on their own.   Things like making themselves harder for other cells to eat, and making it easier for them to eat other cells.

That’s pretty much all there is to say about that part of the story.  Now fast-forward 3 1/2 billion years.

The reason this scientific story of the origins of life is so useful is because you see that story continuing in every living thing you ever look at.

Every organism alive today is made of cells that work the same way the original cells did.  We are all machines that our genes built to help replicate themselves.

A lot of people hate this part of the story, because this is where serious questions about the nature of free will begin to arise, and I have to dispel a lot of superstitions.

When you put all the science together in one place, it disproves the existence of free will.  What we have instead is something that seems so much like free will that usually we can’t tell the difference.  But that’s only because so much of your decision-making happens in your subconsciousness, that you never notice it.  I’ve got a lot to say about that over the course of this book.

Our genes created something that seems like free will to us because they needed to be able to make our bodies move.  The same is true for any animal.  So we’ve evolved a lot of genes for creating sensory organs, brains, nerves, and muscles that we use to move our gene-replication machines around.  As usual, these things evolved because the animals that had genes that didn’t build sensory organs and brains and muscles that worked as well as the others, didn’t replicate their genes—natural selection, in other words.

There are two important conclusions that can be drawn here.

First of all, our brains are organs for replicating our genes, in the same way that all of our organs contribute to replicating genes.   There isn’t any part of our brain that contains a “replicate genes” center.  The replicate genes center is our entire brains.  To use computers as a metaphor, we have programs for doing different things like eating, running from tigers, and having sex.  But “replicate genes” isn’t a software program, it’s the programming language that all the programs in our brains were written with.

Second, if our entire brains had been created by a single gene, we would be robots.  What we have instead are brains created by a lot of genes that each create different parts.  Each gene does whatever it does because that’s what keeps its replication reaction happening.  That combination has worked better for our genes than any other combination, which is why our brains evolved the way they did, instead of any other way—because every other combination of genes died out.   Obviously there is still a lot of variation within our brain gene pool, which is why we’re all unique individuals.  But just as obviously, there are limitations on that variation, which is why humans are born with human brains, polar bears are born with polar bear brains, and so on.

The genes don’t control us, all they can do is to build our brains and start them up.  Whatever happens next happens as a result of all of those components working together.

Now this is the part where people always ask me if our brains were built to replicate our genes, why don’t we all have as many children as possible?

You’ve answered your own question.  Having as many children as possible isn’t always the most effective way to replicate your genes.  Replicating your genes effectively also depends on raising some of your children at least to adulthood.  The more children you have, the less effort you can devote to raising each of them.  That means that replicating your genes depends on striking an optimal balance between quantity and quality of children.  That optimal balance depends on your environment, like, how much food is available, but also the chances that each of your children is going to grow up instead of being killed by wars or plagues.  We have genes that create parts of our brains for figuring those things out too, even if we don’t realize we’re using those parts of our brains.

Hence the reason people can choose not to have any children, even though their brains were created to make them replicate their genes.  For some individuals, the combination of all the things that get put into their brains end up working against each other, and they decide to let their genes die out.  The simplest way to explain that is that all the things happening in the person’s brain make them feel like they’re replicating their genes, even though they aren’t.  The brain-program can only tell whether it feels like it’s carried out its purpose; but that doesn’t prove anything.  Some individuals end up with brains that work that way, but as a species, the combination of genes that create our brains works pretty well for replicating our genes, which is why our population keeps growing.

But now that stable gene-replication reaction has gone out of control.  What has been a stable chemical reaction to this point ultimately will run into the physical limitations of the Earth.  Now if our population is going to survive, instead of destroying our environment and killing ourselves, we are going to have to figure out how to make everyone’s brains work in ways that will make our population stop growing.

Dr. Dawkins spells his Selfish Gene Theory out a lot more in his book, and you can learn more there if you want.  People engage in altruism, sharing, caring for the sick, and everything else they do that seems unselfish as a result of their gene-replication brain-organs perceiving that the benefit to helping someone else is greater than the benefit to not helping them.  Altruism is mutual aid, which means aid that will be returned to you in one way or another—even if it’s never repaid directly.  Altruism is not voluntary slavery.

Now this brings us back to the outline of all of biology as a chemical reaction.  Everything we or any other animal ever do, we do in the attempt to replicate our genes—even if it doesn’t work.  Without human genes, there wouldn’t be any human behavior, there wouldn’t be any human impact on the environment, there wouldn’t be any greenhouse effect, and so on.   All of those things exist because of human genes replicating themselves.

That’s really all there is to tell about this part of the story.  A lot of people always ask when we’re going to stop talking about chemical reactions and go back to talking about people.  The answer is, we’re not—and that’s the whole point.  Dr. Dawkins made the jump from biology to chemistry so completely that we can talk about all of human behavior as a chemical reaction.  It’s so strange to most people that it usually isn’t convenient to talk that way, but it is useful sometimes.  Any time it becomes useful, we can make the jump from human behavior to chemistry easily.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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The other major breakthrough in the chemistry/biology problem was the Gaia Theory, which was discovered by James Lovelock.

Several books are available about the Gaia Theory.  Dr. Lovelock’s first was called simply Gaia.  His most recent is called The Revenge of Gaia.  Somewhere in the middle, he collaborated with a lot of other scientists from around the world to write Gaia—The Atlas of Planetary Management.  The original Gaia is a good introduction to the idea, but all the main points of that book are covered and built upon in The Revenge of Gaia.  Gaia—The Atlas of Planet Management is a high school level reference book, or maybe even junior high school level book, with big colorful illustrations on every page that shows how the Gaia Theory works and how you can see it happening all around us.

Ironically, Dr. Dawkins and Dr. Lovelock disagreed with each other on a lot of things, because they were studying biology at two different levels, using two different approaches, so it wasn’t always obvious that the two fit together.  Sometimes it looked like they disagreed with each other, even though they were talking about the same things using two different vocabularies.  But having told you how Dr. Dawkins discovered his Selfish Gene Theory, it’s easier to build up from there to Dr. Lovelock’s Gaia Theory, instead of using Dr. Lovelock’s explanation.

Just like all the genes that create an individual person have settled into a stable chemical reaction by all working together, all the genes in an environment have settled into a much bigger stable reaction.  That’s why environments survive for thousands of years, even though individual organisms come and go.    But that’s just the beginning…

When we talk about local environments, that’s really just a human convention that makes the idea easier to think about, and it works pretty well most of the time.  Every “local” environment overlaps with all the other “local” environments around it, so there really is no such thing as a local environment.  If you want to talk about all the genes in an environment settling into a really big stable chemical reaction, you have to talk about the environment of the entire Earth.

Dr. Lovelock was involved in the early NASA program for planning how to search for life on Mars.  Landing one or two probes on the surface of the planet to look around with cameras wasn’t good enough, because if they landed in the Martian equivalent of the Sahara desert, they wouldn’t see anything and would report there was no life on the planet.  But that wouldn’t prove anything.

Dr. Lovelock worked on a team of scientists and engineers who developed a mobile chemistry lab for the probes that could sample the atmosphere.  The idea was that if there were plants, or animals, or anything similar, on Mars, they would be breathing in and out.  More specifically, they would need a constant supply of some chemical, and the chemical reaction they used to supply themselves with that chemical would create a waste product.  The atmosphere would bring them a constant supply of one chemical, and carry away the waste product of that chemical reaction—which is exactly what the atmosphere here on Earth does when we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.

That meant the scientists could use what they knew about the chemical composition of the planet to see how those chemicals should react with each other and what kinds of gasses would be produced as a result.  If the atmospheric sample showed an atmospheric makeup that was a lot different from that, it would mean that something must be breathing in and out, somewhere on the planet, extracting some chemical from the atmosphere, and replacing it with something else.

Dr. Lovelock’s job for NASA was helping to design parts of the chemical laboratory, which wasn’t very interesting, so he wasn’t there long.  But after he left, he got curious and started carrying out the experiment here on Earth.

To that point, scientists had always assumed that the atmosphere here on Earth had always been pretty much like it is now, and had only changed a little by the evolution of life.  But when Dr. Lovelock ran the experiment, the atmosphere that the geochemistry of the Earth indicated was nowhere close to what we have.   Likewise, the salt content of the oceans is all wrong.  If we had the atmosphere and the ocean salinity that our planetary geochemistry would create, just about everything on Earth would die.

This meant that our entire planetary environment is maintained by the environment itself.   Life on Earth depends on life on Earth.  Back when life first evolved, we had the original geochemical atmosphere and ocean salinity, and whatever those original self-replicating molecules were, that’s the environment they evolved in and lived in.  But over the course of about a billion and a half years, their waste products changed the environment gradually to what we have now.  Then new organisms evolved to live in that environment.

Now we have a global environment that’s so highly evolved that every single thing on Earth is used by something.  Something depends on every single thing on Earth for its livelihood.  That includes every single thing that’s given off as a waste product by something else.   That means that just about anything people do to the environment makes it stop working as well as it did before.

If you extract something from the environment, you throw off some chemical reaction of the environment.  That throws off more chemical reactions of the environment.  If you extract a lot of one species of an animal from a food cycle, whatever that animal ate goes through a population explosion, and whatever ate that animal goes through a population crash, because they starve to death. The environment is usually more robust than that, but you do push it in the direction of that happening.  If you do it enough times, that will happen.

When Dr. Lovelock realized what he discovered, he realized he’d better find a way to report it that lots of people could understand, not just scientists.  So he named it after an ancient Greek goddess of the Earth and called it the Gaia Hypothesis, to make the idea understandable to as many people as possible.

Unfortunately, a lot of ivory tower academic scientists spent the next 20 years kicking and screaming about him trying to name a scientific hypothesis after a Greek goddess.  By the time other scientists had studied his work enough to see he was right and upgraded it to the Gaia Theory, it was too late for them to put it to use in solving the problems he’d been trying to warn everyone about.

Basically, we wasted a generation.

For 10,000 years we’ve been waging war against the environment that we depend on to keep ourselves alive, without realizing it.  The Earth was patient with us for as long as it could be, but we never learned our lesson on our own, and we kept waging war against the environment harder and harder.  Now the Earth is fighting back.  New Orleans was just the beginning.  When terrorists want to fight Americans, they destroy a few buildings (or so the story goes, anyway).  When the Earth wants to wage war against humanity, it destroys entire cities.

Now you can see why I’m not wasting my time trying to write books academic snobs can understand.  Instead, I’ll make things really easy for them.  If they want observable evidence so badly and aren’t willing to lift a finger to go look around for themselves, they’re welcome to study the observable evidence of why the anti-Capitalist revolutionaries suddenly start winning.

Currently, most of the environmental movement is a joke.  It’s either an emotional defense mechanism used by people who want to feel like they’re saving the environment even though they’re not really, or it’s a PR campaign to help Capitalists make more money to invest in extracting more resources from the environment.

Basically, if we were doing enough to save the global environment, everyone in the world would belong to Earth First!.  Unfortunately, a lot of what Earth First!ers are doing isn’t even going to work.

First of all, we need our current technological level to build down to an environmentally sustainable relationship between humanity and the global environment.  What we need is a different economic system.

If we shifted to a worldwide, localized organic agricultural economy immediately, we’d still kill ourselves.  Right now, humans don’t know enough about organic agriculture to produce as much food per acre of land as we can by industrialized agriculture.  Some people probably know how to do that, but collectively we don’t.  The only way we could produce enough food to feed everyone in the world with crude organic agriculture would be to cut down a lot more wilderness and turn it into farmland.  And right now, we need all the wilderness we have to keep the environment working—because it’s our planetary life support system.

(Granted, Dr. Lovelock is no expert at anti-Capitalism, so the redistribution of food would probably go a lot further than he realizes.  But he wrote his book with the assumption that people were going to try to keep the economic and political systems we have right now—which they are, unless we stop them.)

Alternative fuels won’t save us, because we can’t produce enough of them to power our technological level.  The big fake-environmental PR campaign has a lot to do with this.  The majority of Americans, and people worldwide, now live in urban areas.  That means that the majority of our species has no meaningful contact with the natural environment.  That means that when politicians promise to use alternative energy to solve the environmental crisis, most city people have no idea what they’re talking about, and vote for anything they feel will help the environment, instead of anything that actually will help the environment.

So Capitalists go cutting down forests to build solar power stations that only work on sunny days, and they still keep the fossil-fuel plants burning constantly, to bring online whenever the solar power stations stop producing electricity.  The Capitalists make money by selling people the feeling of helping the environment, even though they just sacrificed a whole forest just to save a fraction of the oil the fossil fuel plant was using, by letting it idle some of the time instead of turning its generators all the time.

So here’s something else progressive activists always hate to hear about:  Our global economy has run down such a dead end that nuclear energy might be our only way out.

Fossil fuels and nuclear energy are the only two energy sources on Earth that can power our technological level.  There’s one crucial difference between them:  We are about to kill ourselves with fossil fuels, and we’re not about to kill ourselves with nuclear energy.  We have stretched the global environment’s ability to absorb the pollution from fossil fuels, to its breaking point.  We haven’t done that with nuclear energy.

Most of what anti-nuclear activists have said about the nuclear waste generated by reactors is propaganda.  When the anti-nuke movement began in the 1970s, a bunch of activists were trying to prevent a nuclear war.  As long as they made it political and economic suicide for politicians and business people to try to use nuclear energy for anything, the activists could kill the threat of nuclear war at its source.  It was a crude strategy, but effective.

Nuclear power is the most environmentally destructive energy source ever harnessed by humankind, because it requires the most steps to extract the energy, compared to any other energy source, and each of those steps requires energy.  You can’t talk about the energy efficiency of nuclear energy just by talking about the energy it takes to mine the uranium, process it, and dispose of it afterwards.  If you want to talk about energy efficiency, you also have to talk about the energy it’s going to take to build the nuclear power plants, to build all the machinery that’s going to be used in those plants, to train the workers who are going to work in the plants, to build the universities the plant engineers are going to trained in, etc., etc..  But the thing is, we’ve already paid a lot of those environmental costs.  We have the nuclear plants, we have the machinery, we have the universities, and so on.

Nuclear energy won’t let us carry on our technological level forever, because that’s a non-renewable resource too. Dr. Lovelock is probably the greatest environmental scientist in the world, but when it comes to human behavior he’s no expert.  Despite what he says, we’re probably better off with the anti-nuke movement we’ve had.  If we had used fossil fuels and nuclear energy side by side, we would’ve used up our environmental absorption capacity on both of them at the same time.  We wouldn’t be suffering from the greenhouse effect yet, but we wouldn’t be trying to solve it yet either, because we wouldn’t’ve noticed it yet.  When it finally did become a problem and we finally did start trying to fix it, we would have a lot less environmental absorption capacity for nuclear energy left to use.  Then we might not have any escape route left at all.

What we have instead is a need for a new energy source, a good environmental safety margin for using it, and a public who hates the idea of having to use it.  If the public agrees to use more nuclear energy to escape the greenhouse effect, it wouldn’t be too difficult for anti-nuke activists to keep the pressure on the Capitalists to limit the use of nuclear energy to power our economic build-down to environmental sustainability.  A lot of Capitalists are trying to get us to write them a blank check on how much nuclear energy they should be allowed to use.  So the anti-nuke movement wasn’t completely misguided, just premature.  Even if everything they said wasn’t literally true before, they’ve prepared the public ahead of time for a problem that’s inevitable.

Just because Dr. Lovelock knew that a lot of people wouldn’t believe him that nuclear energy isn’t nearly as bad as everyone believes, he’s made a standing offer, in writing, in his latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, to dispose of a year’s supply of nuclear waste from any medium-size reactor literally in his own back yard—if not under his own house.   He said the waste would consist of a one-meter cubic block of concrete.  He said he would bury it and could use the heat it gave off to help heat his house.  (I’m guessing he was talking about setting a water tank on top of it and using hot water radiators or baseboards or something, but he didn’t specify.)

Or if you would prefer this experiment, you could go to Hiroshima, which today is a city of over 1 million people, and ask them how bad the nuclear radiation is there.  Nagasaki is a city of 400,000 people today.

A lot of other environmental scientists are saying that the greenhouse effect and the energy crisis could be solved by using technology that exists now to improve energy efficiency in every part of manufacturing, use, and disposal (which would now be recycling) of everything we make now.  Dr. Lovelock was talking about how we could use the energy and resources we have in the world now with the political and economic systems we have now.  Another way to look at the problem, which a lot of scientists use, is to see what we could do with the energy and resources we have now and ignore man-made political and economic systems—which is the same as assuming that our political and economic systems could be made to work in a way that would make those uses of energy and resources possible.  That says nothing in favor of, or against, keeping the political and economic systems we have now.

Personally, I think we’d be better off using the energy efficiency solution and doing whatever was necessary to put the optimal political and economic system in place to make it work.  We aren’t anti-Capitalist revolutionaries for nothing, are we?  If we simply switch from fossil fuel over to nuke power, we won’t be solving the real problem, because we still won’t have a political or economic system that can solve the environmental crisis.  Solving the environmental crisis and keeping it solved is going to depend on social evolution, not on different technology to use in making the same mistakes we’ve been making all along.  Humanity inventing a lot of new technology and continuing to act like animals just keep making all our problems worse, because people keep making bigger and bigger versions of the same mistakes.

I think the best consensus I can draw here is that we can’t rule out the use of more nuclear power as an option, simply because we might not have any other viable options.  There are other solutions, but any of them will take a lot more development to make them work.  Nuclear power is a non-renewable resource so it isn’t a long-term solution, but we will probably need to use it temporarily to buy the time we need to develop sustainable alternatives—both technological and social.  But if we write the Capitalists a blank check for using more nuclear energy, in a hundred more years from now or whenever, our descendants are going to be faced with another energy and environmental crisis, and they won’t have anything left they can burn to power their technological level while they build down to a sustainable relationship with the environment.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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The Gaia Theory gives us another good frame of reference for talking about biology.  That means another first principle.  Any time you talk about biology, you’re talking about individual genes replicating themselves in stable reactions on the molecular scale, and simultaneously, you’re also talking about zillions of genes interacting in a stable chemical reaction on the planetary scale.  And again, you can talk about the Gaia Theory in terms of chemical reactions, or if it’s easier, in terms of food chains and lifecycles of plants and animals, and you can shift back and forth between chemistry and biology as necessary.

This is where Dr. Dawkins’ disagreement with Dr. Lovelock takes a couple of ironic twists.

By Dr. Dawkins’ own Selfish Gene Theory, evolution is a chemical reaction.  Life is a stable chemical reaction.  Evolution happens and life continues because each gene in an environment competes against all the other genes in the environment, including all the alternate versions of that gene (which are called alleles).  According to the Selfish Gene Theory, a gene’s environment consists of all the other genes in the environment, including all the other genes in the same organism and all the alleles of that gene.

Whatever genes are best adapted to surviving in their environments, which includes surviving among all the other genes in the environment, get the most stable chemical reactions.  Those genes make the most copies of themselves, while the genes that don’t survive as well in the environment don’t get as stable of chemical reactions and die out eventually.  The Selfish Gene Theory is simply natural selection at the molecular level.

That’s exactly what Dr. Lovelock said.  The global environment is a stable chemical reaction, made up of all the genes in the environment.  The genes of each living thing make each living thing do all it can to try to keep its own genes alive.  But ultimately, the global environment doesn’t work the way it does because of what any individual living thing wants or doesn’t want.  The global environment works the way it does for the same reason each individual living thing works:  because all the genes in the environment have settled into a stable chemical reaction.

People have tried to define life in a lot of ways.  Dr. Dawkins’ definition of life is the most fundamental, because it defines life as a stable chemical reaction.  Once Dr. Lovelock defined the global environment as a stable chemical reaction, by Dr. Dawkins’ own definition, he proved that, in a sense at least, the global environment is a life form.

In a sense, salt crystals are a life form also, because they are a stable chemical reaction.  We don’t consider them to be alive because life is a much more complicated chemical reaction than the formation of salt crystals.

In the same way, the chemical reaction of the global environment is a much more complicated chemical reaction than the chemical reaction of life.  To call the global environment a form of life is really an understatement, in the same way that calling people salt crystals would be an understatement.  So really, the global environment is only a form of life in the sense that we don’t have a better word for it.   We don’t have a better word for it because it’s the biggest stable chemical reaction anyone has ever discovered.

Since Dr. Lovelock was the one who discovered that stable chemical reaction, he was the one who gave it a name.   His name for it is Gaia.

Now we come to the second ironic twist in the Dawkins-Lovelock dispute.  Dr. Lovelock is one of the greatest environmental scientists in the world, but he’s no expert at human behavior.  Whether he meant to do this or not, by calling the global environment Gaia, he raised a battle flag.  He named the global environment Gaia in order to make the existence of the super-life-form personally meaningful to people, as opposed to giving it some obscure scientific name that most people would think meant it was just an abstract idea someone had that didn’t really mean anything.  But because of the way people perceive the word Gaia, as far as most people can tell, he’s proved that the Pagans were right and the Christians were wrong.  And various other groups of people were either right or wrong.

The word Gaia used as a name for the global environment inevitably is going to make all the people who have already been fighting to save the environment fight a lot harder.  But it’s also going to make all the people who have been fighting against those people fight a lot harder, just to try to prove they were right in what they believed, and the other people were wrong.   Now the showdown over what to do about the global environment is going to become even more of a showdown.  But more of a showdown is exactly what we need, because what people have been doing isn’t nearly enough.

Dr. Lovelock was in his 40s when he discovered the stable chemical reaction of the global environment and named it Gaia.   Dr. Dawkins was in his 30s when he discovered the stable chemical reaction of life and called it the Selfish Gene.  Dr. Dawkins is a zoologist.  He’s no expert at human behavior either.  At least Dr. Lovelock had an extra decade of earned wisdom to put into his choice.

Now the easiest way to understand Gaia is to understand the Selfish Gene.  But most of the people who love the idea of Gaia hate the idea of the Selfish Gene, and most people who love the idea of the Selfish Gene hate the idea of Gaia.  Now selfish people use the Selfish Gene to prove they’re right for thinking the way they think, and people who care more about the environment refuse to learn enough about the Selfish Gene to understand how the global environment works.

None of this has anything to do with the chemical reactions these words actually refer to.   Ultimately, they’re the same chemical reaction taking place on two different scales.  You can’t have one without the other.

Now here we are, with the global environmental crisis about to spiral completely out of control, and the people who discovered two of the most important pieces of information for understanding why it’s happening and how it can be stopped have driven a gigantic wedge between their discoveries just by other people’s emotional reactions to their choices of names.

Really, any word you use to refer to the fact that everything is connected to everything else works just as well as any other, provided you’re willing to learn the chemistry behind it.  Om, Tao, Life, 42, whatever.  Take your pick.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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The big question now is:  If the Earth created life, and Gaia is a stable chemical reaction, and we are a part of Gaia, but we are destabilizing the chemical reaction, what are we?

Quite simply, when humans evolved intellect, Gaia developed cancer.

If we don’t cure her, she’s going to cure herself.  She’s just now starting her cancer treatment program.

People talk a lot about destroying the global environment, and I talk about it too.  That’s another humanocentric abstraction, but I use it because the alternative is irrelevant to us.  No matter what we do, the Earth will always have an environment.  Venus has a global environment.  So does Mars.   It’s not a question of whether or not the environment will continue to exist.  It’s a question of whether or not the environment will continue to support us.

There are many different degrees of destroying the environment.  We probably aren’t even capable of eradicating all life on Earth with an all-out nuclear war.  As long as some bacteria survive buried in the mud at the bottom of the ocean, the living environment will survive.  It was bacteria like that that created the environment we have now.

Dr. Lovelock is fairly optimistic about humanity’s ability to survive the environmental crisis.  But when you’re talking about the survival versus extinction of a species, you’re talking about enough members of the species surviving to be able to maintain a healthy gene pool.  Before we destroy the environment to the point that humanity becomes extinct, it’s virtually guaranteed that the environmental crisis will destroy our ability to destroy the environment any further.   A few thousand people are bound to survive, somewhere in the world.  Maybe even a few million.  If only one out of every million people survived the environmental crisis, and built a few small villages where they farmed bananas and coconuts on the tropical beaches of northern Alaska, our species would still survive.  Gaia’s cancer would be in remission.  She would be left severely weakened by it, but she could recover in a few hundred thousand years.

This gives whole new meaning to the saying, “Stop, or be stopped.”

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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