A lot of people love to jump all over Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and say that the fact that we can’t measure all the properties of a subatomic particle at the same time, and the fact that everything in the world is made up of subatomic particles, proves we can’t be certain of anything.  And other people say that the fact that subatomic particles seem to appear and disappear at random proves we can’t be certain of anything.  And other people go so far as to say that we can’t be certain of anything because we can’t measure anything without changing it.

Well despite what those people say, you can be certain of the Periodic Table of the Elements.  That was discovered independently of subatomic physics.  Even if particles do act completely at random—as opposed to acting according to laws of cause and effect that physicists have yet to discover—randomness cancels out.  Whatever one particle is doing at random, some other particle is doing the opposite of that.  And that’s how randomly acting particles all add up to the reliable predictions of the Periodic Table of the Elements.

The Periodic Table of the Elements is a collection of a certain type of facts.  These are known as first principles.  A first principle is a rule that scientists have discovered to apply universally to an area of study.

Dr. Wilson’s goal of Consilience has been greatly advanced by the discovery of five first principles that connect different fields of science.  Chemistry has been connected to biology, biology has been connected to psychology, and ecology—which is a branch of biology—has been connected to chemistry, physics, and mathematics.  Each of these discoveries is not the kind of discovery you memorize, but the discovery of a perspective you can use to interpret information and convert between one field and another.

All of these five first principles are different manifestations of two mathematical laws: entropy and stability.   Change makes things spread out.  Whenever you have a large group of things, like molecules, cells, people, or ideas, the more changes you introduce to the group, the more different results you get.  The soles of your shoes are thinner now than they were when they were brand new, because with every step you take you’re adding friction to their bottom-most molecules.  That change you have introduced has spread the molecules of your shoes out into a trail of microscopic dust that follows you everywhere you go.  Once upon a time, the molecules in your shoes were concentrated into one place, but the more friction you add, the more places those molecules end up.

Out of all the possible results of changes, some create patterns that resist further change.  That’s why some kinds of rocks erode more slowly than others.  A few patterns not only resist change but also create more patterns.  And that brings me to evolution…

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One of the biggest obstacles of all to environmental sustainability is that so many people have so many misconceptions of what science is. Most of what people believe they know about science is either misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, superstition, political correctness, or emotional defense mechanisms.  So I’d better start with a chapter on how to distinguish real science from fake science, why real science works, and why fake science doesn’t work.

(If you already know those things, you could skip this chapter, but knowing how to explain those things to other people in simple terms is just as important.)

A lot of progressive activists have severe emotional allergies to science, and make a lot of arguments against it.  I’ve heard every argument that’s ever been made against science—or at least, it’s been years since I’ve heard an original one.

They’re all bullshit.  People who make these arguments either don’t understand what science is and how it works, or else they’re confusing science with the Capitalist cultural values that have built up around science.  In the first case, you’re spreading negative propaganda about a certain group of people, their occupation, and their system of thought, even though you obviously understand nothing about them.  In the second case, you’re blaming the wrong people and not doing anything to solve the real problem—just like if you tried to prevent violent crime by outlawing guns.   All this misinformation and disinformation so-called progressive activists are spreading is just helping the Capitalists to divide and conquer people who could oppose them, and to keep everyone from learning why the Capitalists are winning.

By now, all the information we need to solve all of our global problems has been discovered.  Scientists are always discovering more, and the more we know the better off we are.  The critical things to know are how a stable environment works, how we destabilized our environment, why it seemed like a good idea to us, and how to recognize whether things we do will help stabilize the environment, or will destabilize it further.

We don’t know everything there is to know about the global environment, but we know a lot about some things and a little about everything.  Between the things we know a lot about and the things we know a little bit about, we know enough to see that the things we know a little bit about are just different versions of the things we know a lot about.  Out of all the countless things there are left to learn, we can already tell that learning them will only add to our understanding of the world; it won’t fundamentally change it.

Everything the scientists have discovered has been figured out by someone somewhere in the general worldwide progressive activist movement.  What progressive activists haven’t figured out yet is how to fit all the pieces together.  So what I have to tell you about in this book will sound an awful lot like typical anti-Capitalist rhetoric.  But the difference between my way of doing things and the typical anti-Capitalist revolutionary approach is that I’m not talking about my opinions about things. I’m talking about atomic physics.   Everything I have to say is evidence admissible in court.

It isn’t possible to use science to prove that miracles don’t exist, because miracles (if they do exist) happen so rarely.  But it isn’t possible to build a sustainable economic and political system by depending on miracles either, because, once again, miracles happen so rarely.  At this point, the global environment and humanity’s relationship to it is understood well enough that miracles don’t need to be invoked to explain it, and miracles don’t need to be invoked to show how we could make a peaceful transition to environmental sustainability.

Science is the study of the big things that affect everyone most of the time.  (In other words, everything except miracles.)  By now, all of environmental unsustainability can be traced to big things that affect everyone most of the time.  We also know how to make the transition to environmental sustainability using big things that affect everyone most of the time.  At this point, if we don’t make the transition to environmental sustainability, we have no one to blame for it but ourselves.

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This brings me to another big misunderstanding a lot of people have about science.

As you can see, scientists have developed a fundamentally different approach to defining reality than anyone else uses.  Everyone else uses whatever way of defining reality seems to work best to them, just like people have always done.  But what has always seemed to everyone else to be the best way of defining reality has always been affected by their own subjectivity.  Scientists, on the other hand, have eliminated subjectivity by requiring that anyone’s work can be replicated by someone else.  Anything that can’t meet that requirement doesn’t qualify as science.

When people define reality in whatever way seems best to them—meaning subjectively—it leads them to be certain of some things and uncertain of others.  What those certainties and uncertainties are varies from person to person.  But the fact that everyone has the same human brain structure means that everyone’s subjective perception of reality is affected in the same basic ways.

Once you feel certain of some things and uncertain of others, you talk about those things accordingly.   Any time you meet anyone whose version of reality greatly differs from yours, they still talk as though they’re certain of some things and uncertain of others.  You may not agree with the things they believe in, but you can at least recognize that they are certain or uncertain of things that people are supposed to be certain or uncertain of.

People have found innumerable ways to arrive at their definitions of reality, to the point that they can’t understand how another person could believe that their own version of reality was right.  If a Mormon and a Buddhist were to talk about life, their words might be almost completely incomprehensible to each other, even though they were both speaking English.  But they could still recognize that the other person was talking about certainties and uncertainties that were appropriate for a person to have.

In the same way, a human, a rabbit, a cow, a canary, a leopard, an ostrich, a turtle, and a shark all have the same basic body structure.  Each has a head with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, a chest, an abdomen, and four limbs—whether those limbs are two arms and two legs, or four legs, or two wings and two legs, or two pectoral fins and two abdominal fins.  If you were walking down the street tomorrow and saw a creature that had five arms, a hundred tiny legs, and no head, that thing would look completely alien to you.  You might eventually figure out that it was a sentient being that evolved from a starfish, but until you figured that out, it would not be any form of life as you had known it.

Now I’ve shown you how scientists have developed a qualitatively different version of reality by not using any old version of reality that seems like the best idea to them, but by specifying that subjectivity must be eliminated.  Guess what that does to their speaking habits.

Since scientists have eliminated subjectivity from their system of thought, the things they are capable of being certain or uncertain of are different.   Their approach to studying the world lets them be certain of things other people aren’t certain of, like that all of life is a chemical reaction, and it prevents them from being certain of things other people are certain of, like the meaning of life.

That hypothetical Mormon and the hypothetical Buddhist might think they disagree with each other about everything, but they do at least agree that all of life isn’t a chemical reaction, and that life has meaning.  To them, those things are so fundamental they overlook them and don’t even realize they agree on them.  But then if the two of them hear a biologist talking about life, they’ll both think he doesn’t understand anything about life.

When scientists talk about their discoveries, the things they’re talking about sound completely alien to other people.  It makes scientists sound like people who just have a lot of weird ideas and who try to tell everyone else what to believe.  It doesn’t matter to people that the things the scientists are talking about are true; most people are more concerned with the fact that what the scientists are talking about sounds to them like it isn’t true.  If scientists can’t be certain of the meaning of life like everyone else, how much can they possibly know about life?  What does biology really prove?

Then a lot of people who are opposed to science pounce on the way scientists talk and make it seem to everyone else like the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.   Anarchists do this to me all the time.  Then they usually tell me that if I really knew anything about how to save the world, I’d be sitting around smoking a bunch of weed and learning how to be more open minded like they are.

I should add here that the very word “theory” is something else people who are opposed to science use to undermine support for it.  The word “theory” has two different meanings.  Among the general public, it’s used as a synonym for “idea”, which translates to “the idea of evolution”.  Among scientists, the word “theory” means “a logical conclusion, drawn from observable evidence, that can be used to make accurate predictions”.

Contrary to what most people believe, the word “logic” doesn’t mean, “whatever makes sense to Mr. Spock”, or even, “whatever seems to make sense to someone who wants everyone else to believe they’re Mr. Spock”.  The word “logic” means “a systematic approach to figuring something out that leads you to the correct answers”.  By that I mean “correct” in the sense that what you predict logically actually happens.  The world itself is the judge of whether your logic and your theory work or not.  If you predict something and something else happens instead, it proves that your logic was faulty, and that your theory was either incomplete or wrong.

People have been using the Theory of Relativity successfully to build nuclear reactors for about 60 years now.  They didn’t do that just because Albert Einstein wrote a paper on how atomic particles ought to behave in his opinion.

The Theory of Evolution works the same way.  The Theory of Evolution was easier to discover than the Theory of Relativity, because the Theory of Evolution can be studied by observing plants and animals, while the Theory of Relativity depends on the study of atomic particles.  The Theory of Evolution has been a lot more complicated to study, however, because biology is made up of so many more interactions than physics.  That means the field of biology contains a lot more information that scientists have to sort through to try to figure out how biology works.

Atomic physicists can build atomic reactors to shatter atoms and see what happens.  Then they can use what they learn to build nuclear power plants to generate electricity.

Now we’ve discovered that the entire Earth is a biological reactor, and it has been for far longer than humans have existed.  We are a product of the biological reaction, we are a part of it, and we live inside the biological reactor.

And we’ve never known that before now.

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I have one cousin who’s a Jehovah’s Witness.  Like any other Jehovah’s Witness, she doesn’t celebrate holidays, because every day is equally important.  Like other Jehovah’s Witnesses I’ve known, she’s very responsible and hard working, and doesn’t allow herself to be distracted from her responsibilities by a bunch of superfluous celebration.  Among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, every day is Thanksgiving, because every single day is something you should be thankful for.

Somewhere in the south Pacific is an island where the primitive people live in grass huts and rake mud with sticks all day. I heard a story from an American who lived among these people for a while (but I don’t remember which island it was, unfortunately).  According to the story, these people spend all their free time doing only three things: getting ready for parties, partying, and recovering from parties.  That doesn’t sound very responsible, does it?  And yet their entire culture is built around it.  They sound like my kind of people!  Literally, because they don’t sound terribly different from the Pagan community here in America.

So on behalf of the Pagan community, I just have one thing to say:  No sh*t every day single day is something you should be thankful for.  Every Pagan knows that!  Why do you think we throw parties constantly?  It’s not that some days are more important than other days, it’s just that some days you celebrate some things and other days you celebrate other things.  Some days you celebrate bountiful harvests, and some days you celebrate the changing seasons, and some days you celebrate the mysteriousness of the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and some days you celebrate your birth and some days you celebrate other people’s births, and some days you celebrate mothers, and some days you celebrate fathers, and some days you celebrate your wedding anniversary, and some days you celebrate the birth of your country and the things that it stands for, and a lot of days you celebrate being able to work for a living, and some days you celebrate being able to take a day off from working for a living.

So I can’t help but thinking that just maybe the Jehovah’s Witnesses are missing the point.  If you try to celebrate everything by celebrating nothing, how are you ever going to know if you’re succeeding?  How are you ever going to be able to tell what celebrating feels like if you never do it? In the same way, virgins aren’t very good in bed either, no matter what they might like to tell themselves.

It’s a great idea in theory, but in practice, as all the former Jehovah’s Witnesses I’ve known agree, and all the practicing Jehovah’s Witnesses I’ve ever known seem to indicate through their actions as far as I can tell, by trying to celebrate everything by celebrating nothing, they make every single day just as boring, uninteresting, plain,  and non-descript as every other day.  So what kind of a celebration is that?

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