Why We Need Science

Recently, I had several thoughts ranging from agnosticism to The Walking Dead and the role of science. The conclusion of the many thoughts was that besides luck, my species or descendant species best hope for continuation is the advancement and implementation of science and the creation of technologies that results from the advancement of science . Philosophy and religion got us to science in that they both started with wonder, for example, the questions of why are we here; why is there something rather than nothing, etc., were and still are important questions. Most Religions, especially Judeo-Christian based religions, stopped with a supernatural explanation or agent and didn't advanced from there, they hoped to somehow manipulate the supernatural agent, while Philosophy continued to become what is called Natural philosophy the precursor to science. I don’t think philosophy is dead, I think it has a role in science from asking pertinent questions to guiding the ethics around the result of scientific inquiry. The questions philosophy ask should lead to new avenues and falsifiable theories or explanations that describe who, what, when, where, why, and how of the empirical evidence and phenomena that science is trying to describe or observe. Religion at least in Western societies are stuck on a Judeo-Christian paradigm or model that is no longer relevant for the advancement of my species and its future species. In other words, the Judeo-Christian (and Islamic) model stopped at the supernatural explanation i.e. god did it model and has not advanced, this means it has only put forward a mystery to describe another mystery and this explains nothing. I am agnostic why we’re here and whether the universe has a meaning or point that is objective, this is unknowable or if it’s just a brute fact, it is what it is, and there is no objective meaning only subjective meaning, again this is unknowable without additional data. This line of thinking lead me into thinking about why do we as a species study nature in order to understand how the universe work unless there is a hope that we’re able to find a solution to the eventual heat death of the universe, whether it culminates in the Big Chill or the Big Rip, because of a repulsive force called Dark Energy, the place holder name for an unknown force that science doesn’t know what it is, it is the cosmological constant in Albert Einstein’s theory of Relativity. The better we understand the universe there is hope that we can use this knowledge to our advantage to perpetuate our survival as a species or whatever we evolve into. For example, when Sir Isaac Newton gave us a better understanding of gravity, we used that knowledge to develop technologies to overcome the force of gravity to the point that we used his laws to land on the moon, and still use them to land objects on Mars, and other space missions. Likewise, we hope that a better understanding through the scientific methods would lead to knowledge and this knowledge would lead to technologies that will help our descendants whether they’re an entirely different species overcome the heat death of the universe. For example, science with its track record so far for the betterment of life on our planet has done this, i.e. the advancement of science has developed genetically modified food to feed more people, it has developed pharmaceutical advancements to cure and treat biologically based disease and so science has and continue to get the job done, not religion. If our species or a descendant species of ours is going to survive science is our best hope with the guidance of ethics and other areas of philosophical ideas, not religion, for when you stop with a supernatural explanation that explains everything else, without the same time being explained, you explain nothing for you have not further our knowledge. Especially, if you don’t know if this supernatural entity is doing anything without some type of empirically based or falsifiable evidence. We don’t know if someone goes into remission if it is luck or a miracle, thus until direct evidence of a supernatural effect is known it does not add to our knowledge. With this thought I thought about the hit series The Walking Dead and why do they fight on even though everyone is infected, I think it is the evolutionary instinct that want to perpetuate itself in the gene, for life, consciousness, awareness, and existence itself is what Arthur Schopenhauer called the “will to Live”. It is this instinct that evolved in every living cell, when the first replicating molecule adapted to its environment and became alive and aware or conscious, this desire to survive that drive the survivors in The Walking Dead and (in each of us) to live with, within, and beyond their circumstances and my argument is if they are going to survive it will take science to figure out the cause and effect and the solution through some form of technology to a problem that is or will turn them into zombies, in other words, they currently don’t have an answer, but if they stop with a supernatural answer that cannot explain itself in a coherent way or advance a solution to create an immunization protocol then they are all destined to become zombies and this is no answer at all. Think about it....

King Tut Unwrapped and need for Critical Thinking

Last week I watched the Discovery Channel King Tut Unwrapped. In the documentary, allegedly the truth about King Tut is finally revealed; however, I think it open up more questions than it answered. One important question is what is King Tut's Y-DNA and mt-DNA Haplogroups? First I think it is important to discuss what's a haplogroup, and why do geneticists concentrate on the Y-chromosome and Mitochondrial in their search for markers? For that matter, what's a marker? "Each of us carries DNA that is a combination of genes passed from both our mother and father, giving us traits that range from eye color and height to athleticism and disease susceptibility. One exception is the Y-chromosome, which is passed directly from father to son, unchanged, from generation to generation. Unchanged, that is unless a mutation-a random, naturally occurring, usually harmless change-occurs. The mutation, known as a marker, acts as a beacon; it can be mapped through generations because it will be passed down from the man in whom it occurred to his sons, their sons, and every male in his family for thousands of years. In some instances there may be more than one mutational event that defines a particular branch on the tree. What this means is that any of these markers can be used to determine your particular haplogroup, since every individual who has one of these markers also has the others. When geneticists identify such a marker, they try to figure out when it first occurred, and in which geographic region of the world. Each marker is essentially the beginning of a new lineage on the family tree of the human race. Tracking the lineages provides a picture of how small tribes of modern humans in Africa tens of thousands of years ago diversified and spread to populate the world.
A haplogroup is defined by a series of markers that are shared by other men who carry the same random mutations. The markers trace the path our ancestors took as they moved in and out of Africa. It's difficult to know how many men worldwide belong to any particular haplogroup, or even how many haplogroups there are, because scientists simply don't know.
Likewise for Mitochondrial DNA, the string of 569 letters is your mitochondrial sequence, with the letters A, C, T, and G representing the four nucleotides-the chemical building blocks of life-that make up your DNA. Here's how it works. Like I describe for the Y-DNA every once in a while a mutation-a random, natural (and usually harmless) change-occurs in the sequence of our mitochondrial DNA. Think of it as a spelling mistake: one of the "letters" in your sequence may change from a C to a T, or from an A to a G.
After one of these mutations occurs in a particular woman, she then passes it on to her daughters, and her daughters' daughters, and so on. (Mothers also pass on their mitochondrial DNA to their sons, but the sons in turn do not pass it on.)
Geneticists use these markers from people all over the world to construct one giant mitochondrial family tree. As I can imagine, the tree is very complex, but scientists can now determine both the age and geographic spread of each branch to reconstruct the prehistoric movements of our ancestors. By looking at the mutations that we carry, geneticist can trace our lineage, ancestor by ancestor, to reveal the path they traveled as they moved out of Africa." (1)
As a result, I did a search on Google "King Tut's DNA results". I found the actual results were published in the JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) that Dr. Hawass used in the Discovery Channel's documentary and King Tut's Haplogroups information is absent, perhaps because there weren't enough data to conclude this information. However, I did another Google search "King Tut's DNA results haplogroup". I found the absent of haplogroup in the published report did not stop people from trying to speculate. Consequently, we now have an unproven speculation circulating on the World Wide Web that King Tut's haplogroup is R1b. I found the source of this speculation to be someone on RootsWeb (link: http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/GENEALOGY-DNA/2010-02/1266472989) who claimed by looking at the screen shots of the video, they were able to decipher the Y-STR markers and therefore determine King Tut's Y-DNA Haplogroup. I watched the same video and no marker numbers are evident. From this now there is a great debate that King Tut and his ancestors where R1b on Rootweb and other places on the internet (some which have become racially tinged). Nowhere was the Y-STR markers published except for 2 Y-STR here's a link to the Article: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/303/7/638?home. The end result from this discussion someone published the so-called y-STR markers on Family Tree DNA's y-search.org under the ID ER7RQ. I think this should be a lesson in critical thinking; if you do not have enough data don't make it up. This led to another question; what was the motivation of the person who allegedly was able to determine King Tut's haplogroup? Quoting directly from the person who started this fiasco: "Additionally, if you look at the CODIS markers for Tutankhamen which they provide in the published study and run them in OmniPop, it indicates similarity with Europeans." In other words, did he want to know if King Tut was European? Why should King Tut's ethnicity matter? What I find fascinating is the science, that we can abstract DNA from a 3,000 year old mummy and verify his genealogy! Think about it....

Source:
Genographic project: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/index.html

How do I know it's true?

I don’t believe that what Christianity professes is true, not just Christianity but any religion that make an unproven claim. What do I mean by true? True is something that is a provable or proven fact. Christianity is a faith or is based on faith, it is something that you have to accept on the word of another, but I have a difficult time just blindly accepting someone’s opinion that don’t have any provable evidence to back up it’s claim. How can we prove the tenets of Christianity’s claim? How can I prove that Jesus is sitting at the right hand of his father? As I type this it is almost laughable that people actually believe this, that is, that a god impregnated a virgin in a village in what was a Roman providence in the so-called middle east area that is now called Israel, this semi-divine being walked on earth, did miracles, knew he was going to be killed and he was going to rise three days later, and if you believe this you will be saved from the punishment this semi-divine being‘s father has created for people who don‘t accept this, believe something else, or even perhaps never heard. The reason this semi-divine being did this is because two naked people in a garden ate some fruit that his father had put in a garden and told them not to eat and they ate the fruit after they were convinced by a talking serpent. It is like me as an adult actually believing in Santa Claus and his eight tiny reindeer, without me being mentally ill or handicapped. However, a believer don’t think this is delusional but it actually happened because of a book put together by the Roman Catholic Church, the remnant or what is left of what was the Roman Empire. I can understand how someone can believe in an uncaused cause, an unknown intelligence that is innate in the universe or that is the universe, that caused the big bang or was the big bang, that goes from simplicity to complexity over an infinite amount of time, however, science hypothesizes that this universe will stop evolving and will one day die. This leads me to ask questions about science. How do I know science is true? How do we know the age of the universe? How do we know the age of the earth? How does science come to its conclusions? Why is this significant? Why do science believes that it is right? What happens if science is wrong? These are things which we should think about...

Review of Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan

I recommend this book to anyone who enjoy Carl Sagan's writings. This book is a compilation of a series of talk Dr. Sagan gave a the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology in 1985 at the University of Glasgow, his wife Ann Druyan edited them.

Chapter 1: Nature and Wonder: A Reconnaissance of Heaven:
What I got out of this chapter is: The main point of this Chapter: is that the western theology view of God is too small or seems very small when you compare the vastness of the universe to what concepts these theology claim (i.e. the universe was created in six days, the sun came after light, a snake can talk, that human came on the scene full evolved, etc.). The information backing Dr. Sagan claim is there are a trillion of worlds some smaller than earth, some larger in the Oort Cloud that revolve around around single sun. Our sun is 1 in 400 billion in our milky way galaxy. Our galaxy is 1 in 10 to the 23rd power of known galaxies in the universe. All one has to do is go to Hubble website to see a glimpse of the vastness of the universe. He concludes "I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.
Chapter 2: The Retreat from Copernicus: A Modern Loss of Nerve
What I got out of this chapter is: We have anthropomorphized the Cosmos in which human psychologically felt the universe/cosmos evolved solely for us and no one or nothing else. Copernicus and others have demonstrated that we are one among many and not the point of the cosmos. Dr. Sagan info backing his claim is we use such terms such as sunrise/sunset because we once thought the sun revolved around the earth. The idea was the earth was the center of the God's creation and therefore was the center of the universe. However, Copernicus, Laplace, Kant, Darwin, and others have shown that we are one among many, our Earth is just another planet, our species share biological and genetics with other plants and animal. It took our planet 4500 million years to get were it is, in which species came and went, stars came and went, and our retreat or fear is that we are insignificant and our need for purpose causes a psychological bias in which hate what Copernicus and others have shown us, and so instead of accepting the facts of science, we cling to the faith of religions.
Chapter 3: The Organic Universe:
What I got out of this chapter is: We are the product of a natural organic universe. It does not take much to jump start or to get life going and for Darwinian Natural Selection to pull out the experiments that works and ignore the ones that don't. In other words, we live in a universe/cosmos that have an abundance of the organic molecules that are necessary for life and we live on a planet that has had the time to experiment with Darwinian Natural Selection that created the life we now know. For instance, if look toward the center of the milky way galaxy in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. We can see a set of dark clouds some extensive, some smaller. In these clouds that are upward of 50 different kinds of molecules, most of which are organic.."And it is precisely in such dark clouds that the collapse of solar nebulae is expected to happen, and therefore the forming solar system should be composed, in part, of complex organic matter. The conclusion is that complex organic materials are everywhere."
Chapter 4: Extraterrestrial Intelligence:
Summary:What I got out of this chapter is: 1) We don't have an appropriate language or concept for extraterrestrial intelligence, not even theologically. 2) John Adams " Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." However, as Schiaparelli and Lowell show us even scientist can misinterpret facts. 3) The Drake Formula is given only as an idea of the possibilities of intelligent life.
Chapter 5: Extraterrestrial Folklore: Implications for The Evolution of Religion
Summary: What I got out of this chapter is: 1)We have a hope that someone or something would come and save us from ourselves and 2)This is a dangerous idea because the more we look for someone/something to save us or for a solution outside of ourselves the less likely we are going to solve our problems ourselves. 3)Extraordinary claims require evidence just like anything else that is claimed: i.e. "Is is more probable that nature should go out of her course or that man should tell a lie?" 4)We want miracles because it makes a better story 5) Sometimes history is rewritten to our satisfaction and not for truth. 6) If we have an emotional stake in the answers the more skeptical scrutiny is required.
Chapter 6: The God Hypothesis
What I got out of this chapter is:1) Natural Theology has long meant that theological knowledge can be established by reason, experience, and experiment alone. 2) What is the definition of God? In the West, God is defined as omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, and personal. How could we establish that the Western God have these qualities? 3) Is God the sum total of the laws of physics as described by Einstein and Spinoza? 4) There is no truly Natural Theology because all arguments or proofs given so far cannot be established by reason, experience, and experiment and are not compelling when held-up to scrutiny.
Chapter 7: The Religious Experience
What I got out of this chapter is:1) Humans are millions of years old with the human species perhaps being one million years old(with uncertainty) 2) Whatever feelings, thoughts, and approaches to the world must have selective advantages. 3)If we analyze for examples of hunter-gathers from the !Kung (i.e. non-hierarchical society) versus Jivaro (extremely hierarchical society)their gods are similar to the society that worship them. 4) Religious experience must has a molecular base because certain chemicals (via drugs like LSD, peyote, etc.) or deprivation can trigger molecules in our brains that can have mystical/religious experience and there must have been a selective advantage for it to have stayed with our species. 5) Religion is hardwired into our species to get us to cooperate, be dominated, to try and control our environment and to understand/explain the unknown.
Chapter 8: Crimes Against Creation
What I got out of this chapter is: 1) In the history of our planet many natural catastrophes or events has happened, yet with nuclear weapons we have the ability to destroy our planet. 2) It is Dr. Sagan's thesis that it is not only imprudent but foolish to an extreme for the human species to have so large an arsenal of weapons of such destructive power simply available. 3) Religion can speak truth to power. 4) Christians should rein in fundamentalist who goals are to expedite the world's end. 5) Not one country who claim to have a Christian foundation or Christian founding fathers, not even the United States has adopted Jesus tenets of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you or Love your enemies, etc." 6) We all are mutually dependent on this small planet, we breathe the same air and whatever divides us it is clear the earth will be here thousands or millions of years from now, but the question is, will we?
Chapter 9: The Search
What I got out of this chapter is: 1) It is the search for the answers to what we are and why we are here that open a two pronged investigation into the nature of the world and ourselves. 2) Our intelligence separates us from other species. 3) Because of our intelligence we have increased in numbers and occupy outpost everywhere on this planet. 3) If we don't destroy ourselves we will continue our expansion to other planets. 4) Our species started off as hunter-gatherers millions of years ago, as we grew and expanded we move from small tribes to city-states to nations to empires, our next move needs to move to being citizens of the planet. 5) We have tow conflicting natures in our hearts one is aggressive i.e. reptilian, the other has the capacity for compassion, sympathy, and love. 6) People are fighting over myth and are afraid that their version of the truth is untrue. 7) So we must be willing to question everything even our own ideas. 8)If we think about where we came from 15,000 million years ago; it is truly amazing that the Big Bang lead eventually to a self-replicating organism. 9) We need to hone the talents our evolution and history has given us in order to increase our chances of survival. 10) History shows us how we went from the divine rights of kings to revolutions(i.e. American, French, Russian, etc.) so that we no longer believe in the divine right of kings, we no longer believe in chattel slavery, 11)Disease have been reduced over time it is no longer thought or taught to be a god-given part of life. 12) We all have a vested interest in the elimination of nuclear weapons. 13) The better we understand ourselves and others the better we understand the framework of how we fit in and not to go to our force our emotional predisposition on whatever our exploration tell us but accept the universe as it really is. The end of the book has selected Q & A that occurred after each lecture my favorite Q & A was Chapter Five a Questioner asked Dr. Sagan How do you recognize truth when it is upon us. Dr. Sagan replied "A simple question: How can we recognize truth? It is, of course, difficult. But there are a few simple rules. The truth ought to be logically consistent. It should not contradict itself; that is, there are some logical criteria. It ought to be consistent with what else we know....he went to say "The more badly we want to believe it, the more skeptical we have to be. It involves a kind of courageous self-discipline..."

Black Socrates