My World is Shattered

Ostriches DON'T bury their heads in the sand when they're scared.

Opossums DON'T hang by their tails.

Touching a frog or toad WON'T give you warts.

Mother birds WON'T reject their babies if they've been touched by humans.

What's this world coming to?

A Quest for Truth

I had to pause the other day,  staring at the phrase "quest for truth".  What did that quest look like to me? 

I see the quest as boundless; the joy being in the voyage while exercising the freedom to peruse any path I find interesting.  Learning -  if for no other reason than for the sake of it.

At the tail end of a debate, Christopher Hitchens closed with the most inspiring speech I've ever heard.

"...that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true, could always go on.  Why is that important?  Why would I like to do that?  Because that’s the only conversation worth having.  And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know.  But, I do know it’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive.  Which means that to me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having.  I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet.  That I haven’t done a spit enough.  That I can’t know enough.  That I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom.  I wouldn’t have it any other way... Take the risk of thinking for yourself.  Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way."

It would have to be a pretty large tombstone, but I'll take that as my epitaph.  

The Ashkenazi Jews

I just finished a book called The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.  It was a fascinating read, and I recommend it if you're into learning about that sort of stuff.

One part I found particularly interesting was a section on the Ashkenazi Jews.  This is a group of Jews who lived in the Rhineland.  Ashkenazi is the Hebrew word for Germany.  To highlight the intellectual prominence of the Ashkenazim, authors Cochran and Harpending note the following:

"Jewish intellectual prominence is striking.  As we have said, Ashkenazi Jews are vastly overrepresented in science.  Their numbers among prominent scientists are roughly ten times greater than you'd expect from their share of the population in the United States and Europe.  Over the past two generations they have won more than a quarter of all Nobel science prizes, although they make up less than on-six-hundredth of the world's population.  Although they represent less than 3 percent of the U.S. population, they won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel Prizes in science during that period and 25 percent of the A.M. Turing Awards (given annually by the Association for computing Machinery).  Ashkenazi Jews account for half of twentieth-century world chess champions.  American Jews are also overrepresented in other areas, such as business (where they account for about a fifth of CEOs) and academia (where they make up about 22 percent of Ivy League students)."

Picking out a few other pieces of data from the book, the average IQ of this ethnic group is 112-115, which is about 3/4 of a standard deviation above the European mean of 100.  This difference has a strong impact on the number of people with extremely high IQs.  The disparity has produced personalities like Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Murray Gell-Mann, Ed Witten, and Grigori Perelman.  (That last name is a fun one to Google.  The dude proved a 100-year old math problem and then decline both The Fields Medal as well as a one-million dollar reward.)

While they warn the idea is controversial, they contend the difference in this group is biological as a result of natural selection on intelligence.  There are several interesting pieces in place which make the situation unique.  Among them was the groups role in cognitively demanding occupations.  Their surroundings - like the Christians refusing to offer usury - threw them in these roles (specifically financing).  Another factor was the Ashkenazi's endogamy.  This practice kept the genetic mix inside their group.

Adding weight to this thesis is specific genetic diseases extremely prevalent among their numbers.  Tay-Sachs and Gaucher's disease are among these.  A few of these genetic mutations, including Tay-Sachs, are the only known disease alleles that increase neural connections.

Of course, their case is more involved than the pieces I've mentioned.  If you find it interesting, I'll let you experience the pleasure of reading the book yourself.  Other topics in the book include eye colors, lactose tolerance, affects of agriculture, how disease resistance and vulnerability shaped the way the world was conquered, and more.

My Favorite Salad

Owen Stewart reporting...

My wife makes this salad from time to time, and I always love it.  I tried making it myself a couple days ago, and it turned out delicious :)  So, here's what's in it:

16 oz box of Rotini pasta
33 oz. of Madarin oranges
2 cups of cooked chicken cubes
6 oz of baby spinach
1 1/3 cup of honey roasted peanuts
6 oz of cranberries
1/4 cup of sesame seeds
1/3 cup of sugar
2/3 cup of Teriyaki sauce
2/3 cup of apple cider vinegar
1 cup of vegetable oil
1/4 cup of parsley

Boil the noodles.  Mix together the sugar, Teriyaki sauce, vinegar, and oil.  Then pour that over the rest of the ingredients and stir it up.  I like it better after it's sat for a couple hours.

Skeptic or Cynic?

"Giving your child this vaccine will result in autism."

"911 was planned by the USA."

"Ron Paul is going to ruin the country."

When presented with new information, we have a handful of options.  We can be a derelict, a stoic, a skeptic, or a cynic.  I'll get the first two out of the way so I can focus on the skeptic and cynic.

Derelict - neglectful of duty; delinquent; negligent.

I would have preferred to use the term gullible or credulous - but hey...neither of those ends in an "ic" sound.  I'm using this term to describe the person who blithely accepts anything they hear.  They are negligent of a commitment to the truth.

Stoic - one who is indifferent

This is the person who hears the information and simply shrugs it off.  They don't care to discover the veracity of the claim.  Our lives are busy, so we do have a need to make decisions regarding to which topics we dedicate time and which get swept aside.  Unfortunately, there's an inherent weakness in not having a complete picture.  You may not see the importance of being able to discern hemlock from parsley, but if you knew you were going to be stranded in the wilderness and living off of plants, you may change your mind.  That's just how it goes, I guess.

I'm assuming none of us wishes to be a derelict, and we'll work to discern what types of information are worth our time in research. And so, we make it to the skeptic and cynic. 

Skeptic - a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual.

Cynic - a person who is bitterly or sneeringly distrustful, contemptuous, or pessimistic.

Both the skeptic and cynic are asking questions.  How do you know which you are?  I think it can be challenging for an individual to be honestly introspective in discerning which of these they are.  This is especially true when the new information presented to us is contrary to ideas we already embrace.  None of us likes to be wrong and confirmation bias works overtime in our lives - evidence only matters insomuch as it's confirming evidence.

I think the best way to find a difference between these two terms is to understand the motives behind the questioning.  Are the questions a consequence of wanting to know the truth?  If so, we're a skeptic.  Or are the questions a result of not wanting to believe?  If so, we're a cynic.

But, it can be difficult to nail down our motives.  So, here's a litmus test to help.  Have we subjected our existing view to the same level of scrutiny?  Has our current conviction gone under the same microscope of arduous inquiry?  If not, it's likely our viewpoint isn't a result of rational, objective analysis.  And our visceral rejection of the new material is probably the result of cynicism.

The initial reaction to opposing viewpoints is to immediately dismiss them as we think of all the anecdotal evidence we've experienced to the contrary.  However, our egos work diligently to convince us our ideas and actions are logical and noble.  Our life interpretations must be taken with a grain of salt. We have to pause and allow ourselves time to digest material from every angle. 

Confirming evidence can be found for nearly any proposition.  The quest for truth really begins when we work to disprove ideas and see what still remains.  It's a matter of personal growth to allow the question, "Come to think of it, why do I believe this is true?"