Disconfirmation Only Strengthens Their Belief

When the Founding Fathers (most of whom were Deists, and not specifically Christians) gave us the First Amendment, they intended to keep government out of the “religion” business, but they had to know at the time that there was little they could do to keep religion out of the government business. The “separation of church and state” as it’s commonly called really isn’t a true separation because it only legislates against cross contamination in a single direction, and in a curious way the debt and budget debacle in Washington this week is a byproduct of that situation. In a nutshell, the kind of fervent belief that causes a person to reject evolution and global warming can now also cause a person to reject rational principles of economics. “We don’t need to raise the debt ceiling because I don’t “believe” that we need to raise the debt ceiling.” It took 225 years, but eventually enough of these believers got elected to congress to actually have the power to take down the system. And it looks like that’s exactly what they intend to do. I wonder if the Founding Fathers saw this coming such a long time ago?

Three years ago I attended a neuroscience seminar titled “Hardwired to Believe.” (see my blog “Conference on World Affairs” 5/1/2008) The essence of the seminar was that people are hardwired differently, and some people just have neurological connections within their brains that make it easier for them to accept the idea of creation than to dig into the mountain of scientific evidence supporting evolution. And here’s the kicker. The more these people get their noses rubbed in evolution, the stronger becomes their belief in creation. The disconfirmation only strengthens their belief. Moreover, they’re not just being stubborn. They are following a neurologically based bias, and it’s this bias that we’ve all come to know as faith or religious belief. When this faith is applied to the question, “Where did man come from?” the answer isn’t immediately critical. If faith says that man was created by a creator, then, “So what?” It’s as harmless as believing in Santa Claus. But when these people band together to gain political power— and that’s exactly what happened with the Tea Party phenomenon— then their faith and belief systems are no longer inconsequential. Believing that the U.S. will still be okay if it defaults on its credit obligations is NOT as harmless as believing in Santa Claus.

Oil is the Least of Our Worries

I spent last week at the annual Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado, as I’ve done early in the month of April every year for the last twenty years. This conference brings together over 100 leading intellectuals from the fields of business, politics, science, entertainment (mostly Hollywood), education, medicine, religion, technology, and modern culture, and one thing I’ve always appreciated about the CWA is that the conference discussions tend to explore global problems with refreshing candor, seldom trivializing bad news with Pollyanna, “glass half full” happy talk. Not that I’m a Danny Downer, but I’m realistic enough to know that any glass— whether half-full or half-empty— will still eventually need to be washed and put away.

And so I eagerly attended a panel discussion titled, “Peak Oil,” where I fully expected to hear the latest data on petroleum production and extraction and depletion— all of which was predicted half a century ago on a bell shaped graph called the “Hubbert peak curve.” I knew the drill. I just didn’t know if the latest predictions called for the oil to run dry in 30, or 40, or 50 years. Not that it will make any difference to me since I’ll be dead by then.

To my surprise, the discussion veered off into the “Hubbert peak curve” as it applies to finite, non-renewable commodities other than petroleum. It turns out that oil is probably the least of our worries. Before the world runs out of oil, it will run out of platinum and copper (not to mention edible fish and fresh potable water), and all of the rare earth minerals that make our micro-electronic gadgets possible. The calculation has often been cited that it would take six earth-sized planets to supply the raw material if every nation in the world had the American standard of living. It’s no wonder that current Exxon Mobil television commercials now talk about job creation rather than “sustainable” fossil fuel.

The Secret Is Out. CO2 Levels Were Even Higher In The Past.

At the Conference on World Affairs we were treated to a two hour lecture from Jim Hansen of NASA, considered by many to be the world’s leading expert on climate change. For those unfamiliar with his status in the intellectual community, Hansen is the guy who went to the New York Times four years ago and blew the whistle on a twenty-something political flunky with no college education who had been installed by the Bush administration in NASA to censor press releases and silence any reference to global warming. The terms “icon” and “hero” applied to Jim Hansen are insufficient descriptions of his status in the scientific community.

The good news for Rush Limbaugh and the conservative Evangelical Christians is that they are correct with their claim that CO2 levels fluctuate over time, and that the CO2 levels have been even higher in the past. They’re right (no pun intended). Hansen’s research shows that 10 million years ago, the CO2 level was 450 ppm (parts per million) because the subcontinent of India was starting to plow into Asia and push up the Himalayan mountain chain. This, in turn, unleashed intense volcanic activity around the Pacific rim, and volcanoes are a main source of CO2 emissions. Limbaugh and the Evangelical Christians are right about that, too.

Here’s the bad news. 10 million years ago, that 450 ppm CO2 level made the earth totally free of ice, and sea level was 350 feet higher than it is now. Currently, our atmosphere contains 385 ppm of CO2, and it has climbed from 325 ppm in the last century. Based on that rate of CO2 level climb, in another hundred years the earth can, once again, be ice free and sea level can be 350 feet higher. Of the earth’s 6.5 billion people, 4 billion of them live within a zone lower than 350 feet above current sea level.

Jim Hansen wants us to go down to a level of CO2 somewhere between 325 ppm and 350 ppm. The alternative is unthinkable. Of course, by the time the unthinkable happens, Rush Limbaugh will be dead, and the Evangelical Christians will be looking at the end times which they actually want.

And God Said, “Go Forth and Multiply.”

Some amazing research results were presented at the Conference on World Affairs by Dr. Sanjoy Mahajan of MIT, an internationally known expert on the mechanisms that allow humans to do mathematics. His work has shown that some people who suffer a loss of speech due to brain injury also lose their ability to do simple multiplication. They can still do addition and subtraction with ease. Only multiplication skill seems to be effected. Moreover, this loss is seen mostly in older people who have been educated in the American school system.

The reason for this is astounding. Our American public school system arose during the 1840s and 1850s as a response to the coming industrial revolution. Children growing up on rural farms needed to be trained to adapt to the requirements of factory jobs— jobs which were regimented under authoritarian supervision. The schools of the time also reflected that same regimentation, and one of the ways this manifested itself was in the memorization of multiplication tables. For the last 150 years, students have memorized that 6 times 3 is 18, and this knowledge seems to be stored in the brain as a verbal statement rather than a mathematical concept. When speaking ability is lost, memories of verbal statements are lost too, and simple multiplication skill goes away. In other cultures where multiplication skill is taught as a mathematical concept, brain injury has no effect on this skill.

To demonstrate how “multiplication by memory” shortchanges American students, a large group of high school graduates was tested (all of whom were proficient in reciting their multiplication tables) and they were asked to multiply 3.147 by 5.0842. They had to do it quickly in their head, without paper and pencil, and they answered by selecting one of four multiple choice responses— A-1, B-16, C-160, or D-1600. Only 18% of them answered correctly, B-16. Statistical random selection would have predicted that 25% would have chosen correctly if they had simply guessed at the answer, but such was not the case. Ignoring the decimal points, most of them thought they were multiplying very large numbers, and the most common response was the most absurd choice, D-1600.

For Dr. Mahajan, work like this helps him explain why Americans are so poor at numerical estimation and conceptualization. If a disease effects 3% of the population, and a certain health-adverse behavior is said to increase the risk of that disease by 30%, then the overall chance of getting the disease is still less than 4%, even for those who indulge in the bad behavior. Less than 10% of the adult American public can understand this concept, and there are hundreds of similar examples to show that we just don’t, “get it,” when it comes to even the most basic arithmetic.

America has eliminated almost all of its factories. Maybe it’s time to change our factory schools.

Conference on World Affairs

This year’s international Conference on World Affairs was, by far, the best in the last decade, perhaps because so little time needed to be devoted to Bush and Cheney. Subjects covered ran the gamut— global warming, Charles Darwin, black holes in space, Islamophobia, economic meltdown, the demise of newspapers, Rush Limbaugh, dark energy discoveries in the universe, breast cancer, American education, terrorism, international traffic in sex slavery, Mexican drug wars, and the political danger of misunderestimating the Republicans. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be summarizing many of the best ideas that I picked up from this amazing annual gathering of intellectuals.

One of the highlights was a lecture by Bill Reinert, national head of advanced technology for Toyota. His subject, of course, was the auto industry, and his talk can be summarized in three numbers— 17 million, 14 million, and 8.5 million. Last year the global auto industry produced 17 million cars. After the latest round of cutbacks, the global auto industry now has the capacity to produce 14 million cars per year. This year, the global auto industry is on track to sell 8.5 million cars. Do the math. More than any other single element, it’s overcapacity which most frightens auto industry leaders. There are currently 16 auto companies building cars around the world, and Bill Reinert’s educated prediction was that, when the economic crisis has passed, there will be 6 auto conglomerates left to supply the car industry. Don’t look for GM and Chrysler to be among them.

$4.00 Gas— Soon A Cause For Nostalgia

In 1973, just before the Arab oil embargo, we imported about 25% of our crude oil from abroad. When the automobile fuel-up lines at the gas stations reached their height that year, the politicians of the day raised their hands to the heavens like ecstatic Pentecostals and declared that they would break our dependence on foreign oil. That was then. This is now. Today, we import 70% of our crude oil from abroad. The good news is that our largest supplier of oil is Canada, still a foreign country, but not Islamic. The bad news is that we now buy far more oil from the Arab world than we did in 1973, and the scale of that monetary transfer from us to them exceeds anything previously seen in the history of the world.

Here’s what I’ve learned from some brilliant petro-geologists over the last few years at the Annual Conference on World Affairs. The world supply of oil is known with a high degree of certainty. After a century of extraordinarily sophisticated global petro-exploration, there simply are no more great undiscovered subterranean pools of oil left anywhere on the planet that can be reached with drilling techniques that would be feasible. For every oil field there is a history curve that catalogues the life of the crude petroleum supply in that particular area, and the curve has four phases to it—discovery, production, decline, and depletion. Many of the older early oil fields, like the Los Angeles basin on America’s west coast, have been depleted for nearly a half century. And every oil field has now transitioned through the discovery phase. So the reality is that every oil field on earth, still capable of delivering oil, is now in either the production phase or the decline phase. The point is this— the oil supply is running out. The only thing subject to intelligent debate is how much longer will the oil last before it’s gone? And nobody who engages in intelligent debate thinks that the oil will last another 60 years.

Meanwhile, thanks in large part to China and India, the demand for oil is growing exponentially. That says to me, “supply and demand is what moves the price up.” All the political rhetoric about oil futures speculation and hedge fund manipulation is a pure lie to make the American people believe that something can be done to lower gas prices. Government, if it had the will, could punish speculators and fund manipulators, and in so doing diminish their supposed influence on oil prices. But if Americans fully understood that our government is powerless to discover new oil fields, and powerless to force China and India to reduce their demand, then Americans would see the government for the ineffectual instrument that it is when the subject turns to oil price reduction. Here’s another thing to consider. In 2000, the Supreme Court believed that a background in the oil business was the best preparation for the Presidency, and the result was Bush and Cheney (this is partly tongue-in-cheek, but only partly). Next January, those two will probably go back into the oil business. That could explain a lot about oil pricing over the last seven years.

In a very short time, we Americans will be positively nostalgic about the good old days of $4.00 per gallon gasoline.

Conference on World Affairs

I’ve just returned from my annual pilgrimage to the Conference on World Affairs, and- as I’ve been doing for the last 15 years- I will pass along my observations. Quite simply, this year’s conference seemed to be the best ever, with all of the panels and lectures rising to a level that exceeded anything in years past. Of course, all of the usual topics were presented, discussed, and debated: climate change, global petro-supply projections, geo-engineering solutions, 4th generation warfare tactics, looming global food shortages, U.S. foreign policy as a destabilizing element, exponential rise in population numbers within the Islamic world, and something new this year- a look at the neurobiology of the human belief process. It is this last topic on which I want to report, for it represents something that may possibly have a bearing on everything else.

On a panel titled, “Hardwired to Believe,” neurobiologists presented data on a study which looked at brain response differences in people who classified themselves as either a believer or a skeptic. Here’s how it worked. The person was put into an MRI machine which looked at blood flow in the brain when the person was presented with certain statements of belief. Such statements were “Patriotism is always a virtue,” or “Democracy is worth dying for,” or “Jesus is the Savior of mankind,” or “Evolution is a hoax.” Self-proclaimed believers responded to such statements with brain activity in the pleasure centers- brain activity similar to that which resulted from seeing the image of an attractive member of the opposite sex, or from hearing a favorite piece of music. Self-proclaimed skeptics had no such pleasure response to the belief statements.

The MRI tests were done in the United States with the belief statements reflecting the cultural and religious ideas that stir debate here in America. Presumably, the same results would be seen in a Muslim believer who was stimulated with statements like “The Koran is the source of all truth and wisdom,” or “Religious martyrs go to Heaven,” or “The U.S. invasion of Iraq is a modern crusade.” Assuming that the MRI tests show a real and valid neuro-response to the universal phenomenon of human belief, and assuming that the biological mechanism works the same way in the Islamic world, the implications are staggering. All the happy talk that “The U.S. Marines are winning hearts and minds in the Mideast,” is probably completely bogus. The science seems to show that people don’t change beliefs easily, not even at the point of a gun.

How, you might ask, does this science impact the other topics at this year’s conference? Wendy Chamberlin gave a sobering lecture about the rise of Islam. Chamberlin was the United States ambassador to Pakistan at the time of 9/11 and during the year leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Here are some of her statistics. In the Islamic world, half (50%) of the entire population is under the age of 25. If you increase the age to 30, then 70% of the entire population is under that age. And within that gigantic population of young Muslims, the unemployment rate is 40%. The replacement rate within Islam is 4. That means that for every Muslim who dies, 4 are born. In Japan, the rate is .8, so Japan is losing population. In the United States, the replacement rate is 1.2. By the end of the 21st century, Muslims will outnumber all the rest of the non-Islamic world combined.

Muslims have beliefs that are different from the beliefs of non-Muslims. And as the neurobiological research shows, beliefs within Islam won’t change just to suit the United States. Now, back to that reservoir of the 40% unemployed Muslims under the age of 30. These are the young people who are writing the book on something called 4th generation warfare, which means that there are ways of projecting cultural and religious influence without building aircraft carriers. If the wars of the future will be fought over ideas (which seems like a certainty), then maybe we should be training fewer Marines and more scholars.