I am a few pages from finish reading a book called "Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins, 2004.
The first book I read from Dr. Dawkins was also his first: The Selfish Gene. I was 17, just got admission into the Zoology department of NTU, and I thought I fully understood the essence of Darwinism. That book blew my mind. Now I look back I realized how lucky I was to start my real scientific reading with this book, a book I basically "bumped into" when I wandered around in the library of Northwestern University in Evanston.
At the time I kind of assumed the author was either dead or very very old. After all, Darwin is dead for more than 100 years and you would assume a pop science book explaining an idea as old as evolution to be old too. At the time I didn't know there's still people studying the evolutionary theories, like I didn't think anyone in physics are still studying Newton's Law. Coming from a largely non-Christian country and an extremely atheist family, I didn't realize that there are much more educated people in the world who still believed in Creation.
The first Creationist I knew and the only one I know well (you'd wonder why) was a close friend of mine in junior high. We fought with each other physically in kindergarten, lost contact for six years in different classes in elementary school, and met again in junior high. She came from a Christian family and she was never very interested in science or biology, so I guess I never took her opinions too seriously on the matter of Darwin. You can't blame someone who doesn't believe in Darwin because they never had a chance to judge him with fairness. Even when I was having those heated debates with her, I didn't realize that her point of view is the religious point of view that is share by many, many others. At the time I just thought she was not informed. I suppose it is okay for people to be not informed at age 15 on stuff like this.
A few years later when I read the Selfish Gene, this friend of mine has become more and more devoted to the Church. After college she became some sort of a missionary and we eventually lost contact. Now I looked back, I wish I had made her read the book. It could have changed her decisions, which in my value system would be a good thing.
About two years after I read the Selfish Gene, I read a book translated as "The Great Extinction" in Chinese. The book tells a really fascinating tale of how the dinosaurs became extinct, with lots of interdisciplinatory information. Unfortunately, toward the end of the book, the author attacked Darwin,"Survival of the fittest is a tautology". I think that was a clever attack, since if you only take that phrase and define what fittest is, it does mean the one who survived and reproduced. The point is, Darwinism is not a phrase. Darwinism is a mechanism that could explain how the various species arose. Under the prerequisite of Darwinism, speciation simply could not be avoided (inevitable is different from being tautologic). The phrase survival of the fittest is just a way of describing things so that human being could grasp the idea without having to devote a year or two studying. The logic of Darwinism is so solid that it always surprised me when creationists tried to attack the idea from the logic angle. It's kind of like trying to defeat Andy Roddick in serving speed.
If you are a Creationist and you want to show us Darwinians that Darwinism is wrong, let me tell you how. Go and study the organisms, living or dead, and find a trait that absolutely could not have arisen from evolution in the Darwinian way. This has to be a trait that nobody on earth could think of a way for evolution to do it. Then we might consider another theory which is compatible with all the existent data and this new trait. Unfortunately, I'm afraid we Darwinians will never agree to a Creationist's point of view. That is a theory that could never be disproved and is therefore unscientific not worth wasting time thinking about unless the God in question agrees to show us how it was done.
Back to the books. After college I found the sequel to "the Selfish Gene", "The Extended Phenotype". This book is aimed at a somewhat more informed audience regarding evolutionary biology. Unfortunately I lent the book to somebody and I can't remember who it was.
The discovery of the Ancestor's Tale in a Berkeley book store was a pleasant surprise. I didn't know Dr. Dawkins was still around (I still don't know how old he is, but I used to think he is in the same generation as Huxley the novelist). This book starts at the present human race and traces back the phylogenetic tree. This book is meant for the general public; however, as a postdoc in molecular biology, I have to admit that many of the tales in this book still taught me important lessons in science. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history of our race. This is a beautifully written book as the other two Dawkins books I have read. I wonder, why the Nobel prize in literature never goes to people who wrote such books? Why is scientific literature not considered real literature? Isn't it harder to make science interesting to the general public? Furthermore, isn't it more beneficial to the human race to write something like the Selfish Gene than a book of fiction?
After all, I just wanted to say: Dawkins's books changed my view of life, in a very good way.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Friday, December 10, 2004
Good Books Part II
Reefer Madness is composed of three major assays: one on the absurd laws against marijuana, one on the illegal immigrant workers in California, and one on the porn industry in the US. All three of them are very interesting and I highly reccommend them to any one who is interested in understanding the dark side of the mightiest nation, but I will focus on the one on immigrant workers because it made me cry in public (on the plane).
I understand the unfairness of people being punished more severely for possessing a minuscule amount of marijuana than commiting murder in some states. I understand the sentiment of people who needs pot to take the edge off their debilitating disease. If we are allowed to stay awake more than our body would normally do by drinking coffee, those people should be allowed to use marijuana to alleviated the physical pains. I can also understand how absurd the laws against pornography are in a country that appeared so liberal from the outside (like, have you seen Britney's leatherwear?). But I assume most of us agree that the majority of pot consumed are for recreation, and porn is always recreational. However, produce is not recreational. Proper housing and working conditions are not recreational.
The strawberry pickers in California have it as bad or even worse than the conttonfield slaves before the civil war. Well they have the freedom to leave the country and go home, as some cold-hearted people might argue, but what is freedom without some degree of financial freedom? What is freedom if you cannot afford medicine and education for your children? People who were born in the third world countries did not choose to be there. They didn't end up their because of anything they did (unless you believe in the Buddhist Reincarnation, but if you do you would have mercy on all things living any way). People like us never had a taste of real poverty only because we were lucky. The people who detest the illegal immigrants blame them for intruding "their country" should remember that immigration laws and country borders are set up by men; they were never "sacred".
Many, many workers in the Californian strawberry fields have no proper housing. Sure they have no protection from the union and they don't get minimum wage and they don't even know whether they still have a job every morning. Those facts are probably well-known so they don't seem as terrible as they should be to us. But no proper place to sleep is outrageous. Among them the ones who are better off may sleep on the floor in a garage or share a house with say, 30+ other workers, the luckless ones sleep outside. The description of one "campsite" the author visited brought me to tears. The young man lives among the woods, sleeping under a garbage bag propped with sticks. When it rains they simply get wet. These are people who work 12 hours a day bent in the strawberry fields. These are the people who work in such terrible conditions that they tend to have really bad backs in their twenties/thirties and have a life expectancy under 50 years. These are the people who provide us with the beautiful strawberries we enjoy, and they can't even afford a roof over them.
The worst part about the situation is that, even under such unfavorable conditions, they are still willing to leave their families (and beds, they did sleep in beds before they come here) for, say, 5 bucks an hour or less. I cannot imagine how bad things are in Mexico then. Maybe the US troops should go arrest the Mexican president or whatever the equivalent is for mistreating his people after they are done in Iraq.
I understand the unfairness of people being punished more severely for possessing a minuscule amount of marijuana than commiting murder in some states. I understand the sentiment of people who needs pot to take the edge off their debilitating disease. If we are allowed to stay awake more than our body would normally do by drinking coffee, those people should be allowed to use marijuana to alleviated the physical pains. I can also understand how absurd the laws against pornography are in a country that appeared so liberal from the outside (like, have you seen Britney's leatherwear?). But I assume most of us agree that the majority of pot consumed are for recreation, and porn is always recreational. However, produce is not recreational. Proper housing and working conditions are not recreational.
The strawberry pickers in California have it as bad or even worse than the conttonfield slaves before the civil war. Well they have the freedom to leave the country and go home, as some cold-hearted people might argue, but what is freedom without some degree of financial freedom? What is freedom if you cannot afford medicine and education for your children? People who were born in the third world countries did not choose to be there. They didn't end up their because of anything they did (unless you believe in the Buddhist Reincarnation, but if you do you would have mercy on all things living any way). People like us never had a taste of real poverty only because we were lucky. The people who detest the illegal immigrants blame them for intruding "their country" should remember that immigration laws and country borders are set up by men; they were never "sacred".
Many, many workers in the Californian strawberry fields have no proper housing. Sure they have no protection from the union and they don't get minimum wage and they don't even know whether they still have a job every morning. Those facts are probably well-known so they don't seem as terrible as they should be to us. But no proper place to sleep is outrageous. Among them the ones who are better off may sleep on the floor in a garage or share a house with say, 30+ other workers, the luckless ones sleep outside. The description of one "campsite" the author visited brought me to tears. The young man lives among the woods, sleeping under a garbage bag propped with sticks. When it rains they simply get wet. These are people who work 12 hours a day bent in the strawberry fields. These are the people who work in such terrible conditions that they tend to have really bad backs in their twenties/thirties and have a life expectancy under 50 years. These are the people who provide us with the beautiful strawberries we enjoy, and they can't even afford a roof over them.
The worst part about the situation is that, even under such unfavorable conditions, they are still willing to leave their families (and beds, they did sleep in beds before they come here) for, say, 5 bucks an hour or less. I cannot imagine how bad things are in Mexico then. Maybe the US troops should go arrest the Mexican president or whatever the equivalent is for mistreating his people after they are done in Iraq.
Good books
I recently read a book called "Reefer Madness". I could never remember the name of the author but he also wrote the famous "Fastfood Nation" which I have not read yet.
Here I just wanted to summarize a few facts that I found incredible or horrible from these books.
Although I have not been enlightened by the Fastfood Nation, I saw a short interview with the author in the Supersize Me DVD. One fact struck me so hard from that interview. A beef patty in a MacDonald hamburger could contain meat from over 1000 cows! The author talked about the potential of mass food poisoning, but I was thinking of the mad cow's disease. I used to be a big beef person until last summer, when I stopped touching any beef product for fear of mad cow disease. Granted there was only one cow found to be positive in the US, and that cow seemed to have originated from Canada. Granted my chances of dying from mad cow disease is probably lower than dying from a plane crash. I do not wish a death from mad cow's disease. Anything but neurodegenerative diseases please.
After talking to a few people who are intellectuals but are not in biological sciences I realized that many people have no idea what mad cow's disease really is. Cooking doesn't get rid of the prion, which is the causing agent for mad cow's. I don't know if autoclaving would work, but I'm sure no one would want to eat an autoclaved steak. You also have no idea of kowing whether you have it or not before the symptoms begin to show, and it could take a decade before they do. I could already have it now from my years of beef consumption.
I am not saying that everyone should be as paranoid as I am and stop eating beef. Most of my friends, scientists in biology who are fully aware of the danger, still enjoy beef. There is always some deadly threat out there as long as you are alive. However, a scientifically informed government should not allow a practice of food preparation that seems tailor-made for spreading mad cow's. If one of the 1000 cows used to make that whole shipment of burgers were sick, the tens of thousands of people who eat the burgers could get sick. If it were food poisoning, a small percentage of these people will die from it, whereas most people will be very sick for a number of days in the hospital. However, had it been mad-cow's, all of the people who contracted the disease (not all the people who ate the burgers), will die. There is no cure. There is not even a way to supress that disease yet.
I wonder what the government's action would be should there ever be a proven case of mad-cow outbreak. It would be a huge blow to the economy if everybody gets scared and stop eating beef, and ironically, because of that, lots of people will get scared that the government may not tell us the severity of the outbreak. If that happens, we wouldn't even know about it until years after the beef was consumed.
I do not have a solution to the problem. As usual, most of our current social problems come from over-population. I have already discussed the over-population problem in my essay on abortion. The only way out is for people to find other goals in life that means as much to them as making children. In Taiwan there is currently a concern of an aging population due to lowered reproduction. The government is trying everything to encourage people to have children. I think that is foolish. Let the population drop and you might have some economy problems for one generation, but that will pass and the result would be worth it. From my own experience living in Taiwan, the island was ~3X more crowded for individuals to be comfortable. I think encouraging reproduction is like, say, drinking poison to quench the thirst.
I didn't mean to devote so much room on a book I haven't even read. But now that I did, Reefer Madness would have to wait till the next post.
Here I just wanted to summarize a few facts that I found incredible or horrible from these books.
Although I have not been enlightened by the Fastfood Nation, I saw a short interview with the author in the Supersize Me DVD. One fact struck me so hard from that interview. A beef patty in a MacDonald hamburger could contain meat from over 1000 cows! The author talked about the potential of mass food poisoning, but I was thinking of the mad cow's disease. I used to be a big beef person until last summer, when I stopped touching any beef product for fear of mad cow disease. Granted there was only one cow found to be positive in the US, and that cow seemed to have originated from Canada. Granted my chances of dying from mad cow disease is probably lower than dying from a plane crash. I do not wish a death from mad cow's disease. Anything but neurodegenerative diseases please.
After talking to a few people who are intellectuals but are not in biological sciences I realized that many people have no idea what mad cow's disease really is. Cooking doesn't get rid of the prion, which is the causing agent for mad cow's. I don't know if autoclaving would work, but I'm sure no one would want to eat an autoclaved steak. You also have no idea of kowing whether you have it or not before the symptoms begin to show, and it could take a decade before they do. I could already have it now from my years of beef consumption.
I am not saying that everyone should be as paranoid as I am and stop eating beef. Most of my friends, scientists in biology who are fully aware of the danger, still enjoy beef. There is always some deadly threat out there as long as you are alive. However, a scientifically informed government should not allow a practice of food preparation that seems tailor-made for spreading mad cow's. If one of the 1000 cows used to make that whole shipment of burgers were sick, the tens of thousands of people who eat the burgers could get sick. If it were food poisoning, a small percentage of these people will die from it, whereas most people will be very sick for a number of days in the hospital. However, had it been mad-cow's, all of the people who contracted the disease (not all the people who ate the burgers), will die. There is no cure. There is not even a way to supress that disease yet.
I wonder what the government's action would be should there ever be a proven case of mad-cow outbreak. It would be a huge blow to the economy if everybody gets scared and stop eating beef, and ironically, because of that, lots of people will get scared that the government may not tell us the severity of the outbreak. If that happens, we wouldn't even know about it until years after the beef was consumed.
I do not have a solution to the problem. As usual, most of our current social problems come from over-population. I have already discussed the over-population problem in my essay on abortion. The only way out is for people to find other goals in life that means as much to them as making children. In Taiwan there is currently a concern of an aging population due to lowered reproduction. The government is trying everything to encourage people to have children. I think that is foolish. Let the population drop and you might have some economy problems for one generation, but that will pass and the result would be worth it. From my own experience living in Taiwan, the island was ~3X more crowded for individuals to be comfortable. I think encouraging reproduction is like, say, drinking poison to quench the thirst.
I didn't mean to devote so much room on a book I haven't even read. But now that I did, Reefer Madness would have to wait till the next post.
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