Ones and Zeros

We’ve seen the python invasion of south Florida, and the python hunters of the Everglades. (Hm, that would make a good Discovery Show!) Here’s some recent news:

In this first story, a man steals a ferret by putting it in his pants in Jax Beach. He must have really wanted that ferret! I like to keep biting animals further away from delicate parts of my anatomy. Of course then the thief uses the ferret as a weapon which makes the ferret a special weapon in FL law. And gets an additional charge for the thief too.

And, in Panama Beach, a Fish and Wildlife officer lost a gator at an elementary school. How’s that for a bad day? He took the gator to his daughter’s school for show-and-tell. The gator jumped out of the truck. In more recent news it looks like they found it.

This last isn’t animal, but vegetable. In a protest, some Lantana FL residents are mailing coconuts in an effort to preserve their post office. The residents are saying closing the post office would be nuts, so they’re sending coconuts. But at several hundred coconuts being sent at $4 each, any budget issues may be relieved.

Where I work the building management is taking H1N1 seriously.  That’s a good thing and I don’t want to suggest otherwise.  There’s a free-standing foam sanitizing dispenser in the lobby of each floor, it has flyer taped to it on hand washing too. Gelled alcohol dispensers are prevalent in each office suite.

But the odd thing is that each bathroom (or at least the bathrooms I’ve sampled specific to my gender) have a gelled alcohol dispenser, that’s in addition to the usual sinks and soap.  Personally, I’d just be happy if they made sure that both soap dispensers were kept filled at the same time.

If a bathroom user washes his or her hands then the alcohol isn’t necessary.  It can be less effective than hand-washing in some cases.  But if a person is not inclined to wash their hands, certainly they won’t bother with the alcohol right?

The year before last, we noticed more than usual of the flat, shield-shaped slow-flying stink bugs. Last year it was worse. We were finding them in the house. This year, there are many dozens on the porch screens and some dozen or more manage to get in.

Stink bugs teach us to be respectful. If you squish them, the smell is very strong and hard to remove. I learned that as a kid and the lesson stuck.

Turns out these are Halyomorpha halys or brown marmorated stink bugs. They’re exotics. They’re not native to this area and were from Asia originally. North America has their own stink bugs - it’s a group of beetles widely spread across the world. But this species was introduced sometime in the 1990s in Pennsylvania. Official initial sighting reports vary, but the earlest I found was in 1993 near Allentown. That means it was likely introduced a few years before. Accidental introduction with an imported plant is the most likely means.

Halyomorpha has currently spread through Pennsylvania, up to around Boston area, definately in northern Virginia, and has been sighted in Florida and California as well.

And yes there is an economic impact, they’re not just cluttering up our porch screens. They suck the juices from plants and fruit and damage the fruit for commercial sale. The plants become stressed by the bugs and grow and produce less.

They’re naturally resistant to pesticides and live for two years. Halyomorpha is hardy and lives in cold climates. Where I live they lay eggs once a year. In more southern climates, they’ll have two generations a year.

So one more exotic invasive species to deal with. The potential economic impact of Halyomorpha alone is much larger than a number of the scenarios that Dept of Homeland Security is examining. Expand that to all the exotic invasive species and we have a major issue. It’s not all just pythons in the Everglades, the problems are right here at home and more immediate than Al Queda.

Last February, on the event of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, Gallup polled Americans and found that believe in the theory of evolution. About the same amount had no opinion (in other words the Gallup people called at dinner time). That leaves about 25% do not believe Darwin’s theory.

I’m suspicious of polling. They abstract many people’s potentially nuanced points-of-view into a very few categories. I’ve been on the receiving end of poll questions and found the experience frustrating. But however we quibble about poll numbers it remains true that many people don’t believe the humans evolved from other animals and we weren’t just created by divine intervention somehow.

In earlier periods it was held that humans were special and since animals didn’t have language, make societies, use tools, or think abstractly then there was a massive difference. Humans had to have a divine spark in them that animals didn’t have. This allow us to exploit and damage the ecosystem with God at least implicitly on our side.

Then we found insect societies and other animal communities that indicate some type of society - a wolf pack or pod of dolphins for two examples.

Biologists noted that any society required communication. And they found examples of that in numerous species. Then, they managed to teach gorillas and chimps to communicate with us too.

And, of course, tool use is common in other apes (non-human ones that is), and some birds as well. Otters use rocks to crack shells, they have favorites they keep.

Now, there’s examples of higher-level cognition in animals too.

So if you’re the type of person that requires humans to be special in some critical way, a believer in humanity’s descent from God and not from apes, then you’re feeling pretty crowded by now. All the special human characteristics also have examples in other species too. Either you a) just ignore those pesky scientists, or b) start reacting against “godless liberals”.

Politically, the rise of Reganism in the US and Thatcherism in the UK and the more recent reign of Bush, which was philosophically an extension of Reganism, is part of that reaction.

Note, however, that evolution and the connection of humans and animals is clear. I’ve read that over 98% of our DNA is the same with chimps. We use the same or very similar proteins as all the other animals on the Earth. Those proteins are made from the same amino acids by same or very similar DNA. We can see the evolutionary changes over time in different and related species. It’s quite clear that we not only grew up here on Earth but that we share a common ancestry with all the other animals and plants here. No one seriously disputes that.

The key difference in humans from other species is the combination of design features we have and the level to which we have them. Tool use, opposable thumbs, language, social structures, and more are all special in combination. We are specialized to being generalists. Humans seem to be the only animal that is highly effective at adapting and learning, and passes that knowledge on to future generations. We seem like we might have a part of our brain that specializes in tool use, we think about tools as an extension of our bodies. We use tools and all our other generalist capabilities to be very adaptable.

Faced with this information we have several choices. A first might be to ignore science and scientists. Refuse to adapt, become a button pusher and have no knowledge of what is behind the buttons or technology we’re using. This also means we’re subject to those who actually do know that technology.

Second, we could embrace science and reality. Live up to our fully adaptable humanity and be reality-based. We will never know the world and the universe completely. But science is a way of making a working approximation of what we do know and being able to test that approximation and to improve it. We gain some degree of mastery over our fate this way.

Third, as the T-shirt says, we can reject reality and substitute our own. This can be a problem as we live in the real world. If we ignore reality too much, we will suffer. In a simple case, jumping off a five story building and expecting to walk away is ignoring reality. But there are less obvious ways of ignoring reality that may involve voting against your own interests, making bad decisions, or not anticipating consequences.

For many things it’s quite obvious when we’re being reality-based (#2) and when we’re just making things up (#3). But sometimes it can be hard to judge this, we can’t all be scientists in all areas and know all of human knowledge, we have to trust others sometimes, many times.