Fire and Knowledge

History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who’ve ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 54.

Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire. If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization.

—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 26.

Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved

Since its discovery, scientists have been trying to reconstruct the device, which is now known to be an astronomical calendar capable of tracking with remarkable precision the position of the sun, several heavenly bodies and the phases of the moon. Experts believe it to be the earliest-known device to use gear wheels and by far the most sophisticated object to be found from the ancient and medieval periods….

Remarkably, scans showed the device uses a differential gear, which was previously believed to have been invented in the 16th century. The level of miniaturisation and complexity of its parts is comparable to that of 18th century clocks….

One of the remaining mysteries is why the Greek technology invented for the machine seemed to disappear. No other civilisation is believed to have created anything as complex for another 1,000 years.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, agricultural price support programs led to vast amounts of food being deliberately destroyed at a time when malnutrition was a serious problem in the United States and hunger marches were taking place in cities across the country. For example, the federal government bought 6 million hogs in 1933 alone and destroyed them. Huge amounts of farm produce were plowed under, in order to keep it off the market and maintain prices at the officially fixed level, and vast amounts of milk were poured down the sewers for the same reason. Meanwhile, many American children were suffering from diseases caused by malnutrition.

–Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 56.

No one seems to think that a religious person engaged in the study of history must find a way that God rigged human events in order to cause the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, or the Holocaust. Yet curiously, that is exactly what many expect of a religious person engaged in the study of natural history—they want to know how God could have ensured the success of mammals, the rise of flowering plants, and most especially, the ascent of man.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 237-8

We say, then, that it pleased the designer to design only microorganisms for nearly 2 billion years of earth’s history. He then began to tinker with multicellular organisms, producing a bewildering variety of organisms that survived only briefly. In the Cambrian era, roughly 530 million years ago, the designer produced an extraordinary variety of microorganisms, many of which were the first representatives of what we now regard as the animal phyla, the major groups into which animals are classified. Even in the Cambrian, he was not yet interested in designing a vertebrate, an animal that, like us, is built around the backbone. That came later.

Then, as we have seen, the designer produced one organism after another in places and in sequences that would later be misinterpreted as evolution by one of his creatures. And just to compound that misunderstanding, he would ensure that the very first limbs he designed looked just like modified fins, and that the first jaws he designed looked like modified gill arches. He would further ensure that the first tetrapods had tail fins, like fish, and that the first birds had teeth, like reptiles. So thoughtful was this designer that after having designed mammals to live exclusively on the land, he would redesign a few, like whales and dolphins, to live in water—but not before he designed creatures that were literally halfway between land and swimming mammals. In working his magic, this designer chose to create forms truly intermediate between walking and swimming mammals….

Is the designer being deceptive? Is there a reason he can’t get it right the first time? Is the designer, despite all his powers, a slow learner? He must be clever enough to design an African elephant, but apparently not so clever that he can do it the first time. Therefore we find fossils of a couple dozen extinct almost-elephants over the last few million years. What are these failed experiments, and why does this master designer need to drive so many of his masterpieces to extinction?

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 127

Anthropologists estimate that typical hunter-gatherers worked at feeding themselves no more than seventeen hours a week, and were far more robust and long-lived than agriculturists, who have only in the last century or two regained the physical stature and longevity of their Paleolithic ancestors.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 279

Factory automation and labor-saving appliances were supposed to have all but eliminated the need to work. Yet in the past twenty years there has been an increase in the average number of hours worked in North America. Increased productivity was supposed to create universal affluence, to eliminate poverty as we know it. Yet despite the fact that GDP in Canada has doubled since the ‘70s, the level of “basic needs” poverty has remained unchanged. And what about those flying Jetson cars, or at least clean high-speed trains? Commuting has become a nightmare for most city-dwellers. And far from being clean, the average fuel efficiency of vehicles in North America has dropped.

Who could seriously have predicted, thirty years ago, that this is how things would play out? How is it that we can produce so much more wealth and yet fail to secure any measurable improvement in satisfaction?

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), pp. 100-1