Category: Follies of the Human Condition

Ending the World for 60 Years: 1953

The possibility of human extinction in End of the World sci-fi is sometimes paired with a consideration of our next evolutionary step – a concept that is less scientific than it sounds (evolution shouldn’t be considered in such linear terms), but one that does make an effective fictional tool for thinking about human impermanence.

Arthur C. Clarke’s majestic Childhood’s End is about the end of Homo sapiens and evolutionary succession, in a sense. In this case the end of the human species doens’t occur as a result of nuclear annihilation or an asteroid stike, and our evolutionary successors don’t emerge from a struggling population of mutant survivors. The end here comes through a double transcendence. Our species leaves behind its childhood in a way that reveals our relationship to nature in its most universal form, and to science and rationality, which prove not only more powerful than our wildest imaginings, but also, paradoxically, small and limiting in the larger scheme.

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Scientific Potemkin Villages

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway come up with cool name for a familiar strategy:

This strategy of creating a ‘scientific Potemkin village’ was applied to global warming too. During the period that we scrutinize in our book, the Marshall Institute didn’t create its own journal, but it did produce reports with the trappings of scientific argument — such as graphs, charts and references — that were not published in the independent peer-reviewed literature. At least one of these reports — read and taken seriously by the administration of former US president George H. W. Bush — misrepresented the science by presenting only part of the story. NASA climate modeller James Hansen and his team had demonstrated in the peer-reviewed literature that historic temperature records could be best explained by a combination of solar irradiance, volcanic dust, and anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The Marshall Institute report included only a single piece of Hansen’s graph, using the fragment to make it seem as if there was a poor link between carbon dioxide and climate warming, and to argue — against Hansen’s analysis — that the real culprit was the Sun.

And we can’t forget the pioneering efforts of creation scientists, who are masters of the scientific Potemkin Village.

Ending the World for 60 Years: 1952 yet again

Post-Holocaust Noble Savages

I’ve read three 1952 post-apocalyptic novels for this series – The Long Loud Silence, and two books that are so similar that they can be dealt with in a single post: Star Man’s Son, by Andre Norton, and Vault of the Ages, by Poul Anderson. Both of these books are basically fantasy/neo-barbarian novels set hundreds of years after the North American continent has been ravaged by nuclear war. Both feature late teenage boys defying their elders and seeking out the lost knowledge of the god-like-but-fallen pre-apocalyptic ancestors, ancestors who held so much knowledge, but squandered it in a catastrophic nuclear war. Both feature climactic battles among various tribes, and finish with grand peace settlements (catalyzed by the boy heroes and accompanied by lengthy speeches) as humanity tries to recover the lost secrets of technology.
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Texas finally does something right regarding education

Texas may be screwing over their public school children’s education (and, via the textbook market, our kids’ too), but at least Texas is doing something right: they won’t permit a creationist institute to hand out graduate degrees in science education.

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The Dubiosity Scale

Scientists like classification schemes and, especially, the jargon that comes along with them. Of course, this in part due to the fact that such schemes allow us to flex our intellectual vanity through the ritual abuse of dead languages. More legitimately, classification schemes and terms that are agreed upon within a particular field increase both the ease and precision of communication.

At the moment, I am writing at my patio table, peering with some concern (due to the threat to my ripening raspberries) at a bird hopping around the back garden. This bird is all black, with a relatively straight black beak; it is larger than a sparrow, but smaller than an eagle; and, as mentioned above, moves on the ground by hopping. Alternatively, I could communicate all that information, probably with even greater accuracy, by making use of our shared vocabulary for bird classification and tell you that I am looking at a carrion crow. Two words not only substitute for a tedious, run-on sentence of description, but also reduce confusion about the bird’s characteristics.

Good classification schemes summarize significant amounts of information by identifying many definitive characteristics through classification. Bad classification schemes convey no additional information other than the classification group.
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