Earth Justice

The Real Carbon Economy

2010-01-03T17:44:00.001-08:00

We say the economic system works through flows: flows of resources, flows of capital, and flows of produced goods, which are all mostly exchanged through buying and selling, and then invested, saved, or consumed.

These flows can be measured in terms of money value. That's what the GNP and GDP are: dollar measures of the circular flow of a nation's economy over the time period of a year.

Think of life now. Life can't be measured by dollars because life includes a lot more than just humans and life has been around a lot longer than humans.

But life has circular flows too, flows of resources, flows of energy. And like an economy, life should have a balance between consumption and production.

Think of the Earth as an economy, a circular flow of resources with an input of high quality energy from the sun and output of low grade energy in the form of infra-red heat.

The Earth is a successful economy because it has life. It is life that is able to capture some of the sun's energy and maintain itself for countless generations in a continuous manner since its origins.

The Earth Economy is a lot bigger than the human economy and a lot lot older. In the Earth Economy carbon is the medium of exchange. In other words, carbon in the Earth Economy plays the same role as money does in the human economy. Carbon, like money gets cycled through the Earth Economy, but unlike money, carbon takes hundreds of millions of years to cycle through.

In the human economy money commands resources, goods and services. And money acts as a store of value. It can be saved and spent later. But money, unlike carbon, is conceptual, it only exists because we believe it has value. It ceases to exist when we cease to believe in it.

Money is really only a virtual reality. Ultimately, what makes all things work, all things go, and what makes living things alive is energy.

Energy flows, and like water, it always flows downstream. In the case of water, it flows downstream to the lowest point on Earth, which is the bottom of the oceans. In the case of energy, when we say it flows downstream we are talking about the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”.

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. That's the first law. The second law has to do with what happens when energy is converted into work.

Living systems capture energy and convert it into chemical energy. The second law says that this must be a downhill process. You cannot reconvert chemical energy to electromagnetic energy (light) unless you add more energy from outside the system.

That's why a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Because whenever work is done, the energy used up, even though it still exists, cannot be used again to do the same amount of work. It gets degraded, or disorganized in doing work. In this sense it always flows downstream.

On Earth, carbon plays the role of life's currency, life's means of capturing, utilizing, and storing the high grade energy, and getting rid of the low grade energy. Because it plays such a central role in life, carbon is a lot like the Greek god Atlas, holding up the sky.

Energy is necessary for life because if there's not enough of it then life's activities stop. But too much energy raises the temperature too high and life can burn up.

Over vast scales of time the carbon cycle has had a huge influence on the flows of energy and the overall temperature of Earth's surface. And during those same spans of time, life has had a large influence on the carbon cycle, and hence on Earth's temperature.

Like goods and services in the smaller human economy, energy flows and circulates amongst living things. First to the Producers: bacteria, diatoms, algae, and plants. Producers take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Producers utilize photosynthesis and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to capture solar energy and store it in carbon compounds.

. Next to the Consumers that eat Producers or other Consumers. Consumers breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.

When there is a balance between Producers and Consumers Earth Economy is as healthy as it can be. If there is too many Producers and not enough Consumers, then too much carbon gets locked into plants and algae when they die. Then the available supply of carbon decreases and Earth's temperature decreases. This is just one of, but not the only causes of ice ages.

We can call ice ages “Depressions” in the Earth Economy because just as in depressions when there's not enough money to buy everything the economy freezes, during an ice age there's not enough carbon to capture the energy needed to drive life. Some of the great extinction events such as the Permian - Triassic extinction 250 million years ago are thought to have been caused by ice ages.

If there is too many Consumers and not enough Producers we get too much carbon available. Remember, Consumers breathe out carbon dioxide, so the more Consumers there are the more carbon dioxide there will be in the atmosphere. The amount of available carbon becomes so high that Earth's surface temperature climbs. We can call this “Inflation” .

For thousands of years the human economy was just an insignificant fraction of Earth Economy. But then we discovered fossil fuels – coal, and oil. These are forms of carbon that were saved long ago when for various reasons, plant life was not consumed by other life forms, but eventually was subducted underground. There it was converted by the heat and compression by the Earth's techtonic forces into coal and oil.

By tapping into this stored form of ancient sunlight, we have been able to extract both biological and mineralogical resources at an accelerating rate. This is a situation akin to hyperinflation in human economies, where the circulation velocity of money (carbon) has increased at the same time as vastly greater quantities of money (carbon) are available.

The result is an overheating of Earth Economy and a new mass extinction event. We call this “Global Warming”.

Spontaneous Organization

2009-12-14T04:23:00.000-08:00

The market economy is a self-organizing system because it is made up of countless people who act out of their own self interest to buy and sell to other people. It is not designed and not made by a designer.

A language system such as the english language, is a self-organizing system. Each speaker of english uses english words in conversation with other english speakers. The language itself is shaped and evolves through the sum total of individual conversations and at the same time the language system as a whole shapes the way that each individual speaker uses it in conversation.

Although laws are made by governments and moral codes are often passed on from one generation to the next through formal and informal education, moral systems can also be seen as self-organizing. Our interpretation of values, social norms and rules helps to shape our everyday conduct with others. Each person's conduct in turn, is interpreted by and influences other's value systems and conduct in a vast circle of social networks. Some people's behaviour is exemplary and very influential, other's behaviour is despicable and serves as an example to be shunned.

All these human systems I am describing have emergent properties that are not reducible to a simple description of physical causes. Being an english speaker I can choose to speak eloquently or massacre the language. Either way, I am part of the english language system without being determined by it.

Consciousness is another system, in this case neurological, where the state of consciousness is an emergent property, not reducible to a physical chain of neurons firing.

The parts of consciousness interact together with the other parts: The mid-brain systems that keep us alert and awake and that help us to pay attention, the sensory systems, the motivational system that helps us to focus and prioritize, the memory systems of the cerebral cortex that help in making associations with past experience, and make experiencing into a continuous flow, the parts of the cortex dealing with language, and meaning that help to put ideas into words, the parts that allow us to visualize ideas, and the prefrontal areas of the cortex that assist us in judging and and decision-making.

Our thoughts, sensations, feelings and judgement get organized into coherent ideas and narratives spontaneously without being planned or designed. For any planning, necessarily already involves ideas and narratives, so it can't be primary.

We tend to model reality after ourselves. This is called “anthropomorphism”. At first we attribute human qualities to natural phenomena such as the weather, the sea, volcanoes, the sun and moon, and the stars. We invent mythologies to explain how these things act, as if they were people and acted according to their own purposes.

Determinism can be seen as just another form of anthropomorphism. Just as all humans make things and do things for a reason, determinism sees everything that happens as determined by previous causes. Determinism equates living things with machines as if they were designed for a reason.

According to determinism there is no free will because everything that happens is determined by antecedant causes. But does causation explain everything, and does it really determine behaviour?

Think back to the flock of sandpipers that I talked about in a previous article. The flock flies in unison, quickly manoevering around obstacles as one, and lands on the beach in unison. Where was the cause of that flock's behaviour? Was it the sum total of all the individual sandpipers' behaviour?

But didn't the behaviour of the flock as a whole influence the behaviour of each individual bird? The behaviour of the flock influenced the behaviour of the individual birds, and the individual birds influenced the behaviour of the flock. In which direction was the cause?

We're talking in circles here. If causation happens in both directions or is “circular” in what sense is it determinate?

Everything can influence us at once, and if so what is it that causes us to do what we do? Everything? Then the concept of causation and determinism itself are both meaningless.

It seems to me that self-organization can generate free will because the influence and interaction of a self-organized system can be omnidirectional.

Think of the brain. Interactions between many different parts of the brain contribute to each moment of consciousness. At the same time our conscious experience influences those interactions. What causes the experience then?

That's why we say that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and not reducible to the firing of nerve cells. And we can say the same thing about “purpose” and “meaning”. These emerge out of living and self-organizing systems.

Purpose is more basic than meaning because it does not require consciousness. The purpose of maintaining life appears to be already part of every life-form. Meaning emerges from consciousness so it requires consciousness.

It may seem rather abstract, what I'm talking about but these are all things that science has a problem dealing with but are in the province of religion. Consciousness emerges from physical phenomena but cannot be reduced to them because it influences those phenomena. Purpose emerges from life and influences life, meaning emerges from consciousness and influences consciousness.

The key to all these phenomena is that they appear to emerge spontaneously from the bottom up in self-organizing systems, without being designed or planned. This has obvious implications for religion. But that's not my department.

Just Add Water - It Stirs Itself

2009-12-07T23:55:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a book by Phillip Ball, called: Water, Matrix of Life. If you want to know more about water, it's fascinating and well written. I particularly like this quote of his: “Water is the agent of geological, environmental and global change. It confers fecundity on parched regions, while it's passing turns grasslands into deserts.”

Water does all this and more. But water is incredibly effective at what it does because water is a team player. Apparently there's water on the moon in the form of patches of ice, but it's inert, it doesn't do anything because it lacks the other team players. Let's introduce these other team members.

Water is a compound not an element although the Greeks and the Chinese thought it was one of the “four elements” - Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Let's run with this idea but let's assume that fire can mean all types of energy, especially the Sun. Let's use a bigger name for Air. We'll call it the Atmosphere. Let's say that “Earth” means the planet and not just a hunk of rock. Now let's add a fifth element, and call it “Life”.

Put these five elements together and they will interact spontaneously. And these interactions form the great geophysical systems of the Earth.

The Earth's surface has mountains and basins. It's lowest points are where most of the water is – in the oceans. The Earth's gravitational field is strong enough to hold all the gases: the oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapour that make up the atmosphere.

Think of Earth as a house without a switch because it runs itself. It's roof is the atmosphere. It lets vital energy from the Sun in and gives us a bit of insulation at night. Too much insulation is not good, as we see with the planet Venus, with its surface temperature of 460 *Celsius.

The Earth's got plumbing, heating, ventilation and power, mostly run by one system: the weather. But it's also got backup power from internal heat which causes plate tectonics to reconfigure the seas and continents every hundred million years or so.

It's not like a house that was designed and built, because it repairs itself. But who wants to wait millions of years for the repair job to get done? Besides, by that time there'll be new renovations going on in some other section. Still, no house that we have built repairs itself, or has lasted as long as Earth has.

As a plumbing and heating system and power system the weather is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. Sometimes we get too much water sometimes not enough. Sometimes it gets too hot, sometimes it's just right.

The weather operates under the usual physical laws. The Earth's spin causes winds to curve in the direction of rotation making cyclonic wind patterns counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Sun's radiation heats water on Earth's surface and causes water molecules to change from liquid to gas. The water vapour can rise into the atmosphere because it contains heat from the sun.

Weather systems can last up to a week and travel thousands of kilometers. Weather is partly predictable, we recognize the seasons, but also unpredictable, we don't know what the weather will be like a month from this day. This could mean that weather systems are not purely mechanical and that they are self-organizing systems.

Let's call a system: a group of parts that interact together to form a whole that is separated from the external world by a boundary.

Let's divide the world of systems into two parts: mechanical systems and self-organizing systems. There could be more divisions but for now lets keep it as simple as possible.

Mechanical systems are systems of parts that interact via simple physical laws. The Solar system is a mechanical system because the parts - the sun and the planets, interact by the laws of motion and gravity to form a balanced system that has maintained itself over time.

We can say that the planetary system is determined by the laws of gravity because the movements of the planets around the sun are caused by gravitational forces between the sun and the planets. . And we can predict the future positions of all the planets in relation to the Earth by applying these laws.

All machines are mechanical systems designed and built by humans for various goals. A house is a mechanical system that transfers heat and energy from outside and holds it inside. Houses and other machines have switches on them. When the switch is turned on, the machines start to work and when it's turned off they stop working.

What is a self-organizing system? Think of a flock of sandpipers flying low over the water – the precision and coherence of their flight. The flock swoops and glides as a unified whole as if it acts with one mind.

But each bird is acting on its own and the subtle alterations in flight that each bird makes in response to its neighbours creates an emergent unity.

Unlike mechanical systems, self-organizing systems are not deterministic. These systems have properties that emerge from the interaction of all the parts that cannot be mapped out in a single chain of cause and effect.

You cannot predict the weather beyond a week; Human behaviour is both predictable and unpredictable. Weather systems and societies exhibit complex behaviour that is the hallmark of self-organizing systems. The implications of this are revolutionary for Science, Religion, and Philosophy. Tune in next week when I try to explain just how that is.

How Water Keeps Us Alive

2009-11-30T04:14:00.000-08:00

It's uncanny how many essential functions water serves for life processes. But perhaps the most important function is the regulation of temperature. And the amazing thing is, water acts to regulate temperature simultaneously and independently on multiple levels. On a micro sub-cellular level, a human level, a regional level, and a global level.

Life survives in a narrow temperature range that just happens to correspond with the temperature at which water is a liquid. That's not a coincidence. Life and water are tightly coupled on Earth. All of life's metabolic processes – the things that make a living organism “alive” - happen in water.

The temperature at which water is a liquid is not necessarily the temperature that's ideal for many types of chemical reactions. In some cases heat needs to be added to get a reaction underway, or a chemical reaction can produce a lot of heat in an uncontrollable chain reaction. Either way, the reaction proceeds at a temperature much too hot for life.

All biochemical reactions are catalyzed (made easier) by large convoluted protein molecules called enzymes. The key to an enzyme's function as a catalyzer of chemical reactions is its complex shape. And the key to an enzyme's shape is how the molecule twists and folds in on itself in relation to the water molecules that surround it.

Water is also necessary because it facilitates the flow of dissolved molecules that form the raw materials and the products of enzyme mediated reactions. But that's another story.

The enzymes that catalyze most biological reactions work best within a narrow range of a few degrees centering around 37 Centigrade, normal body temperature. Hotter than this and the enzymes lose their shape and cease to function. Too cold and the chemical reactions slow down too much to sustain metabolic processes.

The human body has several independent systems that work to keep the body's temperature within the narrow range necessary for life. All of these systems involve water in a crucial way and yet each uses water in a unique way.

When we are cold our circulation system shunts blood away from the extremities, where it would be more likely to lose heat to the external environment. This keeps more of the body's water within the better insulated core where it protects the vital organs.

When we are too hot our circulation system shunts more water out to the extremities where heat can be transferred out of the body. Another independent system kicks in to cool the body by secreting water in the form of sweat on the body's outer surface. On a hot sunny day the sweat on our skin evaporates cooling us off.

When we are cold another independent system come into play. We “shiver”. This is a muscular reaction that produces heat to warm the body by increasing metabolic rates and shunting blood to the large muscles of the body. Muscle cells are controlled by nerve cells, and nerve cells cannot tell muscle cells what to do without the medium of water.

So here comes the analogy. Just as water plays the major role in keeping our bodies alive it also plays the major role in keeping life on Earth alive. For it is water in all it's forms that moderates temperature on Earth's surface.

Did I already mention in a previous column that water has the second highest heat capacity of any liquid? Water retains heat. That's why we use it for radiators. But that's also why it's warmer near the ocean in winter, and cooler in the summer. Large bodies of water moderate climate, because they absorb heat and are slow to give it up.

In places far inland it's colder in the winter and hotter in the summer because these places lack the moderating influence of a large body of water. Note that the majority of the world's population lives within 50 miles of the ocean.

Water also has a huge role to play in temperature regulation via an entirely different system – the weather. Here's how it works: The Sun's radiant energy heats the surface water of the oceans. When this happens some of the surface water evaporates. It changes from it's liquid form to water vapour – a gas. In doing so it absorbs heat and cools the surface water.

Not a big deal in terms of the proportion of water that ends up in the atmosphere .001 % of Earth's total, but it's still enough to make a huge difference to the Earth's surface temperature.

The water vapour rises up into the atmosphere where it gets blown far away by the winds. The higher the water molecules rise the colder the air. Eventually the the molecules condense back to liquid and form water droplets. When this happens the latent heat of evaporation is given off into the atmosphere.

But here's the deal - where the water molecule absorbed the heat and where it gives it back can be thousands of miles apart. Thus the sun's energy powers the transfer of heat over the Earth's surface through the medium of water.

But that's not all folks. There's another couple of systems involving water in a major role that effect the Earth's surface temperature independently of the one's I just mentioned. Water freezes into ice at 0 C. Ice reflects sunlight and cools the Earth's surface. That's why during an ice age the Earth's surface gets colder.

But there's more. In the atmosphere water vapour molecules have a stronger greenhouse warming effect than carbon dioxide. This is counterbalanced both by the cooling effect of evaporation, and the fact that water molecules do not stay long in the atmosphere before gravity takes over and pulls the water down to the earth in the form of rain.

OK but there's still more. Because water, unlike most other liquids expands when it freezes, ice forms on top of liquid water and because of that ice insulates water and keeps most of it from freezing in the winter.

Used for warming and cooling, multiple independent systems involved. Where have we heard this before? Something's fishy about water's dual role in regulating Earth's surface temperature and the temperature of individual life -forms. Tune in next week when we delve further into this mystery.

Water, The Restless Creator

2009-11-23T02:19:00.000-08:00

The cells of our body are bathed in water. It circulates throughout our bodies in our blood vessels. Water is intimately involved in all aspects of life. No other substance is as important for life.

Water is constantly moving, circulating over the Earth's surface in ocean currents, or drawn downhill to the sea by Earth's gravity, or up into the atmosphere.

Water is drawn up into the atmosphere by solar powered evaporation, it forms into clouds and falls again to Earth as rain, sometimes in the sea and sometimes on land.

When it falls on land some of it ends up as groundwater, some in lakes. But all is drawn to the sea by Earth's gravity. It is the triple actions of the Sun's radiation, the Earth's gravity, and its centrifugal motion that creates the water cycle on Earth's surface

As if to mirror what goes on on the face of the Earth, water in the form of blood is pumped and circulated throughout our bodies by our hearts. This coordinated internal flow of water provides us with food in the form of dissolved carbohydrates , dissolved oxygen, and electrolytes; It gets rid of wastes; It carries immune cells that protect us from disease, white blood cells and platelets that help to repair the body and hormones and chemical transmitters that communicate information from one organ to another.

Water is not just water. It is the universal solvent. It can hold an unbelievable amount of different molecules in solution. Water is constantly in motion, carrying things, carrying chemicals in solution, carbonic acid, which eats away at minerals and carrying sulphates, phosphates, carbonates, and oxides to the sea.

Streams and rivers carry aluminum and magnesium silicates in suspension, and carry rocks and boulders down stream , depositing sediments on the edge of the continental shelves. Over vast scales of time water recycles all the major elements of life except nitrogen.

No-one can survive without water. Not only do we have to drink it every day, but we wash in it, cook with it, clean with it, use it in manufacturing, use it in transportation, and in recreation.

Without water we wouldn't be able to make cement and even our houses would lack a foundation. It's indespensible in religion, where it signifies holiness, purity, and rebirth

Water is the mother of life. The very first living cell was born in water, All of us were conceived and gestated in water. When we are born, we are born from out of our mother's water.

We find ourselves drawn to water, and feel it's calmness, it's churning, it's raging, and it's bubbling. Houses with a water view are worth more money because of the positive psychological effect of seeing water.

But water by itself is not sufficient for life. Without the Earth in it's special relationship with the Sun, and the Earth's size and shape to hold and channel the water, life could not have existed.

What do I mean by Earth's special relationship with the Sun? We know that the Earth, unlike the rest of the planets is just the right distance away from the sun to keep most of the water on Earth in a liquid state. Not to cold to freeze everything and not too hot to boil it all away.

Water is necessary for life, but it's got to be largely in liquid form for life to have originated and for life to continue. That's because life's metabolic processes, the ways that living things get energy, all happen in liquid water.

When, cells photosynthesize it happens in water; When cells do respiration it happens in water; When cells divide it happens in water. All the molecular reactions that are necessary for life work in water and never outside it.

That doesn't mean that water isn't important to life in it's non-liquid phases. Right now 2.9 % of Earth's water is locked away in glacial ice. Over millions of years the glaciers ebb and flow creating ice ages and lowering sea levels then mysteriously stopping their advance over the Continents, retreating towards the poles and making the oceans rise during warmer times.

Water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide but the reason it does not play as important a role as carbon dioxide in global warming is because a water molecule only stays in the atmosphere for a matter of days, whereas a molecule of carbon dioxide can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

97% of Earth's water lies in the great oceans. Because water has one of the highest heat capacities of any substance, second only to ammonia, the Earth's oceans play an important role in moderating and regulating climate and temperature. Tune in next week when I talk about the effect of water on global temperature regulation.

Science vs Religion

2009-11-14T19:02:00.000-08:00

Religion and Science are two very different activities, but they are both quintessentially human endeavors.

Science is really a way of asking questions and getting answers. Scientists asks how things happen and look at antacedant causes to find the answers. But answers in science are provisional – never final. For instance, Issac Newton's Theory of Gravity was supplanted two hundred years later by Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

That's why scientific knowledge is made up of theories, not immutable decrees. Scientific knowledge is ever growing and never completed. This is different from religion where if someone adds new revelations to established scripture, it often becomes a separate religion with separate adherents, like Mormonism.

Religion, is also a way of asking questions and getting answers but it asks the question “Why?” rather than “How?” because it is really about meaning and purpose in our lives.

We are the only religious species because we don't do well if we don't have a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Science can also give one a sense of meaning and purpose but, because science is provisional – it doesn't give the same sense of security that religion does.

One of the reasons that science and religion conflict is because they are both about life, and life, as we have discovered, is about maintaining itself. Life is intrinsically purposive. Living creatures try to keep on living for as long as possible; They try and begat progeny; They behave purposefully.

Science has subtle problems with this because it doesn't like asking questions about purpose – that's too subjective. It would rather ask questions about physical causes.

One of the main reasons a lot of people are uneasy with scientific descriptions of life is that they sound too mechanistic and meaningless. You can get the impression from strict Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins, that life just happened to evolve purely by chance.

This offends our religious sensibilities – it certainly offends mine. Since everything about life is purposeful, I don't see how the evolution of life could all be due to chance.

But that's a religious approach, not a scientific approach. The questions: “Why does life exist?” and “Why am I here?” - that sort of thing.

I like to think that I'm here for a purpose, that the universe begat life for a purpose, that there is a meaning to life. These are concerns about my subjective experience, about my participation in life.

Science is trying to be objective, trying to approach the ideal of objectivity - which it never quite reaches, because it is provisional and never final. Science is largely uncomfortable getting mixed up in “subjective experience” But that's OK because we've got religion and our religious propensities to deal with the subjective.

We can be uneasy about mechanistic explanations of evolution and human behaviour, but some people go to the extreme of denying the existence of evolution and global warming.
When people deny that life evolved they are taking Martin Luther's extreme position that the holy scriptures trumps every other human authority, including and especially Science.

The people who wrote the Bible were not scientists, they were not really interested in the question of causes and evidence for causes. They were interested in religious questions about who we are, why we are here, why do bad things happen to us, and what happens after we die.

The people who wrote the Bible were fundamentally people. Therefore they had axes to grind, they had personal and political reasons for writing the things that they did. No living person is immune from this, especially not people who claim to be inspired by God, as recent events testify over and over again.

Whoever wrote the book of Genesis, in the Bible was not writing a scientific description of how life originated. He or she, was trying to get people to observe the Sabbath.

God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. So we should observe one day in the seven day week as a holy day. That's what that story is all about. This writer had ulterior motives as do all other writers.

When scientists ask questions such as: “How old is the human species?” and “Where and how did humans originate?” , the answer from Genesis, that God created the world in six days, just doesn't cut it. It's just a way of telling people to shut up and stop asking inconvenient questions.

The evidence is all around us that life is constantly changing, that life is incredibly old, that the Earth is incredibly old, and that we, as the human race, are not all that old. We should have respect for our elders.

Eukaryotic Cells: A Symbiotic Journey

2009-11-09T02:03:00.001-08:00

Symbiosis, is everywhere around us if we know what to look for. Lichens, those scraggly little things that grow on rocks, are half algae half fungi. Fungi and Algae are two very distant families The algae provides the ability to photosynthesize and the fungi provides the physical structure and the ability to gather nourishment from rocks. Neither of the two species that makes up the lichen can exist anymore without the other.

Coral is a creature that forms all the coral reefs in the warm waters of the oceans. Coral is both an animal and an algae. The algae is what gives coral it's colour the greens, reds, and yellows. The animal, called a polyp, is what secretes the calcium carbonate or rock hard body of the coral. If the water stays too warm for too long it kills the algae. If the algae die, the coral dies, because the animal part cannot survive without the energy it gets from the photosynthesizing algae.

The largest structure made from living creatures is the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. This is a series of coral reefs 2600 kilometers long and 344,000 square kilometers. This huge living structure is bleaching out and dying because the algae part of the coral organism cannot tolerate the warmer waters.

Trees are in symbiotic relationships with soil fungi that live on their root tips. The fungi extract minerals and chemicals from the soil and feed them to the tree and the tree is able to feed the fungi with sugars manufactured through photosynthesis in it's leaves.

Termites, which can eat wood, digest the wood with the help of specialized bacteria in their stomachs. Cows and other grass eating herbivores are able to digest the cellulose in grass because of bacteria in their stomachs. Without the bacteria, the cow would not be able to digest the grass. Without the cow, the bacteria wouldn't have access to so much fresh grass,

There are bacteria in our intestines that help us process our waste, making it easier for our intestines to absorb Vitamins B12 and K. Without these vitamins we get blood disorders. When both creatures benefit this is called symbiosis.

There is, in every cell in our body a thing called a mitochondria. Much smaller than a cell, the are about the size of a bacterial cell. The mitochondria take oxygen and sugars and join them to phosphorus creating molecules that store energy. They're like little generators inside your cell. And there can be anywhere from one to a thousand or more of these little mitochondria in each cell, especially in cells that do a lot of work like muscle cells.

In fact, mitochondria are in every type of eukaryotic cell, the type of cell that makes up just about every living thing we know about . But they do not exist in any prokaryotic cells, which is what bacteria are. That means that mitochondria originated when eukaryotic cells originated, two billion years ago, after the proportion of oxygen had increased in the atmosphere. Bacteria could live without oxygen, but eukaryotic single celled creatures with their bigger size and more complex structures couldn't have done without the extra energy that oxygen provided.

One of the most interesting things about mitochondria is that they have their own DNA. Not only that, they appear to be one of the few organelles like plastids in plants and algae, that divides by itself.

Microbiologist Lynn Margulis was not the first scientist to suggest that mitochondria and plastids were actually forms of ancient bacteria, but her version was the first to gain acceptance in the biological community. This was largely because when it became technically feasible to analyze the DNA of mitochondria and plastids separately from the cell's nucleus, scientists discovered that the DNA of these organelles was more closely related to the DNA of ancient bacteria then to the DNA in the cell's nucleus.

Something happened two billion years ago. An oxygen breathing bacteria got swallowed by or invaded a non-oxygen breathing bacteria. Instead of harming each other they benefitted each other. The new cell couldn't survive without the oxygen breathing bacteria so they too were passed on whenever the cell divided. Over time the oxygen breathing bacteria lost some of it's independence, until it too could not survive outside the cell.

All algae, all plants, all animals, all fungi, all single-celled eukaryotes came from this symbiotic combination of bacteria two billion years ago. And the evidence for this caper is in every one of our cells.

One of the reasons it took so long to accept this theory of cell symbiosis is because this didn't quite fit the Darwinian picture. Natural selection was supposed to be imperceptively gradual and stepwise. But here we have the biggest revolutionary change in biology next to the origin of life, the evolution of eukaryotic cells from procaryotic cells, occurring through the fusion of two or more types of ancient bacteria.

This wasn't a gradual series of changes in the cells' characteristics. This was a relatively sudden jump in the structure and functioning of a cell due to the joining together of two or more distinct species. It was not the slow gradual time frame that Darwin had suggested.

The evolution of dinosaurs and human beings was child's play compared to the evolution of the eukaryotic cell. And it couldn't have happened without symbiosis.

Eukaryotic Cells: Size Matters

2009-10-31T19:03:00.000-07:00

Every living thing is either a cell or made up of cells. The fact is, every living thing starts life as a single cell. This divides and divides again as the body is constructed cell by cell.

Lewis Thomas in his famous essay “Lives of a Cell said: “ The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived originally from a single cell.”

The cell is the basic building block of biology. It can be all there is to an organism as many creatures are single-celled, including all bacteria. For humans and other multi-celled creatures one cell can be a tiny fraction of our body, yet each and every cell in our bodies carries our entire genetic identity.

The cells of every living thing are unique. They all contain DNA molecules, the molecules of heredity, that are unique to that particular organism and nothing else. That's why my body can detect the cells of other organisms and produce antibodies that mark these alien cells for destruction by my immune system.

It was about two billion years ago I recall, when something very important happened and a new type of cell developed from bacterial cells. This new type of cell we call Eukaryotic.

If you are old enough to remember, at that time there were no plants, no animals, only microscopic critters called bacteria. Lots and lots of bacteria, many different kinds of bacteria: bacteria that ate iron sulphate and produced sulphur and bacteria that ate sulphur and produced hydrogen sulphide, bacteria that produced methane and bacteria that ate methane. And while there was great diversity in the different metabolic processes that bacteria could do there wasn't much diversity in the size and shape of bacteria.

Why would diversity of size and shape matter? Think about what a world of nothing but bacteria would look like... We're talking soup, slime, and ooze, and PU, what a smell. Enough to literally kill you - not a particularly attractive place to raise your kids. And that was what life on Earth was like for maybe three billion years. Until eukaryotic cells came along, that is.

OK, now what does life look like? There's grass, human beings, seaweed, eagles, redwood trees, moss, elephants, sharks and whales. There's microscopic single-celled sea creatures with fantastic glass houses called diatoms, there's turtles and squids and giant clams and periwinkles. Talk about different shapes and sizes and temperments. Better than 60 degrees of slime any day.

Eukaryotic cells, which is what plants, animals, fungi, and diatoms are made of, are bigger and more complex than prokaryotic (bacterial) cells. They have more parts than bacterial cells and much more DNA, 1000 times more. Eukaryotic cells have more membranes that separate and protect all the numerous parts of the cell.

Eukaryotic cells can do more things, they can specialize and link up to other cells forming organs and entire bodies. They have structures and scaffolding that allow the cells to move about like amoeba or link together like bones, skin, nerves and muscles or layers and fibers in a tree. They can secrete shells of calcium carbonates or silicates to surround and protect themselves.

Bacteria just don't have it in themselves to do any of these things. Their masters of the slime universe but what do they do besides consuming and polluting and exchanging genetic calling cards?

Let's not be disrespectful to our elders now. After all it was out of bacteria that the eukaryotic cell evolved. And that's the amazing thing that I'd like you to contemplate, because if we're looking at the “tree of life” then bacteria aren't in the branches and they aren't part of the trunk. They are in the roots.

Charles Darwin conceived of evolution as a tree with successive species as successively smaller branches, as old species went extinct and new species came into being. New species developed by inheriting new characteristics that eventually separated them from the old species.

Darwin saw the mechanism behind the generation of new species as the competitive struggle to survive. But note: the roots of a tree don't compete with each other. They each extract nutrients from the ground and send them into the tree.

Just so, the first eukaryotic cell evolved not from bacterial competition but from bacterial cooperation. That's something that Darwin didn't anticipate. Tune in next week as I describe how this symbiosis came about.

May the Phosphorous be With You

2009-10-22T18:23:00.000-07:00

Our brains require both sugar molecules and oxygen to remain conscious. Sugar is the product of photosynthesis. Oxygen is also the product of photosynthesis. Consciousness would not be possible without photosynthesis.

Imagine that. We think we are so independent, we can understand things not seen, see things that are no longer there, and predict things that haven't happened, yet we could not do any of these things without the existence of photosynthesizers.

Oxygen has great potential, electrically speaking. And molecules with phosphorous are the key to tapping its potential. Phosphorous is essential to bone formation and basic metabolism in most animals. It forms a part of ATP, otherwise known as Adenosine triphosphate and ADP, or Adenosine diphosphate. These are the molecules that are the workhorses of “ cellular respiration”

And DNA – the molecule of heredity, is non-functional without phosphorus. Maybe it's the power of love between Oxygen and Phosphorous that has really made it possible for life to endure longer than the mountains and the continents

Phosphorous burns with desire for Oxygen. To prove its love it will even burn under water. Carbon won't do that. So it is Phosphorous that makes Oxygen potential food rather than poison. Without Phosphorous Oxygen would have remained on the dark side of life. A deadly toxin that was killing off it's photosynthetic producers. We should be thankful for this intense love affair between Phosphorous and Oxygen, for without it we wouldn't exist.

In cellular respiration oxygen atoms are passed from one molecule to the next in a controlled stepwise process that extracts the maximum energy from an oxygen atom and makes it available to the cell for work. It is molecules of ATP and ADP that makes this possible.

Microbiologist Lynn Margulis is the scientist who first brought to our attention the idea that oxygen played a major role in shaping the direction of early evolution.

“Whereas fermentation typically produces two molecules of ATP for every sugar molecule broken down, the respiration of the same sugar molecule utilyzing oxygen can produce as many as thirty-six.”

“With greater quantities of energy available to them cyanobacteria exploded into hundreds of different forms. They spread into greater extremes of the environment, from cold marine waters to hot freshwater springs.”

“Cyanobacteria's continuing air pollution forced other organisms to acquire the ability to use oxygen too. This set off waves of speciation and the creation of elaborate forms and life cycles among them.”

“Growing, mutating and trading genes, some bacteria producing oxygen and others removing it, they maintained the oxygen balance of the entire planet.”

Oxygen has been twenty-one percent of the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. This is a sign of the endurance of the balance of nature. It shows that there has been a balance between photosynthesizers and respirers for at least that long.

If oxygen was much higher than 21% then all the plants on land would burn even if they were wet. But if there was much less oxygen than 21% then all animals, including humans would asphyxiate. So as animals that need to breathe and depend on plants for food we are lucky that there is just the right proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere.

How could this be? Some lovers of certainty think that there must be an intelligent designer behind it all. On the other hand, strict Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins can't explain this as anything but a coincidence. Neither considers that new properties can emerge from the ground up. In fact, living things maintain themselves. They sometimes adapt to change by changing the environment.

When too much oxygen was produced its dark side came into play. There was massive extinctions. When new forms of life evolved to take advantage of oxygen, the new form of energy, they quickly expanded in population. A new balance was created between the creatures that produce oxygen and the creatures, like us, that consume it. All this occurred over a timescale of millions of years.

There is a parallel between oxygen and oil. We humans have changed the face of the Earth much faster than any other creature. We discovered coal and oil in the ground and developed technologies like steam, diesel, and internal combustion engines to utilize the new form of energy. This occurred over a few hundred years.

Developing transportation, agricultural and extraction technologies based on machines that run on fossil fuels allowed the human population to grow rapidly because it gave us the ability to get more resources from the ground, to grow more food, and to provide more amenities for ourselves.

The greater population led to the greater utilization of fossil fuels which in turn is leading to a greater output of carbon dioxide. It is carbon dioxide that regulates global temperature and ocean acidity. Increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere along with other stresses on other life forms caused by increases in human population is leading to a new major extinction event.

Many creatures will go extinct. Carbon dioxide will stabilize at some higher level until millions of years from now new life forms evolve to fill the empty niches left behind by the mass extinctions and they draw down the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere once again.

The balance of nature is a metaphor, but it represents a real process. In maintaining itself life uses energy and creates pollution. Pollution is toxic to many organisms and many of them die off. New life forms evolve to take advantage of the pollution creating a balance.

But remember the sand pile. Adding a single grain of sand can sometimes effect the entire pile. The global combination of all living creatures may keep the content of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in stable proportions until a new creature, in this case one that adds huge amounts of carbon dioxide, tips the entire system over.

Oxygen: Saviour

2009-10-15T23:09:00.000-07:00

We're the blue planet. That's us. When you're talking planets - blue is associated with life. The blue colour comes from oxygen which makes up a large portion of the weight of a water molecule. And the blue sky also comes from the element oxygen. Oxygen comprises twenty-one percent of our atmosphere.

The colour red also has to do with oxygen. Rust, gets it's red colour because it is oxidized iron. Blood gets it's red colour from the iron and oxygen in hemoglobin. The planet Mars gets it's red colour from oxidized minerals which means that Mars used to have oxygen, probably in the form of water.

Oxygen, with it's all consuming hunger for electrons, has a lot of potential energy. But it is potential for good or ill. Free oxygen has the potential to destroy biological molecules. That's why we use bleach to get out stains. Bleaching is an oxidation process. Oxygen, by grabbing electrons from other elements, weakens covalent bonds in organic molecules leading to their disintegration.

Atmospheric oxygen is the source for ozone, a molecule made up of three oxygen atoms. Ozone is a toxic pollutant, an ingredient in automobile exhaust, but it also exists in the atmosphere where it protects life on Earth from ultraviolet rays. High up in the atmosphere a layer of ozone absorbs the ultraviolet light that would otherwise harm living creatures.

Not only does ultraviolet light harm living things but for time periods of billions of years it has even greater potential for harm. The high energy content of ultraviolet light means that it has the power to break the bonds of water molecules.

Once liberated from water, hydrogen can escape Earth's gravity into space. Without protection, over billions of years, the sun's ultraviolet rays could deplete the oceans of water.

There is evidence on Mars – the famous “Canals” - that there was once water there. Now there is no water and only a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide. No oxygen in the atmosphere. No ozone to protect against ultraviolet light. No water anymore. And without water there is no life.

No life without water and no water without life. Earth has both. Mars had only one and now has none.

Twenty years ago there was an international treaty signed to protect the ozone layer from a man-made substance called freon. Freon was used as the main coolant in virtually all refrigerators and air conditioners. The problem was that when it was released into the air , which is what happens eventually when all fridges and air conditioners are discarded, it rose high into the atmosphere where it chemically reacting with ozone - destroying it.

Sometime during the 1990's Scientists discovered a “hole” in the Ozone in the southern hemisphere. The Ozone hole has gotten smaller since countries complied with the treaty and stopped manufacturing freon, but not before it took it's toll on Australia, where the incidence of skin cancer has increased considerably.

When bacteria first existed there was no oxygen so there was no ozone to protect living things from ultraviolet rays. It took millions of years for oxygen to reach a high enough percentage for the protective ozone layer to develop. We call that a “Time-lag. In that time bacteria were on their own to develop resistance to these deadly toxins: oxygen and ultraviolet light.

Life is autopoietic, but in maintaining itself life alters the chemistry of the Earth. And when that chemistry changed from zero free oxygen to twenty-one percent free oxygen, life developed in a radical new direction.

From photosynthesis, to – “respiration” – the utilization of oxygen to supply chemical energy to life, oxygen,which was first a pollutant and a toxin, became the basis for all new forms of life.

Tune in next week when we learn who helped Oxygen turn from the “dark side” and transform into a Creator.

Why Bacteria Invented Sex

2009-10-07T22:56:00.000-07:00

Bacteria are the ultimate survivors. They've been around for three and a half billion years. Longer than the continents, and all the mountain ranges on Earth. In contrast, the animal kingdom has been here only a paltry six hundred million years – one sixth of that time.

Bacteria are the simplest of creatures being as they were the first of all creatures to exist. They are single-celled. They are so small,that they are invisible to the naked eye. But they are not solitary creatures and they live in huge communities that are sometimes visible in the form of coloured blobs of slime, the kind you might see in a petri dish or on rotting food. It's easy to look down on them as disgusting and smelly but without them we would not exist.

It is bacteria, more than any other creature that has altered the face of the Earth – breaking down it's rocks, and adding to it's atmosphere gases such as carbon dioxide - which is crucial to Earth's temperature regulation, methane, and oxygen – without which we animals could not survive.

The technical name for bacterial cells is “Prokaryotes” , which refers to the fact that bacteria don't have a nucleus. All “Eukaryotic cells” - the kind of cells that we have in our bodies – have a nucleus. The nucleus contains all our genetic material wound up like the rubber strands in a golf ball only way tighter – if the DNA in the nucleus of one of your cells was unwound it would stretch to the moon and back several times.

That extra genetic material and the protective membrane means that eukaryotic cells can do more things and make up more complex multicellular organisms like us.

In contrast bacteria don't have as much genetic material. And the genes are looser, not packed as tight because they are not surrounded by a nuclear membrane.

But, bacteria have an advantage over eukaryotic cells. Bacteria are the original party animals. They love to hang out in huge numbers, and they're not so particular that they have to hang out with their own species. They love to mix and when they mingle they can easily exchange genetic material with whoever they please. They have no shame and the whole thing is over in seconds. Which means that bacterial evolution has been fantastically quicker than the evolution of eukaryotes

This bacterial promiscuity is the basis for genetic engineering, by the way. Because it's so easy to get bacteria to take on different genetic material bacteria can be given genes that will manufacture just about anything we want. That kind of stuff is just not possible for eukaryotic cells, thank God.

Technically speaking, “sex” is the exchange of genetic material between different organisms. It isn't necessarily tied to reproduction the way it is for bigger eukaryotic creatures. Bacteria aren't male and female because they pre-date reproductive sex.

It's immaculate conception. Bacteria can split all by themselves, And go on making millions of exact copies of themselves. They don't need love. But they need protection from toxins.

Ultraviolet light coming from the sun is hazardous to life. It can damage biological molecules. It damages DNA molecules,the genetic material for all forms of life. In Microcosmos, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's book about microbial evolution, the authors hypothesize about this connection: “The pressure to patch up damaged DNA or die induced the development of DNA repair systems. Sometimes instead of using healthy copies of their own genetic material, crowded bacteria borrowed DNA from their neighbours.”

“By adapting to life under harsh light the microcosm had invented sex. Though this first sex was different from the kind of sex animals are involved in, it was sex all the same...”

This was probably their most important means of evolving rapidly in the face of environmental danger. We now know why it was so easy for bacteria to aquire resistance to deadly toxins like anti-biotics. Bacterial sex takes advantage of the natural variety in the population to provide resistance to new toxins.

It's easy enough to say that bacteria should have just kept away from the sun's dangerous rays, and then they would have survived. Because if that's all they ever did they would never have developed photosynthesis and then we wouldn't exist. It's autopoieses. Life maintains itself. And life that survives over time does so because it adapts to Earth's changing environment. In next week's article we will discover how life can also change the odds for itself in a positive direction by altering the environment.

Oxygen: Destroyer

2009-09-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

Oxygen gas is an anomoly. Earth's atmosphere should not be 21% molecular oxygen because oxygen is a very greedy element. It wants electrons badly and would much rather take those electrons by binding with elements on Earth's surface, then hanging around with other oxygen atoms in the atmosphere. As long as these elements are out there oxygen will "oxidize" them, which is what happens when iron rusts or something catches fire.

So why is there always 21% oxygen in the atmosphere? No other planet in our solar system has free oxygen in it's atmosphere (even though it's the third most abundant element in the universe). But no other planet in our solar system has liquid water and no other planet in our solar system has life. That's where the connection lies. It all hinges on a metabolic process called photosynthesis that was invented about two billion years ago by the bacterial ancestor of cyanobacteria or "bluegreen algae".

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, in their book, What is Life?, call photosynthesis: "the most important metabolic innovation in the history of the planet." Why? Because with photosynthesis life could derive energy from freely available sunlight for the first time.

The first bacteria probably lived off hydrogen sulphide bubbling up from volcanic vents under the sea. They derived their energy from catalyzing the hydrogen bonds, combining hydrogen with carbon to make simple sugars. Eventually, different kinds of bacteria evolved that were able to catalyze various non-organic substances such as iron and sulphur, then other bacteria evolved that could derive still more energy by fermenting the waste products of previous kinds of bacteria. Note that all early bacteria were "anaerobic", that is they did not use oxygen in any metabolic process.

There's a pattern here. First, an organism develops a way of getting energy from one substance. Then it grows and multiplies until it exhausts that resource. A crisis ensues which leads to the evolution of new life that is able to utilize new forms of energy, then those resources are exhausted and a new crisis ensues. Out of these series of life-crises bacteria came to invent every single metabolic process utilized by living things. Margulis and Sagan's point is that the development of photosynthesis temporarily bypassed this boom and bust process. By utilizing the energy from sunlight the ancestor of cyanobacteria was able to metabolize enough energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, obtaining hydrogen from a virtually limitless source - the oceans - something that no bacteria before it was able to do.

But photosynthesis wasn't just a brilliant solution for bacteria, it rewrote the rule book for every single new life-form that has evolved since that time 2.5 billion years ago. Because, other than bacteria, all forms of life are either photosynthesizers themselves or they survive by eating photosynthesizers or by eating animals that eat photosynthesizers. That's what we mean by "the food chain".

Let's go back to that connection between oxygen in the atmosphere, water, and life. Because they had just liberated themselves from energy scarcity, the new kids on the block - bluegreen bacteria - were able to grow and multiply and grow and grow and grow until they had covered Earth's surface, wherever there was moisture. We're talking all the oceans and most of the surface rocks. We're talking a vast global empire of bluegreen slime.

But in the process of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, bluegreen bacteria gave off oxygen gas as a waste product. Thus the second type of crisis: pollution. Life multiplies up to it's limit, but in this case, because we are talking about sunlight and water as raw materials there was no imminent shortage. But there was a problem with pollution. Oxygen was created as a waste product and oxygen was toxic to bacteria in those times. In fact if sufficient atmospheric oxygen had been around at the time that life originated it wouldn't have originated. The oxygen would have burned up all the organic molecules before they had a chance to react with each other. Like I said, oxygen is greedy.

At first the oxygen pollution wasn't much of a problem, because oxygen was reacting with all the surface rocks, so it didn't stay long in the atmosphere. There are red bands of oxidized iron and other oxidized minerals in the layers of ancient rocks that date back to that time about two billion years ago. And, in fact, that's the strata of rocks that supplies us with iron ore to this day. From the rock record of oxidized iron we can read back the time it took for oxygen to get a foothold in the atmosphere - four hundred million years. But once everything was oxidized, all the oxygen that was produced by photosynthetic bacteria stayed in the atmosphere, creating a vast die-off of anaerobic bacteria.

Nowadays anaerobic bacteria are far less dominant, existing only in earth, mud, stagnant water, and in the guts of animals, all places where they are safe from the ravages of free oxygen.

This global event, when oxygen increased from one millionth to one fifth of the atmosphere was, according to Margulis and Sagan, in their book: MicroCosmos, "..by far the greatest pollution crisis the earth has ever endured." Unfortunately, there is no fossil record of this event, as bacteria, not having bones or hard shells have left very little in the way of fossils.

Since animals evolved,six hundred million years ago, and three billion years after bacteria evolved, there have been five major extinction events recorded in the fossil background. These were global catastrophes, where from fifty to ninety-five percent of all species on Earth were wiped out. The most famous of these was the Jurassic-Cretaceous event sixty-five million years ago, believed to be caused by a giant meteorite striking the Earth, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs and paving the way for warm-blooded species like birds and mammals.

We are now, as we speak, involved in the sixth (or seventh, if you include "the Oxygen Holocaust") global extinction event, an event which is predicted to lead to the extinction of more than fifty percent of all species in our lifetime. This one is due to carbon dioxide pollution and habitat destruction caused by our clever utilization of a previously unused energy source - hydrocarbons. What goes around comes around, as they say. Whether we will survive it or not, is an open question. Stay tuned.

The Carbon Connection

2009-09-01T00:21:00.000-07:00

“Only connect!... Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...” E. M. Forster

What do we mean when we say that life is an interdependent web? Partly it's a metaphor that points to the way that living things make up of a vast network of interrelations. How are living things connected? All life-forms are made from the same types of molecules: water, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, DNA, and RNA; All life forms metabolize energy with the help of enzymes made from amino acids; All life-forms share a common ancestor, according to Darwin's theory of evolution; All living things ultimately depend on the Sun's energy; All living things share materials and substances that are only available on Earth; All living things interact cooperatively and competitively with other living things.

All well and good, but what makes this vast and intricate global interdependence possible? If I was to pick one thing it would be the element Carbon. You may recall that I said in the previous article that each element is a kind of character. Carbon is the most extroverted sociable element there is. He is an exceptionally friendly fellow. He makes bonds with everybody and they are often strong bonds called covalent bonds that require more energy than the other two kinds of bonds to break apart. Diamonds, the hardest substance known, are made from pure carbon bonded covalently.

OK, lots of elements bond covalently, but what differentiates Carbon from everyone else is that he can't get enough of himself. Carbon loves to bond with himself and does it over and over in chains, and in rings, in two dimensional sheets and in three dimensional tetrahedons. There is literally no end to the number of carbon atoms that can join together to form chains of fantastically diverse lengths.

And Carbon is a multi-tasker extraordinaire. So while he's linking up to carbon copies of himself, he's always socializing with the other elements on the side, especially with Oxygen,Hydrogen and Nitrogen. These chains of carbons with various side links then form the backbones for literally all the molecules of life: the proteins, enzymes, carbohydrates, fats, etc... It's the incredibly complex shapes that are created by carbon bonds that are the key to life.

Life is autopoietic - it maintains itself over time. But in order to maintain itself a living organism must perform many functions , all of which require a vast variety of different kinds of molecules and only Carbon makes that possible .

But that's not all, because Carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, is essential in regulating Earth's surface temperature and the acidity of the ocean and our bodies. These are big jobs and somebody's got to do them, or life as we know it would cease to exist. So why Carbon?

You'd think that a substance that makes up only .03% of the Earth's atmosphere would hardly be up for the job, but it's the size of the molecule that matters when it comes to the greenhouse effect. And carbon dioxide with three atoms, one Carbon and two Oxygen, is a bigger molecule than the two other main components of the atmosphere – Nitrogen and Oxygen - which each form molecules of only two atoms each. Note that water and methane, which are also bigger sized molecules are even more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide but they don't remain in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide does, so their effect is smaller.

We think of carbon dioxide as being the bad guy because of global warming but in actual fact without carbon dioxide the Earth would be a ball of ice. It's just that our industries and transportation systems are producing too much carbon dioxide right now. But that's for another article.

When carbon dioxide dissolves in water it forms a weak solution of carbonic acid and bicarbonate which together makes it a buffer. Chemical buffers keep the pH of a solution more stable by neutralizing acids and bases, thus keeping the ocean and our blood at near constant pH. But if too much carbon dioxide is dissolved in water then it loses it's buffering quality and becomes an acid. When that happens in our blood stream we die from acidosis. The thing is, the metabolic reactions that sustain life only occur in a narrow range of temperatures and pH, so Carbon's role in regulating temperature and ocean pH is vital to life. The problem is when too much carbon gets into the atmosphere both those systems go out of whack and then we get into trouble.

When you think about it, we take Carbon for granted. Carbon has got a lot of responsibility for supporting life as we know it . We oughta give him some slack instead of making his job harder. After all, he's kinda like that guy Atlas, the one who holds up the sky in Greek mythology. Maybe somebody should write a book about him – a “green” Atlas Shrugged.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

2009-08-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

“We are called to restore within ourselves the sense of awe and delight, to respond to matter as a mystery of ever increasing connection.” - Patriarch Bartholomew

What makes life possible? For those of you who successfully avoided Chemistry classes in high school, I'll try to make it simple by talking about four (that is, mostly four) elements. But it doesn't end there. To really understand what makes life possible you need to go all the way back to the beginning of the Universe. You think I'm kidding right? Nope.

Just about everything there is is made from countless atoms. Atoms are ridiculously small. You can't see them even in electron microscopes. There are only about one hundred kinds of atoms. Each kind is called an element and it has unique characteristics that differ from all the other elements. All the atoms of a particular element say, Hydrogen, have virtually identical chemical properties. If you've seen one, you've seen em all. And the same goes for the rest of the elements. But to reiterate, each element has a set of chemical characteristics that's unique to it and it alone. So understanding those characteristics helps to understand why those particular elements are so basic to life.

Our bodies are mostly made up of four main elements. They are, in order of abundance: Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon and Nitrogen. I like to think of each one of these four elements as characters in a story. Each one has it's quirks, it's own special history.

Hydrogen is really special. It's in a class by itself. It's the lightest element, the simplest element, and the most abundant element in the Universe, although wait another ten billion years and that will no longer be the case. But for now it's tops. Hydrogen is also the oldest element because all the hydrogen that exists came into existence during the Big Bang – the origin of the Universe.

Let's just stop and think about that for a moment. One of the main ingredients that makes up our bodies comes from the very origins of the Universe. Every hydrogen atom in our bodies, and believe me, there's a lot of them, is fourteen billion years old. Talk about experienced. Those hydrogen atoms have seen it all. And because hydrogen is so simple – one proton and one electron – it reacts with everything. They've had relationships with every other element many times over. Been there, done that.

Hydrogen is also the main fuel for stars. Stars like the Sun are giant furnaces that burn hydrogen giving off incredible amounts of energy that we see as light. It's the Sun's radiation, caused by the fusion of hydrogen atoms that ultimately supports all life on Earth.

Hydrogen is the building block of the universe, and all the other elements are made from it, forged in the fiery furnaces of stars. A star like our Sun, which is about 4.5 billion years old and counting, is too small and doesn't burn hot enough to create many kinds of elements. That job is reserved for supergiants, stars so big that they burn up in a matter of tens of millions of years , then explode into supernovas, explosions so awesome they can light up a whole galaxy, outshining millions of other stars. It's in the unbelievably hot core of these explosions where all the heavier elements are forged, which include the other three elements that are important to life: Oxygen, Carbon, and Nitrogen.

Life, which requires these and other heavier elements, could not exist without the death of supergiant stars. Joni Mitchell was right, we are stardust. And we have to get back to the garden too, but that's another article. And so begins a theme that I will come back to again and again: even as every living thing dies, life itself comes from death.

What is Life?

2009-08-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

What is life? Biology is the study of life and yet a typical modern biology text with, say, about 1200 pages will devote at most about three pages (and usually less) to answering this question . You will be hard put to find any University courses exclusively devoted to this subject. But after all, Biologists study living things, they are not philosophers.

Everyone has an intuitive feeling for what life is. We can generally tell the difference between something that is alive and something that is either dead or simply material matter. Living things move, they feel warm to the touch, and they react to stimuli. That's enough for most people. But think of a flame or a hurricane. They both move, grow, and die, they react to stimuli and give off heat but they are not alive in the same sense as you or I.

What differentiates a living thing from a flame? Like living things, a flame metabolizes. It takes energy in from the environment and processes it. A flame burns because it's reached a certain temperature and it's fed by fuel. Once the fuel is used up the flame dies. The flame does not go looking for more fuel somewhere else. But a living creature will maintain itself purposefully; it will search out food sources; it will avoid dangers and predators; it will adapt to changing circumstances; it will reproduce and thus maintain some of it's genetic characteristics even after it dies.

This ability to self-maintain is called “autopoiesis”. It's an amazing property because it has created an unbroken link between us and the very first cell. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, in their book, What is Life? capture it's essence well: “ Once autopoiesis appeared in the tiniest bacterial ancestor it was never completely lost....As sheer persistence of biochemistry “we” have never died during the passage of three billion years. Mountains and seas and even supercontinents have come and gone but we have persisted.”

How does autopoiesis come about? We have to be careful when we try to answer this question because it's all too easy to go in circles. Did the first bacterial cell create itself on purpose? And this is also the place where those of us who are impatient for certainty want to bring in God, alias - “The Intelligent Designer”.

Imagine a sandpile. A constant trickle of grains is being added to the middle of the pile. At some point just adding a single grain can cause an avalanche. Maybe a small avalanche, maybe a large avalanche. There's actually no way predict which it will be. Thus the sandpile exhibits complex behaviour. Per Bak, the Danish Physicist who came up with the sandpile model explains how it works in his book How Nature Works – The Science of Self-Organized Criticality:

“The addition of grains of sand has transformed the system from a state in which individual grains follow their own local dynamics to a critical state where the emergent dynamics are global.... It is clear that to have this average balance between the sand added to the pile say, in the center, and the sand leaving the edges, there must be communication throughout the entire system. There will occasionally be avalanches that span the whole pile. This is the self-organized critical state.”

Of course the sandpile doesn't do anything besides reach a peak and spill over it's edges but the point is that it is a simplified model that gets at the essence of emergence. It shows how complex global behaviour can emerge from the simple addition of individual parts without recourse to purpose or design. This model has been used to explain how complex systems such as living cells, human societies, and economic systems can come about from the bottom up, that is through the action of individuals alone.

Obviously autopoiesis, life's ability to self-maintain, is an emergent phenomenon. It cannot be predicted from the chemical properties of all of the molecules in a cell. But we now know that it is possible for such an emergent property to come about from the bottom up, that is from some critical state brought about by the addition of a sufficient number of certain kinds of molecules. For now how these molecules first came together is a matter of conjecture.

One of the problems with Darwin's theory of Evolution has been that although natural selection can explain the evolution of life from the first cell to all the living creatures that exist today it doesn't explain how the first cell came to be. Many critics have pointed out the fantastically small odds of such a cell ever coming to be by chance. We used to think that there were only two alternatives: chance or design. But now we see a third alternative: self-organized criticality. And this fits better with the continuing scientific project of reading universality into the world. Life is an inevitable property of a certain level of molecular organization. That is, whenever that level of organizational complexity is reached that organization will self-maintain and life will occur. The question is – what are the conditions that make autopoieses possible? This is a question I will address in my next series of articles.

What Are They Smoking Now?

2009-08-24T23:25:00.000-07:00

It ain't easy being green, making Canadians feel badly about the Tar Sands. I could have had a comfortable job like Ben Eisen, earning a living working for the Frontier Center For Public Policy, helping Canadians feel good about themselves. ( http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/767682 ) The Tar Sands may be spewing megatons of carbon dioxide into the air but it's really OK because Canada's "emission intensity" has decreased.
Gosh, I feel better already, knowing that Canada has gotten much more efficient at contributing to global warming. Let me guess.... The Frontier Center For Public Policy wouldn't be funded by any oil companies would it? Nah. After all they're at the frontier of public policy, and have nothing to do with the nasty corporate back rooms where they're pulling the strings on government energy policy.
Reminds me of a story I once heard. Remember "light cigarettes"? Not so long ago the big tobacco companies spent millions in an effective campaign to confuse the public and delay governments from regulating what has turned out to be a very carcinogenic product. During those times some marketing genius thought up the idea of "light cigarettes" - cigarettes with less nicotine and tar. The idea was that if smokers knew that tobacco caused cancer they might be enticed to smoke a product that appeared to be safer. Instead of quitting, they could feel less guilty and better about themselves by smoking something "safer". It turns out that light cigarettes were just as likely to cause cancer as ordinary cigarettes because smokers unconsciously smoked them more intensely and therefore received equivalent amounts of nicotine and tar as if they had smoked regulars.
It's no coincidence that the global warming delayers are talking about emission intensity instead of "crude indicators such as total emissions" of carbon dioxide. Why not recycle a clever idea when you don't have anything good to offer in the first place.

Prophecy and Kairos

2009-08-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

“From the moment when a (large scale) disaster appears inevitable and especially after it becomes a reality, it can, like every great torment, become a productive force for the religious point of view. It begins to suggest new questions and to stress old ones.”

“Dogmatized conceptions are pondered afresh in the light of events, and the faith relationship that has to stand the test of an utterly changed situation is renewed in modified form. But the new acting force is nothing less than the force of extreme despair, a despair so elemental, that it can have but one of two results: the sapping of the last will of life, or the renewal of the soul.”

I love this quote from Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian because it seems so appropriate for our times. And yet, it was not written in response to the threat of global warming, it was written seventy years ago, just after the second world war ended, a war which like the ancient Babylonian and Roman assaults on Jerusalem, threatened the very survival of Judaism. This quote comes, not from Buber's most famous work: I and Thou, but from a book called The Prophetic Faith, a book about the ancient Hebrew prophets.

Judaism is unique among the world religions in having a long historical line of major prophets – historical figures like Jeremiah who spoke truth to power at a time when there was no free press or human rights. The Hebrew word for prophet “nabi”, means “one who is called” . The nabi saw themselves as called to speak the word of God even if it was opposed to what the Hebrew kings and their subjects wanted to hear. The prophets challenged their rulers to adhere more strictly to monotheism and eschew the worship of other gods. They also protested against injustice and gross inequality. This was at a time when the Hebrew culture and religion were under direct threat of extinction from the much more powerful empires around them.

It is instructive to note the historical period when the Hebrew prophets were active. We are talking about a period of about four hundred years from the time of king David and king Solomon, to the rebuilding of Solomon's temple after the Babylonian exile. During these times the Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judah were declining in power and increasingly threatened by the powerful empires of the Assyrians and the Babylonians.

Eventually in 722 Bce , the kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian army and the population scattered to the four corners of the Assyrian Empire, where they disappeared from history. That's what happened to the ten lost tribes, by the way.

Two hundred years later Judah, the remaining Hebrew kingdom was conquered by the Babylonian army. Solomon's temple was reduced to rubble and the major portion of Jerusalem's population was exiled to the capital city of Babylon.

It was during these disastrous times that the Hebrew prophets were active. The amazing thing is that with all this destruction the Jewish religion not only survived it became more resilient. In contrast, there is no Moabite, Canaanite, Egyptian, or Babylonian religion today in spite of the fact that some of these countries lasted much longer than Israel and Judah.

After Solomon's temple was rebuilt the Hebrew Bible records no more major prophets. Ezra, the Jewish leader who oversaw the rebuilding of the temple was most likely the same person who edited and redacted the Hebrew Bible into the basic form that we know today. He wove together the various writings – the historical material, and the writings of the prophets into a single work which codified Jewish monotheism. A large part of the Hebrew Bible, in fact, is devoted to the writings of the prophets, and for a very good reason. For without these prophets the Jewish religion would not have survived.

A common misperception of a prophet is of someone who predicts the future. This is not what the Hebrew prophets were doing, and if it was they would not have been able to save the Jewish religion from extinction. I think Buber has the best description of what prophecy is about: “ A true prophet does not announce an immutable decree. He speaks to the power of decision lying in the moment and in such a way that his message just touches this power.” The future is uncertain. What decisions we make now will effect our future. The role of the prophet is to point out the consequences of our present actions and the possibilities of renewal if we change our behaviour.

Today, three thousand years later, our global civilization is under threat of extinction from the very different threats of global warming and eco-catastrophes. And religion does not play the same role that it did in ancient times. Because our civilization is global, and there are many world religions no single religion has the capability to unify and preserve our cultures. Our civilization probably doesn't have one hundred years left, let alone four hundred years. The world religions are slowly responding to the new ecological threats, but the role of the prophet is now paramount and the new prophets are not necessarily religious prophets. While religion has a definite role to play in all of this it is largely scientific knowledge that feeds modern prophecy, if we keep true to Buber's definition of what prophecy is.

In the Greek language there are two concepts of time: “chronos” which refers to sequential time, and “kairos” (pronounced keros) which refers to the right time or opportune moment. According to the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich kairos refers to a crisis in history which demands a life-changing decision on the part of each person. According to Tillich, the coming of Christ is the prime Christian example.

Today global warming is our kairos. This is what Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew has said, and he elaborates in his essay: “The Orthodox Church and the Environmental Crisis”

Our way of life is humanly and environmentally suicidal....yet the crisis is not first of all ecological. It is a crisis in the way we perceive reality and relate to our world......At a time when we have polluted the air we breathe and the water we drink, we are called to restore within ourselves the sense of awe and delight, to respond to matter as a mystery of ever increasing connection.

I can't help seeing an analogy between Patriarch Bartholomew's saying that this is a crisis in the way we perceive reality and relate to our world and the Hebrew prophets' relentless emphasis on monotheism during their prolonged crisis. The ancient Hebrew prophets saw monotheism as the key to Jewish survival. The importance of monotheism to Judaism is that it redefined the relationship between the Jewish people and the divine and it changed the way they perceived the divine. Jesus called the “Shema” from Deuteronomy the great commandment: “You shall love the Lord God with all your heart and all your soul, and all your might.” It basically sums up Judaism in one sentence.

I am not advocating monotheism as the answer to the ecological crisis. Judaism was saved from extinction because a lot of people worked hard to change the Jewish people's perception of their relationship with the divine. To love God with all your heart is to make God personally meaningful, which means that this relationship can survive regardless of whether or not there is a temple, or official priests, or the proper sacrifices. That's why Judaism could survive and grow stronger after the destruction of the temple and the exile. Our civilization will only survive if we stop perceiving nature as something we can control and start seeing ourselves as just one part of the interdependent web of life. “We are called to restore within ourselves the sense of awe and delight, to respond to matter as a mystery of ever increasing connection.” I say amen to that.

Why We Love

2008-12-17T03:13:00.000-08:00

I've just been reading a book called “Hold Me Tight” by Sue Johnson. Johnson's claim is that love between adults has the same emotional attachment issues as the love between a mother and child. She writes, “You are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection.”

Attachment Theory, is a psychological theory proposed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, that infants form attachments to any consistent caregiver who is sensitive and responsive to the infant. This is usually the child's mother, but it doesn't have to be. It could be the father, grandmother, or older sibling. The theory posits that children attach to mothers or other caring figures instinctively. The need for safety and protection, which is paramount in infancy and childhood, is the basis of the bond. If the mother figure is unavailable or unresponsive, separation distress occurs and the anticipation of such an occurrence arouses separation anxiety.

We've all seen examples of this in babies and toddlers when they are relaxed and willing to explore strange situations in close proximity with their mother but react to the same situations with fear and anger if they are deprived of access to their mother. An implication of attachment theory is that a lasting attachment bond with a mother figure is necessary in order for children to be physically and emotionally healthy. Strong evidence in support of the theory comes from observations of babies in orphanages, who, in spite of being fed, clothed, and housed, failed to thrive in the absence of emotional bonds to caregivers.

The theory, which initially was scoffed at by the psychoanalytic mainstream is now universally accepted. But the theory that adult loving relationships are attachment bonds is less accepted. Most of us would agree that adults should be mature, independent, and self-sufficient. We have names for people who are too dependent on others. We call them “immature”, “undifferentiated”, “clingy”, “enmeshed”, and “co-dependent”.

Right now about fifty percent of those who marry eventually get divorced. Having gone through one myself I know all too well how painful and destructive a divorce can be for a family. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. Sue Johnson, a marriage counsellor, wanted to help people in struggling marriages stay together. After working with and then observing them over and over on tape she developed a therapy called Emotionally Focused Therapy or EFT, based on the “key negative and positive emotional moments that defined a relationship.” When she tried to figure out why her therapy worked she came up with the idea that bonds between adult couples were based on “the innate need for safe emotional connection” just like the needs of infants for their mother.

When we feel secure with our lover we can reach out and connect to others easily, we are more curious and open to new information but when we feel insecure, we become anxious, angry, controlling or distant and we are less empathetic to others. “Just what Bowlby and Ainsworth found with children and their mothers,” says Johnson.

According to Sue Johnson, when a marriage is in trouble it is usually because the couple is disconnected emotionally. Neither partner feels emotionally safe with each other. “Most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection,” she says. “Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: “Can I count on you and depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you?” When we express anger, criticism, and demands in a marital spat we are trying to draw our spouse in emotionally and re-establish a sense of safe connection. What we are really saying is: “Notice me. Be with me. I need you.”

When they first express these emotions it can actually work to draw couples together, but over time it only makes them more stuck. Couples quickly develop negative patterns of interaction which work to push each other farther and farther apart. When one partner becomes critical and aggressive the other becomes defensive and distant. According to Johnson, when we withdraw and detach from our partner we are really trying to soothe and protect ourselves. We are really saying: “I won't let you hurt me. I will be independent and stay in control.” Unfortunately the longer we engage in these patterns of conflict the greater the loss of mutual trust. According to psychologist and marital therapist John Gottman, “couples who get stuck in this pattern have more than 80% chance of divorcing within five years.

Johnson emphasizes that “When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness.” When a relationship is failing men often focus on sexual incompatibility. Men aren't comfortable acknowledging their need for emotional closeness so they focus on sex which is a more limited expression of this need. “Think of sexual distress as the relationship version of the “canary in the coal mine,” says Johnson. “What's really happening is that a couple is losing connection; the partners don't feel emotionally safe with each other. That in turn leads to slackening desire and less satisfying sex...”

The idea is to let secure attachment and sexuality come together by creating a “positive loop of closeness, responsiveness, caring, and desire.”

What's Happening to Canada?

2008-12-08T21:59:00.000-08:00

There's an old Chinese curse that some of you may have heard of: “May you live in interesting times.” I think of it when I compare the Canadian election this past October and the parliamentary crisis this December. For the first time in a long time Canadian politics is actually more interesting than American politics.

When Barak Obama was elected President in November the whole world rejoiced. When Stephen Harper was re-elected the head of another minority government in Canada it seemed barely a blip in our consciousness.

But what a difference one month makes. Just last week I've had people who tell me they have little interest in politics, turn around and ask me to explain to them the workings of minority parliaments. I can't remember this much interest in Canadian politics before.

The turn out for this latest federal election should have been a wake-up call. Only 59.1% of those eligible voted. The lowest rate ever recorded. And no wonder. The previous minority government was boring. It wasn't a coalition. The Liberals, who supported the government, had no say in it. They just went along with whatever Harper threw at them for fear a sudden election would kill their popularity.

Now that Stephane Dion has agreed to step down he's finally had the guts to stand up to Harper, but, of course it's too late for Dion. Still it has made a huge difference to our political situation. We've gone from a pathetically low election turn-out to a bunch of super-motivated people. Noisy demonstrations in our nation's capital; people singing “O' Canada”; ecstatic greens and leftists; outraged -and- vocal- about-it conservatives. It's definitely woken-up a large cross-section of Canadians. And that's a good thing.

Now Albertans are talking about separation because of those “pointy-headed easterners wanting to run Canada.” And in Quebec, the until-now moribund separatist movement has sprung back to life because Harper decided to adopt the tactics of Karl Rove. (to motivate your base demonize your opponents and their political parties even if that will alienate the other half of the country.) Because all that's really important for him is getting and holding on to power.

We've been witness to the real Stephen Harper in these last few weeks. The guy who wants it all but doesn't want to compromise with anybody else to get it. In the recent election Harper seriously hurt his party's chances in Quebec when he showed his disdain for government assisting culture. Now he's permanently blown it there by demonizing the Bloc Quebecois.

If Harper gets a majority in the next election he will get it by dividing the country not by unifying it. That is the strategy of Karl Rove and George W. Bush, but they used it to their advantage in a country that's had a long history of disenfranchising and holding back African-Americans. It won't work as easy in Canada because we have always been a multicultural society. The Rovian strategy of division may work here temporarily but the long term consequences are likely to be dangerous to the Conservative party and to the country.

What's in a Week?

2008-11-30T18:00:00.000-08:00

All units of time are circular. They repeat themselves endlessly. Day dawns, the morning passes, afternoon passes, the sun sets, night falls and eventually a new day dawns.

The day corresponds to a relationship between the sun and the earth. The year also corresponds to a relationship between the sun and the earth. A new year is born, winter passes, then spring, summer, fall, all follow in sequence.

The “month” loosely corresponds to the relationship between the earth and the moon over a 28 day period. The two words “month” and “moon” obviously are derived from the same word, as is true in almost all other languages.

Tens of thousands of years ago, before the invention of agriculture, all humans lived as hunter gatherers. They told time by the sun, the moon, and the stars. They told tales about things that happened years ago, but they had no concept of a linear system of dating that one could refer to from any point in time. That's a modern invention requiring writing and calendars. Time was circular. People were born, lived and died and new generations grew up to replace them.

A week is a peculiar unit of time that we take for granted but it is not a natural division of time in the same way that a month or year is. Hunter gatherer societies don't really need to divide time into weeks. Their lives are organized around the daily, monthly and seasonal rhythms of nature and the weather.

Dividing a month into quarters and then naming the days probably first occurred with more sophisticated civilizations like the Egyptians and the Babylonians. The length of a week has varied in history from 3 to 8 days. Seven days has always been the most popular, because it divides evenly into a lunar month of 28 days; and because the number 7 corresponds to the seven celestial objects that can be seen by the naked eye: The Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Indeed, in many languages, including English, the days of the week get their names from the seven celestial objects.

The concept of a week is very important in the Hebrew Bible. It's first mentioned in Exodus in one of the Ten Commandments. (Note the connection of the Bible's focus on the week and the backdrop of Egypt here.) In Exodus 31, 16-17 God says: “The Israelites shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a perpetual covenant. It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.” Nowadays we work for five days , or even less, but we still like to rest and receive refreshment on the weekend. Building heaven and earth must have been quite a job, even for God, and that's why even God needed that extra day for R and R.

When the Ten Commandments are repeated in the Biblical book of Deuteronomy, instead of citing God's making the world in six days and resting on the seventh, it says in Deuteronomy 5, 12-15: “ ...But the seventh day is the Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work... Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord God brought you out of there...”

It makes sense to me that there are all these connections to work and the week, because the organization of time into working days and resting days has to do with agriculture and urban civilizations where people for the first time were brought together as slaves, servants, or contracted labourers. I find it noteworthy that the author of Deuteronomy uses the idea of liberation from slavery as a justification for the Sabbath. Everybody needs at least one day off in a week, I recommend more. “Let my people go”, as the good book says.

And so it came to pass, that this week was the one week in the year when the Prince Rupert phone book arrives at our doorstep. Now we can figure out which days are garbage days for next year. We can also read about cool outdoor activities and enjoy the local tide table for another year. All units of time are circular. They repeat themselves endlessly.

God and Gays

2008-11-25T15:31:00.000-08:00

I've just read a fascinating book called Biological Exuberance. by Bruce Bagemihl. It's about homosexuality in animals. Many of us have witnessed homosexuality in domestic animals - cats, dogs, sheep, bulls, etc. I had no idea that it was widespread in wild animals. According to Bagemihl, homosexual behaviour has been observed in Mountain Sheep, Mallard Ducks, Ostriches, Lions, Buffaloes, Female Cheetahs, Bottlenosed Dolphins, Grey Whales, Gorillas, Giraffes, female Grizzly bears, Canada Geese, Monarch Butterflys, and the list goes on and on.

I realize that for some readers this will be a topic to avoid at all costs. Homosexuality is morally wrong; It's not natural; It's against God's law; It's just plain disgusting; Etcetera. Obviously it's only a minority of individuals of each of these species that engage in homosexual behaviour, just like with humans. Otherwise there wouldn't be enough progeny to continue the species and it would go extinct. But you may be interested to know that humans are not the only species where same sex pairs adopt and raise youngsters. Female Grizzly Bears sometimes pair up and raise cubs. Pairs of male Black Swans are actually more successful than heterosexual Black Swans, because their combined strength makes them able to build bigger nests, and acquire the largest and best quality territories. Bagemihl says that there are at least twenty species documented in which same sex pairs have successfully raised young.

I've always thought that the most important criterion for the ability to be a parent was to love and care for one's children. In my book, it's better to be raised by loving same sex parents than neglectful or abusive heterosexual parents. But in the recent U.S. elections, people voted in Arkansas to make adoption by same sex parents illegal and voted in California to prohibit same sex marriages.

I used to think that the whole same sex marriage issue was trivial. Why were Fundamentalist Christians making such a big deal about it when there were real issues to contend with, like the loss of biodiversity, global warming, and growing inequality? What difference does it make if homosexuals can or cannot marry? No church is going to be forced to marry same sex couples. The way I see it, this whole thing is a wedge issue, used by the Republican Party in the United States to manipulate Christian believers into supporting and campaigning for their candidates. Karl Rove is an atheist, but he learned how to motivate Fundamentalists to volunteer their time and money to support George W. Bush in two presidential elections.

But after the latest elections in the States a protest movement has sprung up. Gays in California and elsewhere in the U. S. are angry about Proposition 8. They see it as a human rights issue. I admit that this whole issue makes me nervous because the more that it's championed the more vociferous the backlash from Fundamentalists, and the easier it is for right-wing politicians to use it to their advantage by motivating their religious base. Even writing about this topic is risky as I am certain to turn off a number of readers by doing so.

But for what it's worth, I think that the fact that homosexuality is widespread in the animal kingdom, as documented by biologists and other close observers of wild animals, has important theological implications. If the practice is widespread in other species then who's to say it's not natural? One can argue that it's a moral question when it has to do with humans but is it really morally wrong for same sex giraffes, and lions, and butterflies to get it on? And if it's not a moral issue for them why is it a moral issue for humans? Why don't we save morality for behaviour that helps or harms people rather than consensual activities that adults do with each other for their own enjoyment?

And if homosexuality occurs throughout the animal kingdom there must be a reason. Why does God create homosexual animals? I think a lot of people will refuse to accept the evidence in Bagemihl's book because they see homosexuality as a defect. And if it's a defect, how could God be responsible for it? That's why they think that people are not born gay but choose to be that way. Because God couldn't possibly have created them to be that way. But think about it for a minute. Why would anybody choose to be gay? There's no advantage to it. You're virtually guaranteed to be despised and ostracized if people find out. It makes it way harder to have a decent life and raise a family.

I don't remember any time in my life when I chose to be attracted to the opposite sex. It's just the way I've always been. I would think that the same would go for gays. If God created straights to be attracted to the opposite sex then God created gays to be attracted to the same sex. I'm not sure why, but how could it be otherwise? We can't always understand God's creation but that doesn't mean we shouldn't respect it in all it's manifestations.

The Rise and Fall of the "Southern Strategy"

2008-11-17T23:55:00.000-08:00

In the recent U.S. Presidential election Barak Obama won a majority everywhere in the United States but the South. There, McCain won Southern whites by 38 percentage points. For the first time in 50 years a Democratic Presidential candidate was elected who wasn't from the South.

The fact that Obama was elected President without the American South means the end of the Republican party's forty year old strategy of appealing to a Southern white evangelical base. We saw this in the recent Presidential campaign, where the veiled attacks on Obama, an African American, for being - too different, not a real American, a scary radical – appealed to the Republican base but fell on deaf ears for everyone else. The “Southern strategy” that worked so well to keep the Republican party in power had finally exhausted itself.

The Southern strategy was premised on the South's unique identity: A more rural, less educated, less tolerant, more church going, more racist white population. For almost a hundred years southern whites had voted for the Democratic party because it was the Republican party under Abraham Lincoln that had led the Union to victory against the Confederacy. But in the 1960's Kennedy and Johnson, two successive Democratic Presidents had supported the civil rights movement and enacted civil rights laws that had challenged white supremacy in the South. Because of this association an opportunity arose for the Republican party to get Southern whites to switch their party allegiance.

In 1964, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater campaigned against the civil rights act. He wasn't a racist, he was a libertarian who believed that individual businesses had the right to do business with whomever they chose. But he campaigned for “States Rights” which was a kind of shorthand in the South for continuing the policy of segregation between whites and blacks.

Goldwater lost in 1964 but he carried the South. In 1968 Richard Nixon won the election on the campaign of State's rights and law and order. Nixon was able to appear moderate to most Americans because his campaign referred to integration obliquely through State's rights and busing. Nixon won again in 1972. In 1980 Ronald Reagan started his campaign by giving a speech supporting states rights in Philadelphia, Mississipi, a town who's one claim to fame was the brutal murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. Reagan was not racist himself, what he did was to promote policies that targeted blacks, but without mentioning race.

The South has the highest concentration of white evangelical Christians of any region in the United States. Except for the Quakers, who were driven out of the South, Southern Christians actively supported slavery in the nineteenth century and white supremacy in the twentieth , often citing verses from the Bible in support of their racist views. The US government enforcing school integration coincides with the start of the association between Christian Fundamentalists and the Republican party. The perennial Republican themes of small government and "getting the government off our backs" was seen as code to Southerners for an agenda supportive of segregationism.

Since Reagan, Fundamentalist Christians have been used by the Republican party as dedicated party workers who were key to getting out the vote. Clever operatives like Karl Rove have used hot button issues like abortion, and homosexuality to motivate evangelicals to do the basic footwork for their campaigns. Because Southern Evangelical Christians have such deep abiding prejudices they were especially vulnerable to being manipulated by the Republicans.

Paul Krugman, New York Times Columnist and Noble Prize winner sums it up nicely: “The Republicans above all are concerned with making America safe for the rich. Right wing economic ideology has never been a vote winner. Instead the party's electoral strategy depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity. The religious right supplied the passion and the economic right supplied the money.”

A leader like Barak Obama is a great leader precisely because he rises above sectarianism. He seeks that which ties us together, that which we have in common. When we build societies together we benefit from a multiplicity of beliefs and viewpoints. Focusing on what separates us and on emotional dividing lines is ultimately destructive to society. America is changing. A growing Spanish-speaking sector in California and the South-West is making even a covert appeal to racism a non-starter. The Southern strategy has seen it's heyday and the Republican party is about to pay the price for promoting hatred and intolerance.

The Value of Democracy is in Getting Involved

2008-11-11T03:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday evening my wife and I went to the municipal all-candidates meeting at Chances. I've been living in Prince Rupert for almost sixteen years and each time that there is a municipal election seems more important and more interesting then the last. It's only in the last two years that I've actually attended any city council meetings and I've been pleasantly surprised to see democracy in action in every one of them.

I've lived in Vancouver and Montreal – two big cities where you could never get the access to city council that you can here. There is something to be said for a place the size of Prince Rupert. It's possible to get acquainted with the mayor and city council members. There isn't a huge distance between them and the public the way there is in the big city.

Sunday's all-candidates meeting was fun. I've been so wired to the U.S. Presidential election and the Canadian Federal election that I'd lost touch with what it feels like to be undecided. Not anymore. There are two mayoralty candidates, both former one term mayors of Prince Rupert. Judging from their words, either one would make a good mayor.

There were the five incumbent city councillors and ten wannabees. They all got to have their say and I thought it gave a pretty good sense of where each of them stood on the issues. If you didn't get a chance to go to either of the two all-candidates meetings you can still listen to this last one on Channel 10, at 5 PM and 8Pm as I recall. Or visit princerupert.ca and check out who is running for what. Then google the candidates to look at their web pages.

Unlike our federal and provincial and the U.S. Presidential elections ideology and negative campaigning don't really come into the picture. All the candidates came across as practical and pragmatic and that's a relief. Most seemed aware of the financial and employment problems that we face here, most had good ideas for solutions and most saw the importance of having a well-thought-out vision for the future of our town.

Of all the new faces I was most impressed by the bus driver. Now there's a great occupation to have as a city councillor. He's bound to get an earful from a good cross-section of citizens every day. I liked the way that he suggested, more than once, that more people should take the bus. He's right and everybody knows it. You can save money and make this a greener city by taking the bus. He's got my vote.

I hope the turnout is good. The turnout for the recent Canadian election was terrible. On the other hand, the turnout for the American election was the best it's been since the 1960's. That's because Americans are so motivated to avoid a repeat of the last eight years and so inspired by the promise of Barak Obama.

Democracy is a treasure that we've built up over the years. In my opinion a treasure is only valuable when it gets shared. If you horde it it becomes meaningless, it loses its value. When we vote, when we attend city council meetings, when we petition city council, when we run for council, and when we write letters to the editor we are making democracy more valuable. The more people get involved the richer we all are. So get out and vote this Saturday and make a difference to the future of this fair city.

Obama's Election Heralds The End Of An Era

2008-11-03T03:47:00.000-08:00

By the time most of you are reading this Barak Obama will be the first African-American President of the United States. Elected on a campaign of change, he appealed to American voters, tired of the divisive tactics and incompetent government of the Bush Republican White House.

Ironically, by abandoning international cooperation, waging preemptive war, and legalizing torture Bush and Cheney have seriously weakened American power. President Obama, who so clearly represents the positive aspects of the American Dream has the potential to reverse the decline in American prestige and power because the very fact of his election has resurrected that dream in the minds of people from around the world.

Over the month of October the world has witnessed the biggest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression. In the space of one month, hundreds of billions of dollars has been flushed away by panic and the loss of trust on a truly global scale.

Even Alan Greenspan, a devoted follower of ultra-free market philosopher Ayn Rand, who resisted calls to regulate sub-prime mortgages when he was chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, has finally admitted that his free market ideology was mistaken. Testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Greenspan said: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief...”

For years the Republican party platform of “limited government” and privatization has led to the use of government institutions for the benefit of wealthy corporations like Haliburton, Exxon, and Blackwater. The American middle class has had it's income stagnate, while the top 1% has grown immensely richer. Meanwhile fraud and abuse of taxpayer's money has reached epidemic proportions. For the entire eight years of the Bush Administration the government has not served the public interest.

During the last months of the presidential campaign much was made by the Mcain Palin team of Obama's “redistributionist” philosophy. Supposedly, the fact that Obama wants to raise taxes for the hyper-rich, means that he is a socialist. The irony here is that it has been previous U.S. Administrations' abandoning government regulation that has led to the redistribution of wealth from ordinary Americans to Wall Street CEO's.

It should be apparent to anyone today that a country cannot prosper if its government abandons economic and environmental regulation. We've seen how people have no compunction about putting the entire financial system at risk if it means they can enrich themselves by doing so. And this year we've witnessed the spectre of thousands of infants in China being put on life-support because a few unscrupulous merchants increased their profit margins by spiking milk with melamine.

Now who wants to buy food from China? Chinese dairy farmers and milk producers are pouring millions of gallons of milk down the drain and suffering severe financial losses because of the Chinese government's failure to regulate it's own food industry. Americans: Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm, and Milton Friedman all believed that capitalists pursuing their own self-interest would somehow magically lead to the best of all possible worlds. And they've been proven wrong by recent events.

Our rights to health care, public education, clean air and water, and old age security should be universally accessible to all. The unregulated market is incapable of providing universal access to these public goods. Nor is it capable of eliminating public “bads”, like pollution and global warming by itself.

A new era is dawning. With Barak Obama, The United States now has a President who is not encumbered by free-market ideology. President Obama can now work to implement universal health care, lead the way in fighting global warming, and, with the help of other world leaders, put the global financial system back in working order.

Let's Banish Violence From This Town

2008-10-21T02:38:00.000-07:00

Early in the morning on Friday, October 3, on second avenue in downtown Prince Rupert a man was beaten within an inch of his life. Three local thugs beat him up so badly that he had to be flown down to Vancouver for reconstructive surgery. Every bone in his face was smashed and it's since been reconstructed with metal plates.

Because of a vicious act of thuggery a man has been permanently disfigured and his family's life has been disrupted forever. He and his wife have now left Prince Rupert for good. A senseless crime has been committed and the repercussions are felt for a lifetime.

It's nothing new for people to be beaten up in down-town Prince Rupert late at night, but that doesn't mean that it somehow should be tolerated. Ten years ago a fisherman was beaten to death by thugs here . No-one was killed this time. Instead a man was scarred and disfigured for life.

This is a wake-up call for Prince Rupert. We need to do something together as a community to heal this wound and to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. I am so appalled by this act of violence that I feel compelled to publicize and write about it.

In a couple of minutes three thugs have destroyed a good person and his family. Three thugs have raised the level of fear and stained the reputation of our good city. They've been arrested for "aggravated assault" and I hope they go to jail for a good long time. But it shouldn't end there.

An RCMP spokesperson has told me that they plan to meet with downtown stakeholders sometime in the near future to discuss solutions to this problem. I certainly hope that the RCMP follows through on this. And I hope that they don't just leave it to downtown merchants because I think that the entire community should be involved. Lives have been ruined and our communities reputation has been dragged through the mud by this senseless act.

Are we going to stand by while this kind of thuggery keeps happening or are we going to get together and do something to prevent it from happening again? We need to put our minds together and come up with a way of banishing violence from this town. We've got to unite on this or we risk our community's future.

Two suggestions I've heard from downtown stakeholders are: bringing back police foot patrols downtown after dark and putting up surveillance cameras on second avenue. Good suggestions, but this is only a part of it. Maybe our schools and colleges need to get involved in educating against violence. Maybe we, as a community, need to be a lot less tolerant of violence. Maybe we need to widen the focus from violence against women to violence against anyone, period.

Violence is not just a bad thing that people do to each other - it's a cancer that eats away at people's good-will and trust. It needs to be rooted out and banished once and for all.