What Changes Your Mind?

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“When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.”

Edge.org

I ran into a couple neat web sites recently when I was looking into why people change their minds.

Kirstyevidence has a thoughtful list of reasons why scientists change their minds:  http://bit.ly/NkfVAn   Edge.org asked this very question of scientists and technologists a few years ago.  The quote at the top of this post comes from their site.  The answers are still interesting:  http://bit.ly/N2E5yD

When scientists change their minds, they are applauded.  Continue reading →

Ecstatic Nation – before, during, and after America’s Civil War

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Ecstatic nation picSince I recently read 1858, reviewed here, I thought Brenda Wineapple’s  book Ecstatic Nation, Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848 – 1877 was a logical follow-up.  It is fairly long at 526 pages, and the 74 pages of notes are connected to the text via by page number rather than footnotes.

The enormity of the Civil War continues to amaze and horrify me.  Wineapple says the number of soldiers who died from a combination of battle and illness was recently revised upwards to over 750,000, “far greater than the number of men who perished or would perish in all other U.S. wars put together.”  According to the count on www.militaryfactory.com , with Wineapple’s “recent revision”, that’s true. Continue reading →

Avoiding Genetically Modified Organisms

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I intend this to be the final commentary about Generically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Of course I reserve the right to do more if I feel new information warrants.

Activists who want GMOs to be excluded from human foods are quite upset that the US Department of Agriculture has approved them for human consumption and are protesting and campaigning in several states to require foods derived from GMOs to be clearly labeled. In the interim, people can take the simple step of buying foods labeled as organic. The US and Canadian governments do not allow manufacturers to label something 100% organic if it has been genetically modified or is from an animal that has been fed genetically modified feeds. There is a web site that provides a discussion about the foods most likely to be GMOs. It also says that foods labeled with a four digit PLU number are conventionally produced, those with five digits beginning with 8 are GMOs, and those with a five digit number beginning with 9 are organic. Continue reading →

Nation Un-Building

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Ecstatic Nation CommentaryThis commentary is inspired by Wineapple’s book Ecstatic Nation, reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  While I marvel at America’s luck in ending the Civil War without an endless insurgency, in many ways our Civil War did not end in 1865.  For a hundred years Jim Crow laws continued the subjugation of black Americans, and the civil rights movement , which peaked in the 1960s, was very regional in America.  Even today some writers say two thirds of the members of Congress who figured in the recent U.S. government shutdown are from the old Confederacy.  (See http://bit.ly/1c4wJcc and scroll down to “Confederate Heritage”, or see the Atlantic’s count at http://bit.ly/1aTtqnu  )

The anti-government political position goes beyond any residual racism.  Consider that Wineapple says that, by the end of the Civil war, the Confederacy was ready to give up slavery but not their independence as a sovereign nation.

Today there seems to be an international anti-Union movement.  Continue reading →

Flying by the Seat of Your Pants

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The expression refers to using your senses to make determinations rather than depending on mechanical aides. You might hear someone say something to the effect, “I’m not certain what I’m doing, but it feels right.”

 According to Tony Kleu, pilots in early airplanes had no instruments to help them turn the plane and stay in control. They relied on their sense of balance and feelings transferred to their bodies by contact with the seat to determine the aggressiveness of the turn. A hard turn would cause them to slip in the seat. Thus “flying by the seat of your pants” is literal.

GMOs, Science, and Morality

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RF_alum has written an informative string of postings on GMOs.  Here’s my two cents.

The GMOs that cause controversy are foods.  No one seems to want to stop producing insulin or vaccines using GMOs, or to ban oil-eating bacteria used to clean up spills in the environment.  Furthermore, I read negative opinions mostly about food crops farmed on an industrial scale, (especially corn, wheat, and soy beans), GMOs that resist Roundup or incorporate biocides, and anything produced by Monsanto.

Since we all agree that healthy food and sustainable production are good things and starvation and high prices are bad things, what causes the public policy controversy?

Many people hold moral and spiritual objections to GMO foods.  They draw on one of humanity’s six moral foundations (see book reviewed here):

Sanctity: People know that some things are noble and pure while others are degrading and base. These sacred values bind groups together.

People also show a practical skepticism about any new or unfamiliar risk.  Both views are important to the debate.  Public policies must consider moral values, and no one should get away with lying about the science. Continue reading →