8. “Everyone has a right to his own opinion.” Or, “We must keep an open mind.” Nonsense. We have an obligation to evaluate opinions that are important to the community. If the outcome of a particular opinion would be harmful to the community, we have an obligation to speak up and explain why we think it would be harmful. Based in common humanity, everyone does NOT have a right to his own opinion, because there are a great many opinions out there that cause real harm — most importantly and subtly by leading us away from understanding the biological and social boundaries of our human rights. But more obviously, if you want an example, I think some of Hitler’s opinions should have been challenged a bit sooner than they were. If we can’t talk about our opinions, stories and metaphors in a discussion format, but only by two-sided debate, then it is almost certain that our opinions are causing a great deal of suffering in ways that we don’t even imagine.

9. We are afraid to ask questions. Where did THAT come from; it is intensely un-American. I was taught that it’s OK to discuss anything, but it is not OK to do cause harm or suffering to others. Now it seems like it’s OK for anyone to say or even do whatever indecency or atrocity, but nobody should question or discuss the harm caused.

5. I have been told several times that “the facts keep changing.” The facts do not keep changing. That is the definition of a fact. The stories keep changing. Facts are facts; stories are metaphors. To be useful, stories must represent fact. Therefore, as cultures change, stories change, but the facts do not. The moon and the earth keep going around. Will they forever? I don’t know, and that is not the point. The point is that we need facts about our environment in order to stay alive, and unless the stories help us to understand reality they are not helping us to stay alive and healthy and to raise our children in harmony with reality. That’s why facts are more powerful than the stories for growing a sustainable lifestyle. Originally, biologically, that’s what human stories are for – to grow behavioral guidelines that keep people out of trouble by emphasizing that bad behaviors will have bad results. Like – don’t jump off a cliff; don’t eat up the seeds for next years planting. And many behaviors that are much more subtle but amazingly wise. That’s what stories are for in human societies. That’s why the corposystem wants to keep the real facts for itself, and control the stories to project the image they want you to believe in, to entertain, divide and emasculate the people with a belief system that aligns them with the desires of the corposystem excess, rather than the reality of biological limits to our behaviors.

6. The indiscriminate use of metaphors. Words are also metaphors. I think this nonsense phrase – “The facts keep changing” – came out of a popular book about science that was written by a nonscientist who thought it was a cute phrase. It certainly is a radically unscientific phrase. I think everyone involved with the media, and also everyone else, has an obligation to not say things that aren’t true, whether or not they are cute. Even if they are Bill Moyers talking about the “DNA of culture.” The whole point of DNA is that it is NOT changed by culture. Geneticists took about 100 years figuring that out. It’s important to know what can and cannot be changed by culture. It’s part of our job to figure out whether our heroes know what they are talking about before we believe what they say. We can’t have a culture together if the words we use have wildly different meanings for different people.

2. They are too busy talking about themselves.

3. They don’t listen. We change words into something that we want to hear. Or anything that is inside the acceptable mantra. My entire life goal is to not be inside the acceptable mantra unless being inside would be more compassionate and useful than being outside (which is rare). But often what I say is not heard because statements that are outside the acceptable mantra get changed into something that is acceptable, without people even knowing they are doing it – inside the mantra, they sound like nonsense. For example, the below:

The tragedy is that the acceptable mantra is most often the nonsense – that’s why the corposystem wants us to believe it. So they can keep all the real facts to themselves to make money with, and we don’t have real facts to challenge them with. Because there is nothing more powerful than real facts in a real biological world. And we can’t get out of the real biological world. In this life.

4. They are afraid. I have not yet figured out what they are afraid of – probably a whole pile of things including each other, because our corposystem works hard at making everyone afraid of something, but minimally there is no doubt that most people in this community are afraid of asking questions, and nobody can understand anything without asking questions.

The theory of evolution was a brilliant breakthrough that took place a couple of hundred years ago. After that, it was studied rigorously until the evolutionary scientists and the geneticists realized they were all studying different parts of the same creature, and they got together. Now, 200 years later, we know a great deal more about how this beautiful life form, the whole earth ecosystem, manages to survive through the millennia by changing in response to changing conditions. We know that these changes are mediated for the most part by organisms that, by their interactions with each other and with the environment, carry the genetic information for the life of the whole system forward from one moment of time to the next. The correct term for this kind of study is evolutionary ecology. We left Darwinism in the dust at least a hundred hears ago.

The corposystem and modern politics and economics do not want us to know about evolutionary ecology, I guess because they have a strong foundation in that little nonsense phrase: “Survival of the fittest.” You have heard me say many times: “That’s not how it works.” I didn’t tell you how it does work for two reasons. One is that I don’t completely know how it works – nobody does – the other is that evolution is so complicated that most people don’t even TRY to understand how it really does work. Not even a massive computer could do the job because we don’t know all the parts of the whole earth ecosystem, so we can’t plug the information into the computer. We don’t even know all the species that do the work of keeping us alive. That’s why biologists are concerned about us humans killing them off – the other species – without even knowing what they are and how they contribute to our well being. The bottom line is that our modern corposystem is partially justified by a false or fake belief in survival of the fittest.

It is true that tooth and claw is an important reality of life. It’s also true that tooth and claw is a necessary component of life because it contributes to the flow of energy through the ecosystem, but tooth and claw is only a subset of how evolution works. How does it work? I lay out the background in pages 32 onward in Bare Bones Ecology Energy Handbook you can download from my website, FactFictionFancy. The shortest version I can tell you in a five-minute spot is that life evolves by generating functionally effective systems out of pre-existing systems.

A cell is a functionally effective system that is made of thousands of molecules – the key is that all these molecules work together perfectly. The problem, from our point of view, is the millions and millions of functional systems that did NOT work together perfectly within the system and so they became extinct. The way evolution works is to generate millions and millions of functional systems, by recombining the older systems, until a new system emerges that works together positively with the whole of life. That one SYSTEM (species) out of all the millions that unbalanced the systems of life, that one survives over time to become a part of the living whole earth ecosystem. We are unbalancing the life systems of the earth. The difference between us and all the other species is that we KNOW these things.

And the reason I am trying to explain this to you is that I see some new social movements coming up that are based on the reality of evolution instead of the failed models that were in part based on a false view of evolution. I’ll talk more about these in future.

Bare Bones Biology 091 – Evolution
KEOS FM 89.1, Bryan, Texas
Audio download available next week
here and at http://www.BareBonesBiology.com

All survived.

Based on what I know about evolutionary ecology, our global and local human travails will become worse no matter what we do politically and economically. This is not a personal belief based in social science. It’s in the numbers, and my professional pronouncement is based in a lifetime of training and experience in genetics built on a base of training in ecological evolution. The human species is entering a biological bottleneck, and we might as well face the fact and deal with it.

Our troubles will become worse, because we can’t change what we humans have already done. We will experience the result of what we have done. What will happen after that depends on what we do now. What we humans can do right now in this moment of historic evolutionary change, is to decide the future of the human species and the whole earth ecosystem by our response to the bottleneck we are entering.

We have so much power on this earth that we can choose to help the ecosystem return to health and grow a good life for our descendants – or we can carry on as we have for centuries trying to eat the apple of the tree of life, like spoiled little children, by trying to force the ecosystem to obey our wishes. Or one could say, trying to create God in our image. I personally think that is blasphemous, and factually as a scientist, I know that approach will not succeed. But most of the people don’t seem to care, as long as they can be among the winners now, and at the same time believe they are the good guys. And so we carry on like the previous generations, destroying our own future. The irony is, so far as we know, we are the only species in history that knows we are destroying ourselves, and we are doing it anyhow.

Even more disturbing, most of the people who believe themselves to be scientists, even biological scientists, are training now within the corposystem value system to continue the very mind-set that caused our problem. In part, that mind set originated from and is still justified by a conveniently flawed and simplistic interpretation of evolution, often quoted as: “Survival of the fittest.” Folks, I keep saying, that’s not how evolution works.
(for example Evolution – BareBonesBiology-010 through -019 and several subsequent to the series. http://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/bare-bones-biology-046-evolution/ Bare Bones Biology 052 emergent properties)
But I’ll talk about that next time.

Further, the modern corporate mind-set is all about control that we do not have. For example, when I began my career, we all were studying a biological organism (the mouse) to try to understand the processes of life. Now, for the most part, my peers are not interested in the mouse and how it functions as a life form. They are interested in the molecules the mouse is composed of, and how we humans can control those molecules. This is mostly because that is the kind of work the corposystem funds – to make money by controlling things.

But we humans cannot make a mouse. We cannot blow the spark of life into those molecules outside of a test tube, and we need to remember that we also cannot blow the spark of life into the whole earth ecosystem. We will fail if we try to redesign the whole earth ecosystem to suit ourselves – either as biologists or as agro-business empires the likes of Monsanto, or as energy corporations that refuse to recognize that we are running out of oil and gas – or as the modern ecologist whose science has become so reductionist that he cannot see the life form that he is studying because he is more interested in how he can control some little part of it. Maybe we can control that part, but all the parts are connected, and as we don’t know how the parts function to make the whole of life, we need to let it function as it does. However that is.

Bare Bones Biology 090 – Evolution
KEOS FM 89.1, Bryan, Texas
Audio download available next week
here and at http://www.BareBonesBiology.com

Thich Nhat Hanh, for the current issue of the web newsletter Upaya.http://www.upaya.org/newsletter/view/2012/01/09#story11
original source – http://www.ecobuddhism.org/wisdom/interviews/thich_nhat_hanh/; accessed January 8, 2012
Reprinted from The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology (2008) by Thich Nhat Hanh, Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, www.parallax.org.

“All this new stuff goes on top / turn it over, turn it over / wait and water
down / from the dark bottom / turn it inside out / let it spread through /
Sift down even. / Watch it sprout. / A mind like compost.”

— Gary Snyder

This is also from the current Upaya, see above