Can We Know the Universe The following excerpt was publ.docx

Can We Know the Universe?
The following excerpt was published in Broca's Brain (1979).
by Carl Sagan
"Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She
shows us only
surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep." — Ralph Waldo
Emerson
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of
knowledge.
Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what
regularities
there may be, to penetrate the connections of things—from
subnuclear
particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living
organisms, the human social community, and thence to the
cosmos as a
whole. Our intuition is by no means an infallible guide. Our
perceptions may be distorted by training and prejudice or
merely
because of the limitations of our sense organs, which, of course,
perceive directly but a small fraction of the phenomena of the
world.
Even so straightforward a question as whether in the absence of

friction
a pound of lead falls faster than a gram of fluff was answered
incorrectly by Aristotle and almost everyone else before the
time of
Galileo. Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to
challenge
old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is.
Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage—at the very
least the
courage to question the conventional wisdom.
Beyond this the main trick of science is to really think of
something: the
shape of clouds and their occasional sharp bottom edges at the
same
altitude everywhere in the sky; the formation of the dewdrop on
a leaf;
the origin of a name or a word—Shakespeare, say, or
"philanthropic";
the reason for human social customs—the incest taboo, for
example;
how it is that a lens in sunlight can make paper burn; how a
"walking
stick" got to look so much like a twig; why the Moon seems to
follow us
as we walk; what prevents us from digging a hole down to the
center of
the Earth; what the definition is of "down" on a spherical Earth;
how it
is possible for the body to convert yesterday's lunch into today's
muscle
and sinew; or how far is up—does the universe go on forever, or
if it

does not, is there any meaning to the question of what lies on
the other
side? Some of these questions are pretty easy. Others, especially
the
last, are mysteries to which no one even today knows the
answer. They
are natural questions to ask. Every culture has posed such
questions in
one way or another. Almost always the proposed answers are in
the
nature of "Just So Stories," attempted explanations divorced
from
experiment, or even from careful comparative observations.
But the scientific cast of mind examines the world critically as
if many
alternative worlds might exist, as if other things might be here
which
are not. Then we are forced to ask why what we see is present
and not
something else. Why are the Sun and the Moon and the planets
spheres? Why not pyramids, or cubes, or dodecahedra? Why not
irregular, jumbly shapes? Why so symmetrical worlds? If you
spend
any time spinning hypotheses, checking to see whether they
make
sense, whether they conform to what else we know, thinking of
tests
you can pose to substantiate or deflate your hypotheses, you
will find
yourself doing science. And as you come to practice this habit
of
thought more and more you will get better and better at it. To
penetrate
into the heart of the thing—even a little thing, a blade of grass,
as Walt

Whitman said—is to experience a kind of exhilaration that, it
may be,
only human beings of all the beings on this planet can feel. We
are an
intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly
gives
us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we
think
well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
But to what extent can we really know the universe around us?
Sometimes this question is posed by people who hope the
answer will
be in the negative, who are fearful of a universe in which
everything
might one day be known. And sometimes we hear
pronouncements
from scientists who confidently state that everything worth
knowing
will soon be known—or even is already known—and who paint
pictures of a Dionysian or Polynesian age in which the zest for
intellectual discovery has withered, to be replaced by a kind of
subdued
languor, the lotus eaters drinking fermented coconut milk or
some
other mild hallucinogen. In addition to maligning both the
Polynesians,
who were intrepid explorers (and whose brief respite in paradise
is
now sadly ending), as well as the inducements to intellectual
discovery
provided by some hallucinogens, this contention turns out to be
trivially mistaken.

Let us approach a much more modest question: not whether we
can
know the universe or the Milky Way Galaxy or a star or a
world. Can
we know, ultimately and in detail, a grain of salt? Consider one
microgram of table salt, a speck just barely large enough for
someone
with keen eyesight to make out without a microscope. In that
grain of
salt there are about 1016 sodium and chlorine atoms. That is a 1
followed
by 16 zeros, 10 million billion atoms. If we wish to know a
grain of salt
we must know at least the three-dimensional positions of each
of these
atoms. (In fact, there is much more to be known—for example,
the
nature of the forces between the atoms—but we are making only
a
modest calculation.) Now, is this number more or less than a
number of
things which the brain can know?
How much can the brain know? There are perhaps 1011 neurons
in the
brain, the circuit elements and switches that are responsible in
their
electrical and chemical activity for the functioning of our
minds. A
typical brain neuron has perhaps a thousand little wires, called
dendrites, which connect it with its fellows. If, as seems likely,
every bit
of information in the brain corresponds to one of these
connections, the
total number of things knowable by the brain is no more than

1014, one
hundred trillion. But this number is only one percent of the
number of
atoms in our speck of salt.
So in this sense the universe is intractable, astonishingly
immune to any
human attempt at full knowledge. We cannot on this level
understand
a grain of salt, much less the universe.
But let us look a little more deeply at our microgram of salt.
Salt
happens to be a crystal in which, except for defects in the
structure of
the crystal lattice, the position of every sodium and chlorine
atom is
predetermined. If we could shrink ourselves into this crystalline
world,
we would rank upon rank of atoms in an ordered array, a
regularly
alternating structure—sodium, chlorine, sodium, chlorine,
specifying
the sheet of atoms we are standing on and all the sheets above
us and
below us. An absolutely pure crystal of salt could have the
position of
every atom specified by something like 10 bits of information.
This
would not strain the information-carrying capacity of the brain.
If the universe had natural laws that governed its behavior to
the same
degree of regularity that determines a crystal of salt, then, of

course, the
universe would be knowable. Even if there were many such
laws, each
of considerable complexity, human beings might have the
capability to
understand them all. Even if such knowledge exceeded the
information-carrying capacity of the brain, we might store the
additional information outside our bodies—in books, for
example, or in
computer memories—and still, in some sense, know the
universe.
Human beings are, understandably, highly motivated to find
regularities, natural laws. The search for rules, the only possible
way to
understand such a vast and complex universe, is called science.
The
universe forces those who live in it to understand it. Those
creatures
who find everyday experience a muddled jumble of events with
no
predictability, no regularity, are in grave peril. The universe
belongs to
those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.
It is an astonishing fact there are laws of nature, rules that
summarize
conveniently—not just qualitatively but quantitatively—how the
world
works. We might imagine a universe in which there are no such
laws,
in which the 1080 elementary particles that make up a universe
like our
own behave with utter and uncompromising abandon. To
understand
such a universe we would need a brain at least as massive as the

universe. It seems unlikely that such a universe could have life
and
intelligence, because beings and brains require some degree of
internal
stability and order. But even if in a much more random universe
there
were such beings with an intelligence much greater than our
own, there
could not be much knowledge, passion or joy.
Fortunately for us, we live in a universe that has at least
important
parts that are knowable. Our common-sense experience and our
evolutionary history have prepared us to understand something
of the
workaday world. When we go into other realms, however,
common
sense and ordinary intuition turn out to be highly unreliable
guides. It
is stunning that as we go close to the speed of light our mass
increases
indefinitely, we shrink towards zero thickness in the direction
of
motion, and time for us comes as near to stopping as we would
like.
Many people think that this is silly, and every week or two I get
a letter
from someone who complains to me about it. But it is a
virtually certain
consequence not just of experiment but also of Albert Einstein's
brilliant
analysis of space and time called the Special Theory of
Relativity. It

does not matter that these effects seem unreasonable to us. We
are not
in the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. The
testimony of our
common sense is suspect at high velocities.
Or consider an isolated molecule composed of two atoms shaped
something like a dumbbell—a molecule of salt, it might be.
Such a
molecule rotates about an axis through the line connecting the
two
atoms. But in the world of quantum mechanics, the realm of the
very
small, not all orientations of our dumbbell molecule are
possible. It
might be that the molecule could be oriented in a horizontal
position,
say, or in a vertical position, but not at many angles in between.
Some
rotational positions are forbidden. Forbidden by what? By the
laws of
nature. The universe is built in such a way as to limit, or
quantise,
rotation. We do not experience this directly in everyday life; we
would
find it startling as well as awkward in sitting-up exercises, to
find arms
out stretched from the sides or pointed up to the skies permitted
but
many intermediate positions forbidden. We do not live in the
world of
the small, on the scale of 10-13 centimeters, in the realm where
there are
twelve zeros between the decimal place and the one. Our
common-
sense intuitions do not count. What does count is experiment—

in this
case observations from the far infrared spectra of molecules.
They show
molecular rotation to be quantized.
The idea that the world places restrictions on what humans
might do is
frustrating. Why shouldn't we be able to have intermediate
rotational
positions? Why can't we travel faster than the speed of light?
But so far
as we can tell, this is the way the universe is constructed. Such
prohibitions not only press us toward a little humility; they also
make
the world more knowable. Every restriction corresponds to a
law of
nature, a regulation of the universe. The more restrictions there
are on
what matter and energy can do, the more knowledge human
beings can
attain. Whether in some sense the universe is ultimately
knowable
depends not only on how many natural laws there are that
encompass
widely divergent phenomena, but also on whether we have the
openness and the intellectual capacity to understand such laws.
Our
formulations of the regularities of nature are surely dependent
on how
the brain is built, but also, and to a significant degree, on how
the
universe is built.
GL

For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown
and, at
the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which
everything
is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of
some
weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no
fit place
for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much
like the
universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really
much of a
coincidence.
Carl Sagan, "Can We Know the Universe?: Reflections on a
Grain of Salt;" from Broca's
Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science, New York:
Random House, 1979, pp. 13-18.
11/30/2018 Staying Human
http://www.aei.org/publication/staying-human/ 1/10
Dinesh D'Souza
January 22, 2001 | National Review
Staying Human
The Danger of Techno-Utopia

Economics
“We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it.”
–Kevin Kelly, author and techno-utopian
The most important technological advance of recent times is not
the Internet, but rather
the biotech revolution–which promises to give us unprecedented
power to transform
human nature. How should we use that power? A group of
cutting-edge scientists,
entrepreneurs, and intellectuals has a bold answer. This group–I
call them the techno-
utopians–argues that science will soon give us the means to
straighten the crooked timber
of humanity, and even to remake our species into something
“post-human.”
One of the leading techno-utopians is Lee Silver, who teaches
molecular biology at
Princeton University. Silver reports that biotechnology is
moving beyond cloning to offer
us a momentous possibility: designer children. He envisions
that, in the not too distant
future, couples who want to have a child will review a long list
of traits on a computer

screen, put together combinations of “virtual children,” decide
on the one they want, click
on the appropriate selection, and thus–in effect–design their
own offspring. “Parents are
going to be able to give their children . . . genes that increase
athletic ability, genes that
increase musical talents . . . and ultimately genes that affect
cognitive abilities.”
But even this, the techno-utopians say, is a relatively small
step: People living today can
determine the genetic destiny of all future generations. Some
writers, including physicist
A A
http://www.aei.org/profile/dinesh-d/
http://www.aei.org/policy/economics/
http://www.aei.org/publication/staying-human/print/
Stephen Hawking, have suggested that genetic engineering
could be used to reduce human
aggression, thus solving the crime problem and making war less
likely. James Watson, co-

discoverer of the structure of DNA, argues that if biological
interventions could be used to
“cure what I feel is a very serious disease–that is, stupidity–it
would be a great thing for
people.” Silver himself forecasts a general elevation of
intellectual, athletic, temperamental,
and artistic abilities so that we can over time create “a special
group of mental beings” who
will “trace their ancestry back to homo sapiens,” but who will
be “as different from humans
as humans are from the primitive worms with tiny brains that
first crawled along the
earth’s surface.”
These ideas might seem implausible, but they are taken very
seriously by some of the best
minds in the scientific community. The confidence of the
techno-utopians is based on
stunning advances that have made cloning and genetic
engineering feasible. In theoretical
terms, biotechnology crossed a major threshold with James
Watson and Francis Crick’s
1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, but practical
applications were slow in coming. In
1997, an obscure animal-husbandry laboratory in Scotland

cloned a sheep named Dolly;
today, the knowledge and the means of cloning human beings
already exist, and the only
question is whether we are going to do it. And why stop there?
As the scientific journal
Nature editorialized shortly after the emergence of Dolly, “The
growing power of
molecular genetics confronts us with future prospects of being
able to change the nature of
our species.”
In 1999, neurobiologist Joe Tsien boosted the intelligence of
mice by inserting extra copies
of a gene that enhances memory and learning; these mouse
genes are virtually identical to
those found in human beings. Gene therapy has already been
successfully carried out in
people, and now that the Human Genome Project has made
possible a comprehensive
understanding of the human genetic code, scientists will possess
a new kind of power: the
power to design our children, and even to redesign humanity
itself.
The fact that these things are possible does not, of course, mean
that they should be done.

As one might expect, cloning and genetic engineering are
attracting criticism. The techno-
utopians have not yet made their products and services available
to consumers; but one can
reasonably expect that a society that is anxious about eating
genetically modified tomatoes
is going to be vastly more anxious about a scheme to engineer
our offspring and our
species.
A recent book communicating that sense of outrage is Jeremy
Rifkin’s The Biotech Century.
Rifkin alleges that we are heading for a nightmarish future
“where babies are genetically
designed and customized in the womb, and where people are
identified, stereotyped and
discriminated against on the basis of their genotype.” How can
living beings be considered
sacred, Rifkin asks, if they are treated as nothing more than
“bundles of genetic

information”? Biotechnology, he charges, is launching us into a
new age of eugenics. In
Rifkin’s view, the Nazi idea of the superman is very much alive,
but now in a different form:
the illusion of the “perfect child.”
Although Rifkin has a propensity for inflammatory rhetoric, he
is raising some important
concerns: The new technology is unprecedented, so we should
be very cautious in
developing it. It poses grave risks to human health. Cloning and
genetic engineering are
unnatural; human beings have no right to do this to nature and
to ourselves.
These criticisms meet with derision on the part of the techno-
utopians. Every time a major
new technology is developed, they say, there are people who
forecast the apocalypse. The
techno-utopians point out that the new technology will deliver
amazing medical benefits,
including cures for genetic diseases. How can it be ethical, they
ask, to withhold these
technologies from people who need and want them?
Lee Silver, the biologist, is annoyed at critics such as Rifkin
who keep raising the specter of

Hitler and eugenics. “It is individuals and couples, not
governments, who will seize control
of these new technologies,” Silver writes. The premise of the
techno-utopians is that if the
market produces a result, it is good. In this view, what is wrong
with the old eugenics is not
that it sought to eliminate defective types and produce a
superior kind of being, but that it
sought to do so in a coercive and collectivist way. The new
advocates of biotechnology
speak approvingly of what they term “free-market eugenics.”
The champions of biotechnology concede that cloning and
genetic engineering should not
be permitted in human beings until they are safe. But “safe,”
they say, does not mean “error-
free”; it means safe compared with existing forms of
reproduction. And they are confident
that the new forms of reproduction will soon be as safe as
giving birth the natural way.
The techno-utopians are also not very concerned that the
availability of enhancement
technologies will create two classes in society, the genetically
advantaged and the

genetically disadvantaged. They correctly point to the fact that
two such classes exist now,
even in the absence of new therapies. Physicist Freeman Dyson
says that genetic
enhancement might be costly at first, but won’t remain
permanently expensive: “Most of
our socially important technologies, such as telephones,
automobiles, television, and
computers, began as expensive toys for the rich and afterwards
became cheap enough for
ordinary people.”
Dyson is right that time will make genetic enhancements more
widely available, just as cars
and TV sets are now. But the poor family still drives a
secondhand Plymouth while the rich
family can afford a new Porsche. This may not be highly
significant when it comes to cars,
because both groups can still get around fairly well. What about
when it comes to genetic
advantages conferred at birth? Democratic societies can live

with inequalities conferred by
the lottery of nature, but can they countenance the deliberate
introduction of biological
alterations that give some citizens a better chance to succeed
than others?
The techno-utopians have not, to my knowledge, addressed this
concern. They emphasize
instead that it is well established in law, and widely recognized
in society, that parents have
a right to determine what is best for their children. “There are
already plenty of ways in
which we design our children,” remarks biologist Gregory
Stock. “One of them is called
piano lessons. Another is called private school.” Stock’s point
is that engineering their
children’s genes is simply one more way in which parents can
make their children better
people.
Some people might find it weird and unnatural to fix their child
in the same way they fix
their car–but, say the techno-utopians, this is purely a function
of habit. We’re not used to
genetic engineering, so it seems “unnatural” to us. But think
about how unnatural driving a

car seemed for people who previously got around on horses and
in carriages. “The
smallpox virus was part of the natural order,” Silver wryly
observes, “until it was forced
into extinction by human intervention.” Diseases and death are
natural; life-saving surgery
is unnatural.
Nor are the techno-utopians worried about diminishing the
sanctity of human life because,
they say, it isn’t intrinsically sacred. “This is not an ethical
argument but a religious one,”
says Silver. “There is no logic to it.” Biologist David
Baltimore, a Nobel laureate, argues that
“statements about morally and ethically unacceptable practices”
have no place in the
biotechnology debate “because those are subjective grounds and
therefore provide no basis
for discussion.” Silver and Baltimore’s shared assumption is
that the moralists are talking

about values while they, the hard scientists, are dealing in facts.
In this view, the subjective preferences of those who seek to
mystify human life do not
square with the truths about human biology taught by science.
The cells of human beings,
Silver points out, are not different in their chemical makeup
from the cells of horses and
bacteria. If there is such a thing as human dignity, Silver
argues, it derives exclusively from
consciousness, from our ability to perceive and apprehend our
environment. “The human
mind,” Silver writes, “is much more than the genes that brought
it into existence.”
Somehow the electrochemical reactions in our brain produce
consciousness, and it is this
consciousness, Silver contends, that is the source of man’s
autonomy and power. While
genes fully control the activity of all life forms, Silver writes
that in human beings “master
and slave have switched positions.” Consciousness enables man
to complete his
dominance over nature by prevailing over his human nature.
Silver concludes that, in a bold
assertion of will, we can defeat the program of our genes, we

can take over the reins of
evolution, we can choose the genetic code we want for our
children, and we can
collectively determine the future of our species.
This triumphant note is echoed by many techno-utopians.
Biotech, writes journalist
Ronald Bailey, “will liberate future generations from today’s
limitations and offer them a
much wider scope of freedom.” Physicist Gregory Benford is
even more enthusiastic: “It is
as though prodigious, bountiful Nature for billions of years has
tossed off variations on its
themes like a careless, prolific Picasso. Now Nature finds that
one of its casual creations has
come back with a piercing, searching vision, and its own
pictures to paint.”
These are ringing statements. But do they make sense? Clearly
there are many problems
with Silver’s definition of human dignity as based in
consciousness. Animals are conscious;
do they deserve the same dignity as human beings? Moreover,
are human beings entitled to
dignity only when they are conscious? Do we lose our right to
be respected, and become

legitimate subjects for discarding or medical experiments, when
we fall asleep, or into a
coma? Surely Silver would disavow these conclusions. They do,
however, flow directly
from his definition, which is, in fact, just as heavily freighted
with values as are the
statements of his opponents.
There is, behind the proclamations of scientific neutrality, an
ideology that needs to be
spelled out, a techno-Nietzschean doctrine that proclaims: We
are molecules, but
molecules that know how to rebel. Our values do not derive
from nature or nature’s God;
rather, they arise from the arbitrary force of our wills. And now
our wills can make the
most momentous choice ever exercised on behalf of our species:
the choice to reject our
human nature. Why should we remain subject to the constraints
of our mortality and

destiny? Wealth and technology have given us the keys to
unlimited, indeed godlike,
power: the dawn of the post-human era.
What is one to make of all this? In many respects, we should
celebrate the advent of
technologies that enable us to alleviate suffering and extend
life. I have no problem with
genetic therapy to cure disease; I am even willing to endorse
therapy that not only cures
illness in patients but also prevents it from being transmitted to
the next generation. Under
certain circumstances, I can see the benefits of cloning. The
cloning of animals can provide
organs for transplant as well as animals with medicinal
properties (“drugstores on the
hoof”). Even human cloning seems defensible when it offers the
prospect of a biological
child to married couples who might not otherwise be able to
have one.
But there is a seduction contained in these exercises in
humanitarianism: They urge us to
keep going, to take the next step. And when we take that step,
when we start designing our
children, when we start remaking human beings, I think we will

have crossed a perilous
frontier. Even cloning does not cross this frontier, because it
merely replicates an existing
genetic palate. It is unconvincing to argue, as some techno-
utopians do, that giving a child a
heightened genetic capacity for music or athletics or
intelligence is no different from giving
a child piano, swimming, or math lessons. In fact, there is a big
difference. It is one thing to
take a person’s given nature and given capacity, and seek to
develop it, and quite another to
shape that person’s nature in accordance with one’s will.
There is no reason to object to people’s attempting brain
implants and somatic gene
enhancements on themselves. Perhaps, in some cases, these will
do some good; others may
end up doing injury. But at least these people have, through
their free choices, done it to
themselves. The problem arises when people seek to use
enhancement technologies to
shape the destiny of others, and especially their children.
But, argues Lee Silver, we have the right to terminate
pregnancy and control our children’s

lives in every other way; why shouldn’t parents be permitted to
alter their child’s genetic
constitution? In the single instance of gene therapy to cure
disease, I’d agree–because, in
this one limited case, we can trust the parents to make a
decision that there is every rational
reason to believe their offspring would decide in the identical
manner, were they in a
position to make the choice. No child would say, “I can’t
believe my parents did that to me.
I would have chosen to have Parkinson’s disease.”
But I would contend that in no other case do people have the
right to bend the genetic
constitution of their children–or anyone else–to their will. But
they might, in good
conscience, be tempted to do so; and this temptation must be
resisted. Indeed, it must be
outlawed–because what the techno-utopians want does, in fact,
represent a fundamental
attack on the value of human life, and the core principle of

America.
The scientific-capitalist project at the heart of the American
experiment was an attempted
“conquest of nature.” Never did the early philosophers of
science, like Francis Bacon, or the
American Founders conceive that this enterprise would
eventually seek to conquer human
nature. Their goal was to take human nature as a given, as
something less elevated than the
angels, and thus requiring a government characterized by
separation of offices, checks and
balances, limited power. At the same time, the Founders saw
human nature as more
elevated than that of other animals. They held that human
beings have claims to dignity
and rights that do not extend to animals: Human beings cannot
be killed for sport or
rightfully governed without their consent.
The principles of the Founders were extremely far-reaching.
They called into question the
legitimacy of every existing government, because at the time of
the American founding, no
government in the world was entirely based on the consent of
the governed. The ideals of

the Founders even called into question their own practices, such
as slavery. It took the
genius of Abraham Lincoln, and the tragedy of the Civil War, to
compel the enforcement of
the central principle of the Declaration of Independence: that
we each have an inalienable
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that these
rights shall not be abridged
without our consent.
The attempt to enhance and redesign other human beings
represents a flagrant denial of
this principle that is the basis of our dignity and rights. Indeed,
it is a restoration of the
principle underlying slavery, and the argument between the
defenders and critics of
genetic enhancement is identical in principle, and very nearly in
form, to the argument
between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln on the issue of
human enslavement.
In that tempestuous exchange, which laid the groundwork for
the Civil War, Douglas
argued for the pro-choice position. He wanted to let each new
territory decide for itself

whether it wanted slavery. He wanted the American people to
agree to disagree on the
issue. He advocated for each community a very high value: the
right to self-determination.
Lincoln challenged him on the grounds that choice cannot be
exercised without reference
to the content of the choice. How can it make sense to permit
people to choose to enslave
another human being? How can self-determination be invoked to
deny others the same? A
free people can disagree on many things, but it cannot disagree
on the distinction between
freedom and despotism. Lincoln summarized Douglas’s
argument as follows: “If any one
man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to
object.”
Lincoln’s argument was based on a simple premise: “As I would
not be a slave, so I would
not be a master.” Lincoln rejects in principle the subordination
implied in the master-slave

relationship. Those who want freedom for themselves, he
insists, must also show
themselves willing to extend it to others. At its deepest level,
Lincoln’s argument is that the
legitimacy of popular consent is itself dependent on a doctrine
of natural rights that arises
out of a specific understanding of human nature and human
dignity. “Slavery,” he said, “is
founded in the selfishness of man’s nature–opposition to it, in
his love of justice. These
principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into
collision so fiercely . . .
convulsions must ceaselessly follow.” What Lincoln is saying is
that self-interest by itself is
too base a foundation for the new experiment called America.
Selfishness is part of our
nature, but it is not the best part of our nature. It should be
subordinated to a nobler ideal.
Lincoln seeks to dedicate America to a higher proposition: the
proposition that all men are
created equal. It is the denial of this truth, Lincoln warns, that
will bring on the cataclysm.
Let me restate Lincoln’s position for our current context. We
speak of “our children,”

but they are not really ours; we do not own them. At most, we
own ourselves. It is true that
Roe v. Wade gives us the right to kill our unborn in the womb.
The right to abortion has
been defended, both by its advocates and by the Supreme Court,
as the right of a woman to
control her own body. This is not the same as saying the woman
has ownership of the
fetus, that the fetus is the woman’s property. The Supreme
Court has said that as long as
the fetus is occupying her womb, she can treat it as an
unwelcome intruder, and get rid of it.
(Even here, technology is changing the shape of the debate by
moving up the period when
the fetus can survive outside the womb.) But once a woman
decides to carry the pregnancy
to term, she has already exercised her choice. She has chosen to
give birth to the child,
which is in the process of becoming an independent human
being with its own dignity and

rights.
As parents, we have been entrusted with our children, and it is
our privilege and
responsibility to raise them as best we can. Undoubtedly we will
infuse them with our
values and expectations, but even so, the good parent will
respect the child’s right to follow
his own path. There is something perversely restrictive about
parents who apply relentless
pressure on their children to conform to their will–to follow the
same professional paths
that they did, or to become the “first doctor in the family.”
These efforts, however well
intentioned, are a betrayal of the true meaning of parenthood.
Indeed, American culture
encourages a certain measure of adolescent rebellion against
parental expectations,
precisely so that young people making the transition to
independence can “find
themselves” and discover their own identity.
Consequently, parents have no right to treat their children as
chattels; but this is precisely
the enterprise that is being championed by the techno-utopians.
Some of these people

profess to be libertarians, but they are in fact totalitarians. They
speak about freedom and
choice, although what they advocate is despotism and human
bondage. The power they
seek to exercise is not over “nature” but over other human
beings.
Parents who try to design their children are in some ways more
tyrannical than
slaveowners, who merely sought to steal the labor of their
slaves. Undoubtedly some will
protest that they only wish the best for their children, that they
are only doing this for their
own good. But the slaveowners made similar arguments, saying
that they ruled the
Negroes in the Negroes’ own interest. The argument was as
self-serving then as it is now.
What makes us think that in designing our children it will be
their objective good-rather
than our desires and preferences-that will predominate?
The argument against slavery is that you may not tyrannize over
the life and freedom of
another person for any reason whatsoever. Even that
individual’s consent cannot overturn

“inalienable” rights: One does not have the right to sell oneself
into slavery. This is the clear
meaning of the American proposition. The object of the
American Revolution that is now
spreading throughout the world has always been the affirmation,
not the repudiation, of
human nature. The Founders envisioned technology and
capitalism as providing the
framework and the tools for human beings to live richer, fuller
lives. They would have
scorned, as we should, the preposterous view that we are the
servants of our technology.
They would have strenuously opposed, as we should, the effort
on the part of the techno-
utopians to design their offspring; to alter, improve, and perfect
human nature; or to
relinquish our humanity in pursuit of some post-human ideal.
Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein describes a monster
that is the laboratory creation
of a doctor who refuses to accept the natural limits of humanity.

He wants to appropriate
to himself the traditional prerogatives of the deity, such as
control over human mortality.
He even talks about making “a new species” with “me as its
creator and source.” In his
rhetoric, Frankenstein sounds very much like today’s techno-
utopians. And, contrary to
what most people think, the real monster in the novel isn’t the
lumbering, tragic creature; it
is the doctor who creates him. This is the prophetic message of
Shelley’s work: In seeking
to become gods, we are going to make monsters of ourselves.
Dinesh D’Souza is the John M. Olin Research Fellow at AEI.
Science, Technology
http://www.aei.org/tag/science/
http://www.aei.org/tag/technology/
Darwin at 200: The Ongoing Force of His
Unconventional Idea
Editorial Observer
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG FEB. 11, 2009
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

I can’t help wondering what Charles Darwin would think if he
could survey the
state of his intellectual achievement today, 200 years after his
birth and 150
years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” the
book that changed
everything. His central idea — evolution by means of natural
selection — was in
some sense the product of his time, as Darwin well knew. He
was the grandson
of Erasmus Darwin, who grasped that there was something
wrong with the
conventional notion of fixed species. And his theory was
hastened into print
and into joint presentation by the independent discoveries of
Alfred Russel
Wallace half a world away.
But Darwin’s theory was the product of years of patient
observation. We love to
believe in science by epiphany, but the work of real scientists is
to rigorously
test their epiphanies after they have been boiled down to
working hypotheses.
Most of Darwin’s life was devoted to gathering evidence for
just such tests. He
writes with an air of incompleteness because he was aware that
it would take
the work of many scientists to confirm his theory in detail.

I doubt that much in the subsequent history of Darwin’s idea
would have
surprised him. The most important discoveries — Mendel’s
genetics and the
structure of DNA — would almost certainly have gratified him
because they
reveal the physical basis for the variation underlying evolution.
It would have
gratified him to see his ideas so thoroughly tested and to see so
many of them
confirmed. He could hardly have expected to be right so often.
Perhaps one day we will not call evolution “Darwinism.” After
all, we do not call
classical mechanics “Newtonism.” But that raises the question
of whether a
biological Einstein is possible, someone who demonstrates that
Darwin’s theory
is a limited case. What Darwin proposed was not a set of
immutable
mathematical formulas. It was a theory of biological history that
was itself set in
history. That the details have changed does not invalidate his
accomplishment.
If anything, it enhances it. His writings were not intended to be
scriptural. They
were meant to be tested.
https://www.nytimes.com/column/editorial-observer
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As for the other fate of so-called Darwinism — the reductionist
controversy
fostered by religious conservatives — well, Darwin knew plenty
about that, too.
The cultural opposition to evolution was then, as now,
scientifically irrelevant.
Perhaps the persistence of opposition to evolution is a reminder
that culture is
not biological, or else we might have evolved past such a
gnashing of
sensibilities. In a way, our peculiarly American failure to come
to terms with
Darwin’s theory and what it’s become since 1859 is a sign of
something broader:
our failure to come to terms with science and the teaching of
science.
We expect these days that a boy or girl obsessed with beetles
may eventually
find a home in a university or a laboratory or a museum. But
Darwin’s life was
his museum, and he was its curator. In June 1833, still early in
the five-year
voyage of the Beagle, he wrote about rounding Cape Horn: “It is
a grand
spectacle to see all nature thus raging; but Heaven knows every
one in the
Beagle has seen enough in this one summer to last them their
natural lives.” (In
this same letter, he celebrates the parliamentary attack on
slavery in England.)
The rest of Darwin’s life did in fact revolve around that voyage.

As you sift
through the notes and letters and publications that stemmed
from his years on
the Beagle, you begin to understand how careful, how
inquisitive and how
various his mind was. The voyage of the Beagle — and of a
young naturalist who
was 22 at its outset — is still one of the most compelling stories
in science.
Darwin recedes, but his idea does not. It is absorbed, with
adaptations, into the
foundation of the biological sciences. In a very real sense, it is
the cornerstone
of what we know about life on earth. Darwin’s version of that
great idea was
very much of its time, and yet the whole weight of his time was
set against it.
From one perspective, Darwin looks completely conventional —
white, male,
well born, leisured, patrician. But from another, he turned the
fortune of his
circumstances into the most unconventional idea of all: the one
that showed
humans their true ancestry in nature.
A version of this editorial appears in print on , on Page A34 of
the New York edition with
the headline: Darwin at 200: The Ongoing Force of His
Unconventional Idea. Today's
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Title:
Database:
Anybody Out There? By: Sacks, Oliver, Natural History,
00280712, Nov2002, Vol. 111, Issue 9
Environment Complete
Anybody Out There?
Section:
REFLECTIONS
Or is life, instead, "a glorious accident"?
One of the first books I read as a boy was H. G. Wells's 1901
fable, The First Men in the Moon. The two men, Cavor and
Bedford, land in a crater, apparently barren and lifeless, just
before the lunar dawn; then, as the Sun rises, they realize there
is
an atmosphere. They spot small pools and eddies of water, and
then little round objects scattered on the ground. One of them,
as it is warmed by the Sun, bursts open and reveals a sliver of
green. ("'A seed,' said Cavor . . . . And then . . .very softly,
'Life!'") They light a piece of paper and throw it onto the

surface of the Moon. It glows and sends up a thread of smoke,
indicating that the atmosphere, though thin, is rich in oxygen
and will support life as they know it.
Here, then, was how Wells conceived the prerequisites of life:
water, sunlight (a source of energy), and oxygen. "A Lunar
Morning" the eighth chapter in his book, was my first
introduction to astrobiology.
It was apparent, even in Wells's day, that most of the planets in
our solar system were not possible homes for life. The only
reasonable surrogate for the Earth was Mars, which was known
to be a solid planet of reasonable size, in stable orbit, not too
distant from the sun, and so, it was thought, having a range of
surface temperatures compatible with the presence of liquid
water.
But free oxygen gas--how could that occur in a planet's
atmosphere? What would keep it from being mopped up by
ferrous iron
and other oxygen-hungry chemicals on the surface, unless,
somehow, it was continuously pumped out in huge quantities,
enough to oxidize all the surface minerals and keep the
atmosphere charged as well?
It was the blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, that infused the
Earth's atmosphere with oxygen, a process that took between a
billion and two billion years. The fossil record shows that
cyanobacteria go back three and a half billion years. Yet,
amazingly,
some of them still thrive today, in odd corners of the world,
forming strange, cushion-shaped colonies called stromatolites
[see
photograph on opposite page]. It is an extraordinary experience
to go to Shark Bay in western Australia, where stromatolites
flourish in the hyper-saline waters, to watch them slowly

bubbling oxygen, and to reflect that, three billion years ago,
this was
how the Earth was transformed. The cyanobacteria invented
photosynthesis: by capturing the energy of the sun, they were
able
to combine carbon dioxide (massively present in the Earth's
early atmosphere) with water to create complex molecules--
sugars,
carbohydrates--which the bacteria could then store and tap for
energy as needed. This process generated free oxygen as a by-
product--a waste product that was to determine the future course
of evolution.
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Although free oxygen in a planet's atmosphere would be an
infallible marker of life, and one that, if present, should be
readily
detected in the spectra of extrasolar planets, it is not a
prerequisite for life. Planets, after all, get started without free
oxygen,
and may remain without it all their lives. Anaerobic organisms
swarmed before oxygen was available, perfectly at home in the
atmosphere of the early Earth, converting nitrogen to ammonia,
sulfur to hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide to formaldehyde, and
so forth. (From formaldehyde and ammonia the bacteria could
make every organic compound they needed.)
There may be planets in our solar system and elsewhere that
lack an atmosphere of oxygen but are nonetheless teeming with
anaerobes. And such anaerobes need not live on the surface of
the planet; they could occur well below the surface, in boiling
vents and sulfurous hot pots, as they do on Earth today, to say
nothing of subterranean oceans and lakes. (There is thought to
be such a subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa, locked
beneath a shell of ice several miles thick, and its exploration is
one of the astrobiological priorities of this century. Curiously,
Wells, in The First Men in the Moon, imagines life originating
in a
central sea in the middle of the Moon and then spreading
outward to its inhospitable periphery.)
It is not clear whether life has to "advance"--whether evolution
must take place--if there is a satisfactory status quo.
Brachiopods-lampshells--for instance, have remained virtually
unchanged since they first appeared in the Cambrian Period,

more than 500 million years ago. But there does seem to be a
drive for organisms to become more highly organized and more
efficient in retaining energy, at least when environmental
conditions are changing rapidly, as they were before the
Cambrian.
The evidence indicates that the first primitive anaerobes on
Earth were prokaryotes: small, simple cells--just cytoplasm,
usually
bounded by a cell wall, but with little if any internal structure.
By degrees, however--and the process took place with glacial
slowness--prokaryotes became more complex, acquiring internal
structure, nuclei, mitochondria, and so on. The microbiologist
Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has
convincingly suggested that these complex so-called eukaryotes
arose when prokaryotes began incorporating other
prokaryotes within their own cells. The incorporated organisms
at first became symbiotic and later came to function as essential
organelles of their hosts, enabling the resultant organisms to
utilize what was originally a noxious poison: oxygen.
Primitive as they are, prokaryotes are still highly sophisticated
organisms, with formidable genetic and metabolic machinery.
Even the simplest ones manufacture more than 500 proteins, and
their DNA includes at least half a million base pairs. Hence it
is certain that still more primitive life forms must have
preceded the prokaryotes.
Perhaps, as the physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton has suggested, there were "pro-
genotes" capable of metabolizing, growing, and dividing but
lacking any genetic mechanism for precise replication. And
before
them there must have been millions of years of purely chemical,
prebiotic evolution--the synthesis, over eons, of formaldehyde
and cyanide, of amino acids and peptides, of proteins and self-

replicating molecules. Perhaps that chemistry took place in the
minute vesicles, or globules, that develop when fluids at very
different temperatures meet, as may well have happened around
the boiling midocean vents of the Archaean sea.
Life as we know it is not imaginable without proteins, and
proteins are built from peptides, and ultimately from amino
acids. It is
easy to imagine that amino acids were abundant in the early
Earth, either formed as a result of lightning discharges or
brought
to the planet by comets and meteors.
The real problem is to get from amino acids and other simple
compounds to peptides, nucleotides, proteins, and so on. It is
unlikely that such delicate chemical syntheses would occur in
"some warm little pond," as Darwin imagined, or on the surface
of
a primordial sea. Instead, they would probably require unusual
conditions of heat and concentration, as well as the presence of
special catalysts and energy-rich compounds to make them
proceed. The biochemist Christian de Duve of Rockefeller
University suggests that complex organic sulfur compounds
played a crucial role in providing chemical energy, and that
these
compounds may have formed spontaneously early in Earth's
history, perhaps in the hot, acidic, sulfurous depths of the
seafloor
vents (where, it is increasingly believed, life probably
originated). De Duve imagines this purely chemical world as the
precursor

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of an "RNA world," believed by many to represent the first form
of self-replicating life. He thinks that the movement from one to
the other was both inevitable and fast.
The two preeminent evolutionary changes in the early history of
life on Earth--from prokaryote to eukaryote, from anaerobe to
aerobe--took the better part of two billion years. And there then
had to pass another 1,200 or 1,300 million years before life rose
above the microscopic forms, and the first "higher"
multicellular organisms appeared. So if the Earth's history is
anything to go
by, one should not expect to find any higher life on a planet that
is still young. Even if extraterrestrial life has appeared, and all
goes well, it could take billions of years for evolutionary
processes to move it along to the multicellular stage.
Moreover, all those "stages" of evolution, including the
evolution of intelligent, conscious beings from the first
multicellular
forms--may have happened against daunting odds. Stephen Jay
Gould spoke of life as "a glorious accident"; Richard Dawkins
of Oxford University likens evolution to "climbing Mount
Improbable." And life, once started, is subject to vicissitudes of
all kinds:
from meteors and volcanic eruptions to global overheating and
cooling; from dead ends in evolution to mysterious mass
extinctions; and finally (if things get that far) from the fateful
proclivities of a species like ourselves.
We know there are microfossils in some of the Earth's most
ancient rocks, rocks more than three and a half billion years old.

So
life must have appeared within one or two hundred million years
after the Earth had cooled off sufficiently for water to become
liquid. That astonishingly rapid transformation makes one think
that life may develop readily, perhaps inevitably, as soon as the
right physical and chemical conditions appear.
But can one argue from a single example? Can one speak
confidently of "earthlike" planets, or is the Earth physically,
chemically, and geologically unique? And even if there are
other "habitable" planets, what are the chances that life, with its
thousands of physical and chemical coincidences and
contingencies, will emerge? Life may be a one-off event.
Opinion here varies as widely as it can. The French biochemist
Jacques Monod regarded life as a fantastically improbable
accident, unlikely to have arisen anywhere else in the universe.
In his book Chance and Necessity, he writes, "The universe
was not pregnant with life." De Duve takes issue with this, and
sees the origin of life as determined by a large number of steps,
most of which must have had a "high likelihood of taking place
under the prevailing conditions." Indeed, de Duve believes that
there is not merely unicellular life throughout the universe, but
complex, intelligent life, too, on trillions of planets. How are
we to
align ourselves between these utterly opposite, but theoretically
defensible positions?
What we need, what we must have, is hard evidence of life on
another planet or heavenly body. Mars is the obvious candidate:
it was wet and warm there once, with lakes and hydrothermal
vents and perhaps deposits of clay and iron ore. It is especially
in
such places that we should look, suggests Malcolm Walter, an
expert on fossil bacteria that date from the Earth's earliest
epochs. If the evidence shows that life once existed on Mars, we

will then need to know, crucially, whether it originated there, or
was transported (as would have been readily possible) from the
young, teeming, volcanic Earth. If we can determine that life
originated independently on Mars (if Mars, for instance, once
harbored DNA nucleotides different from our own), we will
have
made an incredible discovery--one that will alter our view of
the universe, and enable us to perceive it, in the words of the
physicist Paul Davies, as a "bio-friendly" one. It would help us
to gauge the probability of finding life elsewhere instead of
bombinating in a vacuum of data, caught between the poles of
inevitability and uniqueness.
In just the past twenty years life has been discovered in
previously unexpected places on our own planet, such as the
life-rich
black smokers of the ocean depths, where organisms thrive in
conditions biologists would once have dismissed as utterly
deadly. Life is much tougher, much more resilient, than we once
thought. It now seems to me quite possible that
microorganisms or their remains will be found on Mars, and
perhaps on some of the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn.
It seems far less likely, many orders of magnitude less likely,
that we will find any evidence of higher-order, intelligent life
forms,
at least in our own solar system. But who knows? Given the
vastness and age of the universe at large, the innumerable stars
and planets it must contain, and our radical uncertainties about
life's origin and evolution, the possibility cannot be ruled out.

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And though the rate of evolutionary and geochemical processes
is incredibly slow, that of technological progress is incredibly
fast. Who is to say (if humanity survives) what we may not be
capable of, or discover, in the next thousand years?
For myself, since I cannot wait, I turn to science fiction on
occasion--and, not least, back to my favorite Wells. Although it
was
written a hundred years ago, "A Lunar Morning" has the
freshness of a new dawn, and it remains for me, as when I first
read it,
the most poetic evocation of how it may be when, finally, we
encounter alien life.
Douglas Prince, Signs of Life: Oak Leaves over Mars,
Schiaparelli Hemisphere, 1997
PHOTO (COLOR): Stromatolites are colonies of cyanobacteria.
They began charging the Earth's atmosphere with oxygen
some 3.5 billion years ago.
~~~~~~~~
By Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks is a neurologist and the author of nine books,
including, most recently, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a
Chemical
Boyhood and Oaxaca Journal. He lives in New York City.
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