April 2009

§ "At the risk of offending some people, we may discreetly recall that the blond white-skinned Scandinavians have contributed little to Western civilization . . . "

That, in a chapter addressing the controversy over whether IQ, overall intelligence, is racially or ethnically determined. In his The End of Racism, Dinesh D'Souza asserts: The earliest human civilizations emerged not in the coldest climate but in the moderate climates of North Africa and the Mediterranean. "Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek civilization [were developed] where Asians, Africans, and Europeans met and exchanged goods and ideas." D'Souza  himself has been labeled a racist, primarily because his book identifies studies of all sorts which purport to prove the contention that, as a group, Asians are smarter than Whites and Whites are smarter than Blacks. He puzzles over the fact that "China and the Islamic world were once great civilizations; their gene pool has remained relatively constant, but their cultural fortunes have changed dramatically."

Technology is Good
Decades ago, many of us observing and commenting on the developing nations, called "Third World" at the time, predicted that they would benefit from technological leapfrogging. Those countries would not have to work through technological evolution; they could simply begin to use the most recent technology. How wonderfully valid those predictions have proved. Cell phones, television, laptops, small-scale, onsite solar devices are everywhere -- even in the midst of still prevalent atrocious physical and political conditions.

Too many of those appalling conditions are caused by tribal mindsets, with village chiefs opposing, for example, area-wide water distribution because such improvements might diminish the local leader's image of being the source of all benefits. But anyone who still contends that technology is inherently evil cannot be taken seriously.

Nuclear power generation welcome
Sweden, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are going nuclear. Sweden, especially, is reversing its decades-long anti-nuke posture. The cause: climate change targets, energy security, a wobbly economy. France has long been nuke-friendly. Now, if only the United States can rid itself of those anti-coal, anti-oil, anti-oil sands carbon-hating environmentalists who refuse to consider nuke as one of the solutions, along with costlier wind farms and solar arrays.

February 2009

Identifying mankind's races
Nearby are several paragraphs which point out that scientific "truth" ain't necessarily so. Consider:

The 1928 edition of Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia contains an article demonstrating that "the shape of the skull is an important factor in distinguishing races," as are "the facial angle, the color of the skin, the form and color of the hair, the shape of the facial features, the stature and proportions of the bones, etc."

Five races based on color are identified: Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, and White. Pictured are a sub-Saharan African, a face which can be seen as Mediterranean or Southern Asian, an American Indian, a Chinaman, and -- Benjamin Franklin. Admitting that there was/is controversy about some of those racial characterizations, Compton concludes that a combination of "geographical distribution and color of the skin" is the most useful and derives five main groups:

"(1) the Caucasian, European, or white race; (2) the Ethiopian, African, or black race; (3) the Mongolian, Asiatic, or yellow race; (4) the American (Amerind) or red race; (5) the Malay and Polynesian or brown race. The piece goes on to speak of "Nordic or Teutonic" stock as representing the "greatest purity," going on to describe the group-similarity of Slavs and Mediterraneans. 

Touching gingerly on how the white race came to dominate so much of the world, the encyclopedia asks, "How long will the white man continue to be master of the world?" and suggests that the mutual white race slaughter of World War I "intensified the feeling throughout Asia and Africa that the day of white supremacy was nearing its close."

Was that where Hitler got his Master Race idea?

January 2009

True or False?
"In science, truth once discovered always remains the truth." Or, "Physics is not a body of indisputable Truth; it is a body of well-supported probable opinions only, and its ideas may be exploded at any time."

With supporting footnotes, I included the likes of Einstein and Millikan in a series of popular science articles for a Methodist-published high school  publication during the late 1950s.

I also quoted Job 38:4: "Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding."

In the decades since, the sciences have many times corrected their "truths." Even the fundamentals of inorganic chemistry have been extensively revised.

All by way of saying, be slow to accept as gospel any scientific "fact" which is seriously challenged by other scientists. To repeat a thought I have previously expressed in VersagiVoice, no one challenges the fact that nitric acid will, every time, dissolve brass chips. But about such theories as those about the beginning of the universe or climate change . . .

Technology: Good or Bad?
Defenders of science and technology like to point out that just because improvements can be used for evil purposes does not justify attempts to restrict research or product development. "Nuclear bombs in the possession of St. Francis of Assisi would not be a threat," is one of their mantras.

In that context, consider the woman in Omaha who eavesdropped on her husband by planting an electronic bug in her kid's Teddy bear. And: DNA sample from a blood-bloated mosquito found in a stolen-then-abandoned car matched that of a man on the police register in Seinaejoki, Finland. Brought in, the man says he was hitchhiking and left the car with the man driving it.

2008