I’m always reading, a habit of mind not always appreciated by my wife, as I well understand. And the subjects of my reading are not only thrillers, history, and science, but more often what Donald Trump calls “Fake News” on the internet. which I now mostly access through my  iPhone.

“Fake News” journalists are my heros. They look at the world, the whole word, at what’s happening, at what is, at what was, and at what could be, and they write about it. And now there are more of them than  ever before, and to read them we need only an internet access.

Let me call these journalists, the thousands, tens of thousands of them out there, the principal source of my own learning, much more than ever was school or college. And they are probably in this business, in many if not all instances, for life.

My own life-long learning starts with reading them. That’s probably why I begin my day with such as the Times and the Post for these two publications represent the very best of them, their principal job, that which they do admirably on a daily basis, being to send their journalists out into the world so that we, the readers, can be made aware of what’s out there. By reading them I/we grow in our understanding of the world.

Now I’m going to give you a single example of the sort of thing they do, bringing the world out there to us. This is not from the Times, nor the Post, but from another well known Fake News publication, The Atlantic Monthly. And the subject is not Donald Trump, SCOTUS, or the threat of government shutdown, or now of our illegitimate President claiming emergency powers. The subject is Jainism.

As I first began to read this piece, called What The Crow Knows, I was immediately struck by both joy and laughter, my two favorite emotions, as well as by my sharply revived interest in the subject matter,  Jainism, and from that what our animal cousins, what the crows know.

[Now and from now on, it’s the writer,Ross Andersen who is speaking (writing).]

Amid the human crush of Old Delhi, on the edge of a medieval bazaar, a red structure with cages on its roof rises three stories above the labyrinth of neon-lit stalls and narrow alleyways, its top floor emblazoned with two words: birds hospital.

On a hot day last spring, I removed my shoes at the hospital’s entrance and walked up to the second-floor lobby, where a clerk in his late 20s was processing patients. An older woman placed a shoebox before him and lifted off its lid, revealing a bloody white parakeet, the victim of a cat attack.

The man in front of me in line held, in a small cage, a dove that had collided with a glass tower in the financial district. A girl no older than 7 came in behind me clutching, in her bare hands, a white hen with a slumped neck.

The hospital’s main ward is a narrow, 40-foot-long room with cages stacked four high along the walls and fans on the ceiling, their blades covered with grates, lest they ensnare a flapping wing. I strolled the room’s length, conducting a rough census. Many of the cages looked empty at first, but leaning closer, I’d find a bird, usually a pigeon, sitting back in the gloom.

The youngest of the hospital’s vets, Dheeraj Kumar Singh, was making his rounds in jeans and a surgical mask. The oldest vet here has worked the night shift for more than a quarter century, spending tens of thousands of hours removing tumors from birds, easing their pain with medication, administering antibiotics. Singh is a rookie by comparison, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he inspects a pigeon, flipping it over in his hands, quickly but gently, the way you might handle your cellphone. As we talked, he motioned to an assistant, who handed him a nylon bandage that he stretched twice around the pigeon’s wing, setting it with an unsentimental pop.

The bird hospital is one of several built by devotees of Jainism, an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals.

A series of paintings in the hospital’s lobby illustrates the extremes to which some Jains take this prohibition. In them, a medieval king in blue robes gazes through a palace window at an approaching pigeon, its wing bloodied by the talons of a brown hawk still in pursuit. The king pulls the smaller bird into the palace, infuriating the hawk, which demands replacement for its lost meal, so he slices off his own arm and foot to feed it.

Jainism’s highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals; at a bird hospital in Old Delhi, vets treat broken wings, administer medicine, remove tumors, and more. (Hashim Badani)

I’d come to the bird hospital, and to India, to see firsthand the Jains’ moral system at work in the world. Jains make up less than 1 percent of India’s population. Despite millennia spent criticizing the Hindu majority, the Jains have sometimes gained the ear of power. During the 13th century, they converted a Hindu king, and persuaded him to enact the subcontinent’s first animal-welfare laws. There is evidence that the Jains influenced the Buddha himself. And when Gandhi developed his most radical ideas about nonviolence, a Jain friend played philosophical muse.

In the state of Gujarat, where Gandhi grew up, I saw Jain monks walking barefoot in the cool morning hours to avoid car travel, an activity they regard as irredeemably violent, given the damage it inflicts on living organisms, from insects to larger animals. The monks refuse to eat root vegetables, lest their removal from the earth disturb delicate subterranean ecosystems. Their white robes are cotton, not silk, which would require the destruction of silkworms. During monsoon season, they forgo travel, to avoid splashing through puddles filled with microbes, whose existence Jains posited well before they appeared under Western microscopes.

For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.

Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe animals are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy. This idea that animals are conscious was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. And not just the obvious cases—primates, dogs, elephants, whales, and others. Scientists are now finding evidence of an inner life in alien-seeming creatures that evolved on ever-more-distant limbs of life’s tree. In recent years, it has become common to flip through a magazine like this one and read about an octopus using its tentacles to twist off a jar’s lid or squirt aquarium water into a postdoc’s face. For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.

No aspect of our world is as mysterious as consciousness, the state of awareness that animates our every waking moment, the sense of being located in a body that exists within a larger world of color, sound, and touch, all of it filtered through our thoughts and imbued by emotion.

Even in a secular age, consciousness retains a mystical sheen. It is alternatively described as the last frontier of science, and as a kind of immaterial magic beyond science’s reckoning. David Chalmers, one of the world’s most respected philosophers on the subject, once told me that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, like space-time or energy. He said it might be tied to the diaphanous, indeterminate workings of the quantum world, or something nonphysical.

These metaphysical accounts are in play because scientists have yet to furnish a satisfactory explanation of consciousness. We know the body’s sensory systems beam information about the external world into our brain, where it’s processed, sequentially, by increasingly sophisticated neural layers. But we don’t know how those signals are integrated into a smooth, continuous world picture, a flow of moments experienced by a roving locus of attention—a “witness,” as Hindu philosophers call it.

In the West, consciousness was long thought to be a divine gift bestowed solely on humans. Western philosophers historically conceived of nonhuman animals as unfeeling automatons. Even after Darwin demonstrated our kinship with animals, many scientists believed that the evolution of consciousness was a recent event. They thought the first mind sparked awake sometime after we split from chimps and bonobos. In his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that it was later still. He said the development of language led us, like Virgil, into the deep cognitive states capable of constructing experiential worlds.

This notion that consciousness was of recent vintage began to change in the decades following the Second World War, when more scientists were systematically studying the behaviors and brain states of Earth’s creatures. Now each year brings a raft of new research papers, which, taken together, suggest that a great many animals are conscious.

It was likely more than half a billion years ago that some sea-floor arms race between predator and prey roused Earth’s first conscious animal. That moment, when the first mind winked into being, was a cosmic event, opening up possibilities not previously contained in nature.

There now appears to exist, alongside the human world, a whole universe of vivid animal experience. Scientists deserve credit for illuminating, if only partially, this new dimension of our reality. But they can’t tell us how to do right by the trillions of minds with which we share the Earth’s surface. That’s a philosophical problem, and like most philosophical problems, it will be with us for a long time to come.
Continue reading “I’d come to the bird hospital, and to India, to see firsthand the Jains’ moral system at work in the world.” →

by Jeffrey Goldberg
Editor in chief of The Atlantic
January, 2019

In an October 2016 editorial, The Atlantic wrote of Donald Trump: “He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar.” We argued that Trump “expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself.” Trump, we also noted, “is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.”

In retrospect, we may be guilty of understatement.

There was a hope, in the bewildering days following the 2016 election, that the office would temper the man—that Trump, in short, would change.

He has not changed.

This week marks the midway point of Trump’s term. Like many Americans, we sometimes find the velocity of chaos unmanageable. We find it hard to believe, for example, that we are engaged in a serious debate about whether the president of the United States is a Russian-intelligence asset. So we decided to pause for a moment and analyze 50 of the most improbable, norm-bending, and destructive incidents of this presidency to date.

Our 2016 editorial was a repudiation of Donald Trump’s character as much as it was an endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. It was not meant to be partisan. The Atlantic’s founders promised their readers that we would be “of no party or clique.” This remains a core governing principle of the magazine today. What follows is a catalog of incidents, ranked—highly subjectively!—according to both their outlandishness and their importance. In most any previous presidency, Democratic or Republican, each moment on this list would have been unthinkable.

25. “We’re gonna have the cleanest air”. By Robinson Meyer
24. The president can’t stop talking about carnage. By Rebecca J. Rosen
23. America gets a first daughter. By Caitlin Flanagan
22. The UN General Assembly laughs at the president. By Rachel Donadio
21. Rain stops Trump from honoring the dead. By Eliot A. Cohen. 
20. The president learns about separation of powers. By Russell Berman.
19. The president learns about the Justice Department. By Natasha Bertrand
18. The president lies constantly. By Angie Drobnic Holan
17. Trump threatens to press his “nuclear button”. By Uri Friedman
16. Public humiliation comes for everyone in the White House.By Alex Wagner
15. The CIA dead become a TV prop. By Vernon Loeb
14. You know you’re in a constitutional crisis when… By Quinta Jurecic
13. Trump mocks Christine Blasey Ford to a cheering crowd. By McKay Coppins
12. A new term enters the presidential lexicon: “shithole countries”. By Ibram X. Kendi
11. Trump throws paper towels at Puerto Ricans. By Vann R. Newkirk II
10. “I have the absolute right to pardon myself”. By Garrett Epps
9. Covfefe. By Adrienne LaFrance
8. The president calls his porn-star ex-paramour “horseface”. By Sophie Gilbert
7. Trump picks the wrong countries for his travel ban. By Hannah Giorgis
6. Trump declares war on black athletes. By Jemele Hill
5. James Comey is fired. By Benjamin Wittes
4.Putin and Trump talk without chaperones. By Franklin Foer
3.The president still hasn’t released his tax returns. By Annie Lowrey
2.“Very fine people on both sides”. By Adam Serwer
1.Children are taken from their parents and incarcerated. By Ashley Fetters

About the Edge Foundation, I take this from Wikipedia:

The Foundation is an association of science and technology intellectuals created in 1988 as an outgrowth of The Reality Club, and that currently, its main activity is contributing to the Edge website, edited by  John Brockman, who among other things is the author of The Third Culture, a growing movement towards (re)integration of literary and scientific thinking, a nod toward British scientist C. P. Snow‘s concept of the two cultures, of science and the humanities. On the Edge website scientists and others are invited to contribute their thoughts in a manner readily accessible to non-specialist readers.

In recent years Edge has posed its members an annual question, for example in:

• 2006: “What is your dangerous idea”? The responses formed the book What Is Your Dangerous Idea?, which was published with an introduction by Steven Pinker and an afterword by Richard Dawkins.
• 2009: “What Will Change Everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”
• 2014: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?”

This year’s Edge Question is:

WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?

Edge founder and editor John Brockman himself has this to say about this year’s question:

Beware of getting caught up in the details of an argument

You are much more likely to hear common sense invoked as a concept at a cocktail party than at a scientific discussion—but it should play a bigger role in such discussions, where it is sometimes deficient and scorned. This is especially problematic when scientists get caught up in the details of an argument and follow it to an implausible conclusion.

Consider an example from the field of archaeology. Throughout most of human prehistory, human evolution was confined to the Old World, and the Americas were uninhabited. During the last Ice Age, humans finally crossed from Siberia into Alaska over the Bering Strait land bridge. For thousands of years thereafter, they were prevented from spreading further south by the ice sheet that stretched, without interruption, across Canada, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

The first well-attested settlement of the Americas south of today’s Canada-U.S. border occurred around 13,000 years ago, as the ice sheets were melting. We see the sudden appearance of stone tools of the Clovis culture, named after the town of Clovis, N.M., where they were first recognized. Clovis tools have now been found all over the lower U.S. and south into Mexico. That sudden appearance of a culture abundantly filling up the entire landscape is what one expects and observes whenever humans first colonize fertile, empty lands.

But any claim by an archaeologist to have discovered “the first X” is taken as a challenge by other archaeologists to discover an earlier X. In this case, archaeologists feel challenged to discover sites with different stone tools that date from before the Clovis culture. Every year now, new claims of pre-Clovis sites in the U.S. and Latin America are advanced and subjected to detailed scrutiny. Most of these claims have eventually been invalidated.

Still, a handful of pre-Clovis claims have not yet been discredited. The most widely discussed are for sites at Monte Verde in Chile, Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania, and one site each in Texas and in Oregon. As a result, most American archaeologists currently support the thesis of pre-Clovis settlement.

But this seems to me an implausible view, defying common sense. It would require that the first human settlers south of the Canada-U.S. border were somehow airlifted by nonstop flights to Chile, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Texas, leaving no unequivocal signs of their presence at intermediate sites. If there really had been pre-Clovis settlement, we would already know it and would no longer be arguing about it. That is because there would be hundreds of undisputed pre-Clovis sites distributed everywhere across the Americas.

Just like everyone else, scientists need common sense.

If you want to know more about the Clovis people, go to

The Clovis Point and the Discovery of America’s First C ulture

to read the article by Charles C. Mann in the Smithsonian Magazine, from November 2013

I couldn’t resist putting Cathal’s work published in Cosmos Magazine on my own website.

Six physics equations that changed the course of history   

Physics equations are forms of magic. They allow us to explain the past, such as why Halley’s comet visits every 76 years, and predict the future – as far as the ultimate fate of the Universe.

They place limits on the possible, as in the efficiency of an engine, and they reveal possibilities we could never have imagined, such as the energy inside an atom.

Occasionally over the past few centuries, a new equation endowed the next generation with a new magical tool, and so changed the course of history. Here are some of the most pivotal.

1. Newton’s second law of motion (1687)

What does it say?

Force equals mass times acceleration.

In other words …

It’s easier to push an empty shopping cart than a full one.

What did it teach us?

Together with Isaac Newton’s other two laws of motion (the first says you need a force to move something, the third says every action has an equal and opposite reaction), this equation forms the foundation of classical mechanics.

F=ma allowed physicists and engineers to calculate the value of a force. For instance, your weight (measured in newtons) is your mass (in kilograms) multiplied by acceleration due to gravity (on Earth, about 10 metres per second squared).

Saying you “weigh” 60 kilograms is incorrect in physics terms – your actual weight is about 600 newtons. This is the force pushing down on your bathroom scales.

But was it practical?

This equation was crucial to the arrival of the mechanical age. It’s used in almost every calculation which involves using force to cause movement.

It tells you how powerful an engine needs to be to power a car, how much lift an aircraft needs to take-off, how much thrust to lift a rocket, how far a cannonball flies.

2. Newton’s law of universal gravitation (1687)

What does it say?

Any two massive objects pull on one another across space. But the force decreases rapidly the further apart they are.

In other words …

We’re stuck to the Earth’s surface because our planet is comparatively big with lots more mass.

What did it teach us?

For centuries, the Universe had been divided into two realms – the earthly and the celestial. But Newton’s law of gravitation applied to everything. The same tug that causes an apple to fall from a tree keeps the Moon orbiting the Earth. Newton gave us the first direct connection between everyday life and the movement of the heavens.

But was it practical?

For a long time, the equation’s main use was to calculate the orbits of planets. The space-age of the 1950s and 60s saw it used in practice – to send satellites into orbit and astronauts to the Moon.

One failing, which Newton himself admitted, was that he did not know “why” gravity operated. It took nearly 230 years for Albert Einstein to come along and explain gravity as arising from the warping of spacetime by massive objects in his theory of general relativity.

Even so, general relativity is only used in extreme situations, such as when gravity is very strong, or when great precision is required, such as for GPS satellites. In most cases Newton’s 330-year-old equation is still good enough.

3. Second law of thermodynamics (1824)

What does it say?

Entropy (a measure of disorder) always increases.

In other words …

It’s no good crying over spilt milk. Disorder and mess are inevitable in the Universe.

What did it teach us?

While trying to analyse steam engine efficiency in the 19^th century, French physicist Sadi Carnot stumbled upon one of the most profound equations in all of science.

It tells us some processes are irreversible, and may even be responsible for the arrow of time. In one of its simplest forms, it says heat always travels from a warm object to a cold one.

It can also be applied to the grandest scales. Some have applied it to describe the ultimate fate of the Universe in the form of “heat death” where all the stars are burnt out and nothing’s left but waste heat.

Others have used it to wind back through time and describe the origin of the Universe in a moment of zero entropy (or perfect order) at the instant of the Big Bang.

But was it practical?

This law was important for developing technologies of the industrial revolution, from steam to internal combustion engines, to refrigerators and chemical engineering.

In real engines, some energy is always wasted – so the law also showed any efforts at perpetual motion were ultimately futile.

4. The Maxwell-Faraday equation (1831 and 1865)

What does it say?

You can create a changing electric field (left side of the equation) from a changing magnetic field (on the right) and vice versa.

In other words …

Electricity and magnetism are related!

What did it teach us?

In 1831, Michael Faraday discovered the connection between two natural forces, electricity and magnetism, when he found a changing magnetic field induced a current in a nearby wire.

Later, James Clark Maxwell generalised Faraday’s observation as one of his four fundamental equations of electromagnetism.

But was it practical?

This is the equation that powers the world. Most electric generators (whether in a wind turbine, coal-fired plant or a hydroelectric dam) work by converting mechanical energy (from steam or water) to rotate a magnet. By running this process in reverse, you get the electric motor.

More generally, Maxwell’s equations are still used in almost every application of electrical engineering, communications technology and optics.

5. Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence (1905)

What does it say?

Energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.

In other words …

Mass is really just a super-condensed form of energy.

What did it teach us?

Because of the size of the constant in the equation (the speed of light squared, an unimaginably huge number) a colossal amount of energy can be released through converting a tiny amount of mass.

But was it practical?

Einstein’s most famous equation hinted at the potential for the huge amounts of energy released in nuclear fission, when a large unstable nucleus breaks into two smaller ones. This is because the mass of the two smaller nuclei together is always less than the mass of the original big nucleus – and the missing mass is converted into energy.

The “Fat Man” atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki in Japan on 9 August 1945 converted just one gram of mass to energy, but produced an explosion the equivalent around 20,000 tonnes of TNT.

Einstein himself had signed a letter to US president at the time Franklin Roosevelt recommending the atom bomb be developed – a decision he later regarded as the “one great mistake” of his life.

6. The Schrödinger wavefunction (1925)

What does it say?

It describes how the change of a particle’s wavefunction (represented by psi, the candlestick shaped symbol) can be calculated from its kinetic energy (movement) and its potential energy (the interactions on it).

In other words …

It’s the quantum version of F=ma.

What did it teach us?

When Erwin Schrödinger formulated his equation in 1925, it placed the new theory of quantum mechanics on firm footing by allowing physicists to calculate how quantum particles move and interact.

The equation looks a bit weird because it uses the mathematics of waves. (Subatomic particles are “wavy”, so their interaction is described as interference of waves, rather than like billiard balls.)

But was it practical?

In one of its simplest forms, it describes the structure of the atom, such as the arrangement of electrons around the nucleus, and all chemical bonding.

More generally it’s used for many calculations in quantum mechanics and is fundamental to much of modern technology from lasers to transistors, and the future development of quantum computers.

Along with many other writers and commentators I’ve written more than once about Donald Trump’s abysmal  ignorance,

in regard to so many things, in regard to this country’s and the world’s past history, in regard to the present, to what’s happening right now, and in regard to where his ignorance is perhaps most pronounced, and most frightening if he ever were to win the presidency, in regard to the physical and biological, as well as the political sciences. In short,  he is mostly ignorant regarding just about everything you’d assume he should know having been chosen as the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties.

Trump’s ignorance was especially noticeable for me during the Presidential Debates, when at so many moments during those debates, when I would have wanted him to say something interesting and thoughtful, perhaps revealing his own up until then still hidden but perhaps (?) intelligent take on things? But he was a disappointment. No matter what the question from the moderator, Trump seemed only capable of repeating the shallow and superficial and “nasty”, although colorful  words and expressions of the “Trump rallies,” intended to arouse among his no less ignorant listeners their devotion to his cause  as well as their anger against “crooked Hillary.”

In these debates the most he would ever say regarding the policies of the other party, was that their policies were failures and that he, Donald Trump, while making America great again, would scrap them all, the tax code, the excessive regulations on business and entrepreneurship, the Obama immigration and trade measures, as well as the affordable care Act, put into effect also by President Obama. And other than to say he would scrap the measures of his predecessor he said little or nothing of what he would do to replace them, only such things as that he would deport the illegals and build an impenetrable wall between us and our neighbors to the South.

Then just the other day I happened to see the following Genetic Diversity Quiz on the PBS.org web site, exploring the question, what differences make a difference. A great question. What if Donald Trump were to take the quiz? Well he probably never would because he hates to be exposed, as not being better, more knowledgeable than everyone else.

Take the quiz  yourself and see how you would do with the differences that make a difference. If the Donald were ever to take it how do you think he would do, not only in this quiz but in other comparable quizzes, say on U.S.History, economics, the Political and natural sciences, the great books, the great works of art and music, all the knowledge that represents the great and real achievements of man living in a free and open society.

I wonder if Trump even understands what that means, to live in a free and open society, especially given his oft stated opposition to free trade, in a society where the free movement of people and goods is the norm. Especially given his authoritarian and bullying stances on so many things.

Anyway, here’s the quiz (a cure for racism?). Let me know how you do.

GENETIC DIVERSITY QUIZ
What differences make a difference?

1. Approximately how old are modern humans?
   1. 170,000 years
   2. 40,000 years
   3. 70,000 years
   4. 1.2 million years
   5. 5 million years
2. Which group has the most genetic variation?
   1. Humans
   2. Chimpanzees
   3. Penguins
   4. Fruit flies
   5. Elephants
3. What is the source of genetic variation in humans?
   1. mutation
   2. genetic drift
   3. natural selection
   4. sexual selection
   5. environment
4. Which two present-day populations are most likely to be genetically similar?
   1. Italians and Ethiopians
   2. Senegalese and Kenyans
   3. Italians and Swedes
   4. Chinese and Lakota (Sioux)
   5. Saudi Arabians and Ethiopians
5. What caused differences in skin color to evolve?
   1. The environment
   2. Natural selection
   3. Sexual selection
   4. Tanning oil
   5. We don’t know
6. If you know a person’s skin color, what can you predict about them?
   1. their blood type
   2. their height
   3. the likelihood they will get certain inherited diseases
   4. whether or not they have musical talent
   5. none of the above
7. An individual from which country is most likely to carry the sickle cell trait?
   1. Ireland
   2. Greece
   3. South Africa
   4. Samoa
   5. Mexico
8. Your ancestors are likely to include:
   1. Nefertiti
   2. Julius Caesar
   3. Qin Shi Huang – first emperor of China
   4. All of the above
   5. None of the above
9. Which continent has the greatest human genetic diversity?
   1. Europe
   2. Asia
   3. North America
   4. South America
   5. Africa
10. If a catastrophe wiped out everyone except people in Europe, how much of the total genetic variation in our species would be left?
    1. 50%
    2. 38%
    3. 94%
    4. 21%
    5. 74%

Continue reading PBS GENETIC DIVERSITY QUIZ, What differences make a difference →

But first a few words about life long learning. That’s an expression that’s overused, or not used enough, or rather used but not understood. In fact, there’s probably not a school or college that doesn’t mention life long learning in its brochure materials.

What’s going on here? Well it’s simple, we would prepare our students to become in their own lives life long learners. That’s the bottom line, more bottom than even the monstrous, obscene, sometimes life long debts the students are accumulating while attending their schools and colleges.

But are there lifelong learners out there among the graduates of our schools and colleges? How does one judge their presence? Are there any lifelong learners among the millions of Americans who are going to vote for Donald Trump? Those who would vote for Trump what can they possibly know about the history of the West, about the Enlightenment, about art and music, about literature, about math and science, all those subjects that ought to have a greater place in our lives out of school than in school, those subjects that ought to be what life long learning is all about.

The greatest irony is that now, in the 21st century it has never been easier to learn. The incredible achievements of mathematics and science, the great works of art and music and literature, the histories of times past, the nature of other civilizations, of other cultures, of other ways of life have never been so readily accessible, so completely within our reach.

While thousands of brave individuals, hundreds of thousands are making these treasures available by means of the ever new electronic media, putting the knowledge of most everything out there within the reach of most everyone, it’s just not happening, that people are becoming more enlightened, more open, more tolerant, more liberal and/or more conservative.

People seem rather to be closing up within themselves, shutting themselves off from others who are different, from most of the wide world, wanting to hold tight to whatever they may have from the past rather than going out into what is fast becoming without them the bravest new world that men have ever seen.

I’m reminded again of Richard Feynman’s question, of the relation of science to modern society —Why is it possible for people to stay so woefully ignorant and yet reasonably content in modern society when in fact so much knowledge is available to them?

I stumbled upon the article below just this morning in the Review, Cosmos. And I might just as well have stumbled upon any number, thousands, tens of thousands of other no less interesting and informative articles. As I say it’s never been so easy to find out more about our world. We are no longer just cave dwellers putting the best of ourselves on to the walls of a cave in southwestern France.

I think it’s our greater and greater knowledge of our world that saves us, that brings out our humanity, that makes us (well not all of us, helas! but perhaps the life long learners among us) more inclusive, more tolerant, the very sort of qualities that what life long learning should be all about.

Anyway, here’s just one example of the millions of doorways, in this instance a magazine article, leading to new knowledge. Here the subject is extinction. What does that mean? Is it the same as death? What did it mean to the cave dwellers? Did they even know the word? What does it mean to us now?

For even today, with all the knowledge available to us, we still have to come up with our own answers, just like the cave dwellers. We’ll have to decide what meaning to give to extinction, and in particular to the so-called sixth extinction that is now going on and for which we are probably mostly to blame.

The big five mass extinctions


Viviane Richter is a freelance science writer based in Melbourne

Biologists suspect we’re living through the sixth major mass extinction. Earth has witnessed five, when more than 75% of species disappeared. Palaeontologists spot them when species go missing from the global fossil record, including the iconic specimens shown here. “We don’t always know what caused them but most had something to do with rapid climate change”, says Melbourne Museum palaeontologist Rolf Schmidt.

End Ordovician, 444 million years ago, 86% of species lost
— Graptolite 2-3 cm length

Graptolites, like most Ordovician life, were sea creatures. They were filter-feeding animals and colony builders. Their demise over about a million years was probably caused by a short, severe ice age that lowered sea levels, possibly triggered by the uplift of the Appalachians. The newly exposed silicate rock sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere, chilling the planet.
Credit: JAIME MURCIA / MUSEUM VICTORIA

Late Devonian, 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost
— Trilobite, 5 cm length

Trilobites were the most diverse and abundant of the animals that appeared in the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago. Their great success was helped by their spiky armour and multifaceted eyes. They survived the first great extinction but were nearly wiped out in the second. The likely culprit was the newly evolved land plants that emerged, covering the planet during the Devonian period. Their deep roots stirred up the earth, releasing nutrients into the ocean. This might have triggered algal blooms which sucked oxygen out of the water, suffocating bottom dwellers like the trilobites.

Credit: Chip Clark / Smithsonian Institution

End Permian, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost
— Tabulate coral, 5 CM

Known as “the great dying”, this was by far the worst extinction event ever seen; it nearly ended life on Earth. The tabulate corals were lost in this period – today’s corals are an entirely different group. What caused it? A perfect storm of natural catastrophes. A cataclysmic eruption near Siberia blasted CO2 into the atmosphere. Methanogenic bacteria responded by belching out methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Global temperatures surged while oceans acidified and stagnated, belching poisonous hydrogen sulfide.  “It set life back 300 million years,” says Schmidt. Rocks after this period record no coral reefs or coal deposits.
Credit: JAIME MURCIA / MELBOURNE MUSEUM

End Triassic, 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost
— Conodont teeth 1 mm

Palaeontologists were baffled about the origin of these toothy fragments, mistaking them for bits of clams or sponges. But the discovery of an intact fossil in Scotland in the 1980s finally revealed their owner – a jawless eel-like vertebrate named the conodont which boasted this remarkable set of teeth lining its mouth and throat. They were one of the first structures built from hydroxyapatite, a calcium-rich mineral that remains  a key component of our own bones and teeth today.  Of all the great extinctions, the one that ended the Triassic is the most enigmatic. No clear cause has been found.

Credit: Paul Taylor / Natural History Museum

End Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, 76% of all species lost
— Ammonite 15 cm length

The delicate leafy sutures decorating this shell represent some advanced engineering, providing the fortification the squid-like ammonite required to withstand the pressure of deep dives in pursuit of its prey. Dinosaurs may have ruled the land during the Cretaceous period but the oceans belonged to the ammonites. But volcanic activity and climate change already placed the ammonites under stress. The asteroid impact that ended the dinosaurs’ reign provided the final blow. Only a few dwindling species of ammonites survived. Today, the ammonites’ oldest surviving relative is the nautilus. Will it survive the sixth great extinction?

Credit: JAIME MURCIA / MUSEUM VICTORIA