False Choice Dilemma

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts this week, Logically Critical. They guy is really funny. His whole premise is that there are many things out there that everyone buys into that are not logical. The podcast I just listened to was about Logical Fallacies. This is when someone makes a conclusion from arguments that do not follow. In other words, the conclusion may or may not be true, the problem is that the facts or reasons they state do not have anything to do with the result. He was giving examples of Ad Hominum and Straw Man arguments when he reached a section on False Choice. In his example, he states that when a waiter comes up to you and asks if you want soup or salad, that is a false choice. What if you want both or neither? What if you want something else? He was talking about how it is often a mistake to believe that there are only 2 choices, good or evil, yes or no, etc.

I've thought of this often when you look at political arguments. Often times conservatives and liberals, democrats and republicans line up on opposite sides of a problem and blast away at each other. "We can't stop using oil to save the enviroment, it will wreck the economy." "Do you want all your freedoms, or do you want to stop the terrorists?"

Our most polarizing arguments usually are false choice arguments. Take the abortion stances, either you take away a woman's right to choose, or you kill babies. Both bad choices. Why not make it so only people that really want to get pregnant, will get pregnant. Then you get to make the choice of whether or not to conceive without any abortions. The same is true with teaching evolution. Many creationists see evolution as an attack on their religion. Why? Either god created the earth exactly and literally as it says in the bible or god is a lie? How about god created the earth and the people in them through evolution and gradual geological forces? School prayer, public displays of religious material? No problem. Don't mandate prayer or restrict it. If anyone wants to pray, they can, and if you don't like it, don't pray. Same with the nativity scene in the city hall. Don't sweat it. Or lobby your local government to put up a star of david or a notice celebrating ramadan or something.

This false choice thing, unfortunately, is deeply embedded in our government. Two parties, two choices. What if we don't like either choice? Unfortunately, in America, we don't get another choice. I used to think that multiple party coalition governments, Italy and Israel in particular, were stupid because the government is always being dissolved over the latest crisis. That is wasteful, to be in a state of perpetual electioneering. However, if you think about it, our country is full of people that are really voting based pretty much on single issues. There the anti-abortion and pro church people, then there's the small government, or pro environment people, but there are also lobbies based on certain industries or government workers or unions. There are people that seem to only think about inheritance taxes or taxes in general, and there are those that are passionate about health care or national defense. If you had to pick amongst many parties that all had narrow special interests, there wouldn't be a clear 50/50 split in American politics and there would not be such polarization.

Let's face it, the major parties don't serve anyone very well. You probably have a hard time finding many people out there that will tell you that they are staunchly one of the two parties and that they agree with everything that party stands for. I guess I would qualify that as saying they stand for everything that party stands for and actually follows through with.

LATER: Right after I finished writing this and posting it, I got a call from my wife. She had just read that Bloomberg was going to run as an independent. How's that for timing?

GAR

Civil War history is interesting, but people tend to think it does not touch the Kansas prairie. Kansas was frontier during the war, only recently being populated by the white settlers.

But the new and frontier states did contribute troops to the effort. My great great grandfather came from a little town in north central Kansas called Blue Rapids. I visited Blue Rapids in March of 2005 and stopped in to the cemetery. Many of the graves were marked with these star shaped markers, which have GAR on them.

GAR stands for Grand Army of the Republic. During the war, there were various armies, and they were usually named after the geographical region they came from. During the grand review that took place at the close of the war, the first gathering of the Union soldiers took place in Washington D.C. and then the whole organization was disbanded and the war was over. I thought this is where the concept for the Grand Army of the Republic came from, a description of all that served. There was the eastern army of Grant and the western army of Sherman, each given a full day to pass in review.

However, in 1866 a fraternal organization was put together that was called the Grand Army of the Republic. These Civil War veterans designated the precursor to Memorial Day, called Remembrance Day, in order to make sure that those served were properly remembered.

So today when you visit old cemeteries, you sometimes see these markers, placed on the graves of the soldiers over the next 70 years as the veterans of the war died off. Blue Rapids is a particularly good example of a cemetery with a lot of GAR markers. You can tell they are very old. They look like they are made of iron and painted black, and a few have bent or fallen over. I would guess the cemetery has 300 to 400 graves in it and maybe 40 of these markers.

My great great grandfather grew up there and left his mother and father on the farm to join and serve in Sherman's army. He participated in the march to the sea, the famous (or infamous, if you are from the south) overland sweep of the union forces from Atlanta to Savannah. After the war he came back and settled down, and many veterans moved west and settled on the Kansas Prairie. So many in fact, that the towns and counties of Kansas are mostly named after Civil War heroes like Sherman, Grant, Sedgwick, and McPherson, to name a few. These "immigrants" for after the war are probably the bulk of the people buried in the cemetery (rather than people that were there before the war like my family).

This isn't where my great great grandfather is buried. He ended up in Manhattan Kansas, some 40 miles to the south of Blue Rapids. My mother studied genealogy and found the graves in the Sunset Cemetery, just across the street from the fraternity house that many of the men in the family joined in college. George and his wife Mary Cheney purchased a plot and are buried beside each other. My mother discovered that the plot had spaces for 3 more graves that were never used. She was able to transfer the title and now my father and her are buried alongside our veteran ancestor. There is no GAR star marking his grave. I wonder if you can still get them?

Civil War Immunity

The human body as 10 trillion cells in it. We carry around 100 trillion non-human cells, microbes, mostly bacteria. They work for us, helping us with digestion mostly.

There is also an effect where our colonies of friendly bacteria help protect us against harmful infections. Their own defenses help fight off new invaders. We've known for a while that antibiotics have a defense stripping side effect. You've probably heard about eating yogurt (a bacterial culture) in order to help your intestinal cultures.

There is an interesting discussion on the Scientific American podcast from May 2, 2007. The guest was David Relman of Stanford who is studying the subject. He talks about how babies pick up their microbiota in the first weeks and months of life. Each person has their own unique bacteriological content.

Here's the theory I came up with from listening to this information. I believe that Civil War soldiers that survived the war carried a unique superbiota that imbued them with super immune systems.

I've always wondered why so many of the Civil War veterans lived so long. So many of them survived into their 90s in a time when the average life expectancy was around 55. I assumed that the constant marching and hard physical exertions put them into a superb physical shape that carried them on through later life. That may have something to do with it. You could also argue that the war would have weeded out the mentally and physically weak people, an accelerated survival of the fittest.

Most people that died in the Civil War died of disease, not injury. Camp conditions were atrocious. Sanitation was usually non existent, and when it was employed and enforced, as when General Hooker took over the Union forces, it was noted for it's extreme contrast to usual conditions.

Civil War soldiers were in intimate contact with each other. They probably ate out of the same containers, often using their fingers. They often slept tightly packed together for warmth (it was called "spooning"). It is reasonable to assume that much of their microbiota was passed around and shared.

It stands to reason that survivors of the various diseases that swept through the camps would have an immunity of some kind. It also stands to reason that humans with the right mix of internal bacterial stew that happened to confer protection for the various diseases would naturally develop.

The war was a massive mix of humanity under extreme conditions and accelerated development. My theory is unprovable, there would be no surviving cultures, no way to get them. Perhaps a study of medical records of veterans that survived to old age would yield some points of commonality, but the records are spotty, and they are nowhere near complete. So it simply remains an intriguing possibility.

Of course, massive movements of people are also a formula for rapid spread of a microorganism with devastating effect. Many speculate that the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918 was spread worldwide so quickly from the returning soldiers from WWI. But that is another subject.

Adversity Makes Strength

Again with the Star Trek references!

People that are coddled their whole life would have a much more difficult time making something of themselves than people that are challenged and made to work through obstacles.

That may seem obvious, but really, we do not use this principle in helping people develop as well as we could. The old "teach a man to fish" proverb also holds true with education. You sometimes have to struggle through things in order to learn, adapt, enhance your abilities, or become better.

Star Trek Next Generation junkies remember well the continuing storyline of the Borg. The Borg were this advanced species, with a collective consciousness that assimilated races they encountered against their will. All individuality was stamped out and the race lost their freedom and what made them unique and special. While I could probably write several college essays on the parallels to various real life issues and the Borg, I'm concentrating today more on how the humans were introduced to them.

The future history of the humans in Star Trek was set to proceed so that the Borg would have invaded human space, caught them unaware, and probably wiped them out. Instead, a supernatural (maybe I should say very advanced) being called Q whisked the crew of the Enterprise out to Borg space and arranged for a premature meeting between the Borg and humanity. They barely escaped alive. However, they got back to Earth and warned the Federation (not just humanity) about the threat. Humanity was able to prepare and when the inevitable conflict arrived, they were able to hold off being assimilated.

You start off thinking that Q was a real jerk for putting the humans in harms way, but then you realize later that he interfered to help humanity prepare and survive. It sure didn't seem helpful at the time.

This is apparent in so many examples. If your parents are hard on you, and you end up succeeding and excelling, guess what? They did you a favor. Ask a football player if he likes two a day practices, but ask him if he likes the shape he's in afterwards. We don't coddle people through military basic training, we need tough and capable soldiers. And no one does your homework for you in college if you want to actually understand what's going on.

So the point here is that anything worth doing is worth struggling to do.

I listened to this scientific program about the bacterial content of the human body. Apparently, in sheer numbers, there are more bacteria than human cells in the human body (they didn't say how the balance works out in total mass, I assume the bacteria are mostly smaller than human cells). When you say "bacteria" to the average person, they think germs and they start asking their doctor for an antibiotic. The load of bacteria we carry around as humans is mostly beneficial to us. These "infections" do many useful functions as well as helping to fight off harmful bacterial infections. Pretty cool, huh? Yet on the face of it, we tend to see bacteria as harmful. For that matter, some harmful bacteria do us big favors too. Research is just out that purports that herpes infections probably keep us from catching the plague, among other things. The persistent low level response to the virus makes some other more deadly viruses easy prey to our immune system.

And so it is with crime and terrorism. For that matter, the threat of war, too. The total damage and loss of life and property from terrorism (yes, even the 9/11 attacks) is minimal compared to all of our human and property assets. But the response to the threat can help us better prepare for future threats. I think the point to emphasize is that chaos can occur naturally, but being put on alert by dissidents around the world about the potential for nuclear, biological, or good old fashioned explosive mayhem can help us prepare for disasters in a way to prevent them. What are criminals and terrorists other than an unwanted infection on society?

Quantum Entanglement

Physics talks about a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. This is the concept that you can take two particles and entangle them, then, no matter how far you separate them, whatever you do to one, is also done to the other.

Orson Scott Card, in his Ender series of books, played with this concept. He used it directly with a communications device called the Ansible. This device used the principle of quantum entanglement (Card called it philotic threads) to enable instantaneous communication across space. You could have a fleet of spaceships many light years away and still stay in touch with them. He also played with it as a means of mental telepathy, a way to communicate mentally over vast distances. And he played around with it as a component of love. When two people's lives were entangled, whether they were family or just people that loved each other, they created an unseen bond that was physically real.

I think there is something to this. You hear stories all the time about a mother knowing that her child is in danger, even though they are in another room. You've probably felt a bond with a family member, loved one, or close pet that had an eerie quality to it sometimes.

I listened to a researcher talk once about their believed that telepathy in humans was a real thing. They speculated that this ability eventually atrophies because so much of what we say, our verbal cues, do not match what we are thinking. When an infant cries at night and wakes up its parent, the parent doesn't go in there mad at the baby for waking them up. They go in and hold the baby and make comforting noises. Do you feel comfortable when a baby is screaming? No one does. So the theory is that we are picking up on other people's thoughts, but once we learn language, that disconnect between words and thoughts causes us to disregard the thoughts.

I think the subject is at the cutting edge of science in the realm of physics, but maybe should be studied by psychologists, too.