Affirmation

I'm sitting here at the DMV waiting to get a new license and catching up on some reading via google reader. I was interested to see this new post on Kottke.org ( one of my favorites!) that was incredibly similar to one I recently posted about the "Rubber rooms" in NYC. Not only did it quote one of the same passages, it also referenced the This American Life episode I mentioned.
I'm not insinuating anything - I doubt very much that Jason at Kottke reads Meta-Ninja. But given that I beat their post by a few days, it made me feel good!

"...and this is my great uncle Turnip."

Richard Dawkins new book, which comes out in September, is being serialized by the Times of London. Having read most of his books, I will be ordering this one, as well. It follows on the heels of Jerry Coyne's recent publication, Why Evolution is True.
Here's a great quote from the first part of Dawkin's book:

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it.

Insanity in the "Rubber Room"

There is a mind-blowing article in this week's New Yorker about how the New York City education department handles teachers who are accused of incompetence or who may pose a threat to their students. The whole article is just craziness. There are literally HUNDREDS of public school teachers who, because of pending arbitration, are required to report to a "rubber room" every day and waste time for the full duration of a school day. In the meantime, they are still receiving full salary, benefits, and seeing their pension increase with each passing year. This is the perfect example of a good-intentioned system gone dreadfully awry.

These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.

The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.

And further:

Neither the Mayor nor the chancellor is popular in the Rubber Room. “Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence,” Brandi Scheiner, standing just under the Manhattan Rubber Room’s “Handle with Care” poster, said recently. Scheiner, who is fifty-six, talks with a raspy Queens accent. Suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher, she earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she is, she said, “entitled to every penny of it.” She has been in the Rubber Room for two years. Like most others I encountered there, Scheiner said that she got into teaching because she “loves children.”

“Before Bloomberg and Klein, everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own,” Scheiner said. “There was no need to push anyone out.” Like ninety-seven per cent of all teachers in the pre-Bloomberg days, she was given tenure after her third year of teaching, and then, like ninety-nine per cent of all teachers before 2002, she received a satisfactory rating each year.(ITALICS MINE)

There is an episode of This American Life that investigates the same issue. You can hear that here.

Lying Robots and Blind Watchmakers

Robert Wright has a new op-ed in today's NYTimes that addresses an area of commonality between atheists and believers. He claims that both camps need to acknowledge their ignorance when it comes to foundational questions of our existence. Rather than clinging to dogma - religious or scientific - in the face of new information, they both need to adapt and, yes, EVOLVE.

For example, in trying to resist the science of evolution, believers point to humanity's "moral sense" as an irrefutable sign of God's hand in our creation:

Of course, to say that God trusted natural selection to do the creative work assumes that natural selection, once in motion, would do it; that evolution would yield a species that in essential respects — in spiritually relevant respects, you might say — was like the human species. But this claim, though inherently speculative, turns out to be scientifically plausible.

For starters, there are plenty of evolutionary biologists who believe that evolution, given long enough, was likely to create a smart, articulate species — not our species, complete with five fingers, armpits and all the rest — but some social species with roughly our level of intelligence and linguistic complexity.

And what about the chances of a species with a moral sense? Well, a moral sense seems to emerge when you take a smart, articulate species and throw in reciprocal altruism. And evolution has proved creative enough to harness the logic of reciprocal altruism again and again.

Vampire bats share blood with one another, and dolphins swap favors, and so do monkeys. Is it all that unlikely that, even if humans had been wiped out a few million years ago, eventually a species with reciprocal altruism would reach an intellectual and linguistic level at which reciprocal altruism fostered moral intuitions and moral discourse?

This makes me think about the article I read recently that described how robots that were programmed to cooperate in the collection of resources, eventually began "lying" to one another and hoarding the resources at the others' expense. But Wright addresses the development of morality/ethics - particularly as it relates to religion - as a Zero Sum/Non Zero Sum paradigm in The Evolution of God. I found it very compelling.

(Back to the article)
Atheists, on the other hand, refuse to acknowledge any possibility of a "higher purpose" that eludes empirical analysis. A closer look, however, suggests that, in some cases, there isn't any other way to explain things. Here, Wright is describing how Richard Dawkins handled the famous "Watchmaker" anecdote:

As Mr. Dawkins pointed out, we can now explain the origin of organisms without positing a god. Yet Mr. Dawkins also conceded something to Paley that gets too little attention: The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation.

The reason is that, unlike a rock, an organism has things that look as if they were designed to do something. Digestive tracts seem to exist in order to digest food. The heart seems to exist in order to pump blood.

And, actually, even once you accept that natural selection, not God, is the “designer” — the blind watchmaker, as Mr. Dawkins put it — there is a sense in which these organs do have purposes, purposes that serve the organism’s larger purpose of surviving and spreading its genes. As Daniel Dennett, the Darwinian (and atheist) philosopher, has put it, an organism’s evolutionarily infused purpose is “as real as purpose could ever be.”

In sum, Wright wants to suggest that believers open their minds to the possibility that Natural Selection may have guided the development of humanity's "moral sense", and wants atheists to concur that some notions of a "higher power" may not be in conflict with empirical science. He closes with this comment:

William James said that religious belief is “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” Science has its own version of the unseen order, the laws of nature. In principle, the two kinds of order can themselves be put into harmony — and in that adjustment, too, may lie a supreme good.

Raw Milk Update

It is quite delicious! Very creamy and sweet. The girls love it and now ask for "fresh milk". We'll be getting more.

Alice Waters and Roasted Chicken

We purchased a chicken from a local farm recently and, considering it would be the first whole chicken we have prepared and eaten in many years, were trying to figure out a perfect way to do it. I came across this recipe from Alice Waters, read some glowing reviews of it in several places, and decided to give it a try.

It was incredible. Try it. You will love it.

Francis Collins

There has been a lot of conversation lately about the appointment of Dr. Francis Collins to the position of Director of the National Institutes of Health. You see, Dr. Collins is a Christian who has stated that he doesn't believe there is any conflict between his beliefs and his work as a scientist. While many people - including, apparently, President Obama - agree with that notion, there are many who do not. In fact, there have been countless blogs, articles (more here) and interviews recently all centering on the question of whether Dr. Collins is capable of running a federally-funded scientific institute as a Bible believing Christian. He has since taken the reins at the NIH and made a point of acknowledging the tumult by stating:

"I want to reassure everyone I am here to lead the NIH as best I can, as a scientist," Collins said, noting Internet and editorial page concerns about Collins, as an evangelical Christian, leading a science organization.

He has also presented the "five themes" that will guide the NIH under his leadership. These include a focus on global health, domestic health and medical treatment, and support for large-scale projects, including studies on autism. In all, a very impressive agenda, but it won't silence the critics who will continue to claim that Collin's "unscientific" beliefs in miracles compromise his ability to lead the august NIH.

As you can see in the interview excerpted below, both Collins and Richard Dawkins disagree with the late Stephen Jay Gould's notion that the two enterprises represent "non-overlapping magisteria", placing the question of God outside of the realm of science.

TIME: Dr. Collins, the Resurrection is an essential argument of Christian faith, but doesn't it, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method, which depends on the constancy of natural laws?

COLLINS: If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous. If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

TIME: Doesn't the very notion of miracles throw off science?

COLLINS: Not at all. If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.

DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt.

And the closing remarks:

COLLINS: I just would like to say that over more than a quarter-century as a scientist and a believer, I find absolutely nothing in conflict between agreeing with Richard in practically all of his conclusions about the natural world, and also saying that I am still able to accept and embrace the possibility that there are answers that science isn't able to provide about the natural world--the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I'm interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

Steven Pinker on the Genius of Charles Darwin

I love Pinker. I first read The Language Instinct in college and have read most of his other books since then. I had the chance to see him speak in Boston when his book The Stuff of Thought was first published. He is very entertaining and obviously brilliant.

This video is one of many compiled for a documentary celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday. You can find more here.

An Atheist at the Creationist "Museum"

A rather scathing review of the Creation "Museum" from PZ Myers, a boat-rocking atheist biology professor from the University of Minnesota.

What about the scientific content? They must have made some kind of argument, right? Wrong. They didn't even try.This is their core premise. They claim that scientists and creationists are all working from exactly the same set of facts, and the only difference is in how we interpret them…and that they have an extra source of information that scientists reject, the Bible.

Their first big exhibit is a perfect example of the principle in action. It's a model of a dinosaur dig, with two men working away at excavating the bones. There is a video accompanying it in which the two views are presented. The younger Asian fellow in front says, and I paraphrase, "This animal died about a hundred million years ago. Its body dried in the sun for several days before being slowly buried under layers of sediment in a local flood." Then the avuncular creationist says, "I see the same bones, but I believe this dinosaur was killed suddenly about 4400 years ago in a huge global flood, which buried it deeply all at once." And then he goes on to explain that see, they have the very same evidence, but he understands it in the light of God's word.

It is a profoundly dishonest display. No, they are not using the same evidence: the creationist is ignoring all but the most superficial appearances. The scientist says a few details about this particular dinosaur, but what Ken Ham hides is that every statement would have a large body of evidence in its support. This isn't two guys stating their mere beliefs in a field…it's one guy, the creationist, closing his eyes to the evidence and spouting Biblical gibberish, and one scientist stating the conclusions of substantial investigations.

Raw Milk

In keeping with the theme of local food systems, I visited a fairly local farmers market this afternoon and found a the stand for Beaver Brook Farm, a farm that sells raw milk, which, apparently, can't be sold in all states - including Massachusetts. So we are going to try some this weekend when we pick it up Saturday morning.

I asked her to describe it and she said, "It's really creamy. In fact, you have to shake it up before you drink it because all of the butter cream settles."
We'll see how it goes with GrapeNuts.

Follow Up Re: Organic

An interesting debate has sprouted up between Ezra Klein and Tom Philpott on the possibility of actual nutritional differences between organic and conventionally grown produce. 

Thoughts on Being an Eater

I became a vegetarian the summer after finishing college. I had been reading magazines and booklets on industrial agriculture (Farm Sanctuary, et al), and, frankly, decided I didn't want any part of such an inhumane system. It didn't take me too long to figure out that simply being a vegetarian is not, in itself, a particularly daring thing to do. I could eat lots of junk food and still think of myself as a "vegetarian". Despite all of the studies that aim to prove that the simple act of opting-out of the consumption of meat was a good thing for the environment, I still could see no demonstrable positive impact of my choice in the day-to-day. 

A few years later, I found myself in the thralls of an obsession with the idea of becoming a small, artisanal farmer like Eliot Coleman. I started planting and tending "organic" gardens in the backyard, read every "small farm" agriculture book I could find, and spent a good amount of time browsing real estate sections for a 5-10 acre farm to buy. I even worked here and there at local farms and farm stands to get some practical experience with running a farming business. It was a beautiful, haunting dream of returning to the land, reconnecting with Mother Nature, disconnecting from "The Grid", and discovering all that is True, and Real, and Authentic about our earthly existence. 

That dream, while still present in less-obvious ways, has faded somewhat as time has passed. With three children to raise and monthly bills to pay, my attention has, necessarily, focused on the more pragmatic, less idyllic challenges that lie before me. One of those challenges is making decisions about how and what my family should eat - a question that Michael Pollan discusses at length in his now ubiquitous The Omnivore's Dilemma. 

It is not as simple as buying "organic" vs "conventional" produce and products, as the former is more often than not simply a slightly altered carbon copy of the latter. Industrial organic farming practices force one to question whether the term "Organic" has, in fact, been stripped of all meaning. As a result, small farmers who resist industrialized agricultural practices are avoiding the term altogether and are, instead, employing words that have not yet been hijacked by the major industrial food producers. Polyface Farm (given a great deal of attention in The Omnivore's Dilemma) use the term "Beyond Organic", which I've also seen used by small farms here in Connecticut. The term that resonates most with me is the one that has been posited by the aforementioned Eliot Coleman: authentic. Here's what he says:

The label "organic" has lost the fluidity it used to hold for the growers more concerned with quality than the bottom line, and consumers more concerned with nutrition than a static set of standards for labeling. "Authentic" is meant to be the flexible term "organic" once was. It identifies fresh foods produced by local growers who want to focus on what they are doing, instead of what they aren't doing.

And, perhaps, the most compelling element of the term:

Fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, eggs and meat products are produced within a 50-mile radius of their place of their final sale.

You can read the entirety of his thinking about authentic food here. 

In trying to be as conscious as possible about my role in the food system, I have been thinking about concrete, tangible ways to shorten the "chain" of my food, both in terms of the time between harvest and consumption, and in the physical distance it travels in doing so. In addition, I have been thinking about the concept and reality of "organic" food (2 very different things) and trying to peel away the layers of marketing and disinformation that has come to be such a significant piece of the industrial food machine. My goal is to find ways to eat local, authentic food as often as possible and, in doing so, support my local farmers who are trying to resist the lure of large-scale industrial food production and are, instead, reforming the connection between communities and the sources of their food. 

Eliot Coleman, Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, et al are all very clear on this point: We need to fundamentally alter our relationship to food. Rather than viewed as a low cost commodity (which it never is, despite price tags, when you consider the true costs of keeping the industrial food system afloat), food should be seen as an intimate and profoundly important element of our health and identities as humans. It should require thought. It should require contemplation and wonder. 

As Berry said, "Eating is an agricultural act." So it is. Or at least, so it should be. 

And We're Back

After a several month hiatus from posting and commenting throughout last year's presidential election, we are back online. During the time away, I have transitioned from working in the financial services industry back to teaching, moved twice, and now live in Connecticut. But Meta-Ninja has never been far from my mind and I am excited to once again take up the keyboard and begin the process of meaning-making (anyone out there speak education-ese?) in my world.

So here's a quick update on what I've been reading and thinking about over the past 9 months or so. I will be returning to these ideas/concepts/throughlines as we move forward on this page.

Religion:
I'm always looking for a good book that deals with the connections between humanity and the divine. Here are three I've tackled in the last few months that fall in that category:
1. The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright
2. Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Erdman
3. The Great Transformation, by Karen Armstrong

History:
I've been stuck in the early modern era of European history, particularly the era of founding of the Royal Society. Great stuff.
1. Newton and the Counterfeiter, by Thomas Levenson
2. The Courtier and the Heretic, by Matthew Stewart

Food/Food Systems/Health:
We had been members of a local CSA in Massachusetts for several years and were sad to move away from the fresh produce and connection to the land that we had enjoyed for so long. We were fortunate, however, to find a local CSA here in Connecticut that was offering new mid-season shares! We are now members of the Stone Gardens Farm in Shelton, CT.
1. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
2. Clean House, Clean Planet, by Karen Logan

More on all of these later.