Deepak Chopra is still blathering on. I’m afraid that while he can’t shut up, I can ignore him, and this will be my last response to his drivel; it’s also the last time I’ll be linking to the Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington’s exercise in indiscriminate narcissism is not the direction I want to see liberals taking, and while my voice isn’t a significant one, I can at least deny the kook wing of the Left my tiny bit of support.
This time the obsessive small-minded mystic is still whining against science and reason, still railing against his own idiotic imaginings.
But how can anyone seriously defend science as a panacea when it gave us the atomic bomb?
First of all, no one defends science as a panacea. It’s not leading us to utopia, it’s taking us towards a better understanding of the real world…which, contrary to the quacks who claim reality is what you imagine it to be, is often going to expose uncomfortable truths. There is no paradise. There is no perfection. There’s just a world where we have to struggle and compromise, and in the end we all die.
Secondly, the people who whimper about science bringing us bombs (and we’ve also got a few trolls wandering around scienceblogs damning scientists for that) have got it all wrong. Nuclear reactions are a property of the natural world—they go on in stars, they take place beneath our feet. Science did not invent fission and fusion, it only exposed the nature of the event, explained how it worked, and made this knowledge available to human beings. People chose what to do with it. We don’t have any choice in what science reveals. What would you have had 20th century scientists do, intentionally suppress all knowledge of a fundamental property of matter, and all of the unpredictable consequences of that knowledge? And just how would you propose to do that, short of destroying the scientific enterprise all together?
Reason isn’t the savior of the future. That role belongs to wisdom. With all the threats to human survival that we now face, I resort to a phrase coined by Jonas Salk: the survival of the wisest. Although a great researcher in medicine, Salk had the vision to look beyond materialism. He saw that evolution, as it applies to modern human beings, isn’t Darwinian. We no longer live in a state of nature.
Good grief, the inanity, it burns.
No, reason isn’t the savior of the future. It’s just the absolute bare minimum of what we ought to expect from the people to whom we entrust our futures—it’s the foundation of everything we ought to do. I don’t care what other wonderful virtues Chopra wants to tout, if they are built on irrationality and unreason, they are destructive.
I also don’t know what Chopra means by this fuzzy word “wisdom” he’s throwing out in his little essay, but he writes as if he thinks it is something completely orthogonal to reason, but of course it isn’t—unreasoning people can’t be wise, although they may pretend to it, and other irrational people may believe them. He’s using the word in an utterly meaningless way, the same way his kind of people use the words “spirituality” or “vibrations” or “quantum”, as subliminal tokens for indefinable emotions they might have; it’s shorthand for empty pseudo-profundity. It’s the hook the con artist uses to persuade his mark to fork over his respect, but it’s all a lie.
The rest I have no patience for. Chopra doesn’t know what “evolution” or “Darwinian” means, so trying to dissect the meaning he is reading into them as pointless: he’s just reciting buzz words, stringing them together like pretty beads on a string. It’s all noise from a fool.
Enough.
But you have to admit his logorrhea is impressive. Or is that Logosrrhea?
Here’s a little quote mining from Deepak’s wonderblog.
“We no longer live in a state of nature. Competition is more mental and technological today than physical. The survival of specific gene pools, which is the crux of animal survival and adaptation, is irrelevant for us.”
Mr. Chopra, Great Wise One, how about this little tidbit from Sciam News?
Or do you not consider East African cattle herding communities to be a part of modern humanity?
News
December 11, 2006
African Adaptation to Digesting Milk Is “Strongest Signal of Selection Ever”
East African cattle herding communities rapidly and independently evolved ability to digest lactose
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=727EA883-E7F2-99DF-36D89AB12E930315&sc=I100322
Science did not invent fission and fusion, it only exposed the nature of the event, explained how it worked, and made this knowledge available to human beings. People chose what to do with it.
This ‘science gave us evil toys’ arguments really gets my goat. My usual response on hearing it, inevitably from a fundie wingnut, is to ask for the name of a single rational atheist scientist who has ever ordered the detonation of a nuclear bomb. Over a civilian target more to the point. Tends to either shut them up or reduce them to stuttering “b-b-b-but the scientists MADE it”. Dolts.
Well, in the case of the atomic bomb much effort involving scientists was put in to go from basic science to viable technology. Applied science has also more leeway where to go.
But it isn’t a one-way street and science is codependent on technology amongst other activities. It is as if Chopra asked ‘how can anyone seriously defend society when it gave us the atomic bomb?’ While the real question is how he can seriously defend himself giving us the woo.
Well, in the case of the atomic bomb much effort involving scientists was put in to go from basic science to viable technology. Applied science has also more leeway where to go.
But it isn’t a one-way street and science is codependent on technology amongst other activities. It is as if Chopra asked ‘how can anyone seriously defend society when it gave us the atomic bomb?’ While the real question is how he can seriously defend himself giving us the woo.
I don’t know — while Deepak is full of shit, this whole “Science doesn’t create technology; people create technology” cop-out is on par with the NRAs “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people”.
Some scientists like to say nice things like “Science is about understanding the universe”, but that’s not *really* why nations fund science; they fund it because they know science is the goose that lays the golden eggs of technology. And scientists know that very well; when we write grant proposals we *specifically* say why our research should be funded. “Because it’s really neat and tells us about the universe” is not in general a very effective selling point to the NSF or NIH. Saying “This research will lead to industrial, medical and/or defense applications” often is. It’s disingenuous to forget this justification later on.
Apparently he must hate the science that gave us the smallpox vaccine too. And those bastards with their fancy computer chips and copper wire. And those bastards who allow him to freeze foods and vegetables, and fly around the world, and prevent his grandmother (hypothetical grandmother) from dying of pneumonia. How dare they help my grandfather live til 96!
OK, tell me how modern physics could have advanced to the point we are now at without noticing (or by actively concealing) the properties of matter that make it possible to build a great big bomb. I’m not saying scientists did not consciously carry out the applied research necessary to build the bomb, I’m saying that, as was noted in the 30s and 40s, our knowledge of physics made the conclusion that it was possible to build one inescapable.
Three minutes of Deepak Chopra should be enough to last you for life. Once you catch on to his gimmick, there is no reason to continue listening or reading. He is actually less intrusive than a popup ad, which you should also have learned to ignore. Why would anybody spend this much effort taking him seriously? It’s a game he plays, and it makes him money.
“We no longer live in a state of nature.”
*I* do; he obviously lives somewhere pretty far removed from anything *I* know anything about. Holy crap!
Re: Alleged “People create technology” “cop-out”… Writing grant proposals that appeal to industrialism doesn’t change the fact that people create technology and the end result is we understand more about how the world works. The depravity of the military-industrial complex and general industrial profiteering may be the *current* motivation, but it wasn’t always like that, and it won’t always *be* like that.
It was science that gave us the bomb. But was it not a Baptist that ordered not 1 but 2 detonated over populated cities?
So if one can condemn science for giving us the ability, one must certainly condemn the Holy for actually USING IT.
This is of the school that thinks making **** up is a valid “way of knowing.”
“The sleep of reason brings forth monsters”.
And there’s a scary Goya print of that title…..
As for “Huffpost” I suggest everyone write to that address and tell the owner what a load of shit Chopra is, and there should be a limit to this sort of insanity ……
Wait until the first time this nimrod has to count on the ‘Faith Based’ electric power plant down the road to light up his house. You will hear a different story.
Deepak and his whole snake oil racket infuriates me to now end. He takes the scraps of science that he can understand and twists them until he ends up with Quantum Consciousness and information theory.
“[I]t’s also the last time I’ll be linking to the Huffington Post.”
Wow, HuffPost must be shaking in their shoes.
Probably it would not be possible. But then the debate should be whether the positive applications based on modern physics (which include the very computers we are using to converse) outweigh the negative ones. I happen to think they do. I just don’t like it when scientists disavow responsibility for obvious applications of their research that led to their research being funded in the first place.
I don’t think so. Do you have a better suggestion?
“I’m not saying scientists did not consciously carry out the applied research necessary to build the bomb, I’m saying that, as was noted in the 30s and 40s, our knowledge of physics made the conclusion that it was possible to build one inescapable.”
Clearly this is true, but it is the actual building of the bomb by scientists, and the urging towards said project by scientists, that people are talking about. Science is amoral, which means it can be dangerous. In the same way reason is amoral, and it too can be dangerous. At the same time, I don’t buy all this “wisdom” crap, but we need to recognize what the limits of science are.
Every sentence is an insult to intelligence.
Deepak, you’re a lousy, egotistical self-help author. Is that what you aspired to be when you were a kid? Do you sleep well at might knowing you are perpetuating stupidity with your quantum woo? Why don’t you try to do something positive with your life?
Stop misleading people with this tripe, you buffoon!
Guys like this are such jokers, didn’t you read the rest of what PZ had written?
I also don’t know what Chopra means by this fuzzy word “wisdom” he’s throwing out in his little essay…
Neither do I, although I’m confident it is predicated on dualism for which he has no evidence. (His conceit seems to be that materialists ignore the half of the universe which can’t be demonstrated to exist. He needs to see a Mr. Orcam about a shave…)
This sounds like a kissing cousin of the “you can’t find love with your microscope, smarty pants*” argument of which he is so fond.
* (congrats on the lovely coining)
You know, a lot of scientists do want to do their work so we can know more about the universe. If we’re forced to come up with technology applications to get grants, that’s the fault of everyone else.
You can’t hope scientists will leave nasty truths aside as we move forward. It’s like building a road and uncovering a 40-ton diamond*. There’s no hiding it. The great challenge is that all of us need to work together and made the right decisions as we advance.
Maybe this is kinda dumb, but did anyone else ever wonder why the first bomb wasn’t just dropped outside a big city? Wouldn’t that have had the same effect? It’s not like they wouldn’t have noticed it, or figured we had another one.
*do I win some kind of awful analogy award?
Clearly this is true, but it is the actual building of the bomb by scientists, and the urging towards said project by scientists, that people are talking about.
>> coathangrrr
Wait, wait. I thought it was the U.S. government that was doing the urging for the creation of the bomb. Was it really scientists, outside of being people who wanted an end to the war, that were urging it to be created?
I’m sorry, but the best argument you can make now is that science is inescapably linked to people, and those people are capable of misusing knowledge. That’s a far cry from science it’self may be bad.
My physics professor once told me that scientists didn’t invent the atomic bomb. Politicians commanded scientists to invent it for them.
She also told me how to properly use aluminum foil in order to retain a turkey’s juices while microwaving it.
The bomb is often cited as a mistake. What effects did it really have, though?
One: it forced Japan’s surrender by taking thousands of civilian lives. We took more civilian lives through fire-bombing their cities than nuking them, though. If you want to use this result as a negative aspect of the bomb, you will have to disprove the commonly held opinion that using those bombs shocked the country into realizing that it was fighting a losing battle to the point of annihilation.
Two: it was used (effectively!) to prevent a full-scale war between the U.S.A and U.S.S.R. Why did we keep developing and building ever more powerful nukes? Because as long as both sides held the weapons to annihilate each other, war was not an option.
Three: its development gave us a deeper understanding of the nature of reality. I am not well-informed enough to start listing technologies and scientific insights that followed from this program, but this is clearly real, and clearly a win.
I might add that nuclear detonations could be used in future highly efficient space propulsion systems. Look up Project Orion (:
“Guys like this are such jokers, didn’t you read the rest of what PZ had written?”
-5 unparallel construction
Yes, I’ve enjoyed and agreed with PZ’s fiskings of Deep-pocket. But unlike PZ, I don’t demand (or expect) to agree with everything published on HuffPo.
Everything I’ve read describes scientists being pulled unwillingly from their research, and told it was their patriotic duty to build it before the Russians did.
Note to Deepak:
A couple of weeks ago, I was up to my ass in “Nature”, shoveling it off of my driveway.
He’s referring to a special kind of wisdom – unreasoning wisdom; that is, words which seem wise, so long as one does not reason about them …
Can I ask a stupid question? Does any biologist actually use the term “Darwinian”? It only ever seems to appear in the context of Intelligent Design apologetics.
jeffk wrote:
“The Nazis” might be a better choice of phrase than “the Russians”. Thanks to scientific advances, we can watch Richard Feynman explaining why he worked on the Bomb and his reflections upon it afterward. There’s lots of other good stuff in that video too.
(The dead move and speak before our eyes, summoned out of machines whose locations we do not know, reanimated from tombs of magnetism and broadcast through our bodies at the fastest speed anything in the Cosmos can travel. Yes, that is what watching Google Video over WiFi entails. Put that in Chopra’s pipe and smoke it.)
Yes! But it has a very narrow and specific meaning, and is not a proxy for the whole of evolution.
What’s your problem with Chopra really? Indians (Asian ones) have the right to be stupid, don’t they? Stop giving him coverage already!
Science is amoral, but has moral implications and is done by humans with morals. Ethical boards and discussions surrounds areas like medicine, animal testing and weapons, for example. So it is not as dangerous in this respect as painted. But all tools can be used for destructive as well as constructive purposes.
My impression is that a group of allied scientists realized that a bomb was possible, and started lobbying because they knew the Germans know of the possibility too. They got Einstein to endorse this, something he later regretted as he was a pacifist and anti-authoritarian.
But if they, or rather the war process, precipitated atomic bombs some years (it was a huge undertaking) it doesn’t much matter. The secret was out and it is futile to speculate in if it never would have been realized.
Science is amoral, but has moral implications and is done by humans with morals. Ethical boards and discussions surrounds areas like medicine, animal testing and weapons, for example. So it is not as dangerous in this respect as painted. But all tools can be used for destructive as well as constructive purposes.
My impression is that a group of allied scientists realized that a bomb was possible, and started lobbying because they knew the Germans know of the possibility too. They got Einstein to endorse this, something he later regretted as he was a pacifist and anti-authoritarian.
But if they, or rather the war process, precipitated atomic bombs some years (it was a huge undertaking) it doesn’t much matter. The secret was out and it is futile to speculate in if it never would have been realized.
Yes, Chopra has the “right to be stupid”. From all the evidence presented so far, he exercises that right to the fullest. However, he does not have the right to make the rest of us take it quietly.
To steal an aphorism from David Brin, criticism is the only known antidote to error. In these parts, we’re all about that antidote.
Chopra’s anti-Promethean crap-flinging is a major weapon in the arsenal of every ripoff shit who ever worked the religion racket. Chopra is blaming the existence of guns on the existence of metallurgy. It’s as if he were building another Winchester Mystery House with his swindled millions, twitting science because it can’t prove that the confusing layout of his house of lies hasn’t protected him from the ghosts of the victims of Winchester rifles.
The existence of fire kindles the passion to uncover the secrets of the universe. That fire is so frequently used to ignite the pyres under heretics and apostates is a property of people, not combustion.
If Shiva is looking for a dwarf of ignorance, its skull to crush in a dance of destruction, I’d send him over to the Huffington Post.
Maybe this is kinda dumb, but did anyone else ever wonder why the first bomb wasn’t just dropped outside a big city? Wouldn’t that have had the same effect? It’s not like they wouldn’t have noticed it, or figured we had another one.
Actually, that’s not too far from what Leo Szilard and a bunch of other scientists petitioned for after the Germans surrendered. They thought the United States government should invite a bunch of Japanese officials and demonstrate the bomb to them over a desert island. This third way always seems to be left out of the official narrative of “the bomb or invasion!” I grew up in Oak Ridge, surrounded by relics of the Manhattan Project, and I didn’t learn about the Szilard petition until I was sixteen and happened upon “Fat Man and Little Boy” on Bravo.
Because as long as both sides held the weapons to annihilate each other, war was not an option.
I can’t be the only one here to remember something called the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“Reason isn’t the savior of the future. That role belongs to wisdom.”
Perhaps so, but there’s nothing wise about rejecting reality in favor of some subjectively pleasing fantasy.
The bomb lobbying was by physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner. They were not household names, so they made their case to Einstein who lobbied Roosevelt about the dangers of the Nazis building the bomb first.
The Szilárd petition, from the Atomic Heritage Foundation:
Oops, block-quoting error. The final three paragraphs of my previous comment should all have been block-quoted. Anyway, here is the text of the Szilárd petition.
“Science is amoral, but has moral implications and is done by humans with morals. Ethical boards and discussions surrounds areas like medicine, animal testing and weapons, for example. So it is not as dangerous in this respect as painted. But all tools can be used for destructive as well as constructive purposes.”
Sure, ethical boards do this kind of stuff but in reality when it comes to weapons pretty much all of that goes out the window. Hello military!
Despite scientists naive ideals that research done for the military will be used in some “good” way, this is contrary to known facts.
This is most certainly not to say that all science is learning is some sort of horrible information that threatens the world, only that those who defend science and technology seem to put forth a skewed and simplistic view of the world.
Chopra: evolution, as it applies to modern human beings, isn’t Darwinian. We no longer live in a state of nature.
Au contraire:
Lactose Tolerance in East Africa Points to Recent Evolution
Genetic evidence shows that the mutations conferred an enormous selective advantage on their owners, enabling them to leave almost 10 times as many descendants as people without such mutations. The mutations have created "one of the strongest genetic signatures of natural selection yet reported in humans," the researchers write.
I think that is the general idea of people like the D.I. and Mr Chopra. Science isn’t telling us what we want to hear, so we need to make it “better” by incorporating “faith” and “belief” and crystals and thaumaturgic healing and stuff.
(OT?)
schemanista, to elaborate on PZ’s concise response on who uses the term ‘Darwinism’ (one course I teach is called “The Darwinian Revolution” so I feel a special fondness), the en.wikipedia definition is useful.
My own summary: Darwinian is the historically distinct era of evolutionary analysis which didn’t understand genetics, so was limited to Natural Selection. It did surprisingly well but by the 1910’s was fumbling for theory. Adding genetics produced the “Modern synthesis” aka neo-Darwinism in the 1930’s. This is still current, as all the sociobiology and selfish-gene furor was simply the logical extension of this perspective to whole-animal behaviors, including sociality, rather than limiting it to body traits. The “modern synthesis” will probably be renamed someday soonish to incorporate all the evo-devo stuff PZ & company are finally able to address. Candidates for this new name … ?
Chopra wrote:
It wasn’t science which gave us the atom bomb, it was Mathemathics. Everything was written out in formulas! The Math worked, and therefore so did the bomb. And yet we’re supposed to believe and trust in numbers that “add up” the right way. Look where that gets us.
No, Math isn’t the savior of the future. We need to find a Deep Wisdom which goes beyond the superficial limitations of Math to find more subtle patterns. Deep, deep wisdom from someone like Deep-ak Chopra, who doesn’t reduce everything to arrogant mathematical formulas, but thinks gently and holistically.
Darn pesky mathematics.
Deep-ak Chopra
you mean Deep-ACK Chopra?
http://home.earthlink.net/~tjneal/deepACKchopra.jpg
Candidates for this new name … ?
how about just what it’s always been:
The theory of evolution.
would you change the name of the theory of relativity because of the introduction of quantum mechanics?
We don’t have any choice in what science reveals.
We do, in fact. We have a choice in what we pursue, and as long as we allow our political system to decide what we pursue then science will not be neutral. And I see no way out of having our political system determine this.
Coathangrrr wrote:
We can choose what to pursue, for example by funding different projects and allocating the grant money given out by the NSF, DOD, DOE and company. However, we cannot predict in advance what the results of these research projects will be. Often, money will be wasted, simply because Nature does not comply with our expectations. Furthermore, discoveries frequently happen by accident (think penicillin).
Skewed and simplistic, compared to what? Seriously, what else have you got? According to Uncle Al, dangerous phsyicist and Beany and Cecil fan: All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike–and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
Often, money will be wasted, simply because Nature does not comply with our expectations.
wasted how, exactly? because some preconceived notion was not supported?
from a scientific perspective, so long as a funded study runs to completion, or even sometimes if they don’t, but for interesting reasons, it certainly isn’t a waste.
sometimes null hypotheses are not disproven. this is just as valuable of information as that coming studies where they are. Either way, we still learn and our knowledge of the subject under study is increased.
people often forget this when they wish for “positive” results.
science is not a search for profitability, as much as some politicians and industries might want it to be.
“Wasted”, in the sense that you don’t get what you pay for. As a scientist, I love to see the unexpected, and I know that null results can be informative. However, when grant review time rolls around, the guy from the DOD will say, “So you didn’t find a way to use nanoparticles to detect terrorists?” My explanation that no, I didn’t, but I did come across this cool effect which might point the way to room-temperature superconductivity won’t go over very well.
A bureaucrat considers it wasted money, whereas a scientist can see the value. Either way, the real point is unpredictability.
If you want to use this result as a negative aspect of the bomb, you will have to disprove the commonly held opinion that using those bombs shocked the country into realizing that it was fighting a losing battle to the point of annihilation.
This “commonly held opinion” is based on several historical myths. The most important of which is that Japan would never have surrendered without it. In fact, they had already offered surrender terms the the U.S., albeit conditional ones (which demanded appropriate police and military forces, as well as the ability to retain the office of the emperor, to maintain political order afterwards). Dwight Eisenhower himself, in a 11/11/1963 interview in Newsweek stated his own regret: “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
As for the other claim, the USSR got the atomic bomb from us. It is unlikely that the ramshackle economy of the Soviet Union would have been able to support a massive research project to built the A-Bomb independently. They only got it because they stole it.
I would argue that such “armed deterrence” arguments offer a cure that is, in the long term, far worse than the disease. A nuclear arms race can be contained in a tenuous way when only the two largest powers in the world have access to the materials. However, nuclear arms are proliferating throughout the world, in many cases to countries that are perpetually at each-other’s throats. MAD came very close to being broken between just the U.S.A and the U.S.S.R., imagine an entire nuclearized world.
A bureaucrat considers it wasted money, whereas a scientist can see the value. Either way, the real point is unpredictability.
like i said… people often forget this when they wish for “positive” results.
a lamentable fact that has caused much reduction in funding for basic research over the last 30 plus years.
… and exactly why it should be pointed out that the term “waste” is entirely subjective to those who mostly misunderstand the purpose of basic research to begin with.
I stand corrected.
And here they redeemed any claims on them about bad morals. News to me, but good to know.
Treaty bans on (A)BC & personal mine & blinding weapons use and development constrains this. It is not as if we can in a simplistic view ban wars.
I stand corrected.
And here they redeemed any claims on them about bad morals. News to me, but good to know.
Treaty bans on (A)BC & personal mine & blinding weapons use and development constrains this. It is not as if we can in a simplistic view ban wars.
Thanks thwaite, for that better description. I’ve been involved in a stereotypical dispute with a stereotypical ID proponent who insists on referring to that odd mix of abiogenesis and straw-man version of “evolution by random mutation” known as “Darwinism”.
Drives me nuts.
I don’t have much to add to the science/wisdom/ethics discussion, except to point interested parties to my papers on the subject …