Interconnectedness

So, I haven't posted in a while. Mostly because, as I said two posts ago, I've been crazy busy trying to help run my wife's business--how she did it for so long by herself, I'll never know. She's amazing, that's all I've got to say about that.

Partly, though, another reason I haven't gotten back on here is because I think I pigeonholed myself into too tight of a corner; I didn't really find my life interesting enough to blog about, so I wanted a specific theme for the blog... But now I feel like, if a post isn't about Buddhism AND naturalism, I shouldn't bother posting. That is, of course, silly; it's my blog, I should post whatever I damn well please, and if you're not interested, you won't read it. Not like I'm inconveniencing anybody!

That said, I'd like to talk about Buddhism and naturalism ^_^

I've been learning a lot about genetics, lately. Cellular biology is a passion of mine--a purely amateur passion, for now, though I hope to go back to school for it one day--and genetics are naturally integral to any understanding of microbiology. Now, everyone knows that genes have something to do with DNA, and DNA is the code in your cells that builds you, right? Hollywood Science 101, and it's more or less right. But what actually goes on in the DNA at the cellular level? While your body is being built and maintained, macroscopically, what is actually happening to those strands of sugars and acids called DNA?

Allow me to give you a brief layman's version, as best as I understand it (being a layman, myself), and work it around to the Buddhist notion of the interconnectedness of all things.

DNA is code; I think everyone knows that. It tells your cells what to make, how big to make it, when to stop making it, and where to put it when it's done. (Advanced Biology, meet Layman's judo chop!)
Every cell in your body carries, in its nucleus, the entire code for every part of your body. The bits of code for specific parts are called genes; and the grand totality of the information for building your whole body is called the genome.

Now, when I speak of code, what I mean is that DNA is like a type of binary language that a computer would use--every amazing thing that your computer does is because a super-long string of 1's and 0's told it how to behave. Well, DNA is twice as expressive as that; rather than 1's and 0's, it has A's, G's, T's, and C's. A special enzyme runs across a string of DNA like a blind person's finger across braille, translating the GATC's as instructions. And so you can picture what I'm speaking of a bit better, I know you're familiar with the double helix shape of a string of DNA--take it and flatten it out into a ladder in your mind's eye. Now, each rung is made up of two letters, one on either side. And here's a little tidbit that will become important in a minute: just like a magnet always has a north and a south, each letter will only ever fit across from one other letter--G's with C's, and A's with T's. When the enzyme "reader" scans along, it's only looking at one side of the DNA... because the opposite side is always going to be the exact same, just in reverse!

Don't worry, I'm getting somewhere.

So, when a cell receives the chemical signal that it's time to divide (you know, asexual reproduction), another enzyme slices through the DNA's ladder rungs like a zipper, separating a single strand into halves. And since each letter will only ever go with one other letter, it's easy enough for those two halves to be fitted with the appropriate nucleotides (the freefloating letters, if you will) and so you have two copies of one original genome. Each genome goes to an opposite side of the cell, and--sploot!--the cell splits in half, creating two new cells out of one old one. It's kinda poetic, ain't it?

Now, this copying is happening over and over, constantly, within your body. With the exception of a few rare mistakes, every cell in your body replicates, over and over, the exact same set of codes that you started out with when you were just a blastocyst in your mother's womb. From the moment of conception til the moment of death, your cells--whether they're in your skin, your heart, your brain or your spleen--are all expressions of the same genome; like color is the expression of the same quanta of light, just in different wavelengths.

But that got me thinking... what about that little bundle of cells called an embryo? It didn't just pop out of nowhere. It starts out as a single cell, too: an egg. And this egg has exactly half of the mother's genome (the specific genes selected randomly), and the father's sperm has exactly half of his genome, also selected randomly. These combine together to form you--but these genes you're replicating didn't originate with you, they don't belong to you--your mother and father, respectively, were replicating those exact same genes for decades before you ever existed. Which, of course, means that their genome is a constantly replicating amalgam of their parents' genomes, who faithfully replicated their parents', etc. Each time these genomes get replicated into egg or sperm cells, they might contain a few trivial mistakes, but overwhelmingly they stay the same, and have stayed the same for the last 100,000 to 200,000 years. Yes, friends, our similarities are more than just superficial--they literally run right into our marrow; into the very fiber of who we are.

Which means, of course, that if one were to look back at our closest ancestor which split off into a different species, we would see that we still replicate the same genes they had almost identically, and our relatives also still replicate those same genes, almost identically. This is, in fact, exactly what it means when you here someone refer to the fact that we share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees--we literally are still copying 98% of the same patterns, using the same sugars and acids to build the same little twisted ladders, over and over and over again.

We replicate 85% of the same genes that mice use. We have half the genome in us that our shared ancestors also gave to fruit flies. And 31% of the genes in our bodies are the same ones being duplicated right now in a simple, unicellular organism like yeast.

I remember thinking how bizarre it was that some sea creatures reproduce by budding. Like a fungus, they start growing a little clone of themselves, like a little mini-me, off their shoulder, then they cut the little squirt free and start the process again. No sex? No internal gestation? How weird!
But what is reproduction, really? From a gene's-eye-view, sugars and acids stack up, split apart, and copy themselves, over and over. It doesn't care what kind of cell it's in; it doesn't care if the cell is located in one body or another; it stacks up, splits apart, duplicates. For over half the age of this planet, those molecules have duplicated. They've changed a great deal--from the basic need to replicate, all the way into a sentient being that can gaze upon distances astronomic and microscopic and wonder at it all... but it's all connected. From the carbon forged in the massive hearts of stars, to the eye that receives the light shed from those stars' contemporaries.

Ponder the intricate web of it all. Let it make you humble, and let it make you proud, to be part of such a magnificent process. And let the love you feel for your children, your parents, your siblings--knowing that they are literally a part of you and you of them--extend not only to all humanity, but to all life in the world.

Wow. Just, wow.

I've had this vague idea of the interconnectedness of all humankind in the 21st century floating around in my mind for a while, now, but I find it difficult to describe. I can sound kind of articulate when I want to, but I'm not actually very skilled at translating my thoughts to words (so why did I start a blog?)

But Ethan Nichtern has written a book called "One City: A Declaration of Interdependence" that blows my mind. I've only read the preview in Google Book Search, but I'm sold. This guy is a great communicator, and I think he has something to say that everybody in this day and age needs to hear.

As I said in my last post, I don't have a lot of time to blog right now. But I'm going to show you this link to the preview, and I really think you should check it out. It's not a dry lecture; his writing is very organic and it draws you in. Check it out, and I'll try to find time to blog about it more, later.

Here's the preview


Many thanks to 21awake for blogging about it and bringing it to my attention!

Where Am I?

No, this time I'm not asking a rhetorical existential question. I haven't updated in a long time, and I thought some of my adoring fans might be wondering where I am ^_^.

I got laid off from my job at the beginning of March. Since then, I've been working full-time at my wife's studio, which we jointly own but it's really hers.

I've wanted several times to blog about it, but I haven't had the time and couldn't come up with much more to say than that. I thought it was kinda too short to post, but, what the hell, it's my blog. So, there ya go.

Hope to be posting again soon.

Mind control is easier than you think

How well do we really know why we do--or even think--certain things? If there's a theme of my blog, or my pursuit of Buddhism in general, it's this idea: that we do not know nearly as much as we think regarding our intentions.


I ran across this story in the New Scientist just the other week. It's about herd mentality, a character trait all social animals have, but one we like to imagine only exists in humans when it's "them" (in the "us vs. them" worldview).


Nothing earth-shakingly new about the idea that humans will go along with a crowd, but right at the end was a discovery that really shocked me. Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, (my spell checker just crapped itself), did a study where they asked 24 women to rate more than 200 women for attractiveness. They must have been shown the ratings other women did and were then allowed to readjust their own ratings, because it says that if they discovered their scores were significantly different, they would change theirs to match consensus.


Now here's the shocking part:

When a woman realised her differing opinion, fMRI scans revealed that her brain generated what the team dubbed an "error signal."

(emphasis mine)

Did you see that? Your brain, that wonderful little "You Factory" that you depend on for, well, everything, will actually tell you "Hey, you were wrong" when your opinions go against your peers.

I don't know about you, but that kind of pisses me off a little bit. Brain, I trusted you *shakes fist*! But it's not really surprising, though, is it? Peer pressure is common knowledge. But knowing the science behind it makes it a little more urgent, doesn't it?

Just trying to raise awareness on this simple, fundamental fact: you can't trust your brain.

So, what do we do about it? Well, in the same way that science provides a self-correcting system to check our hypotheses, I would recommend some sort of system to check your instincts and gut reactions. For me, it's Buddhism. But before Buddhism, it was just remembering the Bene Gesserit from Frank Herbert's Dune novels--they often talked about the difference between a human and a human animal; the idea that 99% of all humans react to their instincts no different than a lower animal and that to rise above such animalism and truly achieve our potential, a human must always examine their intentions and know the "Why" behind every action, every word spoken, every opinion held.

Try it some time. Ask yourself "Why?" you feel a certain way, or said a certain thing, and really be honest with yourself. Despite how well you might superficially think you understand your intentions, you may be surprised to discover what lies just beneath your immediate conscious awareness.

And such self-awareness is not only informative, it's also empowering. It gives you the chance to adjust your actions and feelings to match your true--that is, your conscious--intentions.

Science and the economy and karma

 I'm not an economist. But I think I'm not the only one these days who's trying to give themselves a crash course in economics just to be able to follow the politics and cut through the BS spinning.

I believe in keeping an open mind to all ideas, and to always try to understand your opponents' point of view, now matter how ridiculous it sounds at the outset. At the very least, you will strengthen your own position and resolve.

So, in that spirit, I've been trying to understand why all the diehard conservatives and Republicans are so against Pres. Obama's stimulus plan; besides just the obvious motivation of being contrary to whatever the new administration says--that's a time honored role that I think politicians believe is a mandatory requirement of their job.

The thing is, I'm not a hypocrite; I practice what I preach (or, at least, I try to). I examine the claims that I agree with even harder than those I don't, and I've found a lot I don't like about Obama's plan. But the Republicans don't seem to be against the bill for the same reasons I am... in fact, they don't seem to mention all the bad parts of the bill that allows fat cats to keep their cake and eat it too; at least, so far as I've heard. Instead, they just complain that spending is wrong because, well, that's what "the other side" does, so it must be wrong. They use plenty of standard political rhetoric that means a whole bunch of nothing--no surprise, that's what all politicians do.

So I'm trying to look at what the Repubs would do differently. What is their solution to the economic crisis? What would they do if they had control of both congress and the White House?

And the answer, so far, has been: Pretty much, nothing. Cut taxes some more. Deregulate some more. And sit back and let the "Free Market" sort itself out.

I find this position striking. Let the Free Market work itself out? While how many families loose their jobs and get booted out of their houses because fat cats in Washington and Wall Street made short-sighted decisions? How many people have to suffer because of the mistakes of the few? I find it absolutely remarkable that the rhetoric from conservatives about greed keeps talking about "people who bought a house they couldn't afford" or "ran up credit card debt because they were greedy." What? Visa and Mastercard brought the world's economies to their knees? There is a fundamental lack of awareness about the nature of this recession evident in that kind of thinking. Now, despite the fact that I am pretty sure I know the reasons behind what they're thinking, I don't believe in making claims about people's intimate thoughts; I can't read minds.

Buuut, I was raised Republican, and I was a Republican myself for many years before I started thinking for myself, so I can tell you what I used to think. I used to think that, when bad things happened to people, somehow, they deserved those bad things. If I was still a Republican in this economy, when someone lost their home to a foreclosure, in my mind it would never have been because the housing values plummeted around them through no fault of their own and they couldn't refinance because the banks were scared and their job was laying off employees--no, it was because the person racked up too much debt living "above himself," or he wasn't working hard enough, he should take some more jobs. It was vital that I believed this, because if it wasn't true (at least the majority of the time), then terrible things happen to good people all the time, which meant I was vulnerable to the same random happenstances, and that if I would want help in those circumstances, then I would have to help other people who found themselves in those circumstances. But if someone got themselves into a jam through their own greed and/or stupidity, then they would have to get themselves out of it, and any government assistance that person received was my tax dollars bailing a fool out of problems I was smart enough not to create for myself.

I'm not so naive as to think that every fiscal conservative believes this. But as I read over the comments on my Facebook friends' pages and on blogs and news sites, I'd have to be a fool to think this isn't the opinion of "Joe the Plumber" on the street.

The fact of the matter is, bad things happen to good people. Stop the presses! Real shocker there, I'm sure. But while I understand the GOP looking to score browny points is going to be anxious to toss "Joe Foreclosure" on the street, what I can't understand is why so many of my fellow "Main Street" Americans are ready to see their neighbors jobless and homeless because of some sort of deluded "survival of the fittest in the free market" scenario. Here's a little factoid: survival of the fittest worked great for 3.5 billion years to create new species... and 99.9% of those species are now EXTINCT.

We are all connected. That's not some sort of spiritual woo-woo, that's a fact of the 21st century. It's not just a pun to say that our fortunes are linked. What happens to autoworkers in Michigan effects whether I can run a small business in North Carolina. What happens on the Stock Market on Wall Street effects what happens on Stock Markets in Tokyo, or London, or Beijing. Remember those little charts we made in 3rd grade, where the cricket eats the grass, and the frog eats the cricket, and the snake eats the frog, and the eagle eats the snake, etc.? Yes, the Circle of Life is not just for Simba anymore, folks. What happens to the Bulls and the Bears affects whether you get to keep your job, or whether your neighbor can go to college or has to flip burgers instead. Survival of the fittest worked great to get us here, but it's time is done. We have to move forward. We have to adopt bigger ideals, or we're ALL screwed, not just your imaginary welfare bogeyman.

So, to wind up this incredibly long and rambling post, let me just quote Jesus as he spoke to the money-changers in the temple: "Take your Free Market and shove it."

The Dawinpada

So, I've been working on another post that's actually about sex (shameless teaser plug (and yes there will be a lot of bad innuendos like that)), but February 12th is the 200 year anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and I can't let Darwin Day go by without saying something about it.

Turns out, there's actually a lot to say. The more I learn about Charles Darwin, the more he becomes a hero in my mind. Of course we all know the "Christmas version" of his story, as I like to call it: he went to the Galapagos islands, saw a bunch of finches, and developed the theory of natural selection. Turns out, there's a lot more to the story... A lot more.

(Minor disclaimer here: I have completely inundated myself with Darwin lately--TV programs, internet specials, podcasts; so I can't remember the sources for all the facts I'm about to talk about--very unscientific and unprofessional of me, I apologize. Take what I'm saying with that in mind.)

There are a lot of amazing things to be said about Darwin... but there are a lot of amazing things to say about a lot of stories regarding science, and I try to leave that to the much better qualified blogs and news outlets out there. The purpose of this blog is to explore where science and Buddhism intersect. So, what does Darwin have to do with Buddhism?

More than I originally imagined, actually.

Charles Darwin was a very empathic man, who cared a great deal about the suffering of others. And not just "others" as in his peers, but beings all over the globe, from humans in slavery all the way down to birds and insects and even plants.

Charles Darwin was raised in a well-to-do family in Victorian England. This was the time of Jane Austin's works; if you've ever watched a movie adaptation of one of her novels, you know what Darwin's world looked like. And if you've ever read her works, you know how the people of that time thought: everything has it's rightful place, everything is ordained by God and was ordained that way since Creation began; to "rock the boat" of soceity was considered a grave, unspoken cardinal sin.

Yet England, at the time, was in a period of great social upheaval. Famines and disasters pushed more and more people into the city, scrounging for work so their children could eat. The aristocracy of the time had pity on the poor... But not too much pity; that would have been improper. They established a welfare system, but they forced those receiving the welfare into horrible workhouses, where they were seperated by gender and made to work 80 hours or more a week. This was the time of child labor and debtors prisons. It was widely believed, at the time, that such conditions were God's way of encouraging people to not reproduce; a little reminder from on high that God doesn't like sex. (Victorians. Ah, what can ya do with'em?)

The conditions of his fellow man no doubt broke Darwin's heart; this is a man who would berate a perfect stranger for abusing a donkey or a pig, who hated slavery and called it an "abomination" (haha, I have a source for this one!) But the attitudes (called Malthusian theory) on how population is kept in check by natural disasters and poverty were to plant the seeds in Darwin's mind for what would become natural selection. He wondered, If things are so bad for we humans, who can choose to excercise self-restraint, how much worse must it be for the lower animals, who always produce more offspring than their natural habitat can sustain?

It was this realization (ooo, another source!) that led Darwin to the conclusion that, in the natural world, where there is only enough food and room to accomodate a fraction of those born, the ones that survived would be the ones who more perfectly fit their niche-- viola, Survival of the Fittest.

Despite this monumental discovery, however, Darwin was hesistant to publish. He knew that the prevailing opinions of his time would be staunchly opposed to his ideas... including the opinions of his beloved wife. He continued collecting evidence and refining his theory for 20 years before he was pushed into publication by the appearance of one Alfred Russel Wallace, who had developed the theory of natural selection himself and was set to publish.

Charles Darwin was a man much concerned with suffering; and not just with the kind caused by clinging, which is what Buddhism mostly concerns itself with, but the general suffering of nature "red in tooth and claw." It led him to question the established ideas of divinely sanctioned order. He could not see how an omniscient and omnipotent creator could devise creatures whose sole means of living was through the painful death of other species (see here, midway down). He had to move his perspective back, zoom out his point of view from the petty English conceits of the time. When he did, he found enlightenment. And through his enlightenment, the world has never been the same.

Happy birthday, Mr. Darwin.

A Look at Perspective, Part II

I've found an absolutely fantastic resource for anyone interested in the scientific bases behind Buddhism that I just have to share. Rick Hanson and Rick Mendius give a lecture on "The Neurology of Awakening" that is available for download (audio) here. They give some amazing information about the brain--it's complexity, it's evolution--as well as how it relates to suffering, self-concept, etc.

It's reaffirmed my original hypothesis--that we are not as in control of our brains as we think, that our brain has many left over "programs" from earlier in our evolutionary history that hold us back, and that the philosophy of Buddhism (or any very strict system of introspection) can help us to overcome and transcend those vestigial instincts.

Let's take perspective, for instance. A lot of things about our perspective make sense: our eyes evolved to see in the tiny spectrum of light we call "visible" because it gives us the greatest benefit when moving about and manipulating our world--a solid state world that is, at the atomic level, mostly just empty space. But we didn't evolve to see radio waves, because then we'd be bumping in to trees and rocks as the light waves pass through that space. No, visible light provides the best information for navigation (give or take a few wavelengths--I'm lookin' at you, bees and snakes!), so it makes sense that that's what we see; it's how we build our point of view.

But some things that shape our perspective of the world don't make sense anymore. For instance, our natural tendency to view the world in a sharp divide of "us" and "them" makes sense in a social species that must compete for resources in a pack vs pack (or, troop vs troop, as I discovered primate groups are called) environment. But in today's modern age of interconnectivity, this tendency is vestigial. Actually, I take that back; wisdom teeth are vestigial. The "us vs them" mentality is downright destructive. And while the danger might not be as prevalent as it was during the Cold War, this mentality still holds the potential to actually self-destruct our very species.

While I'm on the doom and gloom, I guess I should also mention our difficulty in making long-term plans. For our ancestors, "long-term" was "next season". The forager and hunter gatherer societies in which our modern brains evolved could not possibly have damaged their environment so much that not planning years in advance would be a detriment to their offspring surviving--the driving factor behind natural selection. But even with our lifespans quadruple that of our ancestors and our influence now able to shape the face of the planet, we still have enough problems planning for retirement; much less thinking about the consequences of our actions generations from now. What's more, we don't really care. It takes a conscious effort and a great deal of empathy to care what happens to future generations--again, that "us" and "them" thing.

But enough of the doomsaying--what about our day to day living? Everything, from our craving of fatty, sugary foods, to our general avoidance of change, comes from our ancestor's needs, not ours.

What does this mean for us? It means that if you've had your wisdom teeth pulled and your appendix removed, you're only halfway there.