Category: Science

Trust the science

Here’s what a year of novel coronavirus pandemia looks like in America measured by new confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths per day. In retrospect, the impact of the pandemic looks eerily like what the epidemiology experts warned us in advance that it would look like.

COVID-19 cases confirmed in the United States per day
Deaths caused by COVID-19 per day in the United States

Epidemiologists said that cases would be a leading indicator, followed by hospitalizations about a week later, and the trailing indicator, deaths, about a week after that. These graphs show the peaks in deaths following a couple of weeks or so behind those in cases.

They also said that COVID-19 cases would start climbing after people began congregating on Memorial Day, which they did. Then they said cases would spike after Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings, which they didーas high as 300,000 on one day!

So let’s let the science guide us to put an end to this pandemic as quickly as possible now that Americans are getting vaccinated against COVID-19. Until we reach herd immunity in the United States, continue to wear a mask and maintain social distance while out in public and avoid congregating in large groups for extended periods of time.

What good is the EPA?

President Trump recently proposed cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget more than thirty percent but I have seen relatively little outrage voiced over these cuts. It seems that Americans are more concerned about the Supreme Court nomination and Trump’s ties to Russia. While they are both important issues, I expected a greater outcry about the environment since it will have a greater impact on Americans long after Trump’s nominee vacates the SCOTUS bench.

Then it occurred to me that Millennials have never known a time when the smog in LA was so thick that you could barely see the Hollywood sign from the Hollywood Freeway for the entire summer. And Baby Boomers are about the only Americans who remember the Cuyahoga River being so polluted that it literally caught on fire. So many Americans take the relatively clean condition of the United States for granted because it doesn’t seem as urgent an issue as it does to those of us who remember how badly polluted this country used to be.

But all you have to do to get an idea of what the environment could be like is to look at present-day China. It struggles with air pollution and photos of China’s water pollution show that its environment is worse than the USA ever was. But China’s central government does not regulate pollution like the EPA has for almost fifty years in the USA. So pollution goes on relatively unabated there.

Instead, capitalism has been the biggest driver of China’s pollution problems. The invisible hand of the free market generally works against a clean environment as it looks to maximize profits by minimizing the societal costs born by free enterprise. I’m as big a proponent of capitalism as the next American but I don’t deny that, although private businesses do not, the American people do bear the societal costs. And the societal cost of industry is pollution.

But as bad as I know from experience that pollution can get in the USA, it’s the least environmental concern younger Americans should have. They haven’t felt Global Warming sneaking up on them but they are the ones who will feel its impact the most in the future. Military experts say climate change poses a “significant risk” to national security, not terrorism. And although Global Mean Sea Level has risen 0.13 inches a year for the past couple of decades, that’s nothing compared to what we can expect in the years to come if we don’t curtail the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The rise of the oceans will accelerate to reach another two meters by the end of the century. Say goodbye to Miami, New Orleans, and much of Manhattan.

Yet president Trump has pledged to rip up the Paris climate agreement, which would likely lead to its demise. So it’s clear that the EPA will be getting no love from him either. Unless Americans protest cuts to the EPA, prepare for all of its good work to be undone and a slide back to the polluted states of America.

Homo evolutis

I call this blog The Progressive Zone because I like to think of myself as a progressive person. Unfortunately, when some people hear the word “progressive,” they equate it to being liberal. My conception of progressive is neither liberal nor conservative—or maybe it’s a little of both.

When Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling science, he explores a number of examples of what I consider to be “progressive.” Watch Enriquez’s TED presentation then read the rest of this post.

As you saw, none of the science Enriquez shares is “liberal” in the negative sense some hold of socialist government or late-term abortions and the like. In fact, the economic concept presented at the beginning is actually fiscally conservative. But no one would deny that both the fiscal approach and the science is progressive—at least according to my concept of progressivism.

Enriquez paints a picture of the kind of future we will get if progressive thought is used to get us there. The question it raises is, do you find this kind of world scary? There are likely many people who would be intimidated by the thought of humankind becoming Homo evolutis. After living more than twenty-five years in a paralyzed body, I find it exciting!

Evidence for evolution reinforced

People who do not believe in evolution had some seemingly sound arguments against the theory. Unfortunately, those people now have two fewer legs to stand on. Two arguments commonly used against evolution have now been refuted.

One of the widely known arguments is the watchmaker analogy. It says that the complex inner workings of a watch could only come to be through the act of an intelligent designer. Therefore, as with a watch, the complexity of a given life form could only be created by intelligent design.

It turns out that evolution is a blind watchmaker after all. A doctor of molecular neuroscience wrote a computer program that emulates the process of natural selection using the component parts of a watch. He found that a functioning watch could, in fact, evolve from its independent parts without any intelligent design.

Another argument commonly posited is that no fossil evidence has been discovered that shows one species evolving into another. People who ascribe to this argument postulate that, considering the countless species that have existed on this planet, there must be abundant fossil evidence of this speciation if evolution really occurred. Since there is no such evidence, there has been no evolution.

It was long assumed that man had to look into fossil history for evidence of speciation since written history is too short to observe a species splitting into two separate species. It turns out that mankind need not look back tens of thousands of years for evidence of speciation—they need only to look to the Galapagos islands. The birth of a new species has now been witnessed by scientists. A husband-and-wife team of biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species of Galapagos finches split into two separate species within what turned out to be a surprisingly short period of time.

Proponents of Intelligent Design now need to postulate two new arguments against evolution.