Update promises

In case you actually read my blog, then I'm sorry I haven't posted anything in a week, despite promises.  Christmas season, visiting families, etc.  And I have work today and tomorrow so I can't write right now (well I could, but I'm about to go out on a date with the misses to watch Black Swan and eat crepes).

In the realm of my pseudo-intellectual posts, I'm thinking I want to talk about consumerism and what we can do to make a bad situation (being the bitch of big business) into an okay-er situation, which relates directly with Christmas.

In my Pokemon post however, I'm working hard at phylogenetic tree developments.  In fact, I just had a breakthrough; the Slowpoke family probably evolved into the Lapras and Squirtle families!  Crazy shit.

Well I'm off to the movies.  Hope I don't get to scared, I'm usually not into horror but Black Swan sounds awesome.

Racism, Thor, and Avatar

In case you guys haven't heard, there's a bit of a stink over the new Thor movie coming out this spring.  One of the Norse Gods, Heimdall, is being played by British actor Idris Elba, who also happens to be black.  The Counsel of Conservative Christians, a hate group originating from Missouri is complaining about Marvel's "liberal bias" diluting the great European heritage of the Norse Gods with a black man, and have a facebook group advertising their boycott of the movie.  Read the full story here:

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/12/16/racists-thor-idris-ebla-racism/

While these guys are clearly racists who are not thinking of the issue critically beyond the idea of "we don't want dem darkies ruining up the place" (I hesitated to use a racial slur even in the context of quoting the theoretical mind of a racist, but then again the real racist would probably use a worse word, starting with a N), let's look at this critically.  If you're the kind of geek who needs his movie to be completely accurate to the source material, then you might be in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with southern racists.  As the guys from Penny Arcade pointed out, "even a racist clock is right twice a day"

All credit goes to the Penny Arcade guys, of course.  

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/12/20/

Luckily though, I do not find myself in that uncomfortable position at all.  I've always felt that movies are supposed to and SHOULD take liberties with the original source material, to fit the format better.  Stories need to be adapted for the big screen for one, and for two the casting should be colorblind, especially in an already white-dominated Hollywood.  I for one was totally on board the "Donald Glover for the next Spider-Man" train, not because I thought that it would be great for a black man to play Spidey, but that it would be great for a funny man to play Spidey, especially after 3 movies with the dry and boring Tobey MacGuire.

But me being in this position puts me at odds with one of my past positions.  When the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie was cast, I was among the many mad at the casting choices.  The cartoon consisted of a fictional world whose characters were comprised of representations of various Asian races, and was possibly one of the few American shows to celebrate Asian culture in a non-condescending, gimmicky way.  Yet they cast all the lead good guy characters, and thus the rest of their respective nations, as white.  My heart bled for the Asian-American actors out there who were getting denied roles, especially after reading a heart-wrenching blog by an Asian-American who simply gave up his dreams of being an actor because he knew that all he would be able to get were supporting roles.  But wouldn't me siding against white actors in Avatar because it isn't accurate be completely contradicting me siding with black actors in the roles of white characters?  I thought so at first, but I think I feel better about my reasonings now.  My wife often points out that I often think in a philosophical black and white, not because I'm stupid, but because I think that is what is the most dignified and ideologically firm response to debates like this.  But now I think this is the first situation where I can see a middle ground that acts in accordance to reality without demeaning my ideological values.  I'm okay with siding for the accurate racial casting in the Avatar movie, not just because it's more accurate, but because there is CLEARLY some serious racism going on behind the casting of that movie.  I'm talking about this:

I didn't make this one actually, taken from ED or 4chan or something

Not only that, but the Earth Kingdom was the only one nation in the movie that was casted correctly, as a sort of Chinese-heavy racial blend.  However the people of the Earth Kingdom in the first movie are just background characters, villagers that need to be saved.  As the Asian-American blogger I previously mentioned predicted, the only Asians that would get roles would be for extras.  As usual.  So the final product was white people saving yellow people from brown people, in a story that was supposed to be a metaphor about the intricacies of the relationships between the various and diverse Asian countries in the real world.  This was not just colorblind type casting, like in Thor, but rather a dark reminder of the possibly subconscious yet still very real problem that Americans have with seeing Asians in leading roles.  So for once I have an adaptable opinion about something.

Although apparently I'll never side with the white actors.  Oh well, they don't need any more support

Mew Part 2: Posterchild for Lamarckian Evolution

So now that we were confident in the Mew Ancestor Theory, let’s talk about how the various Mew populations evolved into the numerous Pokémon breeds out there.  As for Mew's personal species history, one can see from its Pokedex entries (and by the fact that you can't normally find it in the game) that Mew are an extremely rare species in contemporary times, so rare in fact that many researchers don't even believe it exists (good to see that many old scientists are doddering pessimists who are hesitant to believe anything in the Pokemon world too!).  According to some old legends in Gen 4, however, Mew may have one time been plentiful.  This was before recorded human history, before the prehistoric Pokemon were even around (for Pokemon fans, it was around the time Kyogre and Groundon made the seas and land).  Mew diminished over time however, and the answer why is obvious.  Using its unique ability to change into any shape and use any kind of elemental power, various pockets of Mew population settled down in a physical location and transformed into something better suited for their environment, filling all the available niches.  They then passed on these new traits to their children, and after several generations the individual subspecies of Pokemon started to form.  If you're familiar at all with evolutionary biology, you know what this means.  Evolution in the Pokemon world runs on the mechanics of Lamarckian evolution!  Say whaaaaatt???

If you’ve taken 6^th science class, then you know what Lamarckian evolution is.  Let me refresh your memory:

This is one evolutionary idea that was thought up of before Charles Darwin presented natural selection in Origin of the Species.  Evolution was not an idea that Charles Darwin pulled out of thin air in 1859, on the contrary Enlightenment era biologists were noticing for a while that species obviously change.  There just wasn’t a good mechanic for it proposed yet (plus there was that whole religion thing making people hesitant to speak too boldly about it).  Probably the most favored mechanic pre-Darwin was proposed by French Biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck a couple of times between 1794 and 1809.  You can see the mechanic in the above picture.  The giraffe, after a lifetime of stretching its neck to reach the leaves in tall trees, will then pass down its new long neck to its children.  This idea is summed up in two points: 1) evolution-by-necessity-when a feature is needed, it will appear; 2)use-it-or-lose-it- when a feature is not needed, it will disappear.  We now know this is a fallacy.  Traits are passed on through genetic information (genotypes), not physical traits (phenotypes).  Nothing can will their body to change their genes, and if a bodybuilder has kids they won’t automatically be born ripped.  Therefore we know Lamarckian evolution doesn’t happen because 1)living individuals have no capacity to ‘evolve’ and they have no capacity to change their personal genetic codes; and 2)biological evolution is not a response to the environment, but a consequence of the environment.

However, in the Pokémon Universe Lamarckian theory seems like the most obvious mechanic for evolution.  How could this be possible if it’s been proven wrong in the real world?  Because this is a fictional world with different rules!  Unlike a real animal, Mew DOES have the ability to will its body to transform into whatever it wants.  Mew’s DNA is a wild and complex group of molecules that not only allow its phenotype to change crazily, but to speciate into the other Pokémon without losing its ability to interbreed within the total population.  Each subspecies of Pokémon keeps that intensely varied genetic code too as evidenced by Pikachu (an electric type) using Iron Tail (a steel type move).  And when I get into the mechanics of what Pokémon calls “evolution” (Bulbasaur evolving into Ivysaur, etc), you’ll see just how much Pokémon have a conscious ability to tap into their genotype to radically change their phenotype.  We still run into the problem of ontogeny though (ontogeny is the term for the development of an individual from fertilized egg to its mature form, aka the Pokémon’s journey from sperm and egg to hatched creature).  All Pokémon have almost the same genotype, yet aren’t born as Mew.  I propose two solutions.

Hypothesis 1: Constant use of the same transformed outward form and/or elemental techniques in a population of Mew/Pokémon will permanently mutate the section of genetic code used in ontogeny, resulting in a different phenotype on birth.

Hypothesis 2: An individual is able to permanently mutate the section of genetic code used in ontogeny as a conscious effort.

Before you scoff at the second hypothesis, consider this: Since physical transformation and use of varied elemental powers is a conscious effort of an individual to manipulate sections of its genetic code in the first place, it’s not outrageous to think they the same individual can consciously manipulate the way its children develop.  Regardless, either of these hypothesis could be the answer to the problem of Pokémon’s soft inheritance.

Completely incorrect, and now used as a strawman by creationists.

I should note that there is another evolutionary idea now proven false that is related to ontogeny and Mew itself.  It is the recapitulation theory, which is unsurprisingly inspired largely from Lamarckian evolution.  It infamously states that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, which in laymen’s terms basically means that in an individual animal the development process from embryo to adult goes through stages that look like the previous stages of their species’ evolution.  This concept was proposed by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, and is discredited today namely because… it doesn’t happen.  At no stage of development does a chicken or human fetus grow functional fish gills.  The infamous illustration at the right was exaggerated by the illustrator to try and prove the hypothesis as true, and the initial idea came from overactive imagination when observing fetal stages (humans naturally look for patterns even when none are there).  However the idea isn’t completely bogus.  In development the more ancient of traits often develop first, like the backbone in vertebrate embryos.  So how does this idea relate to Mew?

Mew itself looks like a fetus.  It’s pink, has a big head with a little body, and hair so fine that you need a microscope to see it.  It even forms a protective psychic bubble around it sometimes (like in Pokémon Snap) that resembles an amniotic sac.  Just compare for yourself:

So while recapitulation theory says that our fetuses look like our ancestors, in Pokémon their ancestor looks like a fetus.  Weird.

There’s one last problem with Mew being the Pokémon ancestor.  Why would it, as its Pokedex entry states, “contain the genetic codes of all Pokémon”?  Evolution does work that way.  Our ancestor didn’t have the genetic codes of all the current organisms, bits of genetic code got added, changed, and deleted to it over time and many, many mutations.  To suggest that the original ancestor would have all the different species it would evolve to mapped out in its DNA ahead of time is reminiscent of …. shudder… intelligent design.  I have two answers to this.  First, unlike in the real world intelligent design is an actual possibility in the Pokémon universe.  The Pokémon universe has a creator god called Arceus, and whether it acts as some kind of interfering deity or as a more deistic divine watchmaker is yet to be determined.  However, that possibility of ID is there.  More likely than not however, I feel like the phrase “contain the genetic codes of all Pokémon” is actually a misnomer.  It should read as “contains the same genetic material that all Pokémon have”.  The genotype of all Pokémon is practically the same as Mew’s with only a few genetically minor (while phenotypically major) changes.  Besides, just like dogs one could argue that Mew’s vast variety of breeds and subspecies got that way through artificial selection, only instead of a dog breeder, the one doing the artificial selection is the Pokémon itself.  Mew’s smart enough to do so anyway.

So here’s to Mew, the super rare fetus ancestor Pokémon!  May you grace the Pokedexes of lucky trainers everywhere.

Next time: I'll begin my quest to map out the phylogenetic tree of all Pokemon.  It's not going well so far...

PS: Some of the ideas posited by Lamarck's theories are now actually be reconsidered today, particularly when it comes to evolutionary developmental biology (or Evo-Devo).  But that's current, brand new research that shouldn't be talked about in a mostly pedestrian setting like this yet.

Mew: The Origin of the Species

In my last Pokemon article I revealed that all Pokemon technically belong to the same species.  I ended by saying that the origin of the Pokemon species, the creature they all evolved from, was the legendary Pokemon Mew.  Here's why.

As with all the individual Pokemon families I'll research, my greatest tool will be the Pokedex entries.  The anime, as I've stated before, is crap, my own extrapolations as well as other fan theories are obviously not Nintendo licensed canon, and you could argue that anything said by an NPC in the games could be the hearsay of misinformed characters.  The Pokedex is a portable encyclopedia for Pokemon trainers to carry in the field, and it contains blurbs of information (different in each game version) on individual Pokemon breeds available to read upon capture.  These blurbs consists of data complied by actual Pokemon researchers from the game world, such as Professor Oak.  Thus, the Pokedex will be the most legitimate source of information for me to use and extrapolate on.  Now here are some Pokedex entries on Mew:

From Silver version: Its DNA is said to contain the genetic codes of all Pokémon, so it can use all kinds of techniques.

From Crystal version: Because it can learn any move, some people began research to see if it is the ancestor of all Pokémon.

From Ruby/Sapphire version: Mew is said to possess the genetic composition of all Pokémon. It is capable of making itself invisible at will, so it entirely avoids notice even if it approaches people.

From FireRed version: A Pokémon of South America that was thought to have been extinct. It is very intelligent and learns any move.

From Diamond/Pearl/Platinum version: Because it can use all kinds of moves, many scientists believe Mew to be the ancestor of Pokémon.

These help us paint a picture of Mew.  As I said last time, whatever Pokemon all the other Pokemon derived, the Pokemon Prime if you will, would have to have the capacity to differentiate into all the other Pokemon breeds.  Mew has the amazing ability to learn EVERY SINGLE TM and HM in the Pokemon universe, in all versions (for those of you unacquainted with Pokemon, TM's and HM's are items used to teach attack moves to Pokemon who wouldn't learn them naturally just by leveling up (growing with experience).  Most Pokemon are only compatible with a limited number from the vast pools of TM's and HM's, mostly only with moves that match or are similar to their elemental type).  This means that Mew has the capacity to draw forth from its body any kind of elemental move, be it poison, fire, water, insecty-ness, etc.  While plenty of Pokemon can use moves not of their type, it often makes sense, like a water type using an ice-type move, or a psychic-type using a ghost type move.  However Mew has the capacity for all types, which would make sense if most of the Mew species differentiated into all the different type Pokemon.  Another move-based clue is looking at Mew's movepool.  In generation 1, Mew could only learn 5 moves by leveling up, and the second move it learns is Transform at level 10 (with only Pound which it knows at birth coming before it, something that is unsurprising since any animal should have the ability to physically hit something with their body).  Transform is a move that allows the user to copy the appearance and moveset of its opponent, a move that only the Pokemon Ditto shares with it (more on Ditto later, obviously).  Add these two bits of information to the fact that Mew does share the same genes as all the other Pokemon as stated by the Pokedex entries above, and it seems conclusive that Mew is in fact the originator of all Pokemon species* 

Just like all dog breeds are essentially variations of the first Canis lupis familiaris that helped out ancestors hunt, all Pokemon* subspecies are essentially variations of Mew.  All Pokemon* are Mew.  This explains why every Pokemon is so genetically unstable, is able to interbreed, and can learn moves not of its type.  They're all based on one very mutagenic Pokemon.  Wait, that's a misnomer, Mew isn't mutagenic, but can... mutate its genetic code easily?  What's the best way to describe it?

Ah yes.  Thank you Alpha 5.

I'm splitting my Mew post up because this is getting a little long.  Next time: Mew and Lamarkian Evolution.  Evolutionary biologists out there, get ready.

*All Pokemon except for some of the deities, again, to be talked about later.

An Open Letter to Pretty People

I hate pretty people sometimes.  The problem with beautiful people is that they don’t have to try.  If you’re attractive yourself, you might not have noticed this.  But if you’re not particularly attractive, then I’m sure you’ve witnessed that the pretty people around you generally get treated better in life.  You might have even contributed to this as well, like going out of your way to help out an attractive customer at work when you would have otherwise ignored them.  Why we do this is simple enough: seeing someone that we want to mate with gets us excited and subconsciously willing to do whatever it takes to have sex with them.  While we as a species are obviously past the point of doing everything our instincts tell us, our instincts sure as hell still unconsciously direct a lot of our actions, especially when it deals with sex.  So when a fat guest asks me to turn down the heat in the room because she’s burning up, I consider her a bitch and put in the bare minimum effort to help her, but when a pretty guests asks me if she can have any hot cinnamon tea that my department doesn’t even have in stock, you can be assured that I’ll be rushing down 3 flights of stairs to steal some from another department.  Thus we come to the “curse” that pretty people have to put up with: they don’t get the chance to actually make themselves a better person.  The beautiful usually get whatever they want much more often than the average schlump, and they rarely get critical feedback of their actions.  And because of this, most beautiful people will grow up to be boring, underdeveloped people.

Most intelligent, cynical people who have spent a lot of time being a member of our society will agree on one thing: people suck.  And while I used to agree and back up Thomas Hobbes on the whole “people are born naturally evil” thing, I’ve come to realize that there are in fact a decent amount of truly good, interesting people in this world.  However, a majority of us are still lazy, selfish dicks.  Now what happens when one of the many lazy, selfish people of this world grows up beautiful with everything handed to them?  Chances are, they’ll totally take advantage of this handicap and never have to learn to be functional members of society.  There are even tons of career options based completely around just looking pretty for people, ranging from glamour models to strippers depending on just how pretty and lucky you are.  The really sad thing for these people is that when they get old and their beauty fades, they must now deal with the fact that they spent their youth avoiding the of building any remarkable personality or skills and are now withered shadows of nothingness.  Meanwhile, the average and ugly looking people of this world had to succeed using their own talent, and build relationships by developing a good personality (unless you’re born rich, which is a different though similar conversation), meaning that even the naturally born dicks of this world have to work a little bit to make life worthwhile.  As I’ve said before though, not everyone is a natural schmuck.  If a naturally decent person is born beautiful, they’ll ignore their beautiful person handicap and grow up like the rest of us.  If you meet someone who is beautiful yet has a great personality and/or remarkable talent and skills, you have just met a truly great person that is both an inspiration and totally out of your league.

The point of this post isn’t just to point out why most of the beautiful people of this world should hated for both getting through life easily and by hacking your sexual instincts by smiling at you, that has been pointed out by plenty of people before me (namely the South Park episode “The List”).  I want to discuss something I’ve been considering for a while: What if pretty people aren’t the shameless leeches of society that they appear to be?  Do the naturally beautifully actually contribute something to society?  If you were going to attempt to measure personal happiness, you’d probably look at dopamine levels.  A short explanation of dopamine is that it is the chemical compound that causes us to feel happy.  Think about the moment when an attractive person starts talking to you.  You immediately get excited, your heart starts fluttering, and dopamine floods your system.  Those lips, those eyes….. they’re like liquid happiness that you just want to bathe in forever.  

Happiness, as seen here

Albert Einstein once said: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.”  And while soon this desire morphs into a kind of heartache, you can’t argue that you body physically feels happy and energized.  What if this is the benefit that beautiful people give to our society?  You could argue that this brief moment of happiness isn’t enough to counterattack the damages that occur when a society is based around pleasing a population of pretty people that contribute nothing practical, but maybe it does.  I for one am going to try and live my life counteracting my own instincts, making it more balanced for me.  I’ll enjoy the view of a pretty girl to try to maximize my dopamine levels, then turn off my instincts and try to treat them extra-normal (oxymoron, I know) to level out the benefits they get from other people.  But so far I haven’t been too successful in the latter part.  I can’t help it!  They’re just too damn pretty.

Pokemon and Ring Species

The world of Pokémon is crazy as shit.  You can raise dragons that can breathe fire hotter than the sun, cocoons “evolve” into butterflies, and you can breed a blue whale with a kitten.  While anyone with a shred of sanity would just accept that it’s a video game about a fictional world and thus is unbound by reality, I am clearly insane.  Or just academically bored.  Why?  Because my goal is to figure out the mechanics of Pokémon universe by applying the knowledge and models of the real world.  Obviously I’ll be focusing on biological concepts, not just because that’s what I have a BS in but because we’re exploring living organisms here.  However, I’ll eventually start exploring the religious and metaphysical aspects of the Pokémon universe as well.  After all, the Pokémon universe has an actual creator god.  That you can catch and train.  Plenty of seriously disturbing implications to discuss there!  But I digress.  For the sake of these studies I am going to consider the Pokémon universe to include the video games only and exclude the manga and anime.  This is not just because the video game is the source material, but because the other media are just too confusing to work with.  While there might be plenty of potential material to glean from the anime, particularly about Pokémon behavior, there are just too many moments that make no sense or directly go against the game (“Pikachu! Aim for Rhydon’s horn!” most readily comes to mind) to be able to consider the anime as a viable material to work from.  Thus to keep things controlled and as simple as possible, I will be working with the video games only.

Before I can talk about the larger concepts like the evolution mechanic in the Pokémon world, and especially before we delve into the individual Pokémon oddities like Dugtrio and Exeggcute there is one important fact that must be understood first.  As it turns out, all Pokémon count as a single species.  To understand why, you need to understand the species problem.  Ever since western thought and academia really started to form itself coherently with the ancient Greeks, we’ve been obsessed with labeling knowledge and putting it in neat little organized boxes.  It’s no surprise then that biologists have classified all known living organisms into a system of taxa.  You may remember this from grade school as Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family- Genus-Species, or as the elementary school mnemonic device goes- Kinky People Come Over For Group Sex (what can I say, my 4^th grade teacher was really weird).  This structured language use does a terrible job describing the ever changing body of scientific knowledge as well as the ever changing nature of life.  We realize we have to add a taxon (Domain) before Kingdom, we realize a group of organisms got classified wrong years ago, and worse of all, the species problem.  Not only are there petty problems about distinguishing species like which scientist found it first but defining a species is a really, really difficult task in and of itself.  As it stands, a species is defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring.  For example, horses and donkeys belong to two different species because while they might be related enough to have sex and reproduce, they cannot produce viable offspring (mules are born sterile).  This leads to very difficult problems when defining a species.  A poodle and a Great Dane look very different yet are the same species, while at the same time there are 64 distinct species of rat that all look pretty much the same.  What do you call a population who is in the middle of evolving from one species to another?  And worse of all, how do we deal with ring species?

As it turns Pokémon count as one massive ring species.  What is a ring species you might ask?  A popular, real life example is the Arctic Tern, a bird who lives in a circumpolar distribution around the North Pole.  A breeding population of tern can successfully mate with their neighboring tern population, the latter of which can also mate with the neighboring population of tern on the other side of them, etc. etc.  Eventually the minor genetic differences in the breeding populations makes it so the first group cannot produce viable offspring with the population on the opposite side of the North Pole, thus meaning they now belong to different species.  This creates a paradox where A=B, B=C, C=D, but A≠D.  Allow the below diagrams from Wikipedia illustrate further:

Where 7 is the same species as 1, but at the same time is not.

This concept of ring species applies to the game mechanics of the Pokémon world too.  For those unacquainted with the post- 1^st Generation games, you can breed your Pokémon together in order to collect rare baby Pokémon and/or to breed the ultimate killing machine.  Two Pokémon (of opposite genders obviously) can mate and reproduce as long as they belong to the same egg group, of which there are 15 total.  Let me say right away that this proves that at the very least Pokémon within the same egg groups are the same species, since the offspring of a Snorlax and a Kangaskhan (both in the Monster egg group) can produce a fertile child.  But many Pokémon belong to two egg groups.  This is built into the game so that the Trainer can use technique called chain breeding to pass moves on through generations for battling (Google it for details, too much to discuss here).  While this is a cool game mechanic for creating the ultimate tailored fighter, the scientific implications are staggering.  Because you can essentially breed two Pokémon of any egg group together through intermediate Pokémon and still produce viable offspring, all Pokémon are actually one huge species.  Let’s test this by example.  Take two completely different Pokémon who normally could not breed together, and run them through the ring species evolutionary mechanic.  On one side we have Exeggutor, a walking psychic palm tree with 3 coconuts for heads that belongs solely to the Plant egg group.  On the other side we have Magcargo, a snail made out of lava with a shell consisting of barely cooled rock, which belongs solely to the Indeterminate egg group.  While their unsurprising inability to breed with one another directly would normally make them different species, if this odd couple can eventually produce viable grandchildren together then they are a ring species.

I totally made this myself.  Surprising right?  It looks so professional.

As you can see, the third generation Castform is a fertile grandchild between the Exeggutor and Magcargo, meaning those two are in fact the same species.  This can be applied to almost all of Pokémon save for a few 4^th generation legendaries (which is a metaphysical bordering on religious discussion of Pokémon for the future).  So now the question is, where do all these Pokémon spring from?  They all clearly have a common ancestor, but unlike in the real world this common ancestor would be the defining Pokémon species.  Essentially, all Pokémon would be varying breeds of this single Pokémon.  So could I be some primordial ooze Pokémon perhaps?  Or god (Arceus) itself?  Strangely enough, the answer is Mew.  But I’ll save that discussion for next time.

Coming next- Mew as the Origin of the Species and the Phylogenetic tree of Pokémon.

Why I Don't Recycle Part 4: Final remarks and internet memes

I thought it was only appropriate to have my first opinion-based blog post be an elaboration on my last facebook wall post, where I mentioned as an example how I am morally opposed to recycling.  Unfortunately, I soon realized that I had a lot more to say about this subject than I thought, so I'm going to break this post down into four posts to make it easier to read.  You can check back here over the next four days to read it in chunks in order to prevent you, dear reader, from looking at six pages worth of material and saying "fuck that shit".  As always, feel free to comment.

Now like any of my opinions, they’re not perfect.  Some counterpoints:

If you’d rather keep this current ecosystem in stasis because you personally think pandas are super cute or something, then alright.  It’s the equivalent of me rooting for fungus at the expense of other species, and if you just admit to yourself and other people that you want to preserve this current ecosystem for its aesthetic appeal then I’m fine with it.  Just don’t be a hypocrite and say you’re actions are noble and sacrificing. 

You can easily say that all my talk of a world I want to see is irrelevant because neither I nor my children will probably be alive to see either outcome.  But then I can say the same thing to my opposition.  Chances are whatever you do with your life will barely effect the outcome of the situation.  But we might as well try; I’d rather be jousting at windmills then doing nothing with my life.

When I discussed the kind of resourceful people that will invent new technologies and lifestyles to save the human race from extinction once it’s a big enough threat, you might argue that a) it is threatening enough RIGHT NOW, and b) uhh, isn’t green technology the kind of advancements that you’re talking about?  First, we’re not entirely sure how bad humans are screwed right now.  While the current supply of fuel and gas will certainly run out by the end of the century, new technologies to find new oil deposits as well as alternate fuel sources and awesomely useful resources like nuclear energy make it hard to determine when and if we’ll ever be truly strapped for power.  As for global warming, it’s still unknown just when we’ll be severely negatively affected by it (and it certainly won’t be the day after tomorrow), and honestly I’m not too worried for survival of humanity because of increased floods and wild fires.  Even the most extremist, alarmist reports state that the world won’t go to hell until you and I are too old to care.  Secondly, current green technology is nowhere near enough to permanently save us.  Modern “environment friendly” technology and lifestyles are nothing more than stall tactics.  Here’s a good example of the difference between creating renewable resources the “green”, “smart”, “future-conscience” way that the general public currently thinking of, and the innovative way I keep talking about.  We think recycling is a great way to save the environment because reusing old materials to make new ones is a simple plan with an obvious beneficial outcome (not to mention it’s a very easy way to feel better about ourselves day to day, and that’s how Americans like their altruism- with minimal work).  However, if you think critically about recycling, it falls apart.  Even if every single person on the Earth recycled their recyclable goods then a) the non-recyclable goods would still be screwed and b) eventually everything would still run out because matter is lost in the recycling process, and even if just a few grams of matter are lost a day eventually everything would run out as material is burned up or blown away in the wind.  But we’re not even blessed with that situation in real life because most people on Earth do not recycle; meaning recycling is nothing but a stall tactic.  And even THAT isn’t the case, because most recycling plants are inefficient.  The current technology seems to consist mostly of sorting out the material, and then either wasting massive amounts of water and energy to create the new recycled products or just leaving the sorted trash in warehouses until we can think of better ways to recycle it (seriously).  On the other hand, the kind of technology used to mine trash for minerals and methane gas is being worked on right now (and as all Starcraft players know, everything in the future is built using only minerals and gas).  Using this Mr. Fusion-esque technology, we can mine our massive landfills for necessary materials efficiently in the future.  So if you really want to save our future, throw all your trash in a landfill.  In short, it’s much more likely for humanity to develop the technology to save ourselves under the pressure of looming extinction than the calm ignorance of thinking that the “green” lifestyle will save us.  Admit it, when you see a commercial from a big company promising new green technology, you feel a little more calm and complacent about the environment situation, and a complacent population is a doomed population.

Truer word were never said.

Now you can point out that the current green movement is a necessary step to those future innovations; they lead to better technologies, inspire young intellects to start working towards solutions, and most importantly finally make citizens and their governments recognize the problem so that the demand for the solutions are increased.  I would agree with you too, it’s always better to be prepared.  Except that those citizens and their governments are stupid as hell.  People will continue to panic about the environmental end-times like society is currently doing until enough businesses and politicians pledge to “make the world a better place for tomorrow”.  Give it 5-10 more years and people will feel like they’ve done enough to care for their environment, will grow bored, and worry about something else.  Scientists developing ways to harness new resources will get less funding, and nothing will be done as America wakes up with an empty Bread Basket.  So stop getting excited about the green movement’s ability to “save the world”.  All this greenwashing is going to lead to nothing but a content and lazy population.

Because this is your brain on green.

Finally, if you’d like to counter my argument about it being cool if humans could beat the record for biggest caused extinction with your own point that it would be just as impressive, if not more so, to be the sole species to stop the trend of extinction and death that this universe has lived with, then fine.  Many people would probably agree with you over me, and if not for my other points in the last paragraph, I might too.  That is, until I watched the show Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.  In this anime, the Big Bad villain of the show is the Anti-Spirals, a race who after realizing that the show’s metaphor for evolution and natural life processes in general will eventually cause the destruction of the universe due to life forms using up too much energy and resources as they evolve and advance their civilizations.  In response, they suppressed all other alien species in the universe and placed the survivors under strict control on their respective home planets, while the Anti-Spirals themselves sealed their entire home planet in an internal stasis.  This is the eventual outcome of thinking “green”.  While the Anti-Spirals plan might keep the universe and what little life there is alive forever, what kind of life is that?  An individual’s life, as well as the “life” of a society, a species, an ecosystem, a planet, and the entire universe all consists of birth, a long road of good and bad times, and eventually death.  Environmentalism, essentially, is a fear of this death; a fear of your own death and the death of other people and life forms.  If you want to “save the environment”, it’s probably because you find it hard to except that your life, your children’s life, and the world around you will eventually die.  But it will.  And we just have to except that, and look forward to the new life that death will bring this world.

Why I Consider the Morality of Modern Environmentalist Mindset Shared by a Majority of my Peers is Vastly Flawed Part 3: Am I a sociopath?

I thought it was only appropriate to have my first opinion-based blog post be an elaboration on my last facebook wall post, where I mentioned as an example how I am morally opposed to recycling.  Unfortunately, I soon realized that I had a lot more to say about this subject than I thought, so I'm going to break this post down into four posts to make it easier to read.  You can check back here over the next four days to read it in chunks in order to prevent you, dear reader, from looking at six pages worth of material and saying "fuck that shit".  As always, feel free to comment.

So why do I personally want to expedite the current extinction trend caused primarily by human actions?  First, I much rather allow mass extinction to occur within the next thousands of years and let new organisms evolve rather than keep our current ecosystem on life-support.  It may be a combination of nerdy/geeky desire to see crazy new species evolve to fill some sort of human blasted landscape, but it’s my desire nonetheless.  I consider wishing to save the current environment as a wish to perform an abortion on potential new species.  Secondly, it would be pretty impressive if the human species could ACTUALLY fuck up the earth at such a scale as to put cyanobacteria and natural disasters to shame.  Thirdly, I like the immediate side effects to a complete ecological disaster if it were in fact to occur relatively soon (like within a couple hundred years).  One side effect would be increased fungal growth and evolution, and as I stated before I respect fungi more than all other groups of life (maybe I’ll make a short nerdy post gushing about why I love fungus later). 

I don't care if they constantly produce deadly toxic spores, I want to live in a post-apocalyptic world
filled with huge forests of fungi as seen in Nausicaa:Valley of the Wind.  

More importantly, human technological and possibly even physical evolution would benefit greatly from a dire situation like this.  Contrary to common sense, life-threatening situations seem to do wonders for a population of any size or species.  That fight-or-flight reflex which is in all of us does wonders for getting rid of the weak and promoting the capable.  For instance, when a bacterial population is exposed to an antibacterial drug then most of the population will get killed except for that solidarity freak that is naturally immune.  That immune bacterium will be able to spread his resistance to the surviving population causing them to evolve into a newer, stronger, drug-resistant bacteria population.  To continue my ill-advised use of examples that end in outcomes that you don't want thus emotionally triggering you to disagree with me, this works in human society too.  When Germany got its ass handed to it in WWI, it was left with great shame and a big bill.  Being backed in a corner inspired the German people to develop a powerful fascist state; reenergizing their people, taking over a large part of Europe, and …killing a lot of innocents…. Errrr…. You get my point.  When stuck in a really bad situation, life knows to either put up or shut up, and those worthy will rise to the situation.  And with humans, this isn’t just limited to physical evolution but the innovation of new ideas and memes.  If humans are faced with a seemingly impossible problem (like living on an Earth with dwindling resources) then I guarantee that we will fight back with pioneering and hard work.  The genius men and women in this world that normally have their voices droned out when they’re not immediately need will be turned to in a time of panic.  They will save the human race from extinction.  And the only thing I desire more than seeing fungal evolution is human technological, scientific, and artistic advancement.  And if we can’t step up to the plate and beat our own extinction, then so be it.  We lost far and square.  So in order to create a future Earth where a massive extinction causes another fungal renaissance while our scientists become heroes saving humanity from destruction, and a far future with a fascinating new Earth and an efficient and advanced human society flung around the stars, I have to do my part to avoid “saving the environment” in the way the ascendant moral values of our society demands from us.

Why I Don't Recycle Part 2: Nature? I hardly knew her!

I thought it was only appropriate to have my first opinion-based blog post be an elaboration on my last facebook wall post, where I mentioned as an example how I am morally opposed to recycling.  Unfortunately, I soon realized that I had a lot more to say about this subject than I thought, so I'm going to break this post down into four posts to make it easier to read.  You can check back here over the next four days to read it in chunks in order to prevent you, dear reader, from looking at six pages worth of material and saying "fuck that shit".  As always, feel free to comment.

First, I feel like I should apologize for that terrible excuse for a post title joke.  In all fairness, I'm an idiot.  Anyway, now for a major point in my argument that I realized about 2 years ago; a point that no one has really countered yet seems hesitant to agree with me.  It’s the argument to end all “appeals to nature”, which in of itself is a vastly flawed argument.  In keeping up with my lazy-man style armchair philosopher, I will unabashingly quote the definition from its Wikipedia article, saving me the trouble of putting it in my own words.   “Appeal to nature is a fallacy of relevance consisting of a claim that something is good or right because it is natural, or that something is bad or wrong because it is unnatural or artificial. In this type of fallacy, nature is often implied as an ideal or desired state of being, a state of how things were, should be, or are: in this sense an appeal to nature may resemble an appeal to tradition.”  It’s a terrible argument in the first place because: “Several problems exist with this type of argument that makes it a fallacy. First, the word "natural" is often a loaded term, usually unconsciously equated with normality, and its use in many cases is simply a form of bias. Second, "nature" and "natural" have vague definitions and thus the claim that something is natural may not be correct by every definition of the term natural; a good example would be the claim of all-natural foods, such as "all-natural" wheat, the claimed wheat though is usually a hybridized plant that has been bred by artificial selection.  Lastly, the argument can quickly be invalidated by a counter-argument that demonstrates something that is natural that has undesirable properties (for example aging, illness, and death are natural), or something that is unnatural that has desirable properties (for example, many modern medicines are not found in nature, yet have saved countless lives).”  Yet people will still use this argument to justify their opinions regardless, whether it is an argument for “natural” foods by hippies or for “natural” marriage by the religious.  So to make this already flawed argument even more useless, I posit a question to those who make statements about what is natural or not: What the fuck is unnatural?

The term unnatural usually applies to three things: artificially made objects and outcomes like a building or a drought caused by a man-made dam; the supernatural like ghosts; and things that are the opposite of the norm like homosexuality.  First off, let’s get the irrelevant supernatural point out of this discussion because it’s mostly used in reference to things that are either natural laws yet to be discovered by man or the rantings of crazy people.   As for the other two- what exactly is unnatural?  An ax?  It’s made out of wood and stone from “nature”.  The White House?  Stone, wood, mortar, glass (made from sand, and totally found in “nature” sometimes too), etc.  The computer you’re reading this on?  Minerals, metals, plastic, electricity, all found in or harvested from “natural” products.  Ok, fine, how about the fact that they were made by humans, and not just created for “natural” reasons like survival and reproduction but stupid shit like Snuggies and plush Pikachu dolls?  Oh, you mean the humans that evolved from the same puddle of lipids and RNA molecules like every other living thing on this earth?  The tool use that plenty of animals and arguably plants have exhibited?  Or the complicated desires that humans have built up over the thousands of years of Homo sapiens evolution?  

"Complicated" would be a good way to describe
my own Snuggie-related desires.

What part of that is unnatural?  It’s not like a dimensional rift opened up one day and granted us extra-dimensional materials, knowledge, or ideas.  Some biblical god or gods didn’t one day bless us with extra-natural powers.  Our continued survival, technical knowledge, and need to paint ourselves arbitrary colors to support a group of men throwing a ball of swine skin around a field of painted grass are the outcomes of the natural processes of evolution, time, and luck.  Our needs, no matter how complex, are simply instincts made unusual over time and evolution.  And even the things that may not be the norm, or majority, in a collected population sample, like homosexuality, is not caused by anything not already found in nature.  Tools, human thought, and society are all natural.  And unless you’ve had personal contact with extra-dimensional beings, I challenge you to think of anything unnatural.  There is no unnatural.  There is only nature.  The appeal to nature is irrelevant.

So without the appeal to nature, the question of whether or not to protect “nature” is neutralized.  The loggers cutting down a forest are a natural occurrence, as is the protestors chaining themselves to the tree to save its life.   Which side you stand depends entirely on your personal choice, and shouldn’t be beholden to anyone else’s moral standpoint.

Why I Don't Recycle Part 1: Extinctions aren't that scary once you get to know them.....

I thought it was only appropriate to have my first opinion-based blog post be an elaboration on my last facebook wall post, where I mentioned how I am morally opposed to recycling.  Unfortunately, I soon realized that I had a lot more to say about this subject than I thought, so I'm going to break this post down into four posts to make it easier to read.  You can check back here over the next four days to read it in chunks in order to prevent you, dear reader, from looking at six pages worth of material and saying "fuck that shit".  As always, feel free to comment.

I hope that by now most of you reading this have heard the actual facts about global warming and not just the biased right and left viewpoints.  Scientists that aren’t being paid by a particular political party all agree on three things: 1) Global warming is definitely happening, 2) Global warming is a normal part of the Earth’s life cycle and we’re currently between a cold period (the “Ice Age” that everyone thinks of) and a hot period, and nothing will stop the Earth from eventually cranking up the heat to tropical levels, and 3) while global warming would be happening anyway, human actions are causing it to happen slightly faster than usual.  But before you curse modern humans with all their smokestacks and bottled water, you should know that human-caused ecological damage and extinction is nothing new.  As soon as our ancestors put themselves at the top of the food chain, they started to kill species at a massive rate.  You can actually trace the extinction of many species to just several generations after humans were introduced to the area.  For example, Wooly Mammoths aren’t as ancient as you might think- there was actually a tiny island called Wrangel Island around the Bering Strait with some miniaturized Mammoth relatives still hanging out until just 4000 years ago, until some of the local American Indian tribes finally checked out the island and finished the job.  At this point I probably have you thinking that humans are just natural killers, and might be siding with Agent Smith from the Matrix when he said “Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet”.   And while that might be partially true, let me give you some scope on the history of extinctions on this planet.

One great thing that my favorite college class (History of Life with Dr. Lassiter, the only class at Roanoke College with dinosaurs) taught me was just how close the Earth has come to getting royally screwed.  While most of you should know about the extinction that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and some of you know that decent sized extinctions happen a lot, I doubt most of you know some of the details.  Some of the most problematic extinctions have been: the aforementioned  K-T Extinction where a combination of a massive volcanic eruption and a meteor strike wiped out 65% of life of earth, dooming the dinosaurs; the Great Oxygenation Event where a population boom of cyanobacteria filled the atmosphere with poisonous free oxygen waste eventually triggering the biggest Snowball Earth ever (our planet literally looked like Hoth, just solid ice with some slushy oceans at the equator); and my favorite,  the Permian-Triassic Extinction (informally known as The Great Dying… holy shit that’s so metal) where a triple shot of a massive volcanic eruption, a meteor strike, AND massive amounts of built up CO₂ gas bubbled up from the oceans wiping out every animal, land and sea, that breathed it in.  That last extinction wiped out 90% of life on earth and ended the reign of our ancestors, the mammal-like reptiles, who were just starting to really get that whole warm-blooded thing worked out.  

Seriously, it was pretty badass.  And starkly depressing.

As you know, each extinction event totally wiped out all life on the planet Earth, the spirit of Mother Nature cried, and no joy was ever spread again.  Oh wait, except that didn’t happen at all.  Instead what occurred was (in order of extinctions I listed): the end of the long reign of the dinosaurs eventually let the mammals flourish by evolving to fit the now empty ecological niches, eventually even giving them the chance to PWN the last of the apex predator dinosaurs, aka the Terror Birds.  With a whole bunch of unused oxygen in the air, all it took is for one bacterium to evolve a way to evolve aerobic respiration, using the poisonous oxygen to create energy.  Boom!   Population explosion of our ancestors, aerobic organisms, which created a balanced system of anaerobic and aerobic organisms breathing each others’ air waste, a system that is still the most important cycle keeping the living world alive today.   And as for the Snowball/Slushball Earth side effect created by all that oxygen waste in the first place, the only livable zone on Earth became a small strip of cold water around the equator where only the strong could survive.  This Darwinian wet dream prompted multi-cellular life to evolve; without this strong natural selection situation, we would be chilling around as bacteria in puddles to this day.   The P-Tr Extinction had the same effect that the K-T Extinction did, except in this earlier situation it was the mammalian ancestors that got rooted out by archosaurs, the ancestors of crocodiles, Pterodactyls, and dinosaurs (didn’t know that the mammalian uprising 65 mya was actually just tit for tat, did you?  This kind of back-and-forth between animal taxa happened a lot throughout the history of life…..).  Also, all that death meant a whoooooole lot of fungi could flourish off of delicious dead matter, resulting in a sort of evolutionary renaissance for fungi (which are totally cool).  What can we learn from this?  That no matter how hard the Earth gets hit by something, it manages to bounce back.  To quote a cheesy but totally true line from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, “Life will find a way”.  One might also extrapolate from this history that it seems that extinction, like all death, is a natural occurrence in life and is needed for the life cycle to begin anew.  And finally, that while the current extinction rate has been blowing up 

Well played cyanobacteria.  Well played.

ever since we learned how to use a spear, we are certainly not the only single species to almost single-handedly cause a massive extinction.  We might be worried about man-made atomic bombs causing nuclear winter, but our earliest ancestors already beat us to the punch just by breathing out.

never knows best

I figure that a good, or at least necessary, first blog post is an explanation of its title.  My blog’s name is a reference to the phrase scribbled on Mamimi’s cigarette in episode 1 of the anime FLCL.  In the director’s commentary of the episode, director Tsurumaki Kazuya tells us what it means: “How can I say it? Um... There's a best way, and not everyone can follow it.  No one knows the best way.  I thought it reflected Mamimi's belief that there's no future.  That it had a nuance that said she's given up on life.”  While I haven’t given up on life per se, I’ve given up on trying to figure out the best way, on trying to control it.  This is reflected in what I consider to be my core belief system.

These are my core beliefs: I think, therefore I am.  That’s all I can be 100% sure of.  Everything else I think of is just subjective ideas, and the thought experiments I often partake in are just for shits and giggles.  I must remember to stop thinking about both the practical and abstract sometimes though and just enjoy the real fun of life.

I think the first thing that got me thinking this way was when I got rid of my religion.  It seems that a lot of people go through similar spiritual phases in life; many people experience a “dark night of the soul” in which they are filled with religious doubt, and many people have spiritual reawakening in their lives where they find some sort of spirituality again.  I was lucky enough to go through these (at least their first incarnation, I’m still very young) very early in my life.  My love of dinosaurs and earth history as a child meant that I quickly doubted the biblical creation myth, and by twelve years old I was more or less an agnostic boarding on an atheist (of course I didn’t know the terms for these ideas yet).  But a spiritual awakening in 7^th grade had me crawling back to my God, and I became a better practicing Catholic than the rest of my family for three years.  I don’t regret either of these periods in my life because the former meant that my faith would always be on my own terms, and the latter gave me the positive outlook on life that preventing me from frequenting Hot Topic in high school.  The moment I started rejecting Catholicism came in 10^th grade, during a conversion about the differences in religious dogma with a protestant.  She argued that most of Catholic dogma was based around rules made up by medieval church leaders, and we have no reason to trust that they know what God wants for us.  While she was just trying to convert me to another barely different sect of Christianity, it was the spark of religious nihilism I needed to realize what many other people have: that we have no idea what the fuck the spiritual metaphysical framework of this universe is, what our god or gods would want us to do, or even if they exist at all.  Since then I’ve gradually drifted into a sort of spiritual nihilism, a mix between deism and I’ve been told Daoism, with the only the ontological argument holding me back from being a true agnostic.  I can’t imagine a loving or even neutral god expecting anything more from us than thinking for ourselves and going with our intuition and reason, and since we’re screwed no matter what under a hateful or non-existent god that’s what I’m going to do.  My current idea is a god resembling the Force from Star Wars, an idea that is made even more attractive to me with the inclusion of midichlorians.

As for scientific truth, any true scientist will tell you that nothing is 100% certain in science, and this is what makes science so great.  Unlike religion there is never an end result in science, we always hold a possibility that our scientific doctrine is based on fallacies that won’t be rooted out until the next generation of technology comes along to improve our observations.  My biology professors encouraged my classes early on to always question them and to never take science’s collective knowledge for granted.  I was introduced to this much earlier than college though.  One of my favorite literary moments of all time is the closing monologue in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World.  The main characters spend the whole book discussing awesome biological theories about dinosaurian behavior and extinction.  But as they’re escaping on a raft, the engineer Thorne tells the exhausted young girl character to ignore the heady arguments of scientists Malcolm and Levine. 

“I wouldn’t take any of it too seriously.  It’s just theories.  Human beings can’t help making them, but the fact is that theories are just fantasies.  And they change….. A hundred years from now, people will look back at us and laugh.  They’ll say, ‘You know what people used to believe?  They believed in photons and electrons.  Can you imagine anything so silly?’  They’ll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer and better fantasies.”  Thorne shook his head.  “And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves?  That’s the sea.  That’s real.  You smell the salt in the air?  You feel the sunlight on your skin?  That’s all real.  You see all of us together?  That’s real.  Life is wonderful.  It’s a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air.  And there isn’t really anything else.”

This paragraph, read at a time in my life when I was being introduced to existentialism and nilhism for the first time, cemented my budding belief system and insured that I wouldn’t suffer the existential angst that so many people seem to deal with.  Why be depressed with the possibility that none of your life is real or matters?  That just frees us up from the responsibility of leading a life that society deems meaningful.  Instead, we can just have fun and enjoy the fleeting, senseless time we have for what it is.

This doesn’t just apply to faith or science, but on general philosophy as well.  I’ve been falling in this trap for the last two years of searching for the best way to live my life, a question I previously ignored and chided others for asking.  Honestly I think it happened because two of my best friends from college happened to be philosophy majors, and by senior year I gave too much blind credence to their opinions.  In a conversation about the ethics of superhero vigilantism I mentioned that I don’t think it’s possible to prove any sort of objective morality exists in this world.  They shrugged me off with an “of course we can” and continued the discussion without me.  I assumed that their formal training in philosophy meant that there is somehow some actual way of proving objective morals out there, and I wanted to find it.  I started researching ideas like deontology and utilitarianism, virtue ethics and irony.  I recently had an epiphany however when I realized what I’ve been doing.   I’ve been trying to assert my power over reality by classifying it, and in that regards I’ve become no better than a politician or a self-absorbed academic.  I’m now back to treating my life and ideas more nilhistically, but this time I’m trying not to completely return to the apathy I had lost during college.  I will “never knows best”, and I’m going to try to keep that in mind as I explore the bounds of my reality.