(NaturalNews) Why has there never been a record of cholesterol having blocked a vein in the body! What is it about arteries that makes cholesterol attach itself to their walls, while leaving the veins alone? It is really the sticky nature of cholesterol that is behind the blockage of healthy blood vessel walls?The answers to these questions may surprise you. The body actually uses the lipoprotein cholesterol as a kind of bandage to cover abrasions and tears in damaged arterial walls just as it does it for any other wound. Cholesterol is nothing less than a life-saver. However, for the past thirty-eight years, this lipoprotein has been stigmatized to be the number one cause of deaths in the rich nations - heart disease.This is how the theory goes: For reasons not really known, a form of cholesterol that has earned the name "bad" somehow increases in the bloodstream of millions of people today; it sticks to the walls of arteries, and eventually, it will starve the heart muscle of oxygen and nutrients. Accordingly, the masses are urged to reduce or ban cholesterol-containing fats from their diet so that they can live without the fear of arterial occlusion and dying from a heart attack.The tremendous concern of being attacked by this "vicious" lipoprotein has finally led to innovative technologies that can even extract cholesterol from cheese, eggs, and sausages, thus making these "deadly" foods "consumer-safe." Products that claim to be low in cholesterol, such as margarine and light-foods, have become a popular choice of "healthy eating."
Cholesterol is Not the Culprit After AllBut as INTERHEART and other studies have shown, cholesterol isn't a serious risk factor for heart disease at all. An earlier study sponsored by the German Ministry of Research and Technology showed that no exact link exists between food cholesterol and blood cholesterol. Even more surprising, in Japan, the cholesterol levels have risen during recent years, yet the number of heart attacks has dropped. The largest health study ever conducted on the risks of heart disease took place in China. Like so many similar studies, the Chinese study found no connection between heart disease and the consumption of animal fats.In an 8-year long heart study, researchers observed 10,000 people with high cholesterol levels. Half of them received a best-selling statin drug. The other half were simply told to eat a normal diet and get enough exercise. The results stunned the researchers. Although the statin drug did indeed lower serum cholesterol, this had no impact whatsoever on death rate, non-fatal heart attacks and fatal arterial disease. In other words, the statin-users had zero advantage over those who received no treatment at all. However, they had just spent eight years taking a costly drug with hideous side effects - risking liver failure, muscle wasting, even sudden death. Lowering cholesterol either through drugs or low fat diets does not lower the risk of developing heart disease.All the major European long-term cholesterol studies have confirmed that a low-fat diet did not reduce cholesterol levels by more than 4 percent, in most cases merely 1-2 percent. Since measurement mistakes are usually higher than 4 percent and cholesterol levels naturally increase by 20 percent in autumn and drop again during the wintertime, the anti-cholesterol campaigns since the late 1980s have been very misleading, to say the least. A more recent study from Denmark involving 20,000 men and women, in fact, demonstrated that most heart disease patients have normal cholesterol levels. The bottom line is that cholesterol hasn't been proved a risk factor for anything.The current medical understanding of the cholesterol issue is more than incomplete. The argument that animal tests on rabbits have confirmed that fatty foods cause hardening of the arteries sounds convincing, but only when the following facts are omitted:* Rabbits respond 3,000 times more sensitively to cholesterol than humans do.* Rabbits, which are non-carnivorous animals by nature, are force-fed excessive quantities of egg yolk and brain for the sake of proving that cholesterol-containing foods are harmful.* The DNA and enzyme systems of rabbits are not designed for consumption of fatty foods, and if given a choice, these animals would never eat eggs or brains.It is obvious that the arteries of these animals have only an extremely limited ability to respond to the damage caused by such unsuitable diets. For over three and half decades, Western civilization assumed that animal fats were the main cause of dietary heart disease. This misinformation is highlighted by the fact that heart attacks began to rise when consumption of animal fats actually decreased. This was verified by British research, which revealed that those areas in the U.K. where people consumed more margarine and less butter had the highest numbers of heart attacks. Further studies revealed that heart attack patients had consumed the least amounts of animal fats.In this context, it is important to differentiate between processed and unprocessed fats. It has been discovered that people who died from a heart attack were found to have many more of the harmful fatty acids derived from the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in their fat tissue than those who survived. These so-called "faulty" fats (trans-fatty acids) envelop and congest the membranes of cells, including those that make up the heart and coronary arteries. This practically starves the cells of oxygen, nutrients, and water, and eventually kills them.In another more comprehensive study, 85,000 nurses working in American hospitals observed a higher risk for heart disease in patients who consumed margarine, crisps, potato chips, biscuits, cookies, cakes, and white bread, all of which contain trans fats.Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53 percent over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study. While actually increasing LDL cholesterol, margarine lowers the beneficial HDL cholesterol. It also increases the risk of cancers up to five times. Margarine suppresses both the immune response and insulin response. This highly processed and artificial product is practically resistant to destruction, being one molecule away from plastic. Flies, bacteria, fungi, etc. won't go near it because it has no nutritional value and cannot be broken down by them. It can last for years, not just outside the body, but inside as well.It is very apparent that eating damaged, rancid fats or trans-fats can destroy any healthy organism and should be avoided by anyone. In 2007 New York City banned the use of trans fats in its restaurants; however, the trans fats are merely being replaced with new artificial fats that have the same or worse effects.
Healthy Today - Sick TomorrowUnfortunately, high cholesterol (hypercholesterolemia) has become the dominating health concern of the 21st century. It is actually an invented disease that doesn't show up as one. Even the healthiest people may have elevated serum cholesterol and yet their health remains perfect. But they are instantly turned into patients when a routine blood test reveals that they have a "cholesterol problem."Since feeling good is actually a symptom of high cholesterol, the cholesterol issue has confused millions of people. To be declared sick when you actually feel great is a hard nut to swallow. So it may take a lot of effort on behalf of a practicing physician to convince his patients that they are sick and need to take one or more expensive drugs for the rest of their lives. These healthy individuals may become depressed when they are being told they will need to take potentially harmful drugs to lower their cholesterol levels on a long-term, daily basis. When they also learn that they will require regular checkups and blood tests, their worry-free, good life is now over.These doctors cannot be blamed for the blunder of converting healthy people into patients. Behind them stands the full force of the U.S. government, the media, the medical establishment, agencies, and of course, the pharmaceutical companies. All of them have collaborated to create relentless pressure in disseminating the cholesterol myth and convincing the population that high cholesterol is its number one enemy. We are told that we need to combat it by all means possible to keep us safe from the dreadful consequences of hypercholesterolemia.The definition of a "healthy" level of cholesterol has been repeatedly adjusted during the past 30 years, which certainly does not give me much confidence in a system of medicine that professes to be founded on sound scientific principles. In the early days of measuring cholesterol levels, a person at risk was any middle-aged man whose cholesterol was over 240 and possessed other risk factors, such as smoking or being overweight.After the adjustment of parameters during the Cholesterol Consensus Conference in 1984, the population was hit by a shock wave. Now, anyone (male or female) with overall cholesterol readings of 200 mg percent (200mg per 100 ml) could receive the dreaded diagnosis and a prescription for pills. The claim that 200 blood serum cholesterol is normal and everything above is dangerous was scientifically unfounded, though. At least, this was the consensus of all the major cholesterol studies. In fact, a report in a 1995 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association showed no evidence linking high cholesterol levels in women with heart conditions later in life.Although it is considered completely normal for a 55-year-old woman to have a cholesterol level of 260 mg percent, most women that age are not told about this. Also healthy employees are found to have an average of 250 mg percent with high fluctuations in both directions.The lack of evidence linking elevated cholesterol with increased risk of heart disease, however, didn't stop the brainwashing of the masses. In the U.S. 84 percent of all men and 93 percent of all women aged 50-59 with high cholesterol levels were suddenly told they needed treatment for heart disease. The totally unproved but aggressively promoted cholesterol theories turned most of us into patients for a disease that we probably will never develop. Fortunately, not everyone has followed the advice to have their cholesterol levels checked but, unfortunately, millions of people have fallen into the trap of misinformation.To make matters worse, the official, acceptable cholesterol level has now been moved down to 180. If you have already had one heart attack, your cardiologist will tell you to take cholesterol-lowering statins even if your cholesterol is very low. From the viewpoint of conventional medicine, having a heart attack implies that your cholesterol must be too high. Hence you are being sentenced to a lifetime of statins and a boring low-fat diet. But even if you have not experienced any heart trouble yet, you are already being considered for possible treatment.Since so many children now show signs of elevated cholesterol, we have a whole new generation of candidates for medical treatment. So yes, current edicts stipulate cholesterol testing and treatment for young adults and even children! The statin drugs that doctors use to push cholesterol levels down are LIPITOR (atorvastatin), Zocor (simvastatin), Mevacor (lovastatin), and Pravachol (pravastatin). If you decide to follow your doctor's advice and take one of these drugs, make certain to read the list of side effects so that you know the risks you are taking.If you want to obtain objective and untainted information on cholesterol, agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the American College of Cardiology are certainly not the places from which to obtain it. Until recently, they wanted you to keep your overall cholesterol level below 150. Then, in 2001, they finally admitted that measuring overall cholesterol levels makes no sense at all, so they began recommending an LDL level below 100. Now their aim is to keep LDL lower than 70. Every time they lower the target, the number of "patients" requiring treatment jumps dramatically, much to the benefit of the drug producers. Being officially backed by these agencies, doctors feel motivated, if not obliged, to prescribe these expensive drugs to their new patients.The extensive promotional campaigns by the pharmaceutical giants have already brainwashed the masses to believe they need these drugs to be safe from sudden heart attack. Even if a doctor knows the truth about the cholesterol deception, these anxious patients will demand a prescription from him. This is not just affecting their health, but everyone's economic future. The massive sales of these best-selling drugs of all time drive up health care costs to levels that undermine economic growth and make basic health care unaffordable to an ever-increasing number of people. The masses have been so brainwashed with misinformation that this lurking financial crisis doesn't seem to be their immediate concern.In 2004, there were already 36 million statin candidates in the U.S., with 16 million using LIPITOR alone. When the official LDL target level drops to 70, another 5 million people will be eligible for their use. At the consumer markup price of $272.37 and an actual cost of $5.80 for a month supply of LIPITOR, you can understand the incentive that the pharmaceutical industry has to push their products and make them a mass commodity.Excerpted from Chapter 9 of Timeless Secrets of Health and Rejuvenation by Andreas Moritz, (www.ener-chi.com) or (www.amazon.com) . Check out the book for more information about statins, cholesterol and heart disease, or any of the related topics listed below |
Watch Beau Lotto's talk above on optical illusions and how information can differ depending on perception.
Imagine... as you wake later than usual rolling over towards the window, you notice that it's a gorgeous day outside. Warm, yellow sunlight shines in through glass illuminating floating "dust angles." On the other side of the glass, past the oak tree with yellowing leaves, you see a brilliant blue sky. For the first time it occurs to you that a blue sky is a contradiction: the sky at night is devoid of color, so why during the day does the world seem to be shrouded in a blanket of blue? Years previously as a child full of questions you asked your parents, but the answer they offered seemed somehow inadequate at the time... less than magical. And so the question remains... as it does the most of us.
The answer is this: The sky isn't actually colored at all (not blue or yellow or red or green). Rather, it's your mind that's colored. The world around us is physics devoid of meaning, whereas our perception of the world is meaning devoid of physics. In terms of physics, the light in the sky is heavily biased towards smaller wavelengths (around 450 nanometers). This is because the air itself scatters smaller wavelengths of light more than it does larger ones. Which means the air in the sky is like a filter, letting primarily medium to long wavelengths through more easily than short wavelengths. Hence why the sky is composed primarily of shorter wavelengths (and so appears bluish), whereas the light from sun is composed primarily of longer wavelengths (and so appears more reddish). While the differential scattering of sunlight by the air explains the non-uniform distribution of wavelengths across the sky, it doesn't explain why shorter wavelengths are seen as blue and the longer ones as red.
The sky isn't actually colored at all (not blue or yellow or red or green). Rather, it's your mind that's colored. The world around us is physics devoid of meaning, whereas our perception of the world is meaning devoid of physics.-- Beau Lotto
And yet color is the simplest sensations the brain has. What may surprise you is that even at this most basic level we never see the light that falls onto our eyes or even the real-world source of that light. Rather, neuroscience research tells us that we only ever see what proved useful to see in the past. Illusions are a simple but powerful example of this point. Like all our perceptions, we see illusions because the brain evolved not to see the retinal image, but to resolve the inherent 'meaninglessness' of that image by continually redefining normality, a normality that is necessarily grounded in relationships, history and ecology. Which is why we innately find regularities in information and reflexively imbue those regularities with value. But it is the value, not the information itself we see. So, tomorrow morning when you open your eyes and look "out into" the world, don't be fooled. You're in fact looking in. You're not seeing the world covered in a blue blanket at all; you're seeing aworld... an internal map of value-relations derived from interactions within a particular, narrow context.
Another essential point about illusions implied in my TEDTalk is that they reveal our amazing capacity to entertain mutually exclusive internal realities simultaneously. For instance, while looking at one of my color illusions (say the multi-colored cube) you're aware of one reality: that two tiles look very different, while simultaneously being aware of an opposite reality: that the two tiles are in fact physically the same. This capacity to be an observer of yourself is phenomenal -- and possibly unique to humans. Indeed, to literally "see yourself see" is in my view the principle act of consciousness, which has the power to transform one's view of the world and of oneself.
The central squares on the upper and lower surfaces of this cube appear very different in color: Brown on the top and bright orange on the bottom. Scroll to the very end to reveal their 'true' physical similarity. Photo and caption by: R. Beau Lotto
The importance of these observations transcends neuroscience. They show us in an explicit (and I hope engaging) way that our senses are not "fragile" -- as many would have you believe. They show us instead that we are not outside observers of nature defined in isolation. We are instead indivisible from nature, defined by the trial and error process of interaction, a process in which we can choose to become active agents (but too often choose not to). Understanding this point is I believe critical to personal and social wellbeing, since the typical barrier to a deeper insight into oneself and others is the overriding, but necessarily false impression that what "I" see, what "I" hear and what "I" know is the world as it really is. But, by "seeing yourself see," in other words by actively exploring how your thoughts, feelings, beliefs and even the colors you see reflect your physical, social and cultural ecology, only then is it possible to understand the source of coherence and conflict within and between individuals. Put another way, only by accepting my own humanity can I accept the humanity of others. "Seeing myself see" creates the opportunity for this acceptance. Illusions, then, were not the point of my talk, but simply a tool for encouraging this process.
Resolving uncertainty is essential to our survival. Hence our fear of ambiguous situations is palpable -- e.g., the inability to resolve sensory conflict between the eyes and ears can result in nausea (like sea sickness). And yet it is only by embracing the unknown within education, science, art and most importantly within our own private lives will we find new routes to more enlightened ways of seeing and being. Thus, courage not confidence is at the heart of this process of actively redefining normality, which is the route to compassion and creativity. Encouraging this process by celebrating uncertainty is the raison d'etre of my work.
Photo by: R. Beau Lotto
Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TEDWeekends will highlight some of today's most intriguing ideas and allow them to develop in real time through your voice! Tweet #TEDWeekends to share your perspective or emailtedweekends@huffingtonpost.com to learn about future weekend's ideas to contribute as a writer.
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The largest-ever experiment in space has reported the collection of some 18 billion "cosmic ray" events that may help unravel the Universe's mysteries.
The data haul is far greater than the total number of cosmic rays recorded in a full century of looking to date.
Run from a centre at Cern, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aims to spot dark matter and exotic antimatter.
The astronauts who installed it on the space station in 2011 are in Geneva to see an update on how it is performing.
Mission commander Mark Kelly told reporters that AMS was "the pinnacle of the science that the ISS will do".
The huge number of events seen by the experiment includes some of the highest-energy particles from the cosmos that we have ever seen.
Kelly's flight - the STS-134 mission - was the last for the shuttle Endeavour before it was retired from the Nasa fleet.
The crew visited the Payload and Operations Control Centre at Cern on Wednesday, where a shift of six scientists is watching what is whizzing through the AMS 24 hours a day.
Seven-tonne giantAMS deputy spokesman Roberto Battiston told BBC News that seeing the astronauts back in town was "a great joy".
"We are really thankful of these astronauts because we should never forget they put their lives at stake to do something that for us is pure fun - that is our interest, our curiosity," he said.
"They have high expectations that the AMS will find something interesting, because they put a lot of effort into it. They feel part of the family."
At the heart of the seven-tonne, $2bn machine is a giant, specially designed magnet which bends the paths of extraordinarily high-energy charged particles called cosmic rays onto a series of detectors, giving hints of what the particles are.
A series of ever-larger particle accelerators built here on Earth aim to drive particles to ever-higher energies, smashing them into one another to simulate the same processes that create them elsewhere in the cosmos.
But no Earth-bound experiment can match nature's power as a particle accelerator - and Earth's atmosphere absorbs incoming cosmic rays - so the AMS will catch some of these high-energy particles "from the source", as a kind of complement to the likes of the Large Hadron Collider.
In scientific terms, the stakes could not be higher. The AMS should be able to spot the results of collisions of the mysterious dark matter that makes up most of the mass of our Universe, catch completely new forms of matter that include the aptly named "strange" quark, or resolve why the Universe we see is made mostly of matter rather than antimatter.
Continue reading the main story
THE ALPHA MAGNETIC SPECTROMETER (AMS-02)
Transition Radiation Detector determines highest-energy particle velocities
Silicon Trackers follow particle paths; how they bend reveals their charge
Permanent Magnet is core component of AMS and makes particles curve
Time-of-flight Counters determine lowest-energy particle velocities
Star Trackers scan star fields to establish AMS's orientation in space
Cerenkov Detector makes accurate velocity measurements of fast particles
Electromagnetic Calorimeter measures energy of impacting particles
Anti-coincidence Counter filters signal from unwanted side particles
"It took more than 35 missions to build the International Space Station - very complicated space shuttle flights - to construct this incredible laboratory in space," said Captain Kelly.
"When we installed AMS, that was the last piece of the ISS, then the space station was complete. This is really the pinnacle of the science that ISS will do, in my opinion the most significant experiment we have on board."
Continue reading the main story
Dark energy and dark matter mysteries
- Gravity acting across vast distances does not seem to explain what astronomers see
- Galaxies, for example, should fly apart; some other mass must be there holding them together
- Astrophysicists have thus postulated "dark matter" - invisible to us but clearly acting on galactic scales
- At the greatest distances, the Universe's expansion is accelerating
- Thus we have also "dark energy" which acts to drive the expansion, in opposition to gravity
- The current theory holds that 73% of the Universe is dark energy, 23% is dark matter, and just 4% the kind of matter we know well
In its 14 months of operation, the AMS has logged some 18 billion cosmic rays - more than collected in a century of looking before now.
But the AMS is a one-of-a-kind machine, so it has taken some time just to understand what it is seeing hundreds of times per second - and the team has only analysed a few percent of the data.
Nobel laureate Sam Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has led the project since its inception some 17 years ago, through a number of setbacks and budget concerns that nearly saw the project shelved altogether - until an act of the US Congress and an unscheduled shuttle mission put it in space.
The team has already noted an excess of extremely high-energy positrons - the antimatter equivalent of electrons - and atomic nuclei at 9 teraelectronvolts (TeV) - higher even than the LHC can produce.
But Prof Ting is interested most of all in careful, methodical work, and is in no hurry to formally announce any findings.
"I have told my collaborators that in the next 40-50 years it is very unlikely people will be so foolish as to repeat this experiment, given the difficulty I ran into," Prof Ting told BBC News.
"Therefore it's extremely important when we publish a result, we publish it correctly, because otherwise you'll certainly mislead physics and there's no way to check us."
Looking for answersMission specialist on STS-134 Greg Chamitoff told BBC News that it was "great to be able to celebrate together" with the AMS team.
"If they discover an antimatter particle - even one - that''ll be phenomenal, because they'll also know which direction it came from and they might be able to say 'that galaxy over there is an animtatter galaxy'," he said.
"What we learn from what it discovers could really transform our understanding of what's in the Universe."
The astronauts were accompanied by their wives, including STS-134 mission commander Mark Kelly's wife, Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The trip to Cern is her first international journey since recovering from a gun attack in her home state just a few months before the mission.
Cern's director of research Sergio Bertolucci welcomed the visitors, saying "it is a clear sign that we'll not find our answers in only one place".
"The fact that AMS is addressing some of the same questions (as the LHC) is in my opinion a nice way in which we see that in this field we cannot get too specialised because probably the answer we're looking for... needs more, different inputs," he told BBC News.
"After all, we're trying to explain this small thing: why the Universe is like it is."
Prof Ting stubbornly refuses to be drawn on what he expects, or even hopes, to find as the team catches up with its glut of data.
Instead he imagines that perhaps we cannot conceive of what is to come.
"Look at particle physics in the last half century," he said.
"In the 60s, the largest accelerators were at Cern and Brookhaven, to study nuclear forces. At Cern, they discovered neutral currents; at Brookhaven they found two kinds of neutrinos, CP violation and the J particle. All three were given Nobel prizes. At Fermilab, the original purpose was to study neutrino physics, what was discovered was the 5th and 6th quarks.
"When you build something new, you ask the best expert what could be discovered, but what you discover with a precision instrument normally has nothing to do with the original purpose."
This is a really long answer, but bear with me and I'll try to blow your mind in the next few minutes. Allow me to begin by asking a seemingly irrelevant question: have you ever heard of the Ultra Deep Field Experiment by the Hubble Telescope?You see, what happened some years ago was that NASA completed a low-resolution map of the night sky, and they decided they wanted to go deeper. So they picked a little, tiny patch of space--about the size of a pencil tip at arm's length. It was utterly insignificant, really, just another blank patch of space with nothing there, but they decided to point the finely-honed lens of the Hubble telescope at that patch in the hope of detecting whatever lonely photons of light might trickle in from that region of space.Each time the Hubble made its way around the earth, it pointed toward that patch for 20 minutes. After 400 orbits, they took all the data and compiled it to discover not a star, nor a cluster of stars, but ten. thousand. galaxies. Turns out that blank patch wasn't so blank after all. Now, assuming a galaxy is about a 100 billion stars, that's a thousand trillion stars--many of which, much like our own sun, presumably have their own planetary systems, all with the potential to house as-yet unknown forms of biology.I think these results are a really good consciousness-raiser to think about as we contemplate the sheer size of the mysteries that surround us. Hold on to this thought as you read on. :-)
== First, a little on science... ==
I am a scientist by training. By the time I graduated college I'd already poured thousands of hours into procedures, scored publications in peer-reviewed journals, presented my work at national conferences, and in total spent nearly a third of my life working in various research labs. Why? Because I figure if I want to understand what's going on in this strange world around me, there's probably no better method than to directly study the blueprints.You have to admit, science in the last several hundred years has been immensely successful--we've cured smallpox and polio, gotten men to the moon, invented the internet, and tripled life spans.But I think one of the most important experiences you gain from a life in science is that once you walk the pier of what is currently known, at some point, you reach the end of the pier. And beyond that end is everything we don't know--it's all the uncharted waters, the deep mysteries that we don't have insight into yet, like why mass and energy are equivalent, or what dark matter/dark energy are, or why there are multiple spatial dimensions, or how you build consciousness from mechanical pieces and parts. That's the real lesson that science provides--the vastness of our ignorance.Now, rest assured that with every generation, we will undoubtedly continue to add more slats to the pier...but it's a huge ocean, and we have no guarantee how far we'll get, and certainly in our brief twinkling of a 21st century lifetime, we're simply not going to live to see the end. So again: science hammers home the message that what we know is so vastly outstripped by what we don't know.So given all this, I find that this question has at its core a popular misconception that's become increasingly widespread over the last decade, particularly in the political arena: that scientists don't have the capacity to gamble beyond the available data, and they act like they've got it all figured out with various equations that perfectly capture the picture of the whole cosmos.That's actually a very poor description of how science operates.Science is in some ways about disproving other people's hypotheses (including those posited by religion), but it's so much more than that. Science is really about creativity in making up new hypotheses--and part of the scientific temperament is a tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time. What we actually do is we make up new stories in lab every day and then we go and we seek evidence to weigh in favor of some stories over others.But it's often the case that some questions are too far out right now. They're beyond the toolbox of science, and as a result we're unable to gather evidence for them. That's ok--science is fine with holding multiple hypotheses on the table. That ambiguity is accepted as part of the relationship we have with mother nature. It's just part of the vast mysteries around us. == A little on religion... ==
I was raised by a microbiologist mother who was a very devout Christian who insisted I read the Bible and learn all its stories and go to church. Despite my many years as a scientist I still find comfort in praying to God even though I know He might not exist/care, and I have seen various circumstances that I could attribute to "power of prayer", although my cynical side calls it "placebo" and "coincidence". So I categorize myself loosely as being "religious".Consider this: there are 2000+ religions on the globe, and everyone already knows what it's like to be an atheist, because all you need to do is look at someone else's religion and say "Well it's patently ridiculous that you would believe in that", and of course they're looking back at you and thinking the same thing.Try an experiment: the next time you meet someone new/random, whether it's on an airplane or in a bar, ask them if they've ever heard of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Experiment. I guarantee you the number of people who have will be outweighed heavily by the number who haven't. But everyone will be able to tell you all the details of whatever cultural story they grew up on.You don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize that our nervous systems absorb whatever our cultures pour into us. So if you grew up in Saudi Arabia, chances are you love Islam. And if you were born in Rome, you probably love Catholicism; in Tel Aviv, Judaism; in Springfield, Ohio, Protestantism (apologies for the broad brush strokes here, I'm clearly overgeneralizing, but I think you get the point).So it's not a coincidence that there's not a blossoming of Islam in Springfield, Ohio, and there's not a blossoming of Protestantism in Mecca. It's because we're products of our culture, and we accept whatever's poured into us. If there were one truth, you would expect that it would spread everywhere evenly, but clearly the data doesn't support that. The crazy part is, our cultures pour this stuff into us, and then sometimes people are willing to fight and die over their particular stories.Are you familiar with the creation story of the Bakuba kingdom of the Congo? It goes like this: there was a white giant named Mombo who had a sharp pain in his belly, and he vomited up the earth and the sun and the moon and the stars. Then he had a second pain, and he vomited up the animals and people and trees. Included in that second ejection was the leopard, the anvil, the eagle, woman, the monkey Fumu, firmament, medicine, man, and lightning.If you find the creation story of the Bakuba to be an unlikely explanation as to how we got here, keep in mind that if you were Bakuba, you would find equally bizarre the Western story of the naked couple and the talking reptile and the prohibited produce. AND if you were Bakuba living in Kansas, you would be fighting to get your story into your children's textbooks.The holy books written by the world's religions are often quite beautiful, and crystallize hard-won wisdom, but keep in mind the fact that these were written millennia ago by people who didn't know about the size of the cosmos, or the Big Bang, or bacterial infection, or DNA, or computation, or even very much about neighboring landscapes/cultures. Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that the religious stories of one generation become the literary entertainment of the next--and indeed, you can see that nobody's fighting over Isis and Osiris anymore, or the Greek/Roman gods. == So how do you combine the two? ==
I'm not suggesting that the Bakuba story is wrong or that the Adam and Eve story is wrong because the two are competing stories...as a scientist, I'm suggesting that they're wrong because all the available evidence weighs against them.For example, the biblical story suggests that the world is 6000 years old while our best science tells us that it's 4.5 billion years old, which means the biblical account has to somehow explain how the Japanese were making pottery 4000 years before the earth existed.For my money, this sort of thing puts me somewhere in the middle. I've felt for a long time that we know too little to commit to strict atheism, yet we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.So what surprises me is the amount of certainty I find out there. When you walk into a bookstore, you'll find books by the neo-atheists and books by the fundamentally religious, and they argue with each other and they polarize each other and they spend all of their energies on that.Maybe there should be another voice here? That seems far too limited for a modern discussion. Because if you think about the space of possibilities...
When you start populating the possibility space with these 2000+ data points, what you realize is that there are vast landscapes in between these possibilities as well. All of these points are infinitesimally unlikely, but together they add up to this possibility space, and there hasn't been enough discussion about this space as a whole. Instead, the discussion has been limited to what I consider a false dichotomy--God vs. no God....and that's where the conversation has ended. :-(True, there are some people in the middle, and they sometimes describe themselves using the term "agnostic". I don't use that term because it's typically used as a weak term--often when people say they're "agnostic", what they mean is "I'm not sure if the guy with the beard on the cloud exists or doesn't exist".So I call myself a "Possibilian". And the belief behind Possibilianism is an active exploration of new ideas, and a comfort with the scientific temperament of creativity and holding multiple hypotheses in mind. As a Possibilian, anything goes...at first. And then I import the tools of science to rule out parts of the possibility space. For instance, while it would be really cool if ESP existed, to the extent that we can measure things now, we cannot find any evidence to support it.Possibilianism basically picks up where the toolbox of science leaves off, when we no longer have the tools to address the questions we have, and must simply understand the space of possibilities, some of which we can rule out, but others which we are unable to at this time. The reason it is so important to keep that open-mindedness about the parts that we don't know is because we know for certain about the magnitude of things we don't know. In every generation of scientists, people have always felt that they have all the pieces and parts that they need in order to answer what is going on around them in the cosmos. But just imagine trying to explain the Northern lights without an understanding of the magnetosphere, or trying to explain the heart before the concept of a pump was invented, or trying to understand how muscles work before electricity was discovered. You would make theories, but you would be doomed to be incorrect. And that's where, in many instances, people found comfort in religion, superstition, the supernatural, etc. We're in that same position now. Example 1: We've got Newtonian physics, and Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics, and we think, ok, we've sort of got all the pieces and parts. But astrophysicists look at the movement of the planets and galaxies, and they look at the gravitational pull, and they realize...something's missing. There's something out there that we can't quite see or smell or touch, but it must be there to make the equations work. So they call this fudge factor "dark matter"--we don't exactly know what it is, but we require it to make the equations balance out. Some of you may already know: dark matter isn't a small fudge factor; it's 90% of all known matter--that's a lot to sweep under the rug! Example 2: Consider the human brain. It's the most complicated device we have ever found; it's essentially an alien computational material. It is so dense in its connectivity that if you were to take a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, there are more connections in there than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Yet somehow, this wet, mechanical networked system is YOU. It's all your hopes and dreams and aspirations and emotions. If you were to lose a little part of your pinky, you wouldn't really be any different, but if you lost an equivalently sized piece of neural tissue, that would completely change your conscious state.The problem is, we don't know how to take mechanical pieces and parts and build private subjective experience out of that. Imagine if I gave you a trillion tinker toys and told you to start hooking them up. At what point do you add one more tinker toy and say, "Ah-ha! It's experiencing... the taste of feta cheese now"?That's the problem. We don't have any way to apply our equations to determine how we perceive the redness of red or the smell of a fart. Not only do we not have a theory of how the brain works...we don't even know what such a theory would look like. == Conclusion ==
All of this calls for a bit of intellectual humility.While we can't prove the existence of God, being unable to prove He exists doesn't necessarily mean He's nonexistent either--our current tools may simply be insufficient for the task. So I keep both religion and science at my side--in some cases, science gives me the answers I seek; in others, it doesn't, and when the current toolbox of science doesn't allow me to gather data to understand how/why a seemingly miraculous phenomenon occurs, I'm happy to simply chalk it up to the wisdom/grace of an all-knowing force until science steps up its game. If science will never be able to answer, then, eh, I'm ok with that.For the smart-alecks out there who would suggest that not committing to anything is more fitting of politicians, I concede that people like people who can firmly commit to a decision. If you're trying to decide whether you should marry someone, or sell some property, or move to a different city, those things require a firm choice. But what I'm going to suggest is that there are some domains where it's appropriate to be decisive, and some domains where it's not so appropriate. Would you stop a guy on a random ranch in the middle of nowhere and ask him if he thinks there are extraterrestrial civilizations? Do you care what his opinion is? Would you value it more than, say, an astrobiologist's? If not, that suggests that there are some domains in which it is not appropriate to commit and act like you have an answer in the absence of having good evidence.I feel that people these days are sick and tired of people acting as though they're certain about things that they can't possibly be certain about. As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position.So whatever. As a Possibilian, I would rather geek out and be creative with new narratives and hold multiple possibilities in mind with comfort. And I always feel free to cite the gospel of science, the most important three words that science ever gave to humankind: I don't know.For anyone struggling to reconcile their seemingly conflicting views on religion and science: try to seek comfort with having multiple narratives and having uncertainty. This is not just a plea for simple open-mindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas. This is important for our education, for our legislation, perhaps even for the future of our warfare (or lack thereof). In short, be free from dogma and full of awe and wonder. See if you can live a life that celebrates possibility and praises uncertainty. :-)~~~~~
I want to give credit where it's due: the overwhelming majority of this answer came from a talk given by my neuroscience professor David Eagleman a few months ago on the subject. I found myself in complete agreement with him and I thought this question was an appropriate opportunity to share his ideas with even more people, so if you're impressed, I want to say that I'm really just standing on the shoulders of a giant here. :-)
I am a scientist by training. By the time I graduated college I'd already poured thousands of hours into procedures, scored publications in peer-reviewed journals, presented my work at national conferences, and in total spent nearly a third of my life working in various research labs. Why? Because I figure if I want to understand what's going on in this strange world around me, there's probably no better method than to directly study the blueprints.You have to admit, science in the last several hundred years has been immensely successful--we've cured smallpox and polio, gotten men to the moon, invented the internet, and tripled life spans.But I think one of the most important experiences you gain from a life in science is that once you walk the pier of what is currently known, at some point, you reach the end of the pier. And beyond that end is everything we don't know--it's all the uncharted waters, the deep mysteries that we don't have insight into yet, like why mass and energy are equivalent, or what dark matter/dark energy are, or why there are multiple spatial dimensions, or how you build consciousness from mechanical pieces and parts. That's the real lesson that science provides--the vastness of our ignorance.Now, rest assured that with every generation, we will undoubtedly continue to add more slats to the pier...but it's a huge ocean, and we have no guarantee how far we'll get, and certainly in our brief twinkling of a 21st century lifetime, we're simply not going to live to see the end. So again: science hammers home the message that what we know is so vastly outstripped by what we don't know.So given all this, I find that this question has at its core a popular misconception that's become increasingly widespread over the last decade, particularly in the political arena: that scientists don't have the capacity to gamble beyond the available data, and they act like they've got it all figured out with various equations that perfectly capture the picture of the whole cosmos.That's actually a very poor description of how science operates.Science is in some ways about disproving other people's hypotheses (including those posited by religion), but it's so much more than that. Science is really about creativity in making up new hypotheses--and part of the scientific temperament is a tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time. What we actually do is we make up new stories in lab every day and then we go and we seek evidence to weigh in favor of some stories over others.But it's often the case that some questions are too far out right now. They're beyond the toolbox of science, and as a result we're unable to gather evidence for them. That's ok--science is fine with holding multiple hypotheses on the table. That ambiguity is accepted as part of the relationship we have with mother nature. It's just part of the vast mysteries around us. == A little on religion... ==
I was raised by a microbiologist mother who was a very devout Christian who insisted I read the Bible and learn all its stories and go to church. Despite my many years as a scientist I still find comfort in praying to God even though I know He might not exist/care, and I have seen various circumstances that I could attribute to "power of prayer", although my cynical side calls it "placebo" and "coincidence". So I categorize myself loosely as being "religious".Consider this: there are 2000+ religions on the globe, and everyone already knows what it's like to be an atheist, because all you need to do is look at someone else's religion and say "Well it's patently ridiculous that you would believe in that", and of course they're looking back at you and thinking the same thing.Try an experiment: the next time you meet someone new/random, whether it's on an airplane or in a bar, ask them if they've ever heard of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Experiment. I guarantee you the number of people who have will be outweighed heavily by the number who haven't. But everyone will be able to tell you all the details of whatever cultural story they grew up on.You don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize that our nervous systems absorb whatever our cultures pour into us. So if you grew up in Saudi Arabia, chances are you love Islam. And if you were born in Rome, you probably love Catholicism; in Tel Aviv, Judaism; in Springfield, Ohio, Protestantism (apologies for the broad brush strokes here, I'm clearly overgeneralizing, but I think you get the point).So it's not a coincidence that there's not a blossoming of Islam in Springfield, Ohio, and there's not a blossoming of Protestantism in Mecca. It's because we're products of our culture, and we accept whatever's poured into us. If there were one truth, you would expect that it would spread everywhere evenly, but clearly the data doesn't support that. The crazy part is, our cultures pour this stuff into us, and then sometimes people are willing to fight and die over their particular stories.Are you familiar with the creation story of the Bakuba kingdom of the Congo? It goes like this: there was a white giant named Mombo who had a sharp pain in his belly, and he vomited up the earth and the sun and the moon and the stars. Then he had a second pain, and he vomited up the animals and people and trees. Included in that second ejection was the leopard, the anvil, the eagle, woman, the monkey Fumu, firmament, medicine, man, and lightning.If you find the creation story of the Bakuba to be an unlikely explanation as to how we got here, keep in mind that if you were Bakuba, you would find equally bizarre the Western story of the naked couple and the talking reptile and the prohibited produce. AND if you were Bakuba living in Kansas, you would be fighting to get your story into your children's textbooks.The holy books written by the world's religions are often quite beautiful, and crystallize hard-won wisdom, but keep in mind the fact that these were written millennia ago by people who didn't know about the size of the cosmos, or the Big Bang, or bacterial infection, or DNA, or computation, or even very much about neighboring landscapes/cultures. Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that the religious stories of one generation become the literary entertainment of the next--and indeed, you can see that nobody's fighting over Isis and Osiris anymore, or the Greek/Roman gods. == So how do you combine the two? ==
I'm not suggesting that the Bakuba story is wrong or that the Adam and Eve story is wrong because the two are competing stories...as a scientist, I'm suggesting that they're wrong because all the available evidence weighs against them.For example, the biblical story suggests that the world is 6000 years old while our best science tells us that it's 4.5 billion years old, which means the biblical account has to somehow explain how the Japanese were making pottery 4000 years before the earth existed.For my money, this sort of thing puts me somewhere in the middle. I've felt for a long time that we know too little to commit to strict atheism, yet we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.So what surprises me is the amount of certainty I find out there. When you walk into a bookstore, you'll find books by the neo-atheists and books by the fundamentally religious, and they argue with each other and they polarize each other and they spend all of their energies on that.Maybe there should be another voice here? That seems far too limited for a modern discussion. Because if you think about the space of possibilities...
- Take the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions--bam! That's one point in the possibility space.
- Take the eastern religions--bam! That's another point.
- The idea that we're just mechanical pieces and parts and we shut off when we die, that's yet another.
- We were planted here by space aliens...sounds absurd, but heck, it's still a possibility.
When you start populating the possibility space with these 2000+ data points, what you realize is that there are vast landscapes in between these possibilities as well. All of these points are infinitesimally unlikely, but together they add up to this possibility space, and there hasn't been enough discussion about this space as a whole. Instead, the discussion has been limited to what I consider a false dichotomy--God vs. no God....and that's where the conversation has ended. :-(True, there are some people in the middle, and they sometimes describe themselves using the term "agnostic". I don't use that term because it's typically used as a weak term--often when people say they're "agnostic", what they mean is "I'm not sure if the guy with the beard on the cloud exists or doesn't exist".So I call myself a "Possibilian". And the belief behind Possibilianism is an active exploration of new ideas, and a comfort with the scientific temperament of creativity and holding multiple hypotheses in mind. As a Possibilian, anything goes...at first. And then I import the tools of science to rule out parts of the possibility space. For instance, while it would be really cool if ESP existed, to the extent that we can measure things now, we cannot find any evidence to support it.Possibilianism basically picks up where the toolbox of science leaves off, when we no longer have the tools to address the questions we have, and must simply understand the space of possibilities, some of which we can rule out, but others which we are unable to at this time. The reason it is so important to keep that open-mindedness about the parts that we don't know is because we know for certain about the magnitude of things we don't know. In every generation of scientists, people have always felt that they have all the pieces and parts that they need in order to answer what is going on around them in the cosmos. But just imagine trying to explain the Northern lights without an understanding of the magnetosphere, or trying to explain the heart before the concept of a pump was invented, or trying to understand how muscles work before electricity was discovered. You would make theories, but you would be doomed to be incorrect. And that's where, in many instances, people found comfort in religion, superstition, the supernatural, etc. We're in that same position now. Example 1: We've got Newtonian physics, and Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics, and we think, ok, we've sort of got all the pieces and parts. But astrophysicists look at the movement of the planets and galaxies, and they look at the gravitational pull, and they realize...something's missing. There's something out there that we can't quite see or smell or touch, but it must be there to make the equations work. So they call this fudge factor "dark matter"--we don't exactly know what it is, but we require it to make the equations balance out. Some of you may already know: dark matter isn't a small fudge factor; it's 90% of all known matter--that's a lot to sweep under the rug! Example 2: Consider the human brain. It's the most complicated device we have ever found; it's essentially an alien computational material. It is so dense in its connectivity that if you were to take a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, there are more connections in there than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Yet somehow, this wet, mechanical networked system is YOU. It's all your hopes and dreams and aspirations and emotions. If you were to lose a little part of your pinky, you wouldn't really be any different, but if you lost an equivalently sized piece of neural tissue, that would completely change your conscious state.The problem is, we don't know how to take mechanical pieces and parts and build private subjective experience out of that. Imagine if I gave you a trillion tinker toys and told you to start hooking them up. At what point do you add one more tinker toy and say, "Ah-ha! It's experiencing... the taste of feta cheese now"?That's the problem. We don't have any way to apply our equations to determine how we perceive the redness of red or the smell of a fart. Not only do we not have a theory of how the brain works...we don't even know what such a theory would look like. == Conclusion ==
All of this calls for a bit of intellectual humility.While we can't prove the existence of God, being unable to prove He exists doesn't necessarily mean He's nonexistent either--our current tools may simply be insufficient for the task. So I keep both religion and science at my side--in some cases, science gives me the answers I seek; in others, it doesn't, and when the current toolbox of science doesn't allow me to gather data to understand how/why a seemingly miraculous phenomenon occurs, I'm happy to simply chalk it up to the wisdom/grace of an all-knowing force until science steps up its game. If science will never be able to answer, then, eh, I'm ok with that.For the smart-alecks out there who would suggest that not committing to anything is more fitting of politicians, I concede that people like people who can firmly commit to a decision. If you're trying to decide whether you should marry someone, or sell some property, or move to a different city, those things require a firm choice. But what I'm going to suggest is that there are some domains where it's appropriate to be decisive, and some domains where it's not so appropriate. Would you stop a guy on a random ranch in the middle of nowhere and ask him if he thinks there are extraterrestrial civilizations? Do you care what his opinion is? Would you value it more than, say, an astrobiologist's? If not, that suggests that there are some domains in which it is not appropriate to commit and act like you have an answer in the absence of having good evidence.I feel that people these days are sick and tired of people acting as though they're certain about things that they can't possibly be certain about. As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position.So whatever. As a Possibilian, I would rather geek out and be creative with new narratives and hold multiple possibilities in mind with comfort. And I always feel free to cite the gospel of science, the most important three words that science ever gave to humankind: I don't know.For anyone struggling to reconcile their seemingly conflicting views on religion and science: try to seek comfort with having multiple narratives and having uncertainty. This is not just a plea for simple open-mindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas. This is important for our education, for our legislation, perhaps even for the future of our warfare (or lack thereof). In short, be free from dogma and full of awe and wonder. See if you can live a life that celebrates possibility and praises uncertainty. :-)~~~~~
I want to give credit where it's due: the overwhelming majority of this answer came from a talk given by my neuroscience professor David Eagleman a few months ago on the subject. I found myself in complete agreement with him and I thought this question was an appropriate opportunity to share his ideas with even more people, so if you're impressed, I want to say that I'm really just standing on the shoulders of a giant here. :-)