Excerpt from a work in progress (not ready to give out the title yet)

NOTE: When I retired, I had a one-year, a five-year, and a ten-year plan, depending on how long I stayed healthy. The one-year plan was to get that damned textbook off my desk (achieved! 9th Ed of FOUNDATIONS OF PARASITOLOGY). The five-year plan was to get some piece of fiction published, by a real publisher (I'm about 2/3 the way through that plan, not entirely successful yet). The ten-year plan was to make some money. Right now one of my fiction pieces, a perfect murder, is available on smashwords.com (search for BE CAREFUL, DR. RENNER), and will soon be published as an e-book by my agency, along with the sequel (THE STITCHER FILE). The following excerpt is from a work that resulted from a comment many years ago by a family friend: "John, nobody cares about worms and snails. If you want people to read your stuff, you need to write about sex, violence, and religion." Here's the excerpt (pages 304-306 out of about 350 so far):

The public has an enormous interest in trials for, I believe, the following reason: they are microscopic illustrations of what most people think are timeless cosmic forces at work. Thus trials hold a certain morbid fascination for us, especially in the west—the global west, that is, the cultures strongly influenced by the tenets of Christianity. Most religions, however well they

function as sources of personal strength in times of stress, fail miserably as cosmologies. Species, individuals, ideas, rumors, innovations, societies, planets, stars, and galactic systems all evolve, degenerate, and change progressively. These changes are irreversible and largely unexpected. In most cases we construct the future rather than predict it. In all instances, the evolutionary end point is death. Species become extinct, stars grow cold, ideas and rumors eventually dissipate, new technological discoveries get replaced by still newer ones, and human beings die. But Christianity claims we do not die, and the more fundamentalist sects declare that sinners and non-believers spend eternity in a place called “Hell.”

I have this picture of a human spirit appearing at the gates to Heaven, being judged, then either admitted or sent to Hell. Such images are, I think, the source of our fascination with criminal proceedings. All of the basic elements of Christianity—origin, sin, judgment, fate—are compressed, metaphorically, in a trial, especially when the defendant is accused of violating one of the Ten Commandments. These are not really cynical comments, just Jack Blake's interpretation of certain aspects of his profession and the public’s view of it.

A trial, however, is as much an evolutionary event as the appearance of a new species. So its progress must be built, made from existing and manifested occurrences, rather than predicted, no less than a work of art, or literature, must be built. You cannot always know in advance what raw materials a witness will provide, or how much of your laboriously constructed edifice will be destroyed by testimony you cannot—let us say, are not prepared at the moment to—refute. Thus Eleanor Haddock becomes a problem. She not only saw Stanley walk away from the church a few moments before the explosions, she also saw him install the dynamite and hook up the wiring. Or so she claims. None of these claims are, of course, true.

Single witness incrimination in the absence of corroborative evidence is a problem for juries as well as for defenses. Technically: single witnesses don’t fulfill the criterion of beyond all reasonable doubt. What they do accomplish within the artistic medium known as “courtroom” however, is to legitimatize massive amounts of circumstantial evidence. Suddenly coincidence is explained so becomes fact, instead of conjecture, in the mind of a juror. Prosecution and defense alike, all bound by legal, ethical, and judicial constraints, are nevertheless free to try to convince a sample of the electorate that the plausible is indeed true. Or, conversely, that the implausible is true, or, I suppose, that the truth is implausible. But even a single witness can play havoc with the best made plans of defense attorneys.

During direct, led by Shivvers, I struggle to keep a straight face. Periodically I glance over at Stanley; for the first time since we met that interested day decades ago in the Fillmore County courthouse, he seems to be paying attention to something other than himself. His eyebrows are drawn together by his squint; his lips are tight; his head is cocked, almost as if he’s a little hard of hearing in one ear. Of all the people in the world who might have been the one who is supposed to have seen Stanley walk away from the Cathedral that night, Eleanor Haddock is the most unlikely. Upon cross examination, I learn why she has survived all these years: she’s a superb actress. She also knows my client well enough, and me too, that she’s confident I will not call him to the stand to testify in his own defense. But Eleanor Haddock on the stand, as a prosecution witness, changes everything. Suddenly, Stanley on the stand is starting to look like a real possibility. I strain to keep from smiling.

“What is your current address, Ms. Haddock?” I begin cross examination innocently enough.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: A BUNCH OF MY BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE ON KINDLE.

Fathers' Day excerpt from BERNICE AND JOHN: FINALLY MEETING YOUR PARENTS WHO DIED A LONG TIME AGO

This text is an excerpt from BERNICE AND JOHN: FINALLY MEETING YOUR PARENTS WHO DIED A LONG TIME AGO, available as an e-book on smashwords.com

So John comes home from the office, pours himself a stiff belt of Ballentine’s Scotch, eats dinner that Bernice has prepared, or, later, when she is increasingly ill, dinner that he prepares, then spreads his maps on the dining room table. Sometime he blows smoke rings. Always he studies drilling reports, makes marks on his maps, notes depths and formations, then draws what he believes to be the habitat of oil. What does the information look like that he uses to find this precious fossil sunlight? It looks like this:

Yoakum - Wasson, NE. (Clear Fork), New Well, Occidental Permian Ltd, Houston, TX, Well # 146, Wasson North Clearfork Unit, 5281 fsl 97 fel, Zone 7854' to 8238', 2-27-04, 365 bbls oil 1057 mcf gas 20 bbls wtr, pumping, 8.90 mi NE of Denver City.

The data are reported as oil field name, type of completion, operator’s name, operator’s office city, well number, lease name, legal description of tract, distance from nearest lease line, producing interval or zone, date tested, initial potential, production method, and distance and direction from the nearest town. This is the raw undigested knowledge of petroleum geology. It’s the rough equivalent of sighting a single bird of a single species, to an ornithologist, and like birds, it comes across his vision as hundreds of such items, some of value to his larger quest—food and shelter for his family, a meaningful life, his children playing the piano, his friends talking politics over a glass of whiskey and a deck of cards—others of value to his immediate needs: a clue to the habitat of oil. Once in a while there is closure; a name, lease, location, and report is familiar to him from months of research and negotiation that end with heavy equipment down in the blackjacks and poison ivy, the roar and clank of engine and tongs, red-brown mud gurgling from a pipe into the slush pit, and a mile of pipe stacked in a derrick.

At Tidewater, and later at Youngblood, John’s responsibility and vested interest end with the derrick out in the pasture. At some point, however, he comes to believe that what he is doing for others, he could just as easily be doing for himself. The American dream, the American audacity, the American gambler, comes home to 2605 Elmhurst in the form of a gentle man with confidence in his own mental capacities. He quits Youngblood and hangs out his shingle. John Janovy—Petroleum Geologist, reads his business card. Half a century later, with John Janovy—Petroleum Geologist cremated and his ashes spread on the wind for 30 of those years, I unfurl his maps and begin to study the tiny lettering, the symbols, the lines that he made while squinting through the smoke. What made one man believe that he could take information available to all and turn it into a discovery and thus into a livelihood, if not a raison d’etre? I don’t know. But I do know it can be done. Novelists, artists, musicians, film makers, politicians do it; why can’t petroleum geologists? Evidently they can. We were never destitute, never without food and clothing, never without books and newspapers, and never without piano lessons.

Digging through the remnants of this life, however, I’m struck by the sheer richness of his interests, nay, his obsessions. Boxes filled with notebooks, notebooks filled with pages, each page filled with stamps, lightly affixed, or sometimes in glassine envelopes, all organized, classified, categorized, and the vast majority residing in a perfect India ink frame, hand drawn, in fine lines, with German drafting instruments, at only God knows what time of night or day and at the expense of what other activities. Boxes filled with boxes filled with coins—Guatemalan coins, Colombian coins, Mexican coins, coins from nations now gone in political upheavals of the late 20^th Century—and files filled with correspondence about coins. To his friend Warren Calvert, a man I remember for his feisty attitude and his strange Ohio accent, his constant sense of having a good time, there is a letter, or rather a copy, on flimsy copy paper, carefully dated, and filed. John and Warren are discussing the potential value of coins issued by a leper colony. There are no typos, no smudges, on this carbon copy. There are no typos, no erasure smudges, on any of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of carbon copies of everything from letters to a Hong Kong supplier of stereo equipment to the United States Government Printing Office to accompany a check for $1.75 for a publication on ecology of the desert Southwest.

The tape recordings are next. Colombian music, piano music, big band dance music, sound effects, percussion ensembles, and among the boxes and boxes of reel to reel tape, his son playing the piano—as an adult long gone from home, on a friend’s Steinway grand—and his father and son playing the fiddle and banjo, respectively, and finally, a recording of the telephone conversation in which he tells Rachel he’s bought her a ring. I salvage the large TEAC tape deck, put it away on a bottom shelf back home, and stare at it periodically. The rest of the stereo equipment goes to our son, along with the hand built, by John’s hands, and beautifully finished, perfectly hinged, cabinet to contain it.

A hundred years from now, if the world is still a relatively stable and safe place for an American, and if our own son, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and their children, have lived long and healthy lives, this cabinet will be a treasured antique. The LP records it once held, however, go into a garage sale, and what doesn’t sell ends up at Goodwill. What he has designed, with his own brain, and made, with his own two hands, is art; what he has bought, a technology evolving at breakneck speed, gets trashed. If one man’s obsessions can tell us anything, it’s a warning to save the art and don’t let your sense of self worth get hitched to any evolving technology.

Some place in the world Mozart is playing. And Glenn Gould. Eventually, I declare, to nobody in particular, I will find that tape he made of my grandfather talking about the good old days and play it. I will take notes, then decipher those notes, writing somewhere on paper—maybe acid-free paper—with ink, not ballpoint that fades in the sun but permanent ink, India ink, like on his maps showing the habitat of oil. Then I will put those notes away somewhere. And somebody will find them, somewhere, some time, in the rubble of our existence, and marvel at what those notes say about coming to America in the late 19^th Century, watching your wife die young, and rearing four kids, one of whom turns out to be a petroleum geologist with plenty to say about the world’s supply of oil, a geologist whose words ring true, indeed more and more true if not outright prophetic, decades after his death: “Foreign crude will kill this country.”

Scientific illiteracy on the part of politicians

In response to some Facebook posts regarding the loss of Louisiana coastline, here is an excerpt from INTELLIGENT DESIGNER: EVOLUTION FOR POLITICIANS (the full book is available on kindle, nook, and smashwords.com, and also from createspace.com as a nice paperback):

Besides the factors of responsibility, approval, and scrutiny, it also is important to remember that mobs want answers and solutions from their leaders, not questions and problems. In general, science tends to produce more questions and problems than answers and solutions. This tendency derives from the fundamental nature of science as an activity and probably is best explained by the metaphor of an Island of Understanding in a Sea of Ignorance. Remember that as an island grows in size (increase in understanding), its shoreline (the boundary between understanding and ignorance) also grows. All the questions and problems lie along this boundary. In addition, to continue with the metaphor, the larger an island gets, the more geographically diverse it tends to be; this principle is well illustrated by existing real islands. If that geographic diversity involves mountains, then we have a high perch from which to observe the sea of ignorance. Routinely such observation shows that sea to be much larger than we imagined when we were only down on our hands and knees in the sand studying nature at the [metaphorical] shore.

The familiar case of New Orleans vs. Hurricane Katrina beautifully illustrates all these points about breadth of knowledge, comparative thinking, observations, history, and the basic properties of science. Breadth of knowledge is perhaps the most important factor that should have been considered in the political decisions involving the Mississippi Delta ecology. A broadly educated politician would never simply ask how much money an ecological project—for example, a system of levees and an artificial river (the New Orleans shipping channel)—costs, or how much money the public is willing to spend on such a project. Instead, as a minimum, a broadly educated politician considers history, socio-economic conditions, the probability of disaster, the quality of expertise consulted, whether or not that expertise is in agreement with other expertise from diverse sources, the nature of observations, the process of analysis, and whether the process itself has obvious flaws or internal contradictions. Thus to really assess the adequacy of New Orleans levees, one would have to study the Mississippi Delta using approaches that would be quite familiar to any evolutionary biologist.

Research over the past half century, an activity increasing both the size of our island of understanding and the length of its shoreline boundary with the sea of ignorance, clearly revealed (produced) more questions and problems about the Mississippi Delta region than answers and solutions. Such research involved new technologies such as satellite imagery, geographic information system software, and socio-economic analysis, as well as experience derived from study of the Achafalaya River and its basin using more conventional methods—measurement of stream flow, sedimentation and erosion rates, pressures on diversion dams and gates, etc. Over the years, the scientific community came to realize that the initial problem and its solution, namely, keeping water out of New Orleans by building levees, was actually only a small part of a much larger problem, specifically, long term management of the interrelationship between a nation’s economy and one of the world’s largest rivers.

This kind of collective activity, in which a truly massive ecosystem is the primary player at the center of a highly integrated, far-reaching, transportation and financial network, does not lend itself to governance by mobs that want answers and solutions instead of questions and problems from their leaders. Instead, this kind of system requires almost Jeffersonian dignity, patience, foresight, and breadth, traits that don’t survive well in our Third Millennium media-driven electioneering environment.

(INTELLIGENT DESIGNER, as well as TEN MINUTE ECOLOGIST and other Janovy books are available on kindle, nook, smashwords, and from createspace.com)

For Governor Dave Heineman, wannabe university president

Dear Governor Heineman - I know that this post is long and in places sort of academic, but the reading level, information, and subject matter are all fairly typical of academia. The chapter is from INTELLIGENT DESIGNER: EVOLUTION FOR POLITICIANS. The entire book is available on kindle, nook, and as a nice paperback from amazon. Enjoy.

16. Why are Politicians so Scientifically Illiterate?

A United States policy that could find no other option, he suggested, was one of “indolent short-term expediency.”

—Barbara Tuchman (Stillwell and the American Experience in China 1911-1945)

Elected officials in general are scientifically illiterate for two reasons: first, they often are either businessmen or–women, or attorneys, and neither one of these professions requires or encourages scientific literacy; and, second, real scientists and serious teachers, those who are most likely to be quite literate, typically have neither the taste for, nor the resources to seek, elected public office. In a pluralistic society such as ours, both reasons are fairly legitimate.

Later on in this chapter I’ll come back to the business community and its scientific literacy because this subject is a rich one to use in exploring the interrelationships between science, technology, national security, and economic health. The legal profession, however, has little or no reason to be scientifically literate except in cases involving modern forensics or industries that are heavily dependent on technology. Lawyers and businessmen can, however, and often do, hire their scientific literacy in the form of consultants and expert witnesses, either of which may be quite literate, but neither of which is particularly constrained by the unwritten laws of real science. In other words, consultants and expert witnesses don’t necessarily do science; instead, they are skilled consumers and users of science.

In a previous chapter I defined “scientific literacy” and explored its several applications. In this chapter I’m actually going to address the problems of science education, but not necessarily what we typically think of as “science education” in the public school sense. Instead, I will focus on what we might call “deep” education, that is, the kind that changes the way we view the world. For example, we might claim that having a vague sense of what a molecule is, and perhaps even being able to define the term, counts as being at least somewhat scientifically literate. After all, you have a word and an idea in your mind and you’re not completely baffled when you hear the word spoken on television or read it in the newspaper. Furthermore, you might actually be able to use this word in a complete sentence, such as “I wonder whether the molecules in these pills will make me sick if I swallow them with good Irish whiskey,” or “I wonder whether some of the molecules in that bag of lawn chemicals will kill my cat.” These particular sentences reveal an incipient scientific-type curiosity, whereas the sentence “Don’t bother me with all that talk about molecules, just give me something to cure this headache,” although also a complete sentence, nevertheless expresses a naïveté typical of the scientifically illiterate.

The deep education is revealed, however, when you incorporate the idea of a molecule into your daily decision making, regardless of whether the decisions are simple easy ones (whether to put sugar or artificial sweetener on your cereal) or more long term and difficult ones (whether to stop taking your prescribed medicine because of a newspaper report on associated side effects in a small number of cases). In the first instance, you feel comfortable making the simple decision because you also have a third choice, namely neither, and you don’t know anyone who’s actually been hurt by either sugar or artificial sweetener, at least in single doses. Your molecular decision may be influenced by your weight on any particular day, by your weight on previous days, on your desired weight, or on the feeling of having achieved a goal relative to weight control. Although the decision to use sugar or substitute is a pretty trivial one in scientific terms, when that decision becomes part of an overall engagement with matters of diet and weight control, especially for sound and healthy reasons, then the decision indicates a fairly sophisticated engagement with biology as a science, albeit at a highly personal level. And, if you actually read labels on food products and understand most of what they contain, you’re well on your way toward becoming scientifically literate.

The second instance, namely, the decision to stop taking a prescription drug, is more troublesome because you really don’t have much control over many of the factors that went into your possession of this supply of molecules. You did not write the prescription; your doctor wrote it based on observations that you might know but probably don’t completely understand. You don’t have any information beyond what’s written in the newspaper about the serious side effects cases or from various web sites, some of them provided by the pharmaceutical industry and others provided by kooks. In the best of all worlds you quit taking the medicine and don’t notice much difference in your health because the medicine wasn’t having any dramatic effects anyway (this actually was the case with me and a drug prescribed for joint pain). In the worst of all worlds you start worrying about the potential side effects and can’t seem to get a straight answer from your doctor or HMO. So it becomes a relief when the company that manufactures this drug pulls it from the market. The deep decision has been made for you.

The decisions that I’ve called “deep” are ones that involve both a breadth of scientific knowledge and a propensity, derived from an understanding of science as a way of knowing, to evaluate evidence supporting an assertion and to think in comparative terms. Deep decisions accept the fundamental nature of science, namely its dependence on observations, the independence of those observations from your desires or beliefs, and the fact that to be relevant, observations must function to test a testable assertion. Such decisions also accept the idea of probability and the fact of statistical variation instead of demanding certainty. In the case of the sugar substitute decision, you may well have shown a high level of scientific literacy if you engaged in all the label reading and diet design activities intended to keep you healthy and actually knew why you were doing these acts. In addition, such literacy probably primed you to acquire further scientific knowledge and understanding if needed, e.g., when faced with a significant environmental issue affecting your property values.

Furthermore, if you’re convinced that your dietary awareness, exercise, and label reading keeps your weight and cholesterol under control, then you’re sort of a walking experiment but with a sample size of one and no control group with which to compare yourself. Nevertheless, you have a testable assertion regarding your own body and through your activity based on scientific literacy you are testing that assertion about weight and blood chemistry, and probably also self-esteem. Regardless of the sample size and lack of control group, you are making decisions that affect yourself and perhaps others, such as family members, using knowledge about the natural world, and using that knowledge in a rational way consistent with scientific practice.

The alternate version of this assertion, that if you consume large quantities of certain kinds of molecules you will become heavier and less healthy (as revealed by a bathroom scale and the blood work at annual physical exam time), is also well within your power to test, but your decision not to test it is an example of one based on a meaningful relationship between desire and nature. In other words, nature will allow you to fulfill your desire, provided you interact with nature in a way suggested by scientific knowledge about how nature—your body—works.

As indicated in a previous chapter, testable assertions are the hallmark of science, and I’ll expand on this scientific property within the context of political action later in this chapter. But for the moment, we should remember that in the political arena, assertions are testable only within an historical framework. In other words, politics is an historical discipline with its own rules of evidence that may not match those of proximal or normal science, i.e., the kind of science that does experiments with material amenable to experimentation. Within the realm of history, you can’t really do “experiments,” as we properly define the term; you can only assess the validity of some assertion by looking back on what actually happened when you acted as if that assertion was true.

There is no better example of this kind of historical assertion testing than the Iraq war that began with the invasion of that nation by a group of other nations, led mostly by the United States, in 2003. The assertion that Iraqis were developing, or had, and intended to use “weapons of mass destruction,” the assertion that Iraqis would quickly adopt an American-style democracy once their dictator was overthrown, and the assertion that Iraq would be a business-friendly working environment shortly after hostilities ceased, all were tested and shown to be false. But unlike a real experiment, say involving bacterial metabolism, you can’t go back and start over with Iraq.

The vast majority of all politicians rely on public approval to sustain their employment. In addition, once in office, the trappings of power can become quite seductive. These two facets of political life are among the main reasons that politicians are so scientifically illiterate, or at least act as if they are. Nevertheless, most if not all positions occupied by politicians also involve major responsibilities, compliance with various laws, ceremonial activities, and nowadays, public scrutiny of religious beliefs and behaviors demonstrating “faith.” Nobody who professes to be an atheist should be so stupid as to spend money running for public office in the United States of America, no matter how lowly that office might be or how qualified the individual. Elected membership on the Lancaster County, Nebraska, Weed Control Authority comes immediately to mind; no self-proclaimed secular humanists need apply. Thus politicians are scientifically illiterate, or act as if they are, because the demands of public office, the need for public approval, and the constant scrutiny of their faith-based behavior, all job-related phenomena that work to make such literacy a liability instead of the asset it should be.

Besides the factors of responsibility, approval, and scrutiny, it is also important to remember that mobs want answers and solutions, not questions and problems, from their leaders. In general, science tends to produce more questions and problems than answers and solutions. This tendency derives from the fundamental nature of science as an activity. Elsewhere in this book I use the metaphor of an island of understanding in a sea of ignorance to explain why science produces more problems than solutions. Remember that as an island grows in size (increase in understanding), its shoreline (the boundary between understanding and ignorance) also grows. All the questions and problems lie along this boundary. In addition, to continue with the metaphor, the larger an island gets, the more geographically diverse it tends to become. If that geographic diversity involves mountains, then we have a high perch from which to observe the sea of ignorance. Routinely such observation shows that sea to be much larger than we imagined when we were only down on our hands and knees in the sand studying nature at the [metaphorical] shore.

The familiar case of New Orleans vs. Hurricane Katrina beautifully illustrates all these points about breadth of knowledge, comparative thinking, observations, history, and the basic properties of science. Breadth of knowledge is perhaps the most important factor that should have been considered in the political decisions involving the Mississippi Delta ecology. Thus a broadly educated politician would never simply ask how much money an ecological project—for example, a system of levees and an artificial river (the New Orleans shipping channel)—costs, or how much money the public is willing to spend on such a project. Instead, as a minimum, a broadly educated politician considers history, socio-economic conditions, the probability of disaster, the quality of expertise consulted, whether or not that expertise is in agreement with other expertise from diverse sources, the nature of observations, the process of analysis, and whether the process itself has obvious flaws or internal contradictions. In other words, to really assess the adequacy of New Orleans levees, one would have to study the Mississippi Delta using approaches that would be quite familiar to any evolutionary biologist.

Research over the past half century, i.e., activity increasing both the size of our island of understanding and the length of its shoreline boundary with the sea of ignorance, clearly revealed (produced) more questions and problems about the Mississippi Delta region than answers and solutions. Such research involved new technologies such as satellite imagery, geographic information system software, and socio-economic analysis, as well as experience derived from study of the Achafalaya River and its basin using more conventional methods—measurement of stream flow, sedimentation and erosion rates, pressures on diversion dams and gates, etc.

Over the years, the scientific community came to realize that the initial problem and its solution, namely, keeping water out of New Orleans by building levees, was actually only a small part of a much larger problem, specifically, long term management of the interrelationship between a nation’s economy and one of the world’s largest rivers. This kind of collective activity, in which a truly massive ecosystem is the primary player at the center of a highly integrated, far-reaching, transportation and financial network, does not lend itself to governance by mobs that want answers and solutions, not questions and problems, from their leaders. Instead, this kind of system requires almost Jeffersonian dignity, patience, foresight, and breadth, traits that don’t survive well in our Third Millennium media-driven electioneering environment.

Such a broad education, and its use in a public arena, is therefore a lot, indeed probably too much, to ask of any modern politician. But then, of course, it is the job of any newspaper reporter halfway qualified for his or her job to ask the right questions of elected officials in order to reveal their breadth of knowledge, in situations involving natural phenomena, or, in the best of all worlds, to inspire those politicians to acquire knowledge, wisdom, and some decent honest advisers who are not just sycophants. Sadly, perhaps for reasons that are deeply embedded in the human DNA, as a general rule we are not patient with careful analysis, complex interactions between elements of nature, varying degrees of probability, and leaders who are honest about the chances that disaster will befall us. Instead, we seem to admire leaders who are strong advocates of actions based on our beliefs and desires, who inspire us to be courageous, and who tend to simplify a complex universe down to issues and explanations we can understand. And leaders who can convince us we are in danger, and seem to be fighting that danger in an obvious way, are the ones we seem to admire the most. None of this typical interaction between a population and its chosen leaders promotes scientific literacy or honesty about the relationship between nature and people.

I do not claim that scientists, because they are scientists, are more honest or broadly educated than politicians. In the realm of science, however, the honesty system operates much more strongly and rapidly than in the realm of politics, mainly because this system typically involves anonymous review of scientific work before that work is made public, and it does not involve public decision-making. If you are doing experiments on the sex life of some tiny worm, and try to publish your results, i.e., make them public, then some well-educated scientist will scrutinize your methods, including your experimental design, your statistical analysis, your rationale for doing the project in the first place, your interpretations of the results, the extent to which you have taken existing knowledge into account, and even the quality of your writing. All this review does not necessarily make you an honest person, but it does tend to pick up flaws in your thinking and mistakes in your actions. But if you go to a cocktail party filled with attorneys and elected city officials, the main question you are likely to be asked about this research is: “Why is this kind of stuff important?”  The question really means: “Why are you wasting time and money, maybe even tax money, on this kind of activity, and why do you seem to be so interested in sex?”

There may be two thousand good reasons why you are studying the sex life of obscure worms, but these reasons probably involve the fundamental nature of science itself. These worms could, potentially, become a model system for the study of hormone action at the cellular level, thus serving to help explain developmental anomalies in humans, livestock, and companion animals. The worms might be extra-ordinarily beautiful creatures under the microscope, thus quite attractive to students who in turn could easily become internationally renowned scholars studying some global human affliction but who remember fondly their carefree undergrad days back in the lab when all they had to talk about was worm sex. The worms’ reproductive biology could easily shed light on the origin of sex itself, or the evolution of pheromones, both subjects of enormous interest to the scientific community. Pheromone action, as you might suspect, also could be of substantial interest to the cosmetics industry. When a scientist hears that another scientist is studying the sex life of obscure worms, then all of the possibilities mentioned in this paragraph usually come to mind because scientists typically understand how science itself works on a grand scale. Politicians, however, like their constituencies, rarely get past the issues of time, money (especially tax money), and sex, although sometimes, if not often, there is a hidden disdain for people who would spend their lives studying microscopic creatures with no immediate economic importance.

In our example of the worms, politicians’ focus on time, money, sex, and utility is not necessarily stupid, evil, or dangerous, although it has the potential for being all three. In the previous paragraph, I’ve actually revealed all the reasons why in order to remain economically competitive in a technologically competitive world, any nation needs to have a strong, healthy, broad, and active scientific enterprise. Flourishing scientific activity, sustained largely by curiosity about the natural world, breeds scientists, models, new ways of studying nature, and new applications of existing technology. In other words, it is the human resources that are of prime importance to a highly developed nation, not the discoveries themselves. Given enough human resources engaged in research, techniques for studying heretofore mysterious aspects of nature will be developed and the discoveries will be made. Furthermore, breadth of research interest tends to produce transferable technologies, a critical factor in sustaining a technology-based economy.

The laser (light amplification by stimulated emission) is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon from 20^th Century science in the United States. A brief history of this technological development can be found on the Bell Labs web site (www.belllabs.com/history/laser/), but in essence, two scientists—Arthur L. Schawlow and Charles H. Townes—developed the technology from research that began in the 1940s. Schawlow was a researcher at Bell Labs, and Townes was a consultant to the Bell Labs research enterprise. These scientists’ primary interest at the time was molecular structure, and the laser was intended to be a device to help them pursue their research in this area.

The commercial development of this technology, along with its rapid spread throughout almost all aspects of modern American life, can be traced to the publication of a paper entitled Infrared and Optical Masers (in Physical Review, volume 112, pages 1940-1949, published December 15, 1958). You can read this original piece of science simply by doing a Google^® search using the title—Infrared and Optical Masers—as your search term. Now we have laser pointers in the classroom, laser surgery in the hospital, laser scanning in the grocery story, etc. Although the laser may be the most easily understood example of transferable technology, our daily lives are filled with other cases. And, of course, science feeds on itself in this regard, with practicing scientists always looking for new applications for new and existing technologies.

Another history lesson—actually a rule of human resource development—that politicians typically fail to understand is the following: Artists often spring quickly, even spontaneously, out of a population, but scientists do not. Technological advances and economically important innovations might periodically emerge out of the realm of basic science, but the “realm of basic science” requires a vastly different cultural milieu than does the intellectual soup that spawns artists. Any nation that does not outright suppress or punish artists will end up with a good supply of them, but to be economically competitive in the Third Millennium, nations need lots of healthy, authentic, curiosity-directed, scientists and such individuals are not guaranteed to arise, and become legitimate scientists, by virtue of their own two hands and a paintbrush.

Nowadays, science needs physical facilities, computational power, technology, ready access to information on a global scale, time, and patience. To be economically competitive in the Third Millennium, a nation does not need a bunch of ignorant elected officials, afraid of science, afraid of the word “evolution,” and afraid of anything that seems to support immoral behavior. A nation needs, instead, a bunch of courageous and intellectually honest people who have the interpersonal and verbal skills to help educate its citizens on scientific matters, and especially on the link between economic health and a valid understanding of how nature operates.