Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

The theory of homeopathy is that the adding something to pure water gives it a pattern of some sort. That pattern remains when more water is added. Thus diluting the solution does not change its effect. This is, of course, nonsense, although homeopathic remedies are sold in every drugstore and supermarket.

If we believe the theory, though, I wonder when the pattern goes away. More and more communities are turning to reclamation of waste water to address their water needs. Waste water in this country is rich with vitamins, pharmaceuticals, and, yes, homeopathic remedies. Those are all patterning the water. Could those patterns survive the reclamation process? If not, why not? Could water reclamation be giving us huge homeopathic overdoses?

These are things I wonder about Iraq these days.

• Things are clearly improving in that fewer people are being killed.
  • How much of that is due to completion of religious cleansing of neighborhoods? How many mixed neighborhoods remain?
  • How many people are returning to Iraq from abroad? At one time millions of Iraqis had left.
• What’s up with Moktada al-Sadr? He backed down in Sadr City. Is he ready to join the political process in the upcoming provincial elections?
• Most of the people holding formal political power did not live in Iraq under Saddam.
  • Will those people be able to win elections if the Sunnis and the Sadrists vote whole-heartedly?
  • If the provincial elections do bring in new people, will they be less tied to Iran?
• There is an old joke about elections when Islamists run: one man, one vote, once. Can that be avoided in Iraq?
• A major reason for the invasion was to get a stable, friendly, oil producer. That has still not succeeded. Does it still matter?
• The civilian economy in Iraq is still wrecked; most people making money are on a government or U.S. payroll. This is not unlike other petrocracies, but it’s not a good thing. Can we do anything to change this?
• I continue to believe that the U.S. should get out as soon as possible. Maliki has suggested that U.S. forces should leave by 2010. Is there anything stopping us from doing just that?

My father’s father bought a new car every year. He and my grandmother had two cars. Every year he traded in the older one and bought a new one. There were two car dealerships in town, and he alternated each year.

One measure of the wealth of a society is what it can afford to discard. By that measure we are not as wealthy as we used to be; very few people buy a new car every year these days. Or, perhaps, my grandfather’s society was not as wealthy as it thought it was: perhaps their trash was incurring a hidden cost, a cost which we are paying today.

Our society has a common notion of progress. We think that things are getting better. Periodically some poll comes out saying that people think their children won’t be as well off as they are, and that generally causes some handwringing and comments that that has never happened in the U.S.

In some ways, we clearly are better off today–medicine today is vastly better than it has ever been. Admittedly our unhealthy diet may be causing average lifespan to decrease, but that is a different problem. However, if you measure success by material consumption–which seems like a natural measure in a capitalist society–then I’m not sure that we are better off than we used to be. We face limits, we recycle, we conserve. These are not issues that our country faced fifty years ago. That we face them now, is that maturity? Or poverty?

All the major U.S. airlines, other than Southwest, are losing money, mainly because of high oil prices (Southwest is an exception because they cleverly hedged their oil purchases). The airlines have been cost cutting for years; I assume that they can’t run their services significantly more cheaply than they do today. Therefore, on routes which are not busy, they are going to start raising prices and cutting service.

This will probably not have a big effect on people flying between large and medium-sized cities. Those prices may go up a bit, but the routes are heavily travelled, so competition between the airlines will keep the prices from going too high. Small cities, though, are often destinations for only one or two airlines. They are likely to see prices go up significantly, and some will see flights reduced or eliminated entirely.

Many of the domestic airlines have a lot of debt and limited room to maneuver. Even if that gets fixed, this is still likely to be a long-term trend, unless somebody develops a cheap alternative to jet fuel.

Train service in the U.S. is very limited, in part because government spending is heavily biased in favor of the automobile. So people in those small cities are going to have to drive to get other places. And, of course, gasoline prices are going up.

It seems to me that the likely long-term effect will be an accelerating depopulation of the rural U.S. As it becomes harder to get places, fewer people will be willing to move to them. The existing population will age and diminish. Over time, people will be more concentrated in fewer and denser cities.

I don’t see this as a bad thing, myself. The U.S. population has been steadily moving from rural areas to cities for over a hundred years now.

It’s also quite possible that something else will happen. Zeppelins can travel about 80 MPH today, and perhaps that can be pushed up some. They don’t require nearly as much infrastructure as trains do, and perhaps even less than planes. They’re too slow to cross the country, except as tourism, but they might be feasible as local transport to large airports.

It took me many years of reading Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins to really grasp what their disagreement was. I’ll try to summarize it here.

They both, of course, completely accept the standard story of evolution as descent with modification and natural selection. Their disagreement is about the degree to which species will change over time, and the amount of change that is possible. Gould stresses that species are constrained by the amount of genetic diversity they have available. Dawkins stresses the ability of species to adapt.

Thus Gould talks about the panda’s thumb, which is an example of evolution reusing an existing structure rather than inventing something new and more efficient. He talks about spandrels, which he describes as nonadaptive changes which are linked, genetically or structurally, to adaptive changes.

Dawkins talks about the selfish gene, and treats it as a unit of evolution without considering the other genes which occupy the same body. He discusses the extended phenotype, and argues that you can consider a beaver’s pond to be a part of the genetic inheritance of the beaver.

Who is right? Obviously, they both are. It’s just a question of emphasis and points of view. Sometimes evolution is constrained in nonobvious ways. Sometimes species can adapt freely. Which is the case in a particular scenario can be very difficult to determine.

Their positions are both sufficiently similar and sufficiently distinct to have generated a lot of strong words over the years before Gould’s death. I personally tend to favor Gould’s arguments when it comes to evolution–I think they are more helpful in understanding what we really see in the world. They helped me recover from a strong adaptationist viewpoint I held in my youth–the belief that all animals must be ideally adapted for their environment. On the other hand, Gould loses me completely in his discussion of nonoverlapping magisteria: it’s either very obvious or rather misleading, I’m not sure which.