One Man's Meat

As the world population balloons blithely towards seven billion people, one of us is missing and presumed eaten. A German tourist (by now a redundant expression like 'round circle') has disappeared in the bush of Nuku Hiva, a large island in the South Pacific archipelagoes. The chap was reported lost by his female traveling companion, taken off on a goat hunt by a resident guide who returned without him, attempted to lure the lady into the brush on a search for her "injured" mate, and then attempted to molest her credulity further by tying her to a tree and making some suggestions which did not invite a broad interpretation.

 The Preprandial Tourist

Searchers have found recently charred human remains, including teeth, bones, jaw and skull fragments and what appear to be melted dental fillings scattered around an extinguished fire. Both local authorities and French police are searching for local tribal people, many of whom had noticeably left before the dessert course. According to one "newsiness" source, "The tribe suspected of killing and eating Mr Ramin had claimed they gave up cannibalism years ago. Local authorities are investigating but it remains unclear if any tribesmen have been held, or even found."

It would naturally be unconvincing to merely deny having enjoyed Mr. Ramin at all (as if they might have stood accused of a mere dietary lapse or a hankering for a seasonal specialty). No, the times demand that the practice itself be soundly repudiated. The current age also demands that French and Nuku Hivan authorities, wherever their personal proclivities may tend, concertedly launch a furious and outraged search for the absconded dinner party.

"Not me, Doc - can't stand tourists."

In this age of "individual rights" it is natural to suppose that we all have the right to travel freely and unmolested wherever the wind or democratic fancy might take us. In our saner moments, we (especially Americans) understand that this isn't the case. But it's easy to think that Siemens and ExxonMobil and Mitsubishi and Tata and Suzlon and Nissan have not only tamed the globe but that they own it and obligingly invite us to burn their gasoline in their automobiles and airplanes to enjoy the usufructs of their civilizing global omnipresence.

Without diminishing the gravity of murdering - or, more charitably, eating - an innocent traveler, the world is not yet like that. It seems to make a difference that the German was probably eaten, but why should it, really? Had this happened in, say, the United States (saving Texas, Utah or Nevada), it would be a clear case of psychotic aberration. But we Amero-European naifs can still stray beyond the pale of "civilized" humanity into old and "unaccustomed" customs, into places of the globe where (unbeknownst to us) we had no business being in the first place - places like Afghanistan where, though we may not be eaten outright, we might be converted to a godless Islam or shot on sight. We know better than to walk through the Hindu Kush these days, but how much else do we know? Dead is dead, whatever the state of the corpus delicti. Other cultures, not so distant from our own, already know this vaguely.

(They can't remember how Captain Cook tasted)

The "global" economy is one of our fondest myths. Even to call the act a murder is to presume that our own "developed" moral code has suffused the globe and made it a finer thing than it was at the creation. Had the poor sod not (by all appearances) been a group barbecue it would have been just the murder or disappearance of a luckless traveller, the usual Muslim terrorist cells would have been under heightened suspicion for a week, a foreign minister would have expressed condolences, and that would have been the end of the affair.

But, presuming he's been eaten, the moral abhorrence is palpable. Whatever for? Most of what human beings have done over the last, say, six or seven or eleven millennia was never dictated by some theory of "free market forces" nor by some Judaeo-Christian proscriptions about what's fit to eat, nor (mirabile dictu) by any "global" economic considerations such as fostering a "robust tourism industry" or "encouraging World Bank participation through the good faith removal of economic barriers." But it's still the case that large cultural tracts on the globe owe Western capitalism no moral debt whatsoever. Quite the contrary.

An ancient culture still rules in many places, mainly because culture is an evolutionary mechanism that still bonds us. Talk about "economic barriers to development." Maybe we still need some faint gasps of cultural individuality (maybe not cannibalism, but . . . ). It once fused us into survival groups (however murderous we were). Granted that survival is, for roughly two-thirds of the globe's population (so far), not an immediate issue; granted that lots of those old cultural adaptations may be a bit outdated or irrelevant to modern survival.

Nonetheless, custom dies hard. Adaptive behavior is not abandoned merely because it is no longer necessary - if that were the case, who in the hell would willingly eat a turkey at Thanksgiving?

(Which ones just smoked some weed before dinner?)

No, much of what humans do and persist in doing beggars the economist, the global market theorist, the theologian, the aid worker and the missionary. Take them all in all, human beings are a tough lot. Too bad more of us aren't a hard sell.

A Theory of Damn Near Everything

Harper's Magazine publishes a monthly "Index" - not the dreaded, largely ignored Index librorum prohibitorum of the Holy See, but a compendium of bizarrely fascinating statistics drawn from the cultural and geopolitical morass of our times. Just as a teaser, the Index for June includes, among other typical bijoux: "Amount  bin Laden paid to replace each cricket ball hit into his compound, according to a local boy: $0.59." Or, "Minimum percentage of U.S. electricity that is consumed by marijuana growers: 1."

While these are informative and tell us something about the state of the nation or the Pakistani rural economy, they are not amongst the juiciest in this month's list. This item in particular caught my eye: "Chance that a Russian believes the sun revolves around the earth: 1 in 3." Fully a third of the ninth most populous country in the world (population 138,739,892) and a major "developed" country still believes what Nikołaj Kopernik, from neighboring Poland, disproved in 1543 with the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium. For 468 years now, it has been understood that the solar system, at least, looks like this:

I'll bet you're glad you're not as dumb as a Russian. 

 Landscape with Russians (Afghanistan)

On the other hand, a Gallup poll conducted among American respondents (1999) determined that seventy-nine percent thought the earth revolves around the sun, while 18 percent had it the other way around - almost one in five. "These results are comparable to those found in Germany . . . 74 percent of Germans gave the correct answer, while 16 percent thought the sun revolved around the earth, and 10 percent said they didn't know." (Results in the UK were similar.)

So with that bit of context, the Russians don't come off so abysmally ignorant compared with people in other developed nations. And in defense of anyone who hasn't been paying attention over the past half-millenium, there is at least empirical evidence to support their case, the truth in this instance being entirely counterintuitive and the solid evidence being of a technical nature.

The very next item in this Harper's Index is: "Chance that a U.S. high school biology teacher is an advocate of evolution: 1 in 4." 

Science media resource

A CBS poll conducted last year found that 40 percent of the population at large believes in "strict creationism," the balance endorsing evolution as either a purely natural mechanism or a divinely directed one. So while a scant 25 percent of those responsible for secondary science education in the United States accept a scientific basis for their discipline, 60 percent of the population at large accepts at least some form of such explanation. The intellectual recalcitrance among teachers is staggering. To paraphrase one of our former presidents, one might well wonder, "Is our educators being educated?" Obviously they are - but abroad. Poland, Croatia, Bulgaria and Greece all score higher than does the U.S. in percentile of population accepting the theory; Western Europe and Japan score consistently in the 70-80+ percentiles.

Of course, if one accepts the prevailing (and mistaken) view that the evolutionary process tends inevitably towards increased complexity and eventual "perfection" in any species, then once again there is ample empirical data to suggest that evolution may be an incorrect view of the matter.

Clearly this resistance to the single theory that makes biology a science is not based, as the flat-earther and geocentric points of view are, on any perceptible evidence. Notwithstanding that there may be intuitive reasons to wonder about evolution, as there are reasons to wonder whether the earth is round, I'd hazard that most of those biology teachers would be "open minded" enough to allow that we should by rights air all views in the classroom and let the students choose which flavor they like best - creationism masquerading as science, or evolution, which really is science. But they don't both deserve a place in the classroom.

What's the difference? A theory is a general proposition, based on a range of available and generally received evidence (in this case anatomical, physiological, genetic, geological, chemical) that a) explains why a broad range of observable phenomena are as they are and not otherwise - it appeals to broader laws to explain particular appearances; b) allows us to predict that future patterns of observation will correspond in large part with historic patterns; c) allows us to explain, in concepts observed in and drawn from nature, what causes these things to happen as they do; and d) assimilates disparate and apparently unconnected observations to explanations that either support or are consonant with the theory in question. 

In order to extend our knowledge (rather than merely cause us to cease wondering), a theory must allow revision and refinement as new data accrues; there must exist the possibility that some data will either require alteration of the theory or falsify the theory - otherwise it is merely an item of faith, since nothing whatsoever could disprove it. And it must not be piecemeal - it must be elegant, in the sense that a comparatively simple principle explains a wide range of data and allows us to predict what will happen in untested hypothetical situations.

It is, then, no answer to evolutionary theory that "it's just a theory." Evolution is a theory, as is gravity a theory - and both persist in the fabric of modern science because they do all the heavy lifting that theories are designed to do. The alternatives merely stop us in our tracks by assuring us that there aren't really any questions to be answered. To say merely that "God did it" lacks all the force of a real theory - that one simple sentence is a theory of damn near everything without explaining a thing.

"Don't ask."