More Evidence, As If We Needed It, of Global Warming, part three

I am posting this on the day on which Europe is having its warmest May on record, passing previous records by a long ways. The ways I am keeping cool is by sitting under ceiling fans and not doing much except writing. But this series of essays is not about global temperatures directly, but about their effects on the seasonal activities of plants.

I conducted a sixteen-year study of budburst dates in Oklahoma deciduous trees, and I found that winter buds opened in spring earlier and earlier each year, consistent with global warming. The results were highly significant. I did not, however, have time to publish this study in a scientific journal before I retired. I decided instead to publish it on my website. Here is the link to the article, with illustrations. Please note that the mailing address on the cover page is now obsolete; you may contact me through the website email link (stanriceauthor@gmail.com).

I here address an interesting point about this research, aside from its unsurprising conclusion. And that point is, how do we avoid bias?

Here is a photo of mulberry buds.

Everyone is biased, including scientists. The people who proclaim themselves to be unbiased (politicians, industry leaders) are in fact the most biased people in the world. Scientists are much less biased, and for good reason. The process of scientific research requires specific steps to be taken to deliberately avoid bias. So, when I conclude that global warming is occurring, a politician (such as the infamous Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, who said whatever oil companies paid him to say) could accuse me of being biased. This is true, but I, unlike him, deliberately designed my research to minimize the bias. Take that, Jim Inhofe! I cannot tell him this, because he died in 2024.

Here is how I did it. For sixteen years, I walked around and noted the budburst dates of a couple of hundred trees. In the back of my mind, I was thinking that the sixteenth year would have much earlier budburst dates than the first year. That, of course, is bias. But budburst is a continuous process. If you note down the very earliest date on which the buds appear to reawaken in the spring, you get an early budburst date; if you note down the first date that the leaves or flowers emerge from the bud, you get a medium budburst date; if you note down the date on which the leaves or flowers are fully expanded, you get a late budburst date. I had to choose some indicator of budburst; I chose the date on which the bud swelled just enough to allow the tissues inside the bud to be visible. And once I had chosen this indicator, I had to stick with it for sixteen years. You can see this in the color photos I included in the article, and in these blog essays.

The technical term for choosing a standard of measurement is construct validity. You can read about it in my book about the adventure of scientific discovery.

There is, in addition, a tradeoff between how detailed your observation can be and how many observations you can make. You cannot measure everything everywhere. When it comes to spring budburst studies, they fall into two categories:

First, satellite measurements. Satellites can measure buds turning green in the spring over hundreds of square miles. This allows the results, such as earlier budburst, in any one location to be generalizable over a larger area. This gives satellite measurements external validity, that is, they are valid not just for the area in which the measurements were made.

Second, there are ground-based studies, such as mine. I am sure of the budburst date and species for each tree. But, as I openly admit in my article, the external validity of ground based studies is limited.

I will explain, in the next essay, yet one more interesting point about scientific research into global warming.

More Evidence, As If We Needed It, of Global Warming, part two

As described in the previous essay, I conducted a sixteen-year study of budburst dates in Oklahoma deciduous trees, and I found that winter buds opened in spring earlier and earlier each year, consistent with global warming. The results were highly significant. I did not, however, have time to publish this study in a scientific journal before I retired. I decided instead to publish it on my website. Here is the link to the article, with illustrations. Please note that the mailing address on the cover page is now obsolete; you may contact me through the website email link (stanriceauthor@gmail.com).

I here address an interesting point about this research, aside from its unsurprising conclusion. And that point is, what do we measure?

This photo shows the giant buds, just opening, of black oak (Quercus velutina).

When we talk about global warming, we can mean lots of different things. It is better to talk about global climate change or even global climate disruption. For global warming, it would seem to be a simple matter of measuring temperatures and seeing if they increase from year to year. But this, by itself, is unsatisfactory, for reasons such as these:

Where do you measure the temperature? Air temperature may be warmest near the ground, and cooler the further you go up in the atmosphere. Air temperature is what affects budburst, since buds are up in the air. But soil temperature is also important, since warmer soil might mean earlier root activity and earlier rising of the sap. Aerial buds do not just open when it is warm enough but also in response to sap rising in the wood.

Temperature is enormously variable. You cannot simply measure it in one place and use this temperature to represent the air temperature. Meteorologists have little stations to measure air temperature (and lots of other things) in numerous locations, but even this is not enough. Temperatures can vary from one location to another just a few feet away.

When do you measure the temperature? The maximum temperature in the day, or the minimum at night? Also, we suspect that springtime temperatures are what matter the most, but winter temperatures can also be important. Some tree buds must have a certain number of days of winter chilling before they can open in the spring.

Other factors are always important, such as wind speed, soil moisture, and the moisture status inside the twigs.

It is not just the temperature that matters to humans, but how it makes us feel. Weather predictions indicate not only the actual temperature but the way it feels to the body. The same is true of trees. We are interested not so much in the actual temperature of the air as in how the temperature affects biological activities such as the opening of the buds.

The climate could be getting warmer even if the temperatures do not increase. Springtime could just come earlier and autumn later, without a change in the average temperature.

If all of this makes it seem hopeless to study global warming, I am happy to report that organisms themselves can transduce all the environmental variables, over time, into biologically meaningful measurements. In the case of trees, all of the variations in temperature, moisture, and wind can be summarized by budburst date, something that the plants, not we, control. Budburst date is the one variable I measured. I used weather data as background, but not for analysis.

By opening their buds earlier and earlier each year, the trees are telling us that it is getting warmer. See the next essay for other scientifically important concepts in the study of global warming.

 

More Evidence, As If We Needed It, of Global Warming, part one

I conducted a sixteen-year study of budburst dates in Oklahoma deciduous trees, and I found that winter buds opened in spring earlier and earlier each year, consistent with global warming. The results were highly significant. I did not, however, have time to publish this study in a scientific journal before I retired. I decided instead to publish it on my website. Here is the link to the article, with illustrations. Please note that the mailing address on the cover page is now obsolete; you may contact me through the website email link (stanriceauthor@gmail.com).

Here is what I indicated on my website:

Global warming is something that is already changing the world in a way that will make human civilization difficult. One indicator of global warming is that buds open sooner in the spring than they did previously. Here you will see the evidence.

It is difficult to think of a more important scientific topic today than global warming. The Earth is getting warmer far more than it ever did in the past by natural climatic variation, and the reason is clear: humans are putting massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There are many consequences of this, for the natural world and the human world (for example, food production). The subject could fill an encyclopedia; as a matter of fact, I was under contract to write the Encyclopedia of Global Warming for Facts on File, but they discontinued the project before I had written any actual entries, just the overview.

Every scientist and scholar, except for fringe people who are either dedicated to extremist politics or paid by corporations, accept the reality of global warming and its human cause. Even many Republicans accept it, although most of them have now been kicked out of the Party. Even Exxon-Mobil accepted it decades ago, until they repudiated their own research for political reasons. The United States is the only major country in the world in which the government opposes the science of global warming. First George W. Bush, then Donald Trump, removed global warming from government websites. Other countries, such as in Europe, know that they can no longer trust American scientific information about global warming.

One reason for this worldwide acceptance of the science of global warming is that it is confirmed by the convergence of many different lines of research. Fields as different as meteorology, geology, and biology all confirm that global warming is real. One small area of research is one in which I was involved: phenology, which is the seasonal patterns of biological activity. In particular, deciduous trees lose their leaves every autumn and open new buds in the springtime. In recent decades, with global warming, tree buds have been opening earlier and earlier in the spring.

Many different sets of data confirm this. Many of them result from satellite measurements which show that forests turn green earlier every spring. Some are based on direct observations of trees and other plants. I have a data set that I worked on for sixteen years and that had over six thousand data points. These observations showed that, in my sample of deciduous trees, budburst occurred about a day earlier every year from 2006 to 2021. There are two particular points in which my data set is important. First, they come from Oklahoma, near the southwestern extreme of the deciduous forests, while most data sets are from the northeast United States or from Europe. Second, my data are longitudinal; that is, I kept track of the same trees for sixteen years. This is longer than the lifetime of any research grant; but my research required no funding. I just kept data sheets about budburst times on the trees near where I lived and worked.

The saying goes, Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But my claims were not extraordinary. They are the same as everyone else’s, even though they were based on an entirely separate data set. If my observations were different from everyone else’s, they might be suspect. But my conclusions are the same as those of nearly everyone else who has studied the changes in spring budburst resulting from global warming. As such, my conclusions are not particularly surprising, except that the fact that the trees opened their buds a day earlier each year much surpasses most studies, in which budburst occurs a day earlier each decade.

 

This photo shows post oak (Quercus stellata) buds just beginning to open.

In the next essay, I will address some particularly interesting features of this research project, which will give us an insight into the process of scientific thinking.

Glass Cathedral, a Religious Novel with a Lot of Science

Stan Rice’s novel Glass Cathedral deals with big religious questions not in the form of serious debate but in good-natured banter among three of the main characters, Dan (the atheist), Emilio (the evangelical Christian), and Misty (the Christian who has deep and serious doubts about her religion). I have written in my other blog about the religious aspects of this novel.

This is the author’s summary from Amazon:

The newspaper staff writers of a small desert town assume the strange light in the sky is merely sunlight refracted by ice crystals: atheist Dan Hardy; the spiritually-searching Misty Barbour; and even the confirmed Christian editor Emilio Villanueva. Then the light turns out to be God—maybe. This is enough to make Misty leave her doubts behind and marry Emilio. Dan, who was hoping to win Misty’s affection, is skeptical, especially since God showed up on no photographic images, and everyone in town saw God differently. The government authorities declare the light was a mass hallucination.

Emilio and Misty raise money to build a glass cathedral in the desert, near the place they think God appeared. When thousands of people come for the inaugural celebration, a storm pulls the glasshouse into the sky. Misty gets trampled. At the end, Emilio and Misty, who is now disabled, conclude that God’s work is to help people, not to build a cathedral, and even Dan agrees.

 What I want to say in this science blog is that Dan arrives at his atheism thoughtfully and at great personal cost.

His interest in science began when, as a boy, he saw a horsehair worm discharged from the anus of a dead cockroach. This got him interested in reading everything he could about biology and ecology, especially parasitism, which earned him the name Buttworm Boy. In a natural world pervaded by evolutionary mercilessness, Dan sees no room for a Creator.

His atheism is challenged when he meets, becomes attracted to, and becomes physically entangled with a Mormon girl, Margaret. Margaret is not an enthusiastic Mormon, but wants Dan to join her to raise nice kids. In this way, Dan discovers that religion does not have to be correct—as Mormonism is clearly contradicted by history—in order to fill a role in a person’s life. This, however, is not enough for him.

Another main character, Misty, is a dedicated Christian, at least until her comfortable religious world is shattered by the assassination of her fiancé. The main event of the novel—God appearing in the sky out in the California desert, or not—restores her faith. But what is it that brings Misty the Christian and Dan the atheist together for meaningful discourse? It is science, of course. They see, then carefully examine, the desert wildflowers, Dan as a scientist and Misty because Jesus said to consider the lilies of the field. That is, to look closely, carefully, and thoughtfully at them. This is something that very few Christians actually do.

The novel also contains other scientific plot elements. In the glass cathedral that Misty and her husband Emilio build out in the desert, a giant band-o-rama has hundreds of tubas that happen to play the resonant frequency of the building, so that it shatters and blows away like a giant jellyfish in a desert storm.

I think the author has a lively, almost childlike, sense of wonder, at the lilies of the field and the surprises that wait within the laws of physics. I think readers of this blog would enjoy Glass Cathedral.

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part four. Eternity

There are some other advantages to self-publishing, both of which surpass anything available to species in the wild.

First, you can make changes in your book even after it is published. I haven’t tried this, but I assume what you would have to do is to take down your original book from Kindle, and replace it with files with the appropriate changes. Or updates. Your book would therefore never go out of date. In nature, once seeds have been dispersed, they cannot be called back. A tree might be able to make slight alterations in the structure of the seeds from one year to the next, but not much.

Second, your book will never go out of print so long as there are at least a couple of people buying it. Amazon has always provided this service to the community of readers. If a used copy of a book can be found anywhere, you can find it on Amazon, which links to the book stores or individuals who have these rare items. In nature, seeds eventually die.

My books, including the Kindle books that do not exist in print form, are my legacy to the future, aside from a little bit of money and a lot of love for my kids. After I have died, the only thing anyone in the world will know about me, apart from increasingly faded memories, will be my books. Somebody who does not know me might buy a copy of Rima and find out what I have learned about rain forests, for example. My legacy will also include my website, which, if the host gets paid, does not itself know whether I am alive or not.

Alas, Kindle books cannot be exactly what the author would want them to be. You have to be careful with non-standard text. I read T. C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain, in which he inserted some lines in Spanish. Spanish questions end with a question mark, but also begin with an inverted question mark. Boyle correctly included the inverted question mark. But Kindle always inserted a nothing-symbol (a zero with a slash through it) just before the inverted question mark.

In particular, illustrations tend to be extremely messed up in Kindle books. Every kindle book I have read, by other authors, have incomprehensible illustrations. My four Kindle novels have only one image in the book itself (not counting the cover, which is usually pretty good) and that is my author photo. No matter what I do, Kindle inserts it sideways. I can just pretend that it is because I am an avant-garde tradition-breaker.

But even with these faults, a website or a Kindle book (or any other book) is a better remnant to leave for future generations than a gravestone which can be fancy even for the meanest sons-of-bitches who ever lived. A good book, however, cannot be faked.

Rima: A Retelling of Green Mansions for the 21st Century

Stan Rice is better known for his nonfiction works (see his website,) about evolution and science, but he has also published fiction, which I have reviewed previously in this blog. He has just published another novel, Rima: Green Mansions for the 21^st century.

 

I think we all realize (at least, all of us who have read Green Mansions by W. H. Hudson, published in the early 20^th century) that a new version of this story was needed. There are two main reasons.

The first is that the original Green Mansions was racist. Hudson, like H. Rider Haggard (She) and James Hilton (Lost Horizon), assumed that any advanced culture had to be at least the remnant of a white civilization: for Hudson, in the Amazon; for Haggard, in Africa; and for Hilton, the Himalayas. Rice, in retelling Green Mansions, has dispensed with civilization altogether: in Rima, the forces of nature itself (personified in the not-quite-human Rima) are intelligent, in a way. The protagonists are a male scientist from Ecuador, and the female scientist Rima from Peru.

Second, the topic has now become urgent. When Hudson first wrote Green Mansions, the rainforest seemed infinite; now, it is in danger of total destruction.

There is another thing that has become urgent. Many of us understand Donald Trump’s disapproval of illegal immigrants. But Trump also cancelled the visas of international graduate students who were in America legally, which was the case for the two protagonists in this book. (This really happened.) But it seemed impossible that Trump would actually try to bring rain forest ecological research to an end. But in 2026, Trump fired—without notice—the entire advisory board of the National Science Foundation. This has brought an immediate end to ecological research, particularly rain forest ecology research. In current reality, then, Trump is even more evil than Rice depicts him in the novel. When I was in graduate school, every graduate student aspired to be part of, and someday have her/his own, NSF grant. Those days are completely over. NSF once stood for National Science Foundation; now it stands for non-sufficient funds. Though published just this year, Rice’s novel is already out of date. A little.

This novel was not an easy job for Rice to pull off. He must have extensive and intimate knowledge of his subject matter, as indicated by the author’s notes at the end of the book. The author has a graduate-school level of knowledge about rain forest science, although he indicates he has only briefly visited a rain forest (including the Jatún Sacha research station about which he writes), as well as the Andean highlands. He also knows a lot about pre-Columbian civilizations. He knows about real and important people in environmental issues, such as Wes Jackson, Wangari Maathai, and Dan Janzen. Even some of his minor incidents (such as when activist Thomas Brail camped in a sycamore tree in Paris, and was visited by actress Juliette Binoche), really happened.

You will enjoy reading Rima. It has some really funny scenes in it, such as when the monkeys get together to destroy a construction site. But the book is also dead serious. If you want to laugh, and to care, this is worth your novel-reading time.

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part three. Quality

You cannot just put your books on Amazon and expect people to find them, even if they would have enjoyed reading them. An author is not only competing with thousands of human authors but with computers that can generate AI garbage a hundred times a second.

An intelligent customer might want to verify that the author of a book is not an AI bot by searching the web for an author website. AI bots generally do not have author websites, though I could be wrong about this. But the author has to make it easy for the customer, who is usually busy and tired when looking for a book.

You have to promote your book. This means several things.

First, you need a platform. My platform consists of a brand new website designed by my son in law which, thus far, has only my non-fiction books on it; two blogs, which have collectively had over a million views; a YouTube channel, in which I pretend to be Charles Darwin; and Facebook. This does not mean I can just scatter announcements all over my platform. People read my blogs and watch my videos because they can learn something, usually about science, from them. If they suspect I am dumping cheap advertising on them, they will stop visiting. I have to make the announcements of my fiction books relevant to the platform. In my case this might be easy, since much of my fiction focuses on science (particularly, Darwin and evolution) which is exactly what my science blog is about, and faces a lot of religious questions, which is exactly what my religion blog is about. This is exactly the same situation as a tree faces out in nature: it has to have fruits and seeds that match the animals it is expecting to patronize them, rather than just random seeds.

Second, you need to catch their eyes in a pleasurable way. I will do this by having really attractive covers and short summaries.

The covers will be colorful and eye-catching and often create just enough cognitive dissonance that they will wonder what the book is about. I am fortunate that I have literally five decades of photographs from which to choose. I could never have guessed I would use them as book covers. It is also important to adjust the photos, not just with cropping, contrast, and coloration, but with special effects, which are now easily available on PowerPoint.

The short summaries must excite the reader and make them want to read the book. Here is an example of the first sentence of a summary, from a novel I wrote about Charles Darwin being a vampire: “You just thought you had seen the last of Charles Darwin.” The summary does not have to have everything in it. The summary of my novel The Confessions of Conseil take a swipe at the exalted image of Pierre Arronax, narrator of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. In Conseil’s voice, I call him Arronax the Arrogant who thinks his servant Conseil cannot possibly have a brain or a life of his own. Now this might create cognitive dissonance, therefore interest, among the thousands of readers who grew up (as I did) loving Jules Verne. I also portray Captain Nemo as a Marxist revolutionary.

Third, you have to deliver the goods. It has to be a good book—a good plot, good characters, good everything. I have to make readers feel good, even when unpleasant things are happening in the book. I have to remember I am writing for my readers, not for myself. I have to remove anything that is interesting only to myself, e.g., lists of plants. Only then will a reader—maybe, just maybe—remember my name and look for another book by me. I include a lot of humor, not gratuitous but as part of the plot and dialogue. I also frequently have sex, not pornographic but as part of genuine human encounters, and very rarely the full sex act. The sex is never degrading. And never gratuitous—it has to have a reason to be there. The Bible is my guide in this respect. There is a lot of sex in the Bible, but there is always a reason for it. Fiction should never have any gratuitous anything.

Will this fiction publishing venture work? I have made a conservative estimate that I will earn at least $75,000 for thirty books, which is $75,000 more than I would earn with my track record with commercial publishers. If it works, it will not be because of my business acumen but because I took my inspiration from the evolutionary success stories of the trees.

Deru Kugi: A Novel about an Alternate Japan

The novel Deru Kugi, by Stan Rice, has recently been published on Amazon Kindle.

This is the author’s summary from Amazon:

 “Hanao Takemoto was a deru kugi—a nail that sticks out. He was strange in Japanese society because he stayed away from the work-hard-play-harder Japanese business culture. Morey Rice was an American friend who lived with the Takemoto family as an exchange student. Morey fell in love with Hanao’s sister Sumiko and never quite recovered from it. Sumiko later married a Japanese man and terminated her friendship with Morey.

“Japan had long reposed under American military protection. But when America begins to alienate its allies, Japan looks to a strong, brilliant business leader, who designs sophisticated ninja drones, to build up its military forces: Minoru Heike, Hanao’s brother in law, Sumiko’s husband. War almost breaks out, with Heike’s hard-liners facing Donald Trump’s loyalists. War is narrowly averted as Heike and the American Secretary of War both commit ritual suicide. Sumiko, as Heike’s widow, feels obligated to kill herself by jumping from a cliff. Morey and Hanao see her and rush to stop her. Will they reach her in time?”

The subtitle says this is a novel about an alternate Japan. That is, history the way it did not and cannot happen. There are many such novels. There are even a few of them about Japan, such as Daikon, by Samuel Hawley. In Hawley’s novel there were not just two but three atomic bombs pointed at Japan. The first two, of course, were for Hiroshima and Nagasaki as in history. The third, fictional one was on a plane that crashed and the bomb was recovered by Japanese forces, who prepared to use it against America. Now that is a clever plot! I will not tell you more about it.

The title Deru Kugi comes from the Japanese saying, Deru kugi wa utareru: the nail that sticks out will be hammered down. This refers to the overwhelming sense of conformity in Japanese society, as opposed to American individualism, in which the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Rice’s novel is not quite as clever as Hawley’s, but it still gets us to think about how likely it could be that America and Japan, which have so long been close allies, would go to war against one another a second time. It would seem unlikely, except that America, under Trump, is alienating long-time allies. Recently, Japan eliminated the famous Article Nine from its constitution, the article that prohibited building an army that could launch aggression against another country. In real life, Japan is now building its military capacity. They no longer trust America to protect them (despite heavy American investments) from China and North Korea.

This novel, as with Rice’s other novels, face up to serious issues. One that most readers have not heard about is the continued prejudice against the descendants of burakumin, the outcasts of traditional Japanese society. They now officially have full rights as citizens, but this doesn’t mean everyone likes them. Hanao’s wife is burakumin.

It is quite clear to the reader that Rice has had very long and intimate contact with Japan. There are many Japanese sentences in the novel, which the author must have written from his own personal knowledge of Japanese conversation, rather than the use of Google artificial intelligence. For example, if a Japanese person says (the sentence used in every introductory Japanese class) Kore wa hon desu, it is pronounced Kore wa hon des’. An author just picking things up from Google Translate would not know this. Also, the main plot (the narrator and a Japanese woman) is conveyed with a tenderness that must have come from actual experience.

This novel, even though it takes us to the brink of war, is riddled with humor, starting with the first sentence: “Hanao’s business associate, Chiramisu Yamaguchi, had gold coming out of his ass. Literally.” And he invented a lot of artificial-intelligence drones that are like ninja weapons. Rice also includes four embedded short stories, including “The multi-colored shakuhachi player of Hamarin Village,” based obviously on the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Readers of this blog will enjoy Deru Kugi, a novel from which you will learn a lot.

The Princess of Kashgar: A Historical Romance about Science and Common Sense

How often do you find the scientific method used in a historical romance? Not very often. But you will find it in The Princess of Kashgar by Stan Rice which I introduced in an earlier essay. Only it is not a presentation of the scientific method as developed by a succession of white Renaissance men. It is a method that the Asian protagonists discover and adopt for themselves. Science, to them, is just organized common sense, which is what Thomas Henry Huxley called it. It is based on being thoughtfully observant of the world, like the protagonists Arzu and Tao.

You cannot tell from the Amazon summary that there is any scientific content in this novel at all. But that is why I am writing about it in this science blog. The science is hidden within the sentence, “They unintentionally corrupt this paradise.”

The paradise in Princess of Kashgar, the Valley of the Peach Blossoms, is strictly communistic. Everyone is equal, and their culture enforces this equality. The only way they can maintain this paradise is through ignorance: They know nothing, and refuse to know anything, about the world outside of their valley. When Arzu and Tao escape from the Mongol empire, they corrupt this paradise by bringing, and engendering, a thirst for knowledge.

Tao, a Mandarin, starts a school in which the younger generation of the valley ask and investigate questions about their world. One example is about the Moon. Is the Moon far away and large, or is it near and small? Chinese legend says the latter, and the people of the Valley neither know or care. But Tao’s top student uses a homemade ruler (something the people did not have) to measure the full moon’s diameter at arm’s length, then climbed a mountain to measure it again. Since the two measurements were the same, that must mean that the Moon is far away. It wasn’t just the knowledge that was disruptive but the way of getting it. It was strictly forbidden to climb the mountains around the valley.

This new knowledge, and other scientific and engineering innovations that Tao’s students generate, is disruptive enough that the people ask Tao and Arzu to leave. Science can make a person, or a society, uncomfortable.

The author set this novel in a valley right at the base of the Altai Mountains. Of course, this valley does not actually exist. But every scientist who has studied human evolution will recognize these mountains as one of the last strongholds of the Denisovan people, close relatives of the Neanderthals. In fact, the cave they are named after, Denisova, is in these mountains. Like the Neanderthals, the Denisovans became extinct thousands of years before this novel takes place, a fact the author sweeps aside. Arzu actually meets the last Denisovans. This is also disruptive to the Valley people, although it turns out that the Denisovans save them from Mongol invaders.

I recommend The Princess of Kashgar to you as a historical romance that celebrates the joy of scientific discovery.

The Princess of Kashgar: A Historical Romance about a Neglected People

Historical romances are often set in exotic locations, but not too exotic. One group of people that gets overlooked in fiction, and non-fiction, in the English-speaking world is the Uyghurs of central Asia. Central Asia itself, a land of dusty hills and sheep, gets overlooked except in fiction about Marco Polo. And right now the Uyghurs desperately need our attention and respect. They live primarily in the extreme northwest of China, where the Chinese government is trying to force them to abandon their culture and assimilate into the dominant Han culture. About a decade ago, they were in the news because China had begun re-education camps to this end.

But Stan Rice’s novel The Princess of Kashgar takes place within this neglected Asian culture.

This is the author’s summary of the novel from the Amazon website:

“Arzu is a beautiful young artist from a Uyghur village near Kashgar, on the Silk Road. She is accustomed to being admired, especially by Muhemmet, who leads a revolt against the ruling Mongol Empire. The Mongol warriors kidnap Arzu, planning to take her to Xanadu for Kublai Khan. But she and her mandarin lover Tao escape to a secret paradise in the Altai Mountains, the Valley of the Peach Blossoms. They unintentionally corrupt this paradise. Expelled, they go to Xanadu, where Arzu becomes not only Kublai’s favorite woman but also his close confidante. Only Arzu can keep the Mongols from destroying Kashgar. The Khan then wants Arzu to go back to Kashgar and assassinate Muhemmet. Still unsure if she wishes to join Muhemmet’s rebellion or obey the Khan, she finds Muhemmet and takes a dagger with her into his bedroom. Her assassination attempt fails, and the Mongols slaughter her people. When the Khan dies, Arzu and Tao flee back to the mountain paradise that may or may not accept them.”

 

 

The author has taken on a very difficult literary trope: a paradise hidden in the mountains of Asia. It is almost a cliché, which sounds like the Shangri-La of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. The Shangri-La trope is itself enough reason for some people to put down the novel without even looking at it. But wait. It all depends on how the author handles it. Hilton’s novel was not actually about the people living in Shangri-La; it was about the Europeans who fly into it in an airplane and meet a wise old man, who turns out to himself be European. The native Asian people themselves play no part in Hilton’s novel except they raise the food and provide sex. Hilton’s Lost Horizon therefore falls into the same racist category as H. Rider Haggard’s She and William Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions: a true lost paradise, whether in Hudson’s South America or Haggard’s Africa or Hilton’s Himalayas, must have begun as an outpost of white civilization. It is time for this racist trope to end. The author of Princess of Kashgar has given us an indigenous Asian paradise, based upon Chinese legend.

The novel The Princess of Kashgar has filled an overlooked spot in the map of historical romance.

Meet Me in Strasbourg, Romance Novel from which You Must Confront Important Issues

In case you think that serious issues are the very thing that you are trying to get away from when you read fiction, particularly a romance, Meet Me in Strasbourg by Stan Rice might convince you otherwise. But if you like to avoid serious issues, you probably would not be reading this blog.

Two of the issues are hunger and medical debt, both of which are major crises in American life.

Other important issues involve race and ethnicity. Even romance writers feel obligated to throw in some racial diversity, but it is seldom related to the plot. Tony is Native American, and Aimée is Jewish. Tony and Aimée do indeed find one another in Strasbourg, leading to a happy ending.

But a couple of things, related to ethnicity, remain unresolved, in this novel as in life.

First, although Native Americans such as myself are a nearly invisible minority in America, we are completely unknown in France. I have to explain over and over to my new acquaintances that I am partie du tribu amerindien Cherokee, qui habite en Amerique. The French have stereotypes of Native Americans that resemble those of white Americans in the 1950s. Americans don’t like to think about Natives, because they feel guilty; but in France, Native Americans are still a humorous stereotype.

And while Hitler and La Seconde Guerre Mondiale are long past, there still are some secret Nazis in Strasbourg, maybe even more than in America. They kick over tombstones and spray-paint synagogues. At least they don’t shoot anyone.

I think the readers of this blog would enjoy Meet Me in Strasbourg by Stan Rice. Just don’t expect it to be escapism.

 

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part two: Publicity

As I described in the previous essay in the series Ecology of Fiction Publication, launching my fiction will be like a tree or a bush blooming or producing seeds. Customers will buy the books only if they notice them. The tree or bush has to attract animal pollinators or dispersers. Those that rely on wind pollination and dispersal do not have this problem; nothing can attract the wind.

I have a good problem. I have about two dozen fiction books to publish. If I publish one at a time on Kindle, I would have to allow more years than I have remaining in my life to finish them. But if I publish them in cohorts, that is, a group of books at more or less the same time (say, in the same month), then I can finish before I die. I think. But I should not have each cohort of books be randomly chosen from my works.

In nature, a tree can produce a bunch of flowers early, then another bunch of flowers later. One common pattern is that the trees start releasing their pollen first from male parts, then start receiving pollen later on female surfaces. That is, the temporal pattern is not random, but is functionally defined. It might be male vs. female trees, as in cottonwood; or male vs. female parts of a flower, as in maples. There is not enough room in this essay to explain this pattern.

Here are the categories by which I will release and publicize my fiction:

The first group would be the fiction that would be hard for me to publish commercially. I have a good novel called Meet Me In Strasbourg. I think anyone would like to read it, but it would have to be categorized, by a publisher or a librarian, as young adult intellectual romance. This is something I do not have the professional credentials for. If any agent or publisher would read even a little of it, they would like it. But they do not have time, or else their AI bots will not forward it to them. Another good book I wrote is The Princess of Kashgar which would be classified as intellectual historical romance. Once again, I have no credentials here.

But when readers search on Amazon, they do not look just for authors who have credentials in YA or historical fiction. I think I might sell some of these books, of which I have about six.

The second group would be fiction collections. I have six of these. Agents generally do not accept, nor do publishers release, story collections. Which is strange because readers like them. Well, they can find them on Kindle.

The third group would be novels, and sets of novels, that have good commercial promise. I have a bunch of these. I will hold off on these for a little while. If my first one or two groups have reasonably good sales, I can use this to get the attention of agents and publishers for this third group of books. Publishers generally do not like to publish something that has already been on Kindle. But this third group might be successful with commercial publishers if groups one and two have earned me enough money that publishers and agents might want some of it.

The fourth group is my poetry. Poetry hardly ever sells very well. And I do not have poetry credentials. I have good poetry, but Kindle is my only option for it.

A fifth group is my bad stuff. Yes, I admit I have written some. And it will just stay on my computer.

As you can see, I have a plan, and I got it from thinking about what the trees do to get their seeds dispersed out into the world. They have evolutionary fitness. Maybe I can too.

There is more, which follows in later essays.

Meet Me in Strasbourg: A Romance Novel from Which You Can Learn a Lot about Music

I gave the background of this novel in an earlier blog post.

To many people, music is just a pleasant background noise. Occasionally a good tune will stick in a person’s mind. But in this novel, Meet Me in Strasbourg, Tony’s experiences will show you how the more you know about music, the more meaningful it becomes, until it encapsulates your life. Examples include:

• The novel is centered around Die Winterreise, a song cycle by Franz Schubert which, like other Schubert song cycles, is about a lovelorn wanderer mourning the rejection of his love. Die Winterreise begins with the wanderer going to his love’s house to bid farewell to it. Then he sings about one thing after another that reminds him of how miserable he is. At the end, he gives up and joins with a penniless organ-grinder (Der Leiermann) on the street. Only Schubert’s astonishing music can rescue this poetry from utter depression. As the principal characters Tony and Aimée develop their friendship and love, their direction is certainly not that of Schubert’s wanderer. They swear that there will be no Leiermann for them! Then circumstances beyond their control intervene and crash their comfortable love.
• Tony composes band music, just good enough to perform. Having composed wind ensemble music myself, rather indifferently, I can testify that it is a very difficult task.
• Tony plays the recorder, and this music plays an essential role in bringing him and Aimée together.
• In a concert, the band plays an arrangement of the medieval hymn Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, which has (as many of you can attest) an almost magical effect upon the mind. Its climax verse is “And the powers of Hell shall vanish as the darkness fades away.” Is this really true? The stirring music forces the question upon the minds of Tony and Aimée. I will write about this in my other blog, the one devoted to religion.

One could almost believe that, in Meet Me in Strasbourg, by Stan Rice, music is not a background but a character.

Meet Me In Strasbourg: a Romance Novel from which You Can Learn a Lot of Science

You would not be reading this blog if you were not interested in science. So you probably don’t read very many romance novels. I do not; but Meet Me in Strasbourg, a novel by Stan Rice is an exception. I summarized it in an earlier essay.

 

There was a prominent scientist who loved romance novels with happy endings. That scientist was Charles Darwin. Maybe he intended the novels as escapism from the heavy issues involved with his theory of evolution, and the social unrest it caused.

But Meet Me in Strasbourg is a novel that presents many scientific concepts, not as escapism but as part of the plot and character development. These are not concepts from science class, but from the direct experiences of life. Examples include:

• All perception is illusion. The brain knows nothing except what the sensory organs tell it, and all of those sensations consist of nerve impulses. It is the brain that sorts them out into sight, hearing, taste, etc. and makes sense out of them. If the brain does this incorrectly, we call them delusions.
• There is a lot about evolution in this novel, which is why I am telling you about it in this blog. This is especially true of sexual selection, Darwin’s “other theory” of 1871. Why do we find symmetrical faces beautiful? Because they indicate a person’s health and potential fitness as a mate. Is “falling in love” just craziness? Tony’s no-nonsense friend Roald explains that if falling in love—a universal experience—were just crazy, natural selection would have gotten rid of it. But falling in love promotes sexual selection. One teacher even explained to Tony why he should want Aimée to be as beautiful as possible, even though she does not need to be, since she is already engaged to Tony. You can even find out about evolution—It’s what’s for dinner. As Tony explains to his kid sister, of course you don’t like broccoli; many vegetables taste bad because they don’t want you to eat them. But it turns out the truth is a little more complicated than this.
• You can also learn about the mathematics of probability. When Aimée vanishes and goes to France, Tony decides he is going to go there and find her. Roald, the no-nonsense friend I told you about earlier, explains that the odds of him finding Aimée would be one in a million. Of course, Tony tries it anyway.
• You can learn a surprising amount about DNA, chlorophyll, hummingbirds, stellar evolution, facial symmetry, the bacteria of the human body, and nutrition in this novel. You can even learn about how the soil holds water—explained to you by a janitor.
• One of Aimée’s creative writing class stories is about green flatworms. It turns out that flatworms on the beaches of the north coast of France are one of the best examples of symbiosis: photosynthetic algae live inside of the flatworms and make food for them, in exchange for eating the worm’s waste products.

Read Meet Me in Strasbourg, by Stan Rice. You might be surprised at how much fun the intellectual life, especially science, can be.

Meet Me in Strasbourg, an Intellectual Romance Novel

Normally, to call a novel, especially a romance novel, intellectual is the kiss of death. But if you dislike intellectual novels, you wouldn’t be reading this blog. I want to tell you about a romance novel that is anything but formulaic: Meet Me in Strasbourg, a novel by Stan Rice. The readers of this blog are interested in science and the life of the mind, things that do not usually show up in romances. Romances often have gorgeous or strikingly handsome protagonists; not this one. These characters are appealing because of their minds.

 

Here is the author’s summary, taken from the Amazon site:

“When the university-bound Native American science student Tony encounters the brilliant and painfully shy French humanities student Aimée in California, he has no idea that their love would drag him halfway around the world.

Tony and Aimée discover their shared passion for music, particularly the love-lieder of Schubert, and then for one another. Tony quickly leaves the social circle that scorned Aimée for her plainness and quietness and becomes her defender and protector. And does she need protection—from the poverty and malnutrition of living alone with her unlucky father, and from her father’s unscrupulous associates in the shadowy world of smuggling. Aimée (French for beloved) finally discovers what it is like to be loved. Just when her joy seems inevitable, she and her father disappear. Tony alters the entire course of his life to go look for her in France.”

Both Tony and Aimée are happy intellectuals. At first, their different kinds of intelligence begins to drive them apart. Every novel has to have some tension that drives the main characters apart before bringing them back together. Tony criticized Aimée’s stories in a creative writing class, and found himself having to apologize to her. A thoughtless joke also made her run from him. But even after they had become engaged, Tony continued to make mistakes that were well intentioned but created stress, such as when he wrote a solo for the painfully shy Aimée in a band piece. He meant it as a tribute to her—the piece was based upon the world’s oldest love song, from Babylonia—but ended up making her into a spectacle, which she hated more than anything else.

It is not intensely intellectual. If intensely intellectual is what you want, you should read the novels of Richard Powers. They are so intellectual that I can hardly understand them, even with a Ph.D. But they are good, especially Overstory, which might well be the best novel ever written. Back in the day, I tried to read Gold Bug Variations and gave up.

Many of the characters are very intelligent and do not attempt to hide it. The author is not afraid to follow them into significant intellectual discussions. Even the janitor/groundskeeper is intellectual. In later essays, I will give examples of science and math, and of music, that are central to the plot, not just thrown into the novel. May I recommend this novel if you, like me, believe that there are a lot more intelligent people in the world than usually show up in fiction?

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part one. Publishers vs. Kindle

I have frequently written on this blog about my non-fiction publications. But I have also written a huge amount of fiction. My fiction would be very hard to sell to commercial publishers, because I have so much science in them. That is exactly the reason that readers of this blog would like them, and commercial publishers would not.

I am no amateur in fiction writing. I have been writing fiction for decades, often rewriting the same story or novel over and over until I get it as good as it can be. In the process, I have removed whole chunks of text that I originally thought were really good but which I admitted would not advance the plot and might, however well written, cause the reader to give up.

But I have almost no fiction publications—just in a couple of minor literary journals that no longer exist. I have earned a grand total of $25, which I sent to a writer and environmentalist who, unlike me, had no steady employment. So the question arose, decades ago, how should I publish my fiction?

The days of submitting manuscripts “over the transom” ended decades ago. Now, to approach an editor of even a small press, you have to be represented by an agent. When I started writing fiction, agents were actual people, and they sent me personal responses. But now, the prospective fiction writer seldom gets any response whatsoever, and if so, it is a form letter. I now have the suspicion, in the modern age of artificial intelligence, that agents almost never read submissions, because they already know what they are going to send to publishers: the works written by their friends, themselves under a different name, or by an AI program they have installed. They claim to be looking for new talent, but I simply do not believe it. In fact, agents may actually themselves be artificial intelligences. They may have their photos on the agency website, but they may not be actual people. An agency can leave the entire process—choosing which manuscripts, if any, to represent, and then sending them to editors—to artificial intelligence. I have encountered a grand total of about five agents out of hundreds who have given personal responses that indicate that they are human. An AI bot can write fiction that is as marketable as that written by most human authors. I guess what I am saying is that getting a fiction agent for a commercial publisher is practically impossible. I have been told this by many authors—you know, the ones that spend their time and money going to writers’ conferences.

For many years, an attractive alternative has been to self-publish on Amazon. Gone are the days of vanity presses, where the author pays for a few hundred copies of the book to be printed, and then the author has to figure out what to do with them. These are the days of Amazon, in two ways:

First, no commercial publisher can afford to do “print-on-demand,” because there has to be a minimum print run of at least a thousand books each day to justify the costs of printing. But Amazon can do it, because they sell so many books. It does not have to be a thousand copies of the same book. Print-on-demand is one of the Amazon options. If just one person wants your book, they can get it.

Second, e-books cost very little to produce. A Kindle book can be produced and sent to customers with very little cost, except for maintaining the servers. Once again, if just one person wants your e-book, they can get it.

Kindle publishing is rather clumsy. If it is just text, as in most novels, it works fine. But I have never seen a really satisfactory illustration in a Kindle book. It usually ends up really small and illegible.

The advantages of Kindle books are astonishing. The software, at least now, is relatively simple. You provide a cover illustration (just the front cover), a document with the whole book in it, financial information, the jacket blurb (which will show up on the Amazon site), etc. You can do it all yourself. If you mess something up, you will get an email telling you what to fix. The best part might be that the author gets to keep 70 percent of the money. In contrast, a commercial publisher offers 10 percent, which must be split with an agent. This would mean an author gets 8 percent. A hundred books (@$5.00) generates $500, of which the author gets to keep $350. From a commercial publisher, you would get $40.

Now, for the ecology of book publishing. It is like a tree or bush disseminating its seeds. There are lots of ways of doing this. A tree could produce a few, large seeds, inside of fruits that animals want to eat; or a lot of small seeds, that blow away in the wind. Wild plant species use both options, just like a writer could use the agent/publisher option or the Amazon option. There is, in the world of publishing just as in seed dispersal, no single correct way of doing it. I spent decades on the agent/publisher route, and am now ready to try the Kindle route. My first Kindle novel just came out today.

What you don’t want to do is to publish online and then ignore all publicity. Fruits and seeds dispersed by animals put a lot of expenditure into publicity—that is, into attracting animals to disperse them. Publicity—that’s what the next essays are about.

The Incredible Burden of White Guilt

Every human being who has ever lived (except, Christians claim, Jesus) has sinned. We all know this is true, even though we cannot easily define sin. Every culture group, race, and country consists of people all of whom have sinned, many of them in a spectacularly evil fashion. There is no group from which we cannot find a long list of atrocities, from prehistory to the present.

But whites have committed atrocities way out of proportion to their numerical importance in human history, and in human culture today. The example I will examine now is slavery. Every cultural group has had slaves, primarily from among captives from other social groups. But whites have had more slaves, treated them worse, and continue to honor the tradition of slavery, more than any other group.

Take, for example, black slavery in the southern colonies, later the southern states. (These thoughts have been inspired by reading Geraldine Brooks’s novel Horse.) The main reason that southern whites started buying black slaves was that they had killed most of the Native American slaves. Native slaves were cheaper, but they were mostly dead by about the year 1600. So the whites bought slaves from Africa who were captured from their tribes and transported as cheaply as possible (tied up in their own filth in slave ships) to the South. The shrewd slave traders took into their calculations that many of their captives would die while on board.

The Southerners treated their slaves much more cruelly than was necessary or even profitable. The slaveowner men would force not just work but also sex on their slaves. I remember an exhibit of slave artifacts in a museum in Tulsa (which is the reddest red state, but museums everywhere tend to be progressive) that showed a bill of sale for slaves. A 45-year-old man went for about $50, while a seventeen-year-old girl went for $600. What did the girl have that made her twelve times as valuable? Sexuality, that’s what. Not only was it legal rape, but it was the way that plantation owners could keep up their slave populations without having to import more of them, which was theoretically illegal after 1808.

The owners would force the slaves to do whatever they chose, regardless of the strengths and talents of the slaves. In Brooks’s novel, a very skillful slave horse trainer was forced to work in the fields while inept white trainers allowed a champion racehorse to be injured. If slaves were an investment, southern white enjoyed abusing their investments in a stupid fashion. Few slave owners would permit slaves to learn to read and write; illiterate whites would look down upon even the free blacks who could read.

Not only that, but the white slave owners would take credit for any innovations or improvements in land and property that the slaves came up with.

In some cases, southern whites were nearly crazy with their lust for cruelty. A prime example was the Confederate terrorist William Quantrill, who exulted in cruelty not only against blacks but against any whites he suspected of not being racist enough. He is one of the characters in Brooks’s novel.

Whites would find or create opportunities to insult and injure even free blacks, that is, the few that were allowed to purchase their freedom. Any black person could be arrested and detained until their status as a free black could be established. This may sound uncomfortably like ICE detaining anyone they suspect of being in America illegally, but at least ICE once in a while allows claims of legitimate presence in America to be investigated.

Slaves were considered property of their white owners, but they treated their slaves worse than they would have treated any of their other property, whether mules or saddles. In some cases, they enjoyed torturing their slaves.

White racists try to use the imperfection of blacks as an excuse for past slavery and ongoing cruelty. A vendor of Confederate flags, at a roadside market in Oklahoma, told me that it was the blacks who began enslaving other blacks, that’s how the slave trade got started. But who was the market? When I told him that what he was doing was offensive, he called the sheriff, but I got away before being arrested. No, this was not back in the 1960s. This was about 2015.

I am Cherokee. Some of my ancestors owned slaves. But our collective Native guilt is far less than that of southern whites.

What about northern whites in America? Some northern whites, and some Europeans, profited from black slavery, but the entire southern American culture was based upon it.

I did not contribute to any of this. I am not responsible for the sins of my ancestors. But part of my white privilege has resulted from the oppressions of the past. Maybe nothing can be done about it now, but when I look a person of color in the eye I feel a level of guilt that goes beyond the calculus of legal liability. I cannot simply pretend that it is not there.

White guilt is a heavy burden, but the only people who feel it are those who, like myself, are trying very hard to live in a redemptive fashion and contribute to a fair and just society. I love people of color (with a few individual exceptions) even if they do not, and cannot, know it. In contrast, racists do not feel any guilt.

The burden of white guilt continues today. In Brooks’s novel, the twenty-first-century black protagonist gets shot by police who assumed, at a glance, that he was a criminal. His white friend was very upset by this, but his black friends said he should have expected it. If a black man sees police, he should just assume that he is likely to be shot. I hate to admit that this is true.

The black protagonist from the nineteenth century in Brooks’s novel chose to live in Canada, and explained why: even after emancipation, he could feel white hatred all around him.

I live in France. I am embarrassed to be an American right now, with unabashed racists in charge of the country of which I am a citizen. I am always instantly ready with an apology on behalf of my country. What can I say to the Lebanese woman in my French language class, whose cousin was just killed by an Israeli, or American, bomb? I can see in her eyes that she does not blame me, but I have to go further and assure her of my sympathy, and that I do not support Trump’s war, nor was I or American citizens in general consulted before He chose to start it as if He is God who can decide everyone’s fate.

The Teachable Moment: A Feather

When I retired from college science teaching, I thought I would continue teaching in an informal capacity. I have continued to write books and blog essays (you are reading one). I also have two grandchildren who are at the discover-the-wonder-of-the-world stage of childhood. I thought that I would impart to them fragments of my vast knowledge about the world.

Of course that is not exactly how it worked. They (ages 7 and 5) have a nearly unlimited capacity to ignore whatever anyone is saying to them, even mid-sentence. What I had to do instead was to wait for a teachable moment, when they showed spontaneous interest in something, or could be led into it.

They were playing with their nature treasure boxes, which included pigeon feathers. (Pigeons make up most of the bird biomass of Alsace.) These particular feathers were fine and delicate. I said I had a story about feathers that my mother (their great-grandmother) told me. Lena immediately said that people used to dip quills in ink to write. But, I said, they had pens by the time my mother was a little girl. Instead, I told them about how my grandfather, their great-great-grandfather, used a turkey feather to put medicine on my Mom’s face. This is not what they were expecting.

My mother, as a little girl, got into the natural world in Oklahoma by brushing poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) against her face. Of course, her face swelled up dangerously. Her father went to town in his wagon (other people had cars, but not him) to get medicine, which was probably some ointment with mercury or something in it. He used a turkey feather to gently apply it to my mother’s face. It was important to not break the skin, which would leave a scar, and also allow bacteria to infect the skin. The in my granddaughter’s box opened up a discussion of infection.

And of allergies. Poison ivy is not poison. Urushiol, found also in poison oak (T. diversilobum) and poison sumac (T. vernix) is not poisonous. It just provokes a massive allergic reaction in most people. But not in everyone. Some people do not react to urushiol at all. One of the main characteristics of allergies is that they differ from one person to the next. I told them the story of the girl with a peanut allergy who died after her boyfriend ate a candy bar and kissed her. (I heard this on the news, but have been unable to trace a source for it.) Most of us do not have peanut allergies. But Lena knew a distant cousin, on the French side of the family, who did.

Urushiol does not cause allergic reactions in all mammals. Deer eat the leaves, and squirrels eat the berries. Horses can eat the leaves. The urushiol comes out in their sweat and you can get it on your legs from riding the horse. I do not know if dogs and cats can get poison ivy, since they are primarily carnivores; but if your dog runs around in poison ivy and then runs up to you, beware of giving the dog a hug.

But it was not just science education; it was also cultural education. An Asian species, T. vernicifluum, produces sap that is used in the production of Chinese and Japanese lacquerware.

All this biology education, just from a feather in my granddaughter’s nature box. She showed genuine interest and surprise. I could easily have missed this teachable moment, had I not been watching for it.

Connections? Real and Imagined

James Burke’s Connections  and its many spinoffs were very popular on British television and American educational channels a couple of decades ago. They were certainly entertaining and thought-provoking in the way they drew connections between events of past centuries and things that have happened in the modern world. The implication is of cause and effect. But is this an illusion?

 

To quote Wikipedia: “Connections explores an “Alternative View of Change” (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g., profit, curiosity, religion) with no concept of the final, modern result to which the actions of either them or their contemporaries would lead. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.”

To this point, Burke’s view can hardly be questioned. One cannot presume or even imagine that people in past centuries could predict the consequences of their discoveries.

Wikipedia continues, “To demonstrate this view, Burke begins each episode with a particular event or innovation in the past and traces the path from that event through a series of seemingly unrelated connections to a fundamental and essential aspect of the modern world.”

To me, the key point is seemingly unconnected. Many of the purported connections are not real—not just that there is no direct, but not even any indirect, connection. The purported connections were most likely neither functional nor phylogenetic. That is, they were not processes that worked the same way, nor was one descended from the other the way amphibians were the descendants of fish. It may just be a similarity of form that Burke noticed, and nobody else could see until Burke, with his inimitable style, reified them. I had the intuition, when I watched the series (which my intelligent daughter loved), that it was all imaginary. And perhaps, I now realize, I might have been right.

Burke’s contribution was in getting his viewers excited and to use their imaginations; to ask, “I wonder if…” But this is not the end of investigation; it is merely the beginning. Not less important for it, of course.