And He Became a Living Soul

I do not write in this blog very much about abortion, since I do not fully understand the issues. But I heard an interesting news report from South Carolina. Anti-abortion protestors stand at the top of the escalator in front of state senators’ offices and accost democratic senators who did not support the total ban on abortion that has just passed. Women senators have had objects slapped onto their backs, and protestors have sent children to run up to them and beg them to stop killing kids. If progressive protestors did this to Republican senators, for example regarding the death of the environment on which our lives depend, they would be jailed.

In one case, a Democratic senator knew more about the Bible than did the protestor. The protestor screamed that the Bible says abortion is murder. The senator, a woman, quoted the Bible back to him. Genesis 2:7 says that Adam became a living soul after God had breathed into him the breath of life. This implies that before a newborn breathes, it is not yet a living soul. Of course, nobody believes abortion is ethical right up to the moment of birth.

Genesis implies, but does not prove, that a fetus is NOT alive. The point is that this interpretation is just as valid as the other interpretations that the anti-abortion activists put upon it. The so-called Christian activists insist that their interpretation, and theirs alone, is correct. They will not permit anyone else to interpret scripture. Apparently God speaks through the Republican party, not through the Bible.

Only Republicans think they have the right to interpret the Bible. The Bible is their weapon, and nobody else can lay a finger on it. God is their God, not the God of the rest of us. Puh-raise Trump!

More about Gorilla Lawyers

In an earlier essay "Gorilla lawyers and jury abuse" I wrote about the evolution of gorilla lawyers in the Oklahoma justice system. Then, in September 2022, there was an interesting new development not in the case but with regard to the District Attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, who argued the case against the accused rapist.

I described my experience in the jury pool for a case that Kunzweiler was arguing. It was clear to me that he was enamored of his male-gorilla role over the jury. He insulted all of us, particularly two women who both ended up being excused, and who left the courtroom in tears and hugging each other. This is the sort of thing that a gorilla-lawyer loves to do. Another woman told me, “I felt like I was on trial.” The only person who was worse was the defense attorney, who even looked like Edward G. Robinson.

The interesting new development is that, on September 27, 2022, Steve Kunzweiler was stabbed by his mentally unstable daughter. There had to be a story leading up to that event, which at this writing has not been publicized. Is it possible that Kunzweiler was such a strict and negative person that he drove his daughter to the crime? Or would it have happened anyway? All I can say is, he was not a humble person and may have precipitated the crime in some way, although neither he nor anyone else deserves to be stabbed.

This makes me wonder if, that day in March 2022, Kunzweiler came to the courtroom with family matters on his mind. He took out his stresses on us, the jury pool. This was unprofessional. The jury pool was made to suffer from his anger.

One can only hope that, as he recovers from the nonlethal wounds, Kunzweiler will learn a little humility, and it might make criminal justice in Tulsa County a little more efficient—for lashing out at the jury is a waste of time if their job is to determine the innocence or guilt of the defendant. As a Republican, Kunzweiler is a hard-liner against not only defendants but, it appears, against the jury as well. Might he reconsider his stance? Considering how few Republicans ever change their minds about anything, I am not holding my breath.

Update: The very next day, Kunzweiler broke ranks with all other Republicans in calling for more, not less, government spending—on mental health interventions. Republicans tend to be mean on everything unless it affects their own lives directly, as in these two other examples:

• Dick Cheney was famous for his hard line on all social issues, except one: he thinks gays and lesbians are just people. This is undoubtedly connected with the fact that his daughter Mary is a lesbian.
• Florida governor Ron DeSantis opposes federal intervention, even for natural disasters; he opposed federal help for New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy. But he suddenly accepted federal help when a hurricane hit his state, as occurred in September 2022.

Don't Offend the Extreme Right: The Darwinian Marketplace

Back in 2011, at the suggestion of Oklahoma’s grand old man of science, Vic Hutchison, I started emailing college biology departments across Oklahoma and requesting that they post a statement supporting evolutionary science on their departmental websites. I even provided a sample that they could use as a draft.

A number of universities—usually the biggest ones, who were confident of their enrollment—responded positively: several departments at OU (the University of Oklahoma), OSU (Oklahoma State), and at TU (University of Tulsa). Even some historically religious colleges posted statements, including OCU (Oklahoma City University).

A couple of departments, however, were unable to reach agreement about support for teaching evolution. East Central University (a state university) and Southern Nazarene University (a private university) both had creationist faculty members who shot down the idea.

But what about the universities I never heard back from? I cannot know, of course, but I can relate the experience at my own institution (Southeastern Oklahoma State University). The faculty completely supported the evolution statement, and it perfectly reflected what we teach. But they did not want to post it. We did not want to alarm any prospective students or their parents. This took me by surprise, but when I thought about it, I could see market forces (Darwinian market forces) at work.

The economic survival of our university depends on getting students to register for our classes, and to finish their degrees. That’s pretty much it. We have been doing it better than many other Oklahoma colleges and universities. While others were suffering economic reversals, we continued growing; and we have not shrunk very much during the pandemic. Our success, I think, made our sister institutions a little jealous. If we put an evolution statement (or a global climate change statement) on our website, the students might decide to go somewhere else, or their parents might make that decision for them.

Now, the reasoning goes, once the students arrive, they will discover that evolution is included in their science courses. In my experience, a few of them have been upset, and may have written home about it. But, for the most part, they either did not care, or were surprised to discover evolution was not the Worship of Satan as their preachers had told them it was. The goal of educating students about evolution was achieved, for the most part. (Many of them just ignore the subject.) Therefore, I cannot argue with the decision for our department to remain silent on our website about the subject of evolution.

Let me tell you the story of one of my general biology students. He took every opportunity he could to let me know how stupid he thought I was. One of my exam questions was about Neanderthals. Europeans have a few Neanderthal genes, and Neanderthal bones have some DNA in them. I simply asked if it was possible to clone a Neanderthal. The correct answer, having nothing to do with evolution, is that we have a few Neanderthal genes but no Neanderthal nuclei for cloning. It was a biotech question. But this student said that since you evolutionists think you have some Neanderthal genes, why don’t you just use those genes to clone a Neanderthal? He went out of his way to insult me. My reaction was simply to write down a zero for that question.

I also required a paper, which I graded leniently, about a semester project in which each student chooses some activity to promote their health and reduce their carbon footprint. Nearly every student got full credit. But this student said that he decided to drive his big truck less. He made it clear that the reason was not for health or to reduce his carbon footprint, but because of high gas prices which he blamed on Biden; his citation was #Letsgobrandon. Then he decided to get out his old childhood bicycle and ride it. But it was too small. The seat was narrower than an Ethiopian hunter, he said. The seat broke; the bar under the seat poked him, as he said, right up the butt. He threw the bike in the ditch and gave up. I’m sure you can see as readily as I that he just made this stuff up. But I couldn’t prove it, so I gave him credit for the paper.

This student also took every opportunity to insult the ideas of vaccination, masking, and social distancing. He even emailed me to defend the use of ivermectin as a treatment for covid.

One of our laboratory activities was about the Donner Party. You can learn a lot about human physiology by studying the demographic records of this group of pioneers that was starving out in the snow during the California gold rush. One of the questions in the manual was about possible ways in which men could contribute to the survival of their families or of the group. He wrote that the men could keep the women warm. This was just one indication of his misogyny, to go along with his racism.

He seemed to be doing his best to get as bad of a grade as possible without actually failing the course. He wanted a D and he got it.

My point in telling his story is this. The only way our university can survive economically is by pleasing students like him. He cannot tell us to not teach evolution, global climate change, and public health. And we already do not penalize students for their religious beliefs. The ability of other students to learn about science is not obstructed by this student’s quiet resentment. But if I challenged him, privately (as his insults were private), he could complain to the university administration, and the administration would tell me to back off. So I took the easiest—and perhaps wisest—approach: I calculated up the points for the things he got right, and calculated his grade, making no comments.

This is how the Darwinian marketplace works. We have to get students to come and pay us. Any university that gave students an inferior educational experience would lose enrollment. But so also would any university that proclaimed scientific truth. The students who want to learn—or, more often, do not care—will still come. But our survival may depend on that marginal recruitment of angry right-wingers, who would almost certainly not come if we had website statements supporting the science of evolution, of global warming, and of public health. We would prefer to have no anti-science racist students, but if they must go to college somewhere, we want them to come to Southeastern, not to East Central.

Would Single-Party Republican Rulership Be So Bad?

Happy Washington’s Birthday, everybody. I continue my series about the inevitability of a permanent Republican takeover of America. The previous essays were about how the Republicans will institute their permanent rule, and how the military will not stop it. In this third essay: would it be so bad? I think Republicans are evil, but could I live with them as our dictators? Many Americans would hate it but go along with it.

Most nations in the world have, officially or unofficially, single-party rulership. In China, it is official; the Communist Party. In Russia, it is unofficial; whatever Vladimir Putin wants. The Chinese people don’t like it, but they don’t want to incite civil unrest that would jeopardize their already unstable economic situation. The average Chinese citizen might say, let Xi Jinping do whatever he wants, let the Party leadership proclaim Him to be God or pretty close to it, an equal in the Celestial Kingdom to Mao Himself as of December 2021, just don’t hurt me. In Russia, it is literally a joke. Vladimir Putin was term-limited, but he traded off his rulership with Dmitry Medvedev, who did whatever Putin told him. Thus Putin was the ruler and yet still fit within the Russian constitution. Here is an actual joke overheard in Moscow: Putin and Medvedev were in a restaurant...

• Waiter (to Putin): What will it be?
• Putin: I’ll have the steak.
• Waiter: And what about the vegetable?
• Putin: He’ll have the steak too.

Russians snickered and got on with the business of hacking our computer systems. Of course, since they have utterly no hope of emerging from the rule of the Putin clique, they then go home and drink vodka.

So long as you don’t pull a Navalny in Russia or a Hong Kong in China, then the government doesn’t want to bother you. They have bigger fish to fry. When faced with the choice of whether to give up their lives for democracy or to let dictators swagger around, they choose the easy route. Patrick Henry has been dead a long time, folks. The only people who suffer much are the Uyghurs in China, and the ethnic minorities in Afghanistan, and…okay, it’s quite a list.

Occasionally, single-party rule can get out of hand. This happened most famously in World War II, in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Today, most people have heard of the murderous troops in Myanmar. But of the scores of undemocratic countries in the world, very few have become hell on Earth.

What this means is that if the Republicans establish a permanent dictatorship in America, most Americans will find some way of continuing their lives. If the Rulers won’t let you have off time to vote, they certainly won’t let you have enough time off to protest or revolt. After the Republicans have run the education system for a couple of decades, nobody will remember that life was any different. Already, Republicans have (by law in Oklahoma) prevented teachers from telling students about Native American genocide and the Tulsa Race Massacre. The sponsor of the law, who represents the city I work in, told a gathering at our university that he intended his law to prevent some people [read, white people] from feeling bad about what their race has done in the past. Before taking questions, he ran off. After a few years of Republican rule, white people will settle smugly into a benign cloud of satisfaction, and minorities will be working too hard to bother with trying to change the system. They won’t remember a time when votes actually mattered.

To me, personally, the most significant loss would be the death of patriotism. I was so enthusiastic about America when I was a kid. But now that the American flag has been taken over by the Republicans, and even Confederates consider themselves American patriots, I have become totally cynical about my country. I did not plan for this to happen.

 

American Single-Party Rulership and the Military: More Evolutionary Perspective

As established in the Constitution, the American military serves a civilian government. But that could quickly change, as I describe below.

Most of us Americans have faith that the armed forces will not serve as the enforcement arm of a dictatorship. What this means is: (1) The military as a whole will not support an attempted Republican dictatorship. The current military leadership took steps to restrain the possible abuse of military power, including nuclear weapons, by former president Trump in his final, unstable days in office. (2) Not all military personnel will support a Republican dictatorship. In fact, it is likely that most will not. We all know of individual members of the military who serve America, not a political party.

But there could still be a military coup not acting on its own but supporting the civilian attempt to establish Republican single-party rule. There will be enough military personnel who will support Trump to make the coup successful. They, the extremists, are well organized; when they act, they will leave the freedom-loving members of the military reeling with confusion and unable to prevent the coup.

We have known for months that the internal security of the US military has been weak, leaving it open to infiltration by criminals or extremists. This article describes the disappearance of thousands of weapons from the US military.

While most military personnel are not extremists, there are enough of them that, in late December, the Pentagon announced an initiative to investigate right-wing extremism in the military.

This military coup will leave America vulnerable to Russian and/or Chinese aggression.

This is the evolutionary perspective: Throughout human history and prehistory, the organized forces of power have predominated over the less-organized forces of peace. Except for brief moments in world history, as exemplified by the United States, the United Nations, and the European Union. I fear we are about to lose the first.

A Modest Proposal for American Single-Party Rule

 

I made the claim in the previous essay that permanent Republican rule of America is inevitable. If Republican legislatures proclaim Republican electors regardless of the popular vote, they will always have 315 electors. They can do this with existing districts; once they get through gerrymandering, they might have even more. Note: I wrote the previous essay before the scandal broke about the fake electoral votes the Republicans planned to create.

But would the Republican Party actually do this? The first reaction of even progressives used to be, No, of course they won’t. They will respect the outcomes of elections. All of us really wanted to believe this. But in recent years, it has become clear that Republicans are ready to take even violent means to grab and maintain power. Before a man actually drove a car at high speed into a racial justice rally in Charlottesville in 2017, we would all have said that this could not happen. Before an armed right wing militia took over the Michigan state house in 2020, we would all have said that this could not happen (see this BBC report). And none of us could have imagined that armed right wing protestors would carry out a violent act of terrorism against the Capitol in Washington, D. C. in 2021. If they have already done these violent things, why would they not take forceful but non-violent action to secure permanent control over the country?

Therefore, instead of saying, They could but they won’t, we must say, They could and they might. If so, how could they do this? I will make a modest proposal (sensu Jonathan Swift) of one way they could solidify their absolute control. How can they actually institute policies that can make white supremacy the law of the land? Just having 315 electors forever into the future is not enough to accomplish this.

They could partially disenfranchise people who are likely to vote against them. They have already tried to do this by making it very, very difficult to vote it you live in a district dominated by minority voters. But they could make it official. They could, for example, pass a law that a minority vote counts as only a partial vote. They could, for example, pass a law that says a minority vote is actually only three-fifths of a vote. I did not just pull this number out of the air. In the original constitution, slaves were to count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of population size, even though none of them could vote. It would not be too much of a stretch to claim that the votes of ex-slaves, as well as Hispanics and Native Americans, would each count as three-fifths of a vote.

You can easily imagine that this would be challenged in court. But since the Constitution does not explicitly forbid this, would the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court actually turn down such a law?

One can imagine that, should a three-fifths law be implemented, there would be a rush of people who would claim that they are not minorities, thus holding onto their right to be counted as a full vote. Barack Obama, exactly half black and half white, could have claimed to be white as legitimately as to be black. Most members of most Native tribes are not full-blooded Natives. Go to a Cherokee National Holiday, and almost everyone you will see looks white. You don’t have to have a certain minimum “blood quantum” in order to be considered Cherokee. My mother was about one-eighth, which is exactly the same as her great-grandmother who was Cherokee enough to have come to Oklahoma in 1838 on the Trail of Tears, and exactly the same blood quantum as the most famous Cherokee Chief, John Ross. I could easily “pass for white.” But my Cherokee ancestry is a matter of public record. I am 17/256 Cherokee.

Conservatives have long considered part-blood minorities to be minorities. No Republican considers Barack Obama to be white. Homer Plessy, the “black” man in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision, was seven-eighths white. Republicans would want to expand the non-white portion of the American population to be as inclusive as possible, in the event of a three-fifths vote. This idea goes back as far as whites have dominated darker people; the “one-drop” rule, made into law before the Civil War, said that if you had even one drop of dark blood, you were dark. In some cases, including part-blood Natives in with the three-fifths votes would backfire. Here in Oklahoma, a lot of the right-wing extremists look white but drive around with Native nation license plates. But, on the whole, white racists would benefit from classifying minorities according to the one-drop rule.

The old days are past when counting “three-fifths of a vote” would take longer than a simple tally. But now a computer can do this calculation, for a whole state, in a few seconds.

I can find nothing that would prevent a permanently Republican federal government from instituting a three-fifths voting rule except the fear of a lawsuit over constitutionality. In such a case, even many reliably “blue” states would flip red, and the Republicans would permanently have much more than 315 electors. You could calculate the result. Just take the percentage of minority citizens in each state, multiply them by 0.6, leave the whites at 1.0, and calculate the results. You don’t even need a computer for this, though a calculator would help. I choose to not spend my time doing this.

I am not being any more serious about this than Jonathan Swift was with his Modest Proposal. I am just trying to get you to think of the possibilities. Whatever happens, we must be aware that the future of the United States might be one of permanent suppression of minority votes.

Democracy is About to End: An Evolutionary Prediction

Ever since the American Declaration of Independence, democracy has been considered the highest achievement of society. Some countries embraced it, some were forced into it. Even today’s dictatorships try to pretend that they are democracies. Less in the achievement than in the image, democracy (widely considered an American invention) has been revered for almost 250 years.

But is it something that we idealistically invented, or is it the product of human evolution? I argue the former, and that human evolution will eventually cause the extinction of democracy.

Democracy is a kind of altruism, in which people give up some of their individual rights to others. For example, warlords want to be dictators, but a democratic system forces them to surrender these rights for the sake of the rest of the people in the country. However much the right-wing militias in America want to impose their will on the whole country by force of arms, the Constitution prevents them from doing so.

This kind of altruism would seem to be good for everyone. In democracy, the selfish interest of almost all individuals is best served by pursuing the interests of all of us. Democracy, rather than roving bands of warlord separatists, is the most efficiently selfish way for almost everyone to maximize their wealth, health, and safety. Try to imagine a country in which every investment could be destroyed by militias without notice. Would you invest in Afghanistan?

But the course of history is inexorably going toward single-party rulership. I will focus just on the United States.

The Republican Party has openly declared that they are going to establish a permanent single-party rulership. Donald Trump demanded that all states with Republican legislatures should appoint a slate of Republican electors, even if the Republicans lost the popular vote. This is what they plan to do. I believe them.

Can they do this? The Constitution, apparently, supports their right to do this. Right at the beginning of Article Two, the Constitution reads, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” No legislature has ever appointed electors in contradiction to the popular vote, but there is no reason they cannot begin doing so in 2024.

One would think that a legislature would need a justification for declaring a slate of electors different than the one indicated by the popular vote. Actually, they don’t, but they would probably want to have a justification to use. We all know what that justification would be: the popular vote cannot be trusted because there is a suspicion of voter fraud.

There will always be suspicion of voter fraud. Always, always, always. If a Red legislature says they have suspicions, then there are suspicions. Evidence? They have made their claims that the Democrats “stole the 2020 election” with no evidence whatever; why should they start needing evidence in the future? All the Red legislatures would have to do is to say, sorry folks, we think that there is fraud in the popular results.

Let’s consider the numbers from the 2020 election. Reliably Democratic states collectively have 213 electoral votes. Reliably Republican states have 229 electoral votes. (Even some of these states, however, have been partly Democratic in the past. Oklahoma, where I live, used to have a Democratic governor, as did Texas.) The other states (Virginia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia) have a total of 86 electoral votes. If, as they plan, Republican legislatures from these states declare Republican electors either in defiance of or agreement with the popular vote, there will be 315 Republican electors. They intend this situation to be permanent; I  believe them. We will therefore have, starting in 2025, a permanent Republican president.

This situation can lead to a permanent one-party rule in America. Once the Republicans rule, they can pass legislation, or at least proclaim executive orders, that will block minority voters from voting. Who is to stop them? The Supreme Court will not. Congrass? There are moderate Republicans who would consider the destruction of democracy to be unacceptable. But they have been deliberately displaced from positions of leadership in Congrass. Any remaining moderate Republicans will be putting their careers on the line by opposing whatever Donald Trump might decide to do. These Republicans, which is to say most Republicans, will allow the extremists to do what they want.

To the Trump Republicans, Democrats are heathens, but moderate Republicans are heretics. Guess which one is worse.

For each of the “swing” states, there are two possible outcomes. First, if the legislature in any of these states is Republican, then the electors will be Republican. Second, if the legislature in any of these states is Democratic, and such legislatures vote to accept the blue popular vote without overturning it, violent militias will storm the state capitols and take them over by force. They have already done so in Michigan (see article here). All I am saying is that they will do so again. These are the two reasons that no swing state will ever again have Democratic electors.

Throughout human evolutionary history, from tribalism to civilization, most people have wanted forceful leaders to impose their will on everyone else. They are deluded into thinking that these forceful leaders will represent them. Then the situation gets out of hand. It is unclear how many Germans really, really wanted Hitler to exterminate the Jews. But they supported him until it was too late. Then they just had to go along with him. Above all, humans are afraid to take a stand against abusive power.

The result must inevitably be that the world will consist primarily of dictatorships that are ready to go to war with each other; and these dictators will have the allegiance of a minority of their citizens, while a majority simply goes along with them.

Neil Young claims that love, spearheaded by his music, will save us. Were it only so.

A Future Full of Plagues

 

Happy New Year, y’all.

The late nineteenth and the twentieth century was an amazing time of medical progress. Nearly every disease at least began to submit to scientific eradication. Not just infectious diseases, but cancer and nutritional diseases also. It seemed as if nothing could stop the progress of medicine.

But, it was apparent by the late twentieth century, one thing could stop the progress of medicine against bacterial diseases: the evolution of antibiotic resistance. Many bacteria that cause disease (which most do not) evolved resistance against many antibiotics, rendering them obsolete. This actually occurred by the process of natural selection: resistance evolved. By the end of the twentieth century, two things became apparent. The first is that we needed to keep developing new antibiotics. The second is that we had to decrease our reliance on antibiotics.

With regard to the first, we have done an inadequate job. Private pharmaceutical companies have not been developing new antibiotics as rapidly as the old ones become obsolete. This is because new antibiotics are not profitable. When a corporation develops a new antibiotic, it has a limited time span of use. First, each patient takes the antibiotic for a limited time, usually ten to fifteen days. Second, after a few years, the bacteria evolve resistance. It is much more profitable for pharmaceutical corporations to develop and market new drugs against diseases that cannot evolve resistance, and for which the patient must take the drug every day for the rest of his or her life. An example would be depression. The result is that our “armamentarium” (medical historians like military metaphors) of antibiotics is growing smaller each year.

With regard to the second, there are clearly things that we can do. Doctors used to prescribe antibiotics with little regard as to whether they were necessary. Since antibiotics do not work against viruses, doctors began to prescribe antibiotics only after they knew the infection was bacterial, not viral, in origin. This was and continues to be a good thing. But another thing we can all do to reduce the use of antibiotics is to prevent the spread of diseases.

There are many ways to reduce the spread of disease, and everyone knows what they are. As the covid pandemic broke out, and before vaccinations were available, we were told to practice social distancing and to wear masks. These practices were very effective, so that covid incidence began to decline even before vaccinations were widely available. It is now very clear that we can reduce our dependence on antibiotics by using vaccination, masking, and social distancing to control the spread of bacterial diseases. If we do these things, the old antibiotics will become obsolete more slowly, or, if we are lucky, not at all. Penicillin almost became obsolete, but it remains effective for some uses even after almost eighty years of use.

But there are no antibiotics against viruses. For viral diseases such as the various kinds of coronavirus, we have only vaccination, masking, and social distancing. That’s it. (Well, there is one alternative: massive dieoff, in which natural selection produces a resistant population of humans. I have actually had people tell me that this is an acceptable solution to the problem.)

Political conservatives in many countries, however, have shown hostility against all three of these ways of preventing the spread of disease. The Islamic fundamentalists have been rejecting vaccination for decades, with the result that many diseases that could have been eradicated are still in the world. And now Christian fundamentalists, and fierce conservatives (often the same people) reject masking, social distancing, and vaccination with unbridled fervor. They would, literally die—and have you die, too—than to participate in any of these.

New infectious diseases will come along. They always do. And when the next one comes, millions of fierce conservatives will make sure that the disease gets a free ride to spread through the world as much as possible. It is almost as if death from covid (even their own deaths) are a badge of honor to them. If the disease is bacterial, these conservatives who would rather die than to wear a mask will get the germs to spread faster than antibiotics can be used to control them.

The nurse in this photo is showing a headline to a man who is confined to a ventilator because the polio virus destroyed the nerves that allowed him to breathe. The news came too late for him, but the nurse intended it as good news that, at least, the next generation of people would not have to suffer from polio. Neither of them would have guessed that millions of people would consider the polio vaccine to be evil. When Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine; when Louis Pasteur developed the rabies vaccine; when Jonas Salk developed one of the polio vaccines—they could not have imagined that people would consider them evil and actively work against them.

We are, it appears, entering a new dark age of plagues. We have political conservatives to thank for it.

An Artificial Pandemic

I am reporting to you from inside the covid pandemic in America in 2021. Back in 2020, when we had mask mandates, the number of covid cases began to decline a little, then steeply declined in 2021 because of widespread vaccination. By early summer 2021, it seemed to most of us that the end of the pandemic was in sight.

But only a couple of months later, the pandemic had come back. There were as many people sick from covid (though fewer dying) as during the previous surge. The differences this time:

• The vaccine (from whichever company) proved remarkably effective. “Breakthrough” cases, in which fully vaccinated people became ill, were very rare. Almost all of the covid cases were unvaccinated people. It is a pandemic primarily of the unvaccinated.
• In many southern, conservative states, vaccination rates are very low. In Oklahoma, only about one-third of the people are even partially vaccinated. The main, though not the only, reason for this is that the extremely right-wing people think that the government, at any level, has no right to require vaccination or masks.
• Right-wing politicians rammed through an agenda of blocking mask requirements. In some states, such as Texas and Florida, Republican governors issued executive orders prohibiting mask mandates, even at schools and hospitals. In Oklahoma, not only did Governor Kevin Stitt issue an executive order, but the state legislature passed a law, prohibiting mask mandates. It is illegal for me, or the university at which I work in Oklahoma, to require students to wear masks.

The result is many thousands of people who are sick from, and many more thousands are carriers of, the coronavirus. That is, Oklahoma and other states have a huge population of viruses lurking inside the bodies of humans.

In many other countries, large numbers of people are sick from covid because of limited access to vaccines. But in America, it is because the majority of people refuse the vaccines that are freely available to them—even when incentives are offered. At my university, you can get $100 for getting the vaccine.

And from there, evolution runs the show. Here’s how:

• Mutations occur all the time. The result is mutant viruses. Not all of them, but just a few.
• The greater the population of viruses, the more chance there is that a dangerous mutation will occur. This is where the delta variant came from. This is a matter of probability. If there had been fewer sick people, the population of viruses would have been smaller, and this particular variant might not have occurred. If you have ten times as many sick people, the mutation is ten times more likely to occur. This is exactly what happened as a result of people refusing vaccination.
• If the mutation enhances the ability of the virus to spread to other people, natural selection will favor it. If a mutant strain of virus can infect ten times as many people as a previous strain, it will spread ten times as fast. Soon it will become the dominant, or maybe the exclusive, strain of virus. This is exactly what happened with the delta variant, which is almost the only strain of covid now in the United States.
• Evolution cannot be stopped, even if the majority of Oklahomans reject evolution. It happens anyway.

If you have refused vaccination for reasons other than a health condition, you have helped to create an artificial pandemic. The pandemic would have “burned itself out” and our population might have reached “herd immunity,” to use popular phrases, if almost everyone had been vaccinated. If you refused vaccination, you have contributed to the illness of hundreds of thousands of people and the deaths of hundreds.

If you decided to not get vaccinated, it is not just a personal decision, but one that you have foisted on everybody. On me, for example. I am required to teach in-person classes at my university. Even if I wear a mask, there is at least a slight risk that I will get infected by the virus. The risk is cumulative. If my odds of getting infected in a typical laboratory session are one in a hundred thousand, by the end of the semester with 50 lab meetings, my odds will have increased to one in two thousand. Is this a risk I am willing to take? I should make this decision, but in Oklahoma, that decision has been made for me by the governor, the legislature, and the seventy percent of people who have refused vaccination. Unvaccinated people hold the power of life or death over me. Even if I do not die, I could bring the virus home to infect my wife, daughter, son-in-law, and/or two grandchildren.

Therefore, in Oklahoma, a majority of the people believe that “I have an absolute, God-given right to spread germs to other people, and maybe kill them.” Their right to be free from societal responsibility is more important than the right of other people to live.

The huge number of covid victims, nearly all of them unvaccinated, has clogged our health care system. Health administrators in Oklahoma have repeatedly warned that the system is on the brink of collapse. In some places, covid patients have to wait in the ER for admission to the hospital. In other states, patients are being put in beds in the cafeteria. This is almost all due to people refusing vaccination. Thanks a lot, right-wingers!

In one state, Arkansas, the Republican governor (Asa Hutchinson) issued an executive order banning mask mandates. The order was struck down in court. Hutchinson’s response was to say he had reconsidered, and that his order against mask mandates had been wrong. He welcomed the court’s decision. As far as I am aware, he is the only prominent Republican who has had this change of heart.

The pandemic will probably never stop. The reason is evolution. There will be new variants, and they will spread, even if the delta variant eventually dies out. Thanks to right-wing extremists, who will continue to refuse vaccination, the covid pandemic will become a permanent aspect of our culture forever into the future. I hope events will prove me wrong, but the facts and the reasoning above seem indisputable. That is, unless, maybe, the virus kills most of the right-wingers. But this will probably not happen. They will just remain a permanent strain on our health care system, and continue to add billions of dollars to our collective debt.

Arizona Ballot Audit: Miracles in the Service of Racism

This week, the Arizona re-audit of 2020 election ballots received international attention. This is a science blog. The Arizona re-audit of ballots provides a good opportunity to examine the process of scientific inquiry, in fact the process of determining the truth, and the results are not pretty. They indicate a strong tendency within the Arizona Republican Party, and the Republican Party in general, toward racism.

AP photo

Most Arizona Republicans are, we assume, not racist. But enough of them are that they have started a conspiracy theory: that 20,000 ballots were flown in from China pre-marked for Biden and Harris; that these ballots were stuffed into ballot boxes, thus contributing to a Democratic victory in Arizona. And the rest of the Arizona Republicans, even those who call the conspiracy theorists crazy and unhinged, are going along with them in support of the re-audit. 

I will apply some of the ideas in my recent book, Scientifically Thinking, to this claim, not because the conspiracy theory deserves any examination, but in order to learn some things, some very disturbing things, about Republicans.

First, there is open and obvious bias in the re-audit. The contractor conducting the audit is called CyberNinjas. With a name like that, the far-right Republican bias of the contractor is obvious. They are looking only for things that will, in their estimation, prove the Chinese connection, and can easily overlook any evidence to the contrary, even if individual employees do not intend to do so.

Second, the conspiracy claim is untestable. If the Republicans find any ballots that they consider to be fraudulent, they will claim that they have proven that the election was stolen—a claim that Donald Trump still makes, and that about half of Republicans believe with religious fervor, even if they do not believe the China theory. But if they do not, they will merely claim that the fraud was so perfect that it left no evidence. That is, the conspiracy theorists have already decided that they are correct, no matter which conclusion is reached by the audit.

Third, is their scenario even possible? How could China have gotten 20,000 ballots slipped into ballot boxes in Arizona? Did Chinese nationals carry ballots with them to the United States, travel to Arizona, and cram the ballots in? Is there any evidence that there was an influx of Chinese nationals going to Arizona? Or, perhaps, the Chinese government sent them to Chinese nationals who were already here. Since there is no evidence of Chinese nationals visiting Arizona or stuffing ballots, then it must have been Asian Americans who did it and did so without leaving any evidence. Sneaky devils! And that is my point. This conspiracy theory is racist because it buys in with widespread hatred of Asian Americans, which came to national attention in 2021. It would require supernatural powers for the Asian Americans to sneak the ballots into the boxes, and to coordinate this activity among themselves without the use of social media. That is, they would have to be demons. This is something that some Arizona Republicans believe, and the others are willing to consider as a possibility.

Fourth, what are the criteria for the evidence? I can hardly say it, it is so weird: they are looking for bamboo fibers in the paper on which the ballots were printed. Bamboo fibers in the paper would, they think, prove that the ballots were printed in China. Most Chinese paper is probably made from the wood of poplar, of which China has large plantations. But even more important is the question about how to recognize bamboo fibers in the paper. One question is, how much bamboo would they consider to be enough bamboo to call it bamboo-based paper? But even more important is the question about how to recognize bamboo fibers in the first place. A microscopic view of bamboo xylem (found here but which I cannot copy for this essay) looks almost the same as any other xylem, which is the kind of fiber from which paper is typically made. My point is that the conspiracy theorists never bothered to specify how bamboo fibers were to be recognized.

None of this really matters, of course. The Arizona Republican racists will continue to claim that Trump won the state and national election, even without ANY evidence to back it up. To them, it is a matter of religious devotion. Former Republican Senator Jeff Flake (warning: this site has a paywall and may demand money from you to look at the article) said in a radio interview on May 14, 2021 that his party (if they allow him to remain) is in denial of reality. I would go further and say that they do not believe there is such a thing as reality except whatever Donald Trump asserts. That is their entire reality.

This is such an extreme position—not simply unscientific, but against the very basis of human consciousness—that some Republicans are calling for others to form a new party.