Female Genital Mutilation Rates in Africa

Thanks to Calestous Juma for the map.

About Declaring Junipero Serra a Saint

The canonization (declaration of sainthood) of Father Junipero Serra has proven controversial. Many are pleased that a Hispanic was so honored, and that he was honored for his acts in what is now the USA. Moreover, Serra was so honored by the Pope during a mass said for the first time in the USA. Others are deeply offended by what they perceive is an honor accorded to a man who helped destroy Indian culture, who helped bring decimating diseases to the California Indians, and whose missions maltreated the very converts that they had made. Apparently, this latter group even desecrated the Carmel Mission where Serra is buried.

I am no expert on the subject, but perhaps I can bring some light to the controversy.  The History Book Club to which I belong recently discussed Father Serra's life after reading Junipero Serra: California's Founding Father by Steven W. Hackel; this relatively new book has gotten good reviews.

As a general principle, do not expect that the Roman Catholic Church, which is evangelical, will accept an argument that its missionaries did wrong in converting those of other faiths to Catholicism. A fundamental principle of the religion is that it was created by Jesus Christ who charged his apostles to go forth and convert people to the religion that he had founded. The church continues its evangelical efforts in response to that directive. That is how it came to have 1.2 billion members. Nor should you expect that California Indians and other  anti-colonialists will accept Serra, an agent of Spanish colonial power as hero or role model.

What Does It Mean When the Catholic Church Declares Someone a Saint?

Canonization is a declaration by the church that the newly declared saint led a life that was in important parts worthy of emulation by Catholics.

It does not mean that the person was without sin, nor that the person did not make mistakes in his/her lifetime. Human beings sin and make mistakes -- all of us do! Indeed, the Catholic Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation is very important in church practice in that it provides a means for the forgiveness of sins.

How Serious is the Church Effort to Assure that a Person so Honored is Worthy of the Honor?

The process by which a person is declared a saint by the Catholic Church is long and arduous. Here are a couple of descriptions of that process:

• In Wikipedia
• The procedure set forth formally by Pope John Paul II in 1983.

Junipero Serra died in 1784 and was canonized a saint in 2015; this hardly seems precipitous.

Statue of Serra
in the Capitol

Compare this with the placement of a statue of Serra in the Capitol Building in 1931 on the motion of California, one of two allowing the state to identify founding fathers of its culture and civilization.

Of course, there were reasons that the canonization was done now. It served to recognize and enhance the importance of the Hispanic culture in the USA. It was a very beautiful event that Pope Francis could conduct before the greatest possible audience. It had special impact as the first time a mass was ever conducted in the USA to formally declare someone a saint, and it was focused on someone who had performed his most visible and important services in what is not the USA.

I suspect that Pope Francis did not take the step lightly. He is after all the head of a 2000 year old church, responsible to turn it over to the next pope in good condition. He had earlier formally apologized for the role of the Catholic Church in the mistreatment of American Indians, and must have been aware of the movement in the U.S. Indian community to oppose Serra's canonization as inappropriate. I suspect he personally considered the options (he is after all a Jesuit, with advanced training in theology) and decided that the canonization was merited. Of course, Pope Francis is human and could be wrong.

Why Did Serra Do What He Did?

For those who are not familiar with the Catholic Church, I will give a little background which I think helps one understand Serra's motivations for what he did. 

Serra probably had had a fairly comfortable life in Mallorca as a priest and professor, even having taken vows of poverty and obedience. However, he sought to become a missionary in Mexico, which he must have believed would lead him to live a more dangerous, difficult and uncomfortable life; one can only presume he did so because he believed the good he could do as a missionary outweighed the negatives of the new life as missionary that he was requesting. His service in Mexico eventually became similarly comfortable to his service to the church in Mallorca -- living in a Franciscan facility that one presumes to have been relatively comfortable and preaching to large groups of Mexican Catholics encouraging them to renew their faith. In Mexico, however, he had acquired a seriously ulcerated leg that would trouble him the rest of his life. When the Jesuits were expelled from Mexico, he accepted the responsibility of taking over supervision of their missions in Baja California, and then of beginning the creation of a chain of mission in southern Alta California. This later work would be especially dangerous, arduous and challenging.

There are seven sacraments in Catholic ritual. Baptism is only given once, usually soon after birth; it enters the recipient into the church. Repentance and Holy Eucharist are usually first given at about age 7, when children have learned about sin and have a basic potential for repentance of sins; these sacraments are given repeatedly through life for the forgiveness of sins and unity with the church. Confirmation is given usually about 13, when a young person is considered able to be fully responsible for his/her faith. Matrimony is the marriage sacrament. Holy Orders is the sacrament by which a man becomes a priest. Anointing of the Sick can be given to any really sick person, but is especially important at the end of a fatal illness. Serra would have believed that a baptized and confirmed person who died with sins forgiven (ideally after receiving the sacraments of Repentance, Holy Eucharist and Anointing of the Sick shortly before death) would enjoy eternal life in the presence of God. He would have believed that Indians who lived according to their native culture (not members of the Catholic Church, not have had the benefit of periodic forgiveness of sins, whose sexual relations were not sanctified by Catholic marriage) would not go to heaven, would not have eternal bliss. Thus he would have seen himself as providing the greatest service Baptizing Indians, instructing them in the Catholic faith, introducing them to the sacraments of Repentance and Holy Eucharist, and Confirming them. 

Apparently it was considered normal at the time for priests to use corporal punishment on members of their religious flock -- as it was normal for parents to physically punish their children to drive home lessons in comportment. Serra apparently whipped himself and beat his breast with a rock.

Indians who converted to Catholicism were expected to join the Mission community so that they could continue receiving instruction and the sacraments. Serra would have expected, probably correctly, that an Indian leaving the mission would fall away from the church; Serra would have believed that that Indian by leaving the mission would be endangering his/her immortal soul. Bringing such a person back to the mission would -- in Serra's opinion -- have justified draconian measures to save the person's soul for his/her own good!

What Actually Did Serra Do in California?

Serra went to California in 1769. He started nine missions before he died in 1784. They must have been pretty minimal in their first years since only one priest was assigned per mission during Serra's lifetime. The duties of the priests were to see to the building of the mission church, to convert Indians, to instruct the converted Indians in the Catholic religion, to build a dwelling for himself and for those Indians who would convert and live in the mission, and to establish an agricultural base so that the mission community could feed itself, with perhaps some surplus to provide the nearby military base.

Serra fought to separate the soldiers and the military posts from the missions. He protested against the military governors treatment of Indians, effectively. Here is a quote from The Economist:

Admirers call Serra a champion of the underdog, who denounced Spanish troops for raping Indian women (some were lassoed like animals, he recorded) and for killing native men who resisted. His writings include a successful appeal to spare an Indian who killed a missionary during a revolt in San Diego in 1775, so that he could be “saved” by conversion. “For that is the purpose of our coming here and its sole justification,” he wrote to the viceroy in Mexico City, far to the south. The present-day archbishop of Los Angeles, José Gómez, has called Serra’s appeal one of the earliest recorded pleas against the death penalty.

I find it difficult to believe that nine priests could decimate the Indian population of California in 15 years, especially since it was unlikely that having walked to their missions from Baja California they would have been infectious on arrival. Remember too that the missions were being established over the entire 15 years, with the last only being created in 1782. During Serra's lifetime the missions would have had only a light footprint on the land of Alta California.

Why is he then Controversial?

We Americans tend to think of church and state as separate entities. The 18th century Spanish, deep into the Counter Reformation, had no such idea. Father Serra was sent to start missions in Alta California as an agent of the Spanish government; those missions were missions of the government affiliated church.

Thus Father Serra was a co-leader of the Spanish government's effort to extend the reach of its power into Alta California. That was clearly the start of a process in which the Indian population was under attack, and was eventually decimated.

Moreover, it was a process in which California Indian culture was specifically targeted, It would seem that the government did not want a California inhabited by "wild Indians", but rather a California in which the remaining Indians produced goods and services that would enrich the crown. Not only were the Indians to become Roman Catholics, inhabiting missions in large numbers, but other aspects of their culture were also to be changed. It was noted that a number of huge land grants were made in California before the Mexican Revolution (and many more afterwards); the Indians were an obvious source of workers for the ranches that were created from those land grants (as indeed they were for the economic activity of the missions) -- but only if their culture was changes so that they became "tame" rather than "wild Indians".

For U.S. Indians, and especially for the current members of California tribes, Junipero Serra was the most famous of the first generation of "colonizers"; and it was the missionaries' followers if not they themselves who not only destroyed the California Indian way of life, their culture, and the Indian population itself but did so deliberately and without consulting their victims. Modern Indians and their allies see no reason to honor him.

The Positions of the Two Parties to the Controversy

I suggest that the Catholic Church position might be as follows: Serra was a man with deeply informed Catholic faith, who sacrificed much in order to strengthen the faith of thousands of Catholics and who brought thousands more to the "one true faith". He lived a life of great simplicity and underwent great risks to accomplish what he did for his religion. These aspects of his life can serve as models for the faithful and members of the church are encouraged to study his life and learn from his example.

While the counter position might be: Serra was a knowing agent of imperial colonialism -- an imperialism in which the Catholic Church was a willing partner and agent of the Spanish imperial government. Over centuries, Spanish colonialism (followed by Mexican colonialism, and indeed by something much like U.S. colonialism) resulted in subjugation of the California Indians, the virtually complete destruction of their culture, and indeed the deaths of a very large portion of the Indian population of Alta California. Thus Serra should not be honored, but rather his life and efforts in Alta California should be seen in the negative light as the beginning of an imperial, colonial process that dramatically injured the interest of the people it colonized. If anything, Serra's efforts in California should be seen as an example of what not to do.

Where do I Stand?

As I said in the start of this post, I see little likelihood that Father Serra will be abandoned by the Catholic Church, since he seems to have lived the prototypical life of an 18th century Catholic Church's saintly person.

Nor do I see any way that the California Indians are likely to accept Serra as a hero. He was the tip of the camel's nose entering the tent of their ancestors, and generations of those ancestors suffered hugely destructive impacts from imperial colonialism that he exemplified.

One option is to refrain from judging a historical figure based on today's values and on chains of events that he could not have foreseen. Another option is

• to allow the Catholics to canonize the man highlighting aspects of his life to serve as a model for Catholics, 
• and for those interested in social and economic development to see Serra as a man whose good intentions were ultimately tied to dysfunction -- a lesson for many of us who have fallen in the same trap or who may do so. 

At the least, we owe the historical parties to study the real history of their time and their acts, and not to judge on false evidence.

Junipero Serra

The Undivided Past

I watched an interview with Sir David Cannadine on his book, The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences. He made a good point that so much of what we see and hear about the world stresses conflict, but much of human history and most of human institutions seem to focus on cooperation and communication -- the good news seems not to be newsworthy.

In his book he looks at six topics: religion, nation, class, gender, race and "civilization", noting that these are factors by which people tend to define themselves, and that different people at different times have stressed each as "the defining basis" for self-identification. (Religion as the basis for Christian-Muslim conflict, etc.)

He notes that "nation" is a relatively new organizing concept. I suppose it has replaced tribe for much of the world, although tribalism seems still important in some places. Clearly we think of nationalism as an underlying element in the great conflicts of the 20th century.

In the interview he mentioned that "empire" was something he considered as a possible chapter subject, but did not ultimately choose. Multi-ethnic empires and multi-racial empires were clearly different than nation-states, and we certainly saw empires fighting each other for a long, long time.

But I wondered whether age might not be considered as also one of those ways in which we define ourselves -- think of Shakespeare's seven ages of man. Today, at least, we clearly think of childhood as different than working age, or than old age. Think of the Young Turks waiting for their turn at the seats of power.

I also wonder if there is not an emerging division between "modern", educated people who tend to value scientific knowledge and adapt new technologies quickly versus "traditional" people with less formal education, who tend to value traditional knowledge and adapt new technologies less quickly.

The Variation in Religious Attendance in the USA

I quote from the Gallup Poll report:

These results are based on Gallup Daily tracking interviews throughout 2014 with 177,030 U.S. adults, and reflect those who say "at least once a week" when asked, "How often do you attend church, synagogue or mosque -- at least once a week, almost every week, about once a month, seldom or never?" Church attendance self-reports are estimates, and may not reflect precise week in and week out attendance, but provide an important measure of the way in which Americans view their personal, underlying religiosity. In particular, the focus on the top category of "weekly" attendance yields a good indicator of the percentage of each state's population that is highly religious, and for whom religion is likely to be a significant factor in their daily lives....... 

The state-by-state variations in church attendance are significant because attendance is a powerful indicator of underlying religiosity, which in turn is related to Americans' views on life, culture, society in general and politics. For most segments of U.S. society -- blacks being the exception -- those who are the most religious are also most likely to be Republican, which helps explain the significant relationship between states with the highest church attendance and those that are traditionally red states. Church attendance also provides ties that bind members to their communities, and research shows that at the individual level, those who are most religious have higher well-being than those who are less religious.

Utah has the highest rate of churchgoing residents, attributed to the large Mormon population and the high rate of church service attendance among Mormons.

Comparison Maps

Source

Nationwide, the creative class totals more than 40 million workers, more than a third of the total workforce, including professionals in the fields of science and technology, design and architecture, arts, entertainment and media, and healthcare, law, management and education.

Source

Go to the interactive source for more information.

The Global Arms Trade in One Image

Source

I quote from Know More on The Washington Post WonkBlog:

Natalia Bronshtein, a professor and consultant who runs the blog Insightful Interaction, used data from the Siri Arms Transfer Database to map all major transfers of conventional weapons in 2013. Russia is the largest player, exporting $8.23 billion in arms that year, while the U.S. follows behind with $5.99 billion. China is a distant third, exporting $1.83 billion in 2013. You can view the interactive, which lets you hover over a country connection to see the details, here. Republished courtesy of Natalia Bronshtein.

 Basically, Russia, the USA and to a lesser extent supply arms to the world. 

Select a great book that has been banned, and read it in protest!

Obviously the ACLU has selected carefully to find the best, most widely loved books that have been banned. I suspect that having been banned does not necessarily mean that a book is in this class.

I suspect that many of the people who have banned these books are simply unable to appreciate good writing, and indeed that many of them have not read the books that they hate. I also suspect that others ban books, not to protect the public, but to protect themselves from the possibility that the public will learn to think thoughts that the censors feel threaten themselves.

An odd parallel -- two processes with similar tipping points.

It just occurred to me that there is a parallel between the nuclear fission and communicable disease.

• When an atom of Uranium 235 breaks up into two smaller atoms, it also emits several neutrons. Absorbing a new neutron causes an atom of Uranium 235 to break up into two smaller atoms. There are three possibilities according to the amount of Uranium 235 present and its configuration: a. on average each atom that breaks up causes less than one new atom to break up as happens in nature; b. on average, each atom that breaks up causes exactly one other atom to break up, as happens in a nuclear reactor; c. on average, each atom that breaks up causes more than one other atom to break up and since the break up of a Uranium 235 atom emits considerable energy, BOOM.
• When someone becomes sick with Ebola that person may infect one or more other persons. There are three possibilities according to the average number of others that each sick person infects: a. on average, each ill person infects fewer than one other person, and the outbreak is quickly contained; b. on average, each ill person infects exactly one other person, and the disease become endemic; 5. on average, each ill person infects more than one other person, and an epidemic occurs.

In the case of nuclear fission, the problem is to arrange the fissile material in such a way as to produce a safe nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb (according to the purpose); in the case of an Ebola epidemic, the problem is to isolate the infective persons in such a way as to prevent or stop an epidemic.

A graph that tells the story of gun violence.

An article in The Economist discusses the rate of homicides in the United States. It points out that the murder rate in the USA is higher than that in other developed nations, nearly three times that in Canada, and that two-thirds of U.S. murders are done with guns.

"Three-quarters of all victims and nearly 90% of perpetrators are male. Black Americans are only 13% of the population, but over 50% of murder victims. Among black men between 20 and 24, the murder rate is over 100 per 100,000 (see chart)."

The data support our intuition that easy availability of guns probably increases the murder rate, and that there are social factors that influence who gets murdered. I doubt that black men want to get murdered, but they are put in danger of being murdered far more often than others in out society.

There seems to be interest in preventing violence against women, even though men are more likely to be murdered than women. But the difference in the rates of white men, white women and black women being murdered are small as compared with the huge increase in murder rate of black men.

Perhaps we should be looking more carefully at violence against black men, and seeking ways to reduce that violence.

I suspect we all know why black men are faced with so much violence. The problem is, we don't know how to quickly overcome centuries of racism directed at them.

On institutions and their sclerosis

There is a long, but interesting article in Foreign Affairs by Francis Fukuyama titled "America in Decay: The Sources of Political Dysfunction". I want to quote some sections:

Institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior,” as Huntington put it, the most important function of which is to facilitate collective action. Without some set of clear and relatively stable rules, human beings would have to renegotiate their interactions at every turn. Such rules are often culturally determined and vary across different societies and eras, but the capacity to create and adhere to them is genetically hard-wired into the human brain. A natural tendency to conformism helps give institutions inertia and is what has allowed human societies to achieve levels of social cooperation unmatched by any other animal species....... 

Institutions are created to meet the demands of specific circumstances, but then circumstances change and institutions fail to adapt. One reason is cognitive: people develop mental models of how the world works and tend to stick to them, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Another reason is group interest: institutions create favored classes of insiders who develop a stake in the status quo and resist pressures to reform........ 

Political decay thus occurs when institutions fail to adapt to changing external circumstances, either out of intellectual rigidities or because of the power of incumbent elites to protect their positions and block change. Decay can afflict any type of political system, authoritarian or democratic.

Of course, some institutions are formal, and indeed some have structures and rules defined by law, not by tradition nor by managerial decisions. I am not sure which are harder to change -- those which are explicit but defined by outside power, or those that are implicit and often unconscious.

Fukuyama goes on to consider the state (as the executive institution in government), the legislature (as the democratic institution in government) and the judiciary (as the institution responsible for assuring the rule of law in government).

The article begins citing the creation of the Forest Service, an agency of the executive branch that represented a pioneering reform of the Progressive Era:

Prior to the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, public offices in the United States had been allocated by political parties on the basis of patronage. The Forest Service, in contrast, was the prototype of a new model of merit-based bureaucracy. It was staffed with university-educated agronomists and foresters chosen on the basis of competence and technical expertise, and its defining struggle was the successful effort by its initial leader, Gifford Pinchot, to secure bureaucratic autonomy and escape routine interference by Congress. At the time, the idea that forestry professionals, rather than politicians, should manage public lands and handle the department’s staffing was revolutionary, but it was vindicated by the service’s impressive performance. Several major academic studies have treated its early decades as a classic case of successful public administration.

Institutions change over time. Taking the Forest Service as an example:

• The real world changes, as the American forests changed over the last 100 years. Over time, while the forest service successfully suppressed fires, dead wood built up in the forests and the composition of the forest changed.
• Society changes, as the American lumber industry changed over the last 100 years. Lumber production became much less important for the U.S. economy.
• Our understanding changes. Scientists learned about forest ecology and realized that forests had evolved with occasional forest fires, and that some trees even needed fire for their seed to germinate; thus eliminating forest fires changed the forest ecosystem.
• There is mission creep. The Forest Service was asked to focus on environmental conservation more than on providing a sustainable resource for the lumber industry; it was called upon to provide employment for demobilized soldiers.

Moreover, institutions don't function in isolation. Changes in other institutions can induce changes in an institution of interest. As the map at the head of this post shows, there were few people in the west at the time that the Forest Service was created (fewer still in Alaska, not shown); the Congress was dominated by representatives of the populous areas in the east. Today the representatives of the western states with extensive forests seem likely to have more power. Fukuyama also suggests that some areas the courts have become responsible for making policy in areas that were once under legislative control. Such changes can change the charter of the Forest Service.

Returning to Fukuyama's own words:

The Forest Service’s performance deteriorated, in short, because it lost the autonomy it had gained under Pinchot. The problem began with the displacement of a single departmental mission by multiple and potentially conflicting ones. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, firefighting began to displace timber exploitation, but then firefighting itself became controversial and was displaced by conservation. None of the old missions was discarded, however, and each attracted outside interest groups that supported different departmental factions: consumers of timber, homeowners, real estate developers, environmentalists, aspiring firefighters, and so forth. Congress, meanwhile, which had been excluded from the micromanagement of land sales under Pinchot, reinserted itself by issuing various legislative mandates, forcing the Forest Service to pursue several different goals, some of them at odds with one another. 

Thus, the small, cohesive agency created by Pinchot and celebrated by scholars slowly evolved into a large, Balkanized one. It became subject to many of the maladies affecting government agencies more generally: its officials came to be more interested in protecting their budgets and jobs than in the efficient performance of their mission. And they clung to old mandates even when both science and the society around them were changing. 

The story of the U.S. Forest Service is not an isolated case but representative of a broader trend of political decay; public administration specialists have documented a steady deterioration in the overall quality of American government for more than a generation. In many ways, the U.S. bureaucracy has moved away from the Weberian ideal of an energetic and efficient organization staffed by people chosen for their ability and technical knowledge. The system as a whole is less merit-based: rather than coming from top schools, 45 percent of recent new hires to the federal service are veterans, as mandated by Congress. And a number of surveys of the federal work force paint a depressing picture. According to the scholar Paul Light, “Federal employees appear to be more motivated by compensation than mission, ensnared in careers that cannot compete with business and nonprofits, troubled by the lack of resources to do their jobs, dissatisfied with the rewards for a job well done and the lack of consequences for a job done poorly, and unwilling to trust their own organizations.”

The scenario appears to be a frightening one in that it may be generalized to many other institutions in many other societies. A new institution is created to solve a specific problem. Over the years, the problem itself changes and new problems are added to the institution's responsibilities. In spite of institutional rigidities, the institution changes; some of the changes are adaptive, some less so. Eventually the institution is seen to be dysfunctional and must be revolutionized or replaced. Or perhaps, if one has confidence on the power to revitalize institutions by revolution or to create new and better institutions, the scenario is optimistic.

Did you know how concentrated religions are geographically?

Source

While Islam is still associated with the Middle East and North Africa in the minds of many Americans, only 20% of the world’s Muslims live in the region. Egypt is the only Middle Eastern-North African country that ranks among the six largest Muslim populations (Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Egypt). Those nations together account for 53% of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. Egypt is also the only country in the group where Arabic is an official language. While these six countries have a majority of all Muslims, they comprise only 30% of the world’s population.

Where do gun deaths occur most frequently?

Source: Rolling Stone

Thanks to Erik Kuhne for identifying this map. Here is similar information in another form:

As you can see there are geographic clusters in which gun ownership and gun deaths are related.

• In Wyoming and Montana people have lots of guns and there are lots of gun deaths.
• In Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi there are not quite as many households with guns but lots of gun deaths.
• Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut (and Hawaii) relatively few households have guns and gun deaths are relatively quite low.

Now compare that with the liberal-conservative balance of the state as shown in the following map.

Ideological Map of States

Source of map; Source of data

Blue- 20 most conservative states

Grey- 21st to 30th most conservative states

Red- 20 least conservative states 

It would seem that states with more conservative populations have more gun deaths, while states with less conservative populations have fewer gun deaths. 

Legal Systems of the WorldS

Source of Map

Every once in a while the question has come up in the book club to which I belong about what legal system is i;nstitutionalized in a country, I am sharing this.

Civil Law: "a legal system originating in Europe, intellectualized within the framework of late Roman law, and whose most prevalent feature is that its core principles are codified into a referable system which serves as the primary source of law."

Common Law: "law developed by judges through decisions of courts and similar tribunals, as opposed to statutes adopted through the legislative process or regulations issued by the executive branch."

Customary Law: "the established pattern of behavior that can be objectively verified within a particular social setting."

Religious Law: "ethical and moral codes taught by religious traditions. Examples include Christian canon law, Islamic sharia, Jewish halakha and Hindu law."

We Are Number 1! And that is not a good thing!

Source

Problems in the USA: Too many sentences longer than they should be. Too many people in jail for minor crimes. Too much racism in our criminal justice system. Too expensive to run. Too much recidivism because prison does not rehabilitate people well. Too many people fail to get help getting jobs and getting started again when they get out of prison.

A thought about neuroscience and free will

Researchers have demonstrated that the firing of individual neurons appear to indicate the decisions of subjects before the subjects report that they have become aware of their own decision. (Read Wikipedia's entry on the research.) This seems to surprise and even bother people. Some seem to feel that the neuron's firing denies the free will of the subject in making the decision.

Let me suggest another situation. Say you want to drink from a cup of coffee on a table in front of you. Are you surprised when your arm moves first to position your hand so that your hand can grasp the cup? Does your arm somehow deny free will of your hand in grasping the cup? Of course, we learn as infants to coordinate hand and arm, and think of the two as part of a single unit implementing our will.

I seems obvious to me that consciousness is a function, primarily related to the brain. It is not surprising to me that the "decision" to do something would be relatively localized in specific part of the brain, and that making that decision conscious (in images or words, according to the style of consciousness of the subject) would involve more of the brain and be subsequent to the "decision". Perhaps that view comes from my experience programming computers, where there would always be a computation to arrive at the decision, and a subsequent step in implementing the decision.

The basic point, I guess, is that you are a single being. When you have been lying down and get up, your body not only orchestrates the muscles of your trunk and legs to change your posture, but it also changes you heart rate to pump blood more strongly to assure that the blood continues to be supplied to your brain, and your arteries may also respond to the chemical signals sent out to assure that blood supply; of course, your blood continues to supply oxygen to the cells of your body, and they continue to metabolize nutrients to power their functions. That you are not consciously aware of all these things going on for "a simple movement" that we do every day without any special thought does not mean that the act does not involve complex operation of many bodily systems.

It is not surprising that your brain and you conscious mind function together. Indeed, your genes are influencing the way your brain is working, as is your state of nutrition. If you are running from an angry bear your brain will probably function quite differently than if you are reading a book about bears, as will your heart and other organs.

So. what about free will? A bird can take off and fly away, and you can not; does that mean you don't have "free will". We don't think of free will as the freedom to do things that are impossible.

We believe that some people with mental diseases do not have free will, but rather act according to compulsion. (Indeed, we excuse the acts of children feeling that they have diminished capacity to understand the effects of their actions and to censor their impulses.)

Perhaps most germane, we know that we can predict the probabilities that adults will commit crimes or participate in other unaccepted behavior from their current and past social status and family characteristics. Indeed, we know that people from different cultures will react differently in similar circumstances (a Brazilian soccer audience is likely to be different than a Japanese one). Thus decisions are partially determined by things outside the "free will" of the individual.

Free will then is the subjective recognition that one can pick up the cup or leave it on the table, that one can do one thing or we can chose another. That choice, when it is so conceptualized, is made as the result of a decision, The decision is made by the brain, and brought to consciousness by the brain. The fact that the brain function is involved, and that a fast enough computer might infer the decision before the decider is conscious of the decision, doesn't seem to have anything to do with free will as we conceive it.

My Representative in Congress on My Neighbor Held Captive in Pakistan

Mapping Religious Affiliation

The Washington Post had an interesting article on religion in America yesterday.

Some of the pattern seems clear. The old Confederacy has many counties with Southern Baptist pluralities. The northeast that had many decades of immigration from Ireland, Italy and other Catholic countries has many counties with Catholic pluralities, as do many counties in Florida and the southwest (which have large Hispanic populations). I think of areas that are marked with large Lutheran populations as also having received large immigrant inflows from Scandinavia. Mormons are famous for their migration to the Great Basin.

I guess there are a couple of thoughts that come from the map: 1. maybe the USA is not the melting pot that we have thought it was, and 2. religious affiliation is an aspect of culture that does not change all that quickly in America.

Five minutes to learn the difference between Great Britain, England, Ireland, etc.

Birds-of-Paradise Project Introduction

From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

A thought on tribal membership

Consider a tribe in which one is a member if one goes through a membership ritual, or if one's mother was a member. Members can not leave the tribe,

Thus someone who has not themselves gone through the ritual is a member if and only if that person's mother was a member. If the mother did not gain membership through the ritual, then she is a member of the tribe if and only if her mother was a member. The relationship is recursive. All tribe members must themselves have gone through the membership ritual or must have a mother who can trace her maternal ancestors back to someone who did go through the membership ritual (or was an original member of the tribe when it was formed).

Thus anyone whose mother had a direct female line going back to a woman who went through the tribal membership ritual is a member of the tribe; anyone who has not him/herself gone through the ritual and does not have a mother who has an unbroken female line going back to a member is not a member.

Lets assume that the tribe has existed for 150 generations.

• Everyone whose mother comes from a female line that at any point included a tribe member is a member.
• Anyone whose mother's female line has a nom-member is not a member unless there was a subsequent woman member of that line who went through the membership ritual, or unless the person him/herself went through the ritual.

Thus, unless one's family history goes back to a woman in one's mother's direct female line who was known to have gone through the ritual, one can not say for sure that he/she is a member, unless that person him/herself has gone through the ritual. 

Equally, one who does not claim tribal membership can not be sure that he/she is not a member; some unknown many times great grandmother may have been a member, leaving her daughters members, and a continuous female line to one's own mother. Thus, unless one can trace one's mother's, mother's, mother's female line back 150 generations one can not be sure one is not a member of the tribe.

For those who can not trace their maternal line back to a woman who went through the membership ritual, they can not be sure that they are members of the tribe unless they can trace the maternal line back 150 generations assuring that each member in that line had a mother who was a member or had herself gone through the membership ritual.

World population has increased from a couple of hundred million at the beginning of the modern era to over 7 billion today of whom about half are female. Assuming that there were say one hundred million women in the year 1, on average each has 35 are female direct female descendants today. Of course, some of those original ladies will have many more descendants and some will not have any.

Assume that in 2000 years there are 80 generations of an average of 25 years per generation. On average, each women would have 1.044 daughters per generation who survived to have children. That is, 1.044 to the 80th power.)

If a specific woman 2000 years ago had girl descendants who averaged instead 1.1 such daughters, she would have today more than 2000 female descendants in the direct female line (that is who inherit her mitochondia) of fertile age. If the tribe described above included 100,000 such women, they would have 200 million such female descendants in the direct female line; thus there would be a about 400 million male and female current members of the tribe..

Of course there are tribes living today that we think of as having lived for thousands of years in the same general location, with fairly stable population size. One would assume that such a tribe would have roughly as many variants of mitochondria now as it had 2000 years ago.

My grandmothers had 12 and 13 children respectively, and one of my great grandmothers had 16. Clearly the potential exists in our species for a population explosion of one tribal group (Celtic in my case). Indeed, there are many more people in the world of Irish ancestry than there are Irish in Ireland.

If you assume a core population of Irish women 2000 years ago, there are probably more women today share their mitochondria who are citizens of other countries than there are in Ireland.

Comment on Organizational Reform -- Don't say the glass is half full

If the bottom is boiling, you can bet that the top is full of hot air.