Ardi Shook Science To Its Roots
by Bill Allin, author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to understand all the ways children develop, not just intellectually. People have problems when they don’t know.

“From studying Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi, we learn that we cannot understand or model human evolution from chimps and gorillas.”
- Owen Lovejoy, a lead author of one of the 11 studies of Ardi that appeared in the journal Science.

Science labelled the discovery of Ardi (more accurately, the revelations of study results of Ardi) the biggest scientific breakthrough of 2009.

At this stage, the study of Ardi and the ramifications of the changes of thinking that will come from it are just beginning. This article will add a few important observations to what we in the general public should learn from the whole exercise. Different information to ponder.

First and foremost is that the lead author of a respected scientific study admitted that the theory (that human evolutionary models could be devised from ape models) that was cherished so long it became thought of as fact, was wrong.

As much as we look somewhat like apes, especially so in the case of young chimpanzees, we differ significantly. The theory claimed that our prehistoric and prehuman ancestors lived in trees and only emerged from the African jungle to walk upright, learn to run and hunt on the savannah.

Cats and birds, for examples, live in trees (at least cats are as comfortable in trees as they are on the ground). Cats and birds can hang upside down from a tree branch and their brains will adjust to the orientation so that they can understand the scene as well as if they were standing upright.

Humans cannot. Stand up now, spread your legs and bend your head down so you look between your legs at the scene behind you. It simply doesn’t make as much sense as it would if you were standing upright even though you know the components of the scene you are trying to look at. Your brain cannot adapt to what it understands as a scene that is non-conventional, that is not oriented to the way it wants to understand a floor or ground level scene.

Can you not bend that far? Interesting. Cats and birds can do that for their whole lives. Most can also keep their bodies steady and turn their heads almost completely around to face behind them (some can even do it more than 180 degrees). That would be useful for animals that spend a great deal of time in trees.

If you have observed a pet cat–perhaps one climbing on you–then you have likely seen it hang upside down (at least its head would be upside down according to common orientation) and yet have no trouble understanding everything in the scene. Birds can do the same. To a cat or a bird, there is no upside down, only different orientations of the head, to which their brains easily adapt and adjust immediately.

Monkeys and their kin can do the same. You may have seen one in a zoo, on television or in a movie hanging upside by a foot, or even by its tail. They understand the scenes around them no matter what orientation their heads have to view the scene.

We humans can’t. No matter how practiced we become, viewing a scene from a non-conventional perspective is always “not right” to us.

Why? If we did indeed once live in trees, we had no reason to lose what was once a critically important ability. We may lose body parts because we have no use for them (prehensile tail of the human fetus that disappears after the fifth month, wisdom teeth that will soon not appear in future generations, useless organs we can have removed and easily live without), but there is no example of humans or other animals losing inherent skills or abilities they once had.

We may no longer be able to do things we once did because our bodies have changed shape or configuration slightly, but we don’t lose the skill within our brain should we ever need it. The potential is still there. Yet we still can’t understand a scene that is “upside down” to our brain.

Even the reason science gives for humans losing their body hair is lame. The claim is that humans lost their body hair because it would have been too hot to run around the plains hunting in a fur coat. So we lost our fur coats so we could expose our bare skin to ultraviolet radiation from the sun (more direct, thus damaging, in Africa than in temperate zones) so we could contract skin cancer more easily?

That doesn’t make sense. Evolution has never been shown to work to create more health risk in any animal. That would be counter to natural selection. Besides, do monkeys not get hot from swinging around in the trees? I would, if I had that ability and strength, hairy or naked. But I don’t now and I didn’t as a child, though I climbed awkwardly (by ape standards) in some trees.

The claim that hair in the crotch and armpits helps to dispel sweat, which is why we still grow it in those places, would apply as well to hair anywhere else on the body. Sweat would evaporate more quickly from crotch and armpits without hair to slow down the movement of air across them. If not, then women who shave those places today would be sweatier than women who let their hair grow. I’m not an expert, but I have never heard of that being a problem of women who shave.

Why do we retain head hair? To protect us from the sun? That argument should give more reason why we should retain all-body hair, not lose it. We can wash hair and skin (cooling off in the water at the same time), but we can’t slough off melanoma.

Why do we like water so much? Never mind that most of our bodies consist of water as that applies to all animals and plants. Archaeologists looking for ancient human habitation almost always look near water. Or they look near where water once was in the prehistoric past.

Why? We can get enough water into our bodies the way monkeys and other animals do.

We also swim differently from most land animals that spend part of their lives in water. A dog swims using the dog paddle (elephants, excellent swimmers, swim the same way). A dog swims this way so easily because its face and nose are, compared to the locations of our own, on top of their heads. A dog doesn’t have to lift its head to swim because its nose is already above water as it floats.

That convenient location of the nose and eyes for dogs did not cause them to lose their fur because they hunt and basically live on land. Elephants, on the other hand, are naked, can find food in the water, and they have webbing between their toes like a duck.

It seems highly likely that our prehuman ancestors–in the Pliocene period–spent a good deal of time in the water. There we lost our body hair, retained it in crotch and armpits for warmth and on the head so our babies could hold onto it. Ever held out your finger to a young baby and had it grasp the finger naturally? For more on this see Elaine Morgan’s The Descent of Woman.

If the experts that study the history of our own species are so careless, so inexact, so arrogant about teaching theory that doesn’t even meet the criterion of common sense examination, as if it were established fact, how much confidence can we place in any scientific claims made with the certainty of experts?

Theory is not fact, by its very definition, though theory is often taught as if it were fact. Even the laws of physics bear questioning. Remember reading about when light was believed to travel in straight lines, when time and space were linear, when the earth was the centre of the universe and when an object was in one place it couldn’t be anywhere else? Not anymore. Evidence proves that these “facts” of science were wrong.

We may be wrong to adopt fantastic stories masquerading as religion (my story is always better and truer than yours), but we would be equally as mistaken to accept all statements by science as fact, no matter how confidently and passionately the statements are made.

We humans do not really know as much as we claim we do. We just act as if we know more, as if we are always right. It’s called hubris. We teach it to our kids.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to understand all the ways children develop, not just intellectually. People have problems when they don’t know.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Big Business Manipulates the Climate Change Debate

by Bill Allin, author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who can think instead of simply accepting life as it imposes itself on them.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
- Maya Angelou, American educator, autobiographer and poet (b. 1928)

manufactroversy n. (neologism) A contrived or non-existent controversy, manufactured by political ideologues or interest groups who use deception and specious arguments to make their case.

Is the temperature of the planet really warming? No. The dirt and rock are not getting warmer.

Is the average temperature of the atmosphere above our planet warming? That’s the core of the debate. Is climate change real and based solely on human activity or simply a cyclical feature of nature? That’s the issue.

The arguments for climate change are based on computer models, which are based on sketchy facts from the past and questionable data from the present. Sketchy facts from the past because today’s technology was not available more than a few years ago.

Questionable data? A Canadian blogger discovered a simple arithmetic error in the calculations by NASA based on its satellite readings, making the atmosphere seem a fraction of a degree warmer than it actually was. NASA satellite readings form the core of most computer climate model inputs.

Read that story here. But don’t expect to find either the correction of NASA’s data or conclusions on its web site or an admission that it made the error. You won’t.

No one can doubt that the ice cap over the Arctic Ocean is thinning. Travelling by ship through the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, through northern Canada, is possible now. That trip that caused the deaths of so many explorers and their shipmates over past centuries of our history has not been possible for over a thousand years. Yes, the Northwest Passage was open in the distant past.

No one can doubt that some countries that usually experience hot seasons are having it hotter than ever, with a few actually desertifying, especially in the Middle East and the Sahel around the Sahara in Africa.

However, ask the people who live in Edmonton, Canada, how much warmer they feel. One Saturday night in mid December 2009 their overnight low temperature was -46.1 degrees Celsius. (At that temperature Celsius and Fahrenheit have almost similar numbers.) That record cold was 10 degrees lower than the previous record cold night. Not one or two degrees colder, but 10.

Edmonton is the capital city of a Canadian province, not a northern territory. It’s not sub-Arctic. It’s province, Alberta, hit new power usage records in two successive weeks as Albertans tried to keep from freezing. The whole Canadian west was a deep freeze for the first part of the winter of 2009.

Eastern Canada was different. Maritimers had their summer in 2009, but it only lasted three days. The whole of spring, summer and autumn were cool and very wet. The previous two winters had old timers claiming they had never seen so much snow, so many storms, so much rainfall in a single season.

Cool and wet. Exactly what the climate models should predict when the air warms. Warm air collects more moisture from the oceans, which results in more cloud (less sun to warm the earth) and more rain.

In the 1970s the prediction was that we might have a new Ice Age based on the same data being used today, but different climate models. Canada’s weather over the past two years would support that claim, though two years can never constitute a trend.

No one can doubt that those who believe in climate change feel strongly enough about it to fight for grants to study climate models and data more than their opponents. No one should doubt that some people, including a number of well respected scientists, believe that climate shift is natural and cyclical. Their work is available on the internet.

Why is there debate? The simplest conclusion is that there is money to be made. From scientific study of climate, not from climate change itself.

While few among us may know that industries puff out half a million different chemicals into the air, we all seem to know that carbon dioxide is the worst culprit for the greenhouse effect that eventually warms the atmosphere. We all know that breathing too much carbon dioxide is unhealthy, may even kill some of us.

We have not put together what we know, let alone figured out the debate most of us can’t understand. While we argue over whether or not global temperatures are rising, whether or not our atmosphere is warming, whether human industries and habits directly affect that change or not, industries and government continue to pour extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide into the air we breathe.

They have no need to spend on changing anything so long as we fight over whether the atmospheric temperature might change by a portion of one degree over a few decades.

We continue to breathe poisonous air. Industries and government owned power plants puff out obscene amounts of poisonous gases into our air. And nothing changes because we are arguing over whether global temperatures are rising or staying steady.

Who wins that scenario?

Those who believe that nothing should change in nature are wrong. History is full of examples. The Mediterranean Sea used to be a plain and the Sahara Desert used to be a giant lake. That’s change. Tropical beasts used to roam what is now the north of Canada, Russia and Alaska until the last Ice Age arrived a few thousands years ago. That’s change. Changes that happened not so long ago by historical standards.

History should teach us that nature changes by itself. It doesn’t need our help. It will change with or without us.

Our own limited knowledge should tell us that we should not be arguing over whether climate is changing while we ignore manufacturing facilities putting millions of tons of poisonous gases into the air we breathe.

No one should doubt that life on earth today is different than it was before the Industrial Revolution. The main difference is not a small change in atmospheric temperature, but a huge increase in diseases that have never before been a problem on earth and the poisonous air we breathe that has caused them since the Industrial Revolution began.

While we debate a small change in atmospheric temperature, we continue to breathe poisonous air. Industries that are fundamentally sociopathic in their quest for profits benefit from our debate because they don’t have to change anything.

We continue to get sick. We continue to die. We continue to argue over climate change when the issue is massive poisoning on a global scale.

Who wins? Who benefits while we argue?

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who can think instead of simply accepting life as it imposes itself on them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

What A Relationship Needs To Succeed

“If we were endowed with the same biological mating pattern as the [pair-bonding] goose, there could be no polygamy, no promiscuity, no celibacy, no harems, no group marriage, no trial marriage, and no divorce in any human community in any part of the world.” and “The gibbon’s ‘very low sex drive’ is a reminder…[of the fallacy] that pair-bonding is based on sexual attraction.”
- Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman, Bantam 1972

The article title refers mostly to male-female relationships, though the first reason could apply to any relationship, including friendships. Let’s examine that first reason.

Why so many relationships fail is simply that few people know what makes a relationship work. A large part of that has to do with the fact that living conditions for most people today are so different from those in the past.

In my country, Canada (numbers for the US are similar), a century ago 85 percent of the population lived in the country, in rural areas. That left only 15 percent in cities, despite what we hear and read about lots of people in cities in those days and very little about those who lived “off the land.” Those numbers are reversed today.

Today 85 percent of North Americans live in urban areas, have access to everything cities have to offer, but miss out on so much that was good about rural life. Country living is simply not available to most people, for reasons beyond their control. More importantly, what was good about rural life in the past has not been replaced sufficiently by the good of city life today.

In agricultural areas and in areas where most people made their living from resources in the past, people had few enemies. They needed each other. Everyone people knew had value. No one knew when they might find themselves at the side of the road with a broken wagon wheel, homeless (or barnless) because of a fire, in need of someone to fetch the doctor in town but unable to get there for having to look after a sick child, or any of uncountable possible emergencies.

Rural people often needed someone else to help them. They couldn’t afford to alienate others they may need to help them one day. Few rural people had money to spare, so volunteer help meant drawing on the goodwill of friends and neighbours, who were often one and the same.

Kids learned in their families how to get along with others because they had to. Sure, they had fights, many physical, far more than today. But they learned to make up after a fight and get on with their lives. Friends were often combatants of the past who made up so they wouldn’t have to live as hermits without any friends in areas with few other people around. Grudges were rare because people couldn’t afford to have enemies living nearby.

Today people in cities believe that most of their needs can be satisfied with money. We hire people to do whatever we need done. Friends are often workmates, fellow church parishioners or other people life brings together frequently. We may know our neighbours little more than on a nodding acquaintance basis.

Friends tend to be those from whom we can derive some benefit, such as people where we work or fellow club or church members. When it’s clear that these people can no longer provide us with any benefits or potential benefits–they or we change jobs, one leaves the club, one moves some distance away–the friendship dissipates with the disappearance of the potential for mutual support. Friends have become another form of object in the throw-away society. There are always more people become friends with in a city. Of course this generalization, like all generalizations, is not true of everyone and not necessarily entirely true of any one person.

Because of this impression that anything we need can be bought, we have allowed ourselves to lose the feeling of needing others in times of tragedy. In the process, over a period of decades we got out of the habit of teaching our children the skills of making friends, of keeping friends through all adversities, of knowing what makes a friendship work. Again, that’s a whole society, not necessarily true in every family.

Though most of us now see more people in a day than our ancestors of a century ago saw in a month, we tend to have fewer close friends, people we can count on when the going gets rough, when worse turns to worst. We no longer teach relationship skills because they were not taught to us. We don’t know what to teach because most of us don’t even realize there are great gaps in our knowledge about relationships.

To make a friend, you have to know how to be a friend. To find a good mate, you have to know how to be a good mate.

The second reason most relationships fail is that we don’t know our obligations in a relationship. We know what we want from others, but we give little or no thought to what they may want or need from us to maintain a healthy relationship. As relationships are two way affairs, when one person feels no great commitment to the other, the relationship fails or wanes away at the first crisis.

For any relationship to succeed, each person must believe that they contribute more to the success and health of the relationship than the other. The perception of an imbalance is usually not real because we don’t fully appreciate what the other contributes. But if we perceive that we contribute more to a relationship than we receive and we can be comfortable with that, the relationship has a chance.

The best examples of why relationships fail is demonstrated by the staggering divorce rate in western countries. A husband or wife believes that the other is not giving what they used to, that their own needs in the marriage are not being met, that the spouse is “not the person I married.” It’s usually true. However, what most people fail to appreciate and understand is that their own commitment to being a devoted spouse may be equally weak.

You can’t be a good husband or wife if you have very little idea of what is required of a good husband or wife. Ironically, we all seem to have pretty good ideas about what is required of the other, our mates, even if we don’t know what is required of ourselves.

The third reason why relationships fail has to do particularly with male-female relationships. Especially the requirement of fidelity in a marriage or common law relationship. If there is one thing we have taught each other and our children about marital and marriage-style relationships it’s that each partner should be monogamous.

The trouble with that is that there is nothing in our natural or evolutionary history to support that. Humans, like all the great apes, are genetically and hormonally programmed to spread their genes as widely as possible. That means that men are genetically programmed to want to bed as many women as they can. And women are programmed to find as many healthy males with whom to procreate future offspring as they can.

Many people will find those last two statements offensive. But why? Nature didn’t teach us to be monogamous. Religions did. Religions even decry (in some cases even threaten death to participants of) male-male and female-female relationships. Why? Because those who formed the religions knew that most gay men are still capable of passing along their male genes to fertile females, just as most lesbians have the ability to give birth to children, can be impregnated by healthy males.

Religions, in the past, wanted desperately to expand, to enlarge their congregations, to increase their power as unelected bodies of social influence. That meant, in addition to sending out missionaries and conquering other cultures and nations by war, encouraging their own followers to have as many babies as possible. The financial ability of parents to raise children, the likely health of the children and the knowledge of parental skills held little importance compared to the lust for expansion. What was important was numbers.

As a result, homosexuality was forbidden and banned, while having large families was encouraged. To keep order among the families of congregations, religions dictated that families should consist of one adult male, one adult female, and the only other adults allowed would be those who could help to tend to the children while the parents were busy creating more or working to support the ones they had. Polygamy and infidelity were considered sinful because the resulting “families” would be hard to manage, to control.

Science doesn’t care much for the word monogamy. It likes “pair-bonding.” You have heard of animals that pair-bond, that stay together for life, through thick and thin. Like geese–most examples of pair-bonding are birds, including northern gannets and penguins. However, the only pair-bonding along our branch of the evolutionary family tree is the gibbon. Though gibbon mates are totally devoted to each other, they are comparatively anti-social. They have little to do with other gibbons or other animals of any kind. They keep to themselves.

Gibbons, like other pair-bonded animals, have low sex drives. Not an attractive characteristic for us humans. In fact, sex is of so little importance among pair-bonded animals that some gibbon couples are homosexual and some heterosexual couples do not engage in sex. Do we really aspire to pair-bonding for ourselves? We should see pair-bonding as it really is in other examples in nature.

Let’s switch back from the term pair-bonding to monogamy. Monogamy, while a charming and attractive concept in certain contexts, is fundamentally unnatural for us humans.

If monogamy is unnatural and many people insist that they could never live with a mate who is “unfaithful” (i.e. not monogamous) then the marriages and marriage-like relationships that depend on monogamy will likely fail. Estimates in the US of infidelity among married men range around 85 percent, while most estimates of infidelity among married women range between 65 and 75 percent.

A priest commented to me recently that it’s up to each member of a couple to fulfill the sexual and other needs of the other so he or she doesn’t need to go looking elsewhere. Good idea in theory, doesn’t work in practice.

If a marriage depends on monogamy, that makes sex the most important component of the marriage, literally the tie that binds. There are two things wrong with that. One is that a marriage must be based on much more than sex or it doesn’t have enough to sustain itself. The other is that few people with a lower sex drive than their partner feel compelled to engage in sex and its accompanying gestures and procedures if they don’t feel like it. They may not want to have sex, even if their partner does, but they also don’t want the “needy” partner to go out and have sex elsewhere.

It may not be the actual act of infidelity of a partner that results in the breakdown of a marriage, but the attitude of the mate that feels “cheated on” who feels the partner should be something he or she was not naturally programmed to be.

Few “unfaithful” partners want to break up their relationship. They just want to be fulfilled in ways they can’t get at home. Nature tells them to find it somewhere else.

A wife who says “You may be the perfect husband in all other ways but you can’t be faithful to me, so you must get out of my life” (even though she can’t give what the husband needs sexually)–reverse the gender words if it applies–can be the partner who makes the marriage fall apart. If doing what nature dictates and what all other primate animals do causes a marriage or relationship to fail, then the marriage was not well founded in the first place.

We humans have the ability to use our intellect to overcome our natural inclinations. Few of us use that ability. Every war that ever was, most murders, almost every person behind bars in a prison or jail and almost everyone in a mental institution or on mood altering drugs give an abundance of evidence that we tend to give in to nature much more often than we overcome it using our intellect.

When following what comes naturally to us causes a relationship to fail, there is something wrong with how the relationship is constituted. That is, we don’t know what a close human relationship is, what it should consist of.

When you don’t know what you’re doing, expect something to go wrong. It will. If you want a relationship to succeed, you need to learn what the other person needs and how you can fulfill that.

A successful relationship means two people each committed more to the welfare and happiness of the other than they are to their own. That’s hard. But no one ever said it was easy.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers, parents and grandparents who want to give their children what they need at each stage of their development, rather than leaving it all to chance.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Living Beyond Your Life Today

It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.
It’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance.
It’s the one who won’t be taken who cannot seem to give
and the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.
- Lyrics in The Rose, Bette Midler artist, Amanda McBroom composer

As often as my heart has been touched by Bette Midler’s singing of The Rose, and today when I heard composer and American chanteuse Amanda McBroom sing it, I have thought that I must write something about fear dominating people’s lives. But I didn’t write. I was afraid that what I wrote would not be as perfect as the song. Note the irony.

Realization of my own fear and how it has affected my reluctance to write about fear became my motivation to write this.

Fear is much more than an emotion, more than an enhancement of the instinctive caution native to each of us. Fear instructs our lives. It dominates the lives of many of us. It shapes us as individuals, as communities and as nations.

Along with everyone else I have watched business and investment leaders charged, convicted and imprisoned for lying out of fear. True, they embezzled millions of dollars from shareholders and investors. But why? They were afraid to tell the truth, that they had failed. They delayed admitting their failure by lying, which ultimately resulted in their incarceration.

Along with everyone else I watched the American public being hoodwinked by their president so he could finish what his father failed to do, and line the pockets of his benefactors with gold in the process, by taking his country into a second (simultaneous) war, this one in Iraq. The USA will be lucky to avoid the fate of its former rival, the former USSR, that went bankrupt and dissolved into chaos in the 1990s. Why would Americans allow themselves to be lied to, to go into an unwarranted and extraordinarily costly war? They had been taught to be afraid that a dictator who could barely hold onto power in his own country had international connections that would wreak havoc on US soil.

Americans believed they should be afraid, though they had no evidence other than the lies of their president. Fear is on the curriculum in every US school, those it is given various other names.

Having moved to the Miramichi area of New Brunswick, Canada, in 2008, I saw how apparently comfortable my new neighbours were toward the possibilities of losing their jobs and having to start over. In my native Toronto, some people would commit suicide or turn to addictive behaviour–at the least start toking marijuana–at the prospect of losing their job. Not because they knew they couldn’t start over but because of the fear of public recognition of their job loss as a personal failure. Miramichiers expect to lose their jobs at some points in their lives and they accept no stigma about it–and offer none against others–whereas people of Ontario fear the public disgrace.

The fear of losing their reputations as well as their jobs causes many people greater fear than the prospect of finding another job. That fear affects their lives, how they conduct themselves every day of their lives. Collectively, the fear of many people impacts whole communities and countries.

People become afraid to speak to each other on elevators or when passing on the street, likely because they fear ending up on the front pages of newspapers as victims of murder, mugging or rape. They fear letting their children out of their sight because they might be charged with neglect, that fear resulting in children who never grow out of their dependence on mommy or a mommy figure in adulthood.

In every case, fear is unwarranted. In every case, fear is taught by those who have something to gain and learned by those who will provide that gain. Fear is a way for a few to control the behaviour and lives of many others. How many Germans in the 1930s and 1940s followed Hitler, becoming murderers and traitors in the process, because they were afraid of Hitler’s power? How many wars have been fought–virtually every war has some association with religion–because the people of one side were made to fear people of the other?

The cosmetics–and to a large extent the pharmaceutical–industry exists solely because of the fear they have created in people, in individuals, that they are not perfect. The OTC (over the counter) supplement industry is booming because people fear becoming ill and disabled as they get older. Some will overdose and harm themselves in the process of trying to protect themselves.

Returning to Amanda McBroom’s lyrics, “it’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.” How many people fail to find love in their lives, or mess it up if they do, because they fear a relationship breaking up? Media reports of marital breakup rates are ceaseless, while education systems never address the problem that people don’t know how to have successful relationships. People who avoid falling in love because they fear breaking up miss an important point about life. Falling in love and breaking up is part of how a person becomes complete, how a person learns to do it better next time. Taking chances is instinctive, while avoiding them is done out of fear of failure. It’s fear that’s not natural.

“It’s the one who won’t be taken who cannot seem to give.” By not trusting others out of fear that they will fail us or steal from us we become closed up emotionally. We become the kind of people that others don’t want to trust. People don’t want to trust others who don’t trust. Trusting another person with our emotions may be risky, but not trusting anyone with our emotions but ourselves generates much greater risk of poor mental, emotional and even physical health (suppression of the immune system).

“The soul afraid of dying…never learns to live.” The person who fears death becomes afraid of life. Everyone accepts that death is part of life: birth, death and taxes (thanks to G.B. Shaw). However, many fear death because they have no idea what to expect afterwards. They have rejected the obviously fictitious guesses of traditional religions about the hereafter, but have nothing to replace them with.

If you plan to go on a hike into a wilderness area or national park where you haven’t been before, you go prepared. You take a compass or GPS, some form of shelter, you scout topographic and place maps, you take more food and water than you expect to use. You know where you are going, even though you haven’t been there before. Then why not do that with the afterlife: prepare.

Are you afraid of dying and as a consequence you don’t know how to live? Living well is your whole purpose for being here. If you are afraid of dying, you become selfish, as all fearful people become. They think of themselves because they tend to fear what others may introduce into their lives. That’s the complete opposite of what living is about.

Every animal and plant we know has the instinct for survival. We humans have it too. But if we depend on our survival instinct to give us direction for our lives, we live a life no different from that of any other animal or plant. Certainly no greater. And we can expect what happens on our death to be similar to what we expect happens to grass and oak trees, gerbils and frogs when they die.

If you want to live, you must not fear death. Death is simply the end of one phase of your existence before you move on. Prepare yourself for your death by living your life to help others. That is the only way you can be different from any other animal or plant. Only people help their own kind, more than simply to avoid starvation.

You have nothing to fear about death unless you allow yourself to be deceived by those who just don’t “get it.” People who believe that only what may be detected and manoeuvred by the senses really exists have put themselves into a box at which they are the centre. They may lead peaceful and self-fulfilling lives, but they do little to help others because they can’t see outside their box. They are, in effect, intelligent ants with only two legs.

Nothing in nature suggests that life ends with death. In nature, every atom that ever existed still exists today, unless it has been transformed into energy, which is simply another state of existence. Conservation of Energy and Matter is the rule of nature. Why should it not be the rule for life as well.

However, you must live your life outside the box. You must be more than other animals and plants or you can expect only to be reformulated as one of them at death. You must create a persona for yourself that is distinctive from that of any other person, while seeking to work with others for the greater benefit of our kind. Nature conserves what exists, so create yourself into something worth saving on the death of your cellular body.

You should not expect your aches and pains and earthly troubles to pass with you into a future life. Why would you want them? Yet how you deal with them while you are here will determine what kind of persona you create for yourself.

Don’t be afraid. Every other animal and plant on earth is guarded about its safety, about its existence in the future. They expect the end of their lives to be the ends of who or what they are.

You don’t have to be afraid. Fear requires too much selfishness, too much energy and too much life-time.

Live your life as if you want to continue with the next phase of your existence after you die and you will have created something worth conserving after you die. According to everything we know about nature and the “real world” we know now, what you create will continue after your body quits.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach their children how to live life without fear, but with powerful and effective guidance about how they should live their lives.
Learn more at

http://billallin.com

Fascinating Stuff About Time

It’s about time! Or is it?

What is time anyway? Isn’t it just something we humans invented? A second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. As greater accuracy was needed, that method was dropped. Earth doesn’t always take exactly the same length of time to rotate once on its axis.

Tidal friction as influenced by the sun and the moon affect earth’s rotation time. As earth is closer or farther away from the sun (it varies by two million miles–3.2 million km–from us from winter to summer), the sun influences our planet differently. In fact, the influence of the sun is not just a fluctuation back and forth. The length of an earth day increases by three milliseconds each century.

Not much you say? In the time of the dinosaurs, earth would have taken 23 of what we call hours to rotate on its axis. That’s not like setting your clocks back an hour in autumn as daylight saving time ends. That’s sunup to sunup every day, 23 hours.

Even weather can change earth’s rotation slightly. When El Niño years take place, strong winds alone can slow earth’s rotation by a fraction of a millisecond each day. If that doesn’t sound like much of a change, remember that it’s nothing more than wind blowing over the surface of our large planet that slows its rotation.

Philosophers and physicists (at least some of each) debate among themselves as to whether or not time actually exists. One school of thought in philosophy says that time doesn’t exist at all, that each “moment” in our lives is like a snapshot instance that comes with memories of a past, sensations of a present and anticipation of a future. Some say we live only in once instance, ever, while others say life is like a flipbook of life instances and no one knows how fast the book flips (we just made up seconds, minutes, hours and so on to satisfy ourselves).

Some physicists speculate that time comes out of some reality even more basic. And timeless.

How sure are you about the length of a second or a minute? In A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams claimed that “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” Most scientists today believe that time was created with the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago. They decline to speculate on time before the Big Bang because that’s too “outside the box.”

Astronauts and Cosmonauts age differently from those of us on earth when they are in space. According to Albert Einstein, time slows the faster you travel. As you approach the speed of light, time almost stops. Because the space station people travel around earth faster than we do on the surface, time passes slower for them and they age slower as a result. Or do they age faster in space? (See below.)

As a large part of work on space and the cosmos depends on Einstein’s theory of relativity, which uses space and time as its basis, scientists really hope that time exists. At the moment, the space part of the theory seems to be considered differently. Space is no longer considered an empty void, but is filled with dark matter and something else. What is visible in space comprises only four percent of what is out there, according to recent studies.

You have likely heard that the universe is expanding at an increasingly faster rate. No one can explain that reasonably, so dark energy was devised as a theory to explain why the universe that should have been coming back together by now is spreading out faster. Does that mean that time should be slowing or speeding up for us if we are part of what is moving away from the central core of the universe at an increasingly faster rate? Science isn’t clear on that.

Three Spanish scientists claim the expanding universe is a myth. They say that time is actually slowing, thus measurements that show the universe expanding fast seem longer when it is in fact not at all. According to their mathematics (it’s all very formal, not just idle speculation), time will eventually come to a dead stop and everything will stop dead as well. (If that time comes, we had better have some good memories to count on.)

Getting back to something more understandable about time, a study recently calculated that a commuter in a U.S. city loses about 38 hours a year of his or her life waiting in traffic delays.

Have you read about people speculating as to why clocks get changed for daylight saving time each year, most claiming how foolish it is? As the story goes, the practice began as a joke by Benjamin Franklin. He said that people should wake up earlier on summer mornings so they could get more work done during daylight hours and burn fewer candles at night. The U.K. instituted daylight saving time first in 1917, then it spread across the globe.

The U.S. Department of Energy claims that power usage drops by 0.5 percent during DST, saving the equivalent of close to three million barrels of oil.

Where is the rat race fastest, the places where the pace of life is faster than most others? Psychologists in the U.S. studied how quickly bank tellers made change, how fast pedestrians walked and the speed that postal workers spoke and found that the three cities where life is the fastest in the U.S. are Boston, Buffalo and New York. The slowest three are Shreveport, Sacramento and L.A.

In 1972, with technology of the day demanding greater accuracy for timing, more than 50 countries agreed on an international time system that was so accurate that it would lose only one second in 31.7 million years. The world’s most accurate clock today is in Colorado, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It measures vibrations of a single atom of mercury. The clock will not lose as much as one second in one billion years.

As noted above, the earth’s rotation is not so accurate, in fact it’s slowing down. Every few years international time systems must add a “leap second” to the year in order that the solstices and equinoxes remain around the same dates. The last year a leap second was added was 2008 (2008 was one second longer than most years, the additional second being added on New Year’s Eve).

When train travel became common in the 19th century, schedules had to be kept. As each community tended to have its own timekeeping system, there were usually two kinds of time–local time and railway time. Because this was too confusing, American railway systems forced the adoption of a national system of standardized time, in 1883. The forced synchronizing of timekeeping systems may have inspired Einstein’s thinking about relativity.

Einstein said that gravity slows the passage of time, so the less gravity influence you experience the slower time passes and the slower you age. That means that airplane passengers at high altitudes and people on the international space station, experiencing less gravity than those of us on the surface, should age faster by a few nanoseconds each day.

According to quantum physics, the shortest possible period of time should be 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.

Which reminds, me, I don’t have time to write more about this.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know the right times to act with their children to make their teaching conform with the developmental needs of the kids. School curriculum rarely conforms.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

[Primary source: Discover, March, 2009]

Censorship drives perversion. Always and everywhere. When we drive sex out of the mainstream we guarantee that all sex is, by definition, deviant.
- Chris, of Atomic Cinema, http://www.cinebizarre.com/essay_eroticphil.htm

Moral issues, more than any other, bring out the mysterious and contradictory parts of human nature. The topic of sex ranks up with the top contenders as best example.

First of all, most of whatever morality each of us has was not born with us. What we were born with–what almost all of us humans have in common–is what we call ethics: what’s right, what’s wrong. Most ethics that travelled into us with our genetic heritage has to do with survival of our own species. Most of that dates back to prehistory.

We don’t allow murder because with such small numbers as our species had in its early years, with so many predators and so little natural protection, we needed as many of us around to defend each other from attack and other forms of danger as we could possibly find.

We don’t allow stealing from each other–though some cultures consider it sharing if it’s for food or protection–because our basic possessions were part of our ability to survive in a harsh world.

We don’t allow cheating each other because that breaks any possibilities for trust. Survival depended on trusting each other. Even today we enter into marriage, new jobs and mortgages believing that we can trust those we have agreed to associate our lives with.

We look after our young, our elderly and those who can’t fend for themselves because each plays a role in the ultimate story of survival of our species and has throughout our existence as a species.

We learn morality mostly from our parents but also from our other family members, our teachers, our community associations and our peers. For example, ethically we disapprove of cheating, but morally we have a paradox if the cheating is on a spouse or someone to whom we have pledged our family allegiance. Nature, through our hormones, tells us that we should spread our DNA as widely as possible, meaning that we should have sex with as many members of the opposite sex as we feel is advantageous to that cause. Nature also tells us that we should contribute to and take responsibility for raising any young that those sexual unions produce.

Morality tells us that if we have agreed to be responsible for any young resulting from a marriage, we should also be prepared to commit ourselves monogamously to one mate. Why do we believe that? Because we have been taught that since childhood. That, it seems, is sufficient for most of us to remain monogamous with our spouses and to ostracize or otherwise punish those who insist upon following only those two dictates of nature–spread your DNA and look after the young you produce. That morality was learned, it’s not natural.

While ethics tells us that we must not murder our own kind, morality dictates that we must pay a penalty for doing that wrong. Even those who believe that people who commit the sin of murder will pay the consequences after death–usually in hell–insist that the sinner must also pay as high a penalty as possible here on earth. Paradox or not, that is how morality works. Morality never pretends to make sense. It only insists that rules someone else made must be followed because they were to taught to us as children. “It’s the way it has always been,” whether that be true or not.

Morality says that sex and public displays of sexuality are deviant and sinful. Why? Because we have been taught that these are examples of debauchery, the beginning of the end of respectability. Respectability, of course, is also taught. It varies from one time period to another and between cultures.

Public examples of sex (such as in the cinema) and sexuality will destroy us, so the lessons that we are taught go. These lessons are taught most vociferously by religions whose leaders intend to control the behaviour of their followers. The easiest way to do that is to make some things that come to us naturally, sinful. No examples exist of history or studies showing that a culture was destroyed because it descended into chaos as a result of public sex and sexuality.

Moral forces insist that prostitution is wrong and that prostitutes and their clients should be punished. The best example that this teaching is wrong is in The Netherlands where prostitution was made legal and controlled for health factors, then cases of rape dropped dramatically. And permanently, as their records show.

Prostitution, sex movies, internet pornography and phone sex provide solutions for those whose natural sexual needs are not or cannot be met by whatever associations people have with their intimate partners (if any). Nature tells us through our hormones that sex is right and normal, only the forces of morality–bigots with white jackets and self designed haloes–say that sex is wrong, must be hidden, must be denied (even if sexual perversions take place in private among them).

Does this mean that we should allow our communities to become modern day Sodoms and Gomorrahs? No. We can avoid that happening by simply teaching our young people about sex instead of trying to hide it while they learn about sex from people who have something to gain from teaching them the wrong lessons. Wherever parents fail to teach their children in a timely fashion the lessons the young ones need, others will be there to help the kids into some real perversion, usually through lies and with selfish motives.

Sex is natural. Get over it. Moreover, if you believe that something relating to sex is wrong, teach it to your children. At the same time, teach them how to accommodate themselves around their natural desires and the community need to maintain certain levels of safety (such as by using condoms) and practicality (don’t have unprotected sex if you can’t take responsibility for children you conceive). Kids want to learn about life lessons. It’s what they know inherently they should do.

Masturbation may be a poor substitute for sexual intercourse with someone you love, but there is no valid reason to say it’s wrong. Is it any more right to tell kids that they might not be able to have children when they become full adults or that hair will grow on the palms of their hands if they masturbate–to lie–than to let them release their pentup hormone-based emotional confusion so they can get on with more socially acceptable activities?

We only have censorship because we don’t teach our children what is right and wrong and trust them to do what is right. Those forces that purvey activities and products that we believe are morally wrong only do so because we fail to teach our children what is right and wrong and why the wrong things are harmful to themselves and to society. The purveyors of anti-social products and activities satisfy the needs created by the failure of parents to do the most important job they were put on earth to do: teach their children life lessons.

Deviance happens not because so many bad people want to warp the minds and bodies of members of society. Deviance happens because the good people of that society fail to do what they should to ensure the safe continuance of our species into the next generations.

Teach the children. Preaching to the adults seldom works in the short term, never works over a long period of time.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children what is both ethically and practically right and wrong before they turn to those with ulterior motives to find answers we don’t want them to receive.
Learn more at

http://billallin.com

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his
creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who
is but a reflection of human frailty.
-Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

In my search for God over the past several decades I have concluded that evidence exists all over our planet that the deity people have tried to teach me about is a fraud.

I have also concluded that people who believe in their God do so fervently. Even those who have doubts will firm their beliefs up quickly if someone presents a formidable argument that God is a myth invented by needy people and hucksters who want to make money off gullible believers. Nothing confirms the belief in God by doubters more than finding someone who bad mouths the God they aren’t sure about.

Two problems present themselves forcibly to my mind that suggest that God–the God of religions, whichever one that may be– is nothing more than a convenient invention. First is that those who most strenuously preach the rules of their religion–those who dictate what is sin and what is not–tend to be sinners against their own rules when the facade is torn away. The hypocrisy of the legislators of sin being devout sinners under the skin repels me.

The second problem I have with the concepts of God that many people hold is the contradiction and hypocrisy of the believers. The hypocrisy part is similar to the legislators of sin being sinners themselves, only this latter example involves the practitioners of the religion rather than it leaders. They simply don’t follow the rules they supposedly subscribe to.

Contradictions abound in the monotheistic religions. God is a vengeful God, but he wants us to be peaceful. God is a peaceful God until he wants his followers to go to war and to die if necessary to defend the faith. Defend it from what is never spoken, never asked, never answered, because faith cannot be killed unless every last believer is annihilated.

Some say that God punishes sinners for every sinful act they commit. The same believers will claim that their own particular sins are forgiven because Jesus (or some other prophet) died that their sins may be forgiven. Convenient.

Some actually believe (and can quote Revelations as evidence) that they can sin abundantly for their whole lives, then repent and be saved on their deathbeds and still be admitted into heaven.

Even the concept of heaven is absurdly contradictory. To Christians heaven is a place of eternal bliss, usually only available to devout and pure Christians, and sometimes their beloved pets. The Christian heaven is as boring as I could imagine, surely a kind of hell itself where every bit of intellectual strength I have gained throughout my life will be lost through atrophy because the inmates have nothing to think about.

The Muslim heaven must be populated by an uncountable number of prostitutes because Muslim suicide bombers are promised 72 of them each when they reach the Pearly Gates. Female bombers, by the way, are greeted by male prostitutes. Islam is not consistent about whether these prostitutes are created by Allah just in time for the arrival of a new bomber or whether they were once occupants of terra firma.

Judaism spends so little time on the concept of heaven that many Jews are not clear about what heaven is. Jews are supposed to focus on being good on earth and leave important stuff like the afterlife to God. This would seem to work except for the fact that Jewish intellectuals and students spend countless hours debating how to interpret the words of their holy books. How can everyone follow what is debated so ferociously?

The point here, as stated in Einstein’s quote, is that people have invented their respective God with human characteristics. Step back from that a moment and consider the absurdity. Believers agree that God is perfect, but present evidence in holy books that God has as many failures and foibles as any foolish human.

Atheists have disavowed anything to do with God or the religions that invented God. Yet it’s not God they don’t believe exists, but the contradictory, hypocritical and nonsensical God that devout believers believe in. What atheists don’t believe exists is the God that religions have invented.

Interestingly, my personal experience and that of many others I have spoken to on the subject suggests that atheists tend to live more wholesome and beneficial lives than religionists who believe the atheists are sinners.

Every religion has some good in it. Every devout believer also has some good. The evidence for these conclusions is easy to see if we remove our prejudicial spectacles.

What most people who claim to believe in God seem to miss is the evidence for God that exists all around them. That kind of evidence would stand up in a court of law if the challenge were to show evidence beyond doubt.

Now you would like me to deliver that evidence into your waiting hands.

Open your eyes. Open your ears. Resensitize your taste, touch and smell.

Begin to pay real attention to real events that can’t be proven by science but for which an abundance of evidence exists. Some of it in book form. Just look for it. Believing or concluding anything from a position of ignorance doesn’t make sense.

Learn about life, especially in its finest detail. The more you learn about life, especially how systems relate to each other within one larger system (a human body, a plant or anything in the physical world) the more you must ask yourself if this all could have happened by accident.

Godless evolutionists claim that everything that happens can be explained by laws of nature. Not a single one of them will attempt to explain why those laws exist or how they happen to fit together so immaculately well. There is no more reason for natural laws to exist than for matter and energy to exist. Natural laws don’t prove anything, they only explain phenomena.

Every single thing that we know exists continues to exist even when it transforms. That is, energy can become mass or can change to another form of energy, but it never disappears. Your body will transform when it dies. No physical part of it will disappear, ever.

Are you thinking about this? Do you have a personality? Can anything you know about the physics of the human body explain either the ability to think rationally or the existence of personality? Only by stretching reality into the realm of mythology or fantasy.

One natural law is conservation. Just as mass and energy can never disappear (nor can dark matter or dark energy, so far as anyone knows), so too the personality that became you cannot disappear just because your body wears out and transforms.

No one can even say for certain that your thoughts happen within your brain, though some electrical activity certainly happens there when you think. Electricity travels around the outside of an electrical wire, not through it. Nature has an energy travelling beside (outside of) mass, not inside of it.

Is it impossible to imagine that the personality that is you exists beyond the limits of your skin and clothing? Have you not felt sometimes that someone was staring at you from behind. Can you not sometimes feel the presence of someone in a room? Have you ever expected someone to call you, then the phone rings and that person speaks? Nothing in natural law can explain those phenomena that most people have experienced.

It’s hard to imagine that your personality may be defined 100 percent within the confines of your body, and its activity can be accounted for by the actions of your muscles, nerves and brain.

If you want to find God, don’t look in a book or listen to someone tell you their version of God. You can find God yourself. Just don’t look to someone who stands to make a profit by convincing you of something to explain God to you. That’s a conflict of interest.

Look and learn. The more you learn, the more God will reveal himself to you.

Bill Allin
‘Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems,’ a book for adults to learn how they came to have the personalities they have and to help parents and teachers teach children what they need to develop fully in all ways.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Before winter leaves the northern hemisphere I’ll take this opportunity to tell you a bit about the white stuff that has been lying two feet thick in my yard for the past few months.