Sports and Education

A vast amount of energy and money is invested into sports programs at educational institutions, both public and private, including schools, colleges, and organizations such as pee-wee football, Pop Warner baseball, Little League, and so on.  The primary concern here is for the extraordinary amount of resources devoted to sports programs in public schools.

Physical education and exercise programs in public schools are jokes.  Students might be required to undergo regimens of physical exercise during only one year of their public school education and then it's dropped.  If there was a real concern that the students needed physical activity then the requirement would exist for every year of their attendance until graduation.  Instead, there is a minimal requirement for PE, and that exists only so that there is a justification for keeping coaches on the public school payroll.

Sports in schools began as an extracurricular activity.  It is still classified as such, meaning that no student can be required to participate in any particular sports program, but it has also far exceeded the intent of an extracurricular activity.  Clubs and organizations in public schools began as a way for students to gather together in order to enjoy a particular passion.  Competition ruins the purity of such social interaction.  Some clubs and organizations still exist solely for the benefit of student socialization, but other groups have instilled within their framework the idea that competition is the reason for that group's existence.  I'm not arguing that this is a bad thing; young adults compete against each other constantly in everything they do, usually for social status.

What I see as a problem is disproportionate support for one extracurricular activity over another.  Sports programs are the number one culprit in this, with some sports taking a much higher priority over others.  Again, I am not speaking out against sports in school, only against the misuse of resources.

I cannot speak for every school, but here in my hometown of Chester, South Carolina, the high school football program is heavily weighted when it comes to staffing and financial support.  The kind of financial support I'm talking about is the use of governmental funding that the school receives ostensibly for education.  In the school budget we could find such items as textbooks, teacher salaries, maintenance, office supplies, equipment...and a large chunk devoted to sports like football.  A typical high school football team requires extraordinary financial support.  Uniforms, pads, sports drinks, training equipment, a weight room, laundry facilities, not to mention the astonishing cost of building facilities in which the team can play. 

A gymnasium has been a standard part of a school's design for several generations.  Typically, it is a basketball court with pull-out bleachers.  A gymnasium usually doubles as an assembly hall for the school, so it serves more than one function.  A football stadium has primarily one use: playing football.  Soccer teams often use the same stadium because the standard minimum requirements for a soccer field's dimensions are the same as the standard dimensions of a football field.  It should be noted, however, that in America soccer is not nearly as pervasive a sport as football, baseball, basketball, or even tennis in our public schools.

The staff required for a football team is expensive as well.  There are usually as many as five coaches even for a small football team.  Some schools have as many as fifteen, and some even more.  This is in a setting where there would be typically four to six English teachers, as many math teachers, two history teachers, and...you get the idea.  We say that education is the most important part of school, but budgeting doesn't reflect that.  Teachers are traditionally underpaid compared to the amount of work they perform, schools complain frequently about having to cut back on teacher staffing, textbook purchases, equipment, and so-on, but rarely does a school sports program suffer.

This is actually quite understandable.  The public loves sports.  Especially professional sports, and the star players all got their starts playing sports in middle and high schools.  Again, let me emphasize that I am not against sports, I'm just concerned about the use of public funds earmarked for education being spent on sports programs that benefit a tiny percentage of the student body.  Other extracurricular clubs and organizations do not enjoy large budgetary allowances out of the general education fund, why should sports?  If the choir wants to go compete, they have to come up with the money for the bus, for hotels, for meals, and do it on their own.  When the football team goes to compete they have a dedicated bus, meals are provided (not just for players but also for the dozen or so coaches, the support staff, the requisite medics, and so on).  The only other group in the school that receives treatment like that is usually the band, and only because they usually travel with the football team and perform at football games.

Football and other sports programs should be paid for the same way other extracurricular activities are paid for.  Privately.  If a student wants to participate in the chess club, for example, he might have to come up with a membership fee.  Most sports players in high school buy their own equipment such as shoes, gloves, athletic supporters, and sometimes even uniforms.  Football players pay nothing.  Football is, after all, the most beloved of American sports, not to mention one of the most dangerous for those who play it, so the almost-pampering of the players is understandable in a way.  They take great risks for our entertainment, so they should be given more.

The problem is that it's not just for our entertainment.  The way players play high school football compares in no way to the way football is played outside of the school environment.  On the other hand, baseball, soccer, and basketball are good examples of sports that are played exactly the same in high school as they are privately in pick-up games or in other non-school settings such as community leagues.  High school football is played the way it is because that's the way it's played in college, and it's played that way in college because that's the way professionals do it.  And here we see the crux of the issue.  High school football players are being trained so that they can secure college scholarships and, in turn, eventually gain the notice of professional teams.  High school football is the first step on the road to a career for many of the players.

There has been alot of arguments back and forth about failures in the public school system.  This is not the time to get into all of that, but one suggestion I might make is altering the educational track to include a future career in professional sports.  At Chester High School, students have three choices when it comes to the kind of education they receive.  If a student is a low academic achiever and has no desire to change that, there is a basic education track which is designed to meet the minimum state requirements for graduation.  For those who think they're going on to college, there is a college preparatory track which emphasizes the kind of classes a four-year college requires.  Then there is the middle ground for those students who want to go into a professional career that can be achieved by attending a two-year community or technical college, and again classes are geared toward achieving that goal.

In most schools, there is a strict academic requirement for those students who engage in sports.  A certain grade level must be maintained in order to ensure continued participation.  This has, in the past, led to grading scandals where teachers were pressured to pass otherwise substandard students so that they could continue to participate in sports.  What I suggest is that we add another education track.  One that focuses on sports.

For those students who want to become a lawyer, doctor, or CEO of a company, the school accommodates them with appropriate courses.  For those who want to become an electrician, nurse's assistant, or computer programmer, the school accommodates them, too.  So why not accommodate those students whose desire it is to become a professional basketball or football player?

I know, the argument might be that we run the risk of encouraging a student to pursue something that they can not achieve, and to that I ask "so what?" Do you really think that everyone who follows the college preparatory track in school goes on to be a doctor? a lawyer? a CEO? Statistically, only about half of all students who start attending college actually graduate within six years with a bachelor's degree.  Graduation rates are slightly higher for those who attend technical schools.  For those who never pursue education past the high school diploma, well what needs to be said about them?  At the absolute worst, a student who pursues his or her dream of a career in professional sports faces nothing more than having to take some remedial courses in community or technical college in order to get them up to level for continuing on toward a career in some other field.

For those who want to be professional athletes, then why not just create an educational plan for them that includes what they really need to know?  But even with that plan in place, the full burden of that student's education should not fall on the public.  A sports-track should receive no more funding than the college-prep track with all other funds coming from private funding.  The same should hold true for colleges.  There is a long-standing prohibition against "paying" students to attend college.  The intent is to discourage rich schools or those with wealthy benefactors from enticing the best athletes.  Ostensibly the student is still there to receive an education that will lead him to a bachelor's degree in a professional field, one such as business management, communications, history, English, science, and so on.  Why not include spots as a viable option? Why not have someone graduate with a degree in "sports science" with particular focus on his or her sport of choice?

Arguments are often made that profound changes need to be made to our education system, and those arguments are completely valid.  One of those changes must be to include the possibility of a career as a professional sports player.  As to the other changes...well, that's the focus of another essay.

Economics is Confusing

If I were to say that I think our government is corrupt, I don't think anyone would argue. At least, not with the conviction that they're arguing a valid point. True, there are different levels of corruption, and our government hasn't sunk to the depths of some foreign governments I could mention. But the corruption is there, all the same. Only we like to call it "lobbying." Rich corporations and individuals hire persuasive people to ply our government leaders with gifts and smooth talk in order to convince them to enact laws that favor those corporations over the common citizen. It is only when a more powerful lobby comes along that the power of one corporation is dwarfed by another, or when public outcry becomes vocal enough to demand a change in the form of ousting unpopular politicians at the polls.

Democracy still works in America, though the American public has been convinced over many years that it does not. That, too, is the work of lobbyists. The most blatant example of the power private business has over our public government came in the form of the 700 billion dollar bailout of the banks, done in order to "save" us from the so-called mortgage crisis.

Here's what happened. Some whiz on Wall Street got the bright idea to start selling mortgages in bundles and billing them as "investments." This came about because the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, decided that it wasn't doing the world any good having all that money sitting there waiting to be used, it would best to invest it. But invest it in what?

Oh, what is the IMF? Think of it this way: When you get your paycheck, you deposit it into your bank. Your bank will make loans to people, charging interest, based on the funds they have available. Funds deposited by people just like you. But what happens when your bank doesn't have enough money to lend out? What happens if they’ve loaned out their money and you want to make a withdrawal? Easy, they borrow from THEIR bank.

There is a system of banks that cater only to other banks, and a system of federal banks that cater to them. That's the Federal Reserve System, what you might have heard referred to as the FED. The Chairman of the FED sets interest rates on the loans the Federal Reserve System makes to banks when they need to borrow money. Those banks charge interest to the banks THEY loan to, and your bank charges interest on the loans it makes to ordinary people like us. While you pay nine percent on your house loan, on up the line the FED is charging about one percent interest. Everyone makes a profit.

What does this have to do with the IMF, you ask? Well, who do you think governments borrow money from when they need it? That's right, the IMF is the bank that all governments bank at. Now, the annual budget in the US is around three trillion dollars. Trillion, with a "T." A trillion is a thousand billion, and a billion is a thousand million, and...you get the idea. It's a LOT of money. And that's just the US. Worldwide, the amount of money flying around is mind-boggling.

So, the IMF decides it wants to invest, and here are these little mortgage bundles ready for investment. You can see now, I think, why the "mortgage crisis" was a world-spanning problem.

At first, the mortgage bundles contained only the regular, every-day mortgages. The kinds banks have been handling since forever. But the IMF had a whole bunch of money to spend, and they weren't the only ones who wanted in on the lucrative deal. Pretty quickly, the number of investment opportunities began to dwindle. There were just so many mortgages to go around. So, being the enterprising people that we are, someone came up with the obvious solution. Make more mortgages.

Offers for house loans proliferated. Interest rates plummeted. Offers became too good to pass up. No down payment, no closing costs, no hidden fees. It was like the banks were just giving away houses. Some companies sprang up just to make more mortgages, the most famous of these being one called Countrywide. Their ads were everywhere, and people flocked to them to buy a home. Didn't make much money? That's okay, you can still get a house. Promises were made that were never intended to be kept. Millions of people bought homes who shouldn't have. The banks and companies making the mortgage loans didn't care. They just sold the mortgages as soon as they could, and it wasn't their problem anymore.

The people buying the loans, maybe they knew the mortgages were toxic, maybe they didn't. They, in turn, sold the mortgages in bundles higher up the foodchain, where eventually the Big Boys invested in them. Not only the big banks, either, it was investors everywhere. Pension plans were the saddest victims.

In order to afford to make payments to all retirees, most pension plans invest their money. The returns they get swell the pension coffers and make it possible to send checks to the retirees who have earned it. Mortgage bundles were advertised as stable, safe, long-term, high-yield investments. They were, too, at least in the beginning.

But as greed took over, as loans were increasingly made to people who could not afford them, the mortgage bundles became more and more unstable. Many people who took out a loan were shocked to discover they had balloon payments to make, or that their interests rates went up along with their monthly payments. They began to default on their loans. Banks began to foreclose.

Normally, when a bank forecloses on a house, it represents a small fraction of the total house loans that bank has made. Banks make back their money by selling the house on the open market. Essentially, they transfer the mortgage to a new person. But that only works when there is a market for new homeowners. As more and more houses were foreclosed upon, the market became flooded with available houses while the pool of potential home-buyers dwindled drastically. The law of supply and demand ensures that when there is an abundance of a product, the value of that product goes down. Houses were no longer worth what they were originally. Banks were hemorrhaging money.

As this crisis swelled, investors began to jump ship. The big banks who now owned all of these toxic mortgages were left holding the bag. And here is where the government bailout was justified. If the big banks failed, we were told, it would destroy our economy. The little banks would be bankrupted in a chain of implosions; the same interconnectivity that made the entire banking system work would destroy it. That would leave us, the people, in a world of trouble.

So, says the government, here's 700 billion dollars to fix the mess. Thank you, said the banks, and went right on foreclosing on houses. Now they could afford to. Now they could absorb the loss of all those investments and it was business as usual. Except...

People were losing their homes. Us, the people, whom the government is supposed to serve, we were being shafted. The downturn in the economy was devastating. Yes, the big banks survived quite nicely, and so did many of the banks down the line. The little banks, the local ones, a lot of them suffered, caught with mortgages they couldn't do anything with. No bailout for them. As the economy suffered, the damage spread. Businesses had to lay off workers or close their doors entirely. Without paychecks, people who otherwise afforded their mortgages could no longer do so. Because of toxic mortgages, non-toxic ones became victims of foreclosure.

The question I have to ask is, what did our 700 billion actually buy? When you pay money, you expect something in return. Right? In my opinion, simply handing that much money over without strings attached was monumentally irresponsible. That was OUR money, the American public's. WE should have benefited. The government should have bought those mortgages. People should have kept their houses. The simple solution would have been to take over the mortgages, adjust payments so that people could actually afford them, and everyone could have benefited. The government was ALREADY in the business of making mortgage loans in the form of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Fannie Mae, or the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), along with Freddie Mac, are two privately traded companies started by acts of Congress and specifically mandated to stimulate and manage the mortgage backed securities market. Mortgage backed securities is a fancy way of saying mortgage bundles, the same things that started the mess requiring the expensive bailout. Essentially, Fannie Mae and it's little brother Freddie Mac don't make loans directly to the public, but they do buy mortgages from banks once the banks have given the loans. That was to free the banks to make even more mortgage loans.

So instead of just handing the banks free money, the government should have purchased the mortgages and given them over to Fannie Mae to manage, then mandated that Fannie Mae do what it could to keep people in their homes. Naturally, not everyone who got a mortgage deserved to stay in their home. If you moved yourself into an expensive home knowing full well you couldn't afford it, then you need to move out and find someplace affordable to you. If, on the other hand, you purchased your home under the assumption that payments would be within your means, only to discover later that your mortgage had been sold, then resold, and the new owners had no idea that you were supposed to have a "deal," then whose fault is that?

Most people, I'd be willing to bet, didn't know that the bank could sell your debt to someone else. I know that I always assumed that my loan with the bank was between me and the bank. Period. But really what you do when you take out a loan is sign a contract, and a contract can be treated like a commodity. It can be bought and sold, which is exactly what these banks did with all those mortgages. Banks and other companies made mortgage loans knowing full well that the people they were selling to couldn't afford them. Yet no one has ever been punished for this fiasco. No, instead our benevolent government bowed to the will of the rich owners of the banks and handed over OUR money to help them out of the mess THEY created.

The purpose of a democratic government is to serve the majority of its people to the best of its ability. The 700 billion dollar bailout of the banks served an elite minority while condemning the majority of Americans to years of economic hardship and sentencing many homeowners to homelessness. Yes, the banks were saved and the trickle down effect was preserved...but at what price? Was it really worth it? And could it have been handled better?

It is the duty of every patriotic American to question the means and motives of government decisions, and it is the duty of public servants (that, after all, is what Senators, Congressmen, and even the President are) to watchdog the interests of the majority, not just those who can afford to show up in Washington and woo them with food and wine and gifts and silver-tongued promises.

Intelligence as a Function of Evolutionary Adaptation

Or: Complex Intelligent Lifeforms are the Inevitable Result of the Evolutionary Process Once It Has Begun

Near the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains, which extend along the eastern coast of the United States, lays the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, over 520,000 acres of land encompassing the most diversified ecology of plants and animals in North America. Over sixteen hundred species of plants, including one hundred twenty-five species of trees, along with two hundred species of birds, fifty species of fish, and sixty species of mammals are nestled into an area only a little smaller than the entire state of Rhode Island. Yet these numbers pale in comparison to the total number of species which currently exist on the planet. Some estimates approach thirty million species, ranging from ten thousand species of sponge, five thousand species of mammals, ten thousand species of birds, and twenty-three thousand species of fish, filling every possible ecological niche from the frozen arctic to equatorial Africa and down to the crushing depth a mile beneath the ocean’s surface. Life flourishes, it is indomitable, diverse, and adaptable. Yet the world’s surface could easily have been a barren landscape if not for something that happened over three billion years ago, an event which is wrongly called by some a miracle and by others a random act of chance.

On the surface, it seems that the likelihood of life formation is low, and it is tempting to narrow one's focus to argue that the probability of life forming here, on our planet, would be astronomical. Those who would argue that are entirely correct. But it is important to not lose sight of the fact that the universe is very, very large, and when one factors in all variables then the possibility of life forming in at least one place in the universe becomes a certainty.

Take the lottery for example. The odds of winning the MegaMillions lottery are 1 in 135,145,920. This means that one person buying one ticket has that much chance of winning the jackpot. So one might argue that the likelihood of someone winning the lottery have the same odds, but that would be incorrect. Each individual lottery ticket has those odds, true, but if the individual buys more than one ticket then his overall odds of winning go up. Holistically, the odds that someone will win the lottery likewise increase as more people participate. Change the variables in the equation, and the probability of success increases. And, given enough time and the same number of variables, the probability of at least one person winning the lottery becomes an inevitability. This truth is reflected in the fact that people do, indeed, win the lottery on a more or less regular basis.

This same logic can be applied to the likelihood of life appearing somewhere in the universe at least once. This is akin to the Infinite Monkeys Theory, which posits that if you had an infinite number of monkeys hitting random keys on an infinite number of typewriters, at least one of them will type out the complete works of Shakespeare. It is a probalistic certainty. Increase the number of variables within a set of parameters and the probability of a desired result becomes increasingly likely and, eventually, inevitable.

Astronomers have estimated that the universe is 150-billion light years wide. To put that in perspective, the United States is about three thousand miles wide and a jet flying at the average of six hundred miles per hour will take five hours to cross that distance. The Earth, by comparison, is ninety-three million miles from the sun, a distance 31,000 times larger, and light from the sun takes a mere eight minutes to arrive here. In one second of time, a beam of light will travel 186,282 miles, which means that if you could travel at the speed of light you could circle the entire Earth seven and a half times in that single second. A "light year" is the distance light would travel in one year's time, meaning roughly 5,878,612,843,200 miles. Multiply that number against 150-billion and you get the measure of the width of the universe.

The Earth is located within the Milky Way Galaxy, which astronomers estimate contains around 100-million stars, and our galaxy is only one of billions of galaxies. A conservative estimate of the number of stars in the whole universe exceeds 10^12 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Now, if one assumes that the likelihood of finding similar conditions to those which brought about the creation of life on our world are one in one trillion, nearly seventy-four hundred times less likely than winning the lottery, then there still could be 1,000,000,000,000 Earth-like planets out there. Planets which find themselves just the right distance from just the right type of sun, covered in just the right amounts of chemicals under just the right conditions in which life could, possibly, appear. Even if one decreases the number of planets one works with, the likelihood that at least one planet in the entire universe would foment the creation of life becomes inevitable. The proof of this is the fact that we are here, we exist. Life did occur.

This should not be construed as an argument for extra-terrestrial life, however. Given a certain number of monkeys on those typewriters, the probability of one of them typing something we can read is a certainty, but the probability of more than one doing so is not guaranteed. Along the same lines, the chance of life appearing at least once in our universe, given its vast size and age, is far more probable than the likelihood that it would never occur at all. That is no guarantee that it will happen again, but neither does it preclude the possibility that it could.

The complexity of life is another matter entirely. The law of entropy says that systems trend toward dissolution, that complexity always reduces to a simpler form. Things decay, they rot, they break apart. In the world of chemistry, entropy is king. On a larger scale, however, the opposite appears to be true. A primary star composed mostly of pure hydrogen will have a short lifespan and end its existence violently. Fusion is, itself, a form of reverse entropy. While the star itself obeys the general rule and reduces to a simpler form by exploding and scattering molecules, fusion has taken those hydrogen atoms and created something more complex: helium.

Then, as the star is dying, the fusion process grasps for more fuel, and the helium becomes that fuel. Helium fuses into something more complex, and that result fuses into something more complex still. When the star becomes a nova, the material it scatters includes every element on the periodic table. We would not be here if not for the death of that star. There would be no carbon, no oxygen, no iron, nickel, silicon, aluminum, gold, nor any other element that comprises the ground we walk upon, the atmosphere that covers us, or the molecules which comprise the bodies we wear.

Likewise, life itself appears to obey a rule of reverse entropy as it becomes increasingly complex over time. Lifeforms compete for resources needed to sustain the processes of life. Better, more complex lifeforms, succeed better than simpler ones. That is evolution. While the exact processes of evolution are, as yet, unknown, the results are easily observable. What began as complex chains of hydrocarbon molecules morphed into self-replicating organisms capable of improving upon their own design. When simple evolution could not provide enough of an advantage, the organisms joined together. They learned to cooperate. Our own bodies today are amalgams of differing cells uniquely suited to performing tasks that keep the aggregate alive. Whether those cells are the descendants of different original symbiotic organisms or the result of specialization of pre-existing cells is a question for a different debate.

Putting aside the question of evolutionary mechanics, we arrive at the crux of the matter. Why should evolution culminate in sentience? Well, saying that our evolution has “culminated” would be arrogance. It is quite likely that our descendants will look back upon us in the same way we look upon Neanderthals or Australopithecines. Nonetheless, we see in ourselves something that is greater than the sum of our parts, something that sets us firmly apart from all other lifeforms. We think. We are self-aware. True, those two traits cannot be proven to belong uniquely to the human species. Chimpanzees, for instance, use tools. Language is not unique to us, either. Whales, elephants, and bees are just three of many examples of species who communicate; whales with their songs, elephants through infrasound, and bees with their dancing.

“Cogito ergo sum,” stated the French philosopher René Descartes. “I think, therefore I am.” This, at the most basic level, is the definition of sentience. We are fully aware of ourselves as entities, and that leads us to conclude that there must be something, some part of us, that transcends the flesh. Scientifically, there must be an evolutionary advantage to such a phenomenon. Certainly, our intelligence has allowed us to succeed as no other Earthly species has before. We dominate all other lifeforms on the planet, from the microscopic to the gargantuan. A virus might kill us, and we might not know the cure, but we are smart enough to learn how to avoid becoming infected. A tiger might be able to attack, kill, and devour us, but we are smart enough to band together and destroy the tiger in turn. It must be that intelligence and sentience are natural extensions of the evolutionary process. An adaptation that allowed us to not only survive but to excel. If that is so, then we must conclude that intelligence is the result of a natural process, that it is, in fact, inevitable. Just as mammals survived whatever killed off the dinosaurs, just as Staphylococcus aureus became Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), evolutionary adaptation transformed our earliest ancestors over the course of billions of years into us.

Again, there is no assurance that such a process is universal law. Perhaps there is a place where life formed, meaning self-replicating metabolic organisms, and where there never developed a need for ecological competition. In such a case, evolution would not have begun, and those lifeforms would remain just as they are until the condition of their environment was no longer conducive to a static existence. Why, we might ask, did evolution begin on Earth? To even begin to formulate an answer to that riddle, we must look back to the very origins of life.

In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, two scientists at the University of Chicago, conducted an experiment in which they attempted to generate life from inorganic materials. By combining water, methane, hydrogen, and ammonia in a sealed, sterile system and applying heat and electricity, they were able to synthesize twenty-two amino acids, the building blocks of life. While they did not create life per se, it seems clear that their experiment proved that given sufficient time life, or something life-like, could arise from the primordial soup that was the very young Earth.

The Earth of 3.5 billion years ago was a very violent place. The young planet was barely a billion years old by then, only 30 million years younger than the Sun itself. Land masses and oceans had formed. The moon hung in the sky, the magnetic field had been established, and the atmosphere was charged with energy. The ocean of the distant past was nothing like it is today, not rich with mineral salts or, probably, not even quite as viscous. It was, however, thick with probiotic chemicals. It would have been a hot, energetic environment, exactly the environment that Miller and Urey recreated in their experiment. In a short time, Miller and Urey were able to create amino acids. The Earth could do it at leisure.

But what then? Amino acids, we know, combine to form proteins, but life is comprised of more than just proteins. The life we know is based upon genetics, meaning the presence of DNA or RNA. In the early 1960s, a scientist named Juan Oro conducted a follow-up experiment to the Miller-Urey research. In his experiment, he combined hydrogen cyanide and ammonia in an aqueous solution, which is theorized to also be a part of the “primordial soup.” The result was the production of adenine which is an essential amino acid for the formation of DNA. Further experiments produced thymine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil, the other amino acids needed for both DNA and RNA.

It is argued that the conditions of those experiments might not have matched the early environmental conditions of the young Earth, or that the constituent components of the “primordial soup” can not be accurately known. Taking that into account, scientists have questioned the results of both experiments. However, on September 28, 1969, a meteorite was recovered near Murchison, Australia, from which over 90 amino acids were able to be extracted. Nineteen of those amino acids are found naturally on Earth. If amino acids form so readily that even a piece of space debris contains over 90 of them, then it is not far fetched to assume that they could occur spontaneously under whatever conditions existed 3.5 billion years ago.

An alternative to the theory of abiogenesis (the theory that life arose from inanimate matter) is the theory of panspermia, the idea that life arrived on Earth pre-formed, delivered by the same kind of meteorite that fell in Australia in 1969. Such an argument sidesteps the real question, which is to ask why such life would have formed anywhere.

The oldest fossils of microbe-like objects date are 3.5 billion years old. By “microbe-like,” the reference is to organic structures called protobionts. Protobionts are simply organic compounds surrounded by a membrane-like structure which is, itself, comprised of other organic substances. While protobionts are not, technically, “alive,” they do provide an indication as to how self-replicating metabolic organisms could have arose. Abiotic replication is not a rare phenomenon, and that also gives us a clue as to how life could have formed from non-living substances.

Let’s look, for example, at a simple chemical compound such as water. Water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen or, more specifically, one atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen (hence “H₂O”). Atoms are comprised of three basic components: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons combine to form the atomic nucleus while electrons orbit the nucleus in complex orbits determined by natural laws. Such formations create points on the atom where other atoms are able to bind. Hydrogen has one available bond while Oxygen has two. They fit together like children’s building blocks. Likewise, complex molecules are also capable of bonding. The more complex the molecule, the more complex the bonding process becomes.

A long chain of molecules would not, for example, bond with just anything else. The analogy of children’s building blocks is apt here. Picture a complex construction of blocks, large ones and small ones, twisting and turning because the geometry of their shape dictates it. Now imagine it is floating weightless in a large room filled with other similar constructions, some of them identical but most of them not. Some constructions fit together perfectly, but only some, and the rules of connectivity are determined by the geometry of shape, which was in turn dictated by the construction of the individual components.

Now imagine that some of the constructs are broken apart or never fully formed into a whole. Those parts might fit piecemeal into place against larger, whole constructs. Additionally, other blocks floating freely, not part of a construct at all, could adhere to matching portions of the whole. In other words, a whole or a fragment of the whole would “collect” other fragments or constituent parts.

Replace the child’s constructions with structures comprised of amino acids, structures which have occurred as the result of a completely natural process. Some chains of amino acids connect together, others don’t, because of natural laws that dictate molecular structure. A complete nucleic chain which gathers fragments or constituent parts to the point that another complete nucleic chain has formed can be said to be replicating. Replication is not, however, an indicator of life. For that, replication must be combined with an ability to metabolize.

While abiotic replication might be a natural function of complex proteins, metabolism might not be. Miller and Urey theorized that the environment of 3.5 billion years ago was one rife with energy. That energy might have come from intense electrical storms, geothermic heat, or increased luminosity from a young Sun. Carl Sagan, the noted astronomer and astrophysicist, proffered the theory that cosmic radiation was the primary energy source for early metabolic processes. In other words, replication was driven by an existence within a highly energetic environment and so there was no need for proteins to generate any energy of their own. Then, as sources of external energy waned, so would abiotic replication. For replication to continue on a prolific scale, proteins would have to utilize less energy, and the easiest way to do that would be to assimilate larger fragments of matching nucleotides rather than binding amino acids one at a time.

Again, look at the analogy of the child’s toy constructs floating in space. Not all of the constructs share similar structures, either in whole or in part. However, part of one entire construct might match a portion of another. It would be much more efficient for one to take from another that portion that it would need in order to replicate. It would have to consume. And the process of consumption for the purpose of assimilating necessary molecular nutrients would be the first step toward becoming true life. As environmental energy waned, the process already underway, that of increasingly complex amino acid constructs to replicate via the consumption of raw materials, would have to be fueled by an alternative energy source. In fact, the very consumption of raw materials could provide that energy as required constituents are absorbed and nonessential molecules are cast aside. Chemical bonding and reactivity will naturally produce energy even if replication or metabolic processes are not involved. Fire is a prime example of a chemical reaction producing copious amounts of energy.

Those amino acid constructs which were able to perpetuate replication by utilizing energy released by chemical reactions were the ones which continued to “reproduce” even after there was insufficient environmental energy to sustain the process. The first instance of evolution in action. From that point on, it was competition for resources which drove evolution, pushing amino acid chains to become protobionts and subsequently change into prokaryotes (simple bacterium).

But, one might argue, what if the probability of achieving “perfect conditions” for the formation of life are much less likely than the posited one in one trillion? The answer is that requirements of meeting the definition of “perfect conditions” are much broader than one might expect. As Stanley Miller was quoted in an interview, “Just turning on the spark in a basic pre-biotic experiment will yield 11 out of 20 amino acids.” So it would seem that the emergence of self-replicating metabolic life is inescapable when conditions conducive for it to occur are present. Conditions which probability says must happen at least once. And, once life has begun, so does the evolutionary process. A process which is conducive to the advancement of increasingly complex organisms. A process in which intelligence becomes perhaps the most powerful survival trait of all. Our existence is not the result of accident or miracle, it is the inevitable result of natural processes. The physical laws that govern the behavior of subatomic particles do, in turn, govern the behavior of atoms, which dictate how molecules are able to form. Molecules that can become such things as DNA.

Much of these conclusions are based upon assumptions. It is very difficult to determine just what ingredients were in the “primordial soup.” Exactly what sparked the emergence of life, of metabolism, and what processes really drive evolution are all still merely theories. However, one inescapable fact remains: we are here. If we attempt at all to explain our existence without resorting to religion or mythology, such assumptions which best fit observable data must be made. From those assumptions, extrapolation of experimentation and theory must explain the conclusive result. When all is considered, it is not far-fetched to conclude that complex intelligent lifeforms are the inevitable result once self-replicating metabolic organisms have appeared and the evolutionary process has begun.

Tobacco

According to the National Health Interview Survey, conducted in 2008 by the National Center for Health Statistics, an estimated 21 million women and 25 million men are admitted smokers, representing 18% and 23% of the US population respectively. However, the United States is not the only market for tobacco products. Globally there are about 1.2 billion smokers, 20% of the entire population of the Earth, roughly 26 times the number of smokers in America.

Any argument against the negative effects of smoking are laughable. What can be argued, however, is whether or not an informed public retains the right to engage in an unhealthy lifestyle. Is it more ethical to restrict the rights of consumers for their own benefit or to deny them the freedom to make their own choices? People die from tobacco use, but they also die from health issues related to obesity, unhealthy diets, alcohol consumption, sexually transmitted disease, and many other activities which the law completely allows. People know that overeating is unhealthy and that eating fatty foods can lead to complications like coronary disease, yet they do it anyway. People know the risks of contracting HIV or herpes from engaging in unprotected sex, yet they do it anyway. People are fully aware of the dangers of drinking too much, dangers which include not only disease but also the innocent death of others from the recklessness that alcohol creates, but they still drink anyway.

Morally, then, the only thing tobacco companies should be faulted for is attempting to hide the facts of risks associated with tobacco use. Yes, that is a huge fault and redress is demanded, but in this modern age saturated with the availability of information, there is no reason for any consumer to be unaware of the risks associated with smoking. Additionally, the availability of pharmaceuticals designed to help break the addiction to nicotine and strong social pressure against smoking is a possible indicator that those who profess a desire to quit smoking don’t desire it enough to actually do so.

Naturally, government-imposed restrictions are an unfortunate necessity. Although a tobacco company could be extremely diligent in restricting sales of its products, that diligence can not be extended to wholesalers or retailers. The law dictates that no one under the age of 21 is allowed to possess or consume alcoholic beverages, and it likewise imposes a restriction on the sale of tobacco to those under the age of 18. In South Carolina, the law stipulates that “a minor under the age of 18 years must not purchase, attempt to purchase, possess, or attempt to possess a tobacco product,” (SC Code 16-17-500), and the law is similar in other states. This means when a minor is seen smoking a cigarette, he or she is breaking the law and can be fined or required to “successfully complete a Department of Health and Environmental Control approved smoking cessation or tobacco prevention program.” Likewise, those middlemen who sell the cigarettes can face stiff penalties. This rarely happens, however. Instead, the blame is typically shifted to the tobacco company with claims of unfair or illegal marketing practices. In some incidences, such allegations are merited, but absolving those who provide cigarettes directly to minors is equally inexcusable.

A proper target market would include only those people who are of legal age to purchase tobacco products in the nation in which the sales take place. Media restrictions would be largely unnecessary if the laws currently in place were properly enforced or if the consequences for violating the laws were stricter. Take, for example, the advertisement of alcoholic products on television. Underage drinking is as big a problem as underage smoking, yet recently the ban against advertising distilled spirits on television was lifted. Tobacco products once relied heavily on sponsorship of sporting events (such as NASCAR) to increase brand awareness. Cigarettes and other tobacco products still appear in print ads, billboards, and posters, yet they are still one of the most highly regulated forms of advertising.

As to the issue concerning global marketization, so long as the law is followed in the nation for which marketing efforts are planned, why should there be ethical or moral questions concerning socially responsible behavior? It would indeed be a better world if there was nothing available for people to use that would harm them in the short or long term, but so long as the law allows a practice to occur and that practice provides pleasure to a section of the populace, then that practice will continue to occur. Huffing, for instance, the act of inhaling the vapors of common household products such as paint or glue in order to achieve a euphoric high, is legal, yet it causes death and creates long-term negative health issues. Consumption of alcohol, even to excess, is legal even though it is a well-documented source of addiction and destructive behavior. But so long as tobacco remains a legal product and continues to be profitable, then there will always be a market for it.

Prison Reform

I've been giving some thought to the prison system. It doesn't work. At least, not the way we all wished it would. The threat of prison just isn't enough of a deterrent to thwart crime. Yes, prison is a horrible place to be, an experience no one sane would wish for. For the lucky ones, prison is merely boredom. You wake, eat, exercise, shower, and sleep to someone else's schedule. You're confined to a little room most of the time, and entertainment is severely limited. At the other end of the spectrum, you might end up locked into isolation twenty-three hours of every day, slowly going mad because you've been cut off from all human interaction. In between are the regular prison horror stories of drug abuse, rape, violence, and fear of fellow inmates.

If prison was a deterrent, the rate at which people are being sent there would have declined over the years rather than increased, which has been the reality. There are, as I see it, three solutions to the booming prison population.

First, the easiest, though not the cheapest, is to build more prisons. Housing a prisoner is not inexpensive. Not only must the State or the Federal Government feed, clothe, and shelter the prisoners, health care must be provided as well. Prisoners often get much better health care than many who are not incarcerated. It's estimated that as many as thirty percent of US citizens do not have health insurance or have insurance that is inadequate to their needs. While at the same time, prisoners are guaranteed one hundred percent coverage of health problems, whether the problem arose while they were in prison or before. Sometimes it seems the best way to get the health care a person needs in order to survive is to commit a crime and go to prison.

Rather than face such an enormous drain on public resources, instead of building more prisons there is option Two. Make prisons exactly the kinds of places everyone would most fear to be. There is a large obstacle to this, of course, and that is the fact that prisoners still have basic human rights. Rights which would have to be stripped away in order to institute the kinds of changes necessary to make prisons an ultimately effective deterrent.

First, make it clear that every prisoner has no right to entertainment of any kind. Lock them in their cells twenty-three hours a day. Yes, some prisons already do that, but the vast majority of prisoners still enjoy privileges like hours of time in the "exercise yard," jobs for which they get paid, televisions to watch, radios to listen to, books to read. Make every single prison a SuperMax, and prisoner-on-prisoner crime would just about vanish altogether. Eliminate communication between prisoners and no one on the "inside" would be running his criminal enterprise from behind bars. No one would be able to smuggle in narcotics. No one would get raped or "shanked." Make the food bland but nutritional. Exercise time would be enforced. Require that all prisoners engage in some kind of manual labor to earn their keep.

The drawback, other than the obvious one of lawsuits from civil rights groups, is that most prisons cannot be switched over to the SuperMax system without major reconstruction, which falls back to Option 1 of building more prisons. Instead, as I see it, Option 3 is probably the best. An amalgamation of both Options 1 and 2, but with other significant changes.

What we must decide is whether prisons are meant to punish or reform. If they are to punish, then they fail. They also fail to adequately reform prisoners. Many people who go to prison once are destined to be incarcerated again and again. If that weren't true, the "three strikes" law would not exist. The reason many ex-cons re-offend is because the world is very unkind to those who have been in prison. Sex offenders must register themselves for the rest of their lives, and those databases are open to the public. Others who engaged in crime may have done so because they had no other life-skills on which to fall back on, and prison does nothing to provide ex-cons with the means to survive in a non-criminal environment.

Prisons must punish, there's no doubt about that, but they must also work to ensure that those who have been punished have learned their lesson and will not re-offend. To that end, here is what I think the ideal prison would be like.

Prisoner interaction is kept to a minimum. Any time a prisoner is out of his cell, he's in restraints. Personal possessions are severely restricted and closely monitored. Hygienic tools are issued by the prison and accounted for on a daily basis. No turning a toothbrush into a weapon. Cells are searched randomly and constantly.

One prisoner to a cell. The cell is small and deliberately uncomfortable. The bed is a concrete slab made into the wall. Prisoners are issued a sleeping mat, a pillow, and a blanket, all of which must be turned in at the start of each new day. Every cell has a television protected behind Plexiglas. It shows a constant stream of educational videos which the prisoner cannot shut off. He can mute the television but only for one hour at a time, and then not again for another half hour. A camera mounted inside the case with the television keeps watch on the prisoner and also provides the means for televised group therapy sessions. Therapy is mandatory for all prisoners.

The only way to get out of his cell is for a prisoner to apply for work. After a screening process, approved prisoners (the ones judged to be least likely to commit an act of violence, larceny, or other criminal activity) are allowed to work for six hours each day. Money they earn goes toward restitution or a charity which they choose from an approved list. Good behavior earns rewards such as a movie to watch in his cell, a dessert with the evening meal, extra time in the exercise room, books to read. Visitation is conducted by teleconference; prisoners are not taken from their cells, they do not interact with visitors physically in any way, thus eliminating the smuggling of contraband. All communication is monitored, even when it's between the prisoner and his lawyer. Being convicted means being stripped of citizenship and the rights that go along with that privilege.

Sentences carry a minimum length of incarceration but no maximum. Prisoners are only released when and if his therapist says he is reformed and only after the prisoner has demonstrated that he is proficient in a legitimate trade. Training can be conducted through teleconference in the beginning and in classrooms once the prisoner has proved himself trustworthy.

Basic healthcare is free to prisoners. This includes regular checkups and treatments for injuries or life-threatening conditions. Medications, extensive medical care, and the treatment of any condition which the prisoner had when he arrived in prison, comes at a cost. The cost of such things accumulate and must be repaid by the prisoner either by working off the debt while in prison or by making regular payments once he has been released. Ensuring repayment would fall to the IRS and/or the Social Security Administration.

Prisoners sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole or to death are treated differently and kept separate from those prisoners who can be reformed. The only purpose of those sentences is punishment, so that is what they get. Locked into a cell twenty-three hours every day. Each of them lives under a no-resuscitation order. No life-saving surgeries will ever be performed on them. If a liver fails, they will die. They'll be given pain medications, but that's the limit. They're in prison until they die, there's no reason to make that sentence longer than God intended.

When prisoners finally come out of prison, they'll have new life-skills, they'll be able to cope, they'll be free of addictions and able to deal with the compulsions that got them into trouble in the first place. The first place they go is to a federal housing project for ex-cons. They'll get a small apartment to live in, be given a job they must report to, goals they must meet. They're required to pass drug tests, continue to attend therapy, and are monitored daily. Failure to comply means they aren't reformed and they go back to prison. Once they prove they're capable of living in society as a law-abiding citizen, full citizenship and rights are restored and they can continue their lives away from the prison system.

Of course, there are drawbacks to this kind of system, and I would never claim to know everything about how to reform prisoners. But it's clear the current system isn't working and something must be done about it eventually. We should never have to live in fear. Right now, we do. We fear the people out there who don't fear prison, who will commit their crimes because they don't fear punishment. We have to teach them to fear it, or teach them to live differently. Only then can we say we truly live in the land of the free.

Fossil Fuels

I know alot of people carry around a fear that the oil will soon be depleted and we'll all be thrust back into the days of horses and buggies. And you think to yourself, where the hell do I buy a horse? Or a buggy for that matter? But I don't ever worry about such things, and I'll tell you why.

It's all about greed. Or, at least, it's about paychecks. Those of us at the bottom of the economic ladder (okay, I'll admit, I'm not at the bottom but I'm certainly somewhere south of the middle), we have bills to pay and jobs to go to and we need that money from week to week just to survive. Any threat to that system worries us.
Back before everyone had a car, or even before the invention of the car itself, people didn't have a need for them. You either lived in a city or town, close to everything you needed in order to survive (meaning within walking distance), or you lived well outside of town and the ownership of a horse or some other beastial transportation was a given. Of course, back then the very defintion of "walking distance" was different. Five miles? Oh, that's walking distance, sir.
The invention of the automobile changed that. More specifically, Henry Ford changed that. Ford made ownership of a personal automobile affordable, and as more people owned one, more people found that they no longer needed to worry so much about the distances they lived from their sources of revenue or from the places where they bought food and clothing. The creation of the vast interstate highway system cemented the exodus from urban centers. Oil was cheap and plentiful, so why not live thirty miles from the city? It only took twenty minutes to drive to work.

It didn't take very long before something else was invented: the traffic jam. While suburbia grew, the centers of industry and employment remained relatively the same. You might live in a nice neighborhood well outside the city, but you still had to drive to the city in order to work and get that much-needed paycheck. The flight of industry from urban centers followed a much slower progression than that of the industrial workers. Financial centers remained the same, for the most part. Support structure followed the workers as the grocery store, department store, mercantile, all the businesses that depended upon consumers found it profitable to relocate, to be the one closest to the centers of population. Convenience became a commodity.

Today we look at a much different world that the one envisioned by those early suburban pioneers. They moved away from the city only to find that the city followed them out to the country. Downtown businesses in smaller cities and towns continue to suffer as they compete with sprawling shopping complexes located well away from urban centers. Despite the fact that the automobile negates the necessity of locating one's home in relative close proximity to schools, shopping, or the workplace, we still continue to place a high value on convenience. Only the scale of measurements has changed. The average citizen wouldn't have balked at the idea of living a mile away from the source of his groceries, while today we think twenty miles is a short distance.

In short, our entire economic structure is dependent upon maintaining convenient transportation. Without oil there would be no fuel for the automobiles, no way for workers to get back and forth to their jobs. Without workers, industry collapses. There is extremely strong motivation from all directions to keep the cars running.

Public transportation is often touted as a solution for the crisis ahead. But public transportation doesn't reach all areas of our society yet. The buses don't run all the way out to the farm. Trains run only where tracks have been laid. Likewise, hybrid or electric cars might be seen as the technologies to save us from the death of fossil fuels. What isn't said is that over half of all electricity used in the US comes from coal-burning power plants, while another high percentage comes from plants that burn petroleum to make electricity. We like to think that all power comes from hydroelectric dams, but that's not the case. If we all switched to electric cars, those cars would add a heavy burden to the existing power grid. The easiest way to make new power is to build a plant that depends upon fossil fuels. It's a catch-22 that can only be ameliorated by switching to alternative forms of power production such as nuclear, geothermal, hydroelectric, or wind turbines.

Newer technologies that show promise include the generation of electricity from tides or even nuclear fusion (what we call nuclear power today comes from nuclear fission, not fusion). According to the U.S. Department of Transportation Statistical Records Office there are currently about 62 million vehicles in use in the United States alone. There is simply no way to generate enough electricty for all of them if they were electric, and the growth of the power-producing industry is insufficient to meet future demands. So what, then, is a viable alternative?
As I see it, people tend to resist change. Change happens, no doubt about it, but people like to go to what's familiar, or at least the closest thing to familiar that they can find. We didn't reach our present state of civilized sprawl overnight. We won't return to urban condensation so quickly either. Alternative fuels for the cars that already exist is the only viable solution. I'm sure car companies would dearly love to sell each and every one of us a brand new electric car, but there's no way we could afford it. Most people can't afford to buy even a new dishwasher or sofa without going into debt to do so.

Converting a car to run on bio-diesel, however, is affordable. It's convenient. It doesn't change the habits we have. We'll still pull our car up to the pump to fill our tanks. No matter what fuel it is, whether bio-diesel, hydrogen, or ethanol, it is the least radical shift, and that has historically been the only way to convert large masses of people to new thought patterns. Even the protestant reformation began with Martin Luther making a few changes within the existing Catholic Church and today there are over thirty thousand different Christian denominations.

But what convinces me most that I needn't worry about the depletion of the oil reserves is, again, paychecks. Not mine, but those that corporate executives earn. Not only are they paid millions of dollars a year to run the giant companies that supply us with gasoline, natural gas, electricity, coal, oil, and every other source of energy, they get huge bonuses when their companies show profits. It is within their best interest to keep those companies profitable, and they can't do it when they've got no product to sell. They want to keep the cars moving, they want to keep the working class in motion, and they'll do it. They might not advertise it, but I'd bet money that the giant petroleum companies invest as much money into researching alternative fuels as they do in looking for new oil deposits. The economies of some entire countries depend upon oil production, and an easy internet search will show that some of those nations are so completely unconcerned about oil depletion that they're embarking upon major internal investments.

No, I don't worry about the future of oil, and neither should you. Gasoline prices go up because of greed, not because supply is dwindling. Don't get me wrong, the supply actually is dwindling, and it will most definitely run out one day. Or at least get so expensive that no one can afford it anymore. But the days of horses and buggies are behind us. Of that, I am quite sure.