Now suppose that you find out the two doctors holding out have together built a huge hospice center for the dying that is currently way under capacity and that this, their life’s work, is under threat of closing if they don’t find patients? Suppose further you find out that they are former tobacco executives who spent their career arguing against tobacco causing lung cancer (the likely cause of your friend’s cancer).

Would that raise the stakes of your concern for your friend, or would you trust in the basic goodness of human nature and tell your friend that the two holdouts probably are being objectively unbiased so their advice should be weighted equally with the 98?

No doubt you can see what is coming because this is the situation with climate change. There is no serious dispute among the scientists studying the issue including climate scientists, geologists, ecologists, etc. Certainly you can find long lists like these two that get a bunch of people unrelated to the disciplines actually studying it to sign their names to a statement that its all a hoax, the NASA one is funny because they are mostly engineers and astronauts. Rather than providing actual research published in the peer reviewed scientific literature, such lists are specifically designed to cast doubt on science without doing any science whatsoever (and as one NY commentator put it, this is the equivalent asking your dentist to do cardiac surgery). Turns out the discipline matters. In Mormon circles the climate change skeptics are so far from the concerned sciences as to be laughable, but on they weigh in, as if a Ph.D. was enough to credential one in all scientific disciplines.

What happened? Science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book Merchants of Doubt detail nicely how Climate Change, a straight up scientific finding became politicized, such that great swaths of the electorate became convinced that this was just partisan bickering¹. Those who wanted to cast doubt on the problem exploited the media’s predilection to tell two sides of a story to manufacture a climate change skepticism. And guess who these people were? O&C (above) outline how funding from corporate sources (including the petroleum industry) allowed three men Bill Nierenberg, Fred Seitz, and Fred Singer to bring enough political clout, largely through the Marshall Institute, to create a disinformation campaign the likes of which we’ve only seen one other time–when Big Tobacco tried to destroy the credibility of the science concluding that tabacco was responsible for cancer and other health effects. And what is especially relevant here is who were the lead consultants in this disinformation campaign on both tobacco itself and later second hand smoke? See if you can guess, but here is a hint: Fred Seitz and Fred Singer respectively. Were they medical researchers perhaps? Seitz & Nierenberg were physicists who worked on the atomic bomb. Singer a rocket scientist.

So after failing at the tobacco smear they turned their attention to the growing consensus about climate change, which had been gathering stronger and stronger evidence in its favor since the 1970s. They founded many of the institutes that have been the most active in disrupting the flow of clear information about climate change to the public and stirring the political clout to rise it to a partisan issue. Why? Oddly it turns out that many for-profit companies have no long-term interest in the fate of the planet over their short-term profits and gains. Surprised? It was simple short-term economics. But the pockets to fund such disinformation are deep. And who are they up against? Scientists—who are fairly poor at getting messages about their work out. A perfect storm of disinformation to squelch the most important story of the last couple of centuries.

Now there is an industry of CC skepticism that floods the web with outrageous claims and falsehoods that deny the real story of a scientific consensus so strong that in any other field it would considered a settled matter and the ethical questions about how to respond would be those being debated, not the fact of the matter. No doubt there will be comments with long chains of links purporting to cast doubt on the climate change story.

What’s disappointing is how widespread the Climate Change skepticism as swept through the Latter-day Saint community. By making it partisan, I think many people of good faith have been confused. Yet we ought to have done better. We had prior information that this was coming:

D&C 89:4 Behold, verily, thus saith the Lord unto you: In consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, I have warned you, and forewarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation—

So, now we have the names of some of those conspiring men. They were deceptive about tobacco and second hand smoke what makes you think that they are telling the truth this time about climate change?—for make no mistake you are embracing the thought of these men when you deny science and embrace their fables.

1. Watch this link to hear Naomi Oreskes’ talk at BYU

Watch this link for the full story. Also read the book.

But it looks like the zombification of humans has been going on for some time. It might be that the following statement must be appended to many of our personal journals, “I wanted to act differently. I wanted to be circumspect and demure, but I caught a bug that made me reckless and thoughtless. You thought I was acting of my own free will? No I was under the influence of a cat parasite.”

An increasing body of evidence coming in from a number of scientific studies is implicating a parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii in influencing human behavior and may be responsible for up to 75% of the cases of schizophrenia (read this write-up in Atlantic Monthly for details on this frightening new finding). Moreover, the beast may be influencing you to act in ways you would have never done otherwise. It even might be causing more accidents than drunk driving.

A little background. In rats, the pest makes them reckless around cats and even causes them to find the smell of cat urine an aphrodisiac. Hence the rats find themselves being placed into a cat’s path more often. It looks like the micro Dr. Moreau, has joined with cats in a mutually beneficial arrangement—host me awhile and I’ll bring you enough rodents to satiate your every feline culinary wish.

However, it looks like this parasite’s rat commandeering machinery has some accidental effects on us. It crawls up into our brains and does some mischief. In humans, males tend to become more gregarious and less fearful in social situations. In females the opposite occurs (it also makes them more incline to be snazzy dressers). But the behavioral changes it causes in humans are real and measurable. The Atlantic Monthly article also shows more evidence that other aspects of our behavior may be driven by our parasites including everything from sex drive to a desire for conversation.

Free agency is at the heart of our understanding of mortality. And by free agency we often mean the freedom to act otherwise. Once again the biological world flexes its muscle in determining who we are and the way we act.

Bishops may have to start asking, “Was that you or your parasite?”

To me this is not controversial. We know we are physical beings and are in real ways an emergence from genes, prenatal environment, cultural embedding and now, apparently, our parasites. In short, we are already zombies.

Does this do away with free agency? No. The academic debates about free agency are endless. In part, because from a secular perspective it is an ascientfic question. If it exists, it is rooted in consciousness, the mysterious aspect of all our minds that science may have many correlates, but no explanation. Same from a LDS perspective, we have no idea, not even a hint how the spirit and body are linked. But we know that biology is a big player in how that relationship falls out (just look at an Alzheimer patient if you don’t believe it). Biology mightily complexifies the question about who we are. It also makes me want to even more seriously take the injunction to “Judge not.” What if that person who seems such a disaster is really the victim of having played in a sandbox with some cat scat in it? We often want the actions of others to be a reflection of some sort of pure agency in which they are responsible for who they are. But we are all a collection of accidents both of birth and the events of this earthly existence.

So next time you are tempted to judge someone say to yourself, “But for a bit of luck, I could have played in that sandbox.”

Discuss.

First thing of note was the wide diversity of disciplines represented. Faculty members from English, Humanities, Linguistics, Psychology, Physics, Philosophy, Geology, Anthropology, Biology (of course), Religious Studies, as well as current and former members of the Administration are a few of the departments there. No discipline dominated and the group was split fairly evenly between the humanities and the sciences. There were names that many of you would recognize among the faculty—and some that would surprise you I’ll be bound.

Next, the reason most of them were there was the perception that we are losing youth over the issue of evolution and that an evolution-friendly LDS response is in order. The literalistic readings of scripture borrowed from Christian fundamentalism in the 1950′s and which has come to dominate much of the way people think bout evolution within the church is becoming untenable vis-à-vis discoveries in modern biology. Most felt that it is time to think, and think hard, about discovering just how we can go about refining our discourse to allow views that permit students to embrace both our faith and science fully—without compromising either. Related to this was the idea that we need to communicate to religious educators that the war between Darwin and our Faith was unnecessary and its continuance destructive to the faith of some of the saints.

The discussions were some of the most profound I’ve experienced in a group setting in my life. They were open, honest, faithful, and friendly. There were strong differences of opinion, which were fully expressed and explored. This was no Sunday School discussion with the answers all provided at the end of the chapter and injunctions to stay away from certain topics. We opened many cans of worms and dissected them as best we could (Darwin would be so proud. His later years were devoted to the study of earthworms).

We looked at the evidence for evolution. We explored at the history of evolutionary thought and the rise of fundamentalism. We read the scriptures. We challenged each other to think in new ways.

We came to few firm conclusions. But by the end everyone that I was aware off, came to see that evolution was no threat to our faith. We also came to the conclusion that we understand very little about things like the Creation and the Fall and that new interpretations must be entertained some that fundamentalisms and literalisms that became popular in the 50s disavow. We also realized that Mormonism and evolution are compatible in surprising ways—perhaps more so than any other religion. That we do not believe in an ex nihilo creation, that we believe that this earth and its inhabitants will be saved and indeed this is our place of final destiny, all speak to a hope that the two are complementary. There are sticking points of course. There are problems that will have to be sorted out by further revelation, closer and more open readings of scripture, and a humility that any interpretation of our scriptures is tentative and subject to further revelation from prophets or the book of nature.

What was most encouraging to me was the optimism present that these problems could be sorted out. That we can communicate the need for the saints to not embrace the anti-intellectualism and in appropriate suspicions of science that drive some collage students away from the Church.

It’s an exciting time to be a Mormon evolutionist.

In the meantime enjoy these creative works. My story is about Mormon’s on Mars battling a reemerging Earth. It has Unicorns.
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I also was nominated for a Rhysling Award for best long-form Sciencefiction poem. It is found Here:

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I also have four poems here that will launch soon:

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I’ll tell you about three novels being published in another post.