Comrade Corn Cob

Until his death in 1952, Joseph Stalin was practically God in the Soviet Union. Everything that was believed and everything that was done had to conform to his wishes, even, as I described in another essay, music.

Stalin considered himself the ultimate authority in science, as well. He even had his own theory of genetics that was strikingly different from genetics as understood in the western world, and everywhere (even Russia) today. He copied his theory (Lysenkoism) from Comrade Trofim Lysenko. In this theory, things that happen to a plant or an animal during its life get passed on to the offspring. This would include the ability of crops, such as wheat, to endure cold temperatures if the seeds were frozen in cold temperatures. That is, you can create cold-hardy wheat by freezing the seeds. Millions of Russians and Ukrainians died in famines because of this stupid theory: when they planted frozen wheat seeds, the wheat simply died over the winter. (Wheat is often planted in the fall, then it produces seeds in the late spring.)

Lysenko was a fake scientist if there ever was one anywhere.

Another Soviet scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, was a real scientist. He studied genetics extensively and traveled the world to find seeds that carried the genetic basis of adaptation. He knew you had to breed cold-hardy wheat, not just freeze the seeds. Vavilov was a geneticist in the modern sense. In return for his scientific beliefs, he was imprisoned, where he died.

As soon as Stalin died, the Communists felt free, at last, to admit that they had created a “cult of personality” around Stalin, a cult that nearly destroyed the Soviet Union. The new leader, Nikita Kruschchev, was an enthusiastic promoter of agricultural research, after the pattern of Vavilov, not Lysenko. His enthusiasm was so great that he was called “Corn Cob.” When he visited America about 1968, one of his main interests was how Americans grew corn.

Once freed from the Stalin personality cult, conditions in the Soviet Union began to improve a lot, but not enough. The Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia began to enter the modern world of prosperity.

That is, until it entered another period of personality cult, this time centered on Vladimir Putin. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is, as nearly as most of us can tell, just a personal whim of Putin. Maybe in the future Russia will see Putin as an evil dictator, and as destructive to Russia as was Stalin. A lot of pain and suffering remains ahead before that can happen.

Quest for Religion

 

A quatrain I wrote in 2004:

 

Between the bastion of Christianity

And the swamps of agnosticism

Are a thousand paths, all winding,

Trodden by a few, without guides.

The New Reality of the Scientific Method: Donald Trump Is Always Right

I outlined the scientific method, which is something in which anyone, not just scientists, can participate, in my previous book Scientifically Thinking. But there is a new reality about science, at least in the United States, which has developed since I wrote the book, and which I will now explain.

For many years at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, I taught the Research Methods course for science graduate students, which was pretty much the precursor of my book. I recently found, in some old papers, that I taught a similar course at The King’s College, in my first faculty job. King’s was and is a fundamentalist Christian college. Soon after I left, it also became a fundamentalist Republican college and, today, is probably a fundamentalist Trump college. When I taught the scientific method, I taught it pretty much the standard way, although technology was different back then (no internet). But that was because my department chair, although he was a leading creationist, was open to free scientific inquiry. He believed that open inquiry would lead a person to accept creationism. He did not, unlike almost all other fundamentalists, impose his views on other people.

But here is what research is usually like at fundamentalist institutions. First, instead of reaching a conclusion, you impose one. For example, you will stipulate up front that there can be no evidence that is consistent with evolution. Next, you selectively gather information that agrees with your conclusion. Last, you draw your “conclusion” from the selectively-gathered information. This is the exact opposite of the scientific method.

The result was predictable. The scientific value of creationist research is nil, for two reasons other than the above. First, creationists used this method to defend not only the Bible but their sometimes highly imaginary interpretations of it. Second, their misuse of the scientific method made their work sloppy even when it had nothing to do with evolution. Their habit of mind was that, no matter what they did, they had to be right. I documented these two things in a pair of articles I wrote a long time ago: in 1988 and  in 1989.

Today we must add another dimension. Not just in creationist or fundamentalist camps, but in all publicly-funded research, the researchers must begin with the conclusion: they must begin with whatever belief the Republican party holds upon the question. For example, is global warming happening, and are humans contributing to it? The answer, fundamentalists think, must be no, even though the Bible does not mention it. The answer must be no because the fossil fuel industry says it is no. This, then, is the conclusion they reach. Are vaccines effective? Again, the required answer is no. Has gun violence reached epidemic proportions? The answer again must be no. Science, then, becomes just a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.

It has been this way for a long time, to various degrees, starting mainly with the George W. Bush administration. But now, under Donald Trump, there is yet a new version of science. You begin with the conclusion that Donald Trump is always right. Science has now become a propaganda arm of Donald Trump, and of his chosen spokespeople, such as RFK Jr. who says that vaccination is not necessary. The conclusion is that vaccination is not effective, because Donald Trump, who used to champion vaccination, says so.

For example, even under Republican presidents in the past, the website climate.gov existed. As of 2025, that URL redirects to NOAA where global warming is hidden, although at this point they still admit that today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide level (421 ppm) is comparable to the atmospheric level four million years ago, and much higher than any time during 6000 years of human civilization. But they are not allowed to draw the obvious conclusion that the Earth is getting hotter, only that it happens to be hot right now; certainly they do not blame our use of fossil fuels.

Modern Republicans place Trump in exactly the same position as medieval theologians placed God. Republicans worship Trump. I realize that this is blasphemy, but it is what they are doing, and we might as well say so.

I am glad that I taught and wrote about science before Donald Trump became the sole standard of truth. I am not sure, however, that I am safe. My most recent book, Forgotten Landscapes, provides evidence that Native Americans were civilized and had a significant effect on the North American landscape. This is not the picture of Native Americans that Republicans prefer. They want to claim that Natives were savages and did not deserve to keep the land that was taken from them. Republican opposition did not prevent the publication of my book. But what will happen next?

Christmas and Yule

Many of you may have been asked by your kids, why is Christmas on December 25? My granddaughter dutifully said, that’s when Jesus was born. Of course, that is not true. Nobody has any idea when Jesus was born. In the middle of winter, the shepherds would not have been watching their flocks by night outdoors; the flocks would have been in barns or mangers or something. I read one article that figured out when John the Baptist was born, based on the priestly schedule of his father (“the course of Abijah”), and then added six months to it (Jesus was a half year younger than John), and came up with sometime in September.

But the church realized celebrating Jesus’ birthday was a good idea. Not knowing when it was, the early church chose an existing pagan holiday and transformed it into Christmas. The holiday was, of course, Yule, on December 25. Midwinter? Not quite. It is four days after the first day of winter.

The pagans wanted to celebrate the day when the sun appeared to be returning. It reached its lowest point in the sky (at midday) on December 21. But how could ancient people know this? They didn’t have accurate time measurement. They lined up stones that indicated the winter solstice. But it was a few days after the solstice before they could be sure the sun was, in fact, “coming back,” by eyeballing the stones.

This was too much to explain to my granddaughter, but I tried. Christmas is not when Jesus was born, but when we celebrate it. Never mind, for now, whether it actually happened. We have a spiritual desire to believe that there is some force of good (God) behind the operation of the world.

In Egyptian mythology, Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25. In the Mithras cult, you were saved by eating the body and drinking the blood of Mithras in a meal. In Zoroastrianism, blood sacrifice was followed by a resurrection three days later. It should be obvious that many Christian beliefs came from pagan sources.

But this does not change the basic idea. They, like us, wanted to believe that there was some ultimate significance. Just think about the words to some of our favorite Christmas carols. They are about the general idea, rather than doctrinal assertions. Consider, for example, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,” and “For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.” Scrooge was not converted to a doctrine, but to love. I am only the millionth blogger to write about the true meaning of Christmas; maybe somebody will read it.

Comfort Ye: The Religious Power of Music

I can still remember where I was, in 1982, when the sound of Handel’s Messiah, the very beginning of it, flooded through my mind. Comfort ye! I was having difficulty in my graduate program, difficulties that only resolved years later, and what I needed was comfort. Comfort does not mean ease; it contains the root word fort, which means strength.

Here is the performance on YouTube. 

I did not need theology. I already had that, reinforced over and over at church. What I needed was something that would cut through the sticky web of theology and pierce my heart. Music did that.

It is easy to tear apart conservative theology and leave its chunks of flesh all over the floor. I have done it often enough in this very blog. But music contains no theology, just pure emotion. Music will make you say that it is all true, all of this religion stuff, simply because the music is so beautiful.

This can be traced back at least to cave man days. The men (or women) who made the magnificent cave paintings in Lascaux and Altamira painted them in the big rooms near the outside, where people would assemble. Down deep in the caves was where people went for spirit quests, and the paintings and etchings there are much simpler. But the cave paintings in the big sanctuary rooms were meant to be experienced by the light of torches, and accompanied by music that would reverberate from the walls, the music of bone flutes and of voices. It was the power of religion. They had myths, but what united the people together into a spirit of unity was the music. The priests used the power of music to manipulate the minds of the tribal members who would then work and fight very hard to make the tribe prevail over its enemies.

When I hear Handel’s Messiah, especially Behold the Lamb of God and Hallelujah, I am as helpless before religion as I would have been thirty thousand years ago, as if skeptical science and philosophy had never evolved.

Keep this in mind this Christmas season.

Return of Slavery?

In this essay, I continue a thought from the previous essay. In O Holy Night, Adolphe Adam said “the slave is our brother,” and looked forward to a glorious dawn in which slavery would vanish. I explained that slavery came to an end in the United States not because God performed a miracle but because America fought a war against itself to eradicate it.

But even if America had not fought the Civil War, slavery would have come to an end. It was economically unfeasible. It was a system of dehumanization and oppression that was maintained by force, not by profit. Clearly a system in which free people produced market goods would have been superior to a slave economy. It was pride, not profit, that kept Southern land owners defiant against the calls for emancipation. Eventually, the world economy would have preferred cotton from non-slave sources over slave cotton, and the South would have collapsed. We do not have slavery today mainly because it is not profitable. We like to think we have lofty religious and ethical reasons to not have slaves, but it is the unprofitability of slavery that has given us the freedom to think lofty thoughts.

Slavery was profitable for millennia because empires fought other empires and made all their captives into slaves.

But what if slavery should ever become profitable again? We like to think this is impossible. And as artificial intelligence and robots become better and better and better at doing almost everything, it would seem impossible that there would ever again be human slaves. Robots have no legal rights, and we could just make a large number of robot slaves to do the dangerous, dirty, and repetitive tasks that no human would do unless enslaved. Robots are also cheaper, since they need no salaries, vacations, or health care. Or even bathroom breaks.

I have been reading a 2022 novel The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler about a future world (not far in the future) in which robots do the dangerous and dirty work more cheaply than humans would, in general. But robots are complex machines that are now, and will be far into the future, expensive to make and to maintain. For some dirty jobs, robot maintenance would be very expensive. Nayler’s example is deep sea fishing, in which fish blood and guts create thick layers of slime on ships. It would be expensive to keep the robot circuitry and mechanisms clean under such conditions. Human slaves, however, can work ankle-deep in slime, all day every day, and all they need is a little cheap food. Most of the expenses of a human work force are those that were considered unnecessary for plantation slaves.

So on the fishing trawler in the novel, human slaves (kidnapped from Asian countries then brainwashed) gut the fish that machines have harvested. But even brainwashed humans can imagine freedom. The human slaves are watched over by brainwashed human soldiers who beat them. The whole trawler is controlled by an artificial intelligence, kept clean inside its hatch, that issues the orders.

It was not economically viable for any wealthy nation to patrol the high seas and stop AI trawlers from kidnapping men from poor nations, so no serious effort was mounted to stop this practice.

In the nineteenth century, it was not a “glorious dawn” of religious inspiration that brought slavery to an end, but because slavery was not profitable. In the twenty-first century, slavery might become profitable again. And if it were profitable, no force on Earth could keep slavery from returning.

Still Waiting for the Glorious Dawn

This morning, I watched the dawn break over the mountains in the east, and the music of Adolphe Adam’s O Holy Night was running through my mind.

For yonder breaks a new and glorious dawn…

I wish I could rejoice with these words in this Christmas season. (I call it Christmas, because I want to, not because Donald Trump insists that I do. Trump is certainly not the glorious dawn.) But this promise of new hope for humanity has not been fulfilled. To all appearances, there is no God who has done any miracles to make life better for humankind.

Just how hard would it be for God to do a miracle now and then to help those who are trying to make the world better? I mean, it’s not like it would make Him tired. We’re not asking for much. Maybe to just once in a while help some of the millions of people who are suffering? Just a little bit, pretty please?

Oh, the world has improved in many ways since the first Christmas, and even since Adolphe Adam wrote those words. But none of them have been due to miracles. All of them have been the result of concerted efforts by millions of people, against greater odds than a more generous God would have allowed. Here are some examples.

First, slavery has virtually disappeared. I mention this one first because this was one of the major things that was uppermost in Adam’s mind as he wrote. The seldom-sung third verse of O Holy Night says that “the slave is our brother.” By this time, the only major world power that still had slavery was America. In Europe, abolitionism mainly meant the end of American slavery, and American abolitionists went to Europe to gather support for the end of American slavery. But it was not a miracle that brought slavery to an end. It took a war that nearly bled America dry. It took over a century of legislation and court cases to make Black Americans even partway equal to whites. We have only the better angels of our nature, not God, to thank for it. And America is starting to regress back into white supremacy.

Second, the world is much healthier now than in Adam’s time. Public health, sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccination have all occurred in the last century. We have just celebrated the 44^th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, due directly to vaccination. But these things did not occur because of a miracle. All of these things took the focused efforts of thousands of people, from scientists to nurses. And America is now starting to regress into the good old days of disease. The campaign of Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr., to erode vaccination efforts—and Trump casting aspersions on vaccinations he previously celebrated and took credit for—is only one example, and is an embarrassment in the eyes of the world.

Third (and the list could go on and on), world wars are currently unlikely. The mountains to the east, over which I watched a glorious dawn break, are the Black Forest of Germany, on the other side of the Rhine River from France, where I now live. I am about ten miles away from Germany. In my parents’ generation, Nazi Germany took over most of Europe, at the same time Japan was conquering much of Asia. As I watched the dawn, I realized that there was exactly zero chance that German troops would take over France today. But it was no miracle that brought this about. It cost the lives of millions of soldiers and civilians, and Hitler did not give up until Germany had been destroyed, all around his bunker. War in western Europe is now unthinkable not due to any miracle but because European leaders like Robert Schuman (not the composer) created the European Union. A united Europe was unthinkable until human effort made it happen. But today, pressure for war is building. Putin wants the Ukraine and everything else he can get, and Trump is not seriously opposing him. According to surveys, most Europeans think war with Russia is inevitable and that they cannot count on America to help them.

We certainly cannot look to American Christianity for any help. Most (not all) American Christians worship Donald Trump and his associates. American Christians do not care that these leaders are flagrant sinners, by Christian standards. Trump has five children by three wives; Hegseth has four kids, by three wives; and Musk has fourteen kids, by four women. This is what the world sees when they hear about Christian morality, as shown by American conservatives.

Our Christian leaders are evil. Please, God, couldn’t you help those of us who are trying to create peace and Christian love? Maybe just a little bit? Pretty please?