I've been thinking a lot lately about religious rage.
It may seem a non sequitur to say, then, that this seems the perfect place to pay homage to Clair Patterson, who both established the age of the earth by studying lead ratios and determined that industry was subjecting all citizens of the earth to lead poisoning.
On the age of the earth:
quote:
In 1955, Patterson published a study in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, that reported lead ratios found in one of the Canyon Diablo meteorites. These iron meteorites are the leftover pieces of a big one that created Meteor Crater in Arizona about 50,000 years ago. Most important, they were also leftovers from the formation of the solar system, which before the publication of his papers was known only to be billions of years ago. As Patterson explained in an interview in the year that he died, the Canyon Diablo meteorites didn't contain any uranium, a metal that radioactively decays into lead at well-established rates taking hundreds of millions of years. Other rocks contained both lead and uranium, screwing up earlier age estimates.
So, by reporting the ratio of lead types found in these pristine meteorites and comparing them to lead ratios found in the other rocks on the Earth and other meteorites, Patterson could calculate the age of the solar system, when the Earth formed, to be 4.55 billion years old, give or take 70 million years. "Except for a few minor disagreements, this paper is probably a concrete expression of the attitudes of most investigators in the field," Patterson noted in the study.
The estimate, now refined and narrowed by other investigations, has stood for five decades, Eiler says, "and has only gotten more solid over time."
On the poisoning of modern humanity by lead:
quote:
The ability to detect faint traces of lead in billion-year-old rocks allowed Patterson to also realize that the Industrial Age was awash in lead. In 1965, he reported that lead from gasoline, solder, paint and pesticides meant that lead levels were 100 times higher than normal in the bloodstreams of most Americans, a result that led to congressional hearings and disagreements with scientists employed by the petroleum industry. Looking at 1,600-year-old Peruvian mummies led him to report in a 1975 New England Journal of Medicine study that modern people suffered lead levels thousands of times greater than in the past, levels close to being poisonous, with debilitating effects on the brain, kidneys and almost every other organ.
Above quotes
How do we know the age of the earth?
So on the one hand, we have a man who employed the most complex known system--the human brain--to measure the age of our mother planet and to warn humanity of the cost of unthinking, unregulated use of lead in myriad products.
On the other, we have people who cite the authority of a cobbled book of myths to deny the authenticity of the work produced by an organ they believe, by their own texts, to be fashioned in the image of God.
One (this one) is tempted to find some leaden connection between these environmental insults to human intelligence and the irrational rejection of its indisputable findings by folks who cling to idiosyncratic interpretations of religious texts produced by primitive peoples.
Fortunately, among the many demographic realities revealed by the recent U.S. election, we find evidence of the increasing secularization of American youth. In my lifetime, I have been thrilled to watch the racist heritage of my parents' generation yield, in my children's and grandchildren's generations, to a casual, confident and loving celebration of commonality. Personally, I've traveled from being a race traitor to a grandfather embraced by my grandchildren as a prophet of something much greater than tolerance.
Sadly, the rejection of scientific and social advances by Christian conservatives--the disdain for environmental science, the rejection of scientific findings that reveals a frightened clutching of religious beliefs no more justifiable by reason than human sacrifice and ethnic genocide, the coded, dog whistle appeals to racism--leads me to believe that we are approaching a period of extreme Christian violence. As the Islamic extremists react to the economic and cultural dominance of the secular west, so I expect the American Taliban to respond to their deepening irrelevance with the acts of terror of which they have already shown themselves capable: bombing Planned Parenthood and government buildings, shooting doctors and creating the ground for further violence by demonizing secularists and Others.
Is it a stretch to get to this conclusion from disagreements about the age of the earth? I don't think so. The age of the earth has been established with as much rigor as the efficacy of vaccines and the heightening threat posed by our global industrial pollution. We can see how those are faring.
Once you embrace the denial of reason, once you commit yourself to believing the cobbled, edited, translated and expurgated religious texts of a desert tribe rather than the products of your own lying mind, then there is no limit.
Discussion with someone whose yardstick of truth is an ancient text rather than rigorous study is not a debate: it is an exercise, for them, in testifying and martyrdom. Inquire (to garner a superficial fluency in terms they cannot understand), obfuscate, deny and distort, and then flee under the flag of martyrdom because rational minds reject tattered myths as the arbiter of reality.
We've seen that cycle over and over here, and we'll see it again, here, soon.
The good news is that this particular disorder appears to be waning, if ever so slowly. The bad news is that true believers, cornered by contradiction, sooner or later seek their redemption in blood.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old. People will die over it.
P.S. Oni once remarked that I sometimes sound like I'm making a speech. He's right--it betrays a regrettable early training in rhetoric, as well as some long ago employment as a speechwriter.
For best results, run the above through your favorite de-rhetoricizing filter. YMMV.
"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
™ Version 4.2
