Untwining the threads of succession in England is like unraveling the weave of a medieval tapestry—it is for me, certainly. All those cross-channel interrelationships! All those pretenders to the throne, and occasionally a couple of kings or queens simultaneously claiming that throne!  All those confusing ties between Danes, Normans, Celts, Scots, Welsh, Anglo-Saxons, and Brits. All those civil wars, including the one that ended with Henry II’s ascension to the throne. All the bribes, the promises of entitlements like lordships, and the “shared” or redistributed (but actually stolen) wealth!


Henry, twelfth-century ruler, was the Empress Matilda’s son. He married the widowed Eleanor of Aquitaine, famous for her association with the literature of chivalry and the Arthurian legend. It was a time before gunpowder altered war, a time when men in armor and on horseback fought pitched battles and laid siege to castles. Henry’s mother was no stranger to civil medieval skirmishes, sieges, promises, bribes, ransoms, and prisoner exchanges. Gosh, she was herself the victim of a siege at Oxford and as a “damsel” in distress dressed in white, had to escape over snowy ground and across a frozen Thames—the stuff of movies! Wizened by her experiences as the head of a military faction during civil unrest and political intrigue, Matilda, or Maude as she was also known, gave her son this advice:


“Show your friends and allies their reward, keep it dangling before their eyes, but remove the bait before they can seize it; thus you will keep them devoted and eager to serve.” *


Does that bit of twelfth-century advice sound familiar? It should. It underlies all the promises made by socialists and big-government politicians.


*Heer, Friedrich, The Medieval World: Europe, 1100-1350. Trans. By Janet Sondheimer. 1963. New York. A Mentor Book, p. 164.

Do we need Phil Collins to sing “Both Sides of the Story” to know that a single path to a solution, an understanding, or even fulfillment of a New Year’s Resolution often fails? We might reasonably argue that taking a single path succeeds more by luck than by science—but, and let’s get this out of the way at the outset: Yes, sometimes a single path does lead to either a solution or an understanding (Go figure, Phil!). While we’re making caveats, let’s acknowledge that some of us humans just don’t want to hear both sides of the story. *


Nevertheless and in spite of occasional single-path successes and almost universal, intractable obstinacy, Phil advises, “We always need to hear both sides of the story.” That’s really good advice that some take to heart. I thought I might use it as the basis of my New Year’s Resolution.


They Have Ears, but Do Not Hear


Ever read the Psalm 115?


They have ears, but cannot hear, and noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel, and feet, but cannot walk; they cannot make a sound.
May all who made them and who trust in them become like the idols they have made.


Sad to confess, but I have occasionally chosen a single path, but mostly during my youth. Yes, there were times when I knew “only one side of the story.” That last line in the Psalm is probably one reason for my self-imposed and youthful closed mindedness. Humans have probably put their contemporaries on pedestals long before the carving of the Löwenmensch figurine and the Venus of Hohle Fels that date to more than 35,000 years ago. Not only have we long idolized, but we have also long listened to idols we “have made.”  How else does one account for the frenzied accolades for people like Hitler? Certainly today, “living” idols people our societies, typified by the TV show American Idol, by “famous” pundits with large audiences, and by generally anyone called “one of the elite,” including those elevated to the status of Elite, such as actors and singers raised to British knighthood. The tabloids daily quote them, photograph them, idolize them. They are among the idols we have made, and they now include scientists or those who speak for science. (Accolades abound for alarmist Greta Thunberg and masked/unmasked/two masks Dr. Fauci; their fame stretches to the horizon——————————————————————————————)




Multiple Working Hypotheses and the Tale of Alfred Wegener


In the twentieth century, scientists began adopting a version of Phil’s advice in a process known as multiple working hypotheses. This approach to understanding was exemplified in the way Alfred Wegener’s “continental drift” evolved into the modern understanding of plate tectonics. Wegener, son-in-law of a climatologist, had studied astronomy, but eventually moved into other endeavors, including meteorology, climatology, paleontology, and geology. His personal intellectual journey is now mirrored in the holistic approach ** taken by earth scientists who realize that Earth is a system of systems. Trying to explain the entire system by focusing on just one part is folly though understanding the nature of each part, each subsystem, is an essential step on a path that can converge on other paths.


Two sides of a story? Multiple paths? Wegener faced derision when he proposed that the continents “had drifted,” even after he had accumulated rather convincing evidence from multiple discoveries like the widespread fossils of Glossopteris flora and the critter called Mesosaurus. He noted, also, that some rocks on either side of the Atlantic Ocean were identical, so his reconstructed Pangaea brought them together as Africa, Europe, and the Americas fit like puzzle pieces. But Wegener’s contemporaries, the geologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, already had an explanation for orogeny; they didn’t need a meteorologist/astronomer/amateur-paleontologist/amateur-geologist to tell them their hypothesis of simple isostasy was incorrect and that mountains formed, as Wegener proposed, because Earth’s continents had, before diverging, converged. Taking offense at the audacity of Wegener’s intrusion into their field of knowledge, his contemporaries mocked and ridiculed him. What else does one do when the very act of listening to an opponent is anathema among colleagues, friends, or neighbors?


A Modern Analog


We see a parallel circumstance today with regard to one of Wegener’s primary passions: Climate. Ridicule and personal attacks await those who doubt the coming of an inevitable climate crisis some of the alarmists are calling so catastrophic that the world will end in twelve years—it was eight years just a few years ago (How did we gain the extra time?).Under the vitriol associated with social media today, it seems almost impossible for anyone calling into question the climate alarmists’ one-explanation-suffices position and frantic alarm to escape a ruined reputation or public ridicule. You doubt, you’re out, just like Wegener. That detrimental effect affects those who simply ask whether there is irrefutable proof that a warmer atmosphere will really destroy a 4.5 billion-year-old planet that has maintained abundant life for hundreds of millions of years through swings in temperatures much greater than those now predicted in demonstrably flawed models.


Eight…Excuse me! Twelve years till Doomsday? Didn’t the sundry human species evolve and survive during some of the most radical shifts of temperatures in the planet’s history? Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus boisei, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo floresiensis, and Homo neanderthalensis lived during glacial and interglacial periods over the last 2.4 million years. Does anyone think climate has been steady during the past 200,000-plus years as Homo sapiens sapiens evolved and spread from Africa to Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas? *** Does anyone think there is a “normal climate”? Are so many unaware that climate cycles and fluctuations are more noticeable just because we notice them with insistence of many others? With our ability to communicate almost instantaneously across the planet, we learn about droughts in Ethiopia or the American Southwest, floods in China or Pakistan, tornadoes in the Kansas and Oklahoma, and snowfall at Tahoe or Buffalo. We are constantly primed to hear about weather not just where we live, but throughout the world. And we’re constantly told to conflate weather and climate. Has that not led to single mindedness, to a common interpretation of physical processes, and to a unified conclusion: Say it often enough, and people will reject a round world. Make it part of the canon of knowledge, and people will reject Galileo’s methods and conclusions.   


Because of our technology we have moved into deserts and piled into cities along coastlines that are subject to the whims of Nature. Primed as we are to take adverse weather events as “evidence of climate change,” we panic over weather anomalies and occasional swings away from“average” temperatures.      


Climate, like tectonics, is a holistic subject that requires a multiple working hypotheses approach. It requires not just “two sides,” but many sides. And the perfect model of this approach lay in how Wegener was vindicated by many scientists walking down paths different from those of Wegener’s contemporaries. The multiple working hypotheses that demonstrated that Wegener was in the main correct derived from combining the research of volcanologists, seismologists, paleontologists, marine geologists, cartographers, paleoclimatologists, mineralogists, petrologists, geophysicists, biologists, and chemists. Each worked on a specialization, but the discoveries of each added up to become plate tectonics. For example, sea floor spreading that breaks up and drives continents by moving the plates was affirmed by sonar readings, drilling, and studies of ocean floor magnetism and the ages of sea floor rocks and sediments.


Another Modern Analog


We can profit from multiple working hypotheses in more aspects of our lives than in our frenzy over climate. Take dietary advice as an analog: No fat, low fat, some fat, high fat, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, no meat, only meat, all carbs, no carbs, some sugar, absolutely no sugar, fasting, six meals a day, protein drinks, less protein, cured meats, uncured meats, an alphabet of vitamins, fewer vitamins, no vitamin supplements, vitamins from natural foods, red wine, no alcohol, gluten, gluten-free, soy, no soy, coconut milk, almond milk, cashew milk, real animal milk with whole, 2%, 1%, or zero fat, starches, no starches…You can probably throw in other dietary advice. The Pythagoreans, if you remember, were vegetarians, but they’re all dead in spite of their diet. And so are all the other human predecessors regardless of their diet. So, what’s a twenty-first century human to do about eating in an affluent world that offers more than 60,000 foods?


Do we take the specific advice of some diet guru who might have studied the eating habits of some old people living on Cyprus, on some other Mediterranean island or land, or in the Himalayas? In 1961, one of Time’s covers pictured physiologist Ancel Benjamin Keys, proponent of a diet that influences people even now. The acceptance of his findings eventually evolved into modern veganism and vegetarianism. It also heralded the beginning of a fatter America with more, not fewer, heart attacks and more cancers. The point here? When we take a singular approach, when we walk down a single path, we risk not ever knowing what we do not now know. In the shadow of Ancel Benjamin Keys’ popularization, U.S. government bureaucrats developed a food pyramid taught now for decades to be the basis of a healthful diet. Yet, like climate, the human body is complex. In fact, it’s more complex than climate; those who know that can see the difficulty in just trying to get to the truth about what constitutes a healthful diet.


I’ll repeat a personal story I’ve told elsewhere, one that has to do with diet. My parents died at ages 95 and 97. When they were in their late 80s, I heard my father ask my mother, “Do we have salami for lunch?” That processed, cured meat could often be found in their refrigerator. She replied, “No, this week we have balogna [aka baloney].” I heard this at a time when I was eating more salads. That they exceeded the average lifespan could be attributed to genetics, of course. But who knows for sure? I know he ate an apple every evening; I know that contrary to the advice about drinking eight glasses of water every day, I saw her drink water only once. Coffee was her drink of choice. Is there a single study that demonstrates irrefutably that those centenarians commonly encountered today avoided the detrimental diets identified by people like Ancel Keys?


Narrowing the Path vs. Widening the Path


We’re still stuck in many ways like those geologists who couldn’t accept Wegener’s multiple working hypotheses, but we can thank Wegener, the polymath, for broadening our approach to understanding through multiple approaches. All of us can ask whether or not we are taking as truth conclusions derived from single paths of inquiry and limited studies. In almost every aspect of our complex modern lives, we entertain ideas so derived. The process can be seen throughout society.


In 2023 we find ourselves walking the paths of educational philosophies that have turned schools and even the military into social engineering experiments, of economic policies thrust on populations, and of bureaucratic dictates thrust on industries, workers, and ultimately on consumers. Just as Ancel Benjamin Keys’ studies had limitations that were ignored in the proliferation of his ideas, so today we suffer the consequences of conclusions often derived from “one side of the story.”


Back to That Climate Stuff


One might argue that nutrition experts and climate alarmists do work through multiple hypotheses and that they are listening to many sides of a story. With regard to climate, we should acknowledge that there are, after all, people who work on coral reefs who say warmer oceans are killing corals, people who work on the spread of diseases who say warmer temperatures are spreading them, people who work on high latitude and high altitude ice who say that warmer temperatures are melting sea ice and glaciers, and people who operate satellites who say warmer temperatures are spreading vertically as well as horizontally. Some of these claims are a bit dubious, **** but it is relatively reasonable for people to believe they have reached a sound conclusion that the atmosphere is warming—though it does not necessarily portend an apocalyptic end. There are also some surface temperature data—though some are questionable—that indicate some warming occurred, especially between the 1980s and 1998. And the same goes for sea level data, some of it dubious because it’s hard to assess accurately against rising or sinking land. Undoubtedly, however, sea level has risen by at least a football field’s length since the last “low stand,” a eustatic change that occurred before humans entered the industrial age. All the preceding is just part of the tale. Note that the trend in warming paused for two decades after 1998, and note that warming, if driven by carbon dioxide, will mostly likely be neither geometric nor exponential, but rather logarithmic. *****


Has the warming resumed? If it’s a trend, then we need years to know—we can’t just rely on models that to this date have been untrustworthy. Nor can we believe measurements that have been fudged by people with an agenda. It is also possible to say that there might be atmospheric controls beyond greenhouse gas emissions, such as cloud type and cover, large circulation patterns, solar input, and some unknowns, including whether or not the current period isn’t just another one of as many as nine interglacials. It’s also possible to say reasonably that there is, in fact, no crisis. A warmer Earth might not be so bad though it might require some adaptation. But isn’t that what we humans did after the melting of the last glacial episode about eight to ten thousand years ago?


Our Compliant Brains


With tens of thousands of people crying, “It’s the end of the world if we don’t do something,” we find ourselves easily rejecting the occasional “denier,” the modern equivalent of Wegener. That’s how our brains work. It’s easier for us to conform than to rebel, easier to accept what the accepted group accepts than to follow the nonconformists, and easier to avoid the hard work of questioning by acquiescing.  Conclusions about climate, diet, economic policy, social mores, and the very nature of humans often rest on single-path approaches. Multiple working hypotheses present most brains with too much information to process easily. It took decades after Wegener published his ideas for scientists to meld the evidence into a unified Plate Tectonic Theory. Of course, today differs from Wegener’s yesterday in the way information and belief spread. Our ancient ancestors were unaware of distant phenomena; we are keenly aware of everywhere.


My New Year’s Resolution


Here’s my New Year’s Resolution: I resolve to consider at least two approaches to solving any problem or maintaining any belief. I know, however, that as with all my previous New Year’s Resolutions, I’ll probably not make it through January without breaking my resolution to employ multiple working hypotheses.


I have ears, but with age my hearing has weakened. It’s a fate that befalls many. When we are young and have the ability to hear everything, we don’t listen. As we age we gain the ability to listen, but lose the ability to hear as much as we once heard. Nevertheless, I resolve to consider what others consider and follow the paths they walk—till February.     


*What a world we live in! We need caveats and “buts” lest we offend someone or find ourselves wholly misinterpreted. We end up trying to cover ourselves against the onslaught of any person who might be offended even by an unintended offense. We’ve become caricatures of ourselves, memes on the go, Rumpelstiltskins stomping our feet at the risk of breaking the very special interest floors on which we adamantly stand. That is, however, part of the gist here. Whoever might be offended by my suggestion that there are often two sides to the story will never truly listen to the other side.


**Conte, Thompson, Moses. Earth Science: A Holistic Approach and Earth Science: An Integrated Perspective. 1994 and 1997. W. C. Brown, a Times Mirror publication.


***Abundant evidence demonstrates that after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) of 27,000 to 20,000 years ago warming occurred until a cold period, beginning about 12,900 years ago and ending about 11,700 years ago, called the Younger Dryas chilled the bones of our ancient ancestors. If you want to know more, study the LGM, the Late Glacial Interstadial (LGI), and the Younger Dryas. Note also that generations of humans survived both the cooling and the warming, even great swings in temperatures in North America, where rock shelters and encampments date to at least 16,000 years ago (e.g., Meadowcroft shelter in Avella, PA).


****Some reefs, a number of polar bear “families,” and glaciers have flourished in recent decades. Multitudes of international travelers might a cause of spreading tropical diseases. Remember that Washington, D. C., harbored malaria during the Little Ice Age that occurred in the centuries before and ended about the time of the American Revolution. Note, also, that urbanization allows diseases to attack many relatively confined people. And, of course, there’s the belief that Earth has climates that are “normal” when all paleontological, biochemical, and geologic studies have demonstrated the fluctuating nature of not only climates, but also of the proportion of carbon dioxide and methane in an atmosphere that generally lacked free oxygen until the so called Great Oxidation Event some 2.4 billion years ago.


*****The layperson, exposed to “one side” most likely assumes that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to a doubling of temperature. To that point, one might ask of a refrigerator repairman, “If I set my refrigerator at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, can you make it twice as cold?”