“I think we have just entered the greatest human experiment. Billions of people have to learn a new way to associate, at least in the short term.”
 
“I disagree. Conquering hostile environments for habitation was a greater experiment. It was all trial and error. ‘Ug, over here. I shall walk (This caveman speaks formal English) into this big hole in the rock.’ And Ug replies, ‘You know, it’s possible that unknown dangers await anyone who enters there.’ So, as humans entered one environment after another outside their native African birthplaces, they ran the greatest human experiment.”
 
“But that experiment was largely a random act involving a few people, like Columbus and his crews on the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. Or like the Viking explorers and before them, the Phoenicians. Somebody or small group said, ‘Oh! Damn the torpedoes. We’re going anyway.’ The intrepid inquisitive explorers ran the ultimate human experiment, the one involving survival in places previously unknown.”
 
“You realize that most explorations involve small numbers of people, don’t you? What we’re doing now is massive. It’s worldwide. A normally or naturally gregarious people have instituted a planned separation with new sets of social rules, guilt-and-fear rules. The former because no one wants to be seen as the person who infects, and the latter because no one wants to be the one infected.”
 
“I think I see what you’re getting at. But humans have a long history of isolating groups of people for tribal, territorial, religious, or racial reasons.”
 
“But not everyone at once. Not everyone within the tribe. And ‘everyone’ at this time encompasses the largest population of living humans the world has ever housed, 7.5 billion.”
 
“Hmmn. I guess this is a great experiment. Let me think…There have always been some reasons for distancing, for separating. Since we all have some deep-seated drive for selfish behavior, even though repressed in most social settings, haven’t we humans always held strangers at spear’s length until we establish trust? Knowing that evil lurks in some makes all suspicious of others. Seeing disease in some makes others draw back in fear. Those who could leave left their environs during plagues of all kinds.”
 
“True, but think of the ordinary clues that suggest proximity is okay. We read body posture. We read eyes. We read mouths for hints of trustworthiness, for clues that say, ‘This person poses no threat. I’ll get closer.’ Have you noticed how people respond to your mere presence when you walk into a building wearing your mask and nitrile gloves? Have you seen how people respond when someone enters a store without a mask? Why, there have been altercations over social distancing. And I have to confess that when I see someone entering a store without a mask, I question whether or not I should enter. This is going to be known as the Great Age of Human Separation. You know who I feel sorry for? The young. It’ll be a while until normal social intercourse returns and people will be able to flirt. ‘She has a nice shape and hair; her eyes are bright, but what if she’s toothless beneath that mask?’ Or, ‘Yeah. He seems nice, but what if he is hiding some scraggly moustache and beard?’ And what about the little ones, the impressionable very young? Aren’t we setting up their personalities to be less trusting, less gregarious, more suspicious? No, this is truly the Great Age of Human Separation. ‘She seems fine, but what if she is asymptomatic?’ That question is going to run through a number of minds as people encounter strangers. The bar scene will be altered. Vegas not as crowded. Restaurants only half full. Resorts restricted.”
 
“Yet, this experiment you talk about isn’t going to have any lasting ramifications. When the pandemic is over, people will return to what they were. Unmasked, they’ll resume life as usual. Look at what happened in Missouri where apparently hundreds gathered to drink, talk, and swim in very close proximity. The moment someone says the pandemic is ‘officially’ over is the moment every restriction to gregarious behavior will be dropped. I foresee a new baby boom as people return to the social norms of the pre-pandemic period.”
 
“Like most experiments, we can’t conclude until the experiment is complete. We’ll see.”

Portable tech devices record our steps as long as we wear smart watches or carry smart phones. The number of steps and the accumulated mileage always surprises me on days when I skip purposeful exercise. “Thousands of steps?” I think, as I check the number at the end of the day. “Miles of walking! Not bad for a lazy day. How did I walk so many steps? I really didn’t go anywhere.”
 
Going nowhere and accumulating steps is part of modern life. But, then, maybe it was always a part of hominin and hominid life, even though I imagine very long ago, long before agriculture and the rise of cities, that most walking was governed by needs for food, safety, and maybe privacy (“I’ve just gotta get out of this cave”). In these days, those smart devices we carry keep track of our steps for us because, for the most part, in all that walking over concrete, asphalt, and other hard artificial surfaces, we leave no footprints. If I extrapolate my daily step count to elsewhere and others, then millions of people daily walk billions of steps just in New York City without leaving a single track, unless they trek through Central Park or check their digital path.
 
For future archaeologists, the remnant roads and sidewalks will indicate both the human presence in our time and the direction of our ambulating lives: “Look they laid out the concrete paths in perpendicular patterns. Obviously, these people had assigned some ritualistic meaning to walking north and south versus east and west.” And even though there are more people alive than at any one time in the past, there might in our artificial world be just as small a chance at footprint preservation as there was when bipedalism arose in hominins whose fossilized tracks are gems in the archaeological record.
 
For our very ancient ancestors’ ambulating, archaeologists can’t use sidewalk and road patterns to determine the direction of daily life. Rather, they rely on chance fossilizations of footprints, the most ancient of which were uncovered at Laetoli by Mary Leakey. In a new discovery of more recent, but still ancient, footprints made by Kevin Hatala and others in Engara Sero, Tanzania, over four hundred impressions in hardened volcanic ash has led the archaeologists to draw inferences about the footprint-makers, including their size, walking or running direction, and their gender.* The footprints run largely in a northeast-southwest pattern that suggests to me a purposeful movement across a “muddy” plain, possibly a temporary migration for water not unlike the movement of wildebeest on the Serengeti today or a more "permanent" movement to a new nomadic settlement.
 
But think about what I just wrote. I assumed the chance preservation of a set of footprints allows me and those archaeologists to hypothesize with some surety. Yet, with regard to my own invisible steps recorded on my smart watch or phone, I look back, not to thousands to millions of years ago, but to a single day’s daylight activity and do so without remembering or even surmising where I was going in all that walking. Was there a purpose in all my movement through the house, around the property, or in the neighborhood? Was I merely “stretching my legs”? Now I have to search my memory…Naw. Not worth the effort. It really doesn’t matter where I went to reach the number of steps my watch recorded. I really didn't go anywhere significant. That I walked around provides its own reward: Without having to grow my own food or search for water, I got off my rear and moved anyway. Gives me a sense of accomplishment, even pride. “Look at how many steps I took today. Descartes would be elated: 'I move; therefore, I exist.'”
 
Oh! What’s this affluent bipedal life come to? Counting steps just for the sake of counting steps? Believing that what hominins did for three million or more years just to survive is the same as ambling around a house and neighborhood or as walking through the aisles of a store or the hallways of a mall in search of “more”? Thinking that my electronic record of steps will elate future archaeologists upon their discovery of an extant and working smart device? How will they infer my lifestyle and motivations; how will they understand “my times”? “Hey, Charlie and Charlene, come over here and look at this gizmo. Says here that he walked 7,856 steps on Friday.”
 
Both and simultaneously, “But where was he going?”
 
In this age of “virtual everything,” do we leave any trace of our daily personal lives that future archaeologists will discover and use for discerning what is important to us? Put your smart device in a drawer today and go outside to walk around in some mud in the hope that someday, just by chance preservation, some trace of your personal existence will endure.**  
 
 
*Summary at:  https://phys.org/news/2020-05-archaeology-fossilized-footprints-ancient-humans.html
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubrontes#/media/File:Dinosaur_State_Park_(Rocky_Hill,_CT)_-_prints.JPG  Accessed on May 20, 2020.  See Hatala, K.g., Harcourt-Smith, W.E.H., Gordon, A.D. et al. Snapshots of human anatomy, locomotion, and behavior from Late Pleistocene footprints at Engare Sero, Tanzania. Sci Rep 10, 7740 (2020).  DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-64095-0
 
 
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubrontes#/media/File:Dinosaur_State_Park_(Rocky_Hill,_CT)_-_prints.JPG      In 1835, more than a century before Mary Leakey and other archaeologists began studying hominin and hominid footprints to discern something about our past, Prof. Edward Hitchcock of Amherst College began studying dinosaur footprints. Since that time paleontologists have examined footprints millions of years old to infer dinosaur behavior. Hitchcock accumulated a large collection of tracks, mostly from the Connecticut River Valley. His collection appears to have been a lifetime’s work so carefully preserved that some slabs with prints have been turned into “three-ring books” much like a modern notebook binder. For a long time, the prints were stored for limited viewing in the basement of the Pratt Museum (an old gym) on campus, a basement that I visited often with college students. In 2006 the collection was moved into the Beneski Museum of Natural History, and access to the footprints is now far more limited than it was during the many years of my visits with students, when the curator simply said, “Sure, go take a look in the basement.” Not too far away, however, lies the footprint museum at Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, a public facility that affords an opportunity to look into that deep past when bipedal organisms were reptilian and avian, rather than mammalian.  At Rocky Hill, the footprints are ascribed arguably to a dinosaur species called Dilophosaurus, and its three-toed footprints are called Eubrontes. As they are classified, all footprints, burrows, and slide marks are called trace fossils. In the absence of physical remains, they are indirect, but very sound evidence, of life.

Obviously, a black swan of pandemic has descended violently upon the world, one of those unpredictable, though not entirely unexpected events that periodically return to disrupt daily life. By coincidence, another unpredictable and not entirely unexpected event has occurred: A newly discovered comet, a green “swan” passing through our Solar Neighborhood.  
 
Discovered through images taken by the Solar Wind ANisotrophies Instrument, acronym SWAN and the agnomen of the comet officially designated C/2020 F8, the new visitor to our orbit was photographed to reveal its green-glowing head and wispy long ion tail.* That green glow emanates from carbon atoms excited by the Solar Wind; the tail, from ionized gases also struck by charged particles ejected from the Sun, the same kinds of particles that give us our Aurora Borealis.
 
Green. A fitting color for a visitor. Something like “when in Rome, do as the Romans do” fashion. It’s the carbon in the comet and the carbon in life on our planet that reveal a common tie. Is there something noteworthy that a single type of atom is so essential to building two types of swans that fill our skies, the earthly swan and the cometary SWAN? Should we draw some kind of conclusion that takes us back to our animistic religions, the conclusion that life and nonlife are intimately related, that the universe is, for all its diversity, largely unified, the organic and inorganic inseparable?**
 
This is not a call to worship or fear a comet as in ancient times, nor is it a call to worship a bird or tree or any finite life-form. Rather, it’s a call to look at the underlying unities that encompass us. And then ask, “If I can see some sort of unity between me and all that surrounds me, can I also see some sort of underlying unity within life, and, more specifically, within humanity? Shouldn’t that unity be sufficient, without any ethical or moral codes, to engender at least mutual respect, if not love?”
 
And yet, surrounded by both subtle and overt hints at unity, we find ourselves constantly embroiled in petty differences. For humans all times are times of disunity; every age is besieged by conflict, if not here, then there, both then and now. The appearance of a swan, organic or inorganic, might serve as a reminder that in our very makeup a single type of atom unites the conscious and the unconscious, the thinking and the thought-about.
 
Both ancient and contemporary animists might have little in common with you except in this: Recognition of a connection that runs through the universe, a connection sometimes manifested in an inimical and indifferent black swan that threatens and divides us and at other times in a celestial green swan, also indifferent, that reminds us of our common ties to the cosmos and to one another.
 

* http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/soho-comet-c2020-f8-swan-08426.html  Accessed May 17, 2020. The article in SciNews shows an animation from the Solar Wind Anisotrophies Instrument that Michael Mattiazzo used to find the new comet. Its orbit can be seen in the New York Times article by Johathan Corum (May 12, 2020) in Following Comet SWAN at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/12/science/comet-swan-photos.html
Accessed May 17, 2020. The article also contains images of the green-glowing comet.
 
**Or are the simultaneous arrivals of the black swan of COVID-19 and the green SWAN together a modern version of the ancient myth of Zeus and Leda, preserved in the skies as Cygnus, a reminder that the hidden forces of the universe are both inimical and beneficial, both violent and creative? Zeus’ rape of Leda engendered in the offspring a history of tragic human relationships, culminating in the fall of Troy and the death of Agamemnon. See various versions of the myth and William Butler Yeats’ famous poem “Leda and the Swan” to draw your own inferences and conclusions. In the grasp of the black swan of a pandemic, do we helpless humans learn something divine? Should we ask, to paraphrase Yeats, “Will we put on his knowledge with his power/Before the indifferent beak lets us drop?”
 
 
 

​Appearance. So important to some that they judge others by their appearance, even ostracize them when they don't look "normal." 
 
As a kid I went to see Dumbo and was enthralled by the flying pachyderm’s aerial maneuvers. But then, I was little, and the animation was entertaining. Had Dumbo not been able to fly, his story might have been different and very much like tragic tales of those whose physical appearance generates derision in the cruel and heartless. I guess Rudolph encountered the same kind of initial ridicule and disdain that all characters like Dumbo face over “differences.” And possibly at times, all of us undergo some form of social cruelty over our appearance. I think, for example, of those advertised slide programs online which are headlined by “She was once a beauty queen, but you will be surprised by how she looks now,” a title that introduces “before” and “after” photos.
 
That we identify physical deformities is a product of our thinking there’s a “normal” appearance. It’s easy for us to generalize the human figure; in fact, such generalizing might be the product of sheer laziness. We pass so many “normal” people in a day, that any perceived exception draws our attention as though, in looking in the mirror over years or decades we see no change in ourselves. But all of us are accumulations of some deformities. That opposable thumb, for example, or that chin you use to change a pillow case. We might even ask whether pillows couldn’t be invented until chins evolved, a “chicken-or-egg” problem. Certainly, Neanderthals would have had trouble changing a pillow case with recessive chins.  
 
And ears. Handy for keep glasses in place when coupled with a nose. Ears come in all sorts of shapes, and they, like other body parts, evolved as accumulations of “deformities” over previous types, the human ear, for example and according to Darwin, containing an inward-pointing “ear point,” a little bump on the inside of the outer ear’s fold that is a vestigial remnant of a pointy ear. And that makes me—as you might guess—think of mummification.
 
Say what? Yes, mummification. I think of mummification because the process preserves those soft parts of the skull not naturally preserved. Skulls easily survive the ravages of time, whereas soft tissue, cartilage, doesn’t survive as well, if at all. Which brings me to artificially deformed skulls, “intentional cranial deformation,” as it is termed. Hippocrates wrote about the practice 2,400 years ago, speaking of the macrocephali, or long-heads. The practice of intentionally deforming the human skull by wrapping it from birth seems to have occurred in many parts of the world, even in parts of the New World. The product of the wrapping is a space-alien appearance in our contemporary imagery.
 
If we believe we know what “normal” is, then obviously, some peoples throughout history (and prehistory) have decided to make cosmetic changes to alter the “normal,” the practice coming from motivations both hidden and known, in some places known as a mark of beauty or social standing. But back to ears. Have you looked in a mirror while wearing a Covid-19 mask? Have you noticed that some masks pull the ears out wing-like, if not Dumbo-like?
 
Now let’s postulate that contemporary civilization adopts a “wear-a-mask-most-of-the-time” policy, even after the passing of the coronavirus threat. Little kids, their heads—and ears—not completely formed, suddenly become deformed by masks, developing “mask ears,” to be preserved for future archaeologists to discover in mummified bodies. They will debate the motivations. “Did these people circa the twenty-first century follow some cult? Did they believe wing-ears were a mark of beauty? Were they hard of hearing, so they changed the angle of the ear to capture more sound? Were such ears a mark of social standing? Why were they so intent on deforming ears?”
 
Sorry, didn’t mean to make you self-conscious about your appearance during your Covid years, especially about your “mask ears.” But if everyone keeps wearing a mask that pulls the ears outward, then “mask ears” will become the norm among the living. Fortunately for future generations—or maybe unfortunately, depending on perspective—ears won’t change through some Lamarckian process. But within a single generation or several generations, any social practice can become the norm. That’s possibly a good thing. Those who perceive that their own “beauty” is the “norm” will by constant exposure, accept a different norm, or at least, have to accept that they, like everyone else, have some deformity. That, in itself, might reduce the instances of social cruelty and ostracizing.  

Okay, say we make it back to the moon and decide to build a permanent colony. Going to need structures, right. But transporting stuff to the moon is expensive. Why not just use moon stuff to build structures? Well, now we know we can, and thanks to scientists from four countries and the European Space Agency, there’s a solution. All we need is thirsty astronauts and enough for them to drink. Yep. Who’da thunk it?
 
So, the story is that Shima Pilehvar and others figured out that astronauts could use urine to make cement.* Yes, like you, I’m wondering, “Who thought first that this was a problem and second that pee was the solution?” Anyway, Shima and friends, probably after drinking too much beer, decided that sending urine down the toilet was probably wasteful. I’m surmising that they took buckets to the pub to have something to carry back to the lab. Or, maybe they just drank beer in the lab.
 
In their abstract, the authors write, “We have…explored the possibility of utilizing urea as a chemical admixture for lunar geopolymers [geo? Doesn’t that mean “earth”? How about moonopolymers?]…[as a superplasticizer]” Their argument, beyond the chemistry and the material involved, lies in the estimated $10,000 per pound to get stuff just into orbit around Earth, forget the expense of getting it to the moon.
 
Having once had a job assisting stone masons, I recall having to use abundant water to mix the mortar and also concrete for the masons. No matter how much beer I might drink, I don’t think I could produce that quantity. I don’t think a small number of astronauts could produce that much urine. But if they could, their urine production, and thus their urea production, would require transporting the beer to the moon. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m totally opposed to astronauts bouncing around drunk in diminished gravity. No doubt, as societies move to other worlds, they’ll carry their rules with them, and among those will be rules against bouncing under the influence. But, if it costs $10,000 to get a pound of stuff into Earth orbit, wouldn’t getting all that beer to the moon offset the savings of not transporting construction materials? Even if the beer is purchased at happy-hour or beer-distributor prices, it still weighs about eight pounds per gallon. Eight pounds times $10,000 is $80,000 in transportation costs. And, how much cement can astronauts make with each gallon? Also, how much time do they want to spend gathering moon-surface polymers to mix with urea? Will it be dangerous to mine under the influence of beer, even moon-surface mine? And, big question: Are there suits that allow both male and female astronauts to pee on moon dust?
 
Gosh, then there’s the problem of where to pee. The moon has no rest stops and no trees. Making cement with urea is going to be a very public process. And how many astronauts will have to devote their time to peeing and separating urea? Will there be work shifts? And what if an astronaut prefers scotch or, moon-forbid (didn’t want to say “heaven forbid” though from my earthbound perspective, the moon is in the “heavens”), the astronaut is a celiac? Would NASA or the ESA send gluten-free beer? Isn’t beer just liquid bread?
 
The quantity problem is really THE problem. The report by Pilehvar and friends contains pictures of little cement structures with weights to demonstrate their capacity to resist deformation under stresses (like their own weight and freeze-thaw cycles). Unless the ESA intends to use the pee-cement to build little houses for moon-hamsters, no human astronaut is going to construct on the moon a large enough place of refuge to shield a human from all that solar radiation, cosmic rays, and micrometeorites that can’t burn up in a non-existing atmosphere. In short, who wants to live in the primitive conditions of a cement yurt in an age of technology so advanced that people can actually get to the moon? Kind of ironic isn’t it? We have on Earth a protective atmosphere, abundant limestone and diatomaceous earth from which to make cement. We can build wooden or steel or cement or stone houses, all with as much elaboration as we wish or can afford, and none of it costing $10,000 per pound unless we decide to construct houses from rare or precious metals. We have air to breathe, places where weather is rather pleasant, where no one has to wear a spacesuit or, indeed, anything. But here we are, discussing how to put humans in the harshest of conditions and asking them to pee just to provide what is easily made on Earth at relatively low cost and effort. Can anyone say, “I ordered ten yards of cement today for my new sidewalk”?
 
Humans. Two to three hundred thousand years of evolution to get to an age of technology only to fly to a place where nothing of human existence, save a few pieces of junk left from a half dozen moon landings, is available. And for what? To go to planets or moons farther away? Planets and moons that are even harsher environments than the moon? Even more primitive environments? Trying to remember. What was one of those basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy? Oh! Yeah. Safety, aka shelter.*** I think I would rather live in a cave on Earth than in a pee-hut on the moon.
 
Humans. Spent 200 to 300 millennia discovering how to make life easy, and they turn around and head toward the past. Go figure.
 
*Pilehvar, Shima, et al. Utilization of urea as an accessible superplasticizer on the moon for lunar geopolymer mixtures. Journal of Cleaner Production. Volume 247, 20 Feb 2020, 119177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.119177  Online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652619340478?via%3Dihub#!  Accessed on May 10, 2020.

***Letzler, Rafi. These lava tubes could be the safest place for explorers to live on Mars. 11 May 2020; Online athttps://www.livescience.com/radiation-mars-safe-lava-tubes.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9160&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2816625&m_i=3GhBzUpX75iIVSO3Gxk0xQ0U2GCWWAOYehhmDTOb6Lhnk75OGtHf9HzoBuvGnoaXY7hd16E75SrYIVXBn36DQ_mUWVq1xhEfvotI2jh33P  .  Accessed May 12, 2020. This is an update reference for this blog. So, we want to go to Mars, and maybe going there could produce some benefit for humans over the next centuries, but not for those humans who go to Mars. they will be living in danger, and might have to revert to what our very ancient ancestors did for shelter, that is, live in caves, or, on Mars, lava tubes. You can imagine the lifestyle (or you can watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie). I love the sentence by Letzler in this article that reads, "Every part of Mars could kill you." What a great travel ad. Makes me want to sign up for the trip. How about you?

Sure, Earth has its dangers, but at least it has oxygen, a protective atmosphere, and food. And if I want to live a more primitive life, I can always find a lava tube in New Mexico or Hawaii for a home.  

What could be more majestic than a mountain chain that rises more than 10,000 feet with views to the ocean? Encompassing views that provide new perspectives. And the volcanoes! Oh! the volcanoes. Thousands: Extinct, dormant, active, many, like Aconcagua, awe-inspiring. And in those high elevations, walks a mountain camel that provides some of the best wool and possibly a cure for coronaviruses. It is the llama toward which the attention of scientists at Belgium’s VIB-UGent Center for Medical Biotechnology has now turned for nanobodies, really tiny antibodies that might protect us from Covid-19.* Oh! the lengths—and heights—to which we will go when we are desperate. Oh! the ideas we will pursue.
 
And, if we read all the newspapers and listen to all the reports during this 2020 pandemic, we are desperate. We see the numbers. We can’t avoid seeing the numbers. Scary numbers. So, why shouldn’t we look at llama blood? Who knows? Maybe something will come of the research. Maybe the researchers will discover a cure that works for all of us.
 
But like a trip into the Andes, the journey is uphill, and like the new disease, it takes away the breath. Nevertheless, when we are desperate, we humans will often pursue every path, explore every option. That’s often how we progress, through multiple working hypotheses. Run through enough of them, we believe inductively, and we’re bound to hit on an answer to any problem.
 
Take the formation of the Andes themselves. Why are they there? Charles Darwin climbed them in the 1830s, long before anyone thought of moving crustal plates, Plate Tectonics, and seafloor spreading. Long before anyone knew about subduction zones and why the Ring of Fire exists. Darwin, climbing above 10,000 feet, saw fossils of marine animals in the rocks and posited two working hypotheses. The first was the standard of his time, that the Deluge had inundated the world, with only Noah and family left to repopulate. The second was that the seafloor had somehow been raised to great elevations. Darwin, looking out from the heights, thought, “Wait a minute. If the water covered the planet to the elevation at which I currently stand, where did all the excess water go?” The consequence of having questioned the Great Flood hypothesis and finding it wanting, was his decision to run with the other hypothesis, that the mountains had been formed by uplifting. Rocks once on the sea floor had been elevated thousands of feet. Sure, Darwin didn’t really know what was going on tectonically, but his hypothesis looked pretty good; it seemed certainly truer than the accepted truth. And when Darwin descended from lofty elevations, he found that the sea level location where he started his upward journey had undergone an earthquake in his absence and that a promontory of rock had suddenly appeared in the water offshore. Rocks were being pushed up. His second hypothesis seemed surer than sure. And those who pursued Darwin’s kind of thinking over the ensuing century established a new way of looking at orogeny and volcanism.
 
And so it might be with llama blood, or with any camel-species blood. Someone in Belgium, just on a hunch, might test an hypothesis that changes how the medical profession develops a vaccine against a deadly pandemic.
Multiple working hypotheses free us from narrow inhibitive thinking. And they don’t have to apply to scientific endeavors only. They can be used to discern what is true—or truer—in all our endeavors, even, believe it or not, in psychology, sociology, and political science.
 
While scientists pursue their multiple working hypotheses on coronavirus, each of us might consider which hypotheses we pursue in our daily life. We might ask ourselves whether or not we are locked onto a single hypothesis or are open to multiple hypotheses. Much of the opposition to Darwin’s work derived from those who supported a single hypothesis, that Noah’s Flood had remade the world and laid the marine fossils high in the Andes and other mountains. That opposition to Darwin still exists, as you know, in spite of almost two centuries of information that supports the tectonic processes that build great mountain chains and cause volcanic activity.
 
As you know, much of what you perceive to be opposition to your way of thinking comes from those locked onto single hypotheses about psychology, sociology, and politics. That begs a question for you to ask yourself: “Am I locked into a single hypothesis?” And another question: “Why are so many people inclined to stick with a single hypothesis?”
 
Very few, if any, of Darwin’s opponents over the past century and a half have ever pursued his working hypotheses with objective thinking and research. After all, if accepting Noah’s Flood explains marine fossils in mountain rocks, why pursue any other mechanism? Don’t most of us cling to one hypothesis to explain beliefs either because we are too lazy to pursue refinements and question anomalies to those beliefs or because we find security in a nostalgic adherence to our beliefs?
 
Probably, each of us adheres to some hypothesis without testing and without pursuing multiple other working hypotheses. It’s only when we open ourselves to re-examining our hypotheses or to examining the hypotheses of others objectively that we can establish a better degree of truth, if not THE TRUTH.
 
Maybe the constituents of llama blood will have no relevance to curing or preventing Covid-19 in humans, but I applaud those who try to discover a new kind of medical approach to a pandemic. The beauty of multiple working hypotheses is that on occasion one of those hypotheses or two or three of them in conjunction will provide a solution to a problem. Who really cares about the source of a cure if the cure works? Who will, after the fact of a cure, deride those who took a different path toward truth?
 
And if you consider multiple working hypotheses to explain your life and the lives of those around you, I applaud you. Like Darwin in the Andes, you have a perspective that others either miss or ignore because they never ventured to the heights that provide sweeping perspectives. Whereas it is possible that pursuing multiple working hypotheses might never yield a final “answer,” it does provide a better chance of finding a truer truth and a cure for what ails not just individuals and groups, but also much of humanity. 
 
*Reuters. Belgian, U.S. scientists look to llama in search for COVID-19 treatment. Science News. 5 May 2020. Online at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-antibodies-llamas/belgian-u-s-scientists-look-to-llama-in-search-for-covid-19-treatment-idUSKBN22H2QA
Accessed May 8, 2020.