“Deos  fortioribus adesse,” as Tacitus said. Maybe you would like the Marquise de Sevigne’s and Bernard Shaw’s version: “Fortune is always on the side of the largest battalions.” Whether you hold that the gods are on the side of the stronger as Tacitus wrote or that big battalions are always fortunate, you might also recognize that sometimes the weaker are just plain luckier. The world isn’t always predictable; big battalions can lose, and the gods can abandon the stronger. Maybe deos  fortioribus  non  adesse.  
 
In other words, it’s possible to make one’s own success in spite of overwhelming odds. And it’s also possible to be by chance in the right place at the right time. No one has to yield to the supposed stronger. If not by confrontation, then by creativity and persistence does the weaker succeed.
 
Regardless of the odds against you, make the next bet on yourself, and then persistently and creatively succeed.  

“Why can’t I feel Earth rotate?” the perplexed asks.
 
“Who are you, a young Einstein asking what it would be like to be in freefall?” I ask.
 
“No, I’m serious. If I open a textbook, I see that the planet is supposed to be turning at about 1,000 mph at the Equator, less at about 40 degrees north latitude because the circumference for the turn is smaller. So, if I’m turning, why can’t I feel it? Obviously, hurricanes seem to feel it because they rotate under its influence according to the texts. I can see that. I can understand rationally that I’m moving, but I just can’t feel it.” 
 
“Scenario: Perfectly smooth highway, luxury car, steady speed. Feel anything? You don’t do you? There’s no jerky motion in Earth’s turning. No way to feel any acceleration, and it is acceleration that makes you aware of movement. A roller coaster without acceleration is a Barcalounger in front of a TV. I think I would be more concerned if you said you could feel Earth’s turning. Even when it experiences a shift in speed because of its position at perihelion or aphelion, you don’t feel the motion—it is a very subtle change, a very gradual change as far as you are concerned. 
 
“Where’s this coming from?”
 
“Well, I looked online and saw a YouTube video about a flat Earth, and I saw some similar videos about other scientific subjects. It’s all so confusing. How do I know what to believe? Especially when I know that some people in government, industry, and science have perpetrated hoaxes. Maybe the government is just trying to cover up the fact of a flat, stationary Earth just the way it is covering up those alien crash sites and microwave weather weapons. Lots of people believe that. They can't all be wrong, can they?" the perplexed poses. 
 
“Ah! Conspiracies. You’ve been in a plane, right?”
 
“Yes.”
 
“Ever sat at a window seat and looked out?”
 
“Yes.”
 
“Haven’t you noticed a curved horizon, an arc in the distance indicative of a sphere-like structure?”
 
“Well, that brings me to another question. Why can’t I just hover in a helicopter in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, until Reno slips under me?”
 
“What’s the helicopter in?” I ask, knowing this conversation is going to jump from topic to topic.
 
“Huh?”
 
“Isn’t the helicopter in the atmosphere that Earth’s gravity holds? I know you know that the weather means the atmosphere moves, but in general it’s a motion in an atmosphere that moves with the planet. The whole kit and caboodle is moving. The helicopter is moving with the system. You want to travel from Reno to Slippery Rock? You’re going to have to move in a moving system, a bit like walking from the back of the train to the front and changing your position relative to the train that is changing its position relative to the ground. Reno is the back of the train; Slippery Rock is the front. They maintain their fixed distance from each other regardless of Earth’s turning.”
 
“Still, I bet the government is holding stuff back.”
 
“For what purpose?”
 
“That’s just it. We don’t know what they are holding back or why they are holding it back. I’ll bet they cause earthquakes with microwaves, and we wouldn’t even know. Hurricanes, too.”
 
“And ‘their’ purpose would be…? You know, the government is made up of people just like you. How good are you at keeping a secret? And what about the people that make up other governments, governments that are adversarial to yours? Think those people wouldn’t want to reveal whatever they could reveal? Or is this conspiracy so wide and deep that everyone who participates in government and science has decided that for whatever purpose they should keep some information from you? Don’t you think you’re better off just doing a little research to see that, for example, Earth revolves around the sun, rotates on its axis, and is an oblate spheroid whose gravitational pull differs according to its local mass and Newton’s laws?
 
“It seems that no amount of reasoning can convince you that Earth is a spinning ball and that the laws of Nature can’t be violated by government officials trying to withhold information from you. YOU! Specifically, you. Why? I don’t know. Did someone determine at your birth that the best course of action was to keep you in the dark by hiding aliens and covering up the planet’s flatness? Was that someone part of a select few who in each generation become guardians of the truth? And how was that someone chosen? How was the Keeper of the Secrets chosen? How could anyone know to trust the Keeper?”
 
“But what about all those fake moon landings?”
 
“I give up.”*


*Food for thought: Goodman, Noah D., et al. Intuitive Theories of Mind: A Rational Approach to False Belief. The authors write, 
In everyday life we often attribute unobservable mental states to one another, and use them to predict and explain each others’ actions. Indeed, reasoning about other people’s mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and emotions, is one of our main preoccupations. These abilities have been called theory of mind (Premack and Woodruff, 1978); theory of mind has become one of the most well-studied, and contentious, areas in modern psychology. In particular, much research has focused on the phe- nomenon of false belief: the ability to infer that others hold beliefs which differ from the (perceived) state of the world. 
Online at http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/Papers/pos785-goodman.pdf 

See also Wimmer, H. and Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition , 13(1): 103-128. 

Have you ever walked beside a turtle? Heavy breathing not needed. The experience is close to drinking a cup of chamomile in a soundproof room. Turtles are—and this is no exaggeration—slow. 
 
Turtles aren’t the model of our affluent lifestyles, not the model for frenzied concert goers, and not the model for traffic or races along the Baja. Turtles take one step…..then another…..careful steps all. Did I say this before? Turtles are slow. 
 
And they have a calming effect. Think turtle. Relax. You’re relaxing now. You can’t help it. Turtles have that kind of control over your entire being. See a turtle; be a turtle. Who needs meditation or biofeedback machinery when a turtle is in the room? 
 
Who wants to be a slow turtle? Look at turtle problems, such as crossing a highway. Maybe ten drivers swerve to miss the critter, but a driver following a truck usually fails to see it. Squish. Anyway, we can’t have humans jeopardizing their lives to save a being that just can’t keep up with our pace. We do have things to do and places to go—fast. 
 
What’s our goal? Although tachyons are fictional particles, they symbolize our desire to get everything done yesterday, to reverse both time’s arrow and cause and effect. Our goal in a tachyonic lifestyle makes us say at the end of each day or week, “Where did the time go?” 
 
We can’t go faster than the laws of nature allow us. We can’t exceed the speed of light. But there are other speed limits we keep trying to increase or exceed, and most of them we derive from the values modern life places on us.
 
Of course, not everyone wants to race like a tachyon. There are people who have walked with turtles and acquired their unspoken lesson: A tachyonic lifestyle isn’t more valuable than one imitative of a turtle’s. It’s just different by many orders of magnitude. 
 
Turtle or tachyon? Which one will characterize your life today? 

If you’ve read Voltaire’s Candide, you know the famous expression “This is the best of all possible worlds.” In the novel Voltaire is taking to task the optimists of his time, presenting some of the most humorous and absurd situations for Pangloss and Candide. Strangely, after all the water that has flowed under the intellectual bridge, we’re apparently very close to using a version of the same philosophy in String Theory Landscape.* Is it a new take on an old idea? 
 
I might be misreading the string theory landscapers, but it seems to me that their message is that this universe reveals the anthropic principle in its so-called fine-tuning for life. Apparently, if any of the four fundamental forces were just a tiny bit different (we’re talking lots of zeroes to the right of a decimal point), then the universe couldn’t hold together, atoms couldn’t form, and you couldn’t exist. Little changes annihilate us and our universe. 
 
So, maybe this is the “best of all possible worlds.” At least, it appears to be the “best world” for us. But the argument is a bit specious. How could we possibly know? String Theory Landscape tells us that there are many possible worlds. We happen to live in the only one that could engender us. The anthropic principle is a bit circular, isn’t it? We exist because the universe favors our existence, and because we are the universe conscious of itself, we ascribe its anthropic character to the fine-tuning that produced us. 
 
Yes, this is, in fact, the best of all possible physical worlds as far as we’re concerned. It’s our real world; all the others are hypothetical. Even if they exist as String Theory Landscape suggests, their nature is, for us personally, merely a guess. 
 
A multiverse is not really a new concept if the eighteenth-century philosophical optimists considered “the best of all possible worlds.” Obviously, other worlds, whether or not they exist, are “possible.” Maybe the string theorists are telling us that “probable” is an appropriate term. But so what? They can’t even run an experiment that proves strings exist even if their arguments seem mathematically irrefutable, and they can’t go to another universe. When they want to show you others exist, they point to the WMAP and COBE images that show some sort of pattern they ascribe to bubble universes or branes bumping. “Look closely, now. See that temperature fluctuation of a zillionth of a degree? That’s where our universe touched another.” Their image proof is like someone’s showing you a black-and-blue mark on his skin and saying, “This is where she hit me.” If you suspect there might be another possible, but unknown, explanation, would you accept that explanation prima facie?
 
Yeah. I know. I’m simplifying. But maybe seeing the patterns the physicists suggest is like seeing patterns in a Jackson Pollock painting that are supposedly fractals. However, there’s a reason I make such a comparison. We can’t change the physical nature of our world. Gravity is what it is, and the other fundamental forces are what they are. This is the world in which we live. It’s never going to be different for us. That means we need to see what we can, as opposed to what we cannot, change. Typically, that means human change.
 
How do we individually make the human world the best of all possible human worlds? We’ve been struggling with that long before Confucius and Siddhartha, long before Christ and Mohammed, and long before the western philosophers began philosophizing and a myriad of others designed their utopian universes. We’ve had some successes, but we still face the same problems the eighteenth-century optimists faced, all those problems wrapped up in two questions: Why is there evil? And Why do bad things happen to good people? 
 
It is the Landscape of Humanity that ultimately concerns everyone. Sure, it’s nice to speculate that somewhere “out there” there’s another you living another kind of life, maybe a lazy and rich one on a tranquil sea of hypothetically cool liquid gold. Hypotheticals aside, you don’t have a speculative life. You—all of us—have only this one, and it’s not practice.
 
*Popular accounts can be found at Nadis, Steve. When Universes Collide. Discover .December 2012 Issue. Online at http://discovermagazine.com/2012/dec/29-when-universes-collide and at
Zyga, Lisa. Scientists find first evidence that many universes exist. Phys.org. December 17, 2010, online at  https://phys.org/news/2010-12-scientists-evidence-universes.html In the so-called “bubble collision” no one has explained why the bubbles limited their penetration, but here’s a speculation. If you try to push a beach ball into a pool, you will find the resistance of all those hydrogen bonds makes the effort very difficult. Is it possible that the dimensions of one universe act like the hydrogen bonds to resist the complete penetration of the “beach ball” neighboring universe? Just thinkin. Or maybe, the supposed collision spots seen on the WMAP image are no different from the shapes we see in cumulus clouds on a lazy summer afternoon. “I see an elephant.” “Looks like a ballerina to me.”

Funny how so many of us are unaware of Earth history. Take the recent and continuing droughty conditions in the American Southwest. Lake Mead stands at 40% capacity in 2018, and that’s an obvious indicator that a persistent dryness has affected the area from California to Colorado. Unfortunately, there’s not much people can do about the lack of precipitation. But drought in the American Southwest has been a characteristic of the area for a very long time. There was, for example, a significant drought between 1130 and 1164, according to Toby R. Ault and others working under the auspices of The Goddard Institute for Space Studies.* 
 
Do the numbers. Thirty-four years of drought. The recent dryness in the region drained by the Colorado River isn’t close to a record. Then consider the opening statement in Ault’s abstract: “The western United States was affected by several megadroughts during the last 1200 years, most prominently during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; 800 to 1300 CE).” Ault and colleagues then note, “similar events are possible today….”
 
As I write this, the American East is experiencing flooding, mostly from a tropical storm that entered the country through the Gulf of Mexico. And more rain is on the way via a hurricane that will enter the country from the Atlantic. Too much rain vs. too little rain. Why can’t we just build a pipeline?
 
That suggestion is absurd for various reasons, including expense and lack of technology to control excessive runoff. But the main reason might be that humans have very, very short memories when it comes to natural events. And short memories reduce the will to act when there is no crisis. Anticipation isn't our strongest characteristic.
 
The East has been flooded before, and the West has been flooded, too. And both have experienced droughts. But weather is a daily phenomenon. We appear to suffer through the heat waves and the floods, do what we have to do to survive, and then acclimatize to the next weather. Seasons have seasoned us to change.
 
So, what’s a human race to do? After 5,000 years of civilization and untold efforts to control Nature, we’re seemingly still at the mercy of the weather. We started trying to tame the Tigris and Euphrates, progressed to taming the Nile (Not a bad job there), managed many of the rivers in Europe, only now started to control massive amounts of water with the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze, and worked for generations to make the Mississippi obey us. Yes, and then there’s the Hoover across the Colorado. Still, we can’t make the sky produce rain at our beckoning (unless you count local cloud seeding) and can’t stop a hurricane’s downpours. 
 
There are limits to artificial controls that societies impose, but often fail to enforce. Those “thousand-year-” and “five-hundred-floods” will continue to inundate us. Those dry spells will exacerbate climates that have existed for millennia. But in our short-term memories, none of that matters. We will attempt to control what we cannot ultimately control. 
 
Unfortunately, the same lack of control occurs on a purely human climate. As population increases, there will be times when behaviors and ideas inundate the most carefully planned societies. There will be times when, as Robert Burns famously wrote in “To a Mouse”:
 
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
 
Is there some lesson in its famous line adapted by William Faulkner for a title? Is there some pessimism in speaking "of mice and men" in the context of this poem and the droughts and floods of the past and present? “What are you saying?” you ask.
 
It’s good to plan, to scheme. Societies couldn’t sustain themselves without some planning. But individuals have little choice but to adapt. Droughts and floods, social and economic systems, and behavioral norms will change. In that famous poem, Burns notes that the mouse lives only in the present, but humans have both the past and future to keep in mind. His last stanza: 
 
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
 
We know, thanks to people like Ault and colleagues and many other researchers that droughts have occurred, and others have informed us of widespread flooding that happened long before civilization established itself. We know from recent history that both drought and flood can overwhelm our infrastructure.
 
Consider this. The red rocks of Sedona and the Grand Canyon indicate that in the distant past desert conditions existed, that the American Southwest was very much like today’s environment, a land in a rain shadow, moisture blocked by mountains back then just as mountains block moisture from moving from ocean to land today. Then take a trip into the American Northeast, where you will see other red rocks, an indication that droughty conditions prevailed millions of years ago. Through all the good times and bad, extant life had little choice but to adapt the best it could. And you seem to have no choice other than to adapt, both to the fickleness of Mother Nature and to the inevitable change that new generations bring to their predecessor generations. 
 
Yes, there are cycles. Yes, there are changes. If you can recognize what part of a either a social or natural cycle dominates your time, you have a better chance of survival. You don’t necessarily have to “guess an’ fear!” as Burns writes, but you certainly can anticipate. Of course, I would be naïve to suggest we can anticipate 500-year floods or 30-year droughts or on-the-spot political changes that sweep through a new generation unaware of the past, but I still hold to my oft-repeated statement: “What you anticipate is rarely a problem.” 

*Ault, Toby R., et al. A Robust Null Hypothesis for the Potential Causes of Megadrought in Western North America, AMS, September 11, 2017. Online at https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0154.1 
See also, Ault and St. George. The magnitude of Decadal and Multidecadal Variability in North American Precipitation. AMS. February 2010 (Vol. 23, No. 4).

I don’t know about you, but I never think about my ribosomes. Okay, never  is incorrect. I thought of them today, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about them. I guess I should be thinking about them occasionally. I can’t live without them and the proteins they produce. But they are tiny and inside me, and just like the pistons in my truck engine, when they work, I simply drive. When ribosomes do their job, I simply live. 
 
Cryo-electron tomography at Yale now allows us to “see” ribosomes through some combining tricks that researchers can play on their computers. We can even see ribosomes in whatever color we choose. They kinda look like buttons or gas caps—at least, that’s how I see those ribosomes imaged by Beck et al. (Science , 306, 2004; Nature 449, 2007).* Now, having seen ribosomes up close and personal, I won’t be able to get the image out of my head every time I fill up the truck’s gas tank, and maybe, when I button a shirt. 
 
Was I better off not knowing what ribosomes looked like? I was happy in my ignorance. I wasn’t thinking of them any more than I ordinarily think of breathing (Shoot, just made you think of your breathing, didn’t I?). Anyway, back to my ribosomes, I know they’ve been performing their tasks all my life, but, even having learned about them in biology class, I ignored their essential function and value. They work. I live.
 
Much of what a society does to hold itself together, to exist, is like the functioning of ribosomes. I don’t pay much attention to the electricity that runs the computer I use to write or the one you use to read. Nor do I pay much attention to the constant functioning of society’s complex interactions and products. When I think of such obliviousness, I realize how truly ignorant and childlike I am. 
 
You might say, “Well, we can’t keep everything in mind constantly, and we can take certain processes and materials for granted simply because they ‘run on automatic’ as far as we are personally concerned.”
 
Right! If we stop to think about “everything,” we won’t get much done about “something.” So, we choose, and in choosing we ignore. It’s only when what we ignore stops functioning that we pay attention. Garbage workers’ strike? We pay attention. Powerline down? We pay attention. 
 
That brings me to the current buzzword mindfulness. There’s really nothing new in the idea, but it is a call for both self-awareness and other-awareness that every generation considers every so often. Possibly, we are mindful of mindfulness more at this time because we live in, as I have written before, the Age of Distraction. Of course, distractions are relative to circumstances. When one is hungry, there’s little to be mindful of other than the search for food. I guess that means that in a well-fed, affluent society, people are more susceptible to distractions of all kinds. If one is suffering in a war-torn or famine-torn society, the frivolous distractions don’t intrude on mindfulness. But in a society with much, distractions abound. 
 
That begs a question or two from you, “So, what is significant enough to catch my mind? Of what should I be mindful?”
You don’t have to think about your ribosomes. They’ll do their job without your conscious help. Unfortunately, now that I’ve seen them and fixed an analogy, I’m stuck thinking about them every time I go to the gas station and undo my gas cap. But every so often, it might behoove you to think about what you normally don’t think about. And not some big thought! Something small, yet valuable. Something—or someone—you take for granted.

*You can see ribosomes as imaged through data combining plus single particle averaging at https://fassciencecores.yale.edu/sites/default/files/cryo-em_discussion_020315.pdf . Or for a complete article see Wolfgang Baumeister's article at http://www.biochem.mpg.de/275009/01_ContentCEM  

When I read some neuroscientists’ and cognitive scientists’ research, I find that I knew stuff I didn’t know I knew when I was little. “Folk psychology” and “folk physics,” for example. Although I don’t like the terms, preferring “innate” and “ a  priori ”  to “folk,” I understand why D. Dennett and others use them.* Supposedly, even babies can distinguish between “agents” and “non-agents,” the latter being nonliving entities like a rock. Agents can choose an action and purposefully cause something to happen. Non-agents are subject to physical forces in the absence of intention—a rock falling in a rockfall triggered by excessive rain.** With regard to folk psychology, a baby appears to be able to empathize and to read faces. With regard folk physics, it seems to know causal relationships among moving and stationary objects. Folk psych has many manifestations; folk physics seems to be generally just a matter of discerning Newtonian forces at work. 
 
So, I guess I knew way back when that someone was upset or happy, my ability to read facial expressions somehow was part of my makeup, somehow was pre-formed in my mind. Of course, experience ultimately refined the ability to read others’ intentions and to understand dangers associated with physical entities acting under those Newtonian forces. But with regard to folk psychology, I’ve been in waiting rooms full of sick children and have heard other babies cry at the sound of crying. It might be a matter of survival: Hearing sounds associated with danger, the baby responds. Could be a cry for preventive help, a call to the mother.
 
That brings me to one of two questions. Given this inherent folk psychology that enables us to determine intention, do we as babies act intentionally or unintentionally to that sound of crying in a waiting room? If the latter, then aren’t we “non-agents”? So, I’ll answer. Both folk psych and physics look outward, not inward. They are “domains” of the mind that characterize how we characterize the world. My second question is one I believe I can answer, but I will need your help in doing so. (That’s just my way of saying, you’re going to have to think about this one on your own; it’s another point of departure) Here goes: Is there any significance to the finding that folk psychology and folk physics occur universally and show little cultural variability (see second footnote)?
 
I see significance in the finding: Barring some neurological dissociation like Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism that inhibits folk psychology—but not so much folk physics as evidenced by an autistic child’s fascination with certain objects or machines—all humans share two mind domains and that such commonality in infancy relates all of us until enculturation un-relates us. 
 
Now, an anecdote to ponder: I asked a three-year-old verbal child, “Is a car alive?” The child responded affirmatively. When I asked why, the child said, “It moves.” So, what do you think? Do the domains sometimes get a bit mixed? Is that the reason we can be fooled by robots? And does our failure to perceive reveal that all of us have the potential to accept “false beliefs” that daily come our way through social media, urban legends, and stories of ancient aliens?***
 
Obviously to you, you, unlike so many around you, have “developed” abilities to understand agents and non-agents. You have surpassed the intuitive through learning. Of course, that doesn’t mean you still don’t mistake your reading of agents and non-agents. Another anecdote: A coed said after one of my lectures on stream development and topography, “My mother said that the Monongahela River runs backwards.” Immediately, I tried to picture the front and back of water, then responded, “I think she means that the Monongahela generally trends to the north like so many other rivers, including the famous Nile. But rivers flow downhill under the force of gravity. In some areas, such as the lower Mississippi, the push of water from behind can drive a stream up a gradient just as the swash of a wave climbs a beach, but rivers flow downhill. The Monongahela begins in the highlands of West Virginia and flows downhill to Pittsburgh, where it joins the Allegheny to make the Ohio and continue the trip to the Gulf of Mexico. By the way, I said, you can picture that if you think of the tallest building in Pittsburgh. Between Pittsburgh and New Orleans, the water falls nearly the same vertical distance as that building is tall.”
 
She said, “I don’t care. That’s what my mother told me.”
 
How much has culture influenced your development of your initial intuitive psychology and physics? How has it shaped the way you view your world? 
 
 
 
*Dennett, D., The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1987.
**Baron-Cohen, Simon, Sally Wheelwright, Amanda Spong, Victoria Scahill, and John Lawson, “Studies of Theory of Mind: Are Intuitive Physics and Intuitive Psychology Independent?” Online at http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2001_BCetal_kidseyes.pdfThe authors refer to folk psychology and physics as intuitive. And they write, “Agents have intentionality, whereas non-agents do not. This means that when agents and non-agents move, their motion has different causes (Csibra, Gergely, Biro, Koos & Brockbanck, 1999; Gelman & Hirschfield, 1994)” p. 48. “Dennett’s claim is that humans from infancy onwards use  folk  ( or intuitive )psychology  to deduce the cause of an agent’s actions, and use  folk  ( or intuitive )physics to deduce the cause of a non-agent’s movement (Dennett, 1987)” p. 48).
     The authors explain that both folk physics and folk psychology are proposed as core domains of human cognition that share seven features (according to Carey, 1985, and other authors). Both “1) are aspects of our causal cognition, 2) demonstrate precocity in human infancy, 3) are acquired or develop universally, 4) show little if any cultural variability, 5) have specific but universal ontogenesis, 6) are adaptive, and 7) may be open to neurological dissociation” (pp. 49, 50).
***Sorry to those of you who believe that the drawings on the Plain of Nazca were made to aid in landing ancient spacecraft. Did they land only in the daytime? Did they have the ability to cross light years of space without remembering to carry along their radar equipment or landing lights? And did none of them that built the pyramids in Central America, South America, or along the Nile ever produce machinery that had rust-proofing? Of course, one could argue that they took their machinery home after traveling trillions of miles just to pile up some rocks on Earth. 

The Caucasian child was young, just a toddler, and someone in the room was asking about a TV star. The child asked, “The one with the brown face?” There was no judgment in the question, just a point of identification. The point is that the child could recognize color differences in faces as surely as it could recognize colors in a crayon box. Not knowing the person, the child searched for a means of identification. Now tell me, given ignorance of a name or a behavior associated with a person, do you do the same? Probably, but not for someone of similar skin color. If there is no exception, there’s nothing to point out. What would you identify in an empty room of uniform color? 
 
We’ve found out that Denisovans and Neandertals had offspring. The Max Planck Society press release of August 23, 2018, confirms the genetic finding. The leg bone of a young teenage girl found in Denisova Cave bears the genetic trace of a Neandertal mother and Denisovan father. And the father seems to have had “at least one Neandertal ancestor further back in his family tree.”*
 
If you are an anthropology inexpert like me, your knowledge of Neandertals is somewhat limited and filled with low-browed, wide-nosed facial images and a stooping posture. See. I just did what the child did. I picked out a feature (the face) and used it as an identifier. I made no judgment. Obviously, unless it was a matter of rape, some Denisovan guy, a very close relative of yours, found some Neandertal girl in a bar and had at least one night of abandoned willpower driven by hormones. And someone in the Denisovan’s past had done the same, maybe even his great grandmother. Apparently, as Clyde Kluckhohn pointed out in his studies, there isn’t such a thing as a pure race, especially outside Africa, and there really never was.** 
 
Enter political correctness. I don’t have any hair on top my head. So, given that you don’t know me, what feature might you use to identify me? Should I be offended if what you say is true, “There’s a bald guy over there.” The feature is what it is. No offense taken. But enter another problem. At what level of variation do you distinguish a “brown” or “black” or “white” or some other color face? Was the girl in the Denisova Cave more Neandertal than Denisovan? Would it make a difference to you? If someone is more Hutu than Tutsi, does it make a difference? “Well,” you say, “it obviously made a difference during the genocide of the 1990s.” Yes, to Hutus and Tutsis, but if you are neither, could you tell one apart from the other? 
 
How does that age-old definition of a species work? A species is a group that can produce fertile offspring.*** Neandertals and Denisovans appear to have done that. All humans currently on the planet have a reproductive potential that matches those ancient humans. I wonder what the girl in the Denisovan cave had to say about her “race.” I wonder whether her nose was a little wider and her brow a little more pronounced than the other people in the cave. I wonder whether or not she was ostracized because of her mother’s Neandertal genes. Or did the mother live in harmony with her in-laws as so many people of mixed backgrounds have done and continue to do?
 
But we still have people like Hitler and Goering arguing for “racial purity” as though they themselves lack the diversity that Clyde Kluckhohn says pervades humanity.**** How far back can you trace your ancestry? If you are of European descent, you possibly incorporate Neandertal ancestry. And for others, even into southeast Asia, it is possible that the Denisovans left their genetic mark. That means that Melanesians have continued the Denisovan biology into today.
 
Anyway, here’s the suggestion. At birth everyone should be given the results of a genetic test and those results should be posted over the crib, then beneath a refrigerator magnet in the kitchen, then in the first-grade classroom, and in every subsequent classroom with everyone else’s genetic background. “Oh! No!” you say. “That would be an invasion of privacy.”
 
Yes, it would be for a bunch of people, but it would also be a check on anyone who claims “racial purity.” Let’s have a genetic background posted online. We might also incorporate in the educational system those anthropological realities that Kluckhohn and other anthropologists and geneticists have uncovered about our common humanity. We currently live with hypocrisy in those who would arbitrarily condemn others over who they are physically. Couldn’t we try something different to diminish both that hypocrisy and the racism with which it is associated?*****
 
 
 
*Max Planck Society (MPG) Press Release, 23 Aug 2018, online at https://www.research-in-germany.org/news/2018/8/2018-08-23_Neandertal_mother__Denisovan_father_Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF): Research in Germany. Study by Prof. Dr. Svante Pääbo et al. of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.
 
**Achenback, Joel. Study Finds Africans More Genetically Diverse Than Other Populations, Washington Post, Friday, May 1, 2009. Online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/30/AR2009043002485.html
 
***As Merriam-Webster defines it: “comprising related organisms or populations potentially capable of interbreeding”
 
****Like you, I have memories that I can’t precisely reference, including the lines Kluckhohn wrote in Mirror for Man, a book I read for a college class and the copy of which I cannot find in my library at this time. I know his point was a simple one: After years of studying the Navajo and other peoples, he had drawn the conclusion that there was no pure race. I remember his mentioning the predominance of dark-haired people in Scandinavian countries stereotypically described as lands of light-haired people. And then I think of my own children and grandchildren, all blond through childhood and some blond or light-haired into adulthood, and all but one blue/green-eyed, in spite of my brown eyes and childhood brown hair (before I lost it). Are those physical characteristics the result of my wife’s northern European and Russian background? Did I marry a Viking? We all have a tendency to generalize based on a single or few characteristics. Are there some characteristics associated with geography and genetics? Yes, probably. But the mix of humanity continues, also probably at an accelerated pace thanks to greater mobility and some breakdowns in cultural taboos. What the Denisovans and Neandertals started no doubt continued with the Neandertals and modern humans, and from then on among humans across the planet. Unfortunately, there will always be those who believe there’s irrefutable purity in their genes. Maybe a good practice would be to give a genetic heritage summation to everyone upon birth, a summation that would include Neandertal and Denisovan genes. With such knowledge of genetic diversity, could anyone claim “purity”?
 
***** I’m not very realistic, am I? As soon as we eliminate one distinction among humans, we’ll find another, maybe culture, religion, politics, or even athletic ventures: Are you an avid fan of curling or football? I’m not opposed to birds of a feather flocking together, but I am opposed to birds of a feather thinking all other birds are ugly ducklings.   

You might think that after uncounted, but maybe trillions, of trips and falls and maybe trillions more drops and stumbles, humans might have a handle on the value of the gravitational constant. Not so. Researchers keep revising the numbers. Like you, I’m going to ask, “Who does this for a living?” I can hear the conversation now.
 
“Honey, I’m off to work. I’ll see you later.”
 
“Don’t forget we need to pack for the Disney trip.”
 
“Right. I can’t wait to ride the Tower of Terror. Nothing like a good and unexpected drop for a gravity scientist.”
 
“Be careful at work, dear. Don’t drop something on you. I haven’t paid the health insurance bill yet.”
 
“Me. No, the only thing I’ve been dropping is the value of the gravitational constant.”
 
About two centuries ago, the reclusive Henry Cavendish measured the gravitational constant, not a small accomplishment in an age preceding modern lab techniques and lasers. Ever since, some people have focused their careers on experiments that measure gravity, both for practical and for theoretical purposes. (Yeah, somebody comes up with the money to pay them) Anyway, in their continuing attempts to refine the constant, Gravitoners (I don’t know what to call them, and maybe that name makes them sound like 1950s rock group or an 80s heavy metal group) keep giving us new numbers.
 
Five years ago this week, French gravitoners measured the gravitational constant and found it to be 21 PPM lower than their previous measurement. The drop in measurement supposedly reflected better science; that’s what they (gravitorners) said about their equipment and their results (some gravitoners found the value 241 PPM lower). So, the 2013 value was set at 6.67545(18) x 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^2. Who am I to question a figure that seems so precise?
 
Drop into 2018 for yet another refiguring. Groups of gravitoners in China and Russia have experimental results of 6.674484 and 6.674184 yada yada yada with exponents.** What the heck is going on? Does this mean that our falls are a bit less violent and that our scales are making us think we are losing more weight than our diets promise? 
 
You know we all love constants. But the value in a constant is, well, CONSTANCY. Now, every time I step on a scale, I have to wonder whether or not I’m not actually losing or maintaining weight, but rather simply applying a different value to my mass. If the value keeps dropping, I’ll soon weigh the same as I currently would on the moon. Of course, the good news is that I won’t fall as hard, won’t get hurt as much by a falling object, and won’t get as much of an inverted stomach during a fall on the Tower of Terror. Wait! That might not be good news for amusement park owners and their customers. “We tried the new ride, but it wasn’t very exhilarating.”
 
Then, again, maybe I’ll walk with a more sprightly step, jump 21PPM farther, or keep my breathing steady during a climb up steps or hills. 
 
Constants. They make us feel secure. Love is the one constant that binds, right? Peace is the interrupted constant most humans have sought since Cain killed Abel. Evenhanded justice is the constant constitutions are supposed to guarantee. Any challenge to constants challenges our sense of stability and security. Of course, we have no standard quantitative way of agreeing on the value of any “human” constant. The Constitution, for example, undergoes alterations through legal precedents that turn a general concept into a set of very specific nuances. 
 
What’s next? Some researcher telling us that after examining all constants, he found that the only constant is the constantly changing nature of constants? The good news is that all dieters have lost weight effortlessly.  
 

* Yirka, Bob. New measure of gravitational constant higher than expected. Phys.org. September 9, 2013. Online at  https://phys.org/news/2013-09-gravitational-constant-higher.html  Yirka writes, “This value is 21 PPM lower than the last time they ran the experiment (measurements by others have ranged as far as 241PPM lower).” So, the measurement is higher than the last measurement that was lower than the previous value by 221PPM. Thus, still lower. 
**Yirka, Bob, Two new ways to measure the gravitational constant. Phys.org. August 30, 2018 online at https://phys.org/news/2018-08-ways-gravitational-constant.html

“What’s on your mind today? You’ve been wandering around wondering, apparently, probably because you’ve written 1,000 little essays, and your brain is empty. After all, how many thoughts could you possibly hide in there, that is, how many thoughts that would inspire essay number 1,001?” you ask.
 
“This is where I am, somewhat lost in a field that is full of fields,” I say. 
 
“Okay, I see you haven’t stopped thinking. I can sense the birth of a little essay. You’re going to make me think just when I thought I might get a rest. This better be good.”
 
“Physicists tell us that we should abandon our notions of solidity, that we aren’t composed of matter as we have understood it. Think the force between north ends of two magnets and Faraday. There’s evidence of the magnetic field in that force. And when physicists look more closely at the subatomic world that makes up the atomic world that makes up the world, they say they are looking at fields and that I should abandon my long imagined atoms as little building blocks of solid matter. Electrons and quarks, baby; that’s it; that’s everything in the world we deal with daily. That’s me. That’s you. Somehow, ‘fields.’ Neither electrons or quarks are solid as we like to think of solids. And that’s the universe in which we live. Impossible to imagine, the composition of everything can be reduced to fields. The protons and neutrons we see in our elementary school textbooks are just models without substance as we normally define ‘substance.’ 
 
“Could someone please show me a quark? No, I don’t want a graph or diagram of some kind. I want to hold a quark or see one under some microscope. I know they are little, but don’t we have some kind of technology that lets us see them? Otherwise, what am I supposed to think when I look in a mirror? That I’m not really there as I see myself? That I’m composed of ‘particles’ that aren’t really particles, that ‘wave functions’ and ‘fields’ are my composition? That I am more emptiness than non-emptiness because the electrons orbit or shroud a nucleus of up and down quarks so tiny that much of what we call atoms is empty space? The diameter of an ‘atom’ some 100,000 times larger than the nucleus of quarks, a pea in the middle of a football field. 
 
“This is very disheartening. I’ve been working all my life to understand myself, and now I realize that the ‘myself’ I want to understand can only be understood physically as it is understood mentally, that is, that my body is as fluid as my mind. Is this the endpoint of knowledge? Am I a set of fields in a larger set of fields? Isn’t all matter the same fundamental composition? Even two magnets themselves are composed of the very kinds of fields to which they respond with resistance or attraction. Am I living in something akin to virtual reality? Am I a fractal? Should I start looking at everyone and everything as though they are screen savers?
 
“Or, should I do what I have always done? Ignore matters I can’t resolve to concentrate on matters that I can resolve? Isn’t everything in our lives a matter of context, anyway? What difference does it make if I merely assume that I am solid and the world I deal with is also solid? What difference does it make if I don’t dwell on touch as a product of the electromagnetic force in action? Don’t I already do that? After all, how can I account for my feelings? They certainly can’t be the same as touch and sight, can’t be mere products of overcrowded electrons resisting one another like similar poles of two bar magnets. And what about consciousness? How does a physical body that is composed of fields make a brain capable of coherent thought or consistent self-awareness? How is my identity derived from fields interacting through forces? Seems strange, but I guess my identity is the same as the identity of any field I see: ‘Look, a field of flowers. There’s a corn field. The cows are in the field. And there’s a field of Donald.' 
 
“Maybe I should ignore the physical fields althogether and just concentrate on the social ones. All those people out there are also a combination of fields interacting through just four fundamental forces (weak, strong, electromagnetic, and gravitational), and the only reason they have mass is the Higgs field through which matter wades like a senior citizen in an exercise pool. 
 
“Those people out there, those other ‘fields’ which they represent (or parts of fields of which I am also a part—or particle), all together make social, religious, and political fields through which I wade. Are they my Higgs fields? Sometimes the walking is difficult; I acquire more mass, becoming something like a heavy metal because of the resistance of the fluid, the field, almost as though I am walking through mercury instead of water or less dense air. Yes, maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the reason that we have the problems we have. We move sluggishly because of the ‘mass’ we acquire when we move through certain social fields. We plow through social, political, and religious ‘fields,’ meeting various degrees of resistance.  
 
“I don’t really need to prove that I am ‘solid.’ Physical mass isn’t what occupies my mind. I’m always wading in fluids of different densities, always encountering various levels of resistance in my interactions with others. Occasionally, I move through the fields of human interactions with little resistance, and life becomes exhilarating. I can move as a glider through air, seeming to defy all forces of society, politics, and religion, or maybe even aided in my flight by them.”
 
“This is it?” you ask. “This is what you want to give me to think about?”
 
“Look about. You are acquiring some mass by some field. You can abandon your walk through the resistant fields, the ones that slow your progress. The physicists tell us that the Higgs field, for example, is what gives matter mass and that things with more ‘mass’ are simply interacting with the field more than things with less mass. We all have some choices here. No, we can’t eliminate our moving as fields through fields, but we can sometimes choose the fields through which we wander. I’m just wondering which field to wander today. Do I pick one through which I can move easily or one through which I must struggle?”