Our self-aware cousins

This weekend I heard an incredibly interesting story on NPR's This American Life titled "Almost Human Resources" (Act 3). The story was all about the issues surrounding chimpanzees in the human world surpassing their usefulness and how we should care for them. Apparently this now includes retirement homes with TVs.

This story, along with a recent tangential debate over at Southern Fried Science and PETA's "sea kittens" campaign, sent my mind down a familiar path - one that anyone working in biology inevitably travels from time to time: the ethics of animal research for science.

There have been myriad writings, books, movies, discussions, and laws surrounding the practice of using animals for research. I'm sure most of us in the science world have come to very similar conclusions on the subject, though we may vary widely in the details.

Nonetheless, I'm very interested to hear where YOU, my readers and my fellow scientist peers, currently stand on the subject. I would like this post to be interactive.

First, I'd like to give my own thoughts.

In general, I view all living things as uber-complex organic robots (humans included). All life is amazing, precious, and beautiful - from bacteria to humans - but I still see us all as robots, running our nearly unfathomable genetic programs, developmental processes, and higher-level emergent programs of conscious and sub-conscious thought.

Mirror Test

At the same time, I feel - for no rational reason really - that consciousness and self-awareness inherently grant those that harbor them the right to live relatively free from human induced suffering. This is a feeling. We all feel it, at least for humans. We feel the immorality of conducting experiments on other human beings (though this was not always the case). Why? Because it's...just...wrong.

It's for this reason that I'm completely opposed to any medical research on chimpanzees or any great apes. There is no doubt that our great ape cousins share many if not most of our own emotional and sensory perceptions, as well as similar intellectual abilities (similar in type - not necessarily degree). For all intents and purposes, I see them as people. Not human people. Not anthropomorphized animals. But sentient to semi-sentient beings.

It's hard to measure degrees of self-awareness and know whether another creature has it. But the classic mirror test is one simple way to find when the answer is a clear yes. As of right now, great apes, dolphins, elephants, and at least one bird species, the magpie, have passed the test and shown that they have some understanding of "self."

If a creature can have any understanding of what is being done to "them," I am completely against it. Recently Orac at Respectful Insolence posted on the discontinuation of using dogs for teaching surgery techniques. He caught some flak from a few commenters for showing an emotional relief that dog use was being halted - at least partially because he loves dogs. As if any decisions on the use of other beings for our own benefit could be arrived at using only reason!

No - we as humans place some inherent value on consciousness, on self-awareness. Dogs may or may not be "self-aware" as defined by behavioral scientists. They can't pass the mirror test, but anyone who has had a dog knows that they clearly experience something akin to guilt, and a whole host of emotions similar to those of our own (I'm being careful here not to anthropomorphize). They know when they have done something wrong.

As any behavioral biologist, psychologist, or cognitive neuroscientist knows, there is no clear dividing line between conscious being and automaton. What about rhesus monkeys and the other more "primitive" primates? I personally feel that much monkey research - particularly those studies on the cutting edge of such diseases as A.I.D.S. - are critical right now. However, I also know that I could never be one to perform such studies. There is a mental hypocrisy here in my own mind. I would feel wrong performing primate research. But I support it to a limited extent.

But for some animals, it seems clear when they are well beyond that gray fuzzy line. Xenopus frogs, as far as any observation or measurement can tell, are much too dumb to have any sort of self-awareness. The same can be said of mice or rats. They simply do not have the cognitive capacity - the hardware - to generate emergent properties like self-awareness as we know it. It seems more than clear to science, I believe, that these creatures are fuzzy automatons. I have performed studies (using incredibly regulated and humane methods) using these creatures, and I have no qualms about it, so long as the use of animal models are absolutely critical to the study at hand. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved or vastly improved by such studies. Few people alive today (in America at least) can imagine what the state of human health would be without mice and rat studies.

And just to go one level further "down" the evolutionary ladder, consider fish.

Fish are NOT "sea kittens." We understand at least at a basic level what overall types of brain structures and neural pathways are required for higher cognition. Fish do not have these structures. They are insanely complex, from a genetic standpoint. They are beautiful. They are unimaginably important to the ecosystems of the earth. But they are still slimy scaly robotic automatons incapable of "suffering" in any human sense.

And invertebrates? Well, they're clearly organic machines. Would any of you really argue otherwise?

However, with all of the above being said, I often think about how barbaric people were only a generation ago (or sometimes less), and I wonder which of my beliefs will be considered equally barbaric by the next generation. As Richard Dawkins mused in "The God Delusion," perhaps animal rights is the issue upon which our generation will be judged to have sinned. Perhaps our ancestors will cringe at our actions (while praising the 500 year lifespans our research has given them - kidding).

What do you think? Take these polls and leave your comments below.

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Is my soul supposed to burn like this?

I’ve had several people recently ask me about the reason for the name of this website and domain.

Let me first state that, no, I do not believe in any form of incorporeal, spiritual, immortal, or otherwise supernatural “soul.” There are many reasons that I disbelieve in a soul, but you can find a sufficient, if simple and unsophisticated, explanation of my own reasoning in this previous post.

Before I explain exactly why I call this site “biochemicalsoul,” I’d like to quote one of my favorite lines concerning the soul. These words come from Lisa Simpson – yes, that’s the yellow, animated, fictitious Lisa Simpson of Matt Groening’s creation:

“Whether or not the soul is physically real…it’s the symbol of everything fine inside us.” - Lisa Simpson

I think that quote perfectly summarizes my own usage of the word soul in my blog title. Originally, I had a website at “mychemicalsoul.com.” It was read by about five people – that’s five people that read it once, not five regular visitors. In it, I basically had compiled everything that I have produced. All my writings and rantings (most hilariously stupid and awkward – everything you can still find here pre-2008, which isn’t a far cry from what I still have going on here), all my art – ranging from sketches from junior high, to clay sculptures and wood carvings, watercolor paintings, and digital artwork and animation, and my photography. After a short while I decided “mychemicalsoul” was exceedingly lame, so I came up with the moderately less lame “biochemicalsoul.”

In essence, it was everything from my head that could be put in digital interwebbed ((yes it is a word - look it up)), ((oh, you did look it up and couldn't find it? That's what you get for relying on the internets)) form. Being the science/biology dork that I am, I wanted something pithy that embodied the above Lisa Simpson version of the soul and my own understanding of consciousness – namely that from a reductionist perspective, everything about who we are breaks down to complex synaptic networks and, ultimately, biochemistry.

Yeah yeah, I know – really it can be reduced to lower levels ending in quantum physics. But I couldn’t call it “neurobiochemisynapticquantumsoul.com.”

So my thoughts, interests, art, photography, and everything else in this site is about as good of a public display of my “soul” that I can put forth.

Hence: biochemicalsoul.com.

Note: I'm still migrating my art and photography, but some of it is available on the "art" tab.

Footnotes:

I hear this argument all the time, in multiple variations - claiming that because we defend evolution passionately, that means that evolution is "dogmatic" or "religious."

This is specious logic at best. I originally responded to his post in his own comment section, and I reproduce my thoughts here:

1) Just because someone is vociferous and passionate with any sort of claim, defense, proclamation, or simple statement, that does not have any bearing on its “religiosity”. Calling a passionate response “religious zeal” is simply an attempt to obfuscate the language and warp the debate.

2) Equating the passionate nature of a subject’s defense with anything concerning the nature of that subject is simple fallacious logic (i.e. what the hell does passion of a response have to do with whether or not it is doctrine?)

I will agree with the philosophical premise that ALL scientific knowledge is predicated on the prime assumption that sense relates to reality. Thankfully, simple pragmatism allows us to build science from the fact that it seems to work.

However, neither science nor evolution can be considered “doctrine” for the simple inherent acknowedgement within the scientific epistomology that it will always be possible that the prime assumption might be false. This is why science “fact” isn’t based on provability, but by falsifiability. Even the falsification of any scientific hypothesis is always considered inherently tentative. You cannot call something doctrine if that doctrine implicitly acknowledges its own fallibility.

(note: obviously in this argument, I am only referring to the common usage of doctrine meaning “dogmatic system of beliefs” as opposed to the more innocuous “codified system of teachings”. Of course evolution is a codified system of teachings. But it is a system that inherently acknowledges its own fallibility and tenuous nature.)

(Update: he has deleted my comments multiple times - maybe the word "hell" offended him? Or perhaps he couldn't argue?

Update 2: now they are online - apparently he doesn't like people to use pseudonyms. I guess I could have made up a name, but oh well - My name is easy enough to find.)

High-energy squirrels about to release the "Darwin Particle"

Thanks to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for finding this one.  I post it here for the simple fact that this is side-splittingly hilarious! Go get your giggles on.

Excerpt:

Malwin dismissed critics who claimed that smashing animals together at high speeds was cruel to the animals. He said, "The animals won't be feeling anything. The collision will vaporize the squirrels in a fraction of a second.  Their brains won't be able to transmit pain at those speeds, so it'll be painless for them."

Scientists currently rely on computer simulations to smash biological units, but simulations can only do so much, and without the visceral enjoyment of seeing two squirrels collide at thousands of miles an hour.

Graciously included in this latest edition is my own previous post, Hope in the Black Void of the Unknowable, in which I muse on whether we really want every human on earth to see the Universe and ourselves as science sees us, namely "no more than blips of energy in an inconsequential cosmic blink."

Check it out, and if you have your own musings on issues relating to an absence of God, go to Carnival of the Godless and find out which blog is hosting the latest edition and submit your stuff to them.

Recently, I wrote an essay for This I Believe, an NPR radio series that asks Americans to answer this simple question. My essay has not yet been reviewed; however I doubt my chances of getting selected on the radio program. It is a bit too impersonal, too “what I don’t believe,” and not nearly as eloquent as many of the best essays (for the absolute best – see below mine). My essay is actually a shorter and reworked version of another essay I wrote on the same subject.

Note: If you find that you believe in something strongly and have a story to tell around that belief, I highly recommend you submit your own essay to NPR This I Believe.

This I Believe: Hope in the Black Void of the Unknowable

As a scientist studying the development of the brain and as a student of all scientific knowledge, I find it highly probable that all life and human experience is devoid of inherent meaning or purpose. The Universe seems nothing more than an enormous cosmic accident – an accident that will be corrected in due course as the Universe and its inhabitants are eventually destroyed in an equally pointless cataclysm. At least this is the view of my Universe as seen through the eyes of empiricism, the only eyes through which I know how to look. My morals, my accomplishments, my feelings and thoughts, and my connections to others and to the world in which I live are apparently no more than blips of energy in an inconsequential cosmic blink. However, underlying all of my knowledge and all of science I hold one major faith, one prime assumption. This is the assumption that my senses and experiences are relating real information about reality. That I am not merely in “The Matrix.” There is simply no philosophical workaround to this argument – it is impossible for me to absolutely know anything.

Thus, I cannot conclude anything definitively about my ultimate creator. I cannot absolutely believe in anything. I can only think from within the pragmatic view of science – that my senses work and my experiences along with the collected experiences of my brethren explain my reality better than any other means of purported knowledge. I can only decide to educate my future children about where we as a species come from, though I cannot guess where we may be going. I must make them understand that our science, our knowledge, is the closest thing to an explanation of our Universe we will likely ever have. However, just as importantly, I must admit where this knowledge can never reach, and allow that place to be inhabited with hope – a hope that maybe, just maybe, in that dark void of unknowability lies a meaning to my existence, a meaning I can never know or comprehend.

I must make them understand that although the fables passed down from our ancestors are no longer useful as a defining belief, the true possibilities of our meaning and our worth may be infinitely larger than I ever imagined. I believe that if we take into consideration the grandness of nature, the mind-boggling array of galaxies in our Universe, and the insanely complex biology and chemistry within ourselves, the unknowable creation of our Universe will seem only that much bigger and infinitely more awe-inspiring. I have seen but a glimpse of this awe in the intricate networks of neurons speaking to each other in unintelligible chemical languages, and I can almost fathom an entity setting it all in motion with a mere equation.

Almost.

As the philosopher Karl Popper once said, “Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” I believe that it is in this infinite ignorance where my only hope for greater cosmic meaning may lie.

The Best "This I Believe" Essay Ever:
NPR This I Believe: I Am Evolution
by Holly Dunsworth, a physical anthropologist at Penn State.

I believe evolution. It's easy. It's my life. I'm a paleoanthropologist. I study fossils of humans, apes and monkeys, and I teach college students about their place in nature.

Of course I believe evolution.

But that is different from believing in evolution.

To believe in something takes faith, trust, effort, strength. I need none of these things to believe evolution. It just is. My health is better because of medical research based on evolution. My genetic code is practically the same as a chimpanzee's. My bipedal feet walk on an earth full of fossil missing links. And when my feet tire, those fossils fuel my car.

To believe in something also implies hope. Hope of happiness, reward, forgiveness, eternal life. There is no hope wrapped up in my belief. Unless you count the hope that one day I'll discover the most beautifully complete fossil human skeleton ever found, with a label attached saying exactly what species it belonged to, what food it ate, how much it hunted, if it could speak, if it could laugh, if it could love and if it could throw a curveball. But this fantasy is not why I believe evolution — as if evolution is something I hope comes true.

After all the backyard bone collecting I did as a child, I managed to carve out a career where I get to ask the ultimate question on a daily basis: "Where did I come from and how?"

If our beliefs are important enough, we live our lives in service to them. That's how I feel about evolution. My role as a female Homo sapiens is to return each summer to Kenya, dig up fossils, and piece together our evolutionary history. Scanning the ground for weeks, hoping to find a single molar, or gouging out the side of a hill, one bucket of dirt at a time, I'm always in search of answers to questions shared by the whole human species. The experience deepens my understanding not just about what drives my life, but all our lives, where we came from. And the deeper I go, the more I understand that everything is connected. A bullfrog to a gorilla, a hummingbird to me, to you.

My belief is not immutable. It is constantly evolving with accumulating evidence, new knowledge and breakthrough discoveries. For example, within my lifetime, our history has expanded from being rooted 3 million years ago with the famous Lucy skeleton, to actually beginning over 6 million years ago with a cranium from Chad. The metamorphic nature of my belief is not at all like a traditional religious one; it's more like seeing is believing.

So I believe evolution.

I feel it. I breathe it. I listen to evolution, I observe it and I do evolution. I write, study, analyze, scrutinize and collect evolution. I am evolution.

Amazing, no? If you enjoyed this beautiful and poignant essay, I highly recommend you read the interview with Holly Dunsworth on the excellent Forms Most Beautiful blog (one of my favorite blogs on the internets).

However, there now exists within the realms of neuroscience, a plenitude of evidence that such a soul does not – cannot – exist (Note: this does not exclude other definitions of soul).

Claim 1: My soul contains the essence of my core personality.

Evidence against it: This one is quite simple. All we have to do to see that this is unlikely is look at brain injury patients. It is irrefutable fact that brain injury can lead to profound changes in personality. Therefore, if one’s personality can be fundamentally changed by brain injury, then one must argue that if a soul exists and contains your personality, then it is also damaged by brain injury. The corollary to this is that if your brain is destroyed, then the soul that contains your personality is also destroyed.

Claim 2: When I die, my soul retains my memories.

Evidence against it: Similarly, many many things can kill the cells (and their network of synaptic connections) that store your memories. Alcohol and substance abuse, brain trauma, etc. Furthermore, there are mountains of evidence that your memories are not static, that they can be changed by suggestion, or changed by time. We have all experienced change of our own memories over time, whether by repetition of embellished stories or simply by memory loss. Our memories lie solely in the physical makeup of the cells in which they are stored, much like digital data on a hard drive (though our own memory storage is much more complex and still being deciphered). Essentially the same argument as above indicates that if a soul exists, it cannot contain our memories, or alternatively, when memories are lost, so too are those parts of the soul.

More Evidence: Everything about what makes “you” you comes from an entire life’s worth of experiences – smells, laughs, people, conversations, traumatic events, feelings, etc. These are all incorporated into your memories, and they help determine your personality. You are not born exactly as you exist today. Your neural pathways, your memories, your reactions, and your emotions are all developed over time, and encoded into the unimaginably complex connections within the 100 thousand million neurons in your brain. Injury can change or erase all of this. Thus, again, if your personality and memory changes, so must the thing which holds them. If your memories and personality die, then so does that which defines them.

All of this does not and cannot rule out the possibility of the existence of some other definition of the soul. But one must wonder: if the soul does not contain my memories, personality or any other characteristics that define my “self”, then in what capacity can I say that any immortal soul is really “me”? Even if your soul lives forever, “you” as you define yourself will be as nonexistent as the brain structures that held “you.”

If brain injury could only delete parts of your personality or delete memories instead of actually changing them, then one might argue that the brain has merely lost access to those parts of the soul – that those parts of “you” are still in there. Many people make this argument - that the soul can only work through the biological machinery that exists, but it still exists independently. But the fact that both personality and memories can be changed suggests that the soul either does not exist, or that it the soul is changed in the same way that the personality or memories are. And if the soul itself is changed, that implies that it is changed similarly by complete destruction of the brain.

It seems that modern neuroscience suggests that any “soul” we contain has no real meaning in regards to containing the “self” as we define it. Thus, any immortal soul we may contain is about as significant as the immortal matter of which we consist. Sure, my energy and atoms might remain for all eternity, but is that “me?”

No.

Yet this is the Universe that we face if we look at it only through the lenses of logic and reason. How much blame can we really place on our Earthly brothers and sisters for rejecting such a worldview? No doubt, within certain psyches such a view might inevitably lead to depression, apathy, and a callousness toward humankind and existence. Do we as scientists wish for every other person on this planet to truly see and understand our world through sensory perception and evidential experience alone?

The media is currently awash with the pontifications of atheist personalities such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, both of which claim that faith and religion are the downfall of humanity and the yoke holding us back from true existential accomplishment. According to them, if only people could truly understand the awe and wonder brought forth by an intimate inspection of existence, from the microscopic to the astronomical – if only they could see that faith is unnecessary – the world would reach a new height of enlightenment and elevated existence. I believe their motives are noble, and I find the essence of their arguments to be true – that is until they cross the line of reason into their own forms of faith. For both of these now famous authors have fallen into the pitfalls of their own arrogance. Through one word alone they have both done a disservice to the endeavors of science, while providing fodder for those who wish to remain blind to the forces of nature. The word is “atheism.”

The error is a small one, yet profoundly significant in its effects. Both men claim to be atheists. Their position is that there is no God. There is no evidence for a God and even entertaining the notion of one is foolishness. Perhaps it is. However, neither of them seem to grasp, or at least to express their understanding, that underlying all knowledge and all science is one major faith, one assumption. This is the assumption that our senses and experiences are relating real information about reality. That we are not merely in “The Matrix.” There is simply no philosophical workaround to this argument – it is impossible to absolutely know anything. Thus, even if science can tell us exactly how the Big Bang began, we can never know what if anything came before that moment or whether it was orchestrated by some deistic entity. So by definition, any scientist who claims to shape all of his or her worldviews around empiricism and logic, must declare themselves agnostic: the view that the existence of a God is unknown or unknowable. Or they should at least qualify themselves as “agnostic atheists”, which takes a more probabilistic view claiming that there is no evidence for or against a God, but that the Universe as we know it seems to suggest that there is not one.

I agree with the supposition that all orthodox religions and dogma as we know them are farce. The genesis stories throughout the religious world have been disproved as far as it is possible to do so, given the above inherent unknowability of all knowledge and the limitations of our ability to measure history. Evolution is not even a debate within the world of science. Every month it seems a new “transition fossil” is found to plug another hole in the fossil record. A steady stream of hominid fossils have traced our own evolution back about seven million years, and 85 million years for all primates. The only debates of this are micro-debates about which species begat which. As for the fossil record, one must understand that by its very nature, every time we fill one hole, two more arise on either side of it. Our understanding of molecular biology and genetics has only cemented our theories of evolution and natural selection. Natural evolution is irrefutable, insofar as the above prime assumption is acknowledged. The world is not a paltry six thousand years old. The Earth and the solar system we inhabit all formed about four and a half billion years ago, over nine billion year after the formation of the Universe itself as we know it. Thus, I agree with the self-branded atheists that it is foolishness to believe that a single man and a woman talked to a demonic snake six thousand years ago and bred to yield our current population. This story, along with all other religious dogmas, appear to be nothing more than fables – parables that helped us once cope with and explain our own existence.

But that brings us back to the original question: do we really want all of humanity to live as if our existence is a meaningless accident? It is my view that we in the science community should embrace the idea, from a philosophical standpoint, that there very well may be an unknowable entity – Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” - that crafted the laws of physics as we know them, that set the ball in motion. We can never even attempt to discover what underlies the laws of our system, for we are within the system, a part of the system, are the system. I personally have no problem admitting that this existence is likely as ethereal and meaningless as a flake of dead skin. However I am not so sure that I have faith that the rest of humanity could cope with such a prospect. Perhaps this is arrogance on my part. The evidence, though, seems to support my lack of faith in human mental well-being: how many of the worlds problems and crimes are caused by individuals feeling lost and unimportant in this world?

Thus, I suggest that we push our science, which is everyone’s science, as strongly as we can. We must educate our children about where we as a species come from. We must make them understand that we use science because it is the only proven method of obtaining anything close to actual knowledge about our Universe and existence. However, just as importantly, we must admit where our knowledge cannot reach, and allow that place to be inhabited with hope – a hope that maybe, just maybe, in that dark void of unknowability lies a meaning to our existence, a meaning we can never know or understand. We must make them understand that although the fables passed down from our ancestors are untrue and no longer useful as a defining belief, the true possibilities of our meaning and our worth may be infinitely larger than they ever imagined. I believe that if we take into consideration the grandness of nature, the mind-boggling array of galaxies in our Universe, and the insanely complex biology and chemistry within ourselves, the unknowable creation of our Universe will seem only that much bigger and infinitely more awe-inspiring. As the philosopher Karl Popper once said, “Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” It is in this infinite ignorance where our only hope for greater meaning may lie.

What is determinism, cosmically speaking? Do we even care? Determinism is embodied by a famous quotation which is often referred to as "LaPlace's Demon:"

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."

-Marquis Pierre Simon de LaPlace

Assuming that all reality is determined by non-random natural laws (which I admit is a very unsolid assumption but for this argument I'm using it), regardless of whether we as beings know or understand the laws, then that means every action and reaction of every particle in the universe must happen in a predetermined fashion. These actions are determined by the initial conditions laid out by whatever created the matter. If particle X is heading at A velocity in B direction, it must collide with particle Y and bounce in BLAH direction, etc. All these near infinite interactions add up to create the illusion of choice, when in fact, the actions of every single particle and subatomic particle involved in that last thought of yours about my sanity were predetermined by the actions immediately before them, which were themselves determined by the previous actions....etc....to creation or infinity.

Now a weird question arises: did I choose to write this line? It sure feels like it to me. I can remember actually thinking "hey, this sentence doesn't strike me as entirely uninteresting." In fact I must argue for free will's sake that I indeed did choose to
write it. However, with the above argument's assumptions of reality, I must also argue that I was predetermined by the laws of physics to think "I should write this".

Now we must ask: is there really a difference between us making a choice based on free will and the laws of physics pre-determining a set of thoughts and reasoning that leads to a choice. And the answer is no (at least from our perspective). Because in both instances, that choice and the thoughts that caused it are the same and our perception of the event remains the same.

Therefore, if the universe is predetermined, it doesn't really matter. As far as we are concerned we have choices. I can decide to eat peanut butter and jelly or kalamari for lunch. It just so happens that the thoughts that lead to each choice were predetermined by the previous events, which were determined by the initial conditions of creation (unless time is infinite, in which case there are no initial conditions and the philosophy falls into a soggy heap wrapped around a lemon).

2/08/2001

Note: this letter was written to me in response to the article above

Dear Mr. Brown,

This letter is in reference to your article on determinism. As a mathematician working in chaos theory, I feel the idea of a completely deterministic world without any random variables is very unbecoming of someone pretending to be a scientist, not to mention that determinism doesn't sit well with my particular ideological paradigm of reality. Haven't you ever heard of the butterfly effect (a butterfly flapping in Brazil affects the weather in New York)? There are literally trillions of tiny random fluctuations of the variables affecting weather, and the particular outcome of the weather is completely unpredictable because of these factors. If you place a drop of water at the top of your wrist 100 times in a row, it will travel a slightly different path each time. That is chaos theory. You are not at all a smart person, and I refuse to believe that I am pre-determined to refuse to believe that I am pre-determined to refuse to believe.....

I hate you.

Yours truly,

Brigadier Gen. Arthur C. Puty (Mrs.)

Daniel responds:

Dear Mr. Puty (Mrs.),
Each one of those "random" variables affecting the weather interact in very defined ways. From the perspective of an outside observer the weather may seem random, but from the perspective of each particle involved every action and reaction is caused by a specific set of previous conditions, and is thus not at all random from that perspective. If we knew every single factor involved in this planets meteorological system, we would, in fact, be able to predict the weather. Of course there are way more factors involved than we will ever have the computing power to calculate. And as for your drop of water example, each time you drop a drop of water, the tiny variables affecting the water's path changes. The tiny hairs are moved and the angle of the hand is changed ever so slightly. But, again everything that occurs with each drop, occurs because of the precise conditions of the environment beforehand. Thus chaos theory sucks and is simply an attempt to place "randomness" on events that have way too many interacting factors for your feeble little mathematical mind to calculate.