Why War is Obsolete for America

One of the bad wraps that liberals get is that they're afraid of going to war- that they're basically a bunch of wimps. Aside from the whole deferment hypocrisy, I'm not saying that conservatives are wrong necessarily. But I believe that war is simply no longer necessary, given the modern state of technology and communications.

There are 3 main purposes for war- to fight over land, to retaliate, and for nation building. As far as America is concerned, there is no conceivable necessity to defend it's borders. We are a bi-coastal nation and there is little chance of ever having to fight for our land with Mexico or Canada. Hawaii and Alaska are entrenched, and the rest of our territories can be filed under 'miscellaneous' and would be readily defendable if necessary (what is the Aleutian islands anyway?).

It is also highly unlikely that America will ever attempt to conquer land again. There's very little reason to do so and the one thing that we Americans love, but take for granted, is the safety and peace under which we live. I seriously doubt that so long as we are a democracy, that people will support disturbing our little party in the name of a few more acres of land.

So, we can knock the first reason for war off the table.

Retaliation is, perhaps, a necessary evil, although one I have trouble endorsing. Why do you have to retaliate? Ghandi, Jesus and I are in the same camp on this one. Do we need to be a tough guy? Do we need to "teach them a lesson?" There may be some argument for future deterrence, and that's reasonable, but I have come to doubt the sincerity of that justification, and believe retaliation is mostly for revenge. Be that as it may, retaliation and war are two different things. Was it necessary to go to war with Afghanistan in order to retaliate against them for 9/11? No, it was not. Why? Because we have precision missiles. We have unarmed drones. We can kill anyone we want, any time, in any city or populated location. Yes, we still have trouble killing from the sky in mountainous areas, but I'm sure we're working on that too.

My point is, if you want to kill Mullah Omar, go ahead and kill him. I'd support that. But there's no need to send our young people into a quagmire over it. You just punch in the coordinates and fire. Or, if you're really certain you want to retaliate, send a MOAB (mother of all bombs, look it up). No dead American soldiers, message sent.

I sometimes think presidents and hillbillies romanticize war, as if there's something noble about going into a foreign country and dying. You know how in some toll booths, there's a basket collecting your money, and in others, there's a person? Well, that's kind of how I view retaliatory war. We don't need to sacrifice the lives of our young people to retaliate, we can just use the basket.

Finally, we come to nation building. Nation building is the futile attempt to prop up nations in hopes of someday harvesting their natural resources.. er.. freeing their people. Has it ever worked? Do we consider Israel a success? How much does that cost us every year? (answer: $2.5B) How about Iraq? Was Iraq really necessary? I mean, we could have just dropped the MOAB or sent a few precision missiles into Sadaam Hussein's castle.

Remember the Stealth bomber? Remember how stealth it was? Why did we come into Iraq with our huge warships, cannons a blazin', announcing our presence? A better idea would have been to fire up the old stealth bomber and drop a few precision bombs. Far fewer deaths, and in the end, Sadaam is dead. With my approach, we'd have total chaos, a country on the brink of collapse, a dead Sadaam Hussein, and no American lives lost. Under the current plan , we have total chaos, a country on the brink of collapse, a dead Sadaam Hussein, and 30,000 casualties. My idea is better- no casualties. But the prerequisite is that we're honest about it. Furthermore, the only way nation building ever works is if the citizens build the nation and benefactor nations support them (remember how the French supported us during the Revolution?), and we can certainly accomplish that goal without war, or at least without American war. We have wire transfers and Skype now.

The fact is, we no longer need to conduct full military assaults anywhere, ever. And we certainly don't need to do it with human beings. Doing so is like using an axe for surgery when we now have the technology for laparascopic surgery.

Am I a big wussy liberal for suggesting we use the laparoscope? Am I showing disrespect for the axe and all the great lumberjacks who built this country? War is obsolete, just like newspapers and rabbit tests. We need to let it go and use our technology for precision killing. That's what it's there for. Now watch this drive.

Why I think human evolution is dead

I was listening to the Scientific American podcast a few weeks ago and I heard the magazine's editor in chief, John Rennie, introduce a modern example of human evolution. He claimed that a few centuries ago, the introduction of cow's milk into the human diet resulted in humans evolving an ability to breakdown milk as adults where no such ability existed in adults prior to its introduction en masse.

This struck me as impossible and I believe that Rennie fell into the trap of what I call integral fallacy- the fallacy of treating a bunch of discrete events as a giant blob of one continuous phenomenon (akin to taking the integral of a discrete function). It means, essentially, that you're ignoring the specific, discrete events that result in a phenomenon, and then simply use the phenomenon as if it's a big continuous thing.

The passage of DNA from parent to offspring requires two and only two things- the offspring has to reach sexual maturity, and the offspring has to successfully mate. A trait is advantageous if and only if it increases the likelihood of one of these two things with respect to the competition. In other words, for a species to evolve, many individuals with inferior traits must die (and be taken out of the gene pool) before reaching sexual maturity or procreating. Remember, evolution is survival of the fittest, and survival implies that some survive and others die.

Specifically, the introduction of milk as a food source would result in a change in the ability for adults to digest milk if those who could digest milk as adults were more likely to survive until sexual maturity, and once there, more likely to copulate. But, remember, it must also work in the opposite direction - if you can't digest lactose as an adult, you must be less likely to make it to sexual maturity and less likely to mate, again, with respect to your competition. From a simple thought experiment perspective, it seems that the ability or inability to digest milk as an adult neither gives an advantage nor disadvantage for or against surviving to sexual maturity, nor does it give an advantage for copulation and therefore, reproduction. It seems, therefore, that we have both adult-non-lactose-digesters and adult-lactose-digesters freely passing on their lactose digestion trait to their offspring with the trait having no effect whatsoever on the gene pool.

Think about it. We walk erect and have highly developed brains because, and only because (take a minute to digest these two things- because and only because), those who walked hunched and had small brains died before copulating and those who walked erect and had bigger brains had a higher chance of surviving to sexual maturity and reproducing. Otherwise, we'd have a whole range of humans, walkers and non-walkers.

How does this relate to milk? Well, how on Earth could having the gene that allows adults to produce lactase, the enzyme that breaks down lactose, increase your likelihood of reaching adulthood or enhance your odds of copulating? It does neither, and therefore falls into the integration fallacy. There is no integral "evolutionary pressure" without the discrete evolutionary pressure, and there is no discrete evolutionary advantage to an adult (post-sexual maturity) having the ability to digest milk. Why? Because they're already sexually mature adults when the trait kicks in.

Now, it could be argued that having milk as a protein source enhances the vitality and therefore, sexual attractiveness of adults, but that's a stretch. And besides, Rennie implies that the mere presence of a plentiful protein source is all the evolutionary pressure necessary for humans to evolve. Absent any impact on the likelihood of gene passage (and therefore trait passage), it is, to put it simply, inconsequential to human evolution. As a point of clarification, I am not claiming that humans have not evolved the ability to digest lactose, only that it's introduction as a food source did not cause it.

To take this argument to a more generic and interesting level, think about these two events- sexual maturity and copulation - and how things have changed from the dawn of civilization to now. Today, in modern society, at least in the West, virtually no child fails to make it to sexual maturity (a tragic badge of shame that we still wear is that we have failed to spread this good fortune to the rest of the world). Further, virtually no human being has a highly unlikely chance to reproduce. Of course, we have social forces and religious factors, etc., but from a strictly genetic perspective, with reproductive clinics, online dating sites, more and more protective and egalitarian social norms, etc., etc., there is no gene that favors or disfavors reproduction. Of course this is a bit of an exaggeration, but between the dawn of civilization and today, the odds have tilted dramatically toward universal gene passage to offspring (again, in the West).

Therefore, I submit that human evolution is dead or severely retarded because we have evolved socially to the point where we all, communally, believe we should do whatever we can to make sure a) that everyone survives and b) that everyone has the opportunity to reproduce. Our social evolution, therefore, has ended (or severely retarded) our genetic evolution.

The irony is that the traits that evolved to make us social beings created our desire to live communally and care for each other communally. This has fostered our shared value of doing everything we can to make sure that very few children die and that any adult who wants to reproduce can. We even pay for these things communally with shared health care costs and shared education and daycare costs. The net effect is that our compassion has effectively arrested our evolution.