Ten Global Trends

You can't fix what is wrong in the world if you don't know what's actually happening. In this book, straightforward charts and graphs, combined with succinct explanations, will provide you with easily understandable access to the facts that busy people need to know about how the world is really faring.

Polls show that most smart people tend to believe that the state of the world is getting worse rather than better. Consider a 2016 survey by the global public opinion company YouGov that asked folks in 17 countries, "All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?” Fifty-eight percent of respondents thought that the world is getting worse, and 30 percent said that it is doing neither. Only 11 percent thought that things are getting better. In the United States, 65 percent of Americans thought that the world is getting worse, and 23 percent said neither. Only 6 percent of Americans responded that the world is getting better.

This dark view of the prospects for humanity and the natural world is, in large part, badly mistaken. We demonstrate it in these pages using uncontroversial data taken from official and scientific sources.

Of course, some global trends are negative. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker says: "It's essential to realize that progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone, everywhere, all the time. That would be a miracle, that wouldn't progress." For example, man made climate change arising largely from increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels could become a significant problem for humanity during this century. The spread of plastic marine debris is a big and growing concern. Many wildlife populations are declining, and tropical forest area continues shrinking. In addition, far too many people are still malnourished and dying in civil and sectarian conflicts around the globe. And, of course, the world is afflicted by the current coronavirus pandemic.

However, many of the global trends we describe are already helping redress such problems. For example, the falling price of renewable energy sources incentivize the switch away from fossil fuels. Moreover, increasingly abundant agriculture is globally reducing the percentage of people who are hungry while simultaneously freeing up land so that forests are now expanding in much of the world. And unprecedentedly rapid research has significantly advanced testing, tracking, and treatment technologies to ameliorate the coronavirus contagion.

PSYCHOLOGICAL GLITCHES MISLEAD YOU

So why do so many smart people wrongly believe that all things considered, the world is getting worse?

Way back in 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo, observed, "There is a basic asymmetry in life between the positive, which is difficult and takes time, and the negative, which is much easier and takes less time-compare the amount of time needed to bring up and socialize an adult person and the amount of time need ed to kill him in an accident, the amount of time needed to build a house and to destroy it in a fire, to make an airplane and to crash it, and so on." News is bad news; steady progress is not news.

Smart people especially seek to be well informed and so tend to be voracious consumers of news. Since journalism focuses on dramatic things and events that go wrong, the nature of news thus tends to mislead readers and viewers into thinking that the world is in worse shape than it really is. This mental shortcut causes many of us to confuse what comes easily to mind with what is true; it was first identified in 1973 by behavioral scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman as the "availability bias." Another reason for the ubiquity of mistaken gloom derives from a quirk of our evolutionary psychology. A Stone Age man hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it's the wind and the rustling turns out to be a lion, then he's not an ancestor. We are the descendants of the worried folks who tended to assume that all rustles in the grass were dangerous predators and not the wind. Because of this instinctive negativity bias, most of us attend far more to bad rather than to good news. The upshot is that we are again often misled into thinking that the world is worse than it is.

"Judgment creep" is yet another explanation for the prevalence of wrong-headed pessimism. We are misled about the state of the world because we have a tendency to continually raise our threshold for success as we make progress, argue Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues. "When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn't actually gotten better at all," explains Gilbert. "Progress, it seems, tends to mask itself." Social, economic, and environmental problems are being judged intractable because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them. More than 150 years ago, political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville noted a similar phenomenon as societies progress, one that has since been called the Tocqueville effect.

What, though, accounts for progress?

Some smart folk who acknowledge that considerable social, economic, and environmental progress has been made still worry that progress will not necessarily continue.

"Human beings still have the capacity to mess it all up. And it may be that our capacity to mess it up is growing," asserted Cambridge University political scientist David Runciman in a July 2017 Guardian article. He added: "For people to feel deeply uneasy about the world we inhabit now, despite all these indicators pointing up, seems to me reasonable, given the relative instability of the evidence of this progress, and the [unpredictability] that overhangs it. Everything really is pretty fragile."

Runciman is not alone. The worry that civilization is just about to go over the edge of a precipice has a long history. After all, many earlier civilizations and regimes have collapsed, including the Babylonian, Roman, Tang, and Mayan Empires, and more recently the Ottoman and Soviet Empires.

In their 2012 book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson persuasively outline reasons for the exponential improvement in human well-being that started about two centuries ago.

They begin by arguing that since the Neolithic agricultural revolution, most societies have been organized around "extractive" institutions-political and economic systems that funnel resources from the masses to the elites.

In the 18th century, some countries including Britain and many of its colonies-shifted from extractive to inclusive institutions. "Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few," they write. "Inclusive economic institutions are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions," which "distribute political power widely in a pluralistic manner and are able to achieve some amount of political centralization so as to establish law and order, the foundations of secure property rights, and an inclusive market economy." Inclusive institutions are similar to one another in their respect for individual liberty. They include democratic politics, strong private property rights, the rule of law, enforcement of contracts, freedom of movement, and a free press. Inclusive institutions are the basis of the technological and entrepreneurial innovations that produced a historically unprecedented rise in living standards in those countries that embraced them, including the United States, Japan, and Australia as well as the countries in Western Europe. They are qualitatively different from the extractive institutions that preceded them.

The spread of inclusive institutions to more and more countries was uneven and occasionally reversed. Those advances and in the University of Illinois at Chicago economist Deirdre Mc Closkey's view, the key role played by major ideological shifts resulted in what McCloskey calls the "great enrichment," which boosted average incomes thirtyfold to a hundredfold in those countries where they have taken hold.

The examples of societal disintegration cited earlier, whether Roman, Tang, or Soviet, occurred in extractive regimes. Despite crises such as the Great Depression, there are no examples so far of countries with long-established inclusive political and economic institutions suffering similar collapses.

In addition, confrontations between extractive and inclusive regimes, such as World War II and the Cold War, have generally been won by the latter. That suggests that liberal free-market democracies are resilient in ways that enable them to forestall or rise above the kinds of shocks that destroy brittle extractive regimes.

If inclusive liberal institutions can continue to be strengthened and further spread across the globe, the auspicious trends documented in this book will extend their advance, and those that are currently negative will turn positive. By acting through inclusive institutions to increase knowledge and pursue technological progress, past generations met their needs and hugely increased the ability of our generation to meet our needs. We should do no less for our own future generations. That is what sustainable development looks like.

Mathematical Objects

 

What’s the nature of mathematical objects?

The question is made difficult by a centuries-old assumption of Western philosophy: “There are two kinds of things in the world. What isn’t physical is mental; what isn’t mental is physical.”

Mental is individual consciousness. It includes private thoughts—mathematical and philosophical, for example—before they’re communicated to the world and become social—and also perception, fear, desire, despair, hope, and so on.

Physical is taking up space—having weight or energy. It’s flesh and bones, sound waves, X-rays, galaxies.

Frege showed that mathematical objects are neither physical nor mental. He labeled them “abstract objects.” What did he tell us about abstract objects? Only this: They’re neither physical nor mental.

Are there other things besides numbers that aren’t mental or physical?

Yes! Sonatas. Prices. Eviction notices. Declarations of war.

Not mental or physical, but not abstract either!

The U.S. Supreme Court exists. It can condemn you to death!

Is the Court physical? If the Court building were blown up and the justices moved to the Pentagon, the Court would go on. Is it mental? If all nine justices expired in a suicide cult, they’d be replaced.

The Court would go on. The Court isn’t the stones of its building, nor is it anyone’s minds and bodies. Physical and mental embodiment are necessary to it, but they’re not it. It’s a social institution. Mental and physical categories are insufficient to understand it. It’s comprehensible only in the context of American society.

**

Mathematics consists of concepts. Not pencil or chalk marks, not physical triangles or physical sets, but concepts, which may be suggested or represented by physical objects.

**

In reviewing The Mathematical Experience, the mathematical expositor and journalist Martin Gardner made this objection: When two dinosaurs wandered to the water hole in the Jurassic era and met another pair of dinosaurs happily sloshing, there were four dinosaurs at the water hole, even though no human was present to think, “2 + 2 = 4.” This shows, says Gardner, that 2+ 2 really is 4 in reality, not just in some cultural consciousness. 2 + 2 = 4 is a law of nature, he says, independent of human thought.

To untangle this knot, we must see that “2” plays two linguistic roles. Sometimes it’s an adjective; sometimes it’s a noun.

In “two dinosaurs,” “two” is a collective adjective. “Two dinosaurs plus two dinosaurs equals four dinosaurs” is telling about dinosaurs. If I say “Two discrete, reasonably permanent, non-interacting objects collected with two others makes four such objects,” I’m telling part of what’s meant by discrete, reasonably permanent non-interacting objects. That is a statement in elementary physics.

John Stuart Mill pointed out that with regard to discrete, reasonably permanent non-interacting objects, experience tells us

2 + 2 = 4.

In contrast, “Two is prime but four is composite” is a statement about the pure numbers of elementary arithmetic. Now “two” and “four” are nouns, not adjectives. They stand for pure numbers, which are concepts and objects. They are conceptual objects, shared by everyone who knows elementary arithmetic, described by familiar axioms and theorems.

The collective adjectives or “counting numbers” are finite. There’s a limit to how high anyone will ever count. Yet there isn’t any last counting number. If you counted up to, say, a billion, then you could count to a billion and one. In pure arithmetic, these two properties—finiteness, and not having a last—are contradictory. This shows that the counting numbers aren’t the pure numbers.

Consider the pure number 10^(1010). We easily ascertain some of its properties, such as: “The only prime factors of 10^(1010) are 2 and 5.” But we can’t count that high. In that sense, there’s no counting number equal to 10^(1010).

Körner made the same distinction, using uppercase for Counting Numbers (adjectives) and lowercase for “pure” natural numbers (nouns). Jacob Klein wrote that a related distinction was made by the Greeks, using their words “arithmos” and “logistiké.”

So “two” and “four” have double meanings: as Counting Numbers or as pure numbers. The formula
 

2 + 2 = 4
 

has a double meaning. It’s about counting—about how discrete, reasonably permanent, non-interacting objects behave. And it’s a theorem in pure arithmetic (Peano arithmetic if you like). This linguistic ambiguity blurs the difference between Counting Numbers and pure natural numbers. But it’s convenient. It’s comparable to the ambiguity of non-mathematical words, such as “art” or “America.”

The pure numbers rise out of the Counting Numbers. In a process related to Aristotle’s abstraction, they disconnect from “real” objects, to exist as shared concepts in the mind/brains of people who know elementary arithmetic. In that realm of shared concepts, 2 + 2 = 4 is a different fact, with a different meaning. And we can now show that it follows logically from other shared concepts, which we usually call axioms.

**

Once created and communicated, mathematical objects are there. They detach from their originator and become part of human culture. We learn of them as external objects, with known properties and unknown properties. Of the unknown properties, there are some we are able to discover.

**

Why do these objects, our own creations, so often become useful in describing nature? To answer this in detail is a major task for the history of mathematics, and for a psychology of mathematical cognition that may be coming to birth in Piaget and Vygotsky. To answer it in general, however, is easy. Mathematics is part of human culture and history, which are rooted in our biological nature and our physical and biological surroundings. Our mathematical ideas in general match our world for the same reason that our lungs match earth’s atmosphere.

**

Psychological and historical studies won’t make mathematical truth indubitable. But why expect mathematical truth to be indubitable? Correcting errors by confronting them with experience is the essence of science. What’s needed is explication of what mathematicians do—as part of general human culture, as well as in mathematical terms. The result will be a description of mathematics that mathematicians recognize—the kind of truth that’s obvious once said.  

Certain kinds of ideas (concepts, notions, conceptions, and so forth) have science-like quality. They have the rigidity, the reproducibility, of physical science. They yield reproducible results, independent of particular investigators. Such kinds of ideas are important enough to have a name. Study of the lawful, predictable parts of the physical world has a name: “physics.” 

Study of the lawful, predictable, parts of the social-conceptual world also has a name: “mathematics.” A world of ideas exists, created by human beings, existing in their shared consciousness. These ideas have objective properties, in the same sense that material objects have objective properties. The construction of proof and counterexample is the method of discovering the properties of these ideas. This branch of knowledge is called mathematics.

Hadislerle İslam Cilt 1: İlim

SORRY, DARWIN, BUT BACTERIA DON’T COMPETE TO SURVIVE

“Survival of the friendliest” outweighs “survival of the fittest” for groups of bacteria, according to new research.

The research reveals that bacteria would rather unite against external threats, such as antibiotics, rather than fight against each other. The discovery is a major step towards understanding complex bacteria interactions and the development of new treatment models for a wide range of human diseases and new green technologies.

For a number of years the researchers have studied how combinations of bacteria behave together when in a confined area. After investigating many thousands of combinations it has become clear that bacteria cooperate to survive and that these results contradict what Darwin said in his theories of evolution.

Futurity

1543

Two books published in 1543 marked a turning point, the beginning of the scientific revolution. In that year, the Flemish doctor Andreas Vesalius reported the results of his dissections of human cadavers, a practice that had been forbidden in earlier centuries. His findings contradicted fourteen centuries of received wisdom about human anatomy. In that same year, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus finally allowed publication of his radical theory that the Earth moved around the sun. He’d waited until he was near death (and died just as the book was being published) because he’d feared that the Catholic Church would be infuriated by his demotion of the world from the center of God’s creation. He was right to be scared. After Giordano Bruno proposed, among other heresies, that the universe was infinitely large with infinitely many worlds, he was tried by the Inquisition and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.

Life is Tough: An Extremeophile, The Water Bear

Homeostasis makes organisms capable of colonising a range of different environments. This would not be possible if their innards could reflect their immediate surroundings only. Turtles and snails carry their protective houses on their backs; living things have internal houses, maintained by homeostasis, and are obliged to maintain them within narrow limits. Those that can’t are dead. Seneca put it thus: ‘It would be some consolation for the feebleness of ourselves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, while the way to ruin is rapid.’ Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, made a similar point: it is possible to fail in many different domains, whereas the path to success is narrow. There are numerous ways, for example, for an archer to miss her mark, but only one way to hit it. A last-minute tremor, gust of wind, broken string, slightly twisted bow, inadequately feathered arrow or sudden cough: any of these can make the whole process go awry.

By the same token, there are many ways for a biological system to fail – and thus, to sicken and die – but very little tolerance when it comes to maintaining the demanding conditions necessary for life. Indeed, life can be defined as a concatenation of highly nonrandom, carefully circumscribed events that must all come together to succeed in keeping random, bad things (such as death) at bay. As someone first noted somewhere, there are many more ways to be dead than to be alive, which would suggest that living organisms are the poster children for fragility.

Then there are extremophiles. Extremophiles tell us that everything we think we know about the fragility of life is wrong. Life is indeed extraordinary, not to mention precious and deserving of reverence – but not in any sense miraculous.

The word extremophile didn’t exist until the 1970s. It entered wide circulation only after 1979 when the US Navy’s submersible Alvin revealed ecosystems prospering in deep-ocean hydrothermal vents. The Alvinscientists discovered organisms living in superheated water and largely metabolising hydrogen sulphide, which until then had been thought toxic and incompatible with life. Interest in extremophiles has burgeoned in proportion as scientists have come to appreciate their abundance, as well as their novel physiology. There is a journal devoted to extremophiles, focusing on creatures that survive – even, thrive – in environments that are extremely hot, cold, highly acidic or alkaline, and so forth, circumstances that would be lethal for most living things.

Not surprisingly, extremophiles tend to be relatively simple creatures, notably invertebrates and especially bacteria and archaea, although there is no bright line distinguishing, say, arctic hares, which thrive in very cold habitats, from their rabbit relatives whose habitats are more temperate. But neither compares with those life forms whose existence excites the admiration and wonder of biologists. The concept itself is nonetheless anthropocentric, since denizens of, say, blisteringly hot hydrothermal vents would perish in our ‘moderate’ temperatures and pressures, which for them would doubtless be extreme.

In 2013, microbiologists found abundant bacteria in a cold, dark lake (of more traditional water), half a mile under the Antarctic ice. A month later, researchers encountered microbes occupying the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth. There are also ‘infra-terrestrials’ that live, incredibly, inside rocks in the deep ocean, nearly 2,000 feet below the sea floor, which itself is 8,500 feet down, and thus not just utterly dark and devastatingly cold, but subject to immense pressure. (This, too, was reported early in 2013, which qualifies it as an annus mirabilis for the discovery of extremophiles.)

The continuing revelation of extremophile lifeforms, and the subsequent recognition that life is resilient and widespread, has helped to undercut the myth that aliveness is necessarily special, much less evidence for divine intervention. As recently as the 19th century, even many scientists believed that the mere existence of life was a miracle, not explicable in material terms. The supposed supernatural specialness of life was encapsulated in the doctrine of vitalism, which held that living things contained some sort of metaphysical ‘life spark’ that was not subject to the basic laws of physics and chemistry. Early in the 20th century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson claimed that life was characterised by a unique ‘élan vital’, which led the English biologist Julian Huxley to respond that this was as satisfying as attributing the movement of a train to its ‘élan locomotif’.

Extremophiles are in a sense antitheological and a cure for life-worshipping mysticism, another nail in the coffin that proclaims living things to be divinely created because they couldn’t possibly derive from natural processes. They also expand the possible playing field within which life initially evolved. Given that organisms can succeed in extreme environments, they might have first developed in them as well. It was long presumed, for example, that life must have originated in some sort of warm, shallow, benevolent puddle that offered the kind of comfortable incubator that such a delicate flower would require. This might indeed have been the case. But the existence of thermophiles thriving in superheated, hydrothermal deep ocean vents, along with the discovery of numerous other extremophiles, raises the prospect that perhaps aliveness first emerged in what we – sunny children of what is, for us, a relatively easy, superficially life-friendly environment – until recently considered impossible conditions.

Astrobiologists pay special attention to organisms abounding in extreme conditions – superheated (thermophiles), supercooled (cryophiles), without oxygen (anaerobes), and intensely salty (halophiles) – but also getting nutrition from methane (methanotrophs) and surviving, even thriving, among heavy concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead and zinc, metals toxic for most ‘normal’ creatures. There are, moreover, radiation-resistant organisms that can cheerfully gargle with the effluent from nuclear reactors. And don’t overlook the cryptoendoliths (‘hidden’ ‘inside’ ‘stones’) that seem perfectly happy occupying cavities within rocks.

Most extremophiles are microbes, but not all. There are, for example, a group of wingless, mostly eyeless insects known as grylloblattids, more commonly ice bugs or ice crawlers. They live, as one might expect, in very cold environments, typically under frozen rocks. My personal favourites, however, are tardigrades. These multicellular creatures are rarely more than one millimetre in length and often invisible to the unaided eye. They have four legs along each side, each outfitted with tiny claws. They also have a clearly discernible mouth, and are impossibly adorable. Purists don’t include tardigrades among extremophiles, since they don’t appear to be adapted to extreme environments per se – that is, like us, they do best in comparatively benign conditions, which, in the case of tardigrades includes the moist, temperate miniworld of forest moss and lichens.

Their probability of dying increases in proportion as they are exposed to highly challenging circumstances, so, unlike classic extremophiles, tardigrades are evidently adapted to what human beings, at least, consider moderate circumstances. However, they are extraordinary in their ability to survive when their environments become extreme. Not only that, but whereas typical extremophiles specialise in going about their lives along one axis of environmental extremity – extreme heat or cold, one or another heavy metal, and so forth – tardigrades can survive when things get dicey along many different and seemingly independent dimensions, simultaneously and come what may. You can boil them, freeze them, dry them, drown them, float them unprotected in space, expose them to radiation, even deprive them of nourishment – to which they respond by shrinking in size. These creatures, also known as water bears, are featured on appealing T-shirts with the slogan ‘Live Tiny, Die Never’ and in the delightful rap song that describes their indifference to extreme situations, entitled Water Bear Don’t Care.

Tardigrades might be the toughest creatures on Earth. You can put them in a laboratory freezer at -80 degrees Celsius, leave them for several years, then thaw them out, and just 20 minutes later they’ll be dancing about as though nothing had happened. They can even be cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero, at which atoms virtually stop moving. Once thawed out, they move around just fine. (Admittedly, they aren’t speed demons; the word ‘tardigrade’ means ‘slow walker’.) Exposed to superheated steam – 140 degrees Celsius – they shrug it off and keep on living. Not only are tardigrades remarkably resistant to a wide range of what ecologists term environmental ‘insults’ (heat, cold, pressure, radiation, etc), they also have a special trick up their sleeves: when things get really challenging – especially if dry or cold – they convert into a spore-like form known as a ‘tun’. A tun can live, if you call their unique form of suspended animation ‘living’, for decades, possibly even centuries, and thereby survive pretty much anything that nature might throw at them. In this state, their metabolism slows to less than 0.01 per cent of normal. Compared with them, a deeply hibernating mammal is living at lightning speed.

Given that tardigrades possess the kind of powers we otherwise associate with comic-book superheroes, it might seem that they are creatures out of science fiction, but maybe it’s the other way around. Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem (2010), a Chinese blockbuster that broke all records for sci-fi literature in its home country, became the first book not originally published in English to win the coveted Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel in 2015. It describes extraterrestrials known as Trisolarans, whose planet is associated with three suns, the real-life interactions of which – as physicists and mathematicians understand – would generate chaotically unstable conditions. 

Trisolarans, therefore, are unpredictably subjected to extreme environments depending on the temporary orientation of their planet relative to its chaotically interacting stars: sometimes lethally hot, other times cold, sometimes unbearably dry and bright, other times dark, and so forth. As a result, these imagined extremophiles have evolved the ability to desiccate themselves, rolling up like dried parchment, only to be reconstituted when conditions become more favourable.

I don’t know if Liu was aware of real-life, Earth-inhabiting tardigrades when he invented his fictional Trisolarans, but the convergence is striking. (In the interest of scientific open-mindedness, it should perhaps also be considered that maybe tardigrades are real Trisolarans, refugees from a planet that was chronically exposed to intense environmental perturbations. This would explain the puzzling fact that tardigrades appear hyper-adapted, able to survive extremes that greatly exceed what they experience here on Earth.)

David Barash, Aeon

This essay is adapted from the author’s Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are (2018, Oxford University Press)

Bilim Materyalist Midir

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[Billions and Billions of Demons - JANUARY 9, 1997 ISSUE]” ― Richard C. Lewontin

“Bizim materyalizme bir inancımız var, ‘a priori’ (önceden kabul edilmiş, doğru varsayılmış) bir inanç bu. Bizi dünyaya materyalist bir açıklama getirmeye zorlayan şey, bilimin yöntemleri ve kuralları değil. Aksine, materyalizmle olan “a priori” bağlılığımız sebebiyle, dünyaya materyalist bir açıklama getiren araştırma yöntemlerini ve kavramları kurguluyoruz. Materyalizm mutlak doğru olduğuna göre de, ilahi bir açıklamanın sahneye girmesine izin veremeyiz.”

Aslında konuya insanlık tarihi ile başlayan iman ve yaratılış konusu olarak da bakmak mümkün. Yani bu dünya bir Yaratıcı tarafından mı hazırlandı yoksa süresi ve nasıl olduğu belli olmayan bir şekilde, kendi kendine mi var oldu? İnsan bu dünyaya başka bir yerden mi geldi/gönderildi yoksa tesadüfen var olan hayatın evrilmesinden mi meydana geldi? İnsanoğlu, biyonik bir beyinden mi ibaret yoksa bedeni ayakta tutan bir ruh mu var?

Tefekkür Tarihinde İki Çizgi

İnsanlık bu noktada ikiye ayrıldı. Maddeci felsefe ve metafizik boyutlu hikmet yolcuları, her zaman diliminde kendilerine bir yer buldular. İlk insan, Yaradan tarafından yaratılmıştır diyenlerle; ilk insan maddenin mükemmel bir şekilde evrimleşmiş halidir diyenler hep oldu hayat sahnesinde.

Antik Yunan’da Epikür ve Demokritus gibi felsefeciler ile Sokrates ve Epiktetos gibi hikmet ehli düşünürler aynı dönemlerde, farklı şeyler düşünüp söylediler. Demokritus, her şeyin hatta ruhun bile atomlardan oluştuğunu iddia etti ve bu âlemin yaratılmadığını ve bunun için Yaratıcı’ya ihtiyaç olmadığını söyleyerek(3) materyalizm kitabının ilk satırlarını yazmaya başlamıştı. Epiktetos ise “Allah bütün insanları mesut olmaları için yaratmıştır; kara bahtlı oluyorlarsa, kendi yanlışları yüzünden oluyorlar” diyerek yaratılışa işaret ediyordu.(4)

Zaman ilerledi, ama çizgi değişmedi. Kimi zaman idealist, kimi zaman Stoacı, kimi zaman epikürcü, kimi zaman da atomist olan felsefe; 19. yüzyılda kendini materyalist düşünce ile ifade etmeye başladı. 17. yüzyılda, aslen din adamı olan matematikçi Pierre Gassendi, stoacı ve epikürcü akımların etkisi ile tabiat bilimlerini maddeci felsefe ile izah etmeye çalıştı. Bilgiyi duyulara ve deneylere bağlayan Gassendi, Demokritus’un atomist akımını yeniden ele alarak, Marx dâhil bir çok düşünürü, bütün dünyevî  yapıların ve davranışların maddî cisimlerin etkileşimi ile açıklanabileceği düşüncesine yöneltti.(5)

Kendini dindar bir Katolik olarak gören idealizm temsilcilerinden Descartes, Yaratıcı’ya inanıyordu. Gassendi’nin çağdaşı olan ve aklı/düşünceyi ön plana çıkaran Descartes, bilginin akılla elde edilebileceğini savunuyor, insan ruhunun beden gemisinde sadece bir kaptan olmadığını, hissedilen acıların, sevinçlerin, susuzlukların; iç içe geçmiş (dual) bir hayatın göstergesi olduğunu ifade ediyordu. Descartes’e göre madde; Gassendi’nin aksine, düşünceden sonra gelen bir şeydi.(6)

Bu arada fikir denizinde yeni isimler kendini gösterdi. Denis Diderot, Ludwig Feuerbach ve John Stewart gibi isimler, materyalist akıma kürek çekmeye başladılar. 19. yüzyılda Feuerbach, Gelecek Felsefesinin İlkeleri adlı eserinde, her şeyin doğaya bağlı olduğunu, mutluluğun maddi aşkta olduğunu (Epikür de böyle düşünüyordu) ve din kelimesinin bağlılık olduğunu, Yaratıcı’nın da insan zihninin yansıtması olduğunu iddia etti. “Her şey gibi düşünce de doğanın ürünüdür ve düşünce maddi bir organ olan beyinden çıkmaktadır. Maddecilik insanın bilgi ve varlık yapısının temelidir” dedi.

Aslen bir din adamı olan George Berkeley (18. yüzyıl) “immateryalizm” düşüncesi çerçevesinde, materyalist karşıtı bir akım oluşturmaya çalıştı. Ona göre madde vardı ama bir yanılsamadan/gölgeden ibaretti.(7)

Son İki Asırda

19. yüzyıla gelindiğinde bütün antimateryalist çalışmalara rağmen materyalist akım, dünyada iyice hissedilmeye başlamıştı. Karl Marx ve Frederick Engels, Hegel’in idealist diyalektiğine karşı tarihî materyalizm ile karşı çıktılar. Hegel’e göre deneye başvurmadan da akıl ile kesin bilgiye ulaşılabilirdi. Ancak, materyalist düşünce deney olmadan bilgiye ulaşılamayacağını savunuyordu. Temelde zengin kesimin, (burjuvazi) işçileri (proletarya) sömürmelerine karşı bir hareket başlatan Marx ve Engels, “Komünizmin İlkeleri” yazısı ile hayat felsefelerini de ortaya koydular. Bu bildiride dikkat çeken üç konu; bir topumda evlilik kurumun, ilahi dinlerin ve özel mülkiyetin olmaması görüşü idi.

Materyalizm, öteden beri maddi başarı ve ilerlemenin hayattaki en yüksek değer olduğunu, varoluşun sadece madde ile açıklanabileceğini savundu. Yaratılışa özellikle karşı çıkan materyalistler, 19. yüzyılda Darwin’in biyoloji alanında ortaya attığı “türlerin kökeni” teorisi ile bu tezlerini daha güçlü bir şekilde savunmaya başladılar.

Bugüne kadar materyalist düşünce; biraz epikürist, biraz ateist, biraz deist, biraz komünist olarak hayata karışmaya devam etti. Ancak materyalist felsefenin bütün gayretlerine rağmen bilim ve bilim insanları yaratılışı ve metafiziği savunmaya devam etti. 

Emin Osman Uygur, Çağlayan Dergisi, Mayıs 2019

Without Calculus

Photo by Shubham Sharan on Unsplash

Without calculus, we wouldn’t have cell phones, computers, or microwave ovens. We wouldn’t have radio. Or television. Or ultrasound for expectant mothers, or GPS for lost travelers. We wouldn’t have split the atom, unraveled the human genome, or put astronauts on the moon. We might not even have the Declaration of Independence.

It’s a curiosity of history that the world was changed forever by an arcane branch of mathematics. How could it be that a theory originally about shapes ultimately reshaped civilization?

The essence of the answer lies in a quip that the physicist Richard Feynman made to the novelist Herman Wouk when they were discussing the Manhattan Project. Wouk was doing research for a big novel he hoped to write about World War II, and he went to Caltech to interview physicists who had worked on the bomb, one of whom was Feynman. After the interview, as they were parting, Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus. No, Wouk admitted, he didn’t. “You had better learn it,” said Feynman. “It’s the language God talks.”

For reasons nobody understands, the universe is deeply mathematical. Maybe God made it that way. Or maybe it’s the only way a universe with us in it could be, because nonmathematical universes can’t harbor life intelligent enough to ask the question. In any case, it’s a mysterious and marvelous fact that our universe obeys laws of nature that always turn out to be expressible in the language of calculus as sentences called differential equations. Such equations describe the difference between something right now and the same thing an instant later or between something right here and the same thing infinitesimally close by. The details differ depending on what part of nature we’re talking about, but the structure of the laws is always the same. To put this awesome assertion another way, there seems to be something like a code to the universe, an operating system that animates everything from moment to moment and place to place. Calculus taps into this order and expresses it.

Isaac Newton was the first to glimpse this secret of the universe. He found that the orbits of the planets, the rhythm of the tides, and the trajectories of cannonballs could all be described, explained, and predicted by a small set of differential equations. Today we call them Newton’s laws of motion and gravity. Ever since Newton, we have found that the same pattern holds whenever we uncover a new part of the universe. From the old elements of earth, air, fire, and water to the latest in electrons, quarks, black holes, and superstrings, every inanimate thing in the universe bends to the rule of differential equations. I bet this is what Feynman meant when he said that calculus is the language God talks. If anything deserves to be called the secret of the universe, calculus is it.

By inadvertently discovering this strange language, first in a corner of geometry and later in the code of the universe, then by learning to speak it fluently and decipher its idioms and nuances, and finally by harnessing its forecasting powers, humans have used calculus to remake the world.

**

When I said earlier that without calculus we wouldn’t have computers and cell phones and so on, I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that calculus produced all these wonders by itself. Far from it. Science and technology were essential partners — and arguably the stars of the show. My point is merely that calculus has also played a crucial role, albeit often a supporting one, in giving us the world we know today.

Take the story of wireless communication. It began with the discovery of the laws of electricity and magnetism by scientists like Michael Faraday and André-Marie Ampère. Without their observations and tinkering, the crucial facts about magnets, electrical currents, and their invisible force fields would have remained unknown, and the possibility of wireless communication would never have been realized. So, obviously, experimental physics was indispensable here.

But so was calculus. In the 1860s, a Scottish mathematical physicist named James Clerk Maxwell recast the experimental laws of electricity and magnetism into a symbolic form that could be fed into the maw of calculus. After some churning, the maw disgorged an equation that didn’t make sense. Apparently something was missing in the physics. Maxwell suspected that Ampère’s law was the culprit. He tried patching it up by including a new term in his equation — a hypothetical current that would resolve the contradiction — and then let calculus churn again. This time it spat out a sensible result, a simple, elegant wave equation much like the equation that describes the spread of ripples on a pond. Except Maxwell’s result was predicting a new kind of wave, with electric and magnetic fields dancing together in a pas de deux. A changing electric field would generate a changing magnetic field, which in turn would regenerate the electric field, and so on, each field bootstrapping the other forward, propagating together as a wave of traveling energy. And when Maxwell calculated the speed of this wave, he found — in what must have been one of the greatest Aha! moments in history — that it moved at the speed of light. So he used calculus not only to predict the existence of electromagnetic waves but also to solve an age-old mystery: What was the nature of light? Light, he realized, was an electromagnetic wave.

Maxwell’s prediction of electromagnetic waves prompted an experiment by Heinrich Hertz in 1887 that proved their existence. A decade later, Nikola Tesla built the first radio communication system, and five years after that, Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first wireless messages across the Atlantic. Soon came television, cell phones, and all the rest.

Clearly, calculus could not have done this alone. But equally clearly, none of it would have happened without calculus. Or, perhaps more accurately, it might have happened, but only much later, if at all.

Sebepler yalnız birer bahanedirler

Dalâletten gelen hadsiz bir cehâlet ve dinsizlikten kaynaklanan çirkin bir inat sebebiyle bilmiyorlar ki, sebepler yalnız birer bahânedirler, birer perdedirler. Dağ gibi bir çam ağacının cihazlarını ve donanımlarını dokumak ve yetiştirmek için bir köy kadar yüz fabrika ve tezgâh yerine küçücük çekirdeği gösterir: “İşte bu ağaç bundan çıkmış.” diye Yaradanın o çamdaki gösterdiği bin mucizeyi inkâr edercesine bazı zâhirî sebepleri gösterir. Cenâb-ı Hakk’ın irade ve hikmetler işlenen pek büyük bir rubûbiyet fiilini hiçe indirir.

Bazen gayet derin, bilinmez ve çok ehemmiyetli, bin cihetle de hikmeti olan bir hakikate fennî bir isim takar. Güya o isimle mâhiyeti anlaşıldı, âdileşti, hikmetsiz, manasız kaldı.

İşte gel! Ahmaklığın nihayetsiz derecelerine bak ki: Yüz sayfa ile tarif edilse ve hikmetleri beyan edilse, ancak tamamiyle bilinecek derin ve geniş bir meçhul hakikata bir nâm takar; malum bir şey gibi. “Bu, budur.” der. Mesela: Güneşin bir maddesi, elektrikle çarpmasıdır. Hem birer küllî irade, birer ihtiyar-ı âmm (her şeyi kuşatan irade) birer nev’î hâkimiyetin ünvanları bulunan ve “âdetullah” (Kâinatın yaratılış ve işleyişinde Allah Taâlanın koyduğu kanunlar) nâmıyla yâdedilen fıtrî kanunların birisine, hususî ve kasdî bir hâdise-i rubûbiyet’i (Cenâb-ı Hakk’ın gerçekleştirdiği hâdise) ircâ eder (mal eder). O ircâ ile, onun nisbetini İlâhî iradenin tercihinden keser, sonra tutar tesadüfe, tabiata havale eder. Ebu Cehil’den ziyade katmerli bir echeliyet (câhilliğin en son noktası) gösterir. Bir neferin veya bir taburun zaferli harbini, bir nizam ve askerî kanuna isnad edip; kumandanından, padişahından, hükümetinden ve kasdî harekâttan alâkasını keser gibi âsî bir divâne olur.