Sunday, January 1, 1995

     Up ahead two people are standing on the sidewalk talking.  A
sweetie-pie and I are walking from Porter Square to Harvard Square.  As
we pass, the man says to the woman: I'm going through a difficult
transition period right now.  That one sentence was all I heard as we
passed them.  So I'm thinking: well, why didn't you just swerve around
it, and make your life easier?  But I declined to ask him.  Rounding a
corner two women pass me and one of them says: a small village in
Africa?  And I wonder: were they talking about someone who is living
there?  Or maybe one of them was going to live there.
     Well, all this led me to thinking about starting an Internet
comicstrip to be called "Out Of Context".  The premise is my overhearing
a single sentence or phrase, and then remarking on it.  Comments from
comics fans?
     This is my latest thinking about the connection between science and
religion.  First, I assume that humans have some combination of
irrational and rational faculties.  From my point of view religion,
horoscopes, tarot cards, alien visitors, entrail reading, scapulamancy,
etc, are all in the same neighborhood.  The irrational has been a part
of human beings for a LONG time.  That is, it has some sort of
evolutionary basis.  There have been, in the course of human history,
many rational individuals.  I take Di Vinci as a prime example.  And
there have been some number like him in the course of many thousands of
years.  Individuals who could take observations about the real world and
come to rational explanations of what was going on.  However, for that
society/group to benefit, there had to be some way of institutionalizing
the observed phenomenon or hard facts.  Knowledge could also come about
by repeated observation by more normal individuals.  An example of this
is an observation made by the Kalahari Kung people of Africa.  There is
a beetle that lives near the roots of a certain kind of tree.  They are
a source of food for the Kung.  They are also a source of poison.  This
poison is used to make their game hunting arrows lethal.  It turns out
you can eat this critter without poisoning yourself provided none of the
body fluids from it enter your bloodstream.  If you have a cut in your
hand or mouth you can be poisoned.  In the stomach the poison is quickly
neutralized.  Somebody noticed this chain of connected events and
capitalized on them.  Possibly Kung women who do this kind of gathering.
It has been proposed that this poison is what makes it possible for
these people to survive in the Kalahari - a generally very barren place,
almost desert like for most of the time.  By moving frequently, and with
this poison that allows the killing of large game animals, the people
scratch out a living.  They have few possessions, including small bows
and arrows made from local materials.  There is some evidence from
garbage dumps that indicate a long term use of the area from 50,000 to
100,000 years or more.  Only the presence of large portable water
drilling rigs in the last several decades has changed this ancient
pattern of life.
     Scapulamancy is another ancient ritual practiced, in various forms,
by ancient peoples in different places around the world.  The scapula is
more commonly known as the shoulder blade.  It is a large bone in
four-footed ungulates (animals like cows, bison, reindeer, etc).  People
save this bone.  It dries.  It turns white.  When hunting goes bad for a
group of people they throw one of their saved scapulas in a fire.  It
turns black.  They take it out of the fire.  It cools.  Fine white
cracks appear.  This information is taken as an omen from the gods.  The
hunters in that group take the pattern of lines as a guide to where to
hunt next.  It produces better than average results.  Why?  The lines
are essentially a bunch of random numbers.  What these numbers do, over
the long run, is cause the hunters to distribute their hunting use of
the land more evenly over their territory.  As a consequence they do not
completely exploit the resources in any one area.  They give the
environment a chance to recover from over use.  The group's use of their
environment is more evenly distributed.
     How did this practice come about?  One can imagine a number of
scenarios.  But the discovery was made at some point.  Then, how to
integrate this knowledge with the group's life?  Science, we might say,
led to the discovery, and religion led to the institutionalization of
the information.

Date: Mon, 9 Jan 1995 18:38:01 -0500
From: lkk@world.std.com (Larry Kolodney)
To: rgardner@charon.MIT.EDU
Subject: The Friedrichshof Chronicles

Hey Richard, I wouldn't be so glib about the "non-rational" practices
of other people.  I challenge you to provide a formal test for
determining whether a practice is rational or not.