peristaltor | Polyamory, Enemy Of The Scientific Method (Reply)

A helicopter pilot here in the Northwest gets caught in thick fog. His instruments are on the fritz. He has no idea where he is. Luckily, he sees through a break in the fog an expanse of grass, and lands safely.

He is on a lawn in one of the "campuses" found in the 'burbs around here, businesses that surround themselves with lawns to avoid looking like businesses. Curious workers peek out at the pilot through their office windows. In a hurry, the pilot grabs a piece of paper and a marker and writes, "Where am I?" in the hopes that someone in the office park will give him an address so he can dead reckon his course back to the airport.

Someone does scrawl a note with an answer, but it says, "In a helicopter."

At first, he is a bit pissed, but then smiles. He gives his "helpers" thumbs up, revs the rotors, and takes off. He sets a compass course due South and manages to find Renton Airport with no problem.

When he gets to Renton, he tells them the story. They ask how he knew to plot the course without knowing where he was. "I did know where I was," he answers. "They gave me completely accurate but ultimately useless information. That's when I knew I had landed squarely in the middle of Microsoft headquarters."

I've done this before. I've read something posted by an LJ friend and found something… lacking. I did that here most recently, in response to a series

tacit was doing on GMO myths. I just re-read that response simply because

tacit has recently added to his GMO series with a post concerning Monsanto, creators of Roundup™ ready corn seed.

After reading my post again—which concerned aspects of GMO farming one might label "meta"—I realized I failed. I should not have questioned the specifics of (for example) separating farms with cows and farms without them. I should not have noted the economic impact of the new farms that do separate cows from corn.

Instead, I should have taken the tack opposite

tacit's. Instead of digging into the scientifically-relevant reasons surrounding myths about genetically modified organisms (as he did), perhaps I should focus instead on why people gravitate toward these myths.

I used to regard such people as willfully deluded for wanting a simple Good v. Evil explanation for why they don't like GMOs, and then crafting the rumors into the Myths of Evil, the "they create disease in people" and other such beliefs without evidence. I don't regard them as completely deluded, not anymore. No, I can't embrace their fallacies. Rather, I see that they are just a bit off-step on their vision quest, grasping at pieces of the world around them, frantically groping, if you will, looking for a future that, though they cannot articulate it well, "looks" right.

What looks right is difficult to explain; hence the fallacies. But what looks wrong? That is very, very easy to identify. Let's take a look at the picture I used to open this post. It's recognizable, to be sure. It's the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz meeting Dorothy. It is a movie set, to be sure. Movie set designers are probably the best people to get when you want something to look "right."

Okay, quiz time. Can you tell me specifically what in that movie set above you will not find in a "normal" farm today? Here's a hint: Leviticus 19:19:

You are to keep My statutes. You shall not breed together two kinds of your cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment upon you of two kinds of material mixed together.

(I underlined the answer.)

It's not an aberration, either, this demand for the monoculture of the fields. It's repeated in Deuteronomy 22:9: "Do not plant two kinds of seed in your vineyard; if you do, not only the crops you plant but also the fruit of the vineyard will be defiled." Ouch. No farmer wants to raise defiled fruit!

So why are pumpkins defiling the corn field behind Dorothy? Simply put, that movie set emulated a tradition in pre-tractor American farming, the Three Sisters.

The original concept of the “Three Sisters” incorporated the planting of corn, beans, and squash in a single mound or bed. In this way, each plant benefited the others. The cornstalk supports the climbing bean vines. The beans help replenish the soil with needed nutrients. The squash provides a number of advantages to the Sisters. The large squash leaves shade the mound inhibiting the growth of weeds, conserves water by slowing evaporation….

The modern day concept of the “Three Sisters” is referred to as companion planting. Companion plants are where two or more different type plants are planted in close proximity to each other…. This method was a major contributing factor for the survival of the Native Americans.

Ah! Those heathens without the benefit of Biblical tradition are responsible for this defiling, then. And since the majority of European settlers were Christian, they can play faster and looser with the Old Testament prohibitions, given that old "cast the first stone" loophole, so they, too, could take advantage of companion planting to get more yield from their fields.

That darned tractor changed all of that. One cannot practice true companion planting when the gadgets attached to the combine are specific to only one type of crop. When you don't want to bother picking squash, beans and corn individually—and, of course, hire the necessary hands to help with that picking—and want instead to drive the combine through the fields and let the mechanized harvester hoover up the corn, the squash and beans will suffer—meaning they will be pulped, or get caught in the corn machinery, or something equally bad. May as well not plant them. So people mostly stopped, at least those people growing food on a commercial scale.

The tractors and the machinery they pull can be blamed, in large part, for creating the farm economy that made GMO crops a viable presence both physically and, more importantly, economically. Just as it's easier to use machines instead of people and animals, it's also easier to dump fertilizers on the crops, water them, squirt a bit of pesticide and herbicide if need be, and call it good. In essence, the tractor led to lazy farming.

That laziness was helped along by lazy science.

The scientific method is a very powerful tool for helping humans analyze the world around us. It is not, though, a perfect tool. Take this image of a pendulum. It is a pretty basic system, a weight separated from a hinge by a length of something. Get it swinging, and using a few pretty well-known formulae, one can determine the period, or frequency, of the swing based on the length of the support separating the hinge from the weight.

But what if we added another hinge?

Here, things get insane, and by that I mean quite a bit less predictable. As in not predictable at all. The addition of a simple extra hinge creates too many variables for anyone formula to predict the position of the assembly after just a few swings. The best any formula can do is give an estimate, take a look after a few swings, make revisions, and give an updated estimate. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's the same problem with weather prediction; things are just too complex for any meaningful predictions.

That does not mean people won't try for predictability. It's in our nature.

And one sure way to achieve greater predictability is to simplify!

In my last rebuttal, I mentioned Joel Salatin extensively. He had something meaningful to say about modern farming and how it is enabled by modern research methods. He is an iconoclastic food producer, in that he embraces the chaos that cannot be predicted, only managed. And he complains that those who do not embrace the chaos embodied by tightly interconnected complex systems—like crops and soils biota and corn, beans and squash—dismiss this unpredictable chaos by giving their analysis of it short shrift.

Salatin explains this in a recent podcast interview with Chris Martenson:

I'll give you one that was done at Virginia Tech back 30 years ago when organics was first just making a little bit of buzz in the farming community. Somebody took a bunch of test plots. Land grants have all of these test plots out in the field and they test all sorts of things. And, so these test plots, back in the early '70s, well, they’ve been for 25 years testing pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers…. And, well, "let’s try this organics," and so they separated out about three of [the plots] and they planted corn… and then they took three plots next door and they dumped all the concoctions of chemicals and fertilizer and everything on it. And the organic plot, they didn't do anything to; just, well, "it’s going to be organic." And, so they, of course, the six plots grew and the three plots looked wonderful, and the other three plots were weedy and junkie and not very productive. And, so they measured the corn off of each one and, of course, the one produced a whole bunch of corn and the other one had a couple of little anemic ears. And, so the official report came out and [the] official pronouncement was if we went to organics, we'd have to pick which half of the world to kill, because we couldn't produce enough food, based on this study.

(I bolded his words.)

Which was, according to Salatin, exactly the wrong conclusion.

Now, anyone that knows anything about the soil knows that that is an incredibly prejudicial, skewed study. Because, if you were going to do a true measure, you would have… picked plots that hadn't had any chemicals dumped on them for several years, and not only that, but had been built up with compost and carbon and woodchips and developed this deep humus bed before you tried it…. But, the point is that you would have done some long-term remediation to that ground before you did a head-to-head test.

Bottom line: though technically "organic" means that the farmer must "avoid most synthetic materials, such as pesticides and antibiotics", that does not mean that this avoidance is the only requirement, at least when it comes to growing successful crops! Without remediation of the soil—without encouraging that wild underground party of interconnected fungi, bacteria, insects and the like that create healthy soils ideal for crops—and without considering the non-monoculture raising of foods exemplified by the Three Sisters and other companion schema like permaculture, for one example, the V Tech scientists studying the "viability" of organics managed to share no useful conclusions whatsoever.

Which puts the farming researchers in league not only with the Microserfs in the opening joke, but also with Old Testament prohibitions, and very much at odds with those practicing polyamory.

I got the example of the pendulum from a Radiolab episode titled The Limits of Science. When you have a tightly-coupled complex system, it is very difficult—if not impossible—to predict into the future with absolute certainty. There are simply too many variables.

The soil—that stuff found, as Stephen Colbert told congress, "at ground level"—is just that complex … in its natural form.

Which gives farmers a couple of choices. They can through trial and error learn which practices build soil, which companions work best to bring multiple crops to fruition. They can keep an open mind and try to intuitively grasp the chaos around them in order to produce the food they need.

Or they can nuke the soil with chemicals, add three main chemical fertilizers that have worked in the past, plant (following the Biblical example) a single crop of mechanically planted, harvested crops (such as GMOs), and call it good.

But soil in its unnatural form? It lacks the "that wild underground party of interconnected fungi, bacteria, insects and the like" I referred to above. It is bits of silica with sprayed gobs of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. It is a simple soil, just as the union of a man and a woman are a simple marriage.

Gone from these simple soils are the variety of life's joys and highlights experienced by people engaging in polyamory, people sharing love and relationships with a wider variety than just the singly married. I'm not poly myself, but have quite a few family members and vocal co-workers on that ride. They have good stories to tell, to say nothing of the pictures.

My sister-in-law Rainne holds the sign.
They are creating rich ecosystems of interpersonal relationships, ones more complex and at times quite a bit more difficult to manage than simple, closed-circle relationships with a more limited number of people. For the most part, they are happy.

Yes, they shun the Biblical traditions proscribed in the big OT, but more people should do that, in my non-so-humble opinion.

Especially farmers and scientists studying farming.

Which brings me back to the people on their groping quests for understanding.

People who see the continuation of mechanized farming; who see the expansion of these farms into mega-farms; who witness the evidence of soil degradation; who see a constant refrain of problems with our food supply: these people see that something is wrong.

They see The Wizard of Oz and might notice the pumpkins. Might. But probably not. They just know that older, pre-industrial farms looked different. There were cows and horses. There was likely a garden. There was more to be found on those family farms than just heavy equipment and (likely) heavier debt.

And so, like those that battled rampant forest razing, they find something to use as a symbol. Someone once said of the Northern Spotted Owl, the threatened species that slowed clear-cuts here in the NW, "If the Northern Spotted Owl didn't exist, the environmental movement would have had to invent it."

When the system feels wrong, but everyone else seems to find the system just fine, those that feel the wrongness must find flaws within the system they can attack—even if they are mythical ones—to force change.

GMOs? They are, for me at least, merely a symptom within a system of wrongness, one that is organized for the short-term profit and against the long-term sustainability of both our natural resources and our societies.

But people who link GMOs with diseases and evils and the like? They are, like those who fear vaccinations cause autism, looking for something, anything that might be causal enough.

Strangely, the best explanation I've found for the autism thing is simply that autism might be an auto-immune disease, which puts it in the same meta-category as both agriculture and polyamory.

Auto-immune diseases are those that are actually an evolved response against pests in our bodies, parasites and fungi and bacterial infections and viral infections. When generations enjoyed disease-free foods and clean water—something unheard of in our prehistory—our bodies, not given the memo about there no longer being need to do so, ramped up their defense against bugs that weren't there and in the process attacked the body itself.

In other words, auto-immune diseases are the result of our bodies' unwillingness to accept that the body really is that free of infection, just as GMO haters are unwilling to accept that our farms should be that enormous and monocultural and sterile, just as the polyamorous community is unwilling to accept that monogamy is just fine.

I'm writing this post less about tacit's series and more against others who, sadly, use the same arguments and observations to advocate a rejection in toto of anti-GMO sentiment in general. One, a F@c#book "friend," suggested joining a boycott of Chipotle Mexican Grills because they are going GMO-free (or at least publicly trying). One finds such screeds, sadly, everywhere:

Chipotle may argue that it’s simply giving its consumers what they want…. Consumers who view themselves as socially conscious and vigilant about their health have begun turning against GMOs, and that seems to be who Chipotle is targeting when it explains its decision as part of its broader commitment to “making high-quality whole ingredients prepared using classic cooking techniques accessible to all.”

Without going into detail, all of the articles I've linked above take a flabbergasted tone, apoplectic that "misinformation" is being substituted for "good sense." Sadly, the three above sources present red flags when it comes to judging whether such a tone is appropriate. The first is an investor site; the second represents agriculture as a business; the third is supported by advertising. There is a lot of financial pressure on all to ignore the consumers' "desires" and emphasize the misinformation aspect, and almost none to question whether the continued mechanization and consolidation of agricultural production is either desirable or in the longer term viable. Most sadly of all, that very question seems to be relegated to the fringes of media, and all but completely ignored by the mainstream.

Which leaves those grasping and groping for why they feel something is either "right" or "wrong" completely in the dark.

If they're lucky, they'll find themselves in the dark with willing others who are also grasping and groping. I guess I can hope that these dark group grope fests are not myth-based anti-GMO or anti-vax straw grasping, but rather good, safe, clean poly fun.