A term popped into my head the other day: "Theoretical Genealogy".  By it I mean the mathematics of populations - genetic diffusion, the probability of surname survival, how population growth skews the pool of descendants, etc.  This post is about just one topic, suggested by some recent research: diffusion.

Diffusion

While using Family Tree Maker’s search capabilities, I found I could add quite a lot of ancestors; there is no sound way to be sure they’re correct, and it’s hard to get an intuition about the reliability of the data, but it is a relatively rapid process.  As I chased lines back into the Middle Ages the doubts increased – but if nothing else the information may be used in the future as a starting point for, say, using DNA to verify links.  That is, it’s better than nothing, though perhaps not as reliable as I would like.

I noticed one phenomenon early on – many of my lines run through England (1600’s, 1700’s), and occasionally one of these would lead to some minor nobleman.  That person would in turn lead back to more important nobility, and finally to some recognizable king (e.g., William the Conqueror).  After this sort of thing happened a few times I began to be concerned that this really represented wishful thinking of someone, or some genealogist, along the line.  Am I really descended from Billy (above), as well as Charlemagne (several ways), along with various Viking and early Irish kings?  I didn't think so  because it seemed so surprising, and began that slightly unnerving process of figuring out where in the line of descent fiction crept in.

Now I’m not so sure.  The records of the minor nobleman and his ancestors seem fairly sound, I expect because property, wealth, and some level of authority changed hands with each generation.  The main weak point was the link between my known ancestry and that nobleman – that is a big jump.  Often it seemed to be the third daughter or so of the nobleman marrying my ancestor, who might have been a well-off farmer.  That sort of thing doesn’t seem unreasonable.  In the cases when this happened in the 1600's-1700's, sometimes coincident with travel to America, it was documented.  It might not have been were it just one more element of small town life in England.

Moving backwards in time from the minor nobleman the links seem fairly solid, for the same reason as above, it mattered at the time in substantial ways.  I’m sure there is questionable data in there – perhaps the occasional infidelity not identified as such ("Yes, he's your son, ignore the red hair") – but otherwise the genealogical data seems as sound as one might expect.

However, looking at the totality of the lines I’ve traced, I find I’m related to all sorts of kings and notables, in Ireland, France, Scandanavia, etc.  Is this reasonable, or is it the cumulative effect of past genealogists fudging the data a bit to claim famous ancestors?

To address this I turned the problem around, and imagined one of these notables (king, count, whatever) – they often had some semblance of wealth and a number of children.  The oldest few, particularly the males, would likely have married into other noble families, and it is from those lines that the people holding the noble titles today are descended.  The other kids did as well as they could, but often married significantly lesser nobility.  When this process repeated itself it eventually would mean some descendants were marrying commoners - perhaps on the well-off side, but non-nobility nonetheless.  This is not at all unreasonable - and if you think about it, the descendants of the original king/count/whatever would end up spreading out throughout the population.  Working backwards, then, as genealogists do, it isn't implausible that one might be caught up in that spread and then subsequently be led to the original notable as an ancestor.

What this really is is just genetic diffusion in the population, and when looked at from that perspective it seems unsurprising.  There have been recent articles about Genghis Khan’s descendents – apparently about 10% of males in the area of his former empire are related to him (or his family; one might imagine a brother, for instance).  As future generations arise the mixing will of course go further, until nearly everyone will be able to claim him as an ancestor.  Of course the number of generations back to Genghis is so large that the percentage of genetic data from him is quite dilute, and will become more so, but this is just the other side of the genetic diffusion coin.

Of course just as many people might trace their lineage back to Charlemagne, or Genghis, there are also some likely unknowns who cast similar genetic shadows over the future - some unknown peasant father and/or mother, who had numerous children, healthy, good looking, both sons and daughters, whose descendants spread out just as widely.  We just don't know their names.  The nobility, even minor nobility, shows up in church and civil records; the farmer doesn't.  Perhaps DNA analysis might at some point in the future reveal his existence, even if tentatively. 

(It is one of the striking things about doing this kind of research - how many people left so little trace other than through their children.  Even their names are missing.  I wish I had a at least a page, or even a paragraph, of information about each - I'm sure their challenges weren't fundamentally so different from ours.)

So - is there any way to quantify any of this, even crudely?

My background is European; the population of Europe in 1700 was about 50 million.  That is about the number of your ancestors back 25 generations (assuming no repeating ancestors).  At 20 years per generation, that’s 500 years.  By 'repeating ancestors' I mean no ancestor appearing twice or more - saying it that way makes it seem easy.  Turning it around - it means that say, at the 15th generation, two people who marry must have absolutely no ancestry in common.  I think this would be rather hard in a society where long-distance travel was rare.  The 500 year figure might well be half of that - 250 years - which, while long, is perhaps close to accessible oral history, particularly in fairly stagnant populations.  In either case, 300+ years on, a crude analysis suggests that pretty much anyone in Europe then might well be one of my (or your) ancestors.

The process of genetic diffusion is an intriguing one.  One might imagine as a simplified ideal a uniform population in which any person is likely to marry any other person in the population with roughly equal probability (excluding close relatives).  In that case the mixing will be maximized, that is it will happen as rapidly as possible.  Of course such populations may not really exist – social stratification, for instance, will lead to several (possibly overlapping) subpopulations that intermix that way, but not so much with each other.  Or there may be geographical separations that cause small ‘pockets’ of population to intermix internally but not externally.  I would think population genetics might be able to detect traces of such historical isolation from the genes and histories of people today.  It would take the right sampling to be able to draw solid conclusions, but it might be done.  While it seems an abstract notion, I think it might be practical, at least for recent cases.

For example, a number of my ancestors were among the early Dutch settlers of what is now New York City.  When the city became British in 1665, the Brits considered the Dutch second-class citizens, and intermarrying with them was rare; consequently the Dutch who remained ny necessity intermarried among themselves.  The end result is that, very loosely speaking, if you have a Dutch ancestor in that group it’s not unlikely you’re related to many of the other Dutch families who were present.  This phenomenon should be detectable by examining the DNA of descendants of that time – there would be areas of commonality due to that (socially) isolated population mixing as it did.  It would be more interesting to deduce such isolated populations entirely from the DNA as a way to augment history.  Doing it in the more distant past might depend on tracking mutations, and these might not happen rapidly enough to spread through a location such as 17th century New York City.  It might be different for, say, 6th century Naples.

The resulting model might be one of relatively static pools of population, connected by some punctuated diffusion.  This might not match historical reality exactly (say, an individual might have married into an immigrant family in his town, then his descendants might have moved back to the source of the immigration), but it might be a useful model nevertheless.  It seems ripe for mathematical modeling.

 

 

The God Abandons Antony (C.P.Cavafy)

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don't mourn your luck that's failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive - don't mourn then uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final delectation - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

(Edmund Keeley, Philip Sherrard, translators)

Thoughts on the Multi-Universe Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

Just looking around the 'net I see much written about quantum mechanics that isn't, well, sound; I hope I'm not contributing to that genre, and fear that I might be.  I should start by saying I have studied it a bit, and have a degree in Physics from MIT, but I'm certainly not an expert, and many of its intricacies I'm sure lie buried by the detritus of years of other thoughts.  I'd like to lay out the outline of an idea, as much to get it down so it won't be forgotten.
Very briefly and somewhat loosely, the multi-universe interpretation of quantum mechanics says that everything that can happen will happen; when a random event occurs (say one with two outcomes), the universe splits into two universes - in one the first outcome holds, in the second the second outcome holds.  Wikipedia has a fairly decent overview here, worth taking a moment to scan.  At first this explanation sounds a bit extreme, wasteful in universes, so to speak.  But it does address some fundamental issues that are otherwise hard to make sense of, like quantum mechanical wave collapse (when an observation transforms a system properly described by a wave function to one described essentially classically) .  In the multi-universe interpretation, this never needs to happen, because each split universe has its own observer and its own result.

I have a small (and possibly testable) modification to suggest, which I'll get to shortly, after I describe its genesis - or at least the thought that provoked the idea.  It was years ago, and I was driving to work, and pulled into a bank near my office to get some cash - something I'd done many times over the years.  As I pulled in I saw a decent place to park about halfway down the lot, and a thought sprang up unbidden: "If I park there I'll be in an accident."  So, I didn't park there.  I went into the bank, stood in line, got cash, came out - and a car was in that spot, the driver exchanging papers with a second car that had hit it.

This was of course somewhat shocking - it'd never happened before, this isn't the sort of thing that occurs in my life (I can't think of another example, certainly not as striking).  I'm not a mystic, so I began to wonder how it could have happened at all.

I've always wondered about the instant we call "now" - a Euclidean point on the time axis, of zero thickness, has always struck me as somewhat absurd.  Einstein  reportedly said "There is no 'now' in Physics", meaning there is no model of it, no description of it, indeed it doesn't appear in physical theories.  If you give this a few moments of thought it's quite amazing - our only experience of life is in the instant we call 'now', and our physical theories don't consider it at all.

 

My thought after the bank parking lot episode, many years ago, was that maybe we don't proceed through time linearly moving forwards - on average we do, perhaps for thermodynamic reasons, but maybe we move forwards a little, back a little, oscillating about what we consider to be "now".  (If you like you could take the furthest point into the future we go and label that 'now', so all of this oscillation is entirely in the past - it is only a naming convention).  Moving backwards in time would change the physics of brain processes so that it would be very unlikely that we'd have any coherent memories of the future.  Occasionally these might persist, perhaps with enough internal consistency that they would be recognizable as useful information - so I might have been 'remembering' an accident, in a manner that felt like a strong intuition to avoid the situation.  This thought has been lying dormant for a long time - perhaps appropriately, as there seemed no way to test it or explore it further.

 

Back to the multi-universe interpretation: all of those splitting universes seem a bit unnatural.  What if, instead of splits, they are different excursions into the future, that is they all occur in this universe.  Let me describe this by analogy.  Imagine a snow-covered football field, with distance along the field analogous to time (think of one goal line being a few minutes ago, the other being a few minutes on, and where you are being "now").  You start walking at the first goal line, go a few yards, walk back, go forwards again, but perhaps not in the same route; you're moving down the field slowly, but making many tracks forwards and backwards as you go.  These tracks represent the excursions into the future mentioned above, each being something like one of the split universes; and, as you walk, you may interact with the tracks you've already laid down, stumbling over earlier footprints (analogous to the sort of effect one sees in the two-slit experiment, when a photon can 'interfere with itself' and seemingly go through both slits at once), or gravitating to well-trodden areas (analogous to high-probability outcomes).  Eventually you get to the final goal line, and can think over what you've done.

 

Wave function collapse reappears because we're back in one universe, but it might be a tiny bit clearer: Your consciousness holds memories, and those of the future excursions are very weak.  As your mind makes sense of where you are it sees multiple tracks behind it, as perhaps it should (see this interesting paper on the possible literal meaning of the 'sum over histories' technique: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3780/1/quantum_path_integral.pdf)

 

I'm glossing over lots of details, such as the nature interference can have, what provokes the random wandering in time, etc.  Some of these may be fatal to the entire approach.  One implication of this idea is that the movements forwards and backwards in time are discrete (you will walk across a given yard line some integer number of times, indeed an odd number of times); given that interference between the excursions is possible, there might be an experimental way to detect this, how long they might be, etc.

 

The Ideal Minimall

Large supermarkets I don't really like, with the exception of Whole Foods - and even then there is much in the middle of the store (organic toilet paper and the like) that I have no use for.  I tend to shop daily now - life circumstances change fast, with kids doing this and that, so it is hard to plan long-term, and I don't particularly want to most of the time.

For a few years an idea has been bouncing around my head - the 'ideal minimall'.  It would have four separate stores as its core.  One would be a good butcher shop, with a knowledgeable butcher and a wide selection of meats - quality meats, meaning no hormones, antibiotics, etc.  Local organic meats would be ideal, but that's probably not practical.  I'd also like to be able to find the kinds of things that supermarkets no longer seem to carry, like bones for making stock, or the more unusual organs (for that occasional haggis craving).

Next to this would be a greengrocer, a thing so rare that the term seems to be falling out of use.  A place to get quality vegetables, run by a person who knows something about them.  I would add fruit to this store as well.

The third store would be a fish market.  We have some fish markets in the area, and given the proximity to the sea and the existence of a local fishing fleet, these are pretty good.  The selection can be limited in some, and in others the staff doesn't seem to know as much as it should.  One of my favorites was one in Waltham, MA (I don't remember the name) which seemed to have 3 or 4 people working at all times, had a large selection, and was a place one could buy things like fishheads or lobster bodies for stock and stew purposes.  Of course there has to be enough business to justify the stock size, and enough turnover to maintain quality, so this might be difficult.  One think I love about Whole Foods is their seafood, which seems to be of high quality at every store - so I'm sure it's doable.

The fourth store would be a bakery.  Supermarket bakeries seem to bake premade or preformulated mixtures - I'm sure it guarantees uniform quality, but that quality isn't very high.  One of my fond memories from childhood is walking into a (good) bakery, and smelling the buttery sweetness that seemed to hang in the air.  A good bakery should do the full range of baked goods, from breads to cakes and pastry. 

Of course all of these stores would be able to handle custom orders, and ought to have knowledgeable staff that could offer advice as necessary. 

There might be other stores as well - a liquor store (perhaps more focused on wine than hard liquors) would be a nice addition, and a cheese/dairy outlet would be a fine addition, particularly if the products were from local farms.  A coffeehouse at one end of the minimall might provide a nice gathering place as well.

One could drive in to such a minimall and stroll from store to store, assembling a dinner.  One would likely have to make occasional trips to supermarkets for soaps, napkins, etc., but I think this sort of minimall might be quite an attraction.  One way to do it would be to find an investor willing to put up the money to buy or build the physical infrastructure, then lease to the individual markets, perhaps also with some equity in those businesses as well.  Such a plan would have to cover the contingencies of a market failing, or key personal leaving, but that shouldn't be insurmountable. 

Issues When Working With MP3s

I recently spent some time trying to put my collection of .mp3 audio files in better shape; this has been an ongoing project for years.  There really aren't any good tools to do it, which, given the popularity of that file format, is somewhat surprising.  I usually find myself doing one task in one app, then a different task in a different app.  Part of the reason I thought to write this post is to see if others have had similar experiences, or found solutions to some of the problems.

My ultimate, ideal goal is to have each .mp3 file be 'complete', with music, lyrics, album art, and credits for everyone who worked on that particular piece.  This would actually be useful - for example, one might want to listen to every piece of music Alan Parsons worked on (beyond the Alan Parsons Project).  One might trace careers of writers, producers, etc. if the tags were complete.

Another goal I've had is to attach years to each piece of music.  The goal would be to let me select music that I might hear on a radio station in a given year, say, 1977.  Of course radio stations play older music, so players really should have some algorithms for picking music from earlier times to add to the playlist.  But attaching years is a necessary first step.

This is harder than it might seem, because work is republished.  If one takes a CD issued recently, the dates attached to the album and the music will be recent, even if the CD is a re-issue of an older album.  The problem is worse with compilations - the dates are often determined by the ISBN of the CD, not the original issue dates of the music.

I've found attaching dates to be an interesting but laborious process - looking up a given song one might find much earlier versions, live versions, long versions, short versions for AM radio play, etc.  I try to use a date that reflects when I might first have heard it on the radio.  In part its interesting because some of the older versions show the evolution of the song.  For instance, while trying to date Taco's "Puttin' On the Ritz" I found that the song had been written by Irving Berlin in 1929, with several notable versions (Clark Gable 1939, Fred Astaire 1946) before Taco's version in 1983.  See for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puttin'_on_the_Ritz.  A surprising number of rock songs go back to early Blues songs of the 1910-1920 period, with likely earlier, but undocumented, roots.

Just managing the MP3s isn't trivial - take 'artist name', a category in pretty much every player or library app.  Now, should The Beatles be listed as "The Beatles" (which will sort with the "T"s), "Beatles" (which will sort well, but isn't the real band name), or "Beatles, The" (which kind of gets at both the real name and the right sort order).  Ideally player and library software should let you specify the name as "The Beatles", which is the correct artist name, but then show this in an alphabetical list under the "B"s, not the "T"s.   Almost inevitably one will have some songs in both categories, and the separation of B and T is such that it may be quite hard to notice this.

Some band names are listed inconsistently, e.g. Pinkard & Bowden or Pinkard and Bowden.  Some music pieces are by a particular band, but feature a guest artist - one would like this piece listed for both the band and the artist.  Then there are case issues, e.g. John McCutcheon vs. John Mccutcheon - these kinds of spelling variants creep in for a variety of reasons.  And, would one like to find the music of Carlos Santana in the "C"s or in the "S"s?  Add to this foreign names with accent marks (sometimes); bands which stay the same but make small changes to their names (e.g. John Cougar, John Cougar Mellencamp, etc.).  Semantically these should be grouped together, but they won't be.

For classical music I describe the composer as last name first, then first and middle names.  It's just how I think of classical music.  There may be other genres with other common guidelines as well.  And, while on the topic of classical music, I often tell my player to play in random order - but I really would never want to mix classical and, say, rock.  This isn't trivial to achieve; of course one may construct playlists of all classical or all rock, but then when one adds new music one must update these playlists.  The player foobar 2000 does some dynamic list assembly, which is a start.  It is a good player, but I have yet to fully tame it, and don't really have the time to dedicate to figuring it out.

Then there is 'genre': one player of mine has hundred of genres, many I just don't understand.  I don't know what "Trip Hop" is, nor how "Electronic" differs from "Electronica".  What I'd like is a smaller subset that isn't too ambiguous, and a way to constrain any new entries in the library to use one of the existing genres that I've found acceptable.  In the absence of this, I've taken to using a kind of 'path' approach, so that similar genres appear next to each other when sorted - so I'll have "guitar" (meaning guitar instrumentals), then "guitar: Spanish", "guitar: electric", etc. 

Then there is 'album': many of the songs I've got have appeared on multiple albums, e.g. the original release album and perhaps a 'greatest hits' album later on, or a different kind of compilation, perhaps one containing many artists (e.g., a Christmas album).  I would really like to link the song to all of those albums, but there is usually no way of doing this (short of keeping duplicate songs around).

'Rating': many players and managers keep ratings for songs in a separate database, not in the mp3 file itself.  I'm not sure why - perhaps because the ratings are personal, and the songs are assumed to be shared, though that makes little sense.  Every once in a while I'd have to rebuild the database for an app, and all of that information would be lost.  I find it to be very useful when putting together playlists, so I adopted a somewhat radical approach: I have subdirectories named "5", "4", "3", etc., and I move all the songs rated 5 into the "5" subdirectory.  If I have to reestablish the ratings in a given player I sort the songs by file path, then select all of those in the "5" subdir and set their rating to 5.  It takes a few minutes, but is far better than losing that information.

So - that's a quick list of issues I've had when trying to manage my mp3 library.  With all of the money and time that's been poured into the production and sale of these, I'm surprised no one has done a player or library manager that can handle all of these issues.  Foobar 2000 seems to come closest, but it's always doing something a bit strange, and I just haven't had the time to master its idiosyncracies.  I would very much like feedback on how others have dealt with these problems.

Government ≠ Society

There's much talk nowadays about the apparently irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right. In nearly all of this talk I think one important, indeed central, point is missed. Acknowledging it will be a necessary first step in finding common ground, the sort needed to craft future policies with broad support.

Those on the Left argue that government should be used to advance social welfare in all its forms, beginning with providing basic necessities. One hears phrases like "No one should starve in a civilized society", or "Everyone deserves health care". These ends are pursued through various forms of legislation, taxation, 'redistribution' of income, etc.

Those on the Right (and by this I mean what people are beginning to call "Conservatives", or even classical Liberals) view government as a necessary but limited institution, largely because of the danger its power presents. As George Washington said, "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." Liberty takes precedence over goals, however noble, because otherwise government power will eventually expand without limit. It is this outlook that is at the root of the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, and of course has helped ensure basic freedoms for quite some time now.

Can these two views of government be reconciled, at least to the extent that policies may be found that are acceptable to both the Left and the Right? I believe it might be possible - that the social goals of the Left may be pursued while respecting the libertarian requirements of the Right. As the wealth of the world grows, enabling more and vaster collective social projects, it will be increasingly important to get this right.

I think the problem stems from confusing 'society', or even 'civilization', with the government. Without this distinction I believe we will be doomed to a relatively primitive stage of political development. This confusion shows up quite frequently, and few seem aware of it. A recent letter in the Wall Street Journal about Obama's health care proposals noted that some key ones should pass because "Society should guarantee basic health care". What struck me was the unwarranted assumption that " Society = Government". At first this seemed innocuous, perhaps because I'd heard statements like it for years; but on second thought it expresses a somewhat extreme world view, that government is the only significant social actor. Why would anyone think that? How did this idea get traction?

I know from local politics that the resources government has act as a great draw - for instance, for small nonprofits, getting funds from the government is usually much easier than raising them independently. Fund raising requires time, effort, expense, and offers no sort of guaranteed return. On the other hand, gov't are of such a scale that the lobbying efforts required are paid back many times over. Government is the one easily accessible institution that can provide this kind of support. Then there are projects seemingly possible only to something with the resources of the federal government: building the Panama Canal, going to the moon, etc. This is often mistakenly used as justification - because the government is the only actor capable of acting, that it should. In a society with relatively little wealth, it may indeed be the case that the government is the only entity with the resources for large-scale projects, but as the wealth of the citizenry increases, this is less and less true. There are many billionaires now; Bill Gates has a net worth of nearly $100 billion. Individuals such as this, and particularly groups of such individuals, are capable of marshalling resources comparable to that of many sovereign states.

What are the implications of declaring that "Government ≠ Society", not only philosophically but practically? This distinction may offer some surprising solutions, generally involving social actors capable of substantial efforts but without the coercive power of government.

Consider the following proposal - intended as an example more than as an actual policy proposal, though some variant of it might well be practical. Government functions are divided into two parts: the "libertarian core" and the "optional social support" components. Your tax bill is similarly partitioned; and you only have to pay the bill for the "libertarian core" part. You're encouraged and expected to pay the "optional social support" part as well, but it's not required. Whether you do or not (or the percentage of it that you pay) is public information.

This should satisfy the most libertarian citizen - no longer will state power be used to extract money from citizens for projects of dubious constitutionality. It might well satisfy the most progressive citizen as well, as it would remove the moral and constitutional barriers to many efforts to alleviate perceived problems. Would it work? Would people pay more than they were absolutely required to? They might if it affected how they were perceived in society, whether they were hired by certain companies, or their chances when running for office ("Candidate X always paid the bare minimum!"). And of course if it wouldn't work, if the citizenry rejected funding social initiatives dreamed up by politicians, perhaps that's a better outcome - a kind of national referendum on those initiatives.

One could modify this proposal in many ways to make it more practical and effective, but I offer it as only one of many possible innovations that might spring to mind once one has broken away from the idea that society's only agent is government. We may eventually look back and see that the separation of social reform efforts from government is as necessary a step as the separation of church and state, and for similar reasons: social reform is usually predicated on a particular view of what an ideal society should be, and there are a multiplicity of such views, just as there are different religious catmas and dogmas. In a free society these choices should not be made because of government coercion.

Until then, we face the issues that arise when the coercive power of the state is used to further questionable ends, often for political reasons. As Robert Heinlein said, "A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul" - it is this sort of politics that can corrupt democracy.

"When" We Are

I've been watching over my kids' shoulders as they take history classes, both in high school and college, and I got thinking about the class titles: "ancient history", "modern history", and so forth. It's not that I have any quarrel with these labels, but they seem far too optimistic. I think we're now living in the ancient world.

I don't mean that life hasn't changed since, say, A.D. 1. Rather, when some students a few thousand years in the future look back, our times will be grouped with more primitive eras, and be considered the mere beginnings of civilization. I'm not sneering at life nowadays, or saying that we're still barbarians; in fact we may have most of the ideas today that will be alive and well in a few thousand years. But these ideas aren't widespread, they're intermixed with a lot of nonsense, and we have no traditions or mechanisms to pass them on to future generations.

Our knowledge and experience is very very new. Literacy itself, at least in widespread form, is a relatively recent occurrence. It was only within the last 100 years or so that humans managed to set foot on all the continents of the Earth (Antarctica being the holdout; that was discovered in 1821). The wave of Europeans and others who migrated to the Americas goes back perhaps 500 years, but has had significant waves within living memory. We've only been able to map the planet within the last 100 years or so.

Our knowledge of ourselves, primarily through biology but also through psychology, sociology, economics, and political science is quite incomplete. While it may never be fully complete, it isn't unreasonable to think that at some point we will have a deeper and essentially stable knowledge of human physiology, nature, and behavior. The physical sciences have advanced further, amazingly so, but much of that has been within the last 100 years as well: quantum mechanics and relativity both arose within that period. We still don't know many answers concerning the nature of the universe, and we may not even know the right questions.

Politically we seem awfully capable of forgetting lessons we've painfully learned time and time again; the same pathologies seem to keep returning in altered forms in different eras. I would like to hope that in the future we are all free, with autonomous spheres of action untouched and unregulated by any level of government. There always seems to be someone coming along with an agenda that requires abridgement of freedoms, and it never leads anywhere good. I hope that after a few thousand years we will have gotten it right, and know enough not to yet again repeat mistakes. When we do, we'll look back at this time the way we now look back at a time of tribes, small kingdoms, or city states.

It will be interesting to see how religion fares in what is likely to be an increasingly rational and scientific world. If it stands against hubris, it may be an essential element to a world in which humans have increasing power to alter the world. If it stands against reason, it will be lost. I wish we allowed no religion to advocate or encourage killing. Most say they do not, but a cursory glance through history will show substantial exceptions. Any ideology that aims to provide a comprehensive explanation for the world and all the answers to all of the questions seems inevitably to get to the point where it must forciby eliminate doubters. We ought to have learned this pattern by now, and recognize and call it for what it is.

In every area we're learning more, but an equal if not greater challenge is passing this knowledge on. Every generation starts over, with of course no innate knowledge beyond what has been built in genetically; there is little reason to think that human beings will be much different in a thousand years, so the culture and education that exist at that time will have to pass on all that we do discover. This seems so very fragile to me.

Maybe figuring this out, how to pass along accumulated knowledge and wisdom without placing a straightjacket on thought and behavior, will be the advance that will move us beyond our current era. Just as we think of the rise of rationality in the Renaissance as the root of the modern era, perhaps in a few thousand years the development of techniques for the preservation and propagation of wisdom will be seen as the key turning point, the one that finally got us out of our 'ancient' phase.