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Presidential tweets, however colorful, do not provide the core reasoning upon which societies make policy—it has and will continue to be science.  Science and the respect for science in human growth are hard-won processes that helps free us from a Stone Age mentality. Evolutionary psychology rests on the observation that most of our modern brain traits are still wired for fighting nature, predators, and anyone who gets in our way. Our ‘gut’ reactions to background stimuli (like a rustle in the grass) are an example.   Now, with over seven billion of us still growing on a planet filled with our infrastructures (roads, bridges, pipes) and the repercussions of our growth ( Climate Change , pollution, loss of biodiversity, over consumption), science is a fundamental necessity for humanity moving quickly to address most of our environmental and technical challenges ahead. Science gives our minds a solid frame of reference that helps keep our paleolithic brains in check and adapt ...

In between marching at the March for Science on Earth Day and the People’s Climate March on April 29 th in Washington, DC, I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . The museum reminds us of the unimaginable evil that can be unleashed from within ourselves when we fail to keep our lesser angels in check. Much of the journey through the museum described events that led up to the Holocaust and the systematic slaughtering of six million Jews.  Its purpose was not to provide an excuse for this great human failure, but rather to put us on notice of where our future can stray when we don’t get our priorities straight. An excellent description of this kind of ethical problem is pithily examined in an essay by a local ethics expert, Lawrence Torcello, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology: “There can be no greater crime against humanity than the foreseeable, and methodical, destruction of conditions that make human life possible. Hindsight i...

The complacency by too many Americans while their government is gutting science harkens back to those onerous days in the 1850’s when our fragmented country tried tooth and nail to hold on to slavery—despite the evil. Russia (1723) and the British Empire (1808) had abolished slavery. New York State had made slavery illegal in 1827. Yet, at the federal level: “Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave-holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers”( Wikipedia ). Though most people believed that slavery was truly evil by the 1850’s, most of the public still sat on the sidelines until they were forced into the fray with their very lives, the Civil War, where 600,000 people perished. The war was terrible; it wasn’t inevitable; it could have been prevented had it not been part of our compromised Constitution. We could have given into our better angels. But we didn’t. The Three-Fifths Compromise is...