How Eggs Hatch

I have noticed an appalling lack of knowledge in our culture about the hatching of eggs. In movies and online, they typically show the hatching creature bursting from the egg, all at once, with shards flying everywhere. This is my attempt to correct this problem. This pattern should hold true for any hard-shelled animal, so if a dragon, for instance, has a hard shell, it would also hatch in this way. If it had a leathery shell like other reptiles, hatching would look different, but then you wouldn't really have people carrying them around and trading them and all those things you do with dragon eggs.

Incubating a chick egg takes exactly three weeks, which is kind of amazing. Twenty-one days to grow from a microscopic cell to a walking, cheeping ball of cuteness... how come people can't do that? I suppose I should be grateful that nobody is planning on eating my nine-month incubated baby...

So, a few days before hatching, the chick breaks through the inner membrane and receives her first breath of air (I say her, because chicks are all female until proven guilty). You can hear tapping and cheeping, and see the egg rock back and forth. 

A day or so later, the chick has managed to make a small hole in the fat end of the egg. We call this stage pipping: 

After this, the chick takes a well deserved break. She may remain still for several hours. Finally she begins to make the hole larger. She's moving in a circle, chipping away piece at a time. We call this zipping:

After an hour or so, the chick has made a line all the way around the top part of the egg. Now she needs to struggle and thrash, moving around until she can squeeze through the hole she has made and emerge into the light:

She isn't very cute yet. She's a scrawny little thing resembling a dinosaur with proportionally huge legs. She doesn't walk very smoothly either. She stumbles around and tumbles over and looks very awkward. But give her a few hours to dry off, and practice using those legs. Then she'll fluff up and turn into that adorable fluff-ball we all recognize:

So, now you know. No more of this instantaneous bursting nonsense. Right?

Why Do You Write?

   Christie Valentine Powell

When reading about writing, I sometimes come across people asking why you want to write, and more particularly, why you want to be published. At first, I had no idea how I should answer the question. The first words coming to mind were “because I have to”.  I’m sure every writer daydreams about lots of money, being recognized on the street, dangling hints to adoring fans… but I knew those were not my main purposes. It took a lot of thinking (and writing) to understand why I put myself through this—the hours in front of a screen, the dozens of false starts when trying to get a story going, the rejections when you start attempting publication, the criticism after. Why do I write?

Reason 1: Because I Can’t Stop

I wrote my first story in second grade. It was about a pair of dogs who were left behind in a move and struggled to catch up with their former owners. It covered the front and back of one sheet of paper.

When I was in fourth grade, my family got an ancient computer, and I would beg to go on it and type. I would turn in chapters to my encouraging teacher. The main story was “The Elephant”, which included, among other things, a subplot involving the children of the current presidential candidates’ children learning to get along.

In sixth grade Language Arts, my teacher assigned a journal, in which we could write whatever we liked. I started off, and the plot soon led me to Pokémon, which I had just discovered. I was hooked. Through all of middle school, it was a rare thing to see me without a binder full of scribbled pages clutched to my chest. I told a few people that the best way to save trees would be to steal my pen. A few of my best friends also wrote Pokémon stories, and we enjoyed sharing them and making each other into characters. There is a picture in our 8^th grade yearbook of me pouring over a notebook, with the caption “Christie Valentine tallies results from a survey”. I most certainly was not tallying results from a survey.

I finally moved on to non-Pokémon subjects in High School as dreams about publication made their way into my personal journal. I still have many of the small scribbled stories I wrote then. The first, “Keep It Wild”, was about talking animals living on an invented African island. Eventually I started a dystopian story set in the desert around my home that kept me busy through most of college.

One night I had a dream which combined a group of magical people who had lived in my imagination since 7^th grade with medieval kingdoms and royalty. It became the spark that led to the Spectra, the manuscript I am working on right now and trying to publish.

Reason 2: To Express Emotion

I started my first journal when I was ten, and have never stopped. Sometimes I wrote to record my doings, but more often, especially when I was around thirteen, I used them to sort out my feelings. I was not encouraged to rant and rave when upset, so writing became my native tongue to express my thoughts and feelings, especially my angry ones. As I practiced, I found that writing helps me to understand the problem and find out how to deal with it. It also helps me to calm down before confronting others. I write other things in my journal as well, but writing is still the way I deal with strong emotion. Writing involves asking questions, and searching to find the words helps me to discover how I really feel.

Reason 3: Control

In my fourteen year old journal, I wrote that I wished life was more like writing, because that was where I felt in control. Being a teenager is hard. You don’t know enough to be in control (though you think you do), and the longing to take charge of your life grates against every person who seems to be trying to shape your life without your say-so. It gets only a little better as an adult. There will always be forces outside of your control, and they will intrude on your life whether you fight or not. Writing is a sanctuary. It’s a place where you make the rules, shape the people, control the world. And in doing so, it teaches you how to manage things, lessons that you can take with you back to the real world.

Reason 4: Learning Skills

One afternoon, the woman driving my high school’s carpool told me that my writing was a waste of time. I knew better than to argue with her, but I also knew she was wrong. I once told my mother that all I needed to do was to wait for the right idea, but I quickly learned better. Writing a good story has very little to do with ideas. It has to do with skill, and skill comes from practice. I still treasure the stories I wrote when I was younger, but even the ones lost forever were not a waste of time, no more than a piece of music is wasted if it is played where no one else can hear.

Writing skills need to be practiced, and those skills can be applied to more than just future stories. We live in a world of reading and writing. Those skills are needed to write essays in school. They are needed to write letters to friends, family, and officials. They are needed to write speeches and lessons, petitions and opinions.

Writing abilities are not the only things learned from crafting stories. They help you learn how to organize your thoughts. They help you learn how to fit ideas together in a way that makes sense. They help you understand people. They help you pay attention to details around you. And they help you to communicate.

Reason 5: Communication

Writing is a form of communication. The whole purpose of writing, the whole reason writing was invented, was to convey information. Expression, control, and learning are ways that writing can help an individual communicate with themselves. Sometimes that’s enough, and those pieces don’t need to be published to fulfil their purpose.

One night when I was around 16, I was pondering about writing when five words came to my mind. “Show them how you see”. That’s what writing is. Deep inside each of us is yearning to connect with others. Writers take a look at their own soul, paste it across a page, and send it into the world. We want people to see who we are. We want to show them how we see the world. We want to offer our souls so that others can see themselves in us and know that they are not alone.  That is why we send a piece of our heart into the world, knowing that rejection and criticism will follow. That is why I write.

Shelled

This is an untitled poem I found in my 14-year-old journal that I think still applies today. I  copied the spelling and grammar exactly.

Like a turtle, egg, or snail

I also have a shell

When I first meet people, my shell is closed

That’s why people think I’m quiet, I supose

But if people are kind and full of fun

I emerge a little, into the sun

If I’m included in activities

You’ll see how open I can be

I’m sorry it takes me a while to come out

That’s what I do when their’s strangers about.

Give me a while and I’ll come through

Ready to spend more time with you

My shell isn’t as thick as it seems

A small conversation can break through the seams

I hear and observe things when I do not speak

Though emerging scares me, I may come out with a leap.

One little warning before I stop,

I can easily come out of my shell with a pop

But I also go back inside

To a lonely place where I can hide.

On Dogs and Dog Breeding

There are a lot of ethical questions about dog breeding. I don’t have many answers, but I wanted to share some of the things that I’ve learned as I’ve tried to understand more about the ethics of keeping and breeding dogs. I’ve gone through my personal history with dogs and some of the research I undertook when I started becoming interested in breeder ethics and genetic implications, so that others who love dogs and are interested in learning might have a few more points to ponder in order to come to their own conclusions about dog ethics and the future of dog breeding.

My Life in Dog Years

Dogs were always part of my life. My earliest memories include Curly, some sort of poodle-like mix who adopted my mother when she most needed a friend. Curly hated children in general and me in particular, and it’s surprising I went on to care for dogs so much.

When I was around seven, our family bought a dachshund to be a family dog and a breeder. Frankie (named because she was shaped like a frankfurter, but on her papers she was known as Francine Von Valentine) soon became part of our family. We made friends with a local dachshund breeder and had a bit of a relationship with her. Soon raising dachshund puppies became a part of my life. At times I loved it, especially when I got to name one of the pups from each litter. At others, usually right after Frankie had eaten one of my hamsters or some other pet that had escaped its cage, I was certain that all dachshunds were spawn of the devil and the most awful, ruthless creatures on earth.

The local breeder (let’s call her Karen) had a large piece of property on the outskirts of town with kennels full of show dogs. When I was older, I would sometimes work a day or two at her place. I would fill water and food bowls, and go into each run with a special pooper-scooper. It wasn’t nearly so bad as it sounds, and I enjoyed playing with each dog when its kennel was clean. I decided which colors and shapes were my favorite, and had secret pet names for my favorites, which I would imagine Karen suddenly becoming generous and giving to me. In middle school, I told my job counselor that I wanted to be a dog breeder when I grew up, sometimes dachshunds, but more often some other breed I was researching at the time.

The year I started high school, I got my first dog, one of Frankie’s pups we had sold that the new owner no longer wanted. She was from Frankie’s last litter, born on Christmas day as all of our visiting relatives looked on. We had given her a Christmas name, perhaps Jingle Bell or Angel, but her new family had called her Gidget. When she came to me, my daydreams had been filled with a puppy, younger than her, but the same color and hair-length, and I gave her the name of that imaginary pup: Dawn. We had babysat a dog with the same name earlier that I had bonded with, and I chose the long name New Day Dawning, assuming that once I got my new special dog it would be like a new beginning to all things bright and beautiful. While not quite as amazing as my daydreams, we did develop a close relationship—one of my high school friends told me that I had told her I preferred my dog to human company. I do not remember saying such a thing, but it doesn’t surprise me. I worked at Karen’s to pay off stud fees so that I could breed Dawn, and earned money for my first digital camera, and extra put away for college.

Leaving for college began my first dogless years.  Dawn remained at home with my family and their other dachshunds. I continued to research different breeds and pined away for a dog of my own. Finally, after I graduated, with husband and new daughter, we moved to a trailer park and were able to get a family dog. I decided that some sort of spaniel would be a good family dog, so we chose a cocker spaniel- basset hound mix named Buster. Things did not go well. I became pregnant not long after, and suddenly I had no more patience for stinking floors, chewed belongings, or leashes yanked out of my hands. We moved, and Dawn, now elderly, came to live with us and was little more than a quiet shadow behind Buster. Then Buster bolted past me one day, and I, a brand-new mom, did not have the strength to chase after him. He came back, but died a few hours later from anti-freeze poisoning. My husband and daughter mourned him, and I felt sad for their sakes. Dawn, who had always been an outside dog with many canine companions, became an only pet, and the transition has been difficult for all of us. We struggle with puddling indoors and yapping whenever we leave her outdoors, but we are working on our relationship and she will remain with us until her natural death or until her aging prevents her from enjoying life as a dog. We hope to try again in the future, which I will explain later on.

Discovering Breeder Ethics

When I went to college I also began spending more time online. I soon found out that other people, especially those who haunt pet forums and who write library books, have very defined ideas on the subject. The only accepted means of getting a dog are from a rescue or from a “reputable breeder”, which is someone who fulfills a huge list of requirements, from winning dog shows to genetic testing to absolutely never making a profit but working tirelessly to “improve the breed”. My family were called “backyard breeders”, the scum of the earth, terrible greedy thugs who made money out of their innocent pets and caused the deaths of hundreds of dogs in animal shelters.

I certainly did not think of my family in that way, but some of their points made sense to me. There is a pet overpopulation, and there are perfectly good pets in the shelters. It seemed to me that the registration should mean something more than an elevated price tag. On the other hand, I still wanted dog breeding to be part of my life, and a part of my children’s lives. I didn’t think it was right either, that the only people influencing the future of dog breeding were supposed to be either the independently wealthy breeders or the hap-hazard ignorant masses whose dogs end up in the shelters, or that the only dogs available were supposed to be the extremely expensive show winners ($800 is considered cheap) or the gamble with a shelter or rescue. In any case, I decided that maybe jumping the hoops and trying to be a reputable AKC breeder was the answer.

AKC Dog Shows

Popular opinion holds that the only purebred dog worth looking at comes from the AKC (other registries such as the CKC and APR, we are told, are simply ways for backyard breeders or worse, puppy mills, to claim that their dogs are worth more money).  The AKC, the American Kennel Club, focuses on conformation shows, where dogs are compared to their breed’s standard of perfection and judged by how close they resemble that perfect dog. Perfection is impossible, and if it ever is reached, the standard will be readjusted so that over time the breed will be “improved”. Conformation shows are not beauty pageants, the AKC folks stress. The dogs are judged on their personalities as well as looks, and the standards were written originally with traits that made them better fit to their purpose. For instance, the shape of a dog’s legs might mean it is a better runner, which makes it better able to hunt or herd sheep. The dog’s color proves that it is a pure dog and has not been outcrossed with some other breed that show different features. Dog shows were originally intended as a way to evaluate breeding stock—only the best dogs, the winners of the shows, are supposed to be bred.

The UKC (United Kennel Club) is something of a gray area. Some consider it another “scumball registry”, while others  find it legitimate. It registers more breeds than the AKC and places more emphasis on working abilities. The AKC sponsors shows besides conformation shows, from herding trials to agility to obedience, but the UKC places much more importance on those competitions. Its conformation events are more low-key (partly because they ban hiring professional handlers to show your dog for you), which make them more enjoyable for newcomers to visit.

I went to several shows, both AKC and UKC, and I checked out books and tried to puzzle out the complicated point systems. I was proud of my new knowledge, and I thought it would be exciting to use it to prove myself and the dog I might get were champions, but there was one big draw back: money. The entry fees are not huge, but they add up. It is not possible to get a championship without winning at least three shows, but that would be ridiculously lucky—ten to twenty wins would be more likely, and even the greatest dogs do not win every show they enter. In the area I lived at the time, there were two shows a year. In order to “finish” a dog, I would need to travel across the country, week after week. Besides travelling costs, you need grooming equipment, crates, leads, travelling equipment for dogs. This path, I found out, is not an option for those who are not independently wealthy, or for those who have priorities besides dogs such as family, friends, work, religion, or other activities.

Farm Collies

While at college I also started researching homesteading and hobby farming. I loved the idea of raising and making most of our own products and becoming truly independent. What could be more satisfying than raising sheep, spinning the wool into yarn, and crocheting it into finished products, I wondered. With my interest in farming, I naturally started to turn toward herding dog breeds. At first this meant the usual AKC breeds, the Belgian shepherds or perhaps an Australian shepherd. Then I stumbled onto a different dog breed, one that was regesterable only with the UKC but not the AKC—the English shepherd. This was the dog that worked on farms in the olden days, the dog that would herd the sheep, guard the fences, kill the vermin, and babysit the children on his days off. This was certainly the dog for my someday farm, I decided.

The English shepherd folks are quite critical of the AKC. You can’t tell a dog’s worth by its appearance, they say. The AKC is just a bunch of judgmental aristocrats. It’s cruel to put a dog through all the stress of a conformation competition in order to judge them on looks alone. My dog would have been disqualified because  the white mark on his neck touches the white mark on his head, and that two inches of white fur might have scared the sheep, a dog owner says sarcastically. I remembered some of the people at the AKC shows I met who snapped at me because I brought a stroller that might distract their dogs, or because I extended my hand toward a dog and might have petted it and mussed his fur. Aristocratic jerks indeed, I agreed.

When I moved to a new state, a search for dog breeders in this area lead me to discover another branch of farm dogs—the Scotch collie. The Scotch collie and English shepherd folks don’t get along very well—the English shepherd people say that the Scotch collies are a recent attempt to recreate a breed that is already extinct, while the collie folks pull out their pedigrees and insist that their founders were truly the original collie dog of Lassie fame. In any case, the Scotch collie people claim to be the true collie, the collie that lived on old farms before people turned away from “regular dogs” and started focusing on show animals. It was while looking at the difference  between these dogs that I began to realize what purebred dogs really are.

The Problem with Purebreds

The AKC, as I’ve stated already, believes in “improvement”. They took the working collie and began to emphasize some of his physical features, such as his long coat and pointed nose. They did this over and over, always improving, until they obtain the modern collie. Some animal experts call this dog a “brainless ice-pick”, a dog with such a long pointed face that it has no room for brains, eyes so small that many are born blind, and a huge coat that takes hours to comb. This is improvement.  Their hunters can’t hunt. Their sheep dogs can’t even see the sheep through the fur on their faces. Many of their smaller dogs, intended to be pets, take more hours to groom than a bride on her wedding day. Some dogs have such strange shapes that they cannot breed unless their handler holds them in place, while others cannot give birth without C-section because of the shape of their heads. This is the “reputable breeding” that our popular culture commends. When diseases started springing up, caused by this improvement, the AKC began genetic testing, filtering out the dogs that carry certain defects and reducing the gene pool even further.

The AKC accelerates these kind of problems by emphasizing extreme physical characteristics, but all purebred registries have inherent problems. If you look at the genetics, over time all populations tend to become more and more uniform. This means that any genetic defects will become more common over time, especially those that can be carried on recessively, so that a healthy individual can have children with these problems. In nature, this is overcome by having such a large population that random changes in genetic information happen as fast or faster than the uniformity, creating a constantly changing, constantly balanced, ultimately healthy population. Purebred registries create difficulties by shrinking the population size, which means that the uniformity (especially when dogs are selected to be more and more alike) will happen faster than changes, and defects become more and more common.

In her fascinating book, Animals in Translation, animal psychology expert Temple Grandin explained,

People probably put much more constructive selection pressures on mutts. A mutt who bites people, or who destroys the house by chewing everything in site, has an excellent chance of being sent to the pound or put to sleep. That means his genes will be removed from the gene pool. Just about the only mixed-breed dogs who get to reproduce are the ones who are well adapted to living with people—and good at getting out of the yard… With purebred dogs the selection pressures are completely different, and a lot of them are negative… This is just a theory, but there’s plenty of evidence on the emotional and behavioral problems of purebred dogs versus mixed breeds to support the hypothesis that the selection pressures on mutts are more constructed. For one thing, mutts are physically healthier…Mutts are also more likely to be emotionally stable…Purebreds were responsible for the large majority of fatal dog bites, not mutts. “Animals in Translation”, Temple Grandin, pp. 82-83

I would like to see more dog breeders who use practical traits more than pedigrees and physical appearances to mold their ideal dogs. Chickens and a few other livestock breeds have an open registry, which means that individuals are registered by their traits alone and not by their pedigrees. As of this writing, Scotch collie breeders have an open registry. Another good group is the American Working Farmcollie Association, which will register dogs based entirely on their herding, hunting, and guarding abilities. Other working associations have other groups.

Solutions

I don’t have all of the answers. A lot of times, finding new information brings more questions than it does solutions. I think I’ve come up with some resolutions for myself, but I cannot claim to have the answers for the entire species, or for the entire culture. My hope is that I can share what I have learned and let others continue their own research and come to their own conclusions.

Population Control

I'm the oldest of a very large family, and I always wanted my own large family as well. I've also always been interested in learning about animals and conservation. As a child I never thought that the two might be considered at odds with each other. I read descriptions of habitat loss and ZooBooks' not-so-subtle hints that we have a human overpopulation problem without taking much notice. In high school my English teacher constantly liked to talk about our population problems and joked about programs to limit the number of children one can have. I felt that was wrong, and I knew my religion encouraged having children, but until college I didn't really have a solid position on the subject.

Lessons From Religion

The first concept I learned came from religion. The Doctrine and Covenants 104:17-18 states:

17 For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves.

 18 Therefore, if any man shall take of the abundance which I have made, and impart not his portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, he shall, with the wicked, lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment.

It made plenty of sense to me. The Lord created the earth and made sure there were plenty of resources to care for the people he created. The problem lies with people who hog all of the resources instead of allowing others to take care of themselves. It reminds me of the agricultural fields around the city where I live--gleaning was banned because people would hoard all of the food and then open vegetable stands to sell what was intended to help everyone.

Another concept I came upon while in college was the idea that Satan, the enemy of all mankind, was fighting to destroy the place where we live. His goal is to make men miserable and to hinder the work of the Lord, and it makes a lot of sense that one of his targets is to make the earth uninhabitable or at least less beautiful. But I think there's enough information out there on this subject, and our culture seems to be erring from caring too much about the earth instead of the other way around, so I'll move on.


History and Innovation

People have been worried about over population for a long time. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich stated:

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

If you look at the information he had available, you might be tempted to agree with him. In fact, the technology and practices available at the time were not enough to feed the world's growing population.

Obviously, the world did not collapse in massive famine forty years ago. What happened? At the same time Ehrlich was prophesying , a global movement called the Green Revolution was beginning.People made new discoveries and inventions which allowed farming to be much more productive.For example, Norman Borlaug bred new types of wheat. While "corn... as high as an elephant's eye" is poetic, it's not really that helpful: we don't eat corn stalks. Borlaug began breeding wheat that grows the same amount of food on a smaller plant, resulting in less nutrient and space requirements. While some of the effects of this were negative (widespread pesticide use and the crippling of the family farm, for instance), it also allowed us to support a larger population. More people means more innovators, and innovators help us to live better.


Economics

In order for a population to stay static, each woman needs to have two children survive to adulthood (one to replace her and one for her husband). Currently in the United States the birth rate is about 1.93 children per woman. Most developed countries are below, sometimes far below, this rate. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article claiming that America's baby bust will be the greatest threat to our economic standing (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323375204578270053387770718.html). The number of children being born cannot support the number of people retiring from the baby boom of the 50's.


The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

Open a map on your computer, zoomed out so you can see the whole United States-- google maps works well. Close your eyes and point to a spot on the map. Now zoom in on your spot. When I did it, I pointed to a spot just east of the Gulf of California in Mexico. As far as I can tell, it's about forty miles from any human habitation. My second try hit the Halfbreed Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Montana, about thirty miles from Billings. Chances are pretty good that you didn't hit any human habitations either.

National Geographic recently came out with an issue that highlighted the importance of cities. They explained that having people in a more centralized location lessens the effect on the earth overall. It uses less wildlife habitat, and less gas as people don't need to travel as far. My husband visited a place in Korea where the people living in the "country" live in high-rise buildings with their fields stretched out in all directions around them.

Beatrix Potter says in her retelling of The City Mouse and the Country Mouse, "One place suits one person, and another place suits another. As for me, I prefer to live in the country." I completely agree with her. I'd rather be in the country, but within a short drive of a larger city. In fact, when I was younger I suggested that the entire earth should be divided equally among all of the people, and each should manage and take care of the section they'd been given. I'm old enough to know this wouldn't work, but the principle holds true--no matter where we live, we need to care for what we have.

One way of solving problems on a personal level is the principle of homesteading, which is that each person should try to be as self-reliant as possible, especially in providing food and other goods for their family. On a city, this might mean a pot of herbs in the window. On fact, the best garden I've had yet was a tiny plot in front of our rented duplex, barely big enough for three tomatoes and a zucchini plant smashed between the owner's mandatory rose bush. In the country, this might mean goats, chickens, and a large garden (my eventual goal). The principle remains the same no matter where you live.


Effects of Overpopulation Fears

One of the biggest problems of fearing overpopulation is that almost every solution to the "problem" involve violating the rights of others. Some people do decide not to have children in order to keep from "adding to the problem", but others see fit to force their opinions on others. This includes the murdering of unborn children, forced sterilization, one-child policies, and eugenics. Eugenetics means that someone in authority will decide for the rest of the population who is fit and who is not, and remove those who are not from the population. Hitler's extermination methods are a very extreme, well-known example. Abortion clinics targeting minority races and doctors suggesting abortion for "disabled" babies are less-known examples.



Quality and Quantity

My favorite story came from a college friend. She was attending an event in high school and was assigned a roommate with very different views from her own. The roommate explained that she did not want to have children because of overpopulation. Then she paused and said to my friend, "I'm glad you want to have children, though. The world needs more people like you."

Raise the change you want to see in the world. This is what makes the most sense to me. I for one believe that there are a lot of problems in our culture. I can't change everything, but I can teach my children right from wrong. I can teach my children how to live a good life. And they will go out into the world and interact with others. I will do my bit, and they can do theirs, and goodness will spread, little by little, person by person. Lasting change for the better is never successful when crammed down people's throats. It happens on an individual level, one by one, person by person. And that's how I hope to make a difference.

The Science of Religion: Truth and Fact

While reading comments online and talking to people, I have found that many seem to think that science and religion are incompatible. This feels rather strange to me, as a science graduate from a religious university. Science and religion are completely different things with completely different objectives, and a blanket assumption about their relationship (or lack thereof) is often overly simplified and inherently untrue.

Some people will reject anything called science in favor of their religion, while others will disregard anything religious yet accept anything as long as it's called science. One major cause of this apparent incompatibility is that people do not understand the difference between truth and fact.


1: Truth

Truth is.

In the book 1984, a government leader explains how his organization views truth. He tells the main character that if he believes that he has flown around the room, and the only other person in the room also believes that he has flown around the room, then he has indeed flown around the room. If a trusted leader says that he is holding up four fingers, then he is holding up four fingers, no matter what he is really doing. If a piece of evidence is forgotten, it does not exist.

Obviously, this is not true. The reader knows perfectly well that this man has not flown around the room, that he is holding up only three fingers, and that the piece of evidence does exist.

What is truth? To be brief, truth is.

I think all of us have the capability to understand this. We all accept that some things are. Truth is unalterable, and it exists independent of belief. If everyone in the entire world believed that the earth is flat, it would not change the truth.

Religion is an institution of truth. Of course, not all religions are true--this is impossible, since most of them consider themselves the one and only truth. However, the purpose of religion is to teach truth. Whether correctly or not, religion teaches what is and what is not. Perhaps some individual religions are fact based--perhaps some will claim "we have made many observations, and as far as we are able to understand, this is how things are", but I do not know of any. Sometimes individual teachings will come into conflict with well-established or widely-believed fact, which does create a separation between that particular religion and science, but it does not mean that all religions and all science are incompatible.

How do you know what truth is? This is a very personal, and a very religious, matter.What you accept as truth and what you do not is up to you, but it is important to realize that your acceptance does not make it true. You will have to find things out for yourself. And how do you find out what the truth is? The process most often used for discovering truth is science.


2: Fact
       
When you go to a science class, chances are you will be given a long list of facts that you are required to know. Especially in the early grades, these facts are presented as truth. Students will accept these as truth, and many people still think this way. If science says it, it must be true. As long as some piece of information has the big label with "science" stamped on it, than it's truth. But defining truth isn't science. That's religion. People who think this way will often find that their "religion of science" clashes with other religions. And really, that's not surprising. Religions are rarely compatible with one another.

In science classes, we learn facts, not truths. Caterpillars turn into butterflies. Cells divide to make new cells. Electrons surround atoms. These are all facts.

Most of us accept these as truth. But, as I've already explained, truth is not based on acceptance.

But everyone knows that caterpillars do turn into butterflies, you insist. I've seen them do it.
No. You have seen one caterpillar turn into a butterfly. You may have seen many caterpillars turn into many butterflies. But in order to say that every single caterpillar will turn into a butterfly, or even that every single caterpillar would turn into a butterfly under ideal conditions, you need to make an assumption. You must assume that because this has happened many many times, it will happen in other situations as well.

Science is what makes that assumption. Science says that the more times an individual thing has happened, the more likely it is to be true. When one thing has been proven enough times and under enough different circumstances, it is called fact. Fact is not truth. Fact does not say that something is. It says that something probably is, or that it is as far as we are able to observe, or that it certainly seems that way. But it does not claim to be truth.

Science is a process used to help people decide what is truth. Remember those science projects in elementary school? Those come closest to explaining the true nature of science. You have a statement that you want to prove, so you design an experiment. You control as many factors as you can, and you run your experiment. You get a result. Is that result truth? Maybe. Is that result fact? Well, it's on it's way. You've learned that your caterpillars did turn into butterflies. But what about other kinds of butterflies? What if your caterpillars were unusual? So you run some more experiments, and other people run similar experiments, and after a whole lot of experimenting  you decide that the evidence shows that your statement is true (or false), and that many other people agree with you.

Congratulations. You have a fact.

Is your fact true?

Probably.

The process of science helps us decide what is true. We decide how many experiments it takes for a statement to become fact. We decide what facts we accept as truth, and which we do not.

This process is not limited to caterpillars and cells and electrons. It can be used for anything. In fact, this process is often used in religion. We tell people to "experiment on the word". Pray about it, we say. Ask, and listen for an answer. Try living the commandments and see if they are the correct way to live. These are all scientific experiments. Conduct your own experiments, do your own research, and decide for yourself what it takes for you to accept something as truth. Then you can stand by it and be sure for yourself.

The Meaning of Food

Once when I was a teenager, my family decided to look after a pregnant goat, to decide if we wanted a goat for ourselves or not. Unfortunately, she died while giving birth, but one of her kids, a cute little boy, survived. We raised him by hand and named him Frost. Unfortunately, male goats are not very useful--they don't give milk, they cost a lot to take care of, and if they aren't fixed they become smelly and aggressive. When our baby grew up, he was sold to a family acquaintance who resold him to a family who had him for dinner. I was devastated.  I even replaced my hamburger patty with french fries in protest (my vegetarian stint lasted a single meal).

In college, my plant physiology professor enjoyed making allusions to people while explaining how plants work. "When you're eating a peanut or a pea, you're eating a tiny baby plant that never had a chance to live," he said. The students chuckled and went home to eat their peanut butter and canned peas without a second thought. While not as dramatic or emotional as butchering an animal, I have felt a quick sense of sadness when harvesting spinach or carrots. We nurtured that plant, and it beat the odds of surviving in our infertile backyard, only to be killed now.

The facts of life are simple: in order for us to live, something must die. Some people try to skate around this by assuming that certain species are more important than others. Most don't even think about it. But the fact remains. We cannot create our own energy--we must take it from something else. This is where the homesteader philosophy comes in--the idea that our culture has lost something vital by separating itself from its food source. If your meat shows up wrapped in plastic, or your dinner shows up in a cardboard box, you forget where it comes from. You don't have to think. You don't have to feel.

If you do think about it, you might find that eating is a very religious thing to do. Doesn't it bring to mind Someone else who sacrificed His life so that we could live? My religious teachers taught that the earth is a school and the Atonement is the subject. They would say that every time you eat a meal, you are being taught about sacrifice.

Whether or not you are religious, when you accept that other living things have died so that you can live, it brings to mind one very important question: what am I doing with my (and their) life? I remember as a teenager thinking about the sacrifices that parents make for their children. I knew that repaying them was impossible, but I was not bothered by this. I thought that the way to repay them is to make that sacrifice myself someday and pass on the gifts I had been given. As we continue eating and continue living, the solution becomes as simple as its cause: If something must die for us to live, let us live in the best way we can. Let us make their sacrifices worth it.

Every once and awhile, people may stop to wonder about the purpose of life and what they are doing with their own. Perhaps we are offered the chance to reflect at every single meal. What are we doing with the life that so many have sacrificed to create?

In addition, we have a holiday to reflect on the previous year and to be grateful for our blessings. Harvest celebrations are an important part of cultures all over the world, but ours has been degraded to a day of gluttony. Thanksgiving is not Turkey day any more than Christmas is x-mas. Thanksgiving is a day to reflect on the lives that have touched ours, including the bounty that nature and nature's God have given us. It is a day to remember our own dependency. It is a day to connect with family and friends, who are after all in the same boat. Repayment for our blessings is impossible. This Thanksgiving, I challenge us to ask ourselves what we are doing with our life, and to determine what we need to do to make our lives worthy of the sacrifices they have been given.