Is The Ebola Epidemic Just Getting Started?

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Maryn McKenna flags a paper that attempts to calculate the outbreak’s reproductive number (i.e., the number of cases likely to be caused by one infected person) and comes to a startling conclusion:

The Eurosurveillance paper, by two researchers from the University of Tokyo and Arizona State University, attempts to derive what the reproductive rate has been in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. … They come up with an R of at least 1, and in some cases 2; that is, at certain points, sick persons have caused disease in two others. You can see how that could quickly get out of hand, and in fact, that is what the researchers predict. Here is their stop-you-in-your-tracks assessment:

In a worst-case hypothetical scenario, should the outbreak continue with recent trends, the case burden could gain an additional 77,181 to 277,124 cases by the end of 2014.

That is a jaw-dropping number.

In an NYT op-ed last Thursday, Michael Osterholm sounded an even more dire warning:

The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice. If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola. Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico. Why are public officials afraid to discuss this? They don’t want to be accused of screaming “Fire!” in a crowded theater — as I’m sure some will accuse me of doing. But the risk is real, and until we consider it, the world will not be prepared to do what is necessary to end the epidemic.

What is necessary, in his view, is a Security Council resolution that would “give the United Nations total responsibility for controlling the outbreak”. The Pentagon has asked Congress for “up to $500 million” to help fight the outbreak, but there’s a catch:

The Defense Department plans to also use at least a portion of those funds to respond to the growing refugee crisis in Iraq. When the Pentagon wants to shift that much money between its accounts, it’s required to send what’s called a reprogramming request to Congress. The Defense Department has offered no details about the breakdown, which means it’s theoretically possible the United States could spend $1 on Ebola and $499,999,999 on Iraq.

“The situations in both Iraq and West Africa are dynamic, and the funds we are seeking to reprogram will help enable [the Defense Department] to be responsive to needs on the ground in both areas as they arise,” a defense official told Foreign Policy. “Therefore, the total amount that may be used in either West Africa or Iraq under this reprogramming request may not be determined at this time.” Without more information, one is left guessing about the scale to which the Pentagon plans to respond to either problem.

The Economist reviews how the spiraling crisis has spurred the development of new drugs to treat the virus:

The arrival of new medicines will encourage health-care workers who have given up their posts to return to attend the sick. It would also help address the fear and panic that is proving so disastrous in the infected countries. But there are other difficulties. One is highlighted in a forthcoming working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, which finds that some Indian drugmakers are taking advantage of the lack of regulatory oversight to send their lowest-quality antibiotics to Africa.

The biggest problem remains containment, especially in the months before new medicines arrive. Virologists, such as Dr Ball at Nottingham, worry that increasing human-to-human transmission is giving Ebola the opportunity to become more transmissible. Each time the virus replicates, new mutations appear. It has accumulated and hung on to some mutations, like “cherries on a one-armed bandit”, he says. Nobody knows what would happen if Ebola hit the jackpot with a strain that is even better-adapted to humans. But the outcome could be grim, for Africa and the rest of the world.

The Offense Industry On The Offense

In a really terrific post during my vacation, Freddie DeBoer nailed something to the cross:

It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing. I now mostly associate that public face with danger, with an endless list of things that you can’t do or say or think, and with the constant threat of being called an existentially bad person if you say the wrong thing, or if someone decides to misrepresent what you said as saying the wrong thing. There are so many ways to step on a landmine now, so many terms that have become forbidden, so many attitudes that will get you cast out if you even appear to hold them.

Freddie’s concern was with online hazing of the politically incorrect. Writers are not just condemned any more for being wrong or dumb or rigid. They are condemned as sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, blah blah blah – almost as a reflex in trying to discredit their work. That’s particularly true when it comes to fascinating issues like race or gender or sexual orientation, where liberalism today seems to insist that there are absolutely no aggregate differences between genders, races, ethnicities, or sexual orientations, except those created by oppression and discrimination and bigotry. Anyone even daring to bring up these topics is subjected to intense pressure, profound disapproval and ostracism. This illiberal liberalism is not new, of course. But it’s still depressingly common.

Sam Harris is one of its latest victims. There sure is plenty to disagree with Sam about – and we have had several such arguments and debates. But the idea that he is a sexist – and now forced to defend himself at length from the charge after a book-signing discussion – is really pathetic. His account of the episode is well worth-reading for the insight it gives into the Puritanical wing of the left. Michelle Boornstein decided to play the sexist card after a contentious interview, and then tweet it out thus:

Here’s what she was referring to (in her words):

I also asked Harris at the event why the vast majority of atheists—and many of those who buy his books—are male, a topic which has prompted some to raise questions of sexism in the atheist community. Harris’ answer was both silly and then provocative. It can only be attributed to my “overwhelming lack of sex appeal,” he said to huge laughter.

“I think it may have to do with my person[al] slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people… People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this—it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”

This is impermissibly sexist because it assumes that there are some essential biological and psychological differences between men and women, and for a certain kind of leftist, this is an intolerable heresy. If that truth cannot be suppressed or rebutted in a free society, its adherents must be stigmatized as bigots. It’s a lazy form of non-argument – and may have been payback from Boorstein after Harris and she differed quite strongly on the power of fundamentalism in American culture.

But Boorstein’s premise – that because many more men than women seem to buy and read his books, there must be some sexism at work – is preposterous.

Anyone can buy a book on Amazon. There are no gender barriers whatever. The free flow of ideas will often lead to different audiences for different authors. That some books by white Americans are read disproportionately by whites doesn’t mean they’re racist. And, yes, style of writing – especially the combative, testosteroned debates that occur online or typify the slash-and-burn atheist conversation – can lead to a disproportionately male-skewed audience for that kind of thing. But all that is a function of free choice in a free market of ideas – not some kind of institutional sexism – let alone personal sexism. Why we cannot revel in these differences and embrace them as part of what makes being human so fascinating and variable is beyond me. But clearly it threatens people. Reality can.

Then Sam was subjected to a public dressing down by a person in the book-signing line:

She: What you said about women in the atheist community was totally denigrating to women and irresponsible. Women can think just as critically as men. And men can be just as nurturing as women.

Me: Of course they can! But if you think there are no differences, in the aggregate, between people who have Y chromosomes and people who don’t; if you think testosterone has no psychological effects on human minds in general; if you think we can’t say anything about the differences between two bell curves that describe whole populations of men and women, whether these differences come from biology or from culture, we’re not going to get very far in this conversation.

But the conversation is not the point. Even an individual writer’s personality and style is not the point. The point is the enforcement of an ideology by the weapon of stigma and social ostracism. Some favorite lines from the p.c. war:

You should just know that what you said was incredibly sexist and very damaging, and you should apologize … You’re just totally unaware of how sexist you are.

It’s that last line that really gives the game away. It means essentially that a writer cannot win. Or rather: that a writer somehow has to represent all of humanity or risk being regarded and demonized as hostile to whole sections of it. This should be called out for what it is: a full-scale assault on the integrity and freedom of writers in the name of social liberalism. Writers need to stand up to this cant – and not capitulate to it.

For more on the subject of women and atheism, check out the Dish discussion thread, “Where Are All The Female Atheists?” One of those readers brought to our attention the work of the brilliant female atheist Jennifer Michael Hecht, whom we subsequently invited to join our Ask Anything feature to discuss the subject of suicide, explored in her book Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It.

A Paradox Of Gay Progress

Alex Morris pinpoints it:

Tragically, every step forward for the gay-rights movement creates a false hope of acceptance for certain youth, and therefore a swelling of the homeless-youth population. …

Research done by San Francisco State University’s Family Acceptance Project, which studies and works to prevent health and mental­ health risks facing LGBT youth, empirically confirms what common sense would imply to be true: Highly religious parents are significantly more likely than their less-religious counterparts to reject their children for being gay – a finding that social-service workers believe goes a long way toward explaining why LGBT people make up roughly five percent of the youth population overall, but an estimated 40 percent of the homeless-youth population. The Center for American Progress has reported that there are between 320,000 and 400,000 homeless LGBT youths in the United States.

Meanwhile, as societal advancements have made being gay less stigmatized and gay people more visible – and as the Internet now allows kids to reach beyond their circumscribed social groups for acceptance and support – the average coming-out age has dropped from post-college age in the 1990s to around 16 today, which means that more and more kids are coming out while they’re still economically reliant on their families. The resulting flood of kids who end up on the street, kicked out by parents whose religious beliefs often make them feel compelled to cast out their own offspring (one study estimates that up to 40 percent of LGBT homeless youth leave home due to family rejection), has been called a “hidden epidemic.”

Globally too the paradox is greater. As gay dignity and equality spreads in the West, that very progress provokes a backlash in less developed countries where homophobia still runs deep. My own group, Immigration Equality, has seen applications for asylum sky-rocket in the last couple of years – just as marriage equality becomes more and more entrenched at home. It seems to me we can adjust to this – by recognizing our youth crisis and taking care to try and find safe places for the homeless and young and gay to stay out of trouble, get on PrEP, and be free from violence. We can also expand our asylum policies for LGBT foreigners threatened with death for being themselves.

Husband Beaters, Ctd

A reader sharpens the discussion over female domestic violence, which the Dish broached back in June:

I think both readers you recently quoted regarding Janay Rice hitting Ray Rice have valid points. What bothers me is that it seems to be treated as a zero sum game when we talk about reciprocity in domestic violence. Do women have it worse than men? Of course! Does that mean that violence against men shouldn’t be mentioned? I don’t think so. If anything, I think it would help the conversation if men understood how universal it is. Not talking about it seems like it only encourages men to accept abuse until they snap back. That by no means justifies when they snap, but it does contribute to it. And just making that point clear definitely doesn’t mean men have it anywhere near as bad as women in domestic violence.

This should not be a contest of who is more oppressed. Everyone suffers from toxic or outdated expectations about gender. The more open and nuanced the conversation, the better.

Two male readers share their stories of abuse:

Never thought I’d be writing to someone about this, but your discussion is prompting me to write. I suffered a severe beating at the hands of a former girlfriend – broken nose, splinters (from a 2×4) in and around the eyes.

The incident, for lack of a better word, went on much longer than it should have simply because for me to defend myself would have involved my committing violence against a woman – such an ultimate “no no” that it’s practically etched on most (stressing “most”) men’s DNA.  I have sisters.  If I had touched my sisters in ANY WAY, my dad would’ve killed me.

I finally realized that if I didn’t do something, the woman in question might literally not stop, and I was somewhat disoriented as a result of the nose-breaking shot to the face with the 2×4, with which I was still getting hit.  I finally took her down to the floor as gently as I could and – I can hardly believe I’m writing this – put a hand around her neck, just enough to let her know it was there – and said “Stop.”   This served to make her snap out of the rage she was in.  It was like a light switched off, and then it was over.

I woke up the next morning and didn’t even recognize myself.  I have a driver’s license photo taken seven weeks after the event in which a black-and-blue shadow can still be seen along one side of my face.  It took two years for a splinter lodged near my temple to finally dislodge itself, and I have some scarring around one eye.  This was almost 30 years ago.

For a long time I thought I must have brought this on myself.  I mean, isn’t this kind of thing unheard of?  All I can say is that I found out years later that she got physical with her next boyfriend, and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that a great burden was lifted from me upon hearing that news.

I’m not saying in any way that Ray Rice was justified in hitting his fiancee/wife.  But sometimes – stress “sometimes” – these things are more complicated than they appear.

Another quotes a reader from another post:

Men are far, far more likely to injure, abuse and murder their partner than women are; it’s not a remotely equal situation, and treating it as such undermines the very real danger millions of American women are facing every single day.

What an absurd argument for the second writer to make regarding the need to crack down on female abusers.  This is not a zero sum game. Abuse is abuse, and the message can be universal without detracting from the fact that women are the more likely victims.

And quite frankly, speaking from experience, when you are on the receiving end, even as a man, it is your own personal hell and statistics go right out the window.  My partner liked to attack me while I was sleeping.  I would wake up in total confusion and then immediately try to restrain her.  I outweighed her by 80 pounds, but to hold a physically fit person by her wrists in the hope she will calm down when she is amped on adrenaline is an exhausting test of stamina.  Trust me: the person’s legs are free to kick out and a determined person can reach a neck with her teeth.

Even in a progressive city like Seattle, she counted on the expectation that she could shame and endanger me by calling out loudly for help as I held her back.  When the neighbors knocked on the door, you can bet your life I opened it as fast as I could, brought them inside and explained exactly what was going on (she often had been drinking and was still “ornery”). I consider it a modern miracle the police never came.

But that is the problem. Neighbors and society, in general, still shrug off the acts of female abusers.  It can’t be that bad, or “legitimate,” if the bad guy is a “bad gal” who is cute as a button and a hundred ten pounds in her stocking feet.  It even worked on me. The aftermath would be tears and apologies that left me feeling sorry for her and guilty about not doing a “better job” to avoid bruising her wrists in the act of holding her down.

Gender-Bending Kids In Afghanistan

In an essay adapted from her forthcoming book, Jenny Nordberg explains why some Afghan families raise their daughters as boys:

Officially, girls like Mehran do not exist in Afghanistan, where the system of gender segregation is among the strictest in the world. But many other Afghans, too, can recall a former neighbor, a relative, a colleague, or someone in their extended family raising a daughter as a son. These children even have their own colloquialism, bacha posh, which literally translates from Dari to “dressed like a boy.”

Midwives, doctors, and nurses I’ve met from all over the provinces are more familiar with the practice than most; they have all known bacha posh to appear at clinics, escorting a mother or a sister, or as a patient who has proven to be of another birth sex than first presumed.

The health workers say that families who disguise their daughters in this way can be rich, poor, educated, or uneducated, or belong to any of Afghanistan’s many ethnic groups. The only thing that binds the bacha posh girls together is their families’ need for a son in a society that undervalues daughters and demands sons at almost any cost. They disguised their girls as boys because the family needed another income through a child who worked and girls aren’t allowed to, because the road to school was dangerous and a boy’s disguise provided some safety, or because the family lacked sons and needed to present as a complete family to the village. Often, as in Kabul, it is a combination of factors. A poor family may need a son for different reasons than a rich family, but no ethnic or geographical reasons set them apart.

Have We Outgrown Growing Up? Ctd

In response to A.O. Scott’s essay on the death of adulthood in popular culture, Freddie sighs, “To believe that different types of cultural products should exist, and that some of these should create artistic pleasures based on work, ambiguity, or difficulty, is to be immediately and permanently labeled a snob”:

If you like any kind of artwork that does not leave its pleasures totally and utterly accessible at all times and to all people with no expectation that consuming art should involve effort, you will be lectured to by the aggrieved. You will get yelled at by the AV Club and Vulture and Slate, by Steve Hyden and Andy Greenwald and the rest of the crew at Bill Simmons’s Geographical Center of the American Middlebrow, in the New York Times and the New Yorker and every other sundry magazine, blog, site, app, Tumblr, Twittr, Tindr, Grindr, newsletter, listerv, forum, message board, image board, room & board, surfboard and broadsheet that humanity produces. …

The only part of adulthood that really matters is the part where when you finally grow up, if you ever really do, it’s because you recognize that there’s other people in the world and that they matter and their needs matter and you need to set aside your self-obsession for long enough to recognize that other people’s needs are often more pressing or important than yours and to act accordingly. Every frame of Guardians of the Galaxy exists to tell you that you are the only human being in the universe.

Alexandra Petri, who is much less perturbed by the shift, attributes it to the rise of the Internet, “where the primary mode of communication is the confessional”:

We know better, now, than to think anyone has anything under control. Too many people have admitted — in GIFs or paragraphs or videos — what a frantic scramble things really are (even and especially for those people, like celebrities, whose job is to appear to be have things effortlessly together). So much for the facade. The celebrities everyone clutches most fervently to their bosoms now are not the ones you aspire to be, but the ones you feel like you already are, the ones who wear their mess on the outside. We don’t want to look up to people. We want something different: to look out from their eyes. Online, currency is identification and sympathy. Competence is admirable, but it isn’t inherently relatable. If anything, the tendency is to play up the bumbling. If you can convincingly pretend to be a polished, collected socialite who is not, in essence, a frantic 12-year-old on stilts who doesn’t know whom to call about the plumbing — what can we possibly have in common with you?

Tom Hawking nods:

It’s not so much that culture is abandoning adulthood; it’s more that culture is deconstructing it. It’s fascinating to watch old American TV shows and think about how much they reinforced the idea of traditional patriarchy, where women deferred to men and children to adults. (I mean, Christ, we’re talking about a TV industry that literally produced a show called Father Knows Best.)  …

Clearly, there’s a mental and emotional difference between childhood and adulthood, and clearly experience does lend some surety and confidence — I’m not A.O. Scott’s age, but at 36 I certainly feel I have something of a firmer grasp on my life than I did at 26, or 16. I suppose I’m technically a grown-up. But you never really lose that feeling of being alone and wondering what the hell you’re supposed to be doing — indeed, I’d argue that’s at the core of human experience. You just learn to mask it better. And I’m sure that hasn’t changed in millennia. If anything, the difference between adulthood as it’s presented in contemporary culture and how it’s been depicted in the past is that today’s writers depict this idea with gusto. The difference between, say, Don Draper and the patriarchs of the past is not that Don doesn’t know what to do, but that he is depicted as confused and increasingly impotent. It’s not that such characters haven’t existed before — but their bewilderment has usually manifested as the result of some sort of crisis, not as an inherent aspect of their character.

Meanwhile, Andrew O’Hehir points a finger at the economy:

[S]ometimes economic forces really do shape the cultural zone. Real wages have fallen since Don Draper’s heyday, especially for American men and double-especially for the middle-class and working-class white men who were once the bulwarks of the mid-century model of adulthood. We now live in a culture (using the word in its anthropological sense) of diminished expectations and permanent underemployment, where many or most young people will never be as affluent as their parents. Lifetime job security is an antediluvian delusion, and in many metropolitan areas home ownership is out of reach for all but the rich. It’s just as useless to object to those changes as it is to complain about grownups reading Harry Potter books, but certainly those things were the essential underpinnings of classic adulthood, and without them it’s no surprise to see the old order fading away.

Lastly, a reader writes:

Your post brought to mind what C.S. Lewis said about growing up and childishness in his 1952 essay “Three Ways of Writing for Children”:

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was 10, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am 50 I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

The Senate Is A Coin Flip

The NYT’s Senate forecast is trending towards Democrats:

NYT Senate

Nate Silver’s calculations have also become more Democrat-friendly:

When we officially launched our forecast model two weeks ago, it had Republicans with a 64 percent chance of taking over the Senate after this fall’s elections. Now Republican chances are about 55 percent instead.

Why the change? He sees money as a big factor:

Consider the states with the largest polling movement: In North Carolina, Hagan had $8.7 million in cash on hand as of June 30 as compared with just $1.5 million for her Republican opponent, Thom Tillis. In Colorado, Udall had $5.7 million as compared with $3.4 million for Republican Cory Gardner. These totals do not account for outside spending. But in stark contrast to 2010, liberal and Democratic “super PACs” have spent slightly more money so far than conservative and Republican ones, according to the the Center for Responsive Politics.

Nate Cohn agrees that the Democrats’ chances have improved:

Over all, the Republicans are still the slightest favorites to retake the chamber. For Democrats to retain their majority, they will have to win at least two states that voted against President Obama in 2008 and 2012. It is possible that this will prove untenable over the final few months of the race, and that Republicans will gradually gain as undecided voters who disapprove of the president’s performance and voted for Mitt Romney make up their minds. But the Democrats now have a lead in enough races to get to 49 seats — and have a few options to reach 50.

Sam Wang, who has always given Democrats a good chance of keeping the Senate, pats himself on the back:

[A]s the election approaches, other sites are decreasing the bias that they add by using fundamentals. This will inevitably make them approach the [Princeton Election Consortium (PEC)] snapshot, day by day. If everything converges on the PEC Election Day prediction, I would score that as an argument in favor of using polls only – or at least letting readers see the difference added by the use of fundamentals.

Asylum Roulette

To qualify for asylum in the US, immigrants have to prove not only that they have a credible fear of persecution in their home countries but also that they belong to a particular social group and are being persecuted because they belong to that group. Not all victims of violence qualify. That burden of proof, as Emily Bazelon points out, leaves many asylum seekers in the lurch, including victims of domestic abuse and gang violence:

In 1996, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which functions as the country’s central immigration court (with review by the federal appeals courts) “broke new ground” on gender-related claims by “granting asylum to a Togolese woman who fled her country to escape female genital cutting,” as Blaine Bookey, a staff attorney for the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, explains in this 2012 article. The idea was that the risk of cutting both depended on gender and was widespread in some African countries.

Domestic violence, however, didn’t easily get the same kind of recognition as a basis for persecution worthy of asylum. In 1999, the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected the asylum claim of Rody Alvarado Peña, a Guatemalan woman whose husband, she testified, treated her “as something that belonged to him and he could do anything he wanted.” Alvarado said she spent 10 years suffering frequent abuse, including the dislocation of her jawbone and a kick in the spine when she was pregnant. She was dragged by the hair, pistol-whipped, and raped. When she tried to run away, the Guatemalan police and the courts did not protect her. The BIA accepted that Alvarado had been abused but ruled that she was not part of a recognized social group—“Guatemalan women subjugated by their husbands” didn’t make the list—and that she had not shown she was abused because she was a Guatemalan woman living under male domination.

Cosmopolitan-ism

https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/509027983357915136

Elizabeth Nolan Brown praises Cosmopolitan for addressing the midterm elections, but wishes they’d take a less partisan approach:

There’s nothing wrong with publications leaning one way or the other politically, or taking an institutionally centrist position while hiring individual writers that slant left or right. Yet Cosmo is trying to portray itself as a friendly, impartial arbiter of “what’s at stake” for women in this election while explicitly pushing the DNC’s wish list. This is not service journalism, nor opinion journalism; it is advocacy. And the magazine’s refusal to acknowledge that leaves me cold.

This wouldn’t be the first time Cosmo has served as a mouthpiece for Democrat policies. Throughout the past year or so, the magazine has run numerous pieces on how the Affordable Care Act is good for women and frequently devoted social media posts to urging young women to sign up with the health insurance exchanges. “The White House says it has no formal publicity agreement with Cosmopolitan,” noted Reuters in June 2013. “But [Editor-in-Chief Joanna] Coles met with senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett last week at the White House, which is in discussions with potential Obamacare promoters including the National Football League, as it prepares for a full-scale public education campaign this fall.” And Coles was back for a personal meeting with President Obama in May 2014.

Finding The Spirit Of Science

While positing that “only matter exists,” Marcelo Gleiser also contends “that we know precious little, that we are surrounded by questions of such forbidding complexity that our knowledge will always be limited even if ever growing.” Why he finds this a reason to embrace science:

But forbidding complexity does not need to mean divine, or supernatural. Unknowns are invitations, challenges to our creativity. Obstacles are triggers, not stoppers. We go after them using the tools of science and reason with a fervor that, as Einstein remarked, has all the dressings of spiritual devotion.

So, we must rid spirituality from its supernatural prison, make it secular. Spirituality is a connection with something bigger than we are, seducing our imagination, creating an urge to know, to embrace the mystery that surrounds us and the mystery that we are.

This natural spirituality is not a form of mysticism. Mysticism presupposes that knowledge that is inaccessible to the intellect can be apprehended by contemplation or by a union with the divine. Science, at least to me, starts with a spiritual — even contemplative — connection with nature. But then it uses the intellect as the bridge between this connection and the pursuit of knowledge. As it brings together this very human spiritual attraction to the unknown (merely calling it “curiosity” sounds very impoverishing to me) and our reasoning powers, science is a unique expression of our wonderment with reality, of our awe with nature’s grandeur.