April 25, 2010
Supernormal Stimuli
Deirdre Barrett
Deirdre Barrett talks about supernormal stimuli, which are exaggerated versions of natural stimuli to which there are existing instinctual responses. She discusses how our evolved instincts are overwhelmed by technological advances and other facets of modern society. She explores how pornography, unhealthy diets, and even the quest for nuclear energy as opposed to wind or solar energy are supernormal stimuli. And she explains how undue credulity in the supernatural and the paranormal may be a function of our natural instincts to believe becoming overrun by supernormal stimuli.
Also, in this week’s edition of the Honest Liar, we consider the similarities between a streetside scam artist and a billion dollar Ponzi schemer.
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Listener Reactions
I really enjoyed listening to this episode. As I listened I wondered how we might be able to subdue these stimuli without losing them altogether. I often consider how I would react in the wake of a natural disaster, or 911 scenario. How would I fair out in a post apocalyptic world? Could I maintain my problem solving skills and reason while searching for food, shelter or trying to avoid predatory humans?
Its not something I either obsess or worry about, but an exercise of thought.
Your interview has given me more grist fro this process.
Thanks to DJ and the JREF for this wonderful podcast.
I was not particularly impressed with the ideas of this guest. Lots of half-baked thoughts and “I have a fancy hammer and ooh I think I see a nail over there” type fallacious reasoning. Her thoughts about nuclear power merely being a “supernormal, unnatural pursuit” were so silly I actually loled. The reason we built the LHC Deirdre (or the “haldron” collider as you refer to it), is not because it “merely gives us prestige”, it is because it tells us how the deep structure of the universe functions and building bigger windmills…..doesn’t.
I just knew that part of their discussion would get people annoyed, but I see her point. Some intellectual pursuits are for nothing more than social and psychological payoffs. I would have liked to hear them talk more about the supernormal stimuli of modern religious movements or the New Age, how they may be hyper-appealing to our natural instincts to believe the supernatural.
I think people sometimes blame the victims because it makes them feel superior to the victim and eases their anxiety about becoming victims. And not just victims of financial scams, but also of disasters and disease. Like, when a focus group was told about a healthy girl who died of swine flu, they didn’t accept it, but instead speculated that she must’ve had a hidden underlying condition or her doctor must’ve done something wrong.
I suspect Stephanie Meyer accidentally created a supernormal stimulus when she wrote her “Twilight” novels.
Haha just like Joseph Smith when he created Mormonism (and Stephanie Meyer is also a Mormon, incidentally!)
Deirdre Barrett is on the front page of CNN today:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/05/05/dreams.psychology/index.html?hpt=C1
Not sure if her dream theories are very mainstream, but interesting anyway.
I must contend Deirdre Barrett when she regards the advancement of nuclear energy technology as irrational. Over the past year or two I have been researching and developing a documentary about nuclear power that I am nearly done with. The initial subject for the film is the Shoreham nuclear power plant where I live on Long Island. The construction of the plant ran $6 billion over-budget and was closed down without ever operating. As a result Long Islanders pay some of the highest utility rates in the country. I cover the unintended consequences of this domestic policy decision in a video I made for YouTube’s “Film Your Issue” contest (I just barely edged out of the semi-finals I was informed):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAOCvrestHE
While the construction of the plant was fraught with many many MANY problems, there was absolutely no reason to shut that plant down! Nobody seems to have walked away from this incident without being tainted. In fact the irony of this story is that the CEO who managed to get the NY state taxpayers to bailout his company’s multi-billion dollar boondoggle is one of the MORE sympathetic characters.
If Deirdre Barrett is concerned about the overpopulation of this planet she has to be concerned with providing the current population of this planet with adequate resources. One of the major contributing factors that correlates with dropping birth rates is acquiring a satisfactory standard of living. When people are well educated (especially women) and reach a proper standard of living they put off having families until later in life and maintain smaller families. You need a lot of energy if you want to provide these people with any reasonable standard of energy. I really get annoyed when people talk about wind and solar as if they are limitless, They are NOT! They are intermittent and dependent upon how much land area you have. Until we invent a wind or solar battery, powering a modern technologically advanced civilization is (I will say this as nicely I can) F’ing impossible! (crass yes I know but watch the FYI video and you will see where I am coming from)
I would just like to know Deirdre Barrett is seeing all of this irrational amount of adulation that is placed on nuclear power. We are not even 5 months in the year of 2010 and we have already seen “the natural gas burning Kleen Energy Plant in Middletown, CT exploded and killed six people, the Upper Big Branch coal mine at Montcoal, WV experienced a methane explosion and killed 29 people, and the Deepwater Horizon off shore oil rig exploded, killing at least 11 people, seriously injuring another 7 people and causing what is estimated to be at least $12 billion worth of damage to the environment.” (Adams, Rod; Atomic Insights Blog;
“Explosions and Slicks - More Reasons for Considering the Benefits of Nuclear Energy”; May 4, 2010) What is the news we have heard about nuclear power. In February the state Senate of Vermont voted to close down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant over a ridiculously benign leek of a naturally occurring isotope (28,000 PICOCURIES of tritium). I do not see any legislators clamoring to shut down all existing coal, oil and natural gas plants.
Me and my collaborators are almost almost finished with the film. Our only problem is securing funding to finish the film. Working a minimum wage job and living an apartment that is five times your weekly salary doesn’t really give you the income to produce motion pictures. D.J., Randi, looking for someone to interview?
Ray, you sound just a tad biased. None the less, you make some interesting points, especially contrasting nuclear power with coal, not to mention recent bad news about oil drilling. I look forward to watching your documentary on the glory of nuclear power, should you find some funding.
Ray, your arguments for nuclear energy make much sense, but I fail to see any mention of how to dispose of the spent fuel rods. I agree that the chances for accident may even be less than in other industries, but when they do happen, they’re very bad. Will anybody be able to live a healthy life anywhere near Chernobyl? And again, the waste generated is dangerously radioactive for, like ever. Nuclear may be cost effective in the short term, but not so much in the long term.
“I fail to see any mention of how to dispose of the spent fuel rods.”
The nuclear material that is used in power plants is so energy dense that that almost all plants maintain all the waste that they have ever produced on site. For amount of energy a single person consumes in their lifetime, their share of the waste would fit inside a Coka-Cola can. Also nuclear waste is the only form of waste that actually decreases over a period of time. Many chemical forms of waste last forever.
Also much of the spent fuel still contains the majority of the stored energy. Using methods of reprocessing spent fuel it is possible to tap into that stored energy along with other useful materials that may be inside. Bill Gates and his venture capital firm Intellectual Ventures is working on a reactor that burns spent fuel, which they have named the traveling wave reactor.
“I agree that the chances for accident may even be less than in other industries, but when they do happen, they’re very bad. Will anybody be able to live a healthy life anywhere near Chernobyl?”
This is a flat out error of ignorance. Chernobyl was brought about by an act of such amazing ineptitude that the possibilities of being reproduced are so slim that they are practically non-existent. First off, the Chernobyl reactor was a generation one reactor, in which the reactor core had NO CONTAINMENT VESSEL. Gen one reactors only exist in the former Soviet Union. All reactors in US and elsewhere are Generation two or better. All of which have containment vessels around their cores and layers of redundant safety systems.
On top of that the Soviet Union staffed the plant with coal miners. On the day of the accident they had disabled all of their safety systems to run a very dangerous test. And they scheduled that test in the middle of a shift change. The oncoming crew had no knowledge of what was going on and the core melted down.
Compare this to the accident at Three Mile Island, the reported worst nuclear plant accident in the history of the United States. The reactor core melted down. The molten fuel touched the bottom of the containment vessel and froze after penetrating the vessel 1/8th of an inch. Multiple studies from resources including the Journal of Epidemiology, The National Cancer Institute, The Pennsylvania Department of Health and The University of North Carolina all concluded that no adverse health effects could be traced back to radiation releases from Three Mile Island. It is even doubtful whether the radiation releases were anything greater then natural background radiation. (On a similar note Pennsylvania along with Colorado have some of the highest naturally occurring background radiation in the country. If someone had moved from Philadelphia to Denver to get away from the “radiation releases” they would actually be increasing the radiation exposure two fold.)
“Who would want to live near” that you ask. In fact my sister and her husband live just blocks away from a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. There the energy is cheap the roads are well maintained and they live in a great school district. I on the other hand am trapped here on Long Island where the citizenry made a conscious decision to ignore anyone with a reputable scientific background and shut down a plant that had already cost them $6 billion. The replacement energy source? Since we are an island that sits on a bed of sand we can’t import coal and can’t tap into geothermal.
I have found a nice full page newspaper advertisement that was run during the whole Shoreham controversy. It boasts a big illustration that reads “SOLAR NOT NUCLEAR” and directly underneath that it reads in little type “paid for in the public interest by the Oil Heat Institute of Long Island”. Today LILCO the company that built the plant is non-existent. Long Island’s grid is composed of no more solar and wind then the rest of the country (less then 2%). Guess where 60% of our electricity comes from (ELECTRICITY mind you! Not even HEAT! ELECTRICITY ALONE!)? OIL! We burn Diesel fuel for our electricity. If you ever fly over Long Island you can see this brown pall that hangs over the island. And yes the Oil Heat Institute of Long Island still exists to this day.
On a final note when you mention the long and short term, I wish to mention the Oklo Nuclear Reactor in Gabon West Africa. The misconception that most people have about nuclear power is that the fission reaction is a man made creation. I will just copy and paste the information below:
Deep under African soil, about 1.7 billion years ago, natural conditions prompted underground nuclear reactions. Scientists from around the world, including American scientists have studied the rocks at Oklo. These scientists believe that water filtering down through crevices in the rock played a key role. Without water, it would have been nearly impossible for natural reactors to sustain chain reactions.
The water slowed the subatomic particles or neutrons that were cast out from the uranium so that they could hit-and split-other atoms. Without the water, the neutrons would move so fast that they would just bounce off, like skipping a rock across the water, and not produce nuclear chain reactions. When the heat from the reactions became too great, the water turned to steam and stopped slowing the neutrons. The reactions then slowed until the water cooled. Then the process could begin again.
Scientists think these natural reactors could have functioned intermittently for a million years or more. Natural chain reactions stopped when the uranium isotopes became too sparse to keep the reactions going.
Once the natural reactors burned themselves out, the highly radioactive waste they generated was held in place deep under Oklo by the granite, sandstone, and clays surrounding the reactors’ areas. Plutonium has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago.
(Oklo: Natural Nuclear Reactors, U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management,
November 2004, http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml)
Meanwhile, the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station is leaking radioactive water into a major New Jersey aquifer.
Are nuclear reactors after Chernobyl somehow exempt from Murphy’s law?
“Meanwhile, the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station is leaking radioactive water into a major New Jersey aquifer.”
Here is a report from a local publication:
“A leak at the Oyster Creek Generating Station contains tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, and officials have lowered power at the plant to make repairs.
Oyster Creek, the nation’s oldest continuously operating nuclear power plant, is now working at about 50 percent capacity, according to spokesman David Benson.
There is no threat to public or employee safety, Benson and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. The tritium has not spread into any public water supplies and is contained on the site, Benson said.
The levels of tritium found in this latest leak, which was first identified Monday, are higher than those found in an April leak.
The tritium levels have been 10 million picocuries per liter of water, higher than the 5 to 6 million picocuries per liter of tritium identified in the leak found in April, he said. By comparison, anything above 20,000 picocuries per liter is considered unsafe for drinking water.” (Leach, Ben; “Tritium found in new leak at Oyster Creek nuclear plant”; August 26, 2009; http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/top_three/article_ebddb4fc-9249-11de-ab1e-001cc4c002e0.html)
Rod Adams is a Navy nuclear engineer whom I interviewed for my film. He also hosts a pro-nuclear blog and podcast (Atomic Insights Blog and The Atomic Show). He posted our entire interview with him as an episode of his podcast:
http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/05/17/the-atomic-show-132-ray-squirrel-interviews-atomic-rod-adams/
He explains why leaks such as this is nothing to worry about in a blog post about a related topic on the tritium leak at Vermont Yankee:
“Let me try to explain why I am not frightened. Here is what the Environmental Protection Agency says about the hazards of tritium (which is simply an isotope of hydrogen with two neutrons in its nucleus).
Health Effects of Tritium
How does tritium affect people’s health?
As with all ionizing radiation, exposure to tritium increases the risk of developing cancer. However, because it emits very low energy radiation and leaves the body relatively quickly, for a given amount of activity ingested, tritium is one of the least dangerous radionuclides. Since tritium is almost always found as water, it goes directly into soft tissues and organs. The associated dose to these tissues are generally uniform and dependent on the tissues’ water content.
With the knowledge that tritium is worth some minor concern because it is mildly radioactive, I then go through the mental process of determining if “thousands of picocuries” per liter is something to worry about. I know off the top of my head that the drinking water limit in the US is 20,000 picocuries per liter. I also know that a picocurie is just 0.000000000001 curies (1*10^-12) and that one of my heros, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover once volunteered during congressional testimony to drink primary coolant water from a nuclear plant, which has a much higher concentration.” (Adams, Rod; Atomic Insights Blog;
Wednesday, “Comparing A Leak of Tritium That Causes A Flurry to Two Oil Leaks That Are Virtually Ignored”; January 27, 2010; http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/01/comparing-leak-of-tritium-that-causes.html)
RaySquirrel,
You’re not helping your case here. You just said the tritium levels have been 10 million picocuries per liter of water, which is 500 times the safety limit. Your last link talks about another tritium leak at the newer Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, which had other problems like a cooling tower collapse. In February, the Vermont Senate voted 26 to 4 to close it.
The same blog post complains that oil leaks are virtually ignored. Well, BP’s oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is not ignored. BP opposed safety regulations, and its VP for Gulf of Mexico production stated, “We believe the industry’s current safety and environmental statistics demonstrate that the voluntary programs..have been and continue to be very successful.”
Are promises of nuclear safety just as empty?
If I didn’t make the point clear enough and made a confusing confluence of numbers and stats that is my fault.
The points that are worthy of highlighting.
In regards to Oyster Creek the local report stated:
“There is no threat to public or employee safety, Benson and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. The tritium has not spread into any public water supplies and is contained on the site, Benson said.”
Even though the leak was 500 times the legal limit, there was no contamination of the ground water or the water supply. As Rod Adams says in our interview (If you didn’t listen to the whole thing I don’t blame you it is nearly two hours long) “what is usually reported as an accident at a nuclear plant is usually on the level of spilling some gasoline at a gas station.”
On the topic of Vermont Yankee. The point is whether it is reasonable to shut down a plant that produces 620MW of electricity over a leak that has had no detectable effect on the environment. Regarding monitoring of the nearby Connecticut River, The New Hampshire Department of Health & Human Services concluded:
“All samples were below the 500 pCi/L level, which is the lower limit of detection of the Public Health Laboratory testing equipment. Vermont Yankee officials announced last week that they believe that they have fixed the leak, but their investigation continues.
Tritium is one of the least dangerous radionuclides because it emits very weak radiation. It does not pose any hazard externally, but it can pose an internal hazard if large quantities are ingested or inhaled. It is present naturally in low levels in the environment.
DHHS’ Division of Public Health Services routinely collects and analyzes hundreds of environmental samples each year around the 10-mile emergency planning zones of both VY and Seabrook Station nuclear power plants to monitor air, soil, ground and surface water, and plants. No radiation levels above what occurs naturally in the environment have been found.”
(New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services; “DHHS Announces More Testing Results of Connecticut River in Response to VY Tritium Leak”; April 1, 2010; http://www.dhhs.state.nh.us/DHHS/PIO/LIBRARY/Press+Release/esu_fourthtritiumresults.htm)
The state government of Vermont insists that they are going to replace the power produced by Vermont Yankee with Wind and Solar. The same thing occurred in Germany back in 2006. They planned to shut down all of their nuclear power plants and replace them with wind and solar. On top of being the highest CO2 emitter in Europe, their natural gas imports from Russian increased dramatically. Gerhard Schröder, the former German Green Party Chancellor who spearheaded the shut down, retired to a well paid position at Gazprom, the company representing Russia’s natural gas monopoly.
The same thing occurred on Long Island. The citizenry shut down a nuclear plant that they swore they would replace with wind and solar. Long Island gets 60% of it’s energy from Oil to this day. If Vermont’s coal, oil and natural gas use dramatically increases with the shut down of Vermont Yankee (if they don’t reverse the decision by 2012 that is), I will not be surprised. That means more despots funded by fossil fuels, more coal miners dying in mine collapses, more gas workers being incinerated by explosions.
Maybe I am not a good spokesperson for this issue. I’m a little too emotionally driven as can be seen. That is why I leave it up to people like Rod Adams to explain the science, and I will just resort to cutting a pasting (or recording and editing). To conclude I conclude I will paraphrase Adams. I’m not saying that nuclear power violates Murphy’s Law and doesn’t make mistakes, there will be accidents, there will be incidents, there will be leaks, but accidents at nuclear plants are arguably and provably safer then the accidents of the competition.
RaySquirrel,
This week’s news about Oyster Creek is that the leak “has now reached a major underground aquifer that supplies drinking water to much of southern New Jersey,” so there WAS contamination of the ground water.
The Vermont Yankee leak didn’t cause detectable levels of tritium in the river, but groundwater monitoring wells had levels that were 40 times the safety limit.
Nuclear power doesn’t have much bearing on oil use, since oil is refined into fuel, not burned to generate electricity.
A very interesting interview. I wish that they had talked about ways to combat these instincts more. A big question in my mind is, could we genetically remove these instincts somehow, and what would be the result of that on the human mind?
Didn’t realize she was a psychologist when I started to listen to this (never heard of her before). I’ve never encountered an interview (written or aural)with a psychologist who showed any understanding of the basics of evolution, and Deirdre is no exception.
“We’ve upset evolution” and “taken evolution off course”. Evolution isn’t a course. There is *no goal* or *end point* in evolution. It’s our way of tracking changes (allele frequencies) in a population over a certain time period. It’s not a race with a trophy at the end, it’s simply how we describe a natural process.
It sounds like she is assuming that our evolutionary ancestors only ever had sex when the females were ovulating (big assumption,evidence?)
Yes, we have porn and sex toys and masturbation. Does she think our ancestors never played with themselves? Primates with whom we share a common ancestor certainly are known for masturbation. Bonobos are probably the most well know for their sexual proclivities - they even have male on male sex! Do Bonobos (and elephants for that matter) “upset evolution” too? And dolphins, who have sex for pleasure and not just procreation, have they also “taken evolution off course”? What does she think about sperm banks and adoption?
“Fats were only available in meat and nuts…Sugars were only available in fruit” so gobbling up whatever food stuffs immediately available was the most evolutionarily “acceptable” survival option. Since that is the “instinct” evolution “gave” us (according to her), does she believe the discovery of pickling and canning upsets evolution since it allows food to be available year round?
Like I said, evolution is not a course. It doesn’t have feelings or urges or desires or an end that can be “upset”. It’s a process.
@nin_shark
I might be with you in spirit, though your reading is a bit tendentious. I think you are using a different sense of the verb “upset” than Deirdre is. I think she uses “upset” in the sense of “disrupt” or “perturb”.
Of course, since evolution has no “correct” course, it is difficult to disrupt it, so she still deserves a little heat for that usage.
In some cases, it might be reasonable to assume that particular features of organisms go relatively small magnitudes of change for long periods, then undergo relatively large magnitudes of change during short periods of time. If the last 5 million years of human history can be said to be characterized by a diet poor in starch, then the advent of agriculture a few millennia ago could be said to be a perturbation that “upset” evolution. Obviously, this language is colorful, but if you grant some small license, it isn’t beyond the pale.
Hey D.J., are there any plans for a forum for comments to replace this rather unwieldy set-up?
My comment is that Ms. Barrett’s framing of “supernormal stimuli” resonated strongly with my own experience, especially within my blue-collar family that I think mirrors much of middle America. Countless hours are spent sitting almost motionless in front of that “box with wires inside” captivated by programs with laugh tracks, Fox “news,” AND advertisements for other “supernormal stimuli” from Taco Bell and Burger King.
Accordingly, their minds and bodies are filled with unhelpful and unhealthy things. Then later, they are taken to hospitals and doctor’s offices where they’re prescribed other super normal stimuli to counteract the results of the first stimuli. Many of those were also advertised on TV.
And of course, there is a sort of science behind it all called “marketing,” but I digress…
The thing that makes my heart break is that most or all of those “supernormal stimuli” are part of a zero-sum situation.
Every minute and/or mouthful spent with “supernormal” stimuli displaces a bit of life that could have been spent with something positive or inspiring or at least healthy.
In the case of television, what is very often lost is time enjoying, learning from, and sharing love with one’s own family.
At the same time, I appreciated Ms. Barrett’s balancing observation that we humans in modern times have SOME time and energy to spare for indulgence in the excessive sorts of stimuli we’ve made for ourselves. But for so many of us it’s just so easy to become addicts…
I know I’m late with this response. But this is mainly directed at Max who seems to be the only responder to all of my comments regarding this topic (which deviates far away from the actual topic of this podcast). Since Max does not seem to have any kind of link to any place where I could continue this discussion in a more direct manner, this is the only place I can counter his responses is on this forum.
Max you seem intent on criticizing nuclear energy regardless of any kind of alternative. The reality of the situation is that we need electricity in order to maintain civilization. We need a power source that is reliable, satisfies demand, can be produced anywhere and for good measure does not emit greenhouse gasses. Nuclear is unique in that it is the only energy source that satisfy all four requirements. On top of that it is cheap.
Things like tritium leaks can be monitored and repaired. Tritium is a naturally occurring isotope with a half-life of only 12 years. It mainly found in nature mainly as water.
If I may continue to cut and paste from my favorite nuclear advocate Rod Adams:
It boggles my mind to hear and read about people who point to fossil fuel related disasters like the clean natural gas explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig as a reason for being reluctant to develop nuclear energy.
There is an amazing difference in the scale of the environmental effect of releasing a few curies of noble gases from a containment building at Three Mile Island or leaking a bit of tritium into the ground water underneath a licensed and operating industrial facility like the Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Station (by the way, the leaks actually occurred and were fixed more than a year ago) and dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico every day for an indefinite and continuing period of time.
Sure, building nuclear power plants under current rules is expensive. Operating existing nuclear power plants under current rules is not expensive, with an average cost per kilowatt-hour of about 1.86 cents in 2008. However, that does not stop anti-nuclear activists from doing everything they possibly can to force the shutdown of those operating nuclear power plants with the intended replacement power coming from Joe Romm and T. Boone Pickens favorite fossil fuel - “clean natural gas”.
(Aside: Did you know that “clean natural gas” explosions have almost as many people in the eastern United States in 2010 as the explosion and fire at Chernobyl did - as long as you include the delayed deaths at Chernobyl for the 18 years after the accident? Detailed derivation and sources available at http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/05/motives-for-molding-public-opinion-on.html )
Vermont Yankee, Indian Point, Oyster Creek are all under coordinated attack BECAUSE they produce large quantities of reliable power that reduce our need to burn (and purchase) natural gas. The existence of those nuclear plants harms the pocketbooks of some of the leading funders of the “environmental” movement, including Chesapeake Energy (the checkbook behind the Clean Skies Foundation), Ted Turner, a man who owns land that supports at least 10,000 coal bed methane wells, and T. Boone Pickens, a man whose BP Capital has billions invested in natural gas production.
Nuclear energy is clean enough to operate inside sealed submarines. Put it on a playing field with standards that are remotely similar to the standards applied to its competitors in the fossil fuel industry and you will find that the cost of construction and plant operation will drop with increasing experience, just like the cost of nearly every manufactured product in human history.
The Chinese, Russians, Indians, French, South Koreans, Finns, Brazilians, Italians, British, Japanese, Vietnamese, Jordanians, and citizens of the UAE recognize the value of nuclear energy and will soon be capturing increasing market share of all energy intensive manufacturing in the world. The US, if it pays attention to thought “leaders” like Romm, will be left in the dustbin of history as an energy poor nation that cannot engineer its way out of lawyer imposed poverty.
—-
To end this comment exchange may rebut your comment that nuclear power does not displace Oil. Maybe right now we have to run our cars, ships and planes on petroleum based fuels (and yes there are base-load power-stations that run on oil, Long Island being one example). Though if we want to eventually want to drive electric vehicles we are going to need a source of base-load power that does not emit greenhouse gasses. My friend Rod Adams has a company where he wishes to sell nuclear reactors to power shipping vessels. One of the byproducts of the atomic fission reaction is hydrogen which can eventually be used to power airplanes.
Max, I think that you simply have not taken the time to research the subject. I think you are reacting from a purely emotional standpoint without taking into consideration the multitudes of pros and cons of the situation. You just simply do not have any good reasons to justify your opposition. If you are looking for a perfect energy source you are going to be waiting a good long time.
If you wish to continue this discussion I have provided the link to my website linked with my username. There you should find the links to my YouTube page.
@J.J.E
I understood her use of “upset” to mean “disrupt”.
Her whole premise rests on “humans have upset evolution” which is wrong.
at about 2:15:
“... but a bird isn’t going to find brighter blue eggs with big black polka dots instead of little grey speckles sitting in its nest ...”
Actually - that is exactly how the common cuckoo cons other birds into raising its young. Many parasites use supernormal stimuli to manipulate the host.
How does Dr. Barrett justify advocating banning trans-fats and food ads to children but NOT banning pornography? Both are supernormal stimuli that are potentially harmful.
I feel she’s too afraid of being on the same side of an issue with the “evil” religious right. She (and DJ) seem like the kind of people who, if Pat Robertson said the sky was blue, would gather a symposium of so-called experts to argue why it was not.
On the issue of religious thought, she gave zero examples of what a modern supernormal stimulus is for religion. If primitive man felt the numinous at seeing a mountain, is her argument that a modern church is bigger than a mountain? I’m just not seeing where the supernormal stimulus comes in with regards to religion. DJ reminds me of the Roman senator Cato, who ended every speech, no matter what the topic, with “and Carthage must be destroyed”. But in DJ’s case, replace “Carthage” with “religion”.