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About This Author
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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
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I'm mostly going to let this Big Think article speak for itself. There's a lot more there than I'm commenting on here.
But deluding ourselves is our superpower.
Is the tap water safe to drink, or to shower in, today? We assume that it is without bothering to check.
For certain values of "we."
Is your seat belt fastened when you get into the car? If it isnāt, a sensor will alert you, reminding you incessantly to buckle it.
My first car—well, truck—well, my dad's farm truck—didn't have seat belts. Or A/C. Or heat beyond a "defrost" switch. Or a radio. Or power steering. I miss that old truck.
Is the air safe to breathe?
No.
We assume that these arenāt real worries and that everything will turn out fine. (And this is okay, in most cases they will.) And yet, the only reason that we can make those assumptions is because somewhere, over long periods of time, responsible adults have done the work necessary to ensure that these mundane, everyday activities arenāt going to pose threats to you.
I miss those days, too.
The truth is not that consensus undermines science, but rather that our modern rejection of expertise, and our newfound embracing of the ādo your own researchā ideology, is a recipe for societal disaster.
Here, I have to agree.
The idea of ādoing your own researchā can only exist side-by-side with a concept that most of us normally take for granted so thoroughly that we rarely, if ever, even mention it: the concept that we inhabit a reality that obeys rules and that those rules can be, at least in principle, understood.
It is likely that quantum effects, while they obey rules, cannot be understood by the vast majority of people. But that doesn't have much bearing on everyday experience.
For example, there are many people who believe that chemicals are bad for you, and that if you can only avoid ingesting or coming into contact with said chemicals, youād rarely-to-never get ill. This is a small portion of whatās known as the naturalistic (or appeal-to-nature) fallacy, but thereās a tremendous lack of homework-doing that one must do to even think up such a thought.
Regular readers may recognize some permutation of this, as I've been railing against it for decades.
Water—pure water, distilled, no additives—is a chemical. And poison ivy is all-natural.
Similarly, vaccines ā rated the #1 public health intervention of the 20th century by the CDC ā are safe, effective, and reduce or eliminate both the virulence and transmissibility of preventable diseases. Tens of thousands of deaths and millions of infections have been eliminated, annually, by the near-universal adoption of routine childhood and adult vaccinations as recommended by the CDC. Yet many people, out of a combination of fear and ignorance and a woefully misguided view of what vaccines actually do inside oneās body, seek to opt out of these routine vaccinations, putting children, newborns, the immunocompromised, and the elderly at elevated, unnecessary risks of severe illness, long-term injury, and even death.
And we can shout that as much as we want (and I want to do so), but some people will never accept it.
This is why we need real science education. Not the big stuff like "what happened in the first second after the Big Bang" or "how do we instantiate artificial general intelligence," but education in the scientific method. And people use it all the time without realizing it. Remember that truck I mentioned up there? I learned the basics of the scientific method by observing, diagnosing, and fixing its many issues when it wasn't running properly.
Can't really do that with modern cars, but that's not my point.
We have seen this at play repeatedly: about fluoridated drinking water, about vaccines, about the origins of COVID-19, and about global warming. Many other examples abound, as you can commonly find Americans denying evolution, the Big Bang, a round Earth, or even the rights to equality for our fellow humans here in 2025.
There has always been a political/ideological aspect to resistance to science and technology, going all the way back to at least Galileo. If the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles happened today, the entrenched Horse Lobby would put out all kinds of disinformation in order to convince the general public that automobiles are dangerous (which, to be fair, they can be), but their real motivation would be to be able to keep breeding and selling horses.
You know, kind of like how the fossil fuel industry puts out bullshit about windmills causing cancer, or solar power being detrimental to the environment, or lobbying to restrict electric vehicles.
But there is a path back from all of this: a path back to reality. First, we have to recognize the value of not ādoing our own research,ā but of doing our own homework...
The path back to reality is instead to value actual expertise, and those who have devoted their lives to the betterment of humanity through discovering scientific truths about reality.
The author is way more optimistic than I am on this subject. But I'm not going to stop trying, anyway. |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
Robert Waltz has granted InkSpot.Com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.
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Yes, you're joking? I never pegged you for having a sense of humor. 
While I agree that the earth doesn't have an edge per se, the horizon is the line at which the earth's surface and the sky appear to meet. Since that is the furthest point you can see, it's an edge. 
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