Reduced Instruction Set Arithmetic

I see recurring comments on Facebook and elsewhere about the new Common Core arithmetic, particularly the method of subtraction. People are indignant, confused, and upset, because this is a marked departure from the method we all learned in grade school.¹

In the traditional method. you start by subtracting the numbers in the one’s column, and if the top number is smaller than the bottom number, you borrow a ten from the ten’s column, reducing the number there by an imaginary one. Proceed in like fashion across the pairs of top and bottom numbers in each decimal column, writing the result of each single subtraction below the line. Watch the result build up from the one’s column across out to however many places the answer happens to go.

This method reaches an exact answer most directly. So it’s good for accountants and other people who need to deal exclusively in exact quantities. But I was raised by an engineer. Now, I was never very good at math, no matter how hard my father tried, but one notion I did learn from him was the idea of approximation.² That is, in most situations you don’t need the exact figure down to the one’s place and all the decimals,³ but instead you want a shot at the “close enough” answer without a lot of work. I think the Common Core teaching of subtraction is an approach to this.

In the Common Core method, you start with the lower number—the one you’re subtracting from the upper number—and add a comfortable, easily recognizable, rounded-off amount that takes you closer to the upper number. In the example most often given, subtracting 12 from 32, you add 3 to the starting 12 to get up to 15, then you add 5 to 15 to get to 20, then 10 to 20 to get to 30, then 2 to 30, to get to 32. Once you’ve made all these approximations, you add them up to get the answer: 3+5+10+2=20. And the difference between 32 and 12 is indeed 20.

This seems like a lot of work. And it is, if you go about it that way. A shorter route might be 3+12=15, 15+15=30, 2+30=32; so 3+15+2=20. Or 10+12=22, 10+22=32; so 10+10=20. In the Common Core, these would all be right answers—unless, of course, the hidden purpose of the exercise is to take the tiniest, most eensy-beansy steps in order to drive the child mad with all of those follow-up additions.

I wouldn’t teach children the Common Core method as the only way to subtract two numbers. First, because the “old way” is fast at reaching an exact answer. Second, because the child’s parents—at least for the next generation or so—will know the old way but not the new. Turning numbers on their heads is a dandy way to exclude parents from involvement with their children’s homework, or to blunt the child’s understanding when he or she hears a lot of parental muttering over an assignment.

But this method of approximating the answer from the bottom up is an excellent alternative to be taught alongside the old top-down subtraction. First, it teaches the child flexibility. It shows that the number system works both ways, and that subtraction can be thought of as another type of addition. Second, it works better with large numbers to get an approximate answer when a sense of proportion is all you’re actually looking for.

For example, suppose I have two large numbers: 53,246 and 34,152. I want to know approximately how much bigger the first is than the second. Say, I have two different makes and models of cars I’m thinking of buying, and I want to compare their two prices generally, without getting bogged down in the weeds with just a few dollars in pocket change. In the old way, I would start by subtracting 2 from 6 to get 4 and write down “4.” Then, because the upper number’s 4 in the ten’s column is smaller than the lower number’s 5, I would borrow 1 from the 2 in the hundred’s column, subtract 5 from 14 to get 9 and write down “9.” Then I would subtract 1 from 1 in the hundred’s column and write down “0.” All that work, and I’ve not yet reached the thousands—the biggest parts of both numbers.

With Common Core subtraction, I would say 34+20=54. That’s too large by a thousand, so I back that off to 34+19=53. The approximation is a difference of 19,000 and change. If I wanted an exact answer, I could go after those hundred’s, ten’s, and one’s places. And if the number there turned out to be negative, then I could subtract it from 19,000.

Accountants wouldn’t like this way of thinking. But a scientist managing data in terms of thousands and millions of cells, seedlings, or stars would find this a quick way to get into the right decimal ballpark. This is arithmetic you can do in your head, without paper and pencil and writing down phantom numbers loaned from one decimal place to another. It’s an instinctive way to get to the “big pieces” answer rather than starting out with the “little pieces.”

The Common Core method, because it turns subtraction into an addition problem, also strikes me as a kind of “reduced instruction set” arithmetic. Reduced instruction set is a concept from computer programming, where you trade a complex language full of purposefully designed operators for a simpler language with a limited number of operators. In this case, you’re trading an arithmetic with the operators “+” and “-” for a new arithmetic that only knows “+”. Generally, with reduced instruction set coding, as you trade off the complexity of discrete operators, you must accept the need to take more steps to achieve a result in any operation.

Say, for example, you want to program a robot car or forklift. The normal four instructions in a set for driving on a square grid—like a city’s streets or the aisles and rows of a warehouse—would be: Forward, Backward, Right Turn, Left Turn. The reduced instruction set would be would be: Forward and Right Turn. You could still perform all the necessary actions to navigate the regular blocks of a city like New York. But instead of backing up, you would take a turn around the block by executing Right, Right, Forward. And instead of making a left turn, you would execute Right, Right, Right, Forward.

Sounds stupid and silly, doesn’t it? Until you realize that UPS asks its drivers to do something similar in devising and following their delivery routes so that they can avoid hazardous, time-consuming left turns and U-turns in busy traffic.

The point of all this is not to be infuriating to parents or confusing to children, but to teach flexibility, to increase understanding, and ultimately to show that anyone can generally find more than one way to approach and solve a problem. And that’s always a useful teaching.

1. That is, all of us older than twelve.

2. I believe this comes—at least in my father’s generation—from their constant use of a slide rule. The old “slip stick” gives you rapid answers in multiplication and division, exponents, square roots, logarithms, trigonometric functions, and similar complex math. But it usually gives you just the “stripped down” version of the answer—that is, the most meaningful digits on the “big end” of the number, as in scientific and engineering notation. For example, the exact speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. But a scientist or engineer would write 3x10⁸ or 3e8, or “about three million meters.” In working a slide rule for multiplication and division, you only get the significant figures and you generally have to keep track of the decimal places—the tens, thousands, millions, and billions—in your head.

3. Unless, of course, you are dealing with very tiny amounts to the right of the decimal point—in which case the significant figures are still written as a one-, two-, or three-place decimal but the exponent notation is negative, reflecting the number of zeroes between the actual answer’s decimal point and the leading significant figure.

How Important is Race?

Not very—at least not on a biological, genetic, or morphological level.

I recently took part in a series of Facebook comments addressing a creationist-inspired link that attacked evolution for, among other things, its failure to produce a single “missing link” between ape and human. The discussion got into the issue of the multiple hominid lines, including the australopithecines and the genus Homo, in which these developments are all cousins and uncles to the H. sapiens species that we call “the human race.”

To me—and I’ve done some reading and study in the area of human origins, as well as genetics and morphology—looking for a single link or trying to define these human predecessors and parallels too closely as to type is a waste of time. In classical evolution, the dividing line between one species and the next is failure to interbreed. First, can a male and female from separate groups produce a viable offspring? And if so, can that offspring breed and produce more viable offspring? Horses and donkeys—both members of the genus Equus—can produce living offspring, but they are almost always sterile. So the two animals are considered to be from different species.

We used to think H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis were separate species, too. I mean, just look at the Neanderthals, with their arching brow ridges, disappearing foreheads, heavy jaws, and stocky bodies. Such features simply scream “brute.” Shave one and put him in a business suit on the subway, and you’d still think you were looking at some kind of monkey … right? But since we’ve discovered fossil remains well enough preserved to take an almost complete genome, we’ve learned that many modern-day Europeans—humans from the geographic areas where these two “species” overlapped some 20,000 to 40,000 years ago—actually contain about 4% genetic material that is particular to the Neanderthal genome. So not only could the two lineages breed, but they must have produced viable offspring.

Maybe H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis are subspecies of a wider—and yet to be identified—Homo species. And maybe they are just two sets of human beings with different associated features who can trace their lineage back to a common ancestor in the not-so-distant past.

Looking for distinguishing features and trying to identify all-encompassing “types” is a particularly 19th-century intellectual fetish. It’s probably best reflected in the natural philosophy inspired by the great 18th-century classifier of botany and zoology, Carl Linnaeus. You can see this classifying urge today in birdwatchers, who go to great pains to distinguish various types of jays and woodpeckers. But it can be a trap and lead one to make false distinctions.

In a parallel vein, I’m reading John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. He makes the interesting point that what we think of as “languages” do not actually exist in natural populations. Instead, what we really have is collections of dialects particular to a certain region. In this way of thinking, Italian, French, and Spanish are simply long-isolated dialects of Latin. And what we today think of as English is actually an amalgam of local dialects, from Yorkshire to Cornish, with the corners rounded off in the studios of the BBC to become “standard English.” Each of these dialects bears some resemblance to the others but has different accents, different vowel and consonant sounds, and different and sometimes peculiar word usages.¹

The trend toward identifying a “standard” language started with the rise in literacy after the adoption of moveable type. Most notably, people in the areas we now call Germany, ranging from the North Sea to the Alps, once spoke quite distinct dialects. It wasn’t until Martin Luther translated the Bible in the 1520s and ’30s, and then popularized it with his own brand of Protestantism, that a modern, standard German—called “High German” for its predominance in the southern or higher elevations of the region, compared to the lowlands of places like the Netherlands—developed to unite the country linguistically.

Similarly, in France one finds the langues d’oïl in the northern provinces and the langues d’oc of the southern provinces. The former beat out the latter as “standard” French because of their closeness to Paris, which was the center of culture starting in the Middle Ages and home of the Academie Française with its binding rules on language and grammar.

Just as our notion of a “standard” language is made up of amalgams of linguistic variants that developed in relative isolation in a separate places, so our notion of various human races is made up of amalgams of genetic mutations and morphological features that developed in isolation in different places. The features we now associate with “distinct” races—variations in skin and hair coloring, hair texture, nose shape, eyelid shape, and so on—are all just minor genetic differences that were passed down first in families and then in tribal lineages, and finally came to dominate in the community and the region.

Social structure and the prominence of certain families had a lot to do with it, too. For example, genetic analysis has shown that about 10% of the men living within the borders of the Mongol Empire at the time of Genghis Khan’s death carry his Y chromosome. It was good to be the khan, or king, or a tribal chieftain.

Take skin color, for the most obvious example of race. Various populations in Africa, southern India, and Australia are nearly uniform in having dark skin. This is a natural response to their lineage’s long exposure to tropical sunlight. The regulation of skin pigments and addition of melanin as an inherited trait is a protective reaction against exposure to damaging ultraviolet rays. If you put a Swedish family in the tropics for a hundred generations, they will start having dark-skinned babies, too—without having to invoke any interbreeding to explain the phenomenon.

Fair hair and blue eyes are genetic recessives—that is, they readily give way to brown or black hair and eyes in any genetic mixing. But places like Scandinavia came to be dominated by these recessives because the earliest inhabitants of these cold, far northern areas didn’t travel much and managed to avoid invasion. Then, during the three centuries of Viking raiding and mercantile expansion into western and eastern Europe in the late first millennium, their descendants passed these features on to other populations.

It’s not logical to think of dark-skinned people as belonging to a separate race but blue-eyed blonds as just another type of Caucasian.

Or imagine an island in the Irish Sea where people with red hair and freckles—another set of recessive genes—had become so dominant that you couldn’t find dark-haired, pale-skinned people anywhere on the island. Would we then speak of a separate race of redheads and make them into a special variant of the human race?²

Or if you imagine you can tell a person’s race by features like wide lips or flattened noses, think of the famous Habsburg jaw. This was a genetic feature—a long jaw and prominent chin—in the Habsburg family which ruled in Austria and other parts of Europe from the Renaissance to the 19th century. If that family had started earlier or been more prolific, its famous jawline might have become the distinguishing feature of a whole “race” of central Europeans, similar to Genghis Khan’s Y chromosome.

It's clear from biology that all the beings alive today and accepted as human are of one species and not even variants. Genetically, we all trace back to a band of about a hundred H. sapiens wandering through eastern Africa about 60,000 years ago. On that basis, we are all cousins under the skin.³

1. It’s not surprising that the British Isles should be so linguistically broken. They have seen successive invasions and domination in different areas by the Celts, the Romans, the Angles and Saxons, the Danes, the Norse, and the Norman French. Everybody brought their own words, accents, and other linguistic pieces to the puzzle—the glorious pastiche—that is modern English.

2. However, my daughter-in-law—being red-haired herself—collects memes and anecdotes about “gingers,” as if they were a separate group of people with their own mysterious origins, attractive features, talents, propensities, and special powers. I sometimes wonder if she’s being satirical.

3. Of course, all of this discussion is based on the biological dimensions of race: genotypes and morphologies, which are accidents of inheritance. I’m not commenting on the social and cultural dimensions of race: physical markers by which one person recognizes another whom he or she wishes to accept or reject as an associate. Race as ethnicity and a form of social bonding is a matter of self-definition and choice as much or more than it’s a matter of inheritance. But it’s not biologically significant.

Can Evolution Be Disproved?

Science—meaning, from its Latin root, the business of knowing—has little or nothing to do with absolute truth, consensus, authority, or belief. Science is about looking into what is really going on, and in most cases, like most things, it’s complicated. Science is an endless series of guesses and questions and refinements of knowledge which do not assume they will uncover a final and for-all-time answer.

Science is a process, written into the Scientific Method. First, you observe what’s going on around you, especially the occasions and outcomes that don’t seem to make obvious sense. These things make you wonder. Second, you think deeply about them and try to imagine what’s driving the observed outcome, why things work out that way, and what’s really going on here. From your thinking, you establish a guess or a principle, theory, or hypothesis about the part that you cannot directly observe: the part that explains the why or predicts the what. Third, you think of ways that your guess might be proven either right or wrong. Fourth, you devise and conduct one or more experiments under controlled conditions that would tend to prove or disprove your theory, guess, or principle. Your bet is: “If this happens during my experiment, then I’m likely to be right. If that happens, then I’m likely wrong.” Fifth, you communicate your theory, the tests you made, and the results in enough detail so that others can understand your idea, reproduce your test, and compare their own results.

The beauty of this process is that it’s entirely limited and incremental, as well as being purely democratic. You are testing your logic and reasoning in specific cases, and you are exposing yourself to questioning and either confirmation or refutation by independent minds. If your hypothesis covers only a specialized, limited case, or does not consider or allow for alternate theories, or if your test design ignores important variables, then your results will be revealed as possessing limited value and perhaps even no value. You can only lay claim to what you state and what you test, and even then your results are only valuable in terms of what others will accept as having been proved or disproved.

It’s really a difficult and demanding way to acquire knowledge—except for all the others, which are worse.¹

The linchpin of the scientific method is disprovability. Your test has to show that your hypothesis and its predictions were either right or wrong. Your hypothesis has to allow for an outcome that disproves it. But this is not always obvious.

Take, for example, the proposition or hypothesis that everything we see and experience in the universe happens according to the design of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing intelligence that stands outside space and time. It may be a comforting belief. It may even be true. But how would you disprove it? Whatever conditional test you proposed, the results could always be explained as part of this intelligence’s deeper intention. It might, for example, be trying to sharpen your wits with a conundrum, or discourage your impertinence with an unexpected result, or simply torment you with doubt. You have no way of knowing or proving anything about this overriding intelligence and its hidden purposes.

Take, for another example—one that claims scientific provenance—the propositions of string theory in physics: that every particle we encounter is actually a tiny loop of stringlike material that’s vibrating in one of a number of microscopic dimensions not observable at the human or galactic scale. It’s an elegant idea, combining notions of both matter and energy. It’s supported by elegant mathematics. It may even be true. But how do you disprove it? How do you physically examine and measure dimensions that we cannot experience? How do you determine where the vibration leaves off and the inert string material begins? Whatever test you proposed, the results could always be explained as applying to a higher and coarser level of existence, under which lies a deeper, more fine-grained level at which string theory actually operates.

This looks superficially like the older conundrums in the physical sciences: that Newton’s laws seem to apply on a human or planetary scale, but don’t exactly work out at the level of galactic interactions or at the level of subatomic particles. At the galactic scale, you have the laws of Newton refined, enlarged, and overwritten by Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. At the subatomic scale, you have Newton refined—and, in some cases, discarded and turned on its head—by the insights of quantum mechanics. The two approaches both work in their respective realms, generate hypotheses and predictions that can be proved or disproved, and answer a lot of important questions. But relativity and quantum mechanics are so far irreconcilable under any form of mathematics, because they take fundamentally different approaches and make mutually antagonistic assumptions.²

One might think then that something similar applies to the disjunction between the older stories of creation and earlier theories about the differences among plants and animals in biology and the insights of Charles Darwin. But Darwin’s theory of evolution is not an enlargement or refinement of earlier ideas but instead a total disconnect. And the people who disagree with and perhaps are offended by the implications of Darwin’s analysis want to attack it along several fronts.³

First, they want to explain that random chance is incapable of creating complex structures. I believe this is a misreading of both the theory and the events of biology. Random chance did not suddenly create a human eye with its ability to focus for varying distances, adjust to available light levels, and detect and discriminate colors among different wavelengths of light. Somebody didn’t roll the dice just once and a full-blown set of eyes came up. Instead, extant organisms and the fossil record show many examples of different stages in this development, from the light-sensitive chemicals in one-celled animals, to collections of light-sensing cells in many different organisms, up through various kinds and qualities of eyes.

Actually, random chance does not operate at the level of structure or purpose at all. Chance only plays a part in the theory at the level of occasional and undirected mutations to the genetic material that controls the nature and expression of proteins. These mutations are happening all the time in every organism, some with positive results, some with negative results, and some making no difference at all. The test of whether a mutation is used and preserved or eventually discarded is fitness for purpose. If the mutation helps the individual thrive and breed, it will likely stay and be transmitted to the next generation. If it hurts the individual, it will either die out immediately with the host organism or disadvantage the next and future generations. If the mutation has no obvious effect, it may either die out or persist, and if the latter, it may prove beneficial or hurtful later under changing circumstances. This test of fitness for purpose is not at all random but rather the most appropriate and important test for organisms inhabiting a dangerous and changeable world. It is the only test that matters.

Second, these people claim that no one has ever observed an “intermediate form,” halfway between one species or type of organism and another. They complain that the fossil record does not show such forms in support of, for example, a transition between apes and humans, or between lizards and dinosaurs, or between any two kinds of animals and plants. They focus a great deal of attention on the 19th-century notion of a “missing link.”⁴

Actually, such forms exist all over the place and throughout the fossil record. Fossils of the shrew-like mammal that survived the dinosaurs have been examined in detail and demonstrate many features that predate later mammals like rodents, dogs, and humans. Fossils of early snakes and lizards show how elements of their jaw hinge became the ear canal and the tiny bones—hammer, anvil, and stirrup—essential to mammalian hearing. And the process works backward, too, because we can trace in the flipper of a whale the bones from the front foreleg of its ancestral mammal, which walked on land, and associate with its vertebrae the vestigial bones of that ancestor’s pelvis. Life on this planet is a glissando of adaptive changes, from one shape and purpose to the next, one generation to the next.

Third, the people who dislike evolution claim that it’s just a theory and as such can never be proven. This claim has some merit, because evolution as currently understood depends on two separate processes: one, a random change to an organism’s genetic material; and two, the usefulness of that change in an environment subject to many different effects and conflicting factors. Neither the mutations nor the ecological conditions can be completely reproduced in the lab in order to arrive at the major dividing line in evolutionary theory: the creation of a new species. A species is generally defined as a population that can interbreed and produce viable and fertile offspring.⁵ Development of a new species generally takes a long time, the right conditions, and geographic separation from the ancestral gene pool.

Actually, we can see evidence of morphological and structural changes that take place fairly rapidly. For example, in studying finches in the Galapagos Islands, Peter and Rosemary Grant saw beak shape change from one generation to the next based on the availability of various seed types. For another example, we have been conducting a large-scale experiment with various types of antibiotics that has created new generations of bacteria that are resistant to their effects. For a third example, Craig Venter has organized at least two sea-going experiments that take genetic samples every couple of miles or so in the Baltic and Mediterranean seas and in the open ocean, looking for new bacterial and planktonic genes and charting their associated capabilities for use in synthetic biology. The genetic variations he discovered suggest that what we once thought of as distinct marine species are actually more like whole genuses and families. It would take time and effort to conduct an experiment designed to consciously create an entirely new species of bacteria or plankton—but probably easier there than with any species of finch, because of the faster generations and ease of isolation with microbes—but I have no doubt that eventually such an experiment could be done.

Given that evidence of evolution seems to be all around us, in terms of structural adaptation, genetic similarities, and traceable lineages, what would it take to disprove the theory of evolution? That is, aside from the claim that genetic mutation is simply the mechanism that an all-powerful, all-knowing intelligence has chosen for the way things work on this planet.

The first disproof—or evidence leading us to doubt the processes of evolution—would be to find a child that differed significantly in phenotype (appearance, structure, and development) as well as in genotype (genetic makeup) from its biological parents.⁶ Such a “cuckoo” would obviously raise questions of actual origins and the possibility of a hoax: did sperm A actually meet egg B to form a zygote as claimed? But if that chain of custody or provenance could be proved, then we would have a true biological oddity that would throw the principles of evolution into a quandary.

In this discussion, I’m not concerned with one or two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that could result from mutations occurring sometime between the separation of the gamete from the parent and examination of the embryo. Those happen all the time.⁷ To be a convincing disproof of evolution, the certified child would have to be so changed from its parents that a preponderance of its genetic material had no connection, its appearance was vastly different, or its genetics and nature were not even of the same genus, species, or family. Such child would represent so great a deviation from what we currently expect of genetics, obstetrics, and medical theory that we would today consider it a miraculous birth.

A second disproof of evolution would be to find two species that appear to be closely related but that had totally different genomes. It’s not hard to find two unrelated species inhabiting similar ecological niches but that have different genomes. For example, bats and birds both fly by flapping their wings, and some species of each make their living by catching and digesting insects in flight. But one is a mammal, descended from that shrew-like creature that survived the dinosaurs, and the other is an Aves of lizard-like heritage and possibly descended from the dinosaurs themselves. Similarly, humans and octopi have very similar eye structures, but one is a vertebrate living on dry land and the other is not, and the two are separated by huge genetic distances.

But what if you had two robins, or a robin and a dove, and the two birds were alike in everything else—their structures, activities, diets, morphology, and phenotype—yet their genomes were as far apart as bats and birds, or humans and octopi? Such a discovery would suggest that something else—maybe a divine and playful intelligence—was ordering the nature of life on Earth.

The third disproof would be to find another type of genetic organization at work. So far, every domain, kingdom, and phylum of organisms on this planet—bacteria, archaea, fungi, plants, animals, and you-name-its—found in the most isolated locations, from freshwater lakes under the Antarctic ice sheets to volcanic vents along the mid-ocean ranges, uses the same genetic system. The four bases of DNA—adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine—are attached to ribose sugar rings, which are strung on a phosphate backbone and arranged in reading groups of three bases each to call for combinations from among just twenty different amino acids to make all the possible proteins used in earthly biology. Aside from minor differences—like replacing thymine with uracil, and dropping the OH group from the ribose ring’s two-prime carbon, in creating and processing RNA—everything we consider to be alive uses this same system. No organism uses just three bases, or up to five, in its genetic material, or assembles them into two-base or four-base reading groups, or makes use of any of the 500 other possible amino acids to make strange and different proteins. And no organism uses some other type of protein-coding system, perhaps based on silicon instead of carbon in its bases and sugar rings, or arsenic instead of phosphorus in its backbone.

If we found another genetic system in operation on this planet, it would suggest a separate and unique creation. It wouldn’t actually disprove “descent with variation,” which is the core of current evolutionary theory. But it would indicate that what is going on in biology is different from what we currently imagine. That would suggest some principle, mechanism, or hypothesis which our biological scientists have not yet considered and discarded.

But we haven’t discovered any such thing. And in the meantime, until we do, evolution as a hypothesis and a working model explains so much of what we see and orders our thinking so clearly—and without those nasty mathematical dislocations that separate relativity from quantum mechanics in the study of physics—that the theory of evolution has no peer. Even if it remains just a theory, it works awfully well.

1. A thought stolen from Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.”

2. I’m not bothered by this and prefer to take a wait-and-see approach as to whether either one will prevail or some third kind of “mechanics” is waiting outside human knowledge and still to be discovered. For now, I’m content to think that, as the biomarkers and medical treatments appropriate for an elephant may be different from those for a flea, so the cosmic experience and the quantum level represent different cases.

3. Let me say here at the outset that I’m a convinced evolutionist, satisfied with the theory’s ability to explain what we see and its every encounter with developments in morphology, paleontology, and genetics.

4. The notion goes back to a creature that is not great ape and not human but has features of both and sits midway between them. The last hundred years has dredged up successive waves of skeletons of varying ages that show this progression. The confusion may lie with the misconception that we humans evolved from any of the present day or recent forms such as chimpanzees, gorillas, or Neanderthals. The truth is, all of these forms are our cousins, and together we all point back to some earlier ancestor.

5. In this context, horses and donkeys are separate species, because their offspring may survive to maturity but cannot breed a new generation. Horses and zebras are in the same situation. Rarely, however, a female mule has been known to reproduce if mated with a purebred stallion.
       For a long time, H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis were thought to be in this relationship, as separate species of the genus Homo. However, recent sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and comparison with our human genome suggest that in lineages tracing back to European populations, which came in contact with the Neanderthals between 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, some humans may possess up to 4% Neanderthal genes. This implies interbreeding with fertile offspring, and so the two groups are probably subspecies of an as-yet unnamed Homo species and not truly separate.

6. In this case, I’m not concerned with issues of adoptive parents or surrogacy, but the simple coming together of egg and sperm to form an embryo, regardless of legal conditions or laboratory circumstances.

7. And I’m not talking about chimeras, either. These are organisms resulting from one or more fused embryos, in which the individual ends up possessing cells and tissues with different genetic backgrounds. Such an individual might have both male and female organs or possess two different blood types. Chimeras are strange, but they do not violate any biological or evolutionary principles.
       In ancient times, chimeras were strange creatures with misaligned body parts: head of a lion, body of a goat, tail of a lizard. Famous ancient chimeras included winged horses like Pegasus, griffins (head, wings, and talons of an eagle, haunches of a lion), or even the humanoid centaurs (half-man, half-horse) and fauns (half-man, half-goat). Needless to say, as viable anatomical structures, these creatures were and are wholly mythical.

Needs vs. Wants

I actually knew someone who won the California lottery. It was back in the 1980s, and the man lived in my mother-in-law’s San Francisco neighborhood. He was retired from the phone company with a pension, a modest house that he and his wife had lived in for decades, having raised children there, and they now had even more grandchildren. I don’t recall the exact amount of his winnings, but for tax purposes they were structured so that he would receive $400,000 a year for twenty years. He kept living in the old house and used that money to get a nice car, buy a vacation cabin on the Russian River, and put his grandchildren through college. Being a prudent man, I’m sure he also set up some generous trust funds. The money greatly improved his lifestyle and his family’s prospects.

I also knew a woman in that neighborhood who wished this man well, but she once told me, “Nobody needs that kind of money. That’s excessive. The lottery should pay out at most about $5,000. That’s enough for anyone.” In other words, keep buying your tickets and dreaming big, but expect to win just enough for a nice vacation—then go back to work.

Shortly after this, the U.S. Congress enacted and the first President Bush signed a luxury tax on expensive goods that people obviously didn’t need. On target were boats costing more than $100,000, cars costing more than $30,000, private aircraft more than $250,000, and furs and jewelry more than $10,000. (Those were big numbers in those days, but slightly more laughable a quarter century later after years of inflation.) To each of these purchases would be attached a ten-percent surcharge designed to reduce the federal deficit as well as discourage such “conspicuous consumption.” The theory was that nobody would mind seeing the millionaires deprived of their toys.¹

More recently, on an episode of CNBC’s Closing Bell, I caught an interview with Thomas Piketty, the Parisian economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He was apparently denying that his book was all about income inequality, but he did say that no one really needed a billion dollars. That’s excessive.

This interview coincided closely in my experience with a poster someone was displaying on Facebook: “Why does anyone need an AR-15 with 30 rounds of ammo?” The presumption was that such firepower is excessive. People should be happy with a smaller gun—or maybe with just a cell phone, so they can call 911 when trouble occurs. That’s all anyone really needs.

The presumption in every such case is that, if you don’t need it, you don’t actually deserve to have it. And so you won’t mind if wiser heads decide to take it away from you.

I am averse to all these forms of social control that begin with “Why does anyone need …?” Whether it’s a gun, a yacht, or a billion dollars, the question still presumes that a fair-minded, “normal” person has the right to deny anyone possession of the specified object based on “reasonableness.” Questions of legal use aside,² this presumption flies in the face of personal freedom and property rights, among others.³

I may not need the object of my desire, or the fortune in the case of lottery winnings, but I do want it. In most cases I must spend time and energy, or their equivalent in money, to obtain the desired object. To have a chance at winning the lottery, I must remember to buy the tickets, seek out lucky numbers or other winning strategies, and sacrifice the other pleasures that the price of those tickets might buy each week. To amass a personal fortune by playing the stock market or climbing the corporate ladder, I must be bold, take risks, focus my talents and energies, and prepare to lose everything during a market collapse or a corporate coup. To acquire that gun, I must—at least in California—take training, pass tests, and submit to a background check. To have that yacht, sports car, airplane, or jewelry, I must spend money that is not available for other purchases or investments. This is my choice. These are my sacrifices. And they are nobody’s business but mine.

The presumption that nobody should be allowed to waste their time, energy, and money on these frivolous desires goes back to the central tenet of Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” That sounds fair enough—if you are twelve years old, have not yet had to make any tough decisions, and do not yet know how the real world works. But an adult must ponder the parallel questions: Who determines those abilities, and what part do effort and coercion play in exercising them? Who determines what a person needs, and what part do desire and freedom of choice play in acquiring them?

I may have the strength to shovel three tons of coal during an eight-hour shift, but that doesn’t make me willing to do it. I may also have the creative imagination to invent a new kind of energy-efficient light bulb or battery, but that doesn’t mean I want to give it away without what the lawyers call “consideration.” Similarly, I may be able to sustain life on three slices of stale bread and a turnip each day, but that doesn’t mean I won’t beg, borrow, or steal for more. I may be able to survive being packed three to a room and sharing a bed with strangers, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be happy about it.

The Marxist presumption is that I do not have either freedom or rights, other than those granted to me by overseers in the name of “fairness” and “reasonableness.” It presumes that my time, my energy, the strength of my body, and the power of my mind do not belong to me but are surrendered to the control of others who act and speak for a vast, nebulous, inarticulate thing called “society.” It presumes that I do not belong to myself, that I have no authority to enter into contracts and seek my own benefit and advantage. It presumes that I am a slave—and a docile, willing one at that.

Who needs a billion dollars, or a yacht, or a thirty-round magazine? Personally, I don’t. But if that’s where you want to put your time and effort, your energy and your money, I won’t stop you. Knock yourself out, as they say. Life is short. The road is hard. And personal salvation comes in many forms.

1. I don’t know what this luxury tax did for the fur and jewelry market, but my family has always been interested in yachting, including cabin cruisers and sailboats in the 30-foot range. At something north of $100,000, they were in the price range of a summer cabin on the lake, except you could take off and cruise the canals and waterways of the eastern United States. Most of the power boats in this country were made on the Great Lakes, and the tax just decimated that business. The really big yachts—the millionaire’s mansion on a 150-foot hull—are now made in Taiwan or the Philippines, and potential buyers will still pay for them because, in that price range, ten percent more is nothing. But the luxury tax priced the middle class out of the pleasures of boating.

2. The law says I may own a gun, a yacht, or a billion dollars. So long as I don’t use the gun to threaten and/or kill other people, or the yacht to smuggle contraband, or the billion dollars to overthrow the government—or take similar actions which only become illegal through their execution and not because of the ownership of the means—then my right of possession should be secure.
       And for those of you who believe that my possession of any amount of wealth denies other people or my society of an equal amount of money, I refer you to my earlier blog It Isn’t a Pie from October 3, 2010. Money expands by being used and contracts when hoarded.

3. Such as the Second Amendment, in the case of a gun.

Hierarchies of Learning

I saw an article in Nature magazine recently about a ribosome signaling method, used to start the synthesis of a protein, that was common to both prokaryotes (single-celled organisms like bacteria) and eukaryotes (multi-celled bodies like plants, animals, and us).¹ I found this fact surprising, because when I worked at the biotech company, one of the lessons I learned from my scientific coworkers is that bacteria have a structurally different ribosome—the cellular component which reads the bases in RNA and uses them to assemble amino acids into a protein—from the ribosome in the cells of plants and animals. This difference is the target of most “antibiotic” and “antibacterial” agents: they keep germs from making proteins, and this kills them, but the chemical doesn’t harm us, our livestock, or the household cat.

That same morning someone posted on Facebook a NASA Hubble Space Telescope photograph of a galaxy which had both the dust lanes featured in spiral galaxies and the globular shape of an elliptical galaxy. So either the image showed the result of a merger of two different types of galaxies, or our notions about galaxy formation must allow for the possibility of a rare anomaly.²

This got me thinking about the nature of learning and how we come to accept statements that are “true” or “real.” As a person delves more deeply into a subject, he or she finds that the initial set of facts learned in the early, introductory courses are … not wrong, exactly, but more like a generalization that needs refinement.

So to say that prokaryotes and eukaryotes have different kinds of ribosome is basically true, but more detailed analysis shows that some chemical features and functions are common to both. Or to say that galaxies are divided into spiral and elliptical types is basically true, but a more thorough survey of the cosmos shows that galactic formation is fluid.

For every subject that’s worth studying, it would appear there are layers to the onion. It’s like saying, “Boston is a city on the East Coast,” which is true. It is even more true to say, “Boston is a city in Massachusetts located north of Cape Cod Bay.” But it is also true to say, “Boston is an urban environment that includes the city proper as well as East Boston, Charlestown, Brookline, and South Boston.” That is, people who consider themselves proper “Bostonians” might actually live as far away as Cambridge, Somerville, and Chelsea.

Reality is complicated. Useful definitions are seldom exact or include all the exceptions necessary to understand what’s really happening. We learn by steps, graduating from one level of truth to another. A different way to say this is that reality has a fractal nature. Big generalizations, big concepts, big shapes are redefined as a series of smaller, more intricate shapes that often share a common pattern with the whole.

In considering this, I’m reminded of the dubious effort to measure the coastline of California. A straight line from Pelican State Beach on the Oregon border above Crescent City down to International Park on the Mexican border below Chula Vista might be a first approximation of the distance—but it’s hardly exact. You get a slightly more accurate measurement if you make one bend in the line at Point Arena north of San Francisco and another bend at Lompoc west of Santa Barbara. And you get an even more useful measurement if you survey your way around every point and into every bay along the coastline.

To measure more accurately than that requires some decision making. Do you want to take your reading at high tide or low? Do you measure around every rock and pier on the shoreline? How about every grain of sand? With each decision, your measurement gets longer. And ultimately, by encompassing sand grains, it becomes for all practical purposes infinite. So what is the real distance? What is the most accurate—as opposed to the most useful—measurement?

In the same way, Newtonian physics and its definitions of time, distance, and the effects of gravity work perfectly well on the human scale of thrown baseballs and dropped cannonballs, as well as on the astronomic scale of orbiting planets and the influence of nearby stars. But Newton’s equations break down at the extreme scale of lightspeed and galactic masses, as well as at the infinitesimal scale of atomic particles. To encompass those realities, we must—in the outward direction—adopt the counterintuitive logic of Einsteinian relativity, with its linking of space and time into a single reality and its suggestion that both are relative and may be curved. In the other, inward direction, we must adopt the sometimes il-logic of quantum mechanics, with its particles that shift their properties, generate invisible fields, and pair off over immense distances in ways governed only by pure mathematics.

As a person who is interested in truth and was taught to believe that some things are absolute, this is all very disturbing. What is a true statement if, a few layers further in, we can find exceptions, differing definitions, and contradictions? What part of the fractal represents its real nature?

Perhaps one has to accept a kind of “conditional truth,” as being true on a defined scale or level of understanding that is neither universal nor infinite.

I state that I am a singular creature. And on the level of people, dogs, and cats, this is a true statement. But on the cellular level, I do not exist in any way that is meaningful to my consciousness. My brain is a collection of one or more types of nerve cells; the bones, muscles, and skin of my mouth and my hands are each another kind of cell. And all of these collections of cells are involved with keeping my heart pumping blood, my lungs drawing air, my entrails processing foodlike chemicals, and my muscles moving me away from danger and toward safety. These collections are far more concerned about these survival functions than with my dreamy and sometimes spurious notions of philosophy, astronomy, or biology. Some of those cells—the damaged or cancerous ones—may no longer support the health of the whole and may be actively working against it. And still another kind of cell—those thousands of species of bacteria that constitute my personal microbiome on my skin and in my guts—are no more “me” than the oxpeckers that perch on the back of a rhinoceros or the remoras that ride along with a shark.

In the other, outward direction, I as an individual body am also part of one or more composite entities. I am a member of a family—a collection of individuals bound by genetics, economics, and affections—and have a specific role in that setting. I am also a member of a profession and in times past have been part of a company and one or more teams within that organization. I am also a citizen of a town, a state, and a nation. Each of these roles imposes the expectations of other people upon my behavior and actions. I may work diligently in the interests of and to achieve the goals of these groups, or I may rebel and work against them because I have a different idea of interests and goals. If my opposition is too direct or abrupt, the organization may reject me like a damaged or cancerous cell. But I can never be entirely free of their influence, just as I can never leave the beating of my heart.

Some of these domains are related, as disease will diminish a my ability to act effectively as a parent or employee, or as stresses from the job or in my family may create a condition of fatigue and sickness. But in many ways, these two worlds are unrelated, as the fact that my stomach is working over my breakfast oatmeal has nothing to do with the way I plan to vote in the next election.

Our lives, our thoughts, and the realities we experience are more like a Venn diagram, with overlapping and separate areas of action and interest, than they are a unified whole. In such a situation, why should I look for a single fact to be true in all cases? As I learn more about a subject—that is, encounter more cases, add more details to my understanding, perceive more rules to be made and modified—the circles of the diagram grow. That forces a redefinition of what fits inside and what may still lie outside.

Reality is complicated and fractal. Why should I expect any true statement to exist beyond its time and scope?³ The world is fluid and change is constant. A mature person must realize this—or be bruised and crushed by the breaking of old patterns.

1. See Initiation of translation in bacteria by a structured eukaryotic IRES RNA from Nature for March 5, 2015. The full article is behind a firewall.

2. See “Hubble Views ‘Third Kind’ of Galaxy” on the NASA website.

3. And doesn’t that question smack of Einsteinian relativity?

The Future of Publishing: Brass Ring Syndrome

With past articles in this series on the Future of Publishing,¹ I have been most hopeful about the prospects for independent writers and hungry readers in this new world of ebooks and print-on-demand books. Being free of the time constraints imposed by inventory controls and publishing cycles, an author’s works can be made available longer and generally at a lower price. Now I want to address the subject in the back of every new author’s mind: the money.

Short answer: there ain’t any. Long answer: it depends …

If you write non-fiction, especially on assignment, you can make a decent living commensurate with your talent, energy, and expenses. You will write magazine articles, how-to and self-help books, history and analysis of popular or topical subjects, or biographies of recognized and beloved figures. You will be able to test the market and its interest in your kind of work. You will go where the market puts its money. With skill and effort, plus a good marketing plan, you will be successful.

If you write fiction … well, you still have some options. You can—with the right introductions and connections—write as a junior author in collaboration with a senior established author.² You can also ghostwrite for name authors on an established series or “media tie-in.”³ To get these gigs, you usually have to publish at least one or two books on your own to prove your skills. From there on, you are working closely with and taking orders from others: authors, editors, movie and series producers, and sometimes curious functionaries such as “book packagers”—all of whom have a stake in the project and generally take a larger cut of the proceeds than you will as the mere content producer. Still, with the right collaborator or series, you can make a decent and sometimes an excellent living.

But most of us don’t dream of writing novels as the content producer for a cash cow. We want to be the next Robert A. Heinlein, Norman Mailer, or Scott Turow. We want to be recognized, admired, beloved, and rewarded for our unique talent and insights. It’s happened before. It seems to happen every year or two. So why not with me?

You might think that writing a bestseller—for that is a necessary condition of achieving literary fame and fortune—is a matter of analyzing the current marketplace, figuring out the tastes and interests of readers, and synthesizing a book that checks off all the right themes, memes, and leitmotifs. To do this, you must believe that a perfect novel for today’s marketplace—like Plato’s ideal horse—exists and can be conjured out of marketing reports.⁴

Writers are not the only people who believe in the “ideal novel” for the current marketplace. Editors and agents are infected with the notion, too. They will quickly assure you that every project is different and that the author’s approach and talent play a big part in the process of making a bestseller. Still, they tell you to bring them a story about “X,” because they can really sell that kind of book right now. Today, “X” is probably the story of “a nice girl trapped in a romance layered with sadomasochism,” or “the unlikely heroine fighting a dystopian future society.” A dozen years ago, it was “a boy wizard with glasses.” Years earlier it was “a detective with a physical or mental handicap,” or—back when I was starting out—“the unknown heir to a fantasy kingdom.”

Whatever the formula, it is based on what’s popular in the marketplace right now. And that’s a trap. The trap is temporal and goes in two dimensions. First, the trap is already behind you, it’s hindsight, because what is popular right now took the author some finite amount of time—possibly decades, but certainly a year or two—to conceive, formulate, and write today’s popular book. Then it took more months and probably years for the author to make that initial sale to an agent and subsequently to an editor.⁵ And finally, it took a further year at least for the editor to prepare the manuscript, print the book, and perform all the marketing to bookstore and chain buyers through the publisher’s wholesale channels and release advanced press on the retail side.

Second, the trap is still in front of you, and you’re already late to market, because even if you know all about today’s top market trends, it will still take you at least a year to formulate and write your trend-matching book, and then another year for the publisher to edit, prepare, and market it. Taken together, you are now about four years off the cycle. By the time your “X” book appears, the market will have moved on and be wild for “Y.”

With self-publishing through ebooks and print-on-demand services, you can usually cut the cycle time down. And you will have a clear shot with your own trend analysis, because you don’t have to work through the serial filters of first an agent’s and then an editor’s interests, prejudices, and notions about where the market is going. But you are still up against the trap of hindsight and the delay for writing and preparation time. If you are really nimble, you might just make the tail end of the “X” trend, but by then you will be discounted as a “me, too” author on the way to being an “also ran.”

The new marketplace also pits you against a sea of other authors. Where traditional publishing, with its “gatekeepers” in the person of agents and acquisitions editors, might produce only thousands of new books in all categories and genres each year, the current market produces millions. And, without the economics of inventory keeping and returns policies to limit their lifespan, those books will stay in production and be available to readers for much longer—years so far, and probably for decades still to come. That’s good for an author with an established readership but stifling and frustrating for a new author trying to make a name for him- or herself—for anyone, that is, who’s trying to catch the brass ring.

What can a fiction writer do? If you can’t tie into an established senior author or series, I suggest a Jedi Mind Trick. Tell yourself that writing isn’t about the money. This shouldn’t be far from the truth, because most people write their first stories or books without the promise an assured sale.⁶ In the traditional literary marketplace, writing a book as a first-timer was the equivalent of buying a lottery ticket and had about the same odds of winning the jackpot, which was just getting published. But instead of the ticket costing you a few dollars, you bought it at the price of perhaps a thousand hours of hard work, depending on how fast you could write, followed by a year or two of dogged submissions. In the new self-publishing paradigm, the odds of getting published have risen to near certainty, but the odds of making a monetary success are now much worse.

The Jedi Mind Trick is to tell yourself it doesn’t matter. You have to say, “Oh? … Money? … Well …”

And that frees you. You can stop chasing the market, at least with the goal of making a fortune no matter what it might cost you in terms of personal interest, taste, or satisfaction.⁷ You can write what you like to read and think others will like in the long run. You can exercise your imagination and find something new and interesting to think, do, and show the world. You can be disruptive and daring and refreshing all at once. You can focus on quality.

Once you stop reaching for the brass ring of bestsellerdom and focus on achieving something unique and powerful, something intended to catch a reader’s mind, only then do you have a real chance at attracting loyal followers and making a new market that will be all your own.

1. For the earlier entries in this series, published about two years and more ago, see:
        1. Gutenberg Economics: What Is a Book Worth?
        2. Traditional Publishing: Through the Eye of the Needle
        3. eBook Publishing: No Inventory, No Logistics, No Middlemen
        4. eBook Publishing: The Author’s Toolkit
        5. Welcome to Rome, 475 AD
        6. How to Survive in Rome, 475 AD
        7. I’ll Survive in Rome, 475 AD
        8. The Best of Times

2. I did four of these novels back when I was publishing with Baen Books: Crisis of Empire: An Honorable Defense with David Drake; The Mask of Loki and Flare with Roger Zelazny; and Mars Plus with Frederik Pohl. See the Science Fiction books page on my website for fuller descriptions.

3. Many famous book series, like the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, were ghostwritten. The author’s name on the covers—Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon, respectively—are of people who never existed. Both of these series were the work of publisher Edward Stratemeyer in the 1930s. I’m sure other, more modern series that you would recognize today are published the same way.
       A modern variant of this is the media tie-in market: writing fresh, new novels set in the universe and using characters popularized by a movie or television show. I believe Alan Dean Foster was the first to try this, with a series of Star Trek novels that appeared soon after the original series went off the air. Now such novels seem to cover about a third to half of store bookshelves—at least in the Science Fiction section. The good news is that you usually get your name on the cover. The bad news is that your work must be approved not just by the editors at the publishing house but also by the production company of the original product. But if you can walk the line and take direction, you’ll make good money.

4. In local parlance, this is called “the great American novel.” I once tried to write an intentional bestseller in the thriller category. The result was Trojan Horse, an unsatisfactory book both for myself and, apparently, for my readers.

5. The tribulations that bestselling authors go through, with rejection after heartbreaking rejection of a story that everyone now loves, is the stuff of legend. For a summary, see Literary Rejections. This shouldn’t be surprising: every book that becomes a notable bestseller offers something new and refreshing to a market that’s looking for excitement. Such a book must change or disrupt established patterns, and the best of them establish new patterns of their own. That is always a risk and a gamble for established publishers.

6. I wrote two and a half novels and left them in manuscript before I wrote a book that could attract an agent and make a sale. I think most authors do about the same while they’re learning to write and finding their niche and voice. If you see a successful “first novel,” understand that it’s probably the author’s third, fourth, or fifth attempt. My mantra is that every overnight success is ten years in the making. It’s called learning the craft.
       Of course, for everyone who actually writes and finishes a book, fifty wannabes who are otherwise unhappy with their lives still cherish the notion that if they could just sit down and write their novel or screenplay, they could sell it and make a million dollars. They could also win the lottery, which is a whole lot easier.

7. The money trap is all around us. Maybe it’s a feature of the current American culture, where every Horatio Alger who studies hard, puts in the hours, and remains cheerful and persistent can grow up to be President of the United States, or CEO of his own company, or in some other fashion catch the brass ring. But the reality is that only two or three Presidents get elected in each generation, as only a couple of dozen people will rise to the C-suite of the major companies in each industry. But all of this striving does keep legions of local politicians, salesmen and –women, or engineers at work, and a fair number of them will eventually move up to become senators and congressmen and –women, regional sales managers and heads of marketing, or vice presidents of product development and design. In the same way, a lot of writers will eventually get a following and make a modest mark in the world—and some might even make a modest living.

One-upmanship

I was chatting with the manager of my local motorcycle dealership¹ while waiting for the shop to finish my service call, and we got onto the subject of the sales process. As a salesman himself, he recently had a good experience when buying a new car, and we both started telling stories about the people who make for bad experiences.

You know the type of person. He has to drive the hardest bargain, get the dealer to give him a price below invoice, and haggle until the other person is ready to just walk away. He forces every contractor to make concessions on rates and pricing, or offer extra services, then demands the highest level of service and performance, requires extra meetings and site visits, and finally complains about shoddy workmanship.

In the living world outside of business and retail sales, this is the driver who won’t let you pass him or merge into his lane. This is the man—for it seems to be a male trait, although not unknown among women—who has to win, who crows about it when he does, and either pouts or makes excuses when he doesn’t. This is the person who is obsessive about price and quality—not just in matters of work or art that are dear to his heart, but in every category imaginable—and lets you know his exact calculations, too, with the understanding that he never accepts anything less than the best.

Every encounter with this person is a struggle, an abrading of his or her ego against yours or someone else’s. Life for this person is a matter of continuous testing, with myriad acts of judgment both large and small. He or she practically declares personal superiority, conquest, and one-upmanship as a matter of principle.

Please understand that I’m not against seeking value, because the search can lead us to experience quality. I don’t despise saving money, because the quest can lead us to habits of thrift. I’m not against competition, either, because only when people strive against each other in situations that really matter to them can we achieve excellence. But for the type of person I’m describing, quality, thrift, and excellence are secondary or tertiary goals—if they are remembered at all.

A person who is really concerned with quality adopts an outward, almost selfless focus. The search is for the thing itself: a beautiful painting, an entertaining book or movie, a lovely symphony, a fine meal that one can enjoy by oneself but also appreciates simply knowing that it exists and meets some ideal of perfection. One does not absolutely have to possess or consume the object in question and can take pleasure in the joy it will bring to others.²

A person who is concerned with saving and thrift also has an outward appreciation. These are elements of a simpler life, shorn of extravagance, mindful of available resources. Thrift can reflect a yearning for efficiency, for incurring the least amount of waste energy and excess motion. One who values thrift also admires controlled processes, tight systems, and clean exchanges of quality for value, of result for effort.

A person who strives for excellence in competition is pleased to find it, no matter who might have achieved it. Yes, a competitor wants to win, and feels disappointment if the fastest time, the highest score, or the best performance does not accrue to one’s own efforts or team action. But the focus is on the quality of play and a clean result. The true striver abhors a cheat, a shortcut, or unfair advantage as a violation of the rules and spirit of the contest.

The sort of person who makes life a struggle is acting from inwardly focused ego rather than any outward focus on quality, thrift, or competition. He only cares about competition if he can win at it. He argues about price as a matter of pride, not thrift.³ And he mentions quality only when he can possess it to the exclusion of others, as a mark of his singular superiority.

The Zen master would say this attitude is a distraction. The Godfather would call it a waste. It engenders strife where none is necessary. It brings out bad feelings where we should strive for harmony. It creates losers—intentional, hurt-filled losers—where we should work toward mutual satisfaction.

The person who practices this kind of ego-driven one-upmanship is striding the road of bad karma, because he is raising bruises and blisters on all sides. And even if one doesn’t believe in mystical forces of retribution, it should make anyone uneasy to know that he or she is littering the path behind with people who now feel no sympathy or charity, will offer no benefit of the doubt, and will gladly pay back rudeness and bad dealing in kind.

It’s a push-me–pull-you universe out there. The person who rides through it recklessly on a wave of ego has yet to learn this.

1. BMW Motorcycles of San Francisco—a good place to do business, by the way.

2. Certainly, anyone can see how the act of looking at a painting, reading a book, or hearing a symphony can be a shared pleasure and not reduced through consumption. Food is a little harder to understand—until you think how much pleasure people take in sharing with friends their discovery of a new restaurant or a great wine, or reading about it in a positive review with enticing pictures.

3. It should be obvious that someone who is driving a hard bargain on something beloved but nonessential to continued life—like art, books, music, wine … or a new motorcycle—is haggling in the wrong bazaar.