On Life, Knowledge, and Belief
May - June 2018
All living things have a life of their own Mankind’s rush is usually for vain Forgetting their uniqueness They compete with animals
Poisoning 4 of Spirit CANADA: $5.95 • TURKEY: 7.50
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LEAD ARTICLE M. Fethullah Gülen
Poisoning OF Spirit
If the vitriolic areas of one’s spiritual life are vulnerable to carnal desires, such a person’s conscience will inevitably perish. When this most important system is paralyzed, such persons cannot understand the immense purpose behind the blessing of being created with the best of stature.
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he spirit constitutes human's deepest otherworldly aspect, which is open to the heavenly realms. It is like a mysterious wing that helps one remain human while also extending to the realms further beyond this one. Realizing the peak of one’s human potential is a divine grace promised when that wing is alive and spiritually alert. Its paralysis, however, means paralysis of the anatomical system of the human spirit; we briefly refer to this as the “poisoning of spirit.� Treating the poisoning of spirit is rather difficult, and in some cases, it is nearly impossible, for most of the time one does not feel aches and pains. The person does not wish to visit a physician for it. Therefore, such a person is almost like the dead, at least in terms of liveliness of the heart and spirit. Worst of all, they fail to realize the gravity of the issue. In spite of undergoing deformations in their inner world, the person further degrades their spirit, failing to see the dark end that awaits. One fails to see the true nature of things, for they are being poisoned in spirit and experiencing a blindness of insight. As for what such a person claims to see, they cannot make sense of what underlies them. How can they make sense while their system of cognition is paralyzed? While their spiritual anatomy is broken? While their reasoning and judgment fail to function? Consequently, they fail to soundly judge what happens, to tell right from wrong, for the poison incapacitates their abilities of cognition and discernment. They see poison as an antidote, and like one attempting to quench thirst with sea water, they burn further as they drink and continue to drink as they burn.
ENTOMOLOGY Atif Yorulmaz
Admit: we all hate getting bit by mosquitoes. Yet insects, despite giving us the creeps, are integral to nearly every ecosystem. Here are some of the most remarkable insects.
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Many of the most fascinating features in nature are from the world of insects: in proportion to their size, they can jump the longest, they can beat wing the fastest, and kill the highest number of humans.
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e classify each living thing by the different and similar features they possess. Through such classifications, we understand that all things are created for a purpose. They help us to read the book of nature laid before us. Many species of animals belonging to groups such as one-celled organisms, fish, invertebrates inhabiting the seas, and worms in the earth, are still waiting to be discovered. No one can know for sure what the total number of animal species will be. Time will show whether it will be two million, or three, or even five. The number of animal species identified and named to date is about 1,400,000. Of these, insects number nearly one million species. The group called Coleoptera, or beetles, have the most species, with about 350,000. The next largest groups are Lepidoptera, or moths and butterflies (about 120,000); Diptera, or flies (120,000); and Hymenoptera, or ants and bees without 110,000 species.
Incredible numbers from the insect world Many insects serve a vital role for humans. Bees, of course, are a great gift to humanity. They do not only serve us honey, but also have a duty to pollinate flowers, fruits, and vegetables. If it were not for the bee, we would not have many types of fruit we enjoy today, or we would find them with difficulty and at exorbitant prices because they would have to be pollinated artificially. To be able to produce honey as small as one gram, a bee, which covers an approximate distance of 800 km in its lifetime, has to collect nectar from as many as 125,000 flowers. Put differently, in order to make one kilogram of honey, 40,000 bees have to visit 6 million flowers.
The animal with the longest jump If we asked which could jump longer, a kangaroo or a flea, many would underestimate the flea. Striking findings emerge when we compare distances with body size. While a man can leap a distance of five times his height, the red kangaroo can jump 13.5 meters, which translates as nine times its height. The springbok, a medium-sized antelope living in Africa, can jump 10 times its height, a grasshopper 20 times, a kangaroo mouse 45 times, the northern cricket frog (Acris crepitans) 36 times, and a cat flea (Ctenocephalides felis) 200 times. It is a very special protein called resilin, placed in the muscle fibers in the hind legs, with which the cat flea is enabled to jump such incredible distances (Picture 1).
Picture 1: The cat flea (Ctenocephalides felis)
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MATHEMATICS Ali Kaya
and their mysterious role in nature and our lives
M Prime numbers are actually not only of purely mathematical interest. When you answer your phone, you are using prime numbers. When you buy something online, prime numbers are protecting you from thieves.
y favorite number is 7. It’s a beautiful number and, most importantly, it is a prime number. I emphasize it being prime because I am fascinated by prime numbers. A prime number is a positive number that is only divisible by 1 and itself. Math teachers emphasize teaching prime numbers because prime numbers lie at the very heart of mathematics. But prime numbers are actually not only of purely mathematical interest. When you answer your phone, you are using prime numbers. When you buy something on Amazon, prime numbers are protecting you from thieves. Some animals and fruits love prime numbers also. If you keep reading, you will see that a lot of algorithms develop from number theory, using it for communication security and for the transmission and compression of information. Prime numbers cannot be evenly divided into smaller integers. Hmmm, so we can take half of all possible numbers off the table right away. Yes, we can! Even numbers, except for 2, cannot be prime. All multiples of three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and so on can also not be prime. At this point you might think, “Hey, there are no prime numbers then.” However, this is not true. There are an infinite number of primes. Euclid proved the theorem many years ago. Theorem: There are infinitely many primes. Proof: Suppose that p1=2 < p2 = 3 < … < pr are all of the primes. Let P = p1 x p2 x … x pr+1 and let p be a prime dividing P; then p cannot be any of p1, p2, …, pr, otherwise p would divide the difference P – p1 x p2 …pr=1, which is impossible. So, this prime p is still another prime, and p1, p2, …, pr would not be all of the primes. I know the theorem seems complicated. But the basic idea of the proof is that, if there were only finitely many primes, we could have a list of all of those prime numbers. For example, let’s say we only know 2, 3, 5, and 7 as prime. Now if you multiply them all together and add 1, you will get a new number, 211, that isn’t divisible by any of the numbers except for 1 and itself. So, we get a new prime number for our list. You can do this operation infinitely and every time you will get a new prime. So, if somebody asks you what is the largest prime, you know the answer. “I don’t know! They are infinite.” Assumption: There is no real formula which can be used to find all the prime numbers.
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had been considered a lot of things in my life but for the first time in my 100 years, I was a time traveler. I walked out on the moonlit deck behind the house with an envelope nearly as old as I was. It was still crisp and white thanks to the plastic sleeve it had been kept in all these years. I took a seat on a chair beneath a brilliant expanse of stars that seemed to always be there and then smiled, laughing at the fact that they were hundreds of light years away and probably hadn't even been there at all, not as I saw them my entire life. Everyone always imagines time traveling to take some sort of machine or vehicle, but that night I had bridged the great divide of 72 years of space-time more gracefully than the Tesseract, using just the contents of just that envelope to have a conversation that had been waiting for nearly a century. I ran my fingers over its corners and edges. I had known how to time travel for years but was waiting for this moment. I had written a letter to myself for my 100th birthday and now that the family had left, the cake had been divided and devoured, and my sweet wife of 82 years was fast asleep, I was ready to finish what I had started. I took a deep breath and broke the glue seal on the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper. I marveled at how the sheet was so neatly folded and tried to recall how I felt the day I folded it, but I couldn't get a clear picture. I knew the catalyst was still inside, the magic of the words would transport me back in time. Upon opening it, the first thing I saw was the date: April 21, 2018. Now, some might imagine the feeling of time traveling to be gradual or spontaneous, that it may feel like every atom is ripping apart or perhaps completely painless and instantaneous, but that's not how it feels at all. Instead, it feels effortless and gradual, just as the water flowing from the small fountain in the middle of the deck.
A MOMENT FOR REFLECTION Mat Hritz
We spend our whole lives trying to be something and somebody that we miss who we've been the whole time.
HEALTH Ferhat Ozturk
Honey is supersaturated in sugars, packed with beneficial chemicals, and, thus, possesses high nutritive value. It has been used both as a nutritious food and a remedy for various ailments throughout history.
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First biological weapon in history n 67 BCE, the magnificent Roman army, which was led by Pompey the Great, marched through the green mountains and blue shores of the Black Sea, chasing King Mithridates of Pontus and his Persian army. Once the Romans reached the highlands of Trabzon, now part of northeastern Turkey, they found pots full of local honey on the sides of their path. The hungry and tired Roman army, with a total of about 1000 soldiers, rushed into the pots, assuming they were gifts from the villagers. Within a couple of hours, a majority of Pompey’s soldiers were perplexed and hallucinating, and could no longer fight against Mithridates’ army. The Romans had been trapped by the “mad honey,” the first biological weapon used in history. The alkaloid grayanotoxin, of the rhododendron, locally known as the forest rose or the Kumar flower, induced aorta expansion among the Roman soldiers, which resulted in bradycardia (decrease in heart rate), hypotension, hallucinations, and eventually disorientation.[1] This mad honey is still being used, at low doses, by locals of the Black Sea region as a traditional medicine for the treatment of hypertension. Honey is produced through enzymatic processing of the nectar or honeydew honeybees collect from various plants. The invertase enzyme within the bees’ abdomens catalyzes the conversion of sucrose – table sugar within the nectar – into glucose and fructose. Honey is supersaturated in sugars, packed with beneficial chemicals, and, thus, possesses high nutritive value. It has been used both as a nutritious food and a remedy for various ailments throughout history. Wound healing, and treatment of gastrointestinal diseases, conjunctivitis, acute fever, and pain, are just some of the disorders honey can treat.
PERSPECTIVES Jon Pahl
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The world may seem like it’s controlled by so-called “strongmen,” but Jon Pahl believes faith, humility, and cooperation are set to bring about a new order of peace.
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n the early decades of the twenty-first century, strong-men like Okonkwo, the tragic character in Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s classic novel Things Fall Apart, appear to rule the world. From Russia to Turkey, from North Korea to the United States, men driven by fear and a need to demonstrate their masculinity through power control armies and nations. Okonkwo, Achebe tells us, was an athlete – a wrestler, a hard worker, rightly proud of his achievements – and yet he was also a man who treated people “with a heavy hand.” If you know the novel, and every literate person should, as it is truly one of the world’s classics, you know the story. Okonkwo breaks the Week of Peace by beating his young wife, Ojiugo. He cuts down with his machete his adopted son, Ikemefuna, whom he loved, because, Achebe tells us, Okonkwo “was afraid of being thought weak.” And then, when the British arrive with their “peaceful administration” (Achebe was a master of irony), Okonkwo responds first by killing one of the government messengers and then commits an offense against the Earth, tragically hanging himself from a tree. This “strong man” was driven by fear. And strong men like Okonkwo do seem to rule the world. Yet I want to offer an alternative point of view, based in part on a recent trip to Nigeria. At almost the exact center of Things Fall Apart, Achebe has one of the wives of Okonkwo, Ekwefi, tell an old Igbo folktale that can highlight what happens when strong men rule. Every Nigerian child knows the story. It’s the story of how the tortoise got a cracked shell. The birds of the Earth were invited to a great feast by the people in the sky. There was a drought and famine on the Earth, and Tortoise was hungry. He heard about the feast for the birds and wanted to go along. So, Tortoise persuaded the birds to each give him a feather. Tortoise then made those feath-
ers into two wings, so that he could go to the feast, and he flew with the birds to the banquet. On the way he told the birds that the people of the sky gave guests new names, and that his name was “All of You.” So, when the feast was served, Tortoise asked the people of the sky, “For whom is this great feast prepared?” And the people of the sky answered, “For all of you!” Tortoise then told the birds, “You remember that my name is All of You. The custom here is to serve the spokesman first and the others later. They will serve you when I have eaten.” Tortoise ate the choicest foods, leaving the birds only bones. The birds understandably grumbled. One by one, they then took their feathers back from Tortoise. He could not fly back to Earth. So, he asked Parrot to take a message to his wife, to put out all the soft things from their hut. Parrot agreed, but then when he returned to Earth, instead he told the wife of Tortoise to put out all the hard things, like the machetes and guns and even a cannon. When Tortoise fell, he landed on these hard things, and his shell cracked into many pieces. A very strong traditional doctor was nearby, allowing Tortoise’s wife to gather the pieces of his shell and glue them back together. I’ll return to this story near the end of this essay, but my main point in what follows is that despite all appearances to the contrary, I believe the era of the so-called strong man is coming to an end. It is not going to end easily, because when they feel threatened, such men react with displays of pride and force. But as Mohandas Gandhi and Desmond Tutu and other nonviolent peacebuilders learned, “when people decide they want to be free there is nothing that can stop them.” And strong men, too, can learn to change their ways. For as Jesus put it so clearly, when his disciple Peter reached for his machete, “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”
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REFLECTIONS
Some live without thinking; some only think, but cannot put their thoughts into practice. However, we have an obligation to live thoughtfully and while living, by producing the freshest combinations, to develop more and varied approaches to thinking.
The crıtıcal lımıt for global warmıng: 1.5 degrees Celsıus
Warren R. et al. The projected effect on insects, vertebrates, and plants of limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C. Science, May 2018
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A new study claims that if we can manage to keep global warming below 1.5 oC, which is the ambitious goal of the 2016 Paris Agreement, we can save the vast majority of the world’s plant and animal species from climate change. Researchers in this study have analyzed 115,000 species, including 31,000 insects, 8,000 birds, 1,700 mammals, 1,800 reptiles, 1,000 amphibians, and 71,000 plants, to see how different projected climate futures may cause effect these species, measuring the risks to biodiversity by counting the number of species projected to lose more than half their geographic range due to climate change. Their analyses showed that achieving the ultimate goal of the Paris Agreement, or limiting warming to 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels, is critical for the survival of biodiversity. They also found that insects will be particularly sensitive to climate change, as 18% of the 31,000 insects are projected to lose more than half their range at 2oC increase. This can be reduced to 6% at a 1.5oC increase. The current global warming trajectory, if countries meet their international pledges to reduce CO2, is unfortunately around 3oC. In this case, almost 50% of insects would lose half their range. Insects are extremely vital to ecosystems and for humans. They have a long list of duties: to pollinate crops and flowers, provide food for higher-level organisms, break down detritus, maintain a balance in ecosystems by eating the leaves of plants, and help recycle nutrients in the soil. Ultimately, it won’t be just the biodiversity that suffers if the temperature rises too much, but the human race as well. The world is heating up. It’s no longer a case of if this is happening, but rather how fast can we limit the damage.