“Incentives have evolved over the decades to encourage some behaviors that are detrimental to good science,” says Ferric Fang, editor-in-chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), who is speaking today at the meeting of the Committee of Science, Technology, and Law of the NAS along with Arturo Casadevall, editor-in-chief of mBio®, the ASM’s online, open-access journal.

In the past decade the number of retraction notices for scientific journals has increased more than 10-fold while the number of journals articles published has only increased by 44%. While retractions still represent a very small percentage of the total, the increase is still disturbing because it undermines society’s confidence in scientific results and on public policy decisions that are based on those results, says Casadevall. Some of the retractions are due to simple error but many are a result of misconduct including falsification of data and plagiarism.

More concerning, say the editors, is that this trend may be a symptom of a growing dysfunction in the biomedical sciences, one that needs to be addressed soon. At the heart of the problem is an economic incentive system fueling a hypercompetitive environment that is fostering poor scientific practices, including frank misconduct.

The root of the problem is a lack of sufficient resources to sustain the current enterprise. Too many researchers are competing for too little funding, creating a survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all environment where researchers increasingly feel pressure to publish, especially in high-prestige journals.

“The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high profile journal,” says Fang. “This is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior to salvage their career.”

Funding is just one aspect of a very complex problem Casadevall and Fang see growing in the biomedical sciences. In a series of editorials in the journal Infection and Immunity they describe their views in detail, arguing that science is not as healthy as it could be or as it needs to be to effectively address the challenges facing humanity in the 21^st century.

“Incentives in the current system place scientists under tremendous stress, discourage cooperation, encourage poor scientific practices and deter new talent from entering the field,” they write. “It is time for a discussion of how the scientific enterprise can be reformed to become more effective and robust.”

The answers, they write, must come not only from within the scientific community but from society as a whole that has helped create the current incentive structure that is fostering the dysfunction. In the editorials they outline a series of recommended reforms including methodological, cultural and structural changes.

“In the end, it is not the number of high-impact-factor papers, prizes or grant dollars that matters most, but the joys of discovery and the innumerable contributions both large and small that one makes through contact with other scientists,” they write. “Only science can provide solutions to many of the most urgent needs of contemporary society. A conversation on how to reform science should begin now.”

This article originally appeared on the American Society for Microbiology.

A report from Yale University:

Early this year, at the point in northern India where the Yamuna River empties into the Ganges, several hundred people set out on a six-week protest march. They were aiming to gather strength in numbers en route to New Delhi, the national capital, halfway up the Yamuna River. The river itself was the subject of their protest, and the popular chant was “Yamuna Bachao, Pollution Bhagao!”—meaning “Save the Yamuna, Stop the Pollution!”

They had ample cause for complaint. The Yamuna River starts out clear as rainwater from a lake and hot spring at the foot of a glacier, 19,200 feet up in the Himalayas. But for much of its 853-mile length, it is now one of the world’s most defiled rivers. Agricultural demand repeatedly depletes the river’s flow. Rapid modernization of the Indian economy since the 1980s has added thousands of manufacturing plants to the Yamuna’s watershed, with little thought given to how much water they take out or how much pollution they add back. And urbanization has roughly quintupled the population of New Delhi, from about 3.5 million people 30 years ago to more than 18 million today.

In some places, the Yamuna is now so heavily exploited that broad swaths of riverbed lie naked and exposed to the sun for much of the year. In other places, the river is a sudsy, listless morass of human, industrial and agricultural wastes, literally an open sewer. Given that 60 million people depend on the river for bathing and drinking water, a protest might seem inevitable.

The surprising thing, at least to untutored Western eyes, was that the leaders of the Yamuna march were not primarily political activists. They were sadhus, or holy men, devotees of the central Hindu hero and deity Krishna. They briefly shut down their temples along the river as part of the protest, and they added a colorful strand of religious belief to the familiar environmental language of oxygen content, turbidity and toxicity. When Mathura, one of the towns along the route, moved to end the blight of plastic shopping bags along the river banks, The Times of India headlined the news: “Lord Krishna’s birthplace now polythene-free.”

For Hindus, the Yamuna is not just a natural resource, but also one of the holiest rivers in India. She is a goddess, a giver of life and the chief lover of Krishna. So the protesters were motivated as much by faith as by environmental outrage. In the past they would have relied exclusively on prayers, incense and offerings of fresh flowers to practice seva, the Hindu ritual of loving service to the deity. But of necessity seva has lately also come to mean environmental action, working to restore life to a river now widely regarded as dead.

That same disorienting blend of science and religion also showed up at a January conference on the banks of the Yamuna. A collaborative effort between TERI University in New Delhi and the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, the conference brought ecologists, microbiologists, chemists and hydrologists together with spiritual leaders and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The stated purpose, according to organizers Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, co-directors of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, was to foster understanding across disciplines and to bridge the gap between studies focused exclusively on scientific issues and the broader world of societal, ethical and religious concerns. But for the Americans who attended, the surprise was how comparatively narrow that gap is, at least on the Indian side.

“Religions are the largest NGOs in the world, and people have to understand that you can’t just ignore them.” – Mary Evelyn Tucker “Coming from America, we were all amazed at the comfort and readiness with which these scientists were willing to engage in discussions that included religion,” says one participant, David Haberman, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University Bloomington. They were also intrigued with the potential to bring about change for the Yamuna River through careful scientific research disseminated and acted on by millions of people with a powerful spiritual motivation. An inadvertent side effect was to leave some of the Americans wondering about missed opportunities back home. That is, would environmental remedies come easier if science and religion could look beyond their differences and begin to seek common ground?

The Ecozoic

For many scientists who have lived through 30 years of American culture wars, the words religion and ecology can seem to go together about as well as a blind date between Mother Teresa and Richard Dawkins. Religious conservatives have become notorious among scientists, particularly in environmental fields, for working relentlessly to block the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools, for adamantly resisting efforts to promote birth control (even as the human population has doubled to 7 billion people over the past half-century) and for serving as a leading source of skepticism and obstructionism on climate change and almost every other environmental issue of the day.

The prominent evangelical and political activist Rev. Jerry Falwell, for instance, once called climate change “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” from evangelism to environmentalism. His son, Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr., said environmentalism itself was an attempt to “use pseudo-science to promote political agendas,” with the aim of destroying the freedom and “economies of the Western world.” In their most deranged moments, some fundamentalists have actually seemed to welcome drought, famine, flood and other forms of environmental havoc as harbingers of the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ.

This is the sort of thing that once led the late historian Lynn White Jr. to describe Christianity as “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” In an influential 1967 paper, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” he wrotethat “by destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”

But White also acknowledged that any religious faith is complex, with multiple traditions and interpretations. He regarded St. Francis of Assisi, in particular, as “the greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history” and as the patron saint of ecologists for his attempt “to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation.”

Though White did not say so, Christianity also inadvertently produced the West’s greatest scientific revolutionary. The natural theology movement of the early 19th century popularized the idea that nature revealed the divine hand of the Creator and that naturalists came closer to God by providing detailed scientific descriptions of how species were perfectly adapted to their habitats. One young reader would later rank Natural Theology by Rev. William Paley together with the works of Euclid above all others “in the education of my mind.” The student who thus learned the critical importance of studying minute variations in nature was Charles Darwin.

But these instances of religiously instigated environmentalism in the past were clearly exceptional. Is there any reason to rethink scientific attitudes toward religion now? That is, does religion have anything to add to the search for environmental solutions, whether in India or the United States? “Religions have been late to this,” says Tucker. “We often say religions have problems and promise. Everybody realizes there’s a problematic side, the fundamentalist side, the narrow-minded side.” But religions have also been a powerful force behind some of the great reform movements of the past—for instance, the drive by Quakers and other religious groups to abolish slavery, Mahatma Gandhi’s long struggle to win India’s freedom from British colonial rule and the campaign by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other religious leaders during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. From a purely practical view, Tucker adds, religions “are the largest NGOs in the world, and people have to understand that you can’t just ignore them.”

Moreover, neither scientists nor religious believers are as simple, or as mutually antagonistic, as sometimes supposed. Commonplace notions about fundamentalist and other religious attitudes can border on caricature (or perhaps a hijacking of the religious identity by one end of the political spectrum). So it can be tempting, for instance, to just ignore the Evangelical Environmental Network’s Creation Care Blog, which is rooted firmly in the Bible. And yet writers there can sound as alarmed as any Greenpeace activist about climate change and other issues. One recent entry: “I’m not so prescient as to suggest that there will be environmental martyrdom, mass civil disobedience or game-changing arrests. But laying down our lives has got to mean something. Doesn’t it?” Among white evangelicals in the United States overall, 73 percent actually favor tougher environmental laws and regulations, according to a 2010 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Among scientists, meanwhile, Pew reported in 2009 that just over half say they believe in God or some form of higher power.

Even so, it takes a certain daring to bridge the chasm that has opened up between religion and science in America—and even more so for institutions on “opposite” sides to collaborate, as Yale’s Divinity School and F&ES have done for the past five years. The two schools now jointly host the Forum on Religion and Ecology and also offer a combined master’s degree program.

“I live in the state of Indiana,” says Haberman, “and I can assure you that Purdue University’s Department of Forestry & Natural Resources would never, ever do that: ‘How could religion have anything useful to say in environmental studies?’” (The Purdue department confirms that no such collaboration exists: “We’re very traditional.”) And yet, Haberman continues, “Yale has said, ‘Hmm, not only is the pairing of religion and environmental studies interesting, but let’s turn it into a joint-degree program.’ I can’t think of another school that has taken it that seriously.”

For Yale, the collaboration has roots in a long-standing search to address “one of the great failings of environmentalism in our country,” says Gus Speth, the former F&ES dean who brought the Forum on Religion and Ecology to the university in 2006. The green movement “never really developed the ethical and spiritual dimension of environmental concern,” he says. “We had run on the political capital that catalyzed action in the late 1960s, but that had been largely exhausted by the 1980s. Unless there were huge moral and ethical sentiments that could be mobilized, we were unlikely to achieve the long-term transformation that was needed.” So when the opportunity arose to bring Tucker and Grim to Yale, Speth grabbed it, “motivated by the fact that they have been leaders in explaining the links between environment and ecology and the world’s great religions.” Funding came from the V. Kann Rasmussen and Germeshausen foundations and the Kendeda Sustainability Fund. The V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation has also supported annual student exchanges between TERI University and Yale.

Tucker and Grim, who hold faculty appointments at both F&ES and the Divinity School, walk a fine line in describing their work. They are not “eco-theologians,” and words like “activist” can raise eyebrows in an academic context, says Grim. “At the same time, Mary Evelyn and I are not keen to just stand on the edge and watch these problems carry us away.” What they do, he says, is “engaged scholarship,” based largely in the traditional academic field of religious studies. (Tucker specializes in Asian cultures, Grim in American Indians.) They work with all shades of religious belief, looking to find room for agreement among skeptical scientists, politically minded environmentalists, New Age spiritualists and traditional religious groups pushing back against any hint of pantheism or nature worship.

Read the entire Yale report, here.

The following is excerpted from Steve Jobs’ now-famous

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

This following article originally appeared in

A few days ago I was intrigued by an article in the Hindustan newspaper (संत ने लिखी गिरिराज तलहटी में हरित क्रांति की इबारत, Sept. 13, 2011) about a sant who had been planting tens of thousands of trees on the side of Govardhana for the past five years, calling it a “green revolution.” From the article, I learned that not only had he slowly begun the operation of planting, but that he had put into place an elaborate system of irrigation and caretaking that had resulted in a considerable greening of this most sacred spot in Vraja.

Rather than simply translate the article, I decided I wanted to follow up personally and get more information about this sant, Jugal Kishore Dasji, in order to see what kind of man he is and what motivates and inspires him to do this work. So yesterday I came to Govardhana and, after wandering around the town a bit, headed down the parikrama marga in search of Vamsivat Asrama.

When I was being “vetted” at the entrance, I showed the Hindustan article to the young gatekeeper, along with my card. I was later rather surprised to find that no one in the asrama had seen the article or was even aware of it. Rather unlike most people who are engaged in activities of this sort, there seems to be little or no desire to exact some return on the good deed “investment” through publicity and enhanced public reputation.

Acarya Jugal Kishore Dasji was younger than I first expected. Perhaps it is because I myself am getting old! Now 47, he came to Vrindavana as a young boy to stay in his guru Haricharan Dasji’s ashram (Nimbarki) near Vamsi Vat, Kishore Kutir.

He took training in Bhagavata from Atul Krsna Goswami (Jnana Gudri) of the Radha Raman Goswamis, and eventually started his own career as a Bhagavata speaker. Somehow, this career took a different turn from that which most Bhagavata speakers from Vrindavana seem to aspire to–getting on Aastha TV and holding huge Bhagavata saptahas in Delhi and Mumbai, or on cruise ships to Dubai, traveling to foreign lands and having government ministers trekking to your asrama or temple to show their reverence. Instead, he started to go and give programs in villages and small towns to audiences of farmers and country folk.

Even now, says Jagdish Goswami, his principal assistant in the plantation project, Jugal Kishoreji will not accept any invitation from a wealthy donor unless the patron first sponsors at least three village programs. This has led to some interesting results as we shall see.

About twelve years ago, Jugal Kishore Dasji got the “call” to come and serve Govardhan. The opportunity came to build an asrama on a plot of land off the parikrama marga. Govardhana parikrama became a feature of the asrama‘s life, and even now there is a prominent sign that says, “You came this far, now go and do parikrama of Giriraj.” And the various rules and regulations for the parikrama are written on the outside wall. “First of all, bow down to the holy mountain, either with your full body or on five limbs. Do not insult the sacred dust of Vraja by shaking it from your body.”

But it wasn’t long before, in his words, “we saw the situation of the parikrama–empty stretches of barren land without any shade, gokharu thorns strewing the path and making it impossible to walk barefoot. We thought that this was not the ideal atmosphere in which to do this holy parikrama and our hearts went out to the pilgrims making the walk. If the government does not take responsibility, then someone else has to step forward to realize the dream.”

In 2006, he began by planting 1500 trees from the Talhati towards Anyaur. He arranged for a drip irrigation system with sweet water which he had piped in from his asrama.

Gradually the march westward continued and reached Anyaur. The sector from Anyaur to Puchari is already served by the district’s Udyana Vibhaga (Parks Department), but Jugal Kishore took on responsibility for greening the sector between Puchari and Jatipura and then from there to Govardhana.

In the beginning, he begged saplings from devotees in Agra, Dehradun, and other places where he gave Bhagavata saptahas. But now he has his own nurseries in Puchari and elsewhere. In order to get sufficient water for irrigation, he pipes in sweet water from five kilometers away and even the Parks Department is making use of this facility.

Another feature of the Vamsivat Asrama program is the govar gas plant and vermicompost tanks. The asrama has a small goshala that provides sufficient govar for all of its cooking needs and also enough fertilizer to nourish the young saplings.

Now, five years later, the results of the effort can be seen, thousands of young neem, banyan, kadamba, rose apple (jamun), and mulberry (shahtut) trees, as well as varieties of flower bushes and vines, fill the entire parikrama area from Govardhana to Puchari and back.

In all of this, Jugal Kishoreji says that he has taken no government aid. And the government officers, who are quite happy to see him taking this responsibility, are standing back and letting him follow his inspiration without interference. Seeing the success of his efforts, others are being inspired to come forward. Now the district Forestry Department is working with the Siddha Siddhanta Yoga Academy to plant trees in the Govardhana-Radha Kunda segment of the parikrama marga using the same strategies that Jugal Kishore has implemented. Except it seems that Yogi Shailendra Sharma has decided to concentrate on rat ki rani and kadamba.

The slight and unassuming Jagdish Goswami calls himself Jugal Kishore Dasji’s technical advisor. Jugal Kishore calls him his right-hand man and is not slow to praise him.

In 2009, Jagdish, who lives in Radha Kunda, observed that the government was planning to widen the parikrama marga on the Radha Kunda side even further, opening it up to more vehicle traffic and eradicating the soft shoulder areas of the walk that are so necessary to pilgrims making the walk. As a result of the protests he spearheaded, the more than Rs 50 crore plan was eventually scrapped by the government.

But, interestingly enough, all these accomplishments already seemed to be things of the past for the two men. Jugal Kishore Dasji was much more excited about something else, an unusual and inspired annual go-seva program that is conducted during Kartika month. [Read about the wonderful go-seva program, here.]

Feeling the need for an example of government policy run amok? Look no further than the box of cornflakes on your kitchen shelf. In its myriad corn-related interventions, Washington has managed simultaneously to help drive up food prices and add tens of billions of dollars to the deficit, while arguably increasing energy use and harming the environment.

Even in a crowd of rising food and commodity costs, corn stands out, its price having doubled in less than a year to a record $7.87 per bushel in early June. Booming global demand has overtaken stagnant supply.

But rather than ameliorate the problem, the government has exacerbated it, reducing food supply to a hungry world. Thanks to Washington, 4 of every 10 ears of corn grown in America — the source of 40 percent of the world’s production — are shunted into ethanol, a gasoline substitute that imperceptibly nicks our energy problem. Larded onto that are $11 billion a year of government subsidies to the corn complex.

Corn is hardly some minor agricultural product for breakfast cereal. It’s America’s largest crop, dwarfing wheat and soybeans. A small portion of production goes for human consumption; about 40 percent feeds cows, pigs, turkeys and chickens. Diverting 40 percent to ethanol has disagreeable consequences for food. In just a year, the price of bacon has soared by 24 percent.

To some, the contours of the ethanol story may be familiar. Almost since Iowa — our biggest corn-producing state — grabbed the lead position in the presidential sweepstakes four decades ago, support for the biofuel has been nearly a prerequisite for politicians seeking the presidency.

Those hopefuls have seen no need for a foolish consistency. John McCain and John Kerry were against ethanol subsidies, then as candidates were for them. Having lost the presidency, Mr. McCain is now against them again. Al Gore was for ethanol before he was against it. This time, one hopeful is experimenting with counter-programming: as governor of corn-producing Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty pushed for subsidies before he embraced a “straight talk” strategy.

Eating up just a tenth of the corn crop as recently as 2004, ethanol was turbocharged by legislation in 2005 and 2007 that set specific requirements for its use in gasoline, mandating steep rises from year to year. Yet another government bureaucracy was born to enforce the quotas.

To ease the pain, Congress threw in a 45-cents-a-gallon subsidy ($6 billion a year); to add another layer of protection, it imposed a tariff on imported ethanol of 54 cents a gallon. That successfully shut off cheap imports, produced more efficiently from sugar cane, principally from Brazil.

Here is perhaps the most incredible part: Because of the subsidy, ethanol became cheaper than gasoline, and so we sent 397 million gallons of ethanol overseas last year. America is simultaneously importing costly foreign oil and subsidizing the export of its equivalent.

That’s not all. Ethanol packs less punch than gasoline and uses considerable energy in its production process. All told, each gallon of gasoline that is displaced costs the Treasury $1.78 in subsidies and lost tax revenue.

Nor does ethanol live up to its environmental promises. The Congressional Budget Office found that reducing carbon dioxide emissions by using ethanol costs at least $750 per ton of carbon dioxide, wildly more than other methods. What is more, making corn ethanol consumes vast quantities of water and increases smog.

Then there’s energy efficiency. Studies reach widely varying conclusions on that issue. While some show a small saving in fossil fuels, others calculate that ethanol consumes more energy than it produces.

Read the entire New York Times article, here.

[In southern Turkey,] buses (white, air-conditioned, equipped with televisions) blunder over the winding, indifferently paved road to the ridge and dock like dreadnoughts before a stone portal. Visitors flood out, fumbling with water bottles and MP3 players. Guides call out instructions and explanations. Paying no attention, the visitors straggle up the hill. When they reach the top, their mouths flop open with amazement, making a line of perfect cartoon O’s.

Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.

At the time of Göbekli Tepe’s construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple’s builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.

Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species’ deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider.

At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the “revolution” was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.

After a moment of stunned quiet, tourists at the site busily snap pictures with cameras and cell phones. Eleven millennia ago nobody had digital imaging equipment, of course. Yet things have changed less than one might think. Most of the world’s great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages—think of the Vatican, Mecca, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya (where Buddha was enlightened), or Cahokia (the enormous Native American complex near St. Louis). They are monuments for spiritual travelers, who often came great distances, to gawk at and be stirred by. Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.

Read the entire National Geographic article, here.

A resounding theme of May 16th’s Rally for Food and Farm Freedom on the Hill was that the FDA’s recent arrest of Amish farmer Dan Allgyer for selling raw milk was not about food safety; it was about economics and keeping control of the food supply in the hands of big business, instead of giving power to the consumer.

Organizers took power – and sustenance – into their own hands by creating an impressive showing at the rally in Upper Senate Park, and by drinking the controversial liquid, milked fresh onsite from Morgan the cow, who was trailered in from a Maryland dairy farm.

Raw milk drinkers are a passionate bunch. Rally organizer Liz Reitzig, a mother of four who is pregnant with her fifth child, noted that many mothers become food activists in an effort to feed their children the best food they possibly can.

Reitzig noted that among the 450 rally participants were a considerable number of mothers, there to show “the profound impact that switching to raw milk has made for their children and families.”

Weston A. Price Foundation president Sally Fallon Morell described the health benefits of raw milk, which she called a “magic food” that she bought off the shelves for her family when living in California as a young mother. Fallon Morell declared that this century’s rallying cry is going to be about food and farm freedom.

“The USDA and the FDA present two falsehoods,” she said. One is that there is no nutritional difference between raw and pasteurized milk. A European study found raw milk to be the number one factor in preventing allergies and asthma, Fallon Morell said.

She also asserted that the second fallacy – that raw milk is dangerous – is based on “40-year-old science.” Raw milk has immune-system boosters, and “you can’t get pathogens to grow in it.”

Raw, grass-fed milk not only contains live enzymes crucial to digestion – enzymes that are killed by pasteurization – but it is free of antibiotics and hormones, and from pesticides from sprayed grain, which is often genetically-modified.

One speaker said the government is presenting consumers with a choice that is not a choice: poison ourselves with factory-farmed food or starve.

Customers who bought from farmer Allgyer had already contracted to own their food, and speakers criticized the government for standing in their way to eat the food they choose and have paid for.

Representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has recently introduced legislation for the interstate sales of raw milk, which is legal for sale in ten states, but illegal in some others, though, as a Washington Post article recently explained, consumers seeking the substance can find a way to get it.

Mother of two, Wendy Lubell Snyder, was among the many that turned out to support their right to consume the food they want. A personal trainer in Washington, DC, Lubell Snyder resisted drinking pasteurized milk growing up. As an adult, she researched the topic, and found that the science behind raw milk made a lot of sense.

As 16-month-old daughter Sage tasted a sample, Lubell Snyder said she feels great as a raw milk consumer now. “I’m here to support my right to choose what to eat and drink, and to uphold the Constitution,” she explained.

One sign in the swelling crowd reminded participants that the authors of the Constitution drank raw milk. Another sign read: “Junk food is legal. Don’t outlaw real food!”

Speakers urged consumers committed to eating nutrient-dense food to continue to stand up for their right to protect their health through access to live food that is free of pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics, and has minimal environmental impact.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Times Communities section.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) passed a historic measure Tuesday evening allowing openly gay men and women in same-sex relationships to be ordained as clergy.

The move reflects a monumental shift in the 2.8 million-member church, which, along with other mainline Protestant denominations, has had increasingly contentious debates and struggles over issues pertaining to gay and lesbian members and clergy. A majority of the church’s regional bodies, or presbyteries, defeated a similar measure to allow gay clergy two years ago.

“This is quite a day of celebration,” said Michael Adee, the executive director of More Light Presbyterians, a Minnesota-based church group that has pushed to allow openly gay clergy in recent years. “We’ve restored the longstanding Presbyterian understanding of ordination: that the most important qualifications are related to faith, not marital status or sexuality.”

The church’s general assembly voted on the amendment to its Book of Order last summer, opening the door to gay, non-celibate clergy. The ruling also applied to deacons and church elders.

But the amendment needed the approval of a majority of the church’s regional bodies. Nineteen of the bodies that voted against the similar measure two years ago switched their vote this time.

Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area’s pro-amendment vote tipped the scale in favor of pro-gay clergy church members with a majority 87 votes.

“This is profound for me because the church will now choose clergy based on character and faithful lifestyles, not because they like men or women,” said the Rev. Dr. Janet Edwards, a Presbyterian minister and activist from Pittsburgh who voted for the amendment. Edwards’ presbytery famously put her on trial in 2005 for marrying two women, but acquitted her of the charges three years later.

As with other denominations that have allowed gay clergy, most notably Episcopalians, disapproving congregations will likely leave the church. According to the Presbyterian News Service, around 100 congregations have defected in recent years, many of which leaned conservative. Experts say the shift toward more liberal presbyteries could be a reason some church bodies switched their votes from two years ago.

“I think that the old homophobia and stereotypes are beginning to slowly melt away,” added Adee.

The change will go into effect in July 2011 and does not mean presbyteries will be required to to start ordaining gay and lesbian candidates, but it makes it legal under church rules if they do.

The old text of the church’s Book of Order did not refer specifically to gay clergy, but banned non-celibate clergy who did not live “within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.” That amendment was added in 1997.

The new, revised amendment also does not mention gay clergy, but it removes a requirement of chastity for non-married clergy. Significantly, it places more emphasis on specific character traits such as a “candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability” and church regional bodies’ powers in picking ministers.

The amendment passed last year at the church’s general assembly in Minneapolis amid heated debate, with 53 percent of delegates voting to approve. At the same meeting, a slight majority also voted against defining the church’s stance on marriage as between “two people” instead of a “man and woman.”

Late Tuesday evening, the church released a statement on the latest vote.

“Reactions to this change will span a wide spectrum. Some will rejoice, while others will weep. Those who rejoice will see the change as an action, long in coming, that makes the PC(USA) an inclusive church that recognizes and receives the gifts for ministry of all those who feel called to ordained office. Those who weep will consider this change one that compromises biblical authority and acquiesces to present culture. The feelings on both sides run deep,” it said.

The statement continued: “However, as Presbyterians, we believe that the only way we will find God’s will for the church is by seeking it together – worshiping, praying, thinking, and serving alongside one another. We are neighbors and colleagues, friends and family. Most importantly, we are all children of God, saved and taught by Jesus Christ, and filled with the Holy Spirit.”

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is the latest of several Protestant denominations that have dropped bans on gay clergy. Others include the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and The Episcopal Church.

A smaller denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, does not ordain women or openly gay clergy.

The full text of the amendments:

New amendment to Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Book of Order Standards for ordained service reflect the church’s desire to submit joyfully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life (G-1.0000). The governing body responsible for ordination and/or installation (G.14.0240; G-14.0450) shall examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability for the responsibilities of office. The examination shall include, but not be limited to, a determination of the candidate’s ability and commitment to fulfill all requirements as expressed in the constitutional questions for ordination and installation (W-4.4003). Governing bodies shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates
Old amendment in to Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Book of Order
Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament

This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.

Surrounded by lush green wheat and yellow flowering mustard fields at Ekdanta primary school, fifty-seven children in two combined classes are fidgety—impatient for the school-served midday meal.

The hot meals are served by the Akshaya Patra Foundation, the largest non- profit in India, in partnership with the government’s school meal program that covers 120 million children in 1.26 million schools across the country.

A show of hands in Ekdanta indicates that one quarter of students has not had breakfast before school.

Eight-year-old Nagina Singh has not had even the glass of buffalo milk that other children have had before school. “Both my parents left for daily wage labour early morning and there was nothing at home to eat,” she told IPS.

“This is not uncommon among the eighty-five marginal and share-farmer families populating Ekdanta,” says head-teacher Chandrasen Singh.

The small dusty village is 170 kilometers from Delhi in the northern Indian Mathura district of Uttar Pradesh State.

Akshaya Patra, which in Hindu mythology means an inexhaustible food vessel, feeds 1.2 million school children every day from 18 centralized kitchens—15 automated, across eight states. Six of the kitchens are certified under the International Food Safety Management System standard ISO 22000:2005.

Nagina is one among the 169,000 children across 1,516 schools that are fed by Akshaya Patra’s Vrindavana unit—ten kilometers from the Hindu pilgrimage town of Mathura. Karnataka’s Hubli kitchen—420 kilometres from Akshaya Patra’s Bangalore headquarters—is their largest, feeding 176,000 children in 779 schools.

Intelligently engineered automated kitchens have been Akshaya Patra’s cornerstones for achieving remarkable scale and efficiency in delivering school meals. Using a hub-and-spoke model, mass quantities of food cooked in these automated kitchens are distributed in smaller amounts to individual schools in the surrounding areas.

Malnutrition, classroom hunger and school dropouts continue to be grave concerns in India, making Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) one and two—to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, and to achieve universal primary education—difficult to achieve by the 2015 deadline.

The global hunger index published by the International Food Policy Research Institute ranks India – with 42 percent of the world’s underweight children aged under five—sixty-seven among eighty-four countries in 2010.

In 2001 the Supreme Court of India directed governments to provide cooked meals in all state-run primary schools to address these concerns.

In 2000, Akshaya Patra was already feeding 1,500 school children in Bangalore. “Within a month of starting we received requests to feed 100,000 children,” 37-year-old Narasimha Dasa, a mechanical engineer by training, told IPS.

Read the entire IPS article, here.

This article was also cross-posted on Vrindavan Today.

The relentless pursuit of happiness may be doing us more harm than good.

Some researchers say happiness as people usually think of it—the experience of pleasure or positive feelings—is far less important to physical health than the type of well-being that comes from engaging in meaningful activity. Researchers refer to this latter state as “eudaimonic well-being.”

Happiness research, a field known as “positive psychology,” is exploding. Some of the newest evidence suggests that people who focus on living with a sense of purpose as they age are more likely to remain cognitively intact, have better mental health and even live longer than people who focus on achieving feelings of happiness.

In fact, in some cases, too much focus on feeling happy can actually lead to feeling less happy, researchers say.

The pleasure that comes with, say, a good meal, an entertaining movie or an important win for one’s sports team—a feeling called “hedonic well-being”—tends to be short-term and fleeting. Raising children, volunteering or going to medical school may be less pleasurable day to day. But these pursuits give a sense of fulfillment, of being the best one can be, particularly in the long run.

“Sometimes things that really matter most are not conducive to short-term happiness,” says Carol Ryff, a professor and director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“Eudaimonia” is a Greek word associated with Aristotle and often mistranslated as “happiness”—which has contributed to misunderstandings about what happiness is. Some experts say Aristotle meant “well-being” when he wrote that humans can attain eudaimonia by fulfilling their potential. Today, the goal of understanding happiness and well-being, beyond philosophical interest, is part of a broad inquiry into aging and why some people avoid early death and disease. Psychologists investigating eudaimonic versus hedonic types of happiness over the past five to 10 years have looked at each type’s unique effects on physical and psychological health.

For instance, symptoms of depression, paranoia and psychopathology have increased among generations of American college students from 1938 to 2007, according to a statistical review published in 2010 in Clinical Psychology Review. Researchers at San Diego State University who conducted the analysis pointed to increasing cultural emphasis in the U.S. on materialism and status, which emphasize hedonic happiness, and decreasing attention to community and meaning in life, as possible explanations.

Since 1995, Dr. Ryff and her Wisconsin team have been studying some 7,000 individuals and examining factors that influence health and well-being from middle age through old age in a study called MIDUS, or the Mid-Life in the U.S. National Study of Americans, funded by the National Institute on Aging. Eudaimonic well-being “reduces the bite” of risk factors normally associated with disease like low education level, using biological measures, according to their recently published findings on a subset of study participants.

Participants with low education level and greater eudaimonic well-being had lower levels of interleukin-6, an inflammatory marker of disease associated with cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s disease, than those with lower eudaimonic well-being, even after taking hedonic well-being into account. The work was published in the journal Health Psychology.

David Bennett, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and his colleagues showed that eudaimonic well-being conferred benefits related to Alzheimer’s. Over a seven-year period, those reporting a lesser sense of purpose in life were more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease compared with those reporting greater purpose in life, according to an analysis published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry. The study involved 950 individuals with a mean age of about 80 at the start of the study.

In a separate analysis of the same group of subjects, researchers have found those with greater purpose in life were less likely to be impaired in carrying out living and mobility functions, like housekeeping, managing money and walking up or down stairs. And over a five-year period they were significantly less likely to die—by some 57%— than those with low purpose in life.

The link persisted even after researchers took into account variables that could be related to well-being and happiness, such as depressive symptoms, neuroticism, medical conditions and income.

“I think people would like to be happy,” says Dr. Bennett. “But, you know, life has challenges. A lot of it is how you confront those challenges.”

There is some evidence that people high in eudaimonic well-being process emotional information differently than those who are low in it. Brain-imaging studies indicate people with high eudaimonic well-being tend to use the pre-frontal cortex more than people with lower eudaimonic well-being, says Cariem van Reekum, researcher at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics at the University of Reading in the U.K. The pre-frontal cortex is important to higher-order thinking, including goal-setting, language and memory.

It could be that people with high eudaimonic well-being are good at reappraising situations and using the brain more actively to see the positives, Dr. van Reekum says. They may think, “This event is difficult but I can do it,” she says. Rather than running away from a difficult situation, they see it as challenging.

The two types of well-being aren’t necessarily at odds, and there is overlap. Striving to live a meaningful life or to do good work should bring about feelings of happiness, of course. But people who primarily seek extrinsic rewards, such as money or status, often aren’t as happy, says Richard Ryan, professor of psychology, psychiatry and education at the University of Rochester.

Simply engaging in activities that are likely to promote eudaimonic well-being, such as helping others, doesn’t seem to yield a psychological benefit if people feel pressured to do them, according to a study Dr. Ryan and a colleague published last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “When people say, ‘In the long-run, this will get me some reward,’ that person doesn’t get as much benefit,” he says.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to feel happy, psychologists say. Happy people tend to be more sociable and energetic, which may lead them to engage in meaningful activities. And for someone who is chronically angry or depressed, the goal should be to help this person feel happier, says Ed Diener, a retired professor at the University of Illinois who advises pollster Gallup, Inc., on well-being and positive psychology.

Surveys have shown the typical person usually feels more positive than neutral, yet it isn’t clear he or she needs to be any happier, Dr. Diener says. But there is such a thing as too much focus on happiness. Ruminating too much about oneself can become a vicious cycle. Fixating on being happy “in itself can become a psychological burden,” Dr. Ryff says.

Being happy doesn’t mean feeling elated all the time. Deep stress is bad, but the “I don’t have enough time” stress that many people feel while balancing work, family and other demands may not be so bad, Dr. Diener says. To improve feelings of happiness and eudaimonia, focus on relationships and work that you love, Dr. Diener says, adding, “Quit sitting around worrying about yourself and get focused on your goals.”