Hasta La Gadget!

One thousand years ago, when the United States of America did not exist and Oxford and Cambridge were backwaters of ignorance, the light of human reason shone brightly in places like Tunis, Cairo, and Baghdad. During the Abbasid caliphate for much of the 8th through middle 11th centuries, and also sporadically thereafter, tolerance of certain non-Muslim groups was enshrined in law. This was not as extensive as the constitutionally guaranteed religious (and non-religious) freedoms we enjoy in the West today, but it did mean that non-Muslims such as Musa Ibn Maimun (also known as Maimonides), Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and Yuhanna Ibn Bukhtishu, could not only practice their Judaism or Christianity, but could also make enduring contributions to the social and intellectual life of the then-dominant Muslim culture.

It may not be a coincidence that many aspects of our understanding of the world have roots in this age. Arab and Persian scholars (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) not only translated the writings of the Greeks, but also made original contributions about mathematics, medicine, and social science (among other topics). Regarding biology, one of the more interesting claims that surfaces from time to time concerns evolution:

The theory of biological evolution in its complete form was presented by a great early zoologist, al-Jahiz in the ninth century.

wrote the Turkish theologian Mehmet Bayrakdar in a 1983 issue of the London-based Islamic Quarterly.
But in its complete form?

Not quite. There are indeed some tantalizing quotes that evoke evolutionary ideas from medieval Arabic scholars. The Englishman John William Draper famously referred to “The Mohammedan Theory of Evolution” in his 1874 book History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, probably in reference to the Arabic scholar Ibn Khaldun, who wrote in his 14th century The Muqaddimah,

creation … started out from the minerals and progressed, in an ingenious, gradual manner, to plants and animals. The last stage of minerals is connected with the first stage of plants, such as herbs and seedless plants. The last stage of plants, such as palms and vines, is connected with the first stage of animals, such as snails and shellfish … the last stage of each group is fully prepared to become the first stage of the next group.

And 500 years before Khaldun, al-Jahiz articulated a kind of biological selection in his Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of Animals).

In 1930, the Spanish scholar Miguel Asin Palacios translated one such passage from al-Jahiz:

In sum, no animal can survive without nourishment. The hunting animal cannot escape being hunted. Every weak animal devours those that are weaker; every strong animal cannot avoid being consumed by those that are stronger…. God, in sum, made some beings the cause of life to others, and in turn made these the cause of death to yet others.

These two observations— continuity of existence across different forms of life (and indeed non-life) from Ibn Khaldun, and a struggle for existence among individuals from al-Jahiz— are indeed relevant to the contemporary theory of biological evolution. However, this is a far cry from “biological evolution in its complete form”. First of all, the goal of al-Jahiz’s Book of Animals was, according to the German historian Herbert Eisenstein, “not actually the study of animal species, but a proof of the existence of the Creator that is evident from his creation” (p. 122 in Einfürung in die arabische Zoographie). Moreover, al-Jahiz was a gifted philosopher and theologian interested in biology, not vice-versa. He saw free will and the autonomy of God’s creation as the reason why animals were “created” with the means (e.g., claws, fangs, spines) to attack others and defend themselves. According to Einsenstein (continuing the passage quoted above), al-Jahiz wrote that

when you see an animal … of great danger, and concerning whom Man must be very careful, such as snakes and wolves provided with fangs … thus may you know … that God— sublime and powerful is He— gives to the steadfast, those who understand that free will and rational experience could not exist if the world were purely evil or entirely good.

Whether or not you think this argument is convincing (and it remains a key part of modern religion’s approach to theodicy), the point is that al-Jahiz was less interested in the natural mechanisms by which life became diverse over time than he was in understanding nature in the context of monotheistic philosophy.

Another difference between modern biology and the natural philosophy of the Arab-Persian golden age was, ironically, the reality of the species. The notion that a group of interbreeding animals is thereby distinct from other such groups is not evident in pre-modern Arabic literature. Al-Jahiz was fascinated with hybridization and adaptation, and contemplated if and how environmental factors may have had an influence across generations of humans and other animals. According to another German translation of a passage from al-Jahiz, he wrote that maybe eels arose by cross-breeding fish with snakes. Maybe people from the western Caliphate (what is today Morocco and Algeria) look different from Arabians because of differences in the food and air. These were the kinds of discussions one can find in the prolific writings of al-Jahiz, Ibn Qutaiba, and others of their time. Were they more informed about nature than Europeans in the 9th century? Yes. Did ninth-century Arabs discover biological evolution? No.

As summarized by the Iraqi-British physicist Jim Al-Khalili in his book Pathfinders (and echoed by writers such as James Montgomery and Rebecca Stott), al-Jahiz articulated a mix of natural theology with Lamarckian evolution, in which behaviors and environmental influences of a given animal could have a direct influence on its offspring. This was more than just quoting Aristotle, and Europeans didn’t get this far until many centuries later. However, although the Abbasid caliphate played a key role in upholding and advancing human reason, no one there or anywhere else during the middle ages discovered the major principles of contemporary evolutionary biology.

This well-corroborated theory about the mechanisms behind biological diversity recognizes that, in general, what a given animal does over the course of its lifetime (stretch its neck to reach leaves in the treetops, exercise its arms hammering horseshoes) does not directly influence its offspring. Yes, epigenetics and lateral transfer can make detours around the barrier of generational inheritance, but the essence of evolution is about variety, heritability, selection, and constraint. Evolutionary biology is not a static discipline, and in years to come there will be many more discoveries that shake up our understanding of how the mechanism behind biodiversity works. One such recent discovery is that physical laws underpinning cell growth may have a far stronger influence on certain aspects of anatomy than adaptive selection, as demonstrated in 2013 by a study of scale development in crocodiles. This discovery, and many others over the past 150 years, improves (not disproves) our understanding of evolution.

Eager proponents of today’s monotheisms sometimes appear very keen to see in their cultural history and holy books indications of modern scientific discoveries. However, it seems to me that the real take-home message of golden age of the Middle East is not its contributions to modern science (and there are many), but the fact that some of its rulers valued ideas at least as much as ideology. Give scholars the resources to be able to study and write, and encourage curiosity about traditions besides your own. Scientific and civil advancements will happen (and have happened) for the same reasons in the 21st century as they did in the ninth.

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Photo courtesy of WTRMLN WTR

I had never really thought about it before, but upon learning about WTRMLN WTR, a bottled watermelon juice line that, somehow, snagged an endorsement from Beyoncé, it hit me. Why in the world hasn’t anyone done this before?

And, yes, Beyoncé. The famously press-averse singer–she very, very rarely gives interviews–actually stepped out from behind the shadows to invest in WTRMLN WTR. “This is more than an investment in a brand, it’s an investment in female leaders, fitness, American farmers, and the health of people and our planet,” she said in a statement about her “meaningful” investment in the company. And it may have taken this kind of push to actually get a watermelon juice product to market.

“People have tried before,” says Jody Levy, the co-founder of WTRMLN WTR, of creating a watermelon drink. “Watermelon is a very, very difficult product to work with, and it’s the advancement of food tech that’s allowed us to do this.”

Plus: Food Waste: The Next Food Revolution

Levy comes from the world of marketing and advertising and, basically, selling people things in creative, interesting ways. She’s worked, she says, with brands ranging from Toyota to HP to American Idol, designing contests and layouts and all kinds of strange secondary sorts of marketing things that aren’t exactly advertising but aren’t exactly not advertising, either.

WTRMLN WTR came about when a friend mentioned offhand how much watermelon goes to waste in this country every year. Around 4 billion pounds of watermelons are produced in this country each year, almost half of those in the states of Texas, Florida, Georgia, and California. But as with any other product, huge amounts of it, millions of pounds, are wasted each year.

The reasons why so many watermelons get wasted are not, mostly, unusual. Blemished, dented, discolored, or otherwise unappetizing-looking melons don’t even make it to the market. Many are lost via spoilage or due to damage en route from the farm to the buyer. But there’s also another element. “Most people, with exceptions in a couple states, don’t want seeded melons,” says Levy. “And to grow seedless melons, something like 30 to 35 percent have to be seeded,” for pollination reasons. The growers, if they’re lucky, can sell those seeded melons for a drastic decrease in profit, or may just feed them to livestock.

Plus: Waste Not, Want Not: 10 Ways to Reduce Your Food Waste Footprint

Levy and WTRMLN WTR use discarded melons for most of the year, all from the continental United States. They follow the watermelon season: starting in early spring in Florida and Texas, slowly moving northwards and hitting the Midwest and Northeast for their short (but excellent, I say, as a Northeasterner) growing seasons in late summer. During the two months when watermelon production in the continental US is basically dead, WTRMLN WTR heads to Puerto Rico, where they’ve set up a huge farm to produce about two million melons.

That means, necessarily, that WTRMLN WTR’s flavor will vary bottle to bottle; Levy says they have to balance a little bit to make sure each bottle has the same amount of sugar and that sort of thing, but since the melons are coming from all over, and since they’re taking whatever melons they can get, there’s going to be a difference in flavor between batches. Which is fine, really; there’s a difference in flavor between watermelons, too.

Plus: This Maryland Guy is Making Money on Food Waste, While Also Feeding the Hungry

That flavor, by the way, is much more indebted to the cold-pressed vegetable juice trend than it is to Tropicana. A bottle I tried was notably not very sweet, gaining a little bit of that sour tang from the rind. (Levy says they use everything but the skin.) That lends it the same sort of refreshing, non-weighty tang that, say, coconut water has, but it’s bound to disappoint anyone hoping for the super-sweet flavor of the first bite of a watermelon wedge. It does actually quench thirst, unlike most fruit juices. And Levy is quick to point out that it contains citrulline, a compound only found in watermelon that allegedly reduces fatigue and increases endurance during workouts. Citrulline also seems to be an effective treatment for mild erectile dysfunction, so there’s that.

WTRMLN WTR is cold-pressed, and “pasteurized” with a system called high pressure processing, or HPP. HPP is a method of reducing the microbes that cause spoilage by blasting an already-sealed bottle with pressure. It’s the only way that a bottle of watermelon juice, with no preservatives save lemon juice, can have a shelf life of 45 days. But watermelons are also much cheaper to juice than, say, kale: They have a much higher water volume, and are cheap, given that the ones used in the beverage are cast-offs. That allows the price to hit a sweet spot of about $3.50 a bottle–certainly more than a bottle of Coke, but far less than a bottle of fresh green juice. WTRMLN WTR is sold at most Whole Foods Markets and other natural groceries; find stores near you here.

More from Modern Farmer:
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Why Does Everyone Hate Monsanto?
Scientists Discover the Gene That Makes Tomatoes Squishy

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Throughout his campaign, there has been much discussion about whether Donald Trump is racist or not. Like so many conversations about race in America, this particular dialogue has been oversimplified.

Some may point out Trump’s past controversial comments about Muslims, Latinos and black people, while others may counter that by arguing that he’s hired black and brown people in his businesses. But it may be hard to ignore that former KKK leader David Duke has endorsed Trump, or that his daughter described him as “colorblind and gender neutral.”

The question of whether Trump is racist (if we’re really choose to debate that) obscures another important question: What about his supporters?

To be clear: being a Trump supporter doesn’t automatically make someone racist. But Trump’s rhetoric and his platform have emboldened a disturbing amount of Americans with racist ideology to proudly and publicly voice their prejudice.

On Monday, a clip of an angry Trump supporter in New York telling a black woman to get “back in the f**king fields” went viral. The video is shocking, but it’s not the first time a proclaimed Trump supporter has been caught on camera using blatantly racist language. 

Below are just a few instances of Trump supporters being unapologetically racist, which leaves little to the imagination about what this says about Trump if these are the type of people who intend to vote for him.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.

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The Democratic National Committee’s oldest delegate was born before women could even vote. But now she’s closer than ever to seeing a woman become president, and she can’t wait.

Geraldine “Jerry” Emmett, an honorary delegate representing Arizona, is 102 years old, making her Hillary Clinton’s oldest delegate. On Tuesday, Emmett emphatically participated in Arizona’s roll call at the Democratic National Convention, announcing her state’s 51 votes for Clinton, or as she called her, “the next president of the United States of America.”

Emmett was just 6 years old when women won the right to vote in the U.S., and she remembers her mother voting for the first time. “I can remember how proud I was of her,” she said.

She also said that she considers Clinton, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, to be the “greatest two women in the whole world, because they dedicated their lives to freedom, to peace, to working together with every other nation and all of the people on this Earth.”

Hear more from Emmett in the video above.

This video was produced by Samantha Guff, Tiara Chiaramonte, Karah Preiss and Alex Kushneir.

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Everyone loves the rains. The monsoons bring with them a certain romanticism, some magical quality to the days. Which poet worthy of his salt has not courted the sights and smells of the first showers?

Yet, the monsoon can bring a lot of grief with it – especially in the case of babies and school-going children. Parenting for millennials can turn a nightmare between sick children and work schedules that simply don’t let up.

The good news is that these can be avoided by taking a few simple measures.

Food

Stick to seasonal fruits and vegetables as Nature has a way of power-packing all the required nutrients for the season. Leafy vegetables like spinach, cauliflower etc need special care while washing as they might carry microbes from the rain water into your kitchen. Avoid street food, or even eating outside as far as possible. Being consistent with home-cooked food is a great way to boost immunity. Hot/warm soups carry a special appeal during the monsoons and can be an easy option to get the required nutrition to the kids.

Water

Water-borne diseases take on a fresh lease of life during the monsoons. Sterilize feeding bottles and other utensils that are primarily used by children should. Make it a household practice to consume boiled water to safeguard against infections. Drink plenty of water to wash down the bacteria and other unwanted microbes.

Personal Hygiene

Habituate your child to cleaning their hands and feet after they have been outdoors for a while. Use antiseptic in the bath water to eliminate any lingering bacteria and germs. Frequent and gentle towel rub-downs can prevent rashes, allergies, and fungal infections. Clip their nails frequently to avoid stagnation of germs under the fingernails, which can get passed into their food, leading to stomach infections.

Dress appropriately

Tuck away a raincoat (preferred over an umbrella in case of children) inside their school backpack. Even though most raingear has water-proof material, ensure that they are also fitted with high-quality waterproof zippers to avoid seepage and wetness. It’s also a good practice to pack a set of warm clothes to change into as soon as they in a dry environment to prevent colds and other symptoms.

Trump the mosquitoes

Mosquitoes can go on a rampage during the monsoon. Stagnant water pockets either inside or outside the home are breeding grounds for these seemingly annoying but sometimes deadly creatures. Stock up with child-safe mosquito repellents and make sure to throw them in during long trips. Full-sleeved shirts and full pants are preferable to avoid getting bitten. Spraying your wardrobe with Neem leaves and cloves can keep other insects at bay.

Devishobha Chandramouli is the founder and editor of Kidskintha– a platform dedicated to helping millennial parents raise happy kids. Get your own FREE copy of the eBook “137 Proven Productivity Hacks For The Millennial Parent” now.

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