Genius in a small package

Could rabies be any smarter? Animals get it, they go crazy, bite other animals, and pass the disease through their saliva. It's frickin' genius!

I thought of that after I saw 28 Days Later, a great movie. Why I thought of it again now I have no idea.

Humble before God

While researching some of the modern intersection of religion and science I came across The Humble Approach Initiative, a remarkable project to expand spiritual understanding through scientific exploration. This is not a watered-down effort to re-explain religion in a subservient role to science -- it actually puts value in faith and mysticism. One of the initiative's conferences, for example, compared quantum non-locality with spiritual religious elements:

"The assumption of classical physics that physical reality is local — that a point in space cannot influence another point beyond a relatively short distance — was challenged by Nicolas Gisin’s 1997 experiments involving twin photons in which light particles were shown to communicate with one another instantly. Linked to research in atom optics conducted by Alain Aspect in the early 1980s, the revelation led some scientists to argue that physical reality on the most basic level is an undivided wholeness. Does it also imply that the stark division between mind and world is an illusion?"


I really like the direction of this project, and even more so I like the attitude. I have recently felt that humility before the universe, or God, or whatever, is a fundamentally valuable yet undervalued commodity. Since I noticed it I've been seeing it pop up all over, in heady, spiritual stuff like the Humble Approach Initiative, and in more mundane stuff like this bit of an article about the new NYTimes ombudsman [an ombudsman is someone employed by a newspaper who writes in the newspaper about its mistakes]:

As Keller puts it, "reporters and editors are getting a taste of what it's like to be criticized in the New York Times...
The problem with most journalists, says Okrent, is that "if someone challenges you on accuracy or fairness, you immediately go into a defensive posture and say, 'How can I prove I was right?' -- not 'How can I prove the complaint was right?' I've done it my entire career and I really hope I don't do it anymore." He plans to run letters criticizing his own columns, saying: "Why should I get the last word?"

Biotech insects pt ii

A recent report on GM mosquitoes shows that they're less fit than regular mosquitos. A central argument of the pro-biotech crowd has been that genetic engineering can very specifically bring about narrow, intended changes in organisms. If so, then why are GM mosquitos so weak-ass?

The money shot of the article [which doesn't ask what this finding means about biotech in general] comes from professor Anthony James of UC Irvine: 'I do not see findings that transgenic insects are less fit than laboratory or wild-type mosquitoes to be a major challenge to the use of transgenics to control disease transmission... I take it as a given that any [gene] inserted into the genome of a mosquito would [reduce the changes of survival of] that mosquito.'

Biotech insects

This Yahoo! News story [I always feel a little corny using the Yahoo! exclamation point] isn't really news so much, but a little check-up story on GM insects. I suspect that biotech everythings will be popping up over the next few decades. I am so curious that it almost overwhelms my trepidation. One important thing to consider with biotech, especially round-up stories like this -- when they say, "No biotech insect experiment has been conducted outside a laboratory yet, but a few projects are getting close" -- is that it always seems that there are a tons of things about to be released, but for a variety of reasons very few ever do.

Stuff in the story: Glofish [already out and unregulated], mosquitos with immune systems beefed up to resist malaria [might be regulated by USDA], tsetse flies that don't carry sleeping sickness, silkworms to mass-produce silk, disease-resistant honeybees, medflies less destructive to crops, and sterile pink bollworm [cotton menace].

One thing I don't get about destroying a population by releasing sterile insects: How the hell would it work? Yes, they're sexually active and they reproduce, but doesn't that mean there will only ever be as many as you produce in the lab? Can the turn out numbers in the lab that will significantly affect the natural population? I assume there are at least tens or hundreds of billions of bollworms. Even if they released an equal number of sterile bollworms, I figure enough normal ones would mate with normal ones so as to produce a next generation. At some point, all the sterile, GM ones will die out, leaving only the normal offspring. I assume the scientists have thought about this and have some kind of good explanation...

Where do men come from?

This geneticist Spencer Wells, profiled recently in National Geographic, is popping up in a lot of places now. He does pretty interesting research looking at the Y chromosome, finding out when people went to different parts of the world. I think this stuff is very interesting, but I wonder why nobody else has done this already. Seems like it's pretty simple research to do, but what do I know.

In any case, the Geographic article points out some interesting stuff about his studies: we all come from one man in who was alive in Africa 60k years ago, the first people who left Africa made a beeline for Australia, humans came to the Americas no more than 15k years ago, etc.

One thing I don't really understand from the story is the bit about Genghis Khan. It says, "Wells and colleagues found that nearly 8 percent of the men living in the region carry nearly identical y-chromosomes. That translates to roughly 16 million descendants living today." Does that mean 16 million descendants of Genghis Khan? How can this test tell whether they're directly related to him? Wasn't his Y chromosome probably the same as lots of other Mongol men alive at the same time, thereby complicating efforts to find who was related to him in particular? I think Geographic should've gotten a little more detailed here.


This also reminds me of one particularly good part of The Red Queen. He says that 30 generations back [to around 1066] each person had 2 to the 30th ancestors, which is more than a billion. But there were fewer than a billion people in the world then, so many of them are your ancestors many times over.

"If, like me, you are of British descent, the chances are that almost all of the few million Britons alive in 1066, including King Harold, William the Conqueror, a random serving wench, and the meanest vassal (but excluding all well-behaved monks and nuns) are your direct ancestors. This makes you a distant cousin many times over of every other Briton alive today except the children of recent immigrants."

Hm. In this light I'm really not sure what to make of the bit about Genghis Khan. Anyone who tells me gets some thinkness brand karma.

Literal watch strikes back

Part I: I was at a meeting last week in which one presenter said a former art teacher told him, "The paint literally explodes off the canvas." Wow. Art rocks.

Part II: Paul Krugman says, "Mr. Bush has, of course, literally promised us the Moon — and Mars, too."

Okay, the second one isn't perfectly clear. It is a little fuzzy what, exactly, promising someone the Moon means. Maybe it could possibly mean promising to get to the moon. But to me it means giving them the Moon. Then again it wouldn't surprise me if Bush said he'd actually give Americans the Moon -- tax-free, of course -- if it would help him get elected.

Risky assumptions

The Globe Ideas section did a story on risk assessment a few weeks ago [I know, haven't blogged in a while]. Essentially, the risk assessment folks set a price tag on human life based on how much money people will spend to save their own lives [on safer cars, frinstance], and base policy recommendations on that.

Two liberal critics come out and say that's the wrong way to do it. The most interesting criticism they level is that there are unseen costs to pollution and, presumably, other socially costly factors. This gets to a really tricky question: How do you judge factors that you don't even know about yet? [Sort of gets to that Rumsfeldian point about the unknown unknowns.] The risk-assessment critics support the precautionary principle, which basically requires actors to make sure they will do no significant damage through their actions. It gets tricky, though, when there are unknown unknowns. This has been a big fight ever since the whole DDT episode, when people found out that, say, spraying bizarro chemicals all over the world can have some unforeseen effects.

Meta-evolutionary competition

mindtangle involves an interesting factor regarding thinkness' first criticism of The Red Queen, in which I said that Ridley was substantially underestimating the importance of culture for humans, which turned out to be a big part of my criticism of the whole book, it seems. mindtangle says memetics explains humans are the only animal whose courtship does not simply express evolutionary imperatives. Humans 'are the only animals for whom memetic selection occurs,' he says, and, 'evolution might have killed evolution at the very beginning, 100,000 years ago.' That is, that memetic evolution may have stopped biological evolution in some humans.

I would bring up the qualification that other species do have culture, and there is memetic evolution among chimps and other animals like that; we should appreciate that not only is there lots of learned information among other extant animals, but certainly among early humans [e.g., homo ergaster] there was pretty complex culture. So I would say that memetics in some sense came into the world many millions of years ago, probably with some relatively dull-witted mammal, but mimetic power and complexity have probably undergone explosive revolutions, the biggest of which was tied to the emergence of homo sapiens around 100k years ago. And that last burst of memetic power may have brought memetics to the point where memes could overwhelm biological imperatives, as in the case of Catholid priests. This seems pretty fundamental to me, and Ridley erred in severely discounting the power of culture; this partly explains why he harshly attacks the fields of sociology and anthropology, two fields that put lots of weight in the power of memes.

Thanks to mindtangle for expressly bringing memes into this.

Everybody needs a mami

Susan points me to this bit in the NYTimes, in a good article about a revolution in Japanese food in NY:

'Also shared by Japan and France is a national cult of ingredients. At Kai, the menu proudly states that the udon noodles come specifically from Inaniwa in Akita prefecture, a boast that Japanese clients can instantly appreciate. Megu is anticipating an audience for superpremium yakitori made from hinai-jidori, the most expensive chickens in Japan, grilled over binchotan, a charcoal from Wakayama prefecture that is as hard as steel, burns extra-hot and is supposed to imbue food with umami. Umami is the famously elusive Japanese fifth flavor — salty, sour, bitter and sweet are the others — and is pretty much untranslatable. Savory and complex are two approximations.'


I just ate, yet this is making me hungry...

Dewey or doney love me?

So mindtangle has an anecdote relating to that great passage from Eugenides' Middlesex:

'I randomly ran across a book in Thailand whose cover promised to help me "transcend the boundaries of language." Well, it ended up being a self-help book, really: The idea was to group similar real-world feelings into more granular numbered buckets. Sort of like the Dewey Decimal System, for feelings. So if "truth" is the 800's, 823.3 might mean "I really want to tell you something important to me, without any guile or dodginess, but I need you to listen completely and without judgement." I didn't buy the book, but I liked the idea.'


This is interesting. It will always be hard, of course, to free oneself from pre-conceived notions of 'truth', for instance, when one has used them for decades. But I'd like to see how these self-helpers break down the entire range of human emotions. [Where would I find 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy'?] I think mindtangle should get a little looser with his checkbook when he runs into novel ways of breaking down the universe.

Cheering for Lindh

David Edelstein, the Slate movie reviewer, has a spookily incisive point about The Last Samurai:

"...The Last Samurai, in which remorseful Native American killer Tom Cruise joins forces with another mystical tribe, the samurai, against the genocidal American capitalist conglomerate that wants to violate a pristine religious culture. The movie celebrates a warlord who would rather die (and sacrifice thousands of his followers) than remove his sword at a conference. What I find interesting is that the hero was cheered by people who in the real world would want to see him executed for treason—just like the poor Marin County sap who got caught with the Taliban."


It's true! Fantastic religion and faith are acceptable only when presented in a certain way, but abhorrent when not in the way we want.