iMAC CRASHES ON TAKEOFF

Hey, folks. My brand new iMac G5 went boom So it's in the repair shop for who the hell knows how long. All my future blogs are stored there, so I won't be too actively making blogs for a few days unless I've got time to type one up on my little laptop.


GOOGLE CENSORED

As you probable know, Google and other Internet search engines have agreed to the Chinese government’s demand that they limit a Chinese citizen’s window to the net. You can’t find what you can’t see. This goes along with AOL’s seeking to charge certain clients to give them access to a faster Internet service. The Internet will soon be as corrupted as other media.

A long time ago, I was in a chat room, before I tired of their inanity, and came across a Chinese girl who could barely write English. She was at an Internet Cafe somewhere in China. We conversed a little bit, and I began to ask some questions about freedom. She became evasive and guarded and wouldn’t answer my questions directly. That was my first contact with a Chinese citizen on the Internet, and I sensed immediately the fear involved with China and the Internet.


BUSH MAKES US SAFER?

According to a recent Newsweek article (Feb. 13, 2006, p. 29)

[OPEN QUOTE] Even many young people are caught up in this wave. On the campus of Tehran's elite Imam Sadegh University, students who weren't born in 1979 talk about "the purity of the revolution and the war." ''An Islamic renaissance is starting from here;' says Reza Tawana, a third-year law student who fingers his worry beads and avoids looking women in the eye. "We are witnessing the start of a fundamentalist uprising in the region from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to Hamas, Hizbullah in Lebanon and of course Mr. Ahmadinejad in our own country." For the Bush administration, which is trying publicly to drive a wedge between the Iranian regime and the Iranian people, such attitudes present a dangerous challenge. This isn't just about nukes. Iran under pressure can use its extensive contacts in Iraq among dissidents and insurgents-and within the Shiite-dominated government-to further undermine the American position there. In today's tight market for oil, any threat to Iran's exports of crude while likely send prices toward $100 a barrel. Last week, even as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice waged a diplomatic battle to get the regime dragged before the Security Council, President George W. Bush tried reaching out to the Iranian masses "held hostage" by a small clerical elite. "We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom;' said Bush. ''And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.” [CLOSE QUOTE]

Does anyone believe that these patriotic young people would be up in arms as they are if it weren’t for our Imperial Presidency?

A WOMAN'S BODY IS A FINE CONVERSION TOOL

[OPEN QUOTE] [Returning from a trip to Norway] Leif [Erik Rauda or Erik the Red] landed at Eriksflord and went home to Brattahlid. . . . He soon proclaimed Christianity and the Catholic faith throughout the land. . . . Erik was slow in deciding whether or not to forsake his old beliefs. But [his wife] Thiodhild promptly embraced the new faith and had a chapel built at some distance from the house. . . . Thiodhild would not let Erik make love to her after she received the faith, which infuriated him. [CLOSE QUOTE] From THE FARFARERS by Farley Mowat, pages 265-266.

Yes, those foxy Catholic priests knew how to sway a man to godly ways. I think even St. Paul told his followers that a good woman could coerce a man to god. Just be patient, he told them, and they come around.


WHY SEPARATE CHURCH AND STATE

[Open quote] Separation of church and state is the only principle that can ensure religious and philosophical freedom for all Americans. Church-state separation does not mean hostility toward religion. Rather, it means that the government will remain neutral on religious questions, leaving decisions about God, faith and house of worship attendance in the hands of its citizens.

The results of America’s policy of church-state separation can be seen all around us: Thanks to separation of church and state, Americans enjoy an unparalleled amount of religious freedom. In some nations, churches remain dependent upon government for support and aid. Religious life in these nations is often devitalized, and many churches are near empty on Sundays. Other countries merge religion and government into theocracies. Religious liberty cannot flourish under that system either; attempt by the government to enforce a version of religious orthodoxy foster only repression. By contrast, religious liberty has flourished in America and separation of church and state can take the credit.

Our Founding Fathers understood that efforts by government to “help” religion usually end up hurting it in the long run. Thanks to their vision, America has struck the right balance. Religious groups are supported with voluntary contributions, not tax dollars. Houses of worship are free to seek new members and spread their religious messages but they must use their own resources to do so. Institutions that serve Americans of many religious faiths and none, such as public schools, are free from sectarian control. The government cannot force or coerce anyone to take part in religious worship or prayer services. Americans have the right to join whatever religious group they like or refrain from taking part in religion at all. No one can be forced to support, aid or fund religious groups.

This grand tradition of religious liberty has made America the envy of the world. In countries where religion is mandated or supported by the state, people look to the American model of church-state separation with longing. Church-state separation, a policy forged by great leaders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, is the expression of a mature and confident republic. It represents a promise of freedom that few countries have had the courage to fully embrace.

But America had that courage, and the results of that embrace have been nothing short of remarkable. Today we are an open and free society of nearly 300 million Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Atheists and others. All live side by side in harmony. All have the freedom to proclaim their views. All enjoy the right to worship or not worship unmolested by government officials or state-appointed religious leaders. All are equal in the eyes of the government.

That is the legacy of our Founders’ grand experiment with separation of church and state. That is the result of keeping an official distance between religion and government. That is the principle Americans United for Separation of Church and State upholds every day boldly, proudly and without apology. [Close quote]

I found this on the website of “Americans United For the Separation of Church and State”.

THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF IRAN

THESE YOUNG WOMEN ARE THE REAL HEROS

IN THE IRANIAN DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

I want you to picture this, the potential danger for these young women to be out and about under the regime of Ahmadinejad in Iran. Or, of course, also, maybe the fact that these women can be out on the street dressed this way may also be a hint that Iran is not such a dangerous country as Bush and company are trying to paint it. Not only that, but why shouldn't any nation on earth have the right to develop atomic energy for their countries? After all, that's what we all ought to be doing pretty soon in order to break our dependency on oil. What? Will we only allow some carefully screened countries to develop nuclear power in order to free themselves from oil dependency? How fair is that? But, in the meantime, I’ll just call these young women heroes of the revolution.


LOLITA MAKES SENSE IN IRAN AS NOWHERE ELSE

When I was a young man, I certainly read Nabokov's Lolita and went to the "Lolita" movie with Sue Lyons—was she the star?—to be titillated. James Mason played the nasty role. Of course (saving grace!) I went on to read Nabokov's Pale Fire too and, I think, a collection of his poetry and one more novel—I think? Lot's of questions, there, but no question that I went to see "Lolita" and read the book because of the lurid press it got. Same with "Deep Throat" which was the first time I entered a porno theater. A recent documentary called "Inside Deep Throat" brought back many memories of the censorship of those days and of the horny young man I was and, also, the memory of how many average people flocked to theaters to see "Deep Throat". There's even a photo of Jackie Kennedy attending a theater which was showing the film. To date the original "Deep Throat" has grossed 600 million dollars.

Back to Lolita. The following passages are from a book review by Christopher Hitchens in Atlantic Monthly (December, 2005, p. 131). He is reviewing a book by an Iranian writer, Azar Nafisi: [OPEN QUOTE] In Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which young female students meet in secret with Xeroxed copies of Nabokov's masterpiece on their often chaste and recently chadored laps, it is at first a surprise to discover how unscandalized the women are. Without exception, it turns out, they concur with Vera Nabokov in finding that the chief elements of the story are "its beauty and pathos." They "identify" with Lolita, because they can see that she wants above all to be a normal girl-child; they see straight through Humbert, because he is always blaming his victim and claiming that it was she who seduced him. And this perspective—such a bracing change from our conventional worried emphasis on pedophilia—is perhaps more easily come by in a state where virgins are raped before execution because the Koran forbids the execution of virgins; where the censor cuts Ophelia out of the Russian movie version of Hamlet; where any move that a woman makes can be construed as lascivious and inciting; where goatish old men can be gifted with infant brides; and where the age of "consent" is more like nine. As Nafisi phrases it,

This was the story of a twelve-year-old girl who had nowhere to go. Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy, into his dead love, and he had destroyed her. The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual by another. We don't know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel the finished work, is hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life. Warming up and suddenly inspired, I added that in fact Nabokov had taken revenge on our own solipsizers; he had taken revenge on the Ayatollah Khomeini. [CLOSE QUOTE]

Imagine! Now this book with all its notoriety is seen for what it was really about when Nabokov wrote it. Nowhere but in a highly censored, repressive society do its truths ring truer. Just how repressed were we in America of the 1950s? How much now?

A NARROW ESCAPE

Not only did we, so far, escape nuclear destruction during the Cold War, but look at the following:

"We [are] dealing with the unusually high level of genetic uniformity in the human species, despite superficial appearances. If you take blood and compare protein molecules, or if you sequence genes themselves, you will find that there is less difference between any two humans living anywhere in the world than there is between two African chimpanzees. We can explain this human uniformity by guessing that our ancestors, but not the chimpanzees, passed through a genetic bottleneck not very long ago. The population was reduced to a small number, came close to going extinct, but just pulled through. There is evidence of a fierce bottleneck—perhaps down to a population of 15,000, some 70,000 years ago, caused by a six-year 'volcanic winter' followed by a thousand-year ice age. Like the children of Noah in the myth, we are all descended from this small population, and that is why we are so genetically uniform. Similar evidence, of even greater genetic uniformity, suggests that cheetahs passed through an even narrower bottleneck more recently, around the end of the last Ice Age.

"Some people may find the evidence of biochemical genetics unsatisfying because it seems not to square with their everyday experience. Unlike cheetahs, we don't 'look' uniform. Norwegians, Japanese and Zulus all do look rather dramatically different from one another. With the best will in the world, it is intuitively hard to believe what is in fact the truth that they are 'really' more alike than three chimpanzees who look, to our eyes, much more similar." —Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, p. 405.

But Dawkins' claim does not square with the idea that to a white male, three Chinese tailors might look all so very much alike because we just don't look very closely. People who work closely with chimps probably have no trouble distinguishing them and seeing distinct personalities at work and play whereas a casual zoo visitor might think all the chimps in the cage look alike.


MEMES DO PLAY A ROLE

Again we come across the idea that culture does contribute to evolution. I mean if a bird's song can attract a mate of his own kind, then why not a hymn or a chant? Fortunately, we are not so bound up as the bird.

"Our (relatively) recent worldwide diaspora out of Africa has taken us to an extraordinarily wide variety of habitats, climates and ways of life. It is plausible that the different conditions have exerted strong selection pressures, particularly on externally visible parts, such as the skin, which bear the brunt of the sun and the cold. It is hard to think of any other species that thrives so well from the tropics to the Arctic, from sea level to the high Andes, from parched deserts to dripping jungles, and through everything in between. Such different conditions would be bound to exert different natural selection pressures, and it would be positivelY surprising if local populations did not diverge as a result. Hunters in the deep forests of Africa, South America and South-East Asia have all independently become small, almost certainly because height is a handicap in dense vegetation. Peoples of high latitude, who, it has been surmised, need all the sun they can get to make vitamin D, tend to have lighter skins than those who face the opposite problem—the carcinogenic rays of the tropical sun. It is plausible that such regional selection would especially affect superficial characteristics like skin colour, while leaving most of the genome intact and uniform.

"In theory, that could be the full explanation for our superficial and visible variety, covering deep similarity. But it doesn't seem enough to me. At the very least, I think it might be helped along by an additional suggestion, which I offer tentatively. It takes off from our earlier discussion about cultural barriers to interbreeding. We are indeed a very uniform species if you count the totality of genes, or if you take a truly random sample of genes; but perhaps there are special reasons for a disproportionate amount of variation in those very genes that make it easy for us to notice variation, and to distinguish our own kind from others. This would include the genes responsible for externally visible 'labels' like skin colour. Yet again, I want to suggest that this heightened discriminability has evolved by sexual selection, specifically in humans because we are such a culture-bound species. Because our mating decisions are so heavily influenced by cultural tradition, and because our cultures, and sometimes our religions, encourage us to discriminate against outsiders, especially in choosing mates, those superficial differences that helped our ancestors to prefer insiders over outsiders have been enhanced out of all proportion to the real genetic differences between us. No less a thinker than Jared Diamond has supported a similar idea in The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. And Darwin himself more generally invoked sexual selection in explanation of racial differences." Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, pp. 410-411

THE MACHIAVELLIAN LOOK

Okay, so look, what can I say? With my new iMac, I can use this function called "Photo Booth" and snap my picture with a tiny camera at the top of the screen anytime I want to, so last night I was playing solitaire, and I found I could import any photo I wanted to onto the backs of the cards, so I was messing around, snapping some shots for the card backs, and I snapped this one, and I like the look even though I don't think I'm anything like so Machievellian as all this, although there are one or two editors at our local rag, the Spokesman Review, who'd argue that I'm a lousy son-of-a-bitch, only they'd stop shy of using a curse word in their public comments. In private, they would use it, which, by the way, is the curse that religious fundamentalism brings to the world—hypocrisy! I also know that I'm awfully childlike delighted with this new iMac, but what can I say? I mean, look, I can hear you saying, "O, ho hum, that old guy just learned about Photo Booth. Soon he'll discover the Visualizer function of the iTunes and be staring at the screen like a newbe on acid." Okay, so I'm slowly being converted into the modern world where so many younger people are breaking ground. But that's okay too. I was once a member of the silent generation, those who grew up in the late 40's to early 50's, and I was converted once by the hippies, this age's parents, and so I don't mind at all changing again in my older age. No use freezing up and selling out now!


OF COURSE THIS'LL TAKE THE MACHIA' OUT OF THE 'VELLIAN
















THEN THERE'S THIS OTHER PERSONA

Now ain't this smiley mask better, taken on a power boat day trip up the Snake River into Hell's Canyon with my lovely wife? Much more relaxed, eh?

Okay, this'll be the end of photos of me for hopefully a long time. Look, I just discovered the Photo Booth function and, even though I'm pretty old, I still like the way I look.

Vanity, thy name is Geo!

O, yeh and the visualizer too!

THIS IS HOW BAD IT GETS

Jonathan Alter, in a piece called, "The Price of Loyalty" (NEWSWEEK, Nov. 7, 2005, p. 47) catalogues the following items about what happens to people who disagree with the current regime in Washington.

"This has been the Bush pattern. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill presciently says a second tax cut is unaffordable if we want to fight in Iraq—he's fired. Bush's economic adviser Larry Lindsey presciently says the war will cost between $100 billion and $200 billion (an underestimate)—he's fired. Army Gen. Eric Shinseki presciently says that winning in Iraq will require several hundred thousand troops—he's sent into early retirement. By contrast, CIA Director George Tenet, who presided over two of the greatest intelligence lapses in American history (9/11 and WMD in Iraq) and apparently helped spread "oppo ammo" to discredit the husband of a woman who had devoted her life to his agency, receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom."


SUV'S ENDANGER AMERICA'S POWER IN THE WORLD

I can't get over the selfishness of America's most wealthy, those who can afford to buy, maintain and gas up the gas hogs of the world. Here's a snippet of an article by Fareed Zakaria of NEWSWEEK magazine.

"In almost every region [of the world] efforts to produce a more stable, peaceful and open world order are being compromised and complicated by high oil prices. And while America spends enormous time, money and effort dealing with the symptoms of this problem, we are actively fueling the cause.

"Rising oil prices are the result of many different forces coming together. We have little control over some of them, like China's growth rate. But America remains the 800 pound gorilla of petroleum demand. In 2004, China consumed 6.5 million barrels of oil per day. The United States consumed 20.4 million barrels, and demand is rising. That is because of strong growth, but also because American cars—which guzzle the bulk of oil imports—are much less efficient than they used to be. This is the only area of the American economy in which we have become less energy-efficient than we were 20 years ago, and we are the only industrialized country to have slid backward in this way. There's one reason: SUVs. They made up 5 percent of the American fleet in 1990. They make up almost 54 percent today." —Fareed Zakaria in NEWSWEEK, Aug. 29, p.41.


LIGERS AND TIGRONS AND BEARS, O, NO! LIGERS AND. . .

Believe it or not, in zoos and other non-wild places, lions and tigers do hybridize. That is, they get it on with each other and offspring are born. . . of course, sterile offspring. I had never heard of this. They are called ligers and tigrons. This fact comes to us from Dawkin's THE ANCESTOR'S TALE in a passage where he discusses some of the speciation ramifications of gender in evolution, p.399.


MORE QUESTIONS OF THE DAY

How many phylum are there in the animal kingdom? Those are the huge categories. . . .

Answer: Thirty-eight.

I just love to sound so smart when the answers are right here on the page under my nose. Did you know. . .

. . . that in some species the males are so small they can ride around on females' legs or other body parts? (Man, talk about getting under the skirts of our women folk!)

. . .that the fan arrangement of our fingers and toes derive from the fins of our fishy ancestors? Right here, under my nose, on the pages of a book.

CHENEY MAKES ME ADD TO TODAY'S POST

President Bush stares amazedly at VP's shot!!

No, it's not really VP Cheney who makes me make entries today. It's this new iMac G5 with, finally, dsl (which I didn't have before this), which makes making posts so darn easy, I just can't restrain myself. Whoa there, fingers, quit your dancing!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyhow, look, everyone has accidents. So we ought to give Cheney a break in this accidental shooting of a friend in the face with a load of buckshot. We don't know all the circumstances, and, besides, how important is it with all the really important things to worry about in this world, like was Heidegger crazy, a Nazi, or did Kierkegaard really give his money to a woman he'd been in love with all his life but who he'd never slept with. . . you know, really important things. Or how long will it be before people get rational and realize there truly is no big monster in the sky who watches out for them and watches every little football player dance his dances in the endzones of his life.

No, really, all I got to quibble about is the Cheney functionary who had to mention that Cheney was a "safe hunter". I thought that the accolade "safe hunter" would go to those millions of hunters who have hunted every year of their lives and never shot a friend in the face with a load of buckshot. If Cheney is a safe hunter then who is not?

HAPMAP IS A HAPPY MAP

The National Institutes of Health director, a Republican appointee who will go nameless ‘cause isn’t he the dude who refused to make a decision about the morning after pill, said recently that, “...over the next five years we’re (that should read, ‘they’re’ instead of ‘we’re’ because Republicans are so consistently anti-science, they should get no credit for any scientific advancement) going to discover the most important genes that are associated with the most important diseases...”

The Hapmap is a sophisticated method of finding out which genes cause which problem in the human chemistry. According to a NEWSWEEK report in the November 7, 2005, p. 12:

“The reason for all the excitement is simple, even if the science behind it isn't: the HapMap may finally usher in the era of preventive medicine that doctors have been anticipating ever since the discovery of DNA's structure. The highly variable SNPs, which make up about .1 percent of the genome, can signal susceptibility to various diseases. They tend to travel in packs, so they're always inherited in tandem.

“The HapMap essentially tells scientists which SNPs travel together, reducing the work scientists have to do in order to pin the blame for diseases on particular genes. For a given disease, researchers can compare the SNPs of a group of afflicted patients with the SNPs of a healthy group. Finding a particularly prominent type of SNP in ailing patients would tell a scientist that the SNP was either causing the problem or stuck on the same chunk of DNA as the deleterious gene. In the latter case, scientists would quickly know where to look for the culprit. with the bad genes identified, they could tailor treatments to their patients' genetic profiles—even warding off diseases in advance.”

I always get a picture in my brain, when science triumphs yet once again, of “moralists” moralizing away about making the world a better place as they kill one another with their arguments over which system of moralizing is best while science goes on solving problems and making life an ever better place for the human race with truth and intelligence leading the way.


THE FUNDAMENTALIST EUROPEAN MARRIAGE

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the concept of the European marriage as it has been known in history. The European marriage was or is characterized by “le affaire” or, in the extreme case, by “the other woman”, the love object, who is set up in an apartment while the wife stays home to raise the children. These situations were caused, I believe, by the resistance of the churches of Europe to divorce until both men and women learned to get their love outside of marriage and, simultaneously, the institution of marriage could remain sacrosanct while partners sought real love elsewhere.

I am hearing rumors and a buzz about the same sort of situations developing in the Bible belt South where fundamentalists are heard to brag that their marriages are still intact, while on their desks sit the pictures of the girlfriend instead of the wife and boyfriend instead of husband. These are just rumors brought to me by Southernors, but if human nature is to be our guide, when marriages go bad and people are inclined by black and white dogma not to seek divorces, we should expect the European marriage to become the American marriage soon enough.


QUESTION OF THE DAY

What are the three multicellular kingdoms, according to a passage in Dawkin’s book, THE ANCESTOR’S TALE:

fungi...




animals...





plants.

HERE'S A QUICKIE

"ROME (Reuters) - An Italian atheist lost his legal crusade against the Catholic Church on Thursday when a judge rejected his attempts to sue a priest for saying that Jesus existed 2,000 years ago, the priest's lawyer said."

All is not lost however. The man has more Da Vinci daggers up his sleeve. Click the link to find out.

LINK HERE

HE AIN'T SO OBVIOUS AS ALL THAT

When anyone comes up with talk about missing links, all I know for sure is that the person who brings up such an idea is so far off the mark as to be without merit when it comes to discussing evolution with him. The following passages are yet another place where Dawkins lays out the problems of trying to come up with moments in the gradual evolution by natural selection where one species becomes another. Once one grasps the immensity of time of the process, everything else becomes clearer. If we only understand this little much, so much more about evolution becomes clear. REMEMBER that Dawkins set his book, from which the following chart and text come, to start from the present and to move backward in time to where each of the links rejoins the main branch. That why the graph reads as it does.





[Open quote] Lancelets are live creatures, our exact contemporaries. They are modern animals who have had exactly the same time as we have in which to evolve. Another telltale phrase is 'a side branch, off the main line of evolution'. All living animals are side branches. No line of evolution is more 'main' than any other, except with the conceit of hindsight.

Modern animals like lancelets, then, should never be revered as ancestors, nor patronised as 'lower' nor, for that matter, flattered as 'higher' slightly more surprisingly—and here we come to the second main point of the Lancelet's Tale—it is probably in general safest to say the same of fossils. It is theoretically conceivable that a particular fossil really is the direct ancestor of some modern animal. But it is statistically unlikely, because the tree of evolution is not a Christmas tree or a Lombardy poplar, but a densely branched thicket or bush. The fossil you are looking at probably isn't your ancestor, but it may help you to understand the kind of intermediate stage your real ancestors went through, at least in respect of some particular bit of the body, such as the ear, or the pelvis. A fossil, therefore, has something like the same status as a modern animal. Both can be used to illuminate our guesses about some ancestral stage. Under normal circumstances, neither should be treated as though it really is ancestral. Fossils as well as living creatures are usually best treated as cousins, not ancestors.

Members of the cladistic school of taxonomists can become positively evangelical about this, proclaiming the non-specialness of fossils with the zeal of a puritan or a Spanish inquisitor. Some go right over the top. They take the sensible statement, 'It is unlikely that any particular fossil is an ancestor of any surviving species,' and interpret it to mean 'There never were any ancestors!' Obviously this book stops short of such an absurdity. At every single moment in history there must have been at least one human ancestor (contemporary with, or identical to, at least one elephant ancestor, swift ancestor, octopus ancestor, etc.), even if any particular fossil almost certainly isn't it.

The upshot is that, on our backward journey towards the past, the Concestors we have been meeting have not, in general, been particular fossils. The best we can normally hope for is to put together a list of attributes that the ancestor probably had. We have no fossil of the common ancestor we share with the chimpanzees, even though that was less than 10 million years ago. But we were able to guess, with misgivings, that the ancestor was most likely to have been, in Darwin's famous words, a hairy quadruped, because we are the only ape that walks on its hind legs and has bare skin. Fossils can help us with our inferences, but mostly in the same kind of indirect way that living animals help us.

The moral of the Lancelet's Tale is that it is vastly harder to find an ancestor than a cousin. If you want to know what your ancestors looked like 100 million years ago, or 500 million years ago, it is no use reaching down to the appropriate depth in the rocks and hoping to come up with a fossil labeled 'Ancestor', as if from some Mesozoic or Paleozoic bran tub. The most we can normally hope for is a series of fossils that, Some with respect to one part, others with respect to another part, represent the kind of thing the ancestors probably looked like. Perhaps this fossil tells us something about our ancestors' teeth, while that fossil a few million years later gives us an inkling about our ancestors' arms. Any particular fossil is almost certainly not our ancestor but, with luck, some parts of it may resemble the corresponding parts of the ancestor just as, today, the shoulder-blade of a leopard is a reasonable approximation to the shoulder-blade of a puma. [Close quote.] —Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, pp. 365-366

SCIENCE IS BEAUTIFUL



I'm just messing around here. With my new iMac G5 computer and my new HP 1610 (not too expensive) Printer/Scanner/Copier and my, therefore, upgraded abilities with Blogspot, I found I could upload a photograph which I couldn't do with my old iMac which was slowly losing the ability to accomplish much of anything in blogspot. Anyhow, I like these photos because many people think that women who are very bright scientifically are not also attractive women. These photos came with my NEWSWEEK magazines.

FACE SAVING BEHAVIOR. NOW DON'T MAKE A FACE!

The following two paragraphs make me think of the relationship between Vice-President Cheney and Halliburton and also of the relationship of Cheney's aphid, George Bush, and his aphids, the fundamentalists. It's a whole chain of networking aphids!

"Several groups of ants have independently evolved the habit of keeping domestic 'dairy' animals in the form of aphids. Unlike other symbiotic insects that live inside ants' nests and don't benefit the ants, the aphids are pastured out in the open, sucking sap from plants as they normally do. As with mammalian cattle, aphids have a high throughput of food, taking only a small amount of nutriment from each morsel. The residue that emerges from the rear end of an aphid is sugar-water 'honeydew'—only slightly less nutritious than the plant sap that goes in at the front. Any honeydew not eaten by ants rains down from trees infested with aphids, and is plausibly thought to be the origin of 'manna in the Book of Exodus. It should not be surprising that ants gather it up, for the same reason as the followers of Moses did. But some ants have gone further and corralled aphids, giving them protection in exchange for being allowed to 'milk' the aphids, tickling their rear ends to make them secrete honeydew which the ant eats directly from the aphid's anus.

"At least some aphid species have evolved in response to their domestic existence. They have lost some of the normal aphid defensive responses and, according to one intriguing suggestion, some have modified their rear end to resemble the face of an ant. Ants are in the habit of passing liquid food to one another, mouth to mouth, and the suggestion is that individual aphids that evolved this rear-end face-mimicry facilitated being 'milked' and therefore gained protection by ants from predators." —Again, Richard Dawkins in THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, pp. 396-397.


BIBLE LITERALISM CAN'T BE TRUE

The following is another letter to the editor I've written but haven't sent off. I have so many of them. It is primarily a failure of imagination that makes fundamentalists so dense and literal. How could they claim that the Bible has all the truth in the world, when it's so obvious, with the use of a little creative imagination, the primitive conditions Bible people lived in? Most couldn't even read or write. If they knew so much, why did we have to wait until 1969 to go to the Moon? Well, you know what I mean. . . .

"Go space shuttle! We should thank our lucky stars that we live in modern times. Imagine what it was like just 2000 years ago in Bible times? Few could read or write. Most lived short, ignorant, superstitious, filthy and brutish lives. Old age was 35 years. Everyone lived in fear of imaginary spirits in the skies, under the earth, in forests and oceans. In Bible-wild imaginations, demons dwelled in the earth and, on the high places, they imagined good spirits. Little was known of medicine and surgery. Famines and plagues constantly swept the earth, and there were no vaccinations for them. People of those times knew nothing of the vastness of space or the depths of human psychology, of awesome physic’s theorems or the truths of evolutionary biology. They could not conceive of quantum mechanics. They dwelt in utter ignorance and were even more warlike than we are. At least we liberal moderns know enough to try and resist our conservative, neocon animal impulses to kill those we disagree with. In those days who could even imagine such a thing as a rocket powered space flight, let alone an earth that circled the sun? Bible times, bah!"

PATTERNS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

This is a repeat of an earlier blog entry with a similar lesson about how different consciousnesses must function. The math example is the same, but I’ve put in a different piece of my poetry from my original poetry thesis at Eastern Washington University. Then, since I’m taking a philosophy course at Spokane Falls Community College, I’ve thrown in a paragraph by Kierkegaard. Compared to the math and the poem, the bit of philosophy seems way out there in space, doesn’t it? Just thought you might enjoy thinking about math, poetry and philosophy as different consciousnesses in the same universe. Think, also of those passages I’ve included in other postings which show the mind of a scientist working her way through an experiment. First the math:

4 x (-4) = -16
3 x (-4) = -12
2 x (-4) = -8
1 x (-4) = -4
0 x (-4) = 0
-1 x (-4) = 4
-2 x (-4) = 8
-3 x (-4) = 12 and etcetera

There’s no escaping the conclusion there. Minus times a minus is a positive.


Next the poem:

PAST SEATTLE
For Geoff P.

"Our settlement's only sign of life was smoke;
It drifted up in calms between the blizzards.
I recall it was the color of the sky.
There was never enough food so we ate tubers,
And what the snow did to us we never forgot;
It was the one sure fact we lived against.
The graves spread on a knoll to the east
Where the birch and the pine were thinnest,
And the path to the knoll stayed dark all winter.
In the spring, the grass there came back lush."

Generations later, I stand on the coast
And think west across water that whispers
In my dreams, and I remember that voice.
It rains way too much here, for days obscuring
everything with mist. I drink too much, get drunk,
Try to boogie myself out of the plain facts.
Too many days, I think of them
Who I never knew. Their graves in the snow
Stretch a long shadow; even to this time.
I stare too much out of barroom windows
While Greyhounds gun by from the passes,
Their snowed tops already running slush,
The smoke of their exhausts beaten down by rain.


And, finally, a bit of the old philosophical mind:

a. Despair as Defined by Finitude/Infinitude

The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God. To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. Consequently, the progress of the becoming must be an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing process. But if the self-does not become itself, it is in despair, whether it knows that or not. Yet every moment that a self exists, it is in a process of becoming, for the self [in potentiality] does not actually exist, is simply that which ought to come into existence. Insofar, then, as the self does not become itself, it is not itself; but not to be itself is precisely despair. —Kierkegaard from The Sickness Unto Death


Though I may be making a bit of fun at Kierkegaard’s expense here, I must admit that he reminds me a bit of Jack Kerouac. How, you ask? Well even though Kierkegaard seems to write awfully abstractly, sometimes I sense the emotion driving him to write as he does, the despair in the henhouse, so to speak, and that’s also what Kerouac used to do for me (specially On The Road). Jack wrote very concretely often, but also quite irrationally, like Kierkegaard. He’d spill out those words on the run on the road, breathlessly, in a hurry and driven by a passion. One employs abstract language, one concrete, but both ride on the same sense of despair and anguish, if you ask me.

SO WE'RE HUMAN ANIMALS? SO WHAT? THE GENE'S THE THING

The following paragraphs are from Richard Dawkin's book THE ANCESTOR'S TALE (what else?) and commence on page 359. Again Dawkins argues for the idea that evolution is more about genetic change than the morphological change that fossils and taxonomy reveal. It takes the whole argument out of the primitive hands of the Creationists who still like to sound the "missing link" sound bite meme. Anybody who says "missing link" so reveals their ignorance of the field of evolution that one can only laugh. Just last week a home-schooling mother in a letter to the editor crowed that she teaches her kids science and that the missing link still refutes natural selection. She actually thinks she's educating her kids. Poor dumb kids born to that mother. They might be loved, but they'll be ignorant as door posts. Yes, I know, to be loved is a wonderful thing even if your brain remains as inactive as a stone.

[Open quote.]THE LAMPREY'S TALE

THE REASON IT FALLS to the lamprey to tell this tale will be revealed at the end. It is a reprise on a theme we have met before: there is a separate gene's-eye view of ancestry and pedigree that is surprisingly independent of the view we get when we think about family trees in more traditional ways.

Haemoglobin is well known as the vitally important molecule that carries oxygen to our tissues and gives our blood its spectacular colour. Human adult haemoglobin is actually a composite of four protein chains called globins, knotted around each other. Their DNA sequences show that the four globin chains are closely related to each other, but they are not identical. Two of them are called alpha globins (each a chain of 141 amino acids), and two are beta globins (each a chain of 146 amino acids). The genes coding for the alpha globins are on our chromosome 11; those coding for the beta globins are on chromosome 16. On each of these chromosomes there is a duster of globin genes in a row, interspersed with some junk DNA that is never transcribed. The alpha cluster, on chromosome 11, contains seven globin genes. Four of these are pseudogenes—disabled versions of alpha with faults in their sequence, never translated into protein. Two are true alpha globins, used in the adult. The final one is called zeta, and it is used only in embryos. The beta cluster, on chromosome 16, has six genes, some of which are disabled, and one of which is used only in the embryo. Adult haemoglobin, as we've seen, contains two alpha and two beta chains, wrapped around each other to form a beautifully functioning parcel.

Never mind all this complexity. Here's the fascinating point. Careful letter-by-letter analysis shows that the different kinds of globin genes are literally cousins of each other—members of a family. But these distant cousins still coexist inside you and me. They still sit side by side with their cousins inside every cell of every warthog and every wombat, every owl and every lizard.

On the scale of whole organisms, of course, all vertebrates are cousins Of each other too. The tree of vertebrate evolution is the family tree we are all familiar with, its branch-points representing speciation events— the splitting of species into daughter species. In reverse, they are the rendezvous points that punctuate this pilgrimage. But there is another family tree occupying the same time scale, whose branches represent not speciation events but gene duplication events within genomes. And the branching pattern of the globin tree looks very different from the branching pattern of the family tree, if we trace it in the usual, orthodox way, with species branching to form daughter species. There is not just one evolutionary tree in which species divide and give rise to daughter species. Every gene has its own tree, its own chronicle of splits, its own catalogue of close and distant cousins.

The dozen or so different globins inside you and me have come down to us through the entire lineage of our vertebrate ancestors. About half a billion years ago, in a jawless fish perhaps like a lamprey, an ancestral globin gene accidentally split in two, both copies remaining in different parts of that fish's genome. There were then two copies of it, in different parts of the genome of all descendant animals. One copy was destined to give rise to the alpha cluster, on what would eventually become chromosome 11 in our genome, the other to the beta duster, now on our chromosome 16. There is no point in trying to guess which chromosome either of them sat on in the intermediate ancestors. The locations of recognizable DNA sequences, indeed the number of chromosomes into which the genome is divided, are shuffled and changed with surprisingly gay abandon. Chromosome numbering systems, therefore, do not generalize across animal groups.

As the ages passed, there were further duplications, and doubtless some deletions as well. Around 400 million years ago the ancestral alpha gene duplicated again, but this time the two copies remained near neighbors of each other, in a cluster on the same chromosome. One of them was destined to become the zeta of our embryos, the other became the alpha globin genes of adult humans (further branching gave rise to the non-functional pseudo genes I mentioned). It was a similar story along the beta branch of the family, but with duplications at other moments in geological history.

Now here's a fascinating point. Given that the split between the alpha cluster and the beta cluster took place half a billion years ago, it will of course not be just our human genomes that show the split, and possess both alpha genes and beta genes in different parts of our genomes. We should see the same within-individual split if we look at the genomes of any other mammals, at birds, reptiles, amphibians or bony fish—for our common ancestor with all of them lived less than 500 million years agO. Wherever it has been investigated, this expectation has proved correct Our greatest hope of finding a vertebrate that does not share with us the ancient alpha/beta split would be a jawless fish like a lamprey or a hagfish, for they are our most remote cousins among surviving vertebrates. They are the only surviving vertebrates whose common ancestor with the rest is sufficiently ancient that it could have predated the alpha/ beta split. Sure enough, these jawless fish are the only known vertebrates that lack the alpha/beta divide. Rendezvous 22 is so ancient, in other words, that it predated the split between alpha and beta globin.

Something like the Lamprey's Tale could be told for each one of our genes, for they all, if you go back far enough, owe their origin to the splitting of some ancient gene. And something like this entire book could be written for each gene. [Close quote.]