////////////////BTO-KOSM
///////////////////DBT CRD CRSS
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
SOFT SKILLS FOR MODERN LF
//////////////ANGER MGT
CONFLICT MGT
STRESS MGT
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
TIME MGT
REASONING ABY
COMMUNICATION SKILL
/////////////////////////////VIVEKANANDA-146 YRS OLD
/////////////////////////////RECYCLE
How to save paper save money and save forests
In order to print in an eco-friendly and financially frugal way, extend the settings of your margins by half an inch (or an inch) on each side. It doesn't seem like a lot, but if we all did it, we could save a forest each year. Also, most printers allow a setting for printing 4 pages onto 1. The writing is smaller, but if used for seldom read records you could theoretically print 8 pages onto one piece of double-sided paper. Think about how much space and trees we could all save that way!
/////////////////////////////////FOOD
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These words sum up Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food. Humans used to know how to eat well, Pollan argues. But the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused, complicated, and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists - all of whom have much to gain from our dietary confusion.
As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not 'real'. We've got Michael Pollan in debate with the Chief Scientist at the FSA, and a director from the Food and Drink Federation. It will be a Newsnight Book Club too.
//////////////////////////////////////Couch potato lifestyle may speed up
ageing
NewScientist news service Jan. 29, 2008
*************************
Researchers at St. Thomas' hospital
in London have found that people who
did not exercise in their spare time
had shorter telomeres than very
active people. Telomeres shorten
each time a cell divides, and when
they become too short a cell can no
longer divide, so telomeres act as a
kind of timer counting down our
biological age. Exercise can...
http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=7881&m=33138
////////////////////////////////........EARTH=moon is -253 degrees when it faces the sun and -378 degrees at night, the sun must contribute very little to keeping its planets warm. To me this means that most of the warmth on earth is derived from its molten core and not from the sun. Thank you.
Posted by paul skillman on January 4,2008 |
/////////////////////////////////44 AGE -MOST LIKELY TO BE DEPRESSED
////////////////////////////////DONT COMPARE -IF ,THEN COMPARE DOWNWARDS
///////////////////////////////////
CONFLICT MGT
STRESS MGT
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
TIME MGT
REASONING ABY
COMMUNICATION SKILL
/////////////////////////////VIVEKANANDA-146 YRS OLD
/////////////////////////////RECYCLE
How to save paper save money and save forests
In order to print in an eco-friendly and financially frugal way, extend the settings of your margins by half an inch (or an inch) on each side. It doesn't seem like a lot, but if we all did it, we could save a forest each year. Also, most printers allow a setting for printing 4 pages onto 1. The writing is smaller, but if used for seldom read records you could theoretically print 8 pages onto one piece of double-sided paper. Think about how much space and trees we could all save that way!
/////////////////////////////////FOOD
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These words sum up Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food. Humans used to know how to eat well, Pollan argues. But the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused, complicated, and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists - all of whom have much to gain from our dietary confusion.
As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not 'real'. We've got Michael Pollan in debate with the Chief Scientist at the FSA, and a director from the Food and Drink Federation. It will be a Newsnight Book Club too.
//////////////////////////////////////Couch potato lifestyle may speed up
ageing
NewScientist news service Jan. 29, 2008
*************************
Researchers at St. Thomas' hospital
in London have found that people who
did not exercise in their spare time
had shorter telomeres than very
active people. Telomeres shorten
each time a cell divides, and when
they become too short a cell can no
longer divide, so telomeres act as a
kind of timer counting down our
biological age. Exercise can...
http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=7881&m=33138
////////////////////////////////........EARTH=moon is -253 degrees when it faces the sun and -378 degrees at night, the sun must contribute very little to keeping its planets warm. To me this means that most of the warmth on earth is derived from its molten core and not from the sun. Thank you.
Posted by paul skillman on January 4,2008 |
/////////////////////////////////44 AGE -MOST LIKELY TO BE DEPRESSED
////////////////////////////////DONT COMPARE -IF ,THEN COMPARE DOWNWARDS
///////////////////////////////////
Monday, 28 January 2008
SOGONMASBOG CRSS-CDS 290108
//////////////////24/01/08,18:52, Elsevier Global Medical News By Damian McNamara
Researchers Find Unexpected Symmetry in Progression of Knee Osteoarthritis
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (EGMN) – Symmetrical bilateral progression of knee osteoarthritis was a significant and surprising result of a genetic study of people with hand osteoarthritis and their relatives.
“The most surprising [finding] was that progression occurred in a similar manner on both sides. This indicates to me that there is probably a strong genetic factor for progression,” Dr. Virginia Byers Kraus said in an interview during a poster session at the World Congress on Osteoarthritis.
/////////////////////MRI Seen as Alternative to Chest X-Rays in Children With Lung Disease
CHICAGO (EGMN) - Optimised low-field magnetic resonance imaging has the potential to replace plain chest radiographs in the assessment of lung disease in children, according to results of a poster study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
“The goal is to reduce radiation exposure for these very young patients - many with cystic fibrosis - while visualizing pathologies such as pneumonia and atelectasis,” Dr. Joachim Bernhardt, lead author, said in an interview. “We achieved that goal in about half of the 12 children involved in our study.”
////////////////////////////dg=The Anthropocene: Have Humans Created a New Epoch in the Planet's History?
No one can realistically argue that humans haven’t dramatically transformed the face of the planet. But now scientists propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that that we have brought about an end to one epoch and entered a new age. They suggest humans have so changed the Earth that it’s time the Holocene epoch was officially ended. The new epoch of Earth’s history is being called the Anthropocene, meaning “man-made”.
Geologists from the University of Leicester, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, and their colleagues on the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London say that humankind has entered a phase where we are so rapidly transforming the planet that a new era has started. Duke University soil scientist Daniel Richter agrees. He says the dirt under our feet is being so changed by humans that it is now appropriate to call this epoch the Anthropocene Age.
/////////////////////////////////////dg=January 28, 2008
The Ocean’s Biological Deserts are Growing
I have just been introduced to a new term that I am trying wrap my head around: “biological desert” refers to the lack of biodiversity and biomass, in an area other than that typically looked at as a desert. My introduction to the term comes with an even more difficult landscape in which for a desert to exist; the ocean.
But according to researchers, biological deserts cover 40% of the Earth’s surface, so regardless of my inexperience with this phenomenon; it is indeed an issue worthy of our attention.
///////////////////////////////
Researchers Find Unexpected Symmetry in Progression of Knee Osteoarthritis
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (EGMN) – Symmetrical bilateral progression of knee osteoarthritis was a significant and surprising result of a genetic study of people with hand osteoarthritis and their relatives.
“The most surprising [finding] was that progression occurred in a similar manner on both sides. This indicates to me that there is probably a strong genetic factor for progression,” Dr. Virginia Byers Kraus said in an interview during a poster session at the World Congress on Osteoarthritis.
/////////////////////MRI Seen as Alternative to Chest X-Rays in Children With Lung Disease
CHICAGO (EGMN) - Optimised low-field magnetic resonance imaging has the potential to replace plain chest radiographs in the assessment of lung disease in children, according to results of a poster study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
“The goal is to reduce radiation exposure for these very young patients - many with cystic fibrosis - while visualizing pathologies such as pneumonia and atelectasis,” Dr. Joachim Bernhardt, lead author, said in an interview. “We achieved that goal in about half of the 12 children involved in our study.”
////////////////////////////dg=The Anthropocene: Have Humans Created a New Epoch in the Planet's History?
No one can realistically argue that humans haven’t dramatically transformed the face of the planet. But now scientists propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that that we have brought about an end to one epoch and entered a new age. They suggest humans have so changed the Earth that it’s time the Holocene epoch was officially ended. The new epoch of Earth’s history is being called the Anthropocene, meaning “man-made”.
Geologists from the University of Leicester, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, and their colleagues on the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London say that humankind has entered a phase where we are so rapidly transforming the planet that a new era has started. Duke University soil scientist Daniel Richter agrees. He says the dirt under our feet is being so changed by humans that it is now appropriate to call this epoch the Anthropocene Age.
/////////////////////////////////////dg=January 28, 2008
The Ocean’s Biological Deserts are Growing
I have just been introduced to a new term that I am trying wrap my head around: “biological desert” refers to the lack of biodiversity and biomass, in an area other than that typically looked at as a desert. My introduction to the term comes with an even more difficult landscape in which for a desert to exist; the ocean.
But according to researchers, biological deserts cover 40% of the Earth’s surface, so regardless of my inexperience with this phenomenon; it is indeed an issue worthy of our attention.
///////////////////////////////
Saturday, 26 January 2008
FAILURE MANAGEMENT
///////////////JB LOSS-MAX FEELING OF FAILR
///////////////MV ON TO NEW OPPORTUNITIES-WITH PMA
///////////////SETBACK INTO COMEBACK
//////////////////LEARNING FROM FAILURE MODEL-IACOCOA eg
///////////////MV ON TO NEW OPPORTUNITIES-WITH PMA
///////////////SETBACK INTO COMEBACK
//////////////////LEARNING FROM FAILURE MODEL-IACOCOA eg
Friday, 25 January 2008
GRANNY SHIFT
////////////////granny shift n. Some men were interned during the Troubles and no one knew when they were getting out, so often women were left to rear the children. So, it was vital that the women went out to work. Some women worked what was known as the “granny shift” for extra money. When their husband came home from work they went to the mill every night from 6-10pm.
////////////////
Today is Jan 25, 2008.
Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.
~John Sales~
////////////////////////MERGE INTO PANGON
/////////////////////////////////
////////////////
Today is Jan 25, 2008.
Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.
~John Sales~
////////////////////////MERGE INTO PANGON
/////////////////////////////////
BLACKPOOL MEDICS
//////////////////////HOUSE HUNTING BEES BEHAVE LIKE A BRAIN-USES GROUP MEMORY-HOW NEURONES RELATE IN A VERTEBRATE BRAIN
/////////////////////////SURNAME BEHAVES LIKE GENE TRANSMITTED THRO Y CHROMSM
///////////////////////////WPM=So the notion that God is the supersensible aspect of Nature, points to
this integrated mystery: a universe that can give rise to creatures who are
aware of the universe. God gains awareness and intelligence through
creatures that evolve from Nature. God discovers God in these creatures,
which is to say Nature discovers its Godliness in the subjectivity, the
supersensibility of the creatures.
The reason I use that crazy word God for this, is to draw attention to just
how utterly amazing it is to be living and aware -- that each of us is
God's awareness and intelligence, it's an ideal worth living up to.
Namaste (a Sanskrit word that means "I honor God's awareness and
intelligence in you).
T
////////////////////////BLOODLINE OVER ABILITY?
////////////////////////////DTR-MMTA /WF -COMPANN-CRSS-DOLTC LINE-BEING PHILO
PRNTS-TALU-72/70-BEING PHILO
///////////////////////PM2.5S=FROM CAR EXHAUST IN CITY STREETS CAN HEART ATTACKS
////////////////////////PACIFIC OCN SPLITTING INTO 2= NORTH AND SOUTH PLATES
/////////////////////////BONK-TILL U TRY=BONK-TUT
//////////////////////////////////GLOBAL GARDENING=USE BIOMASS FUELS AND CARBON SEQUESTRN -FRANCE+GERMANY AREA FOR GROWING BIOMASS FUELS FOR 25 YRS
///////////////////////////////////A WATCHED POT NEVER BOILS-QUANTUM THEORY
////////////////////////////////////WHY DOES PAIN HURT?
//////////////////////////////////LUCID DREAMING IS A METAPHOR FOR ENLIGHTENMENT
////////////////////////////////CONSCIOUSNESS MAKES CONSCIOUSNESS INTERESTING
/////////////////////////////I AM THE CONTENT OF A TRANSPARENT SELF MODEL
///////////////////////////////////////NO SUCH THING AS A SOUL
I AM JUST A GENE COPYING DEVICE
////////////////////////////////////THER IS NOTHING THERE UNTIL U WONDER WHAT IS THERE
///////////////////////EXPERIENCE IS A BRAIN CAPACITY
////////////////////////////REAL UNDERSTANDING IS SOMETHING OUTSIDE COMPUTATION
//////////////////////////////////I AM PART OF SHIVA'S DANCE-NOT A LITTLE SOUL THAT IS GOING TO BE EXTINGUISHED
////////////////////////////////THERE IS A SPATIAO-TEMPORAL SMEARING OF EVENTS IN THE BRAIN
//////////////////////////////ANIMALS EXPERIENCE AS WELL
///////////////////////////////////UNIVERSE HAS DIFF VIEWS OF ITSELF THRU U AND ME
/////////////////////////////////VANAPRASTA ASHRAMA ( THE ANCHORITE)
VANAPRASTA is the third stage of Elder Advisor usually between 48 and 72 years of age. A stage comes when business, family, secular life like the beauties and hopes of youth have exhausted themselves and need to be left behind. The person retires usually from worldly attachments to lead a life of contemplation and meditation alone or with his wife.
What life holds beyond middle age depends in the end not on fancy and imagination but on the realities of the values of life we regard as inviolable. Vanaprasta may be termed as the beginning of a person's real 'adult education' to evaluate his performance thus for as Grihasta and reorder his life in such a way as to discover who he is and what life is all about.
"The time had come for him to probe 'the secret of 'I' with which he has been on such intimate terms all these years yet which remains a stranger, full of inexplicable quirks, baffling surds, irrational impulses."
It is curious to find that many do not wish to venture into this but would like to remain in Grihastashrama even by remarrying if the first spouse predeceases the man.
A playboy of 25 may impress but how could one pose perpetually as the 'prince charming' at 50, 60 or 70 years of age? Look at those who try hard to do this. However hard they might try, they not only fail to receive recognition but also incur the derision of people whom they seek to impress.
SANNYASA ASHRAMA ( THE RENOUNCED)
SANNYASI is the fourth stage of an Ascetic - Solitaire - usually beyond 72 years of age. This means 'Samyak Nyasa' - 'Total detachment' from worldly pleasures including the bare necessities to subsist. This is the last 'Ashrama'. He does not aspire to be recognized as somebody who matters - The wish of the Sannyasi is just to be a 'persona non grata'- one who exists almost without giving any thought to his being - with no desire for name or fame or recognition.
"He no more cares whether his body falls or remains than does a cow what becomes a garland that someone has hung around her neck - for the faculties of his mind are now at rest in the holy power, the essence of bliss."
"Business, family, secular life, the beauties and hopes of youth and the success of maturity have now been left behind, Eternity alone remains. And, so it is to that - and, not to the tasks and worries of their life, already gone which came and passed like a dream - that the mind is turned."
"The Sannyasi has his spiritual eye on goods that men can't give and cares little for anything that men can take away. . Therefore, he is beyond the possibility of either seduction or threat."
Sannyasa is of four kinds:
'Vidvat'- born out of real wisdom and is spontaneous 'Vividisha'- springing from a yearning for self-realization through study of the Scriptures and practicing the rigors prescribed Aatura upon one's deathbed when there is no hope in living further, and Markata - embracing Sannyasa as an escape from great misery, disappointment or misfortune that one is not able to face in worldly activities.
No one is encouraged to become a 'Sannyasi' unless one has gone through one's natural impulses through the three previous Ashramas. He who runs away from marriage (Grihastashrama) is no better than a coward deserting the battle field.
The student's attention is directed inward, preparing for life ahead. In Grihasta and Vanaprasta attention is directed outward - Grihasta supporting the entire society, Vanasprasta sharing his experiences for the good of others. The Sannyasi is again inner directed. Having contributed to society and having received from society what he needed, he prepares himself for the final release.
Sannyasa means renunciation not of life alone but of Kama, Artha and even worldly Dharmas. Sannyasa may be deemed a second phase of Brahmacharya.
The first was a preparation for life; the second a preparation for death. While Brahmacharya and Grihasta show the 'Pravritti Marga ( towards the world) , Vanaprasta and Sannyasa indicate the 'Nivritti Marga' (away from the world) through introspection and renunciation.
Thus, while 'Varna' is determined by past 'Karma', Ashrama is determined by the stage of maturity displayed by individuals in viewing the goals of life.
"Varnas stress human nature ; Ashramas stress human nurture"
And, Lord Krishna advises "One's own duty, though done imperfectly is preferable to the duty of another even if well performed. Even death in doing one's own duty is blissful; doing another's duty is frightful".
So, everyone is advised to do his / her 'Dharma' according to one's Varna and Ashrama - and not to venture doing those outside one's own.
Every person has his Svabhava (natural being) fitting him for his Svadharma (natural function). We cannot change either our natural being or our natural function because nature cannot be forced into a change by our whims and fancies.
A Sadhu was rescuing a scorpion that had fallen into a pond. Every time he lifted it out of water, it stung him but he would not give up until it was saved. One of his disciples asked why he was persistent in saving the scorpion that stung him. The Sadhu replied: "The `Dharma' or nature of scorpion is to sting; the nature or Dharma of a Sadhu is to rescue a being from distress - and in this case sure death by drowning. So long as the scorpion does not give up its Dharma why should I give up mine and give up saving it?" The `Dharma' of fire is to burn, of water is to be cool, of wind is to blow. So, the Dharma of man is to be humane. This story emphasizes how one should go on doing one's duty even if obstacles, impediments and difficulties intervene in discharging it.
The Dharma of a student is to study. If the student - neglects his studies he neglects his svadharma; if fire does not burn, it is not fire; When heated by fire (by external influence) water loses its nature (Svadharma) of being cool. When Svadharma is not practiced, there ensues an imbalance in the environment. This understanding and adherence to Svadharma is what distinguishes human beings from other beings.
///////////////////////////////////The Consumer Confidence Index
This Index is a composite of the two other indices, and is weighted 40%-Present Situation Index and 60%-Expectations Index.
The Present Situation Index
This Index is based on two questions the survey asks: 1) How would you rate the present business conditions? and 2) What would you say about available jobs in your area right now?
The Expectations Index
This Index is based on respondents' predictions for business conditions and available jobs six months from now. It also measures whether those surveyed think their incomes will be higher, lower or about the same in six months.
///////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////SURNAME BEHAVES LIKE GENE TRANSMITTED THRO Y CHROMSM
///////////////////////////WPM=So the notion that God is the supersensible aspect of Nature, points to
this integrated mystery: a universe that can give rise to creatures who are
aware of the universe. God gains awareness and intelligence through
creatures that evolve from Nature. God discovers God in these creatures,
which is to say Nature discovers its Godliness in the subjectivity, the
supersensibility of the creatures.
The reason I use that crazy word God for this, is to draw attention to just
how utterly amazing it is to be living and aware -- that each of us is
God's awareness and intelligence, it's an ideal worth living up to.
Namaste (a Sanskrit word that means "I honor God's awareness and
intelligence in you).
T
////////////////////////BLOODLINE OVER ABILITY?
////////////////////////////DTR-MMTA /WF -COMPANN-CRSS-DOLTC LINE-BEING PHILO
PRNTS-TALU-72/70-BEING PHILO
///////////////////////PM2.5S=FROM CAR EXHAUST IN CITY STREETS CAN HEART ATTACKS
////////////////////////PACIFIC OCN SPLITTING INTO 2= NORTH AND SOUTH PLATES
/////////////////////////BONK-TILL U TRY=BONK-TUT
//////////////////////////////////GLOBAL GARDENING=USE BIOMASS FUELS AND CARBON SEQUESTRN -FRANCE+GERMANY AREA FOR GROWING BIOMASS FUELS FOR 25 YRS
///////////////////////////////////A WATCHED POT NEVER BOILS-QUANTUM THEORY
////////////////////////////////////WHY DOES PAIN HURT?
//////////////////////////////////LUCID DREAMING IS A METAPHOR FOR ENLIGHTENMENT
////////////////////////////////CONSCIOUSNESS MAKES CONSCIOUSNESS INTERESTING
/////////////////////////////I AM THE CONTENT OF A TRANSPARENT SELF MODEL
///////////////////////////////////////NO SUCH THING AS A SOUL
I AM JUST A GENE COPYING DEVICE
////////////////////////////////////THER IS NOTHING THERE UNTIL U WONDER WHAT IS THERE
///////////////////////EXPERIENCE IS A BRAIN CAPACITY
////////////////////////////REAL UNDERSTANDING IS SOMETHING OUTSIDE COMPUTATION
//////////////////////////////////I AM PART OF SHIVA'S DANCE-NOT A LITTLE SOUL THAT IS GOING TO BE EXTINGUISHED
////////////////////////////////THERE IS A SPATIAO-TEMPORAL SMEARING OF EVENTS IN THE BRAIN
//////////////////////////////ANIMALS EXPERIENCE AS WELL
///////////////////////////////////UNIVERSE HAS DIFF VIEWS OF ITSELF THRU U AND ME
/////////////////////////////////VANAPRASTA ASHRAMA ( THE ANCHORITE)
VANAPRASTA is the third stage of Elder Advisor usually between 48 and 72 years of age. A stage comes when business, family, secular life like the beauties and hopes of youth have exhausted themselves and need to be left behind. The person retires usually from worldly attachments to lead a life of contemplation and meditation alone or with his wife.
What life holds beyond middle age depends in the end not on fancy and imagination but on the realities of the values of life we regard as inviolable. Vanaprasta may be termed as the beginning of a person's real 'adult education' to evaluate his performance thus for as Grihasta and reorder his life in such a way as to discover who he is and what life is all about.
"The time had come for him to probe 'the secret of 'I' with which he has been on such intimate terms all these years yet which remains a stranger, full of inexplicable quirks, baffling surds, irrational impulses."
It is curious to find that many do not wish to venture into this but would like to remain in Grihastashrama even by remarrying if the first spouse predeceases the man.
A playboy of 25 may impress but how could one pose perpetually as the 'prince charming' at 50, 60 or 70 years of age? Look at those who try hard to do this. However hard they might try, they not only fail to receive recognition but also incur the derision of people whom they seek to impress.
SANNYASA ASHRAMA ( THE RENOUNCED)
SANNYASI is the fourth stage of an Ascetic - Solitaire - usually beyond 72 years of age. This means 'Samyak Nyasa' - 'Total detachment' from worldly pleasures including the bare necessities to subsist. This is the last 'Ashrama'. He does not aspire to be recognized as somebody who matters - The wish of the Sannyasi is just to be a 'persona non grata'- one who exists almost without giving any thought to his being - with no desire for name or fame or recognition.
"He no more cares whether his body falls or remains than does a cow what becomes a garland that someone has hung around her neck - for the faculties of his mind are now at rest in the holy power, the essence of bliss."
"Business, family, secular life, the beauties and hopes of youth and the success of maturity have now been left behind, Eternity alone remains. And, so it is to that - and, not to the tasks and worries of their life, already gone which came and passed like a dream - that the mind is turned."
"The Sannyasi has his spiritual eye on goods that men can't give and cares little for anything that men can take away. . Therefore, he is beyond the possibility of either seduction or threat."
Sannyasa is of four kinds:
'Vidvat'- born out of real wisdom and is spontaneous 'Vividisha'- springing from a yearning for self-realization through study of the Scriptures and practicing the rigors prescribed Aatura upon one's deathbed when there is no hope in living further, and Markata - embracing Sannyasa as an escape from great misery, disappointment or misfortune that one is not able to face in worldly activities.
No one is encouraged to become a 'Sannyasi' unless one has gone through one's natural impulses through the three previous Ashramas. He who runs away from marriage (Grihastashrama) is no better than a coward deserting the battle field.
The student's attention is directed inward, preparing for life ahead. In Grihasta and Vanaprasta attention is directed outward - Grihasta supporting the entire society, Vanasprasta sharing his experiences for the good of others. The Sannyasi is again inner directed. Having contributed to society and having received from society what he needed, he prepares himself for the final release.
Sannyasa means renunciation not of life alone but of Kama, Artha and even worldly Dharmas. Sannyasa may be deemed a second phase of Brahmacharya.
The first was a preparation for life; the second a preparation for death. While Brahmacharya and Grihasta show the 'Pravritti Marga ( towards the world) , Vanaprasta and Sannyasa indicate the 'Nivritti Marga' (away from the world) through introspection and renunciation.
Thus, while 'Varna' is determined by past 'Karma', Ashrama is determined by the stage of maturity displayed by individuals in viewing the goals of life.
"Varnas stress human nature ; Ashramas stress human nurture"
And, Lord Krishna advises "One's own duty, though done imperfectly is preferable to the duty of another even if well performed. Even death in doing one's own duty is blissful; doing another's duty is frightful".
So, everyone is advised to do his / her 'Dharma' according to one's Varna and Ashrama - and not to venture doing those outside one's own.
Every person has his Svabhava (natural being) fitting him for his Svadharma (natural function). We cannot change either our natural being or our natural function because nature cannot be forced into a change by our whims and fancies.
A Sadhu was rescuing a scorpion that had fallen into a pond. Every time he lifted it out of water, it stung him but he would not give up until it was saved. One of his disciples asked why he was persistent in saving the scorpion that stung him. The Sadhu replied: "The `Dharma' or nature of scorpion is to sting; the nature or Dharma of a Sadhu is to rescue a being from distress - and in this case sure death by drowning. So long as the scorpion does not give up its Dharma why should I give up mine and give up saving it?" The `Dharma' of fire is to burn, of water is to be cool, of wind is to blow. So, the Dharma of man is to be humane. This story emphasizes how one should go on doing one's duty even if obstacles, impediments and difficulties intervene in discharging it.
The Dharma of a student is to study. If the student - neglects his studies he neglects his svadharma; if fire does not burn, it is not fire; When heated by fire (by external influence) water loses its nature (Svadharma) of being cool. When Svadharma is not practiced, there ensues an imbalance in the environment. This understanding and adherence to Svadharma is what distinguishes human beings from other beings.
///////////////////////////////////The Consumer Confidence Index
This Index is a composite of the two other indices, and is weighted 40%-Present Situation Index and 60%-Expectations Index.
The Present Situation Index
This Index is based on two questions the survey asks: 1) How would you rate the present business conditions? and 2) What would you say about available jobs in your area right now?
The Expectations Index
This Index is based on respondents' predictions for business conditions and available jobs six months from now. It also measures whether those surveyed think their incomes will be higher, lower or about the same in six months.
///////////////////////////////////
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
WISDOM QUOTES
PROVERBIAL WISDOM
The go-between wears out a thousand sandals.
Japanese proverb
He who receives a gift doesn’t measure it.
African proverb
////////////////////////
The go-between wears out a thousand sandals.
Japanese proverb
He who receives a gift doesn’t measure it.
African proverb
////////////////////////
GASTRIC BANDING
//////////Gastric Banding Brings Remission in Type 2 Diabetes
Gastric banding far outperforms conventional therapy in achieving remission of type 2 diabetes, according to an industry-sponsored, preliminary study in JAMA.
Australian researchers randomized 60 obese patients (BMIs between 30 and 40) with type 2 diabetes to laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding or "best practice" conventional therapy. When assessed 2 years later, 73% of the surgical group had achieved remission versus 13% of the conventional-therapy group. Likewise, weight loss averaged 20% of baseline with surgery and 1.4% with conventional therapy.
////////////////////////////Exercise Capacity a Strong Predictor of Mortality in Men
Exercise capacity, measured by a treadmill test, strongly predicts men's risk for death, according to a large study released online in Circulation.
Nearly 16,000 male veterans — about 40% of them black — underwent treadmill exercise testing and then were followed for about 7.5 years. After adjustment for cardiac medications, age, and other risk factors, all-cause mortality risk fell by 13% for every 1-MET increase in exercise capacity.
Exercise capacity was a stronger predictor of death than were cardiovascular risk factors, age, or BMI. The findings were similar regardless of race or presence of cardiovascular disease.
The authors conclude that "exercise capacity should be given as much attention by clinicians as other major risk factors."
Circulation article (Free
//////////////////////////////////vbnut
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:49 am
I spend much more time online, reading stories (my entertainment) on sites rather than reading books or mags. I can more easily find info, and try any game that I feel like on that day, rather than buying a game for $50 and then getting tired of it. Many sites such as http://www.fanfiction.net (stories) or http://www.justexpressing.com (stories, forum, games)
/////////////////////////////////MCLWP=It began three and a half billion years ago in a pool of muck, when a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate ancestor of all earthly life.
It began four million years ago, when brain volumes began climbing rapidly in the hominid line.
Fifty thousand years ago with the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens.
Ten thousand years ago with the invention of civilization.
Five hundred years ago with the invention of the printing press.
Fifty years ago with the invention of the computer.
In less than thirty years, it will end.
/////////////////////////////////The foods included in the non calorie diet:
Some of the foods which give you negative caloric effect are apples, blueberries, broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, chili peppers, cranberries, garlic, grape fruit, green beans, green cabbage, lemons, papayas, pine apples, spinach and straw berries.
The foods which are included in the negative calorie diet contain adequate vitamins and minerals which will produce the enzymes that are used to breakdown the calories in that foods and the calories which are already present in digestion. These foods have the negative caloric value due to its nutritional value.
/////////////////////////////////////..............read with interest this report about Indian Americans' charitable works in the Old Country,
because three years ago I made a one-hour documentary about some rich Ind. Americans giving back. One
was the retired president of Dupont running a school in a UP village for the poorest of the poor
farming folks; another was an ex-Am Airlines pilot, of Rajiv G. batch, who runs an NGO in Haryana.
The third was a former Wall Street exec. Ramesh Ramanathan who is trying to create an
American-style citizen control of city government in Bangalore.
sasialit=
////////////////////////////
Gastric banding far outperforms conventional therapy in achieving remission of type 2 diabetes, according to an industry-sponsored, preliminary study in JAMA.
Australian researchers randomized 60 obese patients (BMIs between 30 and 40) with type 2 diabetes to laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding or "best practice" conventional therapy. When assessed 2 years later, 73% of the surgical group had achieved remission versus 13% of the conventional-therapy group. Likewise, weight loss averaged 20% of baseline with surgery and 1.4% with conventional therapy.
////////////////////////////Exercise Capacity a Strong Predictor of Mortality in Men
Exercise capacity, measured by a treadmill test, strongly predicts men's risk for death, according to a large study released online in Circulation.
Nearly 16,000 male veterans — about 40% of them black — underwent treadmill exercise testing and then were followed for about 7.5 years. After adjustment for cardiac medications, age, and other risk factors, all-cause mortality risk fell by 13% for every 1-MET increase in exercise capacity.
Exercise capacity was a stronger predictor of death than were cardiovascular risk factors, age, or BMI. The findings were similar regardless of race or presence of cardiovascular disease.
The authors conclude that "exercise capacity should be given as much attention by clinicians as other major risk factors."
Circulation article (Free
//////////////////////////////////vbnut
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:49 am
I spend much more time online, reading stories (my entertainment) on sites rather than reading books or mags. I can more easily find info, and try any game that I feel like on that day, rather than buying a game for $50 and then getting tired of it. Many sites such as http://www.fanfiction.net (stories) or http://www.justexpressing.com (stories, forum, games)
/////////////////////////////////MCLWP=It began three and a half billion years ago in a pool of muck, when a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate ancestor of all earthly life.
It began four million years ago, when brain volumes began climbing rapidly in the hominid line.
Fifty thousand years ago with the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens.
Ten thousand years ago with the invention of civilization.
Five hundred years ago with the invention of the printing press.
Fifty years ago with the invention of the computer.
In less than thirty years, it will end.
/////////////////////////////////The foods included in the non calorie diet:
Some of the foods which give you negative caloric effect are apples, blueberries, broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, chili peppers, cranberries, garlic, grape fruit, green beans, green cabbage, lemons, papayas, pine apples, spinach and straw berries.
The foods which are included in the negative calorie diet contain adequate vitamins and minerals which will produce the enzymes that are used to breakdown the calories in that foods and the calories which are already present in digestion. These foods have the negative caloric value due to its nutritional value.
/////////////////////////////////////..............read with interest this report about Indian Americans' charitable works in the Old Country,
because three years ago I made a one-hour documentary about some rich Ind. Americans giving back. One
was the retired president of Dupont running a school in a UP village for the poorest of the poor
farming folks; another was an ex-Am Airlines pilot, of Rajiv G. batch, who runs an NGO in Haryana.
The third was a former Wall Street exec. Ramesh Ramanathan who is trying to create an
American-style citizen control of city government in Bangalore.
sasialit=
////////////////////////////
AB JB CRSS-AD JB CRSS-DTR EYE/CA CRSS
////////////////////BTKAT-140+
/////////////////////DTR-MMTA-DTH-LONG TERM CARE-BTKAT-140+
///////////////////////http://www.thelandsalmon.com/technology/stephen-hawkings-quotations.html
HAWKING QUOTES=10. "Einstein was wrong when he said "God does not play dice". Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
9. "I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road."
8. "My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."
7. "I find that American & Scandinavian accents work better with women." In response to a question about the American accent of his synthesiser.
6. "Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. In the end, however, I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers."
5. "My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus."
4. "To show this diagram properly, I would really need a four dimensional screen. However, because of government cuts, we could manage to provide only a two dimensional screen."
3. "Life would be tragic if it weren't funny."
2. "The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired."
1. "Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end."
////////////////////////////////
Netaji died in aircrash, say declassified documents
Statesman News Service
NEW DELHI, Jan. 22: With the mystery surrounding the death of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose yet to be satisfactorily resolved, official documents declassified by the government say the revolutionary leader was a victim of an air crash on 18 August 1945.
Bose, whose birth centenary is tomorrow, was sitting next to the petrol tank of a K-21 heavy bomber aircraft when it lost control and crashed, according to documents made public by the Union home ministry following a Right to Information (RTI) application.
Contents of 91 documents have been put in the public domain while the home ministry has declined to do so in respect of over 100 documents.
The report of Counter Intelligence Corps, who questioned Bose’s close aide Habibur Rahman, said the plane carrying Netaji after its take-off from Taihoku (Taipei) in Formosa (Taiwan), could not gain much altitude, when he had heard a terrific explosion leaving the plane “vibrating violently.”
Rahman told the investigators that the plane, in which he was accompanying Bose, had lost control and had gone into flames after its take-off from Taihoku in the afternoon of 18 August 1945.
“...the seat Bose occupied in the aircraft was beside a petrol tank. At the time of the crash, the tank exploded, spreading the burning fuel on Bose’s clothing,” the Counter Intelligence Corps said in a report dated 29 September 1945.
The declassified report was revealed to a Delhi-based organisation ‘Mission Netaji’ which had invoked its Right to Information to get from the home ministry documents relating to Netaji’s mysterious death.
/////////////////////////////5 million more may be jobless in 2008: ILO
Statesman News Service
NEW DELHI, Jan. 22: Five million more persons may join the ranks of the unemployed worldwide in 2008 due to credit market turmoil and rising oil prices, the International Labour Office (ILO) said today in its annual Global Employment Trends (GET) report.
The 2008 projection is different from last year’s scenario when global markets were stable with the global GDP growth of more than five per cent. “This year’s global jobs picture is one of contrasts and uncertainty,” said the ILO director-general, Mr Juan Somavia, while releasing the GET report. Though more people are in work than ever before, this doesn’t mean that these jobs are decent jobs, he added.
The ILO report said although the economic turmoil of the developed countries led to loss in jobs, there was compensation in the rest of the world, especially in Asia, where economic and job growth remained strong. However, the report warned that an expected slowdown in growth during 2008 could increase the global unemployment rate to 6.1 per cent, with a resulting absolute increase of at least five million unemployed worldwide.
The report said the global economy growth of 5.2 per cent created an estimated 45 million new jobs in 2007, but failed to have any significant impact on the growth of unemployment. Overall, 61.7 per cent of the global population of working age ~ or an estimated 3 billion people ~ were employed in 2007. As the global unemployment rate remained virtually constant at 6 per cent, it meant an estimated 189.9 million people were unemployed worldwide in 2007, compared to 187 million in 2006.
ILO’s annual report said that South Asia was the leader in jobs growth during 2007, contributing 28 per cent of the nearly 45 million jobs created during the year worldwide. At the same time, the region has the highest share of “vulnerable employment” much of which reflects the poor quality of jobs created. More than seven out of 10 people are either “own-account workers or contributing family workers,” carrying a higher risk of being unprotected, without social security and without a voice at work.
Despite growth in the economy and jobs, the worldwide deficit in decent jobs, especially for the poor, is “massive”. The ILO said five out of 10 people in the world are in vulnerable employment, either contributing family workers or own-account workers with a higher risk of being unprotected. In developing countries these two categories are most likely to work informally and hence have jobs that leave them vulnerable to poverty and risks such as low earnings, dangerous working conditions and lack of health insurance.
The ILO said an estimated 487 million workers ~ or 16.4 per cent of all workers ~ still don’t earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the US $1 per person, per day poverty line while 1.3 billion workers ~ 43.5 per cent ~ still live below the US $2 per day threshold.
The report also underlined that the service sector continued to grow during 2007, further surpassing agriculture as the world’s most prevalent source of employment. The service sector now provides 42.7 per cent of the world’s jobs, compared to agriculture which provides 34.9 per cent.
The industrial sector, which had seen a slight downward trend between 1997 and 2003, has continued a rather slow upward trend in recent years, representing 22.4 per cent of global jobs.
///////////////////////////////////Importance of having Breakfast
Breakfast can help prevent strokes, heart attack and sudden death. Advice on not to skip breakfast! For those who always skip breakfast, should stop that habit now! Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Because the frequency of heart attack, sudden death, and stroke peaks between 6:00 a.m. and noon, with the highest incidence being between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.What mechanism within the body could account for this significant jump in sudden death in the early morning hours?
Platelet, tiny elements in the blood that keep us from bleeding to Death if we get a cut, can clump together inside our arteries due to cholesterol or laque buildup in the artery lining. It is in the morning hours that platelets become the most activated and tend to form these internal blood clots at the greatest frequency.
However, eating even a very light breakfast prevents the morning platelet activation that is associated with heart attacks and strokes. Studies performed at Memorial University in St.Johns, Newfoundland found that eating a light, very low-fat breakfast was critical in modifying the morning platelet activation. Subjects in the study consumed either low-fat or fat-free yogurt, orange juice, fruit, and a source of protein coming from yogurt or fat-free milk. So if you skip breakfast, it's important that you change this practice immediately in light of this research. Develop a simple plan to eat cereal, such as oatmeal or Bran Flakes, along with six ounces of grape juice or orange juice, and perhaps a piece of fruit. This simple plan will keep your platelets from sticking together, keep blood clots from forming, and perhaps head off a potential Heart Attack or stroke.
So never ever skip breakfast
http://www.wonderfulinfo.net/vinfo/breakfast.htm
///////////////////////////////NTAFG=NVR TK ANYTHNG FOR GRANTD
////////////////////////////////////The Tao that can be followed is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth
While naming is the origin of the myriad things.
///////////////////////////////////Science is fact
Religion is faith
Magic is perception
////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////DTR-MMTA-DTH-LONG TERM CARE-BTKAT-140+
///////////////////////http://www.thelandsalmon.com/technology/stephen-hawkings-quotations.html
HAWKING QUOTES=10. "Einstein was wrong when he said "God does not play dice". Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
9. "I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road."
8. "My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."
7. "I find that American & Scandinavian accents work better with women." In response to a question about the American accent of his synthesiser.
6. "Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. In the end, however, I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers."
5. "My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus."
4. "To show this diagram properly, I would really need a four dimensional screen. However, because of government cuts, we could manage to provide only a two dimensional screen."
3. "Life would be tragic if it weren't funny."
2. "The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired."
1. "Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end."
////////////////////////////////
Netaji died in aircrash, say declassified documents
Statesman News Service
NEW DELHI, Jan. 22: With the mystery surrounding the death of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose yet to be satisfactorily resolved, official documents declassified by the government say the revolutionary leader was a victim of an air crash on 18 August 1945.
Bose, whose birth centenary is tomorrow, was sitting next to the petrol tank of a K-21 heavy bomber aircraft when it lost control and crashed, according to documents made public by the Union home ministry following a Right to Information (RTI) application.
Contents of 91 documents have been put in the public domain while the home ministry has declined to do so in respect of over 100 documents.
The report of Counter Intelligence Corps, who questioned Bose’s close aide Habibur Rahman, said the plane carrying Netaji after its take-off from Taihoku (Taipei) in Formosa (Taiwan), could not gain much altitude, when he had heard a terrific explosion leaving the plane “vibrating violently.”
Rahman told the investigators that the plane, in which he was accompanying Bose, had lost control and had gone into flames after its take-off from Taihoku in the afternoon of 18 August 1945.
“...the seat Bose occupied in the aircraft was beside a petrol tank. At the time of the crash, the tank exploded, spreading the burning fuel on Bose’s clothing,” the Counter Intelligence Corps said in a report dated 29 September 1945.
The declassified report was revealed to a Delhi-based organisation ‘Mission Netaji’ which had invoked its Right to Information to get from the home ministry documents relating to Netaji’s mysterious death.
/////////////////////////////5 million more may be jobless in 2008: ILO
Statesman News Service
NEW DELHI, Jan. 22: Five million more persons may join the ranks of the unemployed worldwide in 2008 due to credit market turmoil and rising oil prices, the International Labour Office (ILO) said today in its annual Global Employment Trends (GET) report.
The 2008 projection is different from last year’s scenario when global markets were stable with the global GDP growth of more than five per cent. “This year’s global jobs picture is one of contrasts and uncertainty,” said the ILO director-general, Mr Juan Somavia, while releasing the GET report. Though more people are in work than ever before, this doesn’t mean that these jobs are decent jobs, he added.
The ILO report said although the economic turmoil of the developed countries led to loss in jobs, there was compensation in the rest of the world, especially in Asia, where economic and job growth remained strong. However, the report warned that an expected slowdown in growth during 2008 could increase the global unemployment rate to 6.1 per cent, with a resulting absolute increase of at least five million unemployed worldwide.
The report said the global economy growth of 5.2 per cent created an estimated 45 million new jobs in 2007, but failed to have any significant impact on the growth of unemployment. Overall, 61.7 per cent of the global population of working age ~ or an estimated 3 billion people ~ were employed in 2007. As the global unemployment rate remained virtually constant at 6 per cent, it meant an estimated 189.9 million people were unemployed worldwide in 2007, compared to 187 million in 2006.
ILO’s annual report said that South Asia was the leader in jobs growth during 2007, contributing 28 per cent of the nearly 45 million jobs created during the year worldwide. At the same time, the region has the highest share of “vulnerable employment” much of which reflects the poor quality of jobs created. More than seven out of 10 people are either “own-account workers or contributing family workers,” carrying a higher risk of being unprotected, without social security and without a voice at work.
Despite growth in the economy and jobs, the worldwide deficit in decent jobs, especially for the poor, is “massive”. The ILO said five out of 10 people in the world are in vulnerable employment, either contributing family workers or own-account workers with a higher risk of being unprotected. In developing countries these two categories are most likely to work informally and hence have jobs that leave them vulnerable to poverty and risks such as low earnings, dangerous working conditions and lack of health insurance.
The ILO said an estimated 487 million workers ~ or 16.4 per cent of all workers ~ still don’t earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the US $1 per person, per day poverty line while 1.3 billion workers ~ 43.5 per cent ~ still live below the US $2 per day threshold.
The report also underlined that the service sector continued to grow during 2007, further surpassing agriculture as the world’s most prevalent source of employment. The service sector now provides 42.7 per cent of the world’s jobs, compared to agriculture which provides 34.9 per cent.
The industrial sector, which had seen a slight downward trend between 1997 and 2003, has continued a rather slow upward trend in recent years, representing 22.4 per cent of global jobs.
///////////////////////////////////Importance of having Breakfast
Breakfast can help prevent strokes, heart attack and sudden death. Advice on not to skip breakfast! For those who always skip breakfast, should stop that habit now! Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Because the frequency of heart attack, sudden death, and stroke peaks between 6:00 a.m. and noon, with the highest incidence being between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.What mechanism within the body could account for this significant jump in sudden death in the early morning hours?
Platelet, tiny elements in the blood that keep us from bleeding to Death if we get a cut, can clump together inside our arteries due to cholesterol or laque buildup in the artery lining. It is in the morning hours that platelets become the most activated and tend to form these internal blood clots at the greatest frequency.
However, eating even a very light breakfast prevents the morning platelet activation that is associated with heart attacks and strokes. Studies performed at Memorial University in St.Johns, Newfoundland found that eating a light, very low-fat breakfast was critical in modifying the morning platelet activation. Subjects in the study consumed either low-fat or fat-free yogurt, orange juice, fruit, and a source of protein coming from yogurt or fat-free milk. So if you skip breakfast, it's important that you change this practice immediately in light of this research. Develop a simple plan to eat cereal, such as oatmeal or Bran Flakes, along with six ounces of grape juice or orange juice, and perhaps a piece of fruit. This simple plan will keep your platelets from sticking together, keep blood clots from forming, and perhaps head off a potential Heart Attack or stroke.
So never ever skip breakfast
http://www.wonderfulinfo.net/vinfo/breakfast.htm
///////////////////////////////NTAFG=NVR TK ANYTHNG FOR GRANTD
////////////////////////////////////The Tao that can be followed is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth
While naming is the origin of the myriad things.
///////////////////////////////////Science is fact
Religion is faith
Magic is perception
////////////////////////////////////
Monday, 21 January 2008
HIMALAYAS-PALIN
////////////////////YOUR INNER FISH-SHUBIN=Your Inner Fish is my favorite sort of book--an intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story, one which will change forever how you understand what it means to be human.
The field of evolutionary biology is just beginning an exciting new age of discovery, and Neil Shubin's research expeditions around the world have redefined the way we now look at the origins of mammals, frogs, crocodiles, tetrapods, and sarcopterygian fish--and thus the way we look at the descent of humankind. One of Shubin's groundbreaking discoveries, only a year and a half ago, was the unearthing of a fish with elbows and a neck, a long-sought evolutionary "missing link" between creatures of the sea and land-dwellers.
My own mother was a surgeon and a comparative anatomist, and she drummed it into me, and into all of her students, that our own anatomy is unintelligible without a knowledge of its evolutionary origins and precursors. The human body becomes infinitely fascinating with such knowledge, which Shubin provides here with grace and clarity. Your Inner Fish shows us how, like the fish with elbows, we carry the whole history of evolution within our own bodies, and how the human genome links us with the rest of life on earth.
OLIVER SACKS
////////////////////////////////Deinococcus radiodurans ("strange berry that withstands radiation", formerly called Micrococcus radiodurans) is an extremophilic bacterium, and is the most radioresistant organism known. While a dose of 10 Gy is sufficient to kill a human, and a dose of 60 Gy is sufficient to kill all cells in a culture of E. coli, D. radiodurans is capable of withstanding an instantaneous dose of up to 5,000 Gy with no loss of viability, and an instantaneous dose of up to 15,000 Gy with 37% viability. It can survive heat, cold, dehydration, vacuum, and acid, and because of its resistance to more than one extreme condition, D. radiodurans is known as a polyextremophile. It has also been listed as the world's toughest bacterium in "The Guinness Book Of World Records" because of its extraordinary resistance to several extreme conditions. It has been classified as a Gram-positive bacterium.
//////////////////Threat to medicines from plant extinctions
By Paul Eccleston
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 19/01/2008Page 1 of 3
Millions of lives could be at risk because the plants which provide the basis of more than half of all prescription drugs face extinction, a new report warns.
Yew (top), magnolia (middle) and Hoodia (bottom) all have compounds beneficial to health
The loss of plants and trees which provide natural medicines could provoke a global healthcare crisis, says Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI).
Potential cures for some of the world's deadliest diseases - including currently untreatable cancer - may be lost if the problem is not checked.
In its report London-based BGCI, which links botanic gardens in 120 countries, calls for urgent action to help secure the future of health care across the world.
It says 70 per cent of all newly-developed drugs in the United States, the world's largest and wealthiest pharmaceuticals market, are derived from natural sources and despite major scientific advances, human health is still overwhelmingly dependent on the plant kingdom.
Sara Oldfield, Secretary General of BGCI, said: "We are using up a wide range of the world's natural medicines and squandering the potential to develop new remedies. And yet it is perfectly possible to prevent plant extinctions".
Scientists had predicted that biochemistry would allow most drugs to be produced synthetically in the laboratory but in many cases it has proved impossible to reproduce the beneficial compounds found in plants.
////////////////////////////////////The "Cambrian Explosion"
Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently.
/////////////////////////////////The target of natural selection
Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms - individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate.
////////////////////////////////////Natural selection versus genetic drift
Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive.
//////////////////////////////////SCIENCE IS FULL OF GAPS
////////////////////////////////DTH=LF JUST SNUFFS OUT=ABOS=ABOD
///////////////////////////LF HAS NO MEANING-JUST SO-JUST LIKE VISN=UPLOC
////////////////////////////////Volcano found under Antarctic ice
Active volcano may contribute to rapid glacial melt.
Quirin Schiermeier
Radar surveys from the air can image what's under the ice.Carl Robinson/British Antarctic SurveyScientists have found an active volcano beneath Antarctic ice that last erupted just 2,000 years ago. The hotspot lies beneath the Pine Island region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where glaciers are retreating more quickly than elsewhere on the continent. The dramatic find might help to explain this particularly rapid loss of ice.
Although the Antarctic is often thought of as a huge, sedate expanse of snow, the continent is known to host several active volcanoes, some of which poke out of the ice. Mount Erebus, on Ross Island in the Ross Sea, is the area’s most famous active volcano and its continuous activity has been observed since the 1970s.
//////////////////////////////////Amazon rain forest destruction quickens
5:00AM Monday January 21, 2008
A single tree remains on land that was previously jungle in Mato Grosso state, Brazil. Photo / Reuters
Climate Change
Saving fuel, planet is plain sailing
Greens urge voters: Look beyond the rhetoric
Deforestation of the Amazon has accelerated, in recent months and is likely to increase this year for the first time in four years, says a senior Brazilian government scientist.
///////////////////////////Wanted: Queen Bee Seeks Harem of Male DancersBy Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
posted: 21 January 2008 10:17 am ET
Share this story
Email Honeybee queens have sex with harems of males apparently to give birth to much better dancers, research now reveals.
The better honeybees dance, the better they are at hustling for chow, scientists added.
//////////////////////////////////UNI WISN MDSN=Study: Brain connections strengthen during waking hours, weaken during sleep
MADISON - Most people know it from experience: After so many hours of being awake, your brain feels unable to absorb any more-and several hours of sleep will refresh it.
Now new research from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health clarifies this phenomenon, supporting the idea that sleep plays a critical role in the brain's ability to change in response to its environment. This ability, called plasticity, is at the heart of learning.
Reporting in the Jan. 20, 2008, online version of Nature Neuroscience, the UW-Madison scientists showed by several measures that synapses - nerve cell connections central to brain plasticity - were very strong when rodents had been awake and weak when they had been asleep.
The new findings reinforce the UW-Madison researchers' highly-debated hypothesis about the role of sleep. They believe that people sleep so that their synapses can downsize and prepare for a new day and the next round of learning and synaptic strengthening.
The human brain expends up to 80 percent of its energy on synaptic activity, constantly adding and strengthening connections in response to all kinds of stimulation, explains study author Chiara Cirelli, associate professor of psychiatry.
Given that each of the millions of neurons in the human brain contains thousands of synapses, this energy expenditure "is huge and can't be sustained."
"We need an off-line period, when we are not exposed to the environment, to take synapses down," Cirelli say. "We believe that's why humans and all living organisms sleep. Without sleep, the brain reaches a saturation point that taxes its energy budget, its store of supplies and its ability to learn further."
To test the theory, researchers conducted both molecular and electro-physiological studies in rats to evaluate synaptic potentiation, or strengthening, and depression, or weakening, following sleeping and waking times. In one set of experiments, they looked at brain slices to measure the number of specific receptors, or binding sites, that had moved to synapses.
"Recent research has shown that as synaptic activity increases, more of these glutamatergic receptors enter the synapse and make it bigger and stronger," explains Cirelli.
The Wisconsin group was surprised to find that rats had an almost 50 percent receptor increase after a period of wakefulness compared to rats that had been asleep.
In a second molecular experiment, the scientists examined how many of the receptors underwent phosphorylation, another indicator of synaptic potentiation. They found phosphorylation levels were much higher during waking than sleeping. The results were the same when they measured other enzymes that are typically active during synaptic potentiation.
To strengthen their case, Cirelli and colleagues also performed studies in live rats to evaluate electrical signals reflecting synaptic changes at different times. This involved stimulating one side of each rat's brain with an electrode following waking and sleeping and then measuring the "evoked response," which is similar to an EEG, on another side.
The studies again showed that, for the same levels of stimulation, responses were stronger following a long period of waking and weaker after sleep, suggesting that synapses must have grown stronger.
"Taken together, these molecular and electro-physiological measures fit nicely with the idea that our brain circuits get progressively stronger during wakefulness and that sleep helps to recalibrate them to a sustainable baseline," says Cirelli.
The theory she and collaborator Dr. Giulio Tononi, professor of psychiatry, have developed, called the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, runs against the grain of what many scientists currently think about how sleep affects learning. The most popular notion these days, says Cirelli, is that during sleep synapses are hard at work replaying the information acquired during the previous waking hours, consolidating that information by becoming even stronger.
"That's different from what we think," she says. "We believe that learning occurs only when we are awake, and sleep's main function is to keep our brains and all its synapses lean and efficient."
////////////////////////////////////CONSCIOUSNESS=QUANTUM COHERENCE IN MICROTUBULES
////////////////////////////////quantum state reduction=collapse of wave fn
///////////////////////////HORIZON=TOTAL ISOLATION=ALONE=SENSORY DEPRIVATION
///////////////////////////////SENSRY DEPRIVN-NEAREST-KNPR-MAY1993
/////////////////////////////////////ALSO 24 HR ON CALLS=SENSORY DEPRIVN EQUIVALENT
//////////////////////////////////Minn. hospitals, clinics purge drug co. trinkets
20 shopping carts needed to haul away pens, mugs, notepads
Julia Cheng / AP
Duluth Clinic neurology department manager Gwen Cressman sorts through some of the 18,718 pens, notepads and other drug company trinkets purged from the St. Mary's Duluth Clinic health system as part of the "Clean Sweep" initiative, Friday afternoon.
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Small planes collide in Calif., killing at least 5
Pope draws big crowd after cancellation
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updated 3:24 p.m. ET Jan. 20, 2008
MINNEAPOLIS - When a Duluth-based operator of hospitals and clinics purged the pens, notepads, coffee mugs and other promotional trinkets drug companies had given its doctors over the years, it took 20 shopping carts to haul the loot away.
The operator, SMDC Health System, intends to ship the 18,718 items to the west African nation of Cameroon.
///////////////////////////////////SENSORY DEPRIVN CAUSES MARKED DETERIORN OF MENTAL FN PROCESSES
/////////////////////////////////////
The field of evolutionary biology is just beginning an exciting new age of discovery, and Neil Shubin's research expeditions around the world have redefined the way we now look at the origins of mammals, frogs, crocodiles, tetrapods, and sarcopterygian fish--and thus the way we look at the descent of humankind. One of Shubin's groundbreaking discoveries, only a year and a half ago, was the unearthing of a fish with elbows and a neck, a long-sought evolutionary "missing link" between creatures of the sea and land-dwellers.
My own mother was a surgeon and a comparative anatomist, and she drummed it into me, and into all of her students, that our own anatomy is unintelligible without a knowledge of its evolutionary origins and precursors. The human body becomes infinitely fascinating with such knowledge, which Shubin provides here with grace and clarity. Your Inner Fish shows us how, like the fish with elbows, we carry the whole history of evolution within our own bodies, and how the human genome links us with the rest of life on earth.
OLIVER SACKS
////////////////////////////////Deinococcus radiodurans ("strange berry that withstands radiation", formerly called Micrococcus radiodurans) is an extremophilic bacterium, and is the most radioresistant organism known. While a dose of 10 Gy is sufficient to kill a human, and a dose of 60 Gy is sufficient to kill all cells in a culture of E. coli, D. radiodurans is capable of withstanding an instantaneous dose of up to 5,000 Gy with no loss of viability, and an instantaneous dose of up to 15,000 Gy with 37% viability. It can survive heat, cold, dehydration, vacuum, and acid, and because of its resistance to more than one extreme condition, D. radiodurans is known as a polyextremophile. It has also been listed as the world's toughest bacterium in "The Guinness Book Of World Records" because of its extraordinary resistance to several extreme conditions. It has been classified as a Gram-positive bacterium.
//////////////////Threat to medicines from plant extinctions
By Paul Eccleston
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 19/01/2008Page 1 of 3
Millions of lives could be at risk because the plants which provide the basis of more than half of all prescription drugs face extinction, a new report warns.
Yew (top), magnolia (middle) and Hoodia (bottom) all have compounds beneficial to health
The loss of plants and trees which provide natural medicines could provoke a global healthcare crisis, says Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI).
Potential cures for some of the world's deadliest diseases - including currently untreatable cancer - may be lost if the problem is not checked.
In its report London-based BGCI, which links botanic gardens in 120 countries, calls for urgent action to help secure the future of health care across the world.
It says 70 per cent of all newly-developed drugs in the United States, the world's largest and wealthiest pharmaceuticals market, are derived from natural sources and despite major scientific advances, human health is still overwhelmingly dependent on the plant kingdom.
Sara Oldfield, Secretary General of BGCI, said: "We are using up a wide range of the world's natural medicines and squandering the potential to develop new remedies. And yet it is perfectly possible to prevent plant extinctions".
Scientists had predicted that biochemistry would allow most drugs to be produced synthetically in the laboratory but in many cases it has proved impossible to reproduce the beneficial compounds found in plants.
////////////////////////////////////The "Cambrian Explosion"
Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently.
/////////////////////////////////The target of natural selection
Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms - individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate.
////////////////////////////////////Natural selection versus genetic drift
Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive.
//////////////////////////////////SCIENCE IS FULL OF GAPS
////////////////////////////////DTH=LF JUST SNUFFS OUT=ABOS=ABOD
///////////////////////////LF HAS NO MEANING-JUST SO-JUST LIKE VISN=UPLOC
////////////////////////////////Volcano found under Antarctic ice
Active volcano may contribute to rapid glacial melt.
Quirin Schiermeier
Radar surveys from the air can image what's under the ice.Carl Robinson/British Antarctic SurveyScientists have found an active volcano beneath Antarctic ice that last erupted just 2,000 years ago. The hotspot lies beneath the Pine Island region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where glaciers are retreating more quickly than elsewhere on the continent. The dramatic find might help to explain this particularly rapid loss of ice.
Although the Antarctic is often thought of as a huge, sedate expanse of snow, the continent is known to host several active volcanoes, some of which poke out of the ice. Mount Erebus, on Ross Island in the Ross Sea, is the area’s most famous active volcano and its continuous activity has been observed since the 1970s.
//////////////////////////////////Amazon rain forest destruction quickens
5:00AM Monday January 21, 2008
A single tree remains on land that was previously jungle in Mato Grosso state, Brazil. Photo / Reuters
Climate Change
Saving fuel, planet is plain sailing
Greens urge voters: Look beyond the rhetoric
Deforestation of the Amazon has accelerated, in recent months and is likely to increase this year for the first time in four years, says a senior Brazilian government scientist.
///////////////////////////Wanted: Queen Bee Seeks Harem of Male DancersBy Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
posted: 21 January 2008 10:17 am ET
Share this story
Email Honeybee queens have sex with harems of males apparently to give birth to much better dancers, research now reveals.
The better honeybees dance, the better they are at hustling for chow, scientists added.
//////////////////////////////////UNI WISN MDSN=Study: Brain connections strengthen during waking hours, weaken during sleep
MADISON - Most people know it from experience: After so many hours of being awake, your brain feels unable to absorb any more-and several hours of sleep will refresh it.
Now new research from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health clarifies this phenomenon, supporting the idea that sleep plays a critical role in the brain's ability to change in response to its environment. This ability, called plasticity, is at the heart of learning.
Reporting in the Jan. 20, 2008, online version of Nature Neuroscience, the UW-Madison scientists showed by several measures that synapses - nerve cell connections central to brain plasticity - were very strong when rodents had been awake and weak when they had been asleep.
The new findings reinforce the UW-Madison researchers' highly-debated hypothesis about the role of sleep. They believe that people sleep so that their synapses can downsize and prepare for a new day and the next round of learning and synaptic strengthening.
The human brain expends up to 80 percent of its energy on synaptic activity, constantly adding and strengthening connections in response to all kinds of stimulation, explains study author Chiara Cirelli, associate professor of psychiatry.
Given that each of the millions of neurons in the human brain contains thousands of synapses, this energy expenditure "is huge and can't be sustained."
"We need an off-line period, when we are not exposed to the environment, to take synapses down," Cirelli say. "We believe that's why humans and all living organisms sleep. Without sleep, the brain reaches a saturation point that taxes its energy budget, its store of supplies and its ability to learn further."
To test the theory, researchers conducted both molecular and electro-physiological studies in rats to evaluate synaptic potentiation, or strengthening, and depression, or weakening, following sleeping and waking times. In one set of experiments, they looked at brain slices to measure the number of specific receptors, or binding sites, that had moved to synapses.
"Recent research has shown that as synaptic activity increases, more of these glutamatergic receptors enter the synapse and make it bigger and stronger," explains Cirelli.
The Wisconsin group was surprised to find that rats had an almost 50 percent receptor increase after a period of wakefulness compared to rats that had been asleep.
In a second molecular experiment, the scientists examined how many of the receptors underwent phosphorylation, another indicator of synaptic potentiation. They found phosphorylation levels were much higher during waking than sleeping. The results were the same when they measured other enzymes that are typically active during synaptic potentiation.
To strengthen their case, Cirelli and colleagues also performed studies in live rats to evaluate electrical signals reflecting synaptic changes at different times. This involved stimulating one side of each rat's brain with an electrode following waking and sleeping and then measuring the "evoked response," which is similar to an EEG, on another side.
The studies again showed that, for the same levels of stimulation, responses were stronger following a long period of waking and weaker after sleep, suggesting that synapses must have grown stronger.
"Taken together, these molecular and electro-physiological measures fit nicely with the idea that our brain circuits get progressively stronger during wakefulness and that sleep helps to recalibrate them to a sustainable baseline," says Cirelli.
The theory she and collaborator Dr. Giulio Tononi, professor of psychiatry, have developed, called the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, runs against the grain of what many scientists currently think about how sleep affects learning. The most popular notion these days, says Cirelli, is that during sleep synapses are hard at work replaying the information acquired during the previous waking hours, consolidating that information by becoming even stronger.
"That's different from what we think," she says. "We believe that learning occurs only when we are awake, and sleep's main function is to keep our brains and all its synapses lean and efficient."
////////////////////////////////////CONSCIOUSNESS=QUANTUM COHERENCE IN MICROTUBULES
////////////////////////////////quantum state reduction=collapse of wave fn
///////////////////////////HORIZON=TOTAL ISOLATION=ALONE=SENSORY DEPRIVATION
///////////////////////////////SENSRY DEPRIVN-NEAREST-KNPR-MAY1993
/////////////////////////////////////ALSO 24 HR ON CALLS=SENSORY DEPRIVN EQUIVALENT
//////////////////////////////////Minn. hospitals, clinics purge drug co. trinkets
20 shopping carts needed to haul away pens, mugs, notepads
Julia Cheng / AP
Duluth Clinic neurology department manager Gwen Cressman sorts through some of the 18,718 pens, notepads and other drug company trinkets purged from the St. Mary's Duluth Clinic health system as part of the "Clean Sweep" initiative, Friday afternoon.
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updated 3:24 p.m. ET Jan. 20, 2008
MINNEAPOLIS - When a Duluth-based operator of hospitals and clinics purged the pens, notepads, coffee mugs and other promotional trinkets drug companies had given its doctors over the years, it took 20 shopping carts to haul the loot away.
The operator, SMDC Health System, intends to ship the 18,718 items to the west African nation of Cameroon.
///////////////////////////////////SENSORY DEPRIVN CAUSES MARKED DETERIORN OF MENTAL FN PROCESSES
/////////////////////////////////////
Thursday, 17 January 2008
MIRACLE OVER HEATHROW
///////////////////////Baby boom in US
Going against the trend in many other wealthy industrialized nations, the United States seems to be experiencing a small baby boom.
//////////////////The dip Summary
From WikiSummaries, free book summaries
Jump to: navigation, search
Short book on winning through quitting.You can become "the best" and need to learn when to quit.
The old saying is wrong—winners do quit, and quitters do win.
Everything starts out exciting and fun but then gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point—really hard, and not much fun at all.
And then you find yourself asking if the goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you’re in a Dip—a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try. Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt—until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons. In fact, winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it. Losers, on the other hand, fall into two basic traps. Either they fail to stick out the Dip—they get to the moment of truth and then give up—or they never even find the right Dip to conquer
////////////////////////////////CHOOSE YOUR DIP-
////////////////////////////////48 planes land every hour in htrow
/////////////////////IF UR NOT PART OF THE SOLN ,UR PART OF THE PPT
//////////////////////////////FROM JOHN PLACE=
Have You Learned to Be Helpless?
30 October 2007, 01:15:43 | JohnPlace
This post is for anyone who’s ever felt trapped.
Workers trapped in dead-end jobs
Spouses trapped in unfulfilling marriages
Depressives trapped in despair
Addicts trapped in a helpless cycle of substance abuse, cigarette smoking, or binge eating
Lonely people trapped in emotional isolation
Poor people shackled by poverty
Anyone old enough to read this article has likely felt trapped by something at some point. Some people might say that feeling trapped is just part of living. I know what it’s like to feel trapped by relationships, jobs, and finances, but I also know what it’s like to break free; there is hope.
You have the power to escape nearly any trap that befalls you. And while it’s not feasible to document all the steps that you’d have to take to escape the endless array of claustrophobic life traps available to us in the modern world, it is feasible to discuss the single concept that binds all of these traps together: learned helplessness.
Just as surely as you can learn to be successful, you can learn to be helpless. And once you learn to be helpless, you stop trying. Lack of effort in a situation where change is possible — allowing your life to drift instead of taking the wheel — is a passive destroyer of potential; that’s why learned helplessness is so devastating.
Consider this definition of learned helplessness, paraphrased from Wikipedia:
Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which people have learned to believe they are helpless in a particular situation. They believe they have no control over their situation and that whatever they do is futile. As a result, they will stay passive in the face of an unpleasant, harmful or damaging situation, even when they actually do have the power to change their circumstances.
Whether you’re trapped in a bad marriage, a dead-end job, or some other unhealthy pattern of living, the question is: are you really trapped? or have you learned to be helpless?
Dogs Teach A Shocking Lesson in Learned Helplessness
Many years ago, I remember hearing about an electroshock experiment conducted on a group of dogs. One group of dogs was taught to jump over a hurdle to escape the shocks; they learned quickly because they didn’t like being shocked!
Another group of dogs was given no means of escape. These dogs quickly learned that nothing they did could help them avoid the electric shocks, so they sat passively, whimpering, until the researchers mercifully ended the experiment.
And what do you think happened when this second group of dogs was moved to an enclosure where they could have escaped the shocks by jumping over a hurdle? You guessed it: they just sat there. They didn’t even attempt to escape. The dogs had learned to be helpless to the extent that they were no longer capable of saving themselves, even when they had the power to do so.
Of course, humans are more sophisticated than dogs, but the aforementioned experiment led to hundreds of others that verify that people can – and do – learn to be helpless, and once we do, the consequences can be dire.
Reclaim Your Power: Learn to Be Successful
Several months ago, I wrote about my experiences with grade school bullies and how I had learned to be helpless as a child through their attacks. If I could learn to be helpless through common bullying, what of the abused child? What of those who lose a parent or undergo serious trauma? The sad truth is that life is full of circumstances – both seemingly innocuous and blatantly horrible – in which a person can learn to be helpless.
And until you learn to reclaim your power, as I did, you’ll never truly be free to live a life of your own design. That’s the real tragedy.
The next time you feel resigned to accept some undesirable fate, stop and consider whether your resignation is a symptom of learned helplessness. Are you sure there’s not a way to make things better? Consider your options. And learn to believe in yourself.
//////////////////////////////suppose gratification (quelling the urge) without procreation could be a way to moderate a growing population, especially in a species without contraception (non-human animals mainly then).=MIO=HMSXLTY
//////////////////////////////SELF=CONSCIOUSNESS=SUBJECTIVITY
/////////////////////////CONVERSATIONS ON CONSCIOUSNESS-SUSAN BLACKMORE
///////////////////////////CONSC AS A WORKING THEATRE
/////////////////There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” ~ Albert Camus
Camus’ concept of “the freedom of the condemned man (person)” speaks much about suicide. Once we have accepted—determined?—our own death, the result is freedom rather than despair.
///////////////////////////////////Palliative Care Blog
From Angela Morrow,
Your Guide to Palliative Care.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!
About.com Health's Disease and Condition content is reviewed by V.K. Gadi, MD
To Eat, or Not to Eat?
Your loved one has a terminal illness and has stopped eating meals. They nibble a little soup here, bites of toast there, only when prompted and pleaded to do so. They need to eat to keep up their strength don't they? Won't they be starving? Isn't this going to speed up their demise?
These questions may be plaguing your mind and causing you distress as you watch your loved one lose weight. You may have even considered artificial feedings, such as tube feedings or fluids in an IV. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when considering this common problem towards the end of life:
Loss of appetite may be related to many things, your doctor can help determine the cause.
During the earlier stages of disease, appetite might be stimulated with medications, such as Megestrol.
During later stages of disease, loss of appetite is normal as the body begins to focus on the most vital of organs such as the brain and the heart. The digestive system begins to take a back seat.
Artificial feeding can make your loved one uncomfortable if their body is unable to digest properly.
Artificial hydration can cause unnecessary swelling if the body can't process it properly.
At the very end of life, when your loved one no longer eats or drinks anything, the body produces an abundance of feel good chemicals in the brain called endorphines that override any feelings of hunger or thirst.
Talk to your doctor about your concerns, your goals, and your wishes. Together you can come up with a plan that is just right for you and your loved one.
RMMBR MEJOMAMA-OESO CA-ON HOMEOPATHY AND DILUTED YOGHURT
//////////////////////////////////////How Tomatoes Fight Heart Disease
By Staff Writer Gale Maleskey, MS, RD
A new study finds that a high-tomato diet lowers cholesterol and reduces the risk of heart disease. Lycopene, a powerful antioxidant found in tomatoes may be the source of their protective effects.
> Read More
//////////////////////////frm DAYTIPPER= FAMILY
How to practice math during the commute
When I am driving with my young daughters, I use the cars license plates in front of us to practice math. If the numbers on the plate are: 478 D25 I mix up the numbers and ask addition questions for my younger daughter (what is 4 + 7 or 7 + 2) and I ask my older daughter multiplication questions ( 4 x 7 or 7 x 2). Each car can give you many math problems. It helps pass the time and gets their mind working.
////////////////////////EMPLOYMENT
Office book swap
We have a lot of readers here in the office. Everyone brings in books that they don't want, or that they think someone else will enjoy. We keep them on a shelf and switch books when we're done with them. After about 3 months or so, we tell everyone to take their books back if they want them. Any unclaimed books get donated to the used bookstore across the street.
///////////////////////////////////How do neural firings lead to thoughts and feelings? The conventional (a.k.a. functionalist, reductionist, materialist, physicalist, computationalist) approach argues that neurons and their chemical synapses are the fundamental units of information in the brain, and that conscious experience emerges when a critical level of complexity is reached in the brain's neural networks.
The basic idea is that the mind is a computer functioning in the brain (brain = mind = computer). However in fitting the brain to a computational view, such explanations omit incompatible neurophysiological details:
Widespread apparent randomness at all levels of neural processes (is it really noise, or underlying levels of complexity?);
Glial cells (which account for some 80% of brain);
Dendritic-dendritic processing;
Electrotonic gap junctions;
Cytoplasmic/cytoskeletal activities; and,
Living state (the brain is alive!)
/////////////////////////////////CARTESIAN THEATRE IN OUR MINDS
//////////////////////////////////BIRD FLU SPREADING IN BENGAL CRSS
//////////////////////////////////////While microtubules have traditionally been considered as purely structural elements, recent evidence has revealed that mechanical signaling and communication functions also exist:
MT "kinks" travel at 15 microns (2000 tubulin subunits) per second. Vernon and Woolley (1995) Experimental Cell Research 220(2)482-494
MTs vibrate (100-650 Hz) with nanometer displacement. Yagi, Kamimura, Kaniya (1994) Cell motility and the cytoskeleton 29:177-185
MTs optically "shimmer" when metabolically active. Hunt and Stebbings (1994), Cell motility and the cytoskeleton 17:69-78
Mechanical signals propogate through microtubules to cell nucleus; mechanism for MT regulation of gene expression. Maniotis, Chen and Ingber (1996) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 94:849-854
Measured tubulin dipoles and MT conductivity suggest MTs are ferroelectric at physiological temperature (Tuszynski; Unger 1998)
Current models propose that tubulins within microtubules undergo coherent excitation, switching between two or more conformational states in nanoseconds. Dipole couplings among neighboring tubulins in the microtubule lattice form dynamical patterns, or "automata," which evolve, interact and lead to the emergence of new patterns. Research indicates that microtubule automata computation could support classical information processing, transmission and learning within neurons
////////////////////////////////WHEN COALITIONS OF NEURONES COMPETE,THE WINNER IS THE ONE THAT IS CONSCIOUS
/////////////////////////////////If spin networks are the fundamental level of space-time geometry, they could provide the basis for proto-conscious experience. In other words, particular configurations of quantum spin geometry would convey particular types of qualia, meaning and aesthetic values. A process at the Planck scale (e.g. quantum state reductions) could access and select configurations of experience.
/////////////////////////////Are proteins qubits?
Biological life is organized by proteins. By changing their conformational shape, proteins are able to perform a wide variety of functions, including muscle movement, molecular binding, enzyme catalysis, metabolism, and movement. Dynamical protein structure results from a "delicate balance among powerful countervailing forces" (Voet & Voet, 1995). The types of forces acting on proteins include charged interactions (such as covalent, ionic, electrostatic, and hydrogen bonds), hydrophobic interactions, and dipole interactions. The latter group, also known as van der Waals forces, encompasses three types of interactions:
permanent dipole - permanent dipole,
permanent dipole - induced dipole, and
induced dipole - induced dipole (London dispersion forces)
As charged interactions cancel out, hydrophobic and dipole - dipole forces are left to regulate protein structure. While induced dipole - induced dipole interactions, or London dispersion forces, are the weakest of the forces outlined above, they are also the most numerous and influential. Indeed, they may be critical to protein function. For example, anesthetics are able to bind in hydrophobic "pockets" of certain neural proteins and ablate consciousness by virtue of disrupting these London forces. London force attraction between any two atoms is usually less than a few kilojoules; however, since thousands occur in each protein, they add up to thousands of kilojoules per mole, and cause changes in conformational structure. As London forces are instrumental in protein folding (a problem intractable to conventional computational simulation), protein conformation and folding may be quantum computations.
////////////////////////////////OBSOLETE LITTLE HOMUNCULUS-EVEN INSIDE OUR BIG RADIO
//////////////////////////////PANMIND-INTERNET
/////////////////////////////////At the nanoscale each event determines new classical states of microtubule automata which regulate synaptic and other neural functions;
During the pre-conscious quantum superposition/computation phase, oscillations are "tuned" and "orchestrated" by microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs), providing a feedback loop between the biological system and the quantum state (hence Orch OR);
Quantum states in microtubules may link to those in microtubules in other neurons and glia by tunneling through gap junctions, permitting extension of the quantum state throughout significant volumes of the brain.
Figure 26. Schematic of proposed quantum superposition and entanglement in microtubules in three dendrites interconnected by tunneling through gap junctions. Within each neuronal dendrite, microtubule-associated-protein (MAP) attachments breach isolation and prevent quantum coherence; MAP attachment sites thus act as "nodes" which tune and orchestrate quantum oscillations and set possibilities and probabilities for collapse outcomes (orchestrated objective reduction: Orch OR). Gap junctions may enable quantum tunneling among dendrites resulting in macroscopic quantum states.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//////////////////////////////////areligious, adj.
not influenced by or practicing religion: the sexual mores of today's secular and areligious culture.
/////////////////////////////megacryometeor [meg-uh-kry-oh-mee-tee-ur]
a large chunk of ice that falls from the sky, often without a clear cause or origin.
/////////////////////armpiece, n. Esp. Journ.
an attractive woman escorted to social functions chiefly for the sake of her appearance.
////////////////////////WHY DOES THE WHOLE BRAIN DETERMINE ANYTHING?=PHENOMENOLOGY
/////////////////////ZOMBIE-LACKS CONSCIOUSNESS
///////////////////////////RELIEF TO SAVOUR
////////////////////BRAIN IS A CAUSAL MACHINE
//////////////////////////To give a sense of this, consider that the cortex of your brain has 30 billion neurons. It has a million billion connections, at least. If you counted one connection per second, you would not finish counting until 32 million years later.
About 300 million years ago, during the transition from reptiles to birds and mammals, the thalamocortical system began to develop from a few collections of neurons, which then grew vastly in number. The thalamus is located in the center of the brain and is about the size of your thumb. It relays signals from all senses but smell to the cortex of the brain which, through manifold loops and pathways, “speaks back” to the thalamus.
////////////////////////////////////NPQ | In the future, might humans impart consciousness to technology through artificial intelligence?
EDELMAN | Logic can be “imparted” and robots can be programmed. But that is not consciousness, which cannot arise from pre-defined information, but rather from the ability to self-organize, recognize patterns, learn and evolve on its own. Even if we one day had conscious artifacts, they wouldn’t be like us. They wouldn’t have our body and our evolved neural circuitry and the body that make us what we are. Machines might become intelligent one day, perhaps even conscious, but they will not be human. All the more reason to consider what we have to be precious.
/////////////////////////////////////CONSC NEEDS NEURONES TO SUSTAIN-SO CANNOT SURVIVE DTH
/////////////////////////Yoga is over 5000 years old.
Yoga originated in India.
"Yoga" is a Sanskrit word, which means "to yoke" or "to bind."
Going against the trend in many other wealthy industrialized nations, the United States seems to be experiencing a small baby boom.
//////////////////The dip Summary
From WikiSummaries, free book summaries
Jump to: navigation, search
Short book on winning through quitting.You can become "the best" and need to learn when to quit.
The old saying is wrong—winners do quit, and quitters do win.
Everything starts out exciting and fun but then gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point—really hard, and not much fun at all.
And then you find yourself asking if the goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you’re in a Dip—a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try. Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt—until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons. In fact, winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it. Losers, on the other hand, fall into two basic traps. Either they fail to stick out the Dip—they get to the moment of truth and then give up—or they never even find the right Dip to conquer
////////////////////////////////CHOOSE YOUR DIP-
////////////////////////////////48 planes land every hour in htrow
/////////////////////IF UR NOT PART OF THE SOLN ,UR PART OF THE PPT
//////////////////////////////FROM JOHN PLACE=
Have You Learned to Be Helpless?
30 October 2007, 01:15:43 | JohnPlace
This post is for anyone who’s ever felt trapped.
Workers trapped in dead-end jobs
Spouses trapped in unfulfilling marriages
Depressives trapped in despair
Addicts trapped in a helpless cycle of substance abuse, cigarette smoking, or binge eating
Lonely people trapped in emotional isolation
Poor people shackled by poverty
Anyone old enough to read this article has likely felt trapped by something at some point. Some people might say that feeling trapped is just part of living. I know what it’s like to feel trapped by relationships, jobs, and finances, but I also know what it’s like to break free; there is hope.
You have the power to escape nearly any trap that befalls you. And while it’s not feasible to document all the steps that you’d have to take to escape the endless array of claustrophobic life traps available to us in the modern world, it is feasible to discuss the single concept that binds all of these traps together: learned helplessness.
Just as surely as you can learn to be successful, you can learn to be helpless. And once you learn to be helpless, you stop trying. Lack of effort in a situation where change is possible — allowing your life to drift instead of taking the wheel — is a passive destroyer of potential; that’s why learned helplessness is so devastating.
Consider this definition of learned helplessness, paraphrased from Wikipedia:
Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which people have learned to believe they are helpless in a particular situation. They believe they have no control over their situation and that whatever they do is futile. As a result, they will stay passive in the face of an unpleasant, harmful or damaging situation, even when they actually do have the power to change their circumstances.
Whether you’re trapped in a bad marriage, a dead-end job, or some other unhealthy pattern of living, the question is: are you really trapped? or have you learned to be helpless?
Dogs Teach A Shocking Lesson in Learned Helplessness
Many years ago, I remember hearing about an electroshock experiment conducted on a group of dogs. One group of dogs was taught to jump over a hurdle to escape the shocks; they learned quickly because they didn’t like being shocked!
Another group of dogs was given no means of escape. These dogs quickly learned that nothing they did could help them avoid the electric shocks, so they sat passively, whimpering, until the researchers mercifully ended the experiment.
And what do you think happened when this second group of dogs was moved to an enclosure where they could have escaped the shocks by jumping over a hurdle? You guessed it: they just sat there. They didn’t even attempt to escape. The dogs had learned to be helpless to the extent that they were no longer capable of saving themselves, even when they had the power to do so.
Of course, humans are more sophisticated than dogs, but the aforementioned experiment led to hundreds of others that verify that people can – and do – learn to be helpless, and once we do, the consequences can be dire.
Reclaim Your Power: Learn to Be Successful
Several months ago, I wrote about my experiences with grade school bullies and how I had learned to be helpless as a child through their attacks. If I could learn to be helpless through common bullying, what of the abused child? What of those who lose a parent or undergo serious trauma? The sad truth is that life is full of circumstances – both seemingly innocuous and blatantly horrible – in which a person can learn to be helpless.
And until you learn to reclaim your power, as I did, you’ll never truly be free to live a life of your own design. That’s the real tragedy.
The next time you feel resigned to accept some undesirable fate, stop and consider whether your resignation is a symptom of learned helplessness. Are you sure there’s not a way to make things better? Consider your options. And learn to believe in yourself.
//////////////////////////////suppose gratification (quelling the urge) without procreation could be a way to moderate a growing population, especially in a species without contraception (non-human animals mainly then).=MIO=HMSXLTY
//////////////////////////////SELF=CONSCIOUSNESS=SUBJECTIVITY
/////////////////////////CONVERSATIONS ON CONSCIOUSNESS-SUSAN BLACKMORE
///////////////////////////CONSC AS A WORKING THEATRE
/////////////////There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” ~ Albert Camus
Camus’ concept of “the freedom of the condemned man (person)” speaks much about suicide. Once we have accepted—determined?—our own death, the result is freedom rather than despair.
///////////////////////////////////Palliative Care Blog
From Angela Morrow,
Your Guide to Palliative Care.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!
About.com Health's Disease and Condition content is reviewed by V.K. Gadi, MD
To Eat, or Not to Eat?
Your loved one has a terminal illness and has stopped eating meals. They nibble a little soup here, bites of toast there, only when prompted and pleaded to do so. They need to eat to keep up their strength don't they? Won't they be starving? Isn't this going to speed up their demise?
These questions may be plaguing your mind and causing you distress as you watch your loved one lose weight. You may have even considered artificial feedings, such as tube feedings or fluids in an IV. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when considering this common problem towards the end of life:
Loss of appetite may be related to many things, your doctor can help determine the cause.
During the earlier stages of disease, appetite might be stimulated with medications, such as Megestrol.
During later stages of disease, loss of appetite is normal as the body begins to focus on the most vital of organs such as the brain and the heart. The digestive system begins to take a back seat.
Artificial feeding can make your loved one uncomfortable if their body is unable to digest properly.
Artificial hydration can cause unnecessary swelling if the body can't process it properly.
At the very end of life, when your loved one no longer eats or drinks anything, the body produces an abundance of feel good chemicals in the brain called endorphines that override any feelings of hunger or thirst.
Talk to your doctor about your concerns, your goals, and your wishes. Together you can come up with a plan that is just right for you and your loved one.
RMMBR MEJOMAMA-OESO CA-ON HOMEOPATHY AND DILUTED YOGHURT
//////////////////////////////////////How Tomatoes Fight Heart Disease
By Staff Writer Gale Maleskey, MS, RD
A new study finds that a high-tomato diet lowers cholesterol and reduces the risk of heart disease. Lycopene, a powerful antioxidant found in tomatoes may be the source of their protective effects.
> Read More
//////////////////////////frm DAYTIPPER= FAMILY
How to practice math during the commute
When I am driving with my young daughters, I use the cars license plates in front of us to practice math. If the numbers on the plate are: 478 D25 I mix up the numbers and ask addition questions for my younger daughter (what is 4 + 7 or 7 + 2) and I ask my older daughter multiplication questions ( 4 x 7 or 7 x 2). Each car can give you many math problems. It helps pass the time and gets their mind working.
////////////////////////EMPLOYMENT
Office book swap
We have a lot of readers here in the office. Everyone brings in books that they don't want, or that they think someone else will enjoy. We keep them on a shelf and switch books when we're done with them. After about 3 months or so, we tell everyone to take their books back if they want them. Any unclaimed books get donated to the used bookstore across the street.
///////////////////////////////////How do neural firings lead to thoughts and feelings? The conventional (a.k.a. functionalist, reductionist, materialist, physicalist, computationalist) approach argues that neurons and their chemical synapses are the fundamental units of information in the brain, and that conscious experience emerges when a critical level of complexity is reached in the brain's neural networks.
The basic idea is that the mind is a computer functioning in the brain (brain = mind = computer). However in fitting the brain to a computational view, such explanations omit incompatible neurophysiological details:
Widespread apparent randomness at all levels of neural processes (is it really noise, or underlying levels of complexity?);
Glial cells (which account for some 80% of brain);
Dendritic-dendritic processing;
Electrotonic gap junctions;
Cytoplasmic/cytoskeletal activities; and,
Living state (the brain is alive!)
/////////////////////////////////CARTESIAN THEATRE IN OUR MINDS
//////////////////////////////////BIRD FLU SPREADING IN BENGAL CRSS
//////////////////////////////////////While microtubules have traditionally been considered as purely structural elements, recent evidence has revealed that mechanical signaling and communication functions also exist:
MT "kinks" travel at 15 microns (2000 tubulin subunits) per second. Vernon and Woolley (1995) Experimental Cell Research 220(2)482-494
MTs vibrate (100-650 Hz) with nanometer displacement. Yagi, Kamimura, Kaniya (1994) Cell motility and the cytoskeleton 29:177-185
MTs optically "shimmer" when metabolically active. Hunt and Stebbings (1994), Cell motility and the cytoskeleton 17:69-78
Mechanical signals propogate through microtubules to cell nucleus; mechanism for MT regulation of gene expression. Maniotis, Chen and Ingber (1996) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 94:849-854
Measured tubulin dipoles and MT conductivity suggest MTs are ferroelectric at physiological temperature (Tuszynski; Unger 1998)
Current models propose that tubulins within microtubules undergo coherent excitation, switching between two or more conformational states in nanoseconds. Dipole couplings among neighboring tubulins in the microtubule lattice form dynamical patterns, or "automata," which evolve, interact and lead to the emergence of new patterns. Research indicates that microtubule automata computation could support classical information processing, transmission and learning within neurons
////////////////////////////////WHEN COALITIONS OF NEURONES COMPETE,THE WINNER IS THE ONE THAT IS CONSCIOUS
/////////////////////////////////If spin networks are the fundamental level of space-time geometry, they could provide the basis for proto-conscious experience. In other words, particular configurations of quantum spin geometry would convey particular types of qualia, meaning and aesthetic values. A process at the Planck scale (e.g. quantum state reductions) could access and select configurations of experience.
/////////////////////////////Are proteins qubits?
Biological life is organized by proteins. By changing their conformational shape, proteins are able to perform a wide variety of functions, including muscle movement, molecular binding, enzyme catalysis, metabolism, and movement. Dynamical protein structure results from a "delicate balance among powerful countervailing forces" (Voet & Voet, 1995). The types of forces acting on proteins include charged interactions (such as covalent, ionic, electrostatic, and hydrogen bonds), hydrophobic interactions, and dipole interactions. The latter group, also known as van der Waals forces, encompasses three types of interactions:
permanent dipole - permanent dipole,
permanent dipole - induced dipole, and
induced dipole - induced dipole (London dispersion forces)
As charged interactions cancel out, hydrophobic and dipole - dipole forces are left to regulate protein structure. While induced dipole - induced dipole interactions, or London dispersion forces, are the weakest of the forces outlined above, they are also the most numerous and influential. Indeed, they may be critical to protein function. For example, anesthetics are able to bind in hydrophobic "pockets" of certain neural proteins and ablate consciousness by virtue of disrupting these London forces. London force attraction between any two atoms is usually less than a few kilojoules; however, since thousands occur in each protein, they add up to thousands of kilojoules per mole, and cause changes in conformational structure. As London forces are instrumental in protein folding (a problem intractable to conventional computational simulation), protein conformation and folding may be quantum computations.
////////////////////////////////OBSOLETE LITTLE HOMUNCULUS-EVEN INSIDE OUR BIG RADIO
//////////////////////////////PANMIND-INTERNET
/////////////////////////////////At the nanoscale each event determines new classical states of microtubule automata which regulate synaptic and other neural functions;
During the pre-conscious quantum superposition/computation phase, oscillations are "tuned" and "orchestrated" by microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs), providing a feedback loop between the biological system and the quantum state (hence Orch OR);
Quantum states in microtubules may link to those in microtubules in other neurons and glia by tunneling through gap junctions, permitting extension of the quantum state throughout significant volumes of the brain.
Figure 26. Schematic of proposed quantum superposition and entanglement in microtubules in three dendrites interconnected by tunneling through gap junctions. Within each neuronal dendrite, microtubule-associated-protein (MAP) attachments breach isolation and prevent quantum coherence; MAP attachment sites thus act as "nodes" which tune and orchestrate quantum oscillations and set possibilities and probabilities for collapse outcomes (orchestrated objective reduction: Orch OR). Gap junctions may enable quantum tunneling among dendrites resulting in macroscopic quantum states.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//////////////////////////////////areligious, adj.
not influenced by or practicing religion: the sexual mores of today's secular and areligious culture.
/////////////////////////////megacryometeor [meg-uh-kry-oh-mee-tee-ur]
a large chunk of ice that falls from the sky, often without a clear cause or origin.
/////////////////////armpiece, n. Esp. Journ.
an attractive woman escorted to social functions chiefly for the sake of her appearance.
////////////////////////WHY DOES THE WHOLE BRAIN DETERMINE ANYTHING?=PHENOMENOLOGY
/////////////////////ZOMBIE-LACKS CONSCIOUSNESS
///////////////////////////RELIEF TO SAVOUR
////////////////////BRAIN IS A CAUSAL MACHINE
//////////////////////////To give a sense of this, consider that the cortex of your brain has 30 billion neurons. It has a million billion connections, at least. If you counted one connection per second, you would not finish counting until 32 million years later.
About 300 million years ago, during the transition from reptiles to birds and mammals, the thalamocortical system began to develop from a few collections of neurons, which then grew vastly in number. The thalamus is located in the center of the brain and is about the size of your thumb. It relays signals from all senses but smell to the cortex of the brain which, through manifold loops and pathways, “speaks back” to the thalamus.
////////////////////////////////////NPQ | In the future, might humans impart consciousness to technology through artificial intelligence?
EDELMAN | Logic can be “imparted” and robots can be programmed. But that is not consciousness, which cannot arise from pre-defined information, but rather from the ability to self-organize, recognize patterns, learn and evolve on its own. Even if we one day had conscious artifacts, they wouldn’t be like us. They wouldn’t have our body and our evolved neural circuitry and the body that make us what we are. Machines might become intelligent one day, perhaps even conscious, but they will not be human. All the more reason to consider what we have to be precious.
/////////////////////////////////////CONSC NEEDS NEURONES TO SUSTAIN-SO CANNOT SURVIVE DTH
/////////////////////////Yoga is over 5000 years old.
Yoga originated in India.
"Yoga" is a Sanskrit word, which means "to yoke" or "to bind."
CDS 170108
/////////////////Just because you’re miserable doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your life.” -Annette Goodheart
////////////////////Genetic "Hot Spots" for Autism Probed in 2 Studies
Variations in chromosome 16 were found in about 1% of autism cases, and a common variation in a gene on chromosome 7 increased autism risk, 2 studies report.
////////////////////Family Meals Curb Teen Eating Disorders
Teenage girls who eat with their families are less likely to resort to drastic dieting measures.
WebMD Health News 2008
//////////////////////Night-Time Bedwetting Tied to Central Processes
Successful treatment of nocturnal enuresis with 1-desamino-8-D-arginine vasopressin (dDAVP) is related to normalization of prepulse inhibition of startle responses, which supports the concept of a central etiology of the condition, German researchers report in the December issue of the Journal of Pediatrics.
Reuters Health Information 2008
//////////////////////////////////////“Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” –Voltaire
“The only disability in life is a bad attitude.” -Scott Hamilton
//////////////////////////////////
////////////////////Genetic "Hot Spots" for Autism Probed in 2 Studies
Variations in chromosome 16 were found in about 1% of autism cases, and a common variation in a gene on chromosome 7 increased autism risk, 2 studies report.
////////////////////Family Meals Curb Teen Eating Disorders
Teenage girls who eat with their families are less likely to resort to drastic dieting measures.
WebMD Health News 2008
//////////////////////Night-Time Bedwetting Tied to Central Processes
Successful treatment of nocturnal enuresis with 1-desamino-8-D-arginine vasopressin (dDAVP) is related to normalization of prepulse inhibition of startle responses, which supports the concept of a central etiology of the condition, German researchers report in the December issue of the Journal of Pediatrics.
Reuters Health Information 2008
//////////////////////////////////////“Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” –Voltaire
“The only disability in life is a bad attitude.” -Scott Hamilton
//////////////////////////////////
Monday, 14 January 2008
DLY GLXY
//////////////////Massive Disk Galaxies Collapsed From a Single Cloud of Gas
Here's the traditional thinking. The grand spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way took a long time to come together through a series of mergers between smaller galaxies. But what what if that's totally wrong? Instead of evolving slowly over time, some of the largest galaxies came together quickly, forming all at once when enormous clouds of gas and dust collapsed directly.
(more…)
/////////////////////Complementary palindromes:
DO, O GOD, NO EVIL DEED, LIVE ON, DO GOOD!
LIVE, O DEVIL, REVEL EVER, LIVE, DO EVIL!
/////////////////Apple is the new NASA. Beer is the new water, and water is the new oil.
//////////////////////////lifehack=Literary Gluttony - How to Consume More Books This Year
Posted: 08 Jan 2008 08:00 AM CST
Over 40% of Americans claim not to have read any books in the previous year. The survey was last conducted in 2002, and noted falling reading rates from previous years. I’m sure if you’re reading through lifehack.org that you probably don’t expect reading to stop after you graduate. Yet, with such dismal statistics, how can you beat the odds and read more books this year?
Why Bother Reading More?
I’m sure you’ve seen the advertisements where famous celebrities sit next to a stack of books they haven’t read and tell you to read more. While I agree with the message, the posters take for granted that ordering you to read more is enough to convince you that you should bother.
I usually read 50-70 books each year and I believe it is one of the best investments of time and money I can make. But I wasn’t really sold on the process of reading in my spare time until a few years ago. I might only have read four of five books outside of class in 2002. My decision to build the habit of reading more books came from being sold on the benefits of reading more. Here are some of the reasons to start:
Knowledge. It only takes reading 10-20 books on a subject until you know more on that topic than most of the population. Read 200-300 books on a subject and you’re an expert.
Flow. Unlike the passive activity of television, reading takes mental effort. This mental effort results in keeping your mind sharp and engaged.
Self-Improvement. A book doesn’t have to be in the self-help aisle in order to give you ideas for improvement. Great works of fiction, books on science, culture and philosophy are full of ideas that you can’t get just from skimming an online article.
Awareness. What’s happening in the world? What trends are continuing into the future? Where is the world headed? Unfortunately just flicking through the 24-hour news programs on television are more likely to give you advice on the latest antics of Britney Spears than a broad perspective on the world.
Power. Ignorance is not bliss. You can’t change something you don’t know about. Learning about yourself, science, culture and the world as a whole gives you a power most people lack–awareness.
Pride. Not the most noble of benefits, but it still is a plus. Reading classic works of literature gives you the ability to know what people are referring to when they reference ideas like “doublethink†or quote Shakespeare.
Changed Outlook. This one is harder to realize until after you’ve read a few dozen books, but reading great books can completely change your outlook on life. Books force you to think, and while you may feel you’re doing a good job of that already, they can make you think in ways you hadn’t even considered.
There are many other reasons for reading and I suggest you come up with your own. But wanting to read more (like wanting to exercise, drink less or get promoted) doesn’t make it so. Reading more books requires forming the right habits so that reading becomes an automatic activity, rather than a chore.
How to Read More Books This Year
Here are a few tips for boosting the amount of books you can read:
Speed Read. Speed reading has been attacked by all sorts of people for being fake, compromising understanding or based on junk-science. I think this is based on the misconception that speed-reading is all about a magical technique that allows you to blur through pages, rather than plain, common-sense habits to make reading faster. There are entire books on speed reading, but here are a few tips that have stuck with me since I first learned to speed read a few years ago:
Use a pointer. Run your index finger beneath the text on the page. This keeps your eyes focused on a specific point on the page. After a week or two of adapting to using your finger, this can boost your reading rate considerably.
Practice read. Practice reading means “reading†slightly faster than you can actually comprehend. While you won’t get any new information from practice reading, this trains you to read without needing to subvocalize (repeat the words in your head).
Start a Morning Ritual. Recently I decided to set aside time for reading each morning. Following when I wake up at 5:30, I read for an hour and a half. This lets me squeeze in reading time on a schedule that would otherwise be too busy during the day. Even if you can only devote 15-30 minutes of reading each morning you can read 20-30 books each year.
One Book at a Time. Trying to multi-task between books is wasting your time. My rule is that I should continue reading one book until I finish it, or decide to quit it entirely. Putting one book on hold to start another just crowds your to-do list.
Carry a Book With You. If you plan on going anywhere, keep a book with you and you can read if you are forced to wait. Throughout your day there are probably many moments where you have to wait for a few minutes in lines, during breaks or when traveling. Having a book with you means those moments aren’t wasted.
Audio Books. Most popular books have audio versions. While the audio versions are more expensive (use the library), you can have something to play in your car when you are driving or in your iPod when walking around.
LITERARY GLUTTONY
//////////////////////////Amber Fossils Reveal Ancient France Was A Jungle
Research on a treasure trove of amber has yielded evidence that France once was covered by a dense
tropical rainforest with trees similar to those found in the modern-day Amazon. The
55-million-year-old pieces of amber was discovered in the Oise River area in northern France.
http://www.fossilscience.com/research/Amber_Fossils_Reveal_Ancient_France_Was_A_Jungle.asp
//////////////////////////////Without going into exhaustive detail, the general consensus of neurological research today is that consciousness is also just a clever mathematical trick. We know this because messing with the hardware messes with the mind; there are people with damaged brains that cannot tell the difference between faces, or identify horses even when they aren't painted blue (and yet, some of those people can still ride a horse even while they can't name the beast).
So consciousness turns out to rely solely on the brain; again we find that the supernatural is not necessary to explain the ordinary day-to-day functioning of our minds, including morality (which is just the product of our social existence and theory of mind, or the idea that we can imagine being in the other guy's shoes). And again God is forced out by parsimony to some earlier stage; perhaps God created existence itself.
////////////////////////////////////What we have shown, then, is that in the absence of evidence, it is irrational to believe. Anything, really; God is merely one object that it is irrational to assert the existence of without evidence for. The standard atheist argument for this can be summed up in one sentence: "Explain to me why you don't believe in Zeus, and then I'll explain to you why I don't believe in God." Or, as has been said, "We're all atheists here; you just disbelieve in one fewer God than I do." People generally reject tales of Zeus and the Easter Bunny as fiction, precisely because they fail to confine themselves to the rules of reason: that is, they lack evidence that cannot be explained by recourse to fewer entities and simpler explanations. Why wouldn't God be in the same basket?
This does not mean God is not true; nor does it mean we will never prove that God is or is not true. It merely means that it is irrational to commit to a belief for which you have no evidence. Lacking evidence, and here we mean real evidence, the kind that cannot be explained by recourse to fewer entities and simpler explanations, belief in God is irrational.
Micheal Planck
///////////////////////////////////
Here's the traditional thinking. The grand spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way took a long time to come together through a series of mergers between smaller galaxies. But what what if that's totally wrong? Instead of evolving slowly over time, some of the largest galaxies came together quickly, forming all at once when enormous clouds of gas and dust collapsed directly.
(more…)
/////////////////////Complementary palindromes:
DO, O GOD, NO EVIL DEED, LIVE ON, DO GOOD!
LIVE, O DEVIL, REVEL EVER, LIVE, DO EVIL!
/////////////////Apple is the new NASA. Beer is the new water, and water is the new oil.
//////////////////////////lifehack=Literary Gluttony - How to Consume More Books This Year
Posted: 08 Jan 2008 08:00 AM CST
Over 40% of Americans claim not to have read any books in the previous year. The survey was last conducted in 2002, and noted falling reading rates from previous years. I’m sure if you’re reading through lifehack.org that you probably don’t expect reading to stop after you graduate. Yet, with such dismal statistics, how can you beat the odds and read more books this year?
Why Bother Reading More?
I’m sure you’ve seen the advertisements where famous celebrities sit next to a stack of books they haven’t read and tell you to read more. While I agree with the message, the posters take for granted that ordering you to read more is enough to convince you that you should bother.
I usually read 50-70 books each year and I believe it is one of the best investments of time and money I can make. But I wasn’t really sold on the process of reading in my spare time until a few years ago. I might only have read four of five books outside of class in 2002. My decision to build the habit of reading more books came from being sold on the benefits of reading more. Here are some of the reasons to start:
Knowledge. It only takes reading 10-20 books on a subject until you know more on that topic than most of the population. Read 200-300 books on a subject and you’re an expert.
Flow. Unlike the passive activity of television, reading takes mental effort. This mental effort results in keeping your mind sharp and engaged.
Self-Improvement. A book doesn’t have to be in the self-help aisle in order to give you ideas for improvement. Great works of fiction, books on science, culture and philosophy are full of ideas that you can’t get just from skimming an online article.
Awareness. What’s happening in the world? What trends are continuing into the future? Where is the world headed? Unfortunately just flicking through the 24-hour news programs on television are more likely to give you advice on the latest antics of Britney Spears than a broad perspective on the world.
Power. Ignorance is not bliss. You can’t change something you don’t know about. Learning about yourself, science, culture and the world as a whole gives you a power most people lack–awareness.
Pride. Not the most noble of benefits, but it still is a plus. Reading classic works of literature gives you the ability to know what people are referring to when they reference ideas like “doublethink†or quote Shakespeare.
Changed Outlook. This one is harder to realize until after you’ve read a few dozen books, but reading great books can completely change your outlook on life. Books force you to think, and while you may feel you’re doing a good job of that already, they can make you think in ways you hadn’t even considered.
There are many other reasons for reading and I suggest you come up with your own. But wanting to read more (like wanting to exercise, drink less or get promoted) doesn’t make it so. Reading more books requires forming the right habits so that reading becomes an automatic activity, rather than a chore.
How to Read More Books This Year
Here are a few tips for boosting the amount of books you can read:
Speed Read. Speed reading has been attacked by all sorts of people for being fake, compromising understanding or based on junk-science. I think this is based on the misconception that speed-reading is all about a magical technique that allows you to blur through pages, rather than plain, common-sense habits to make reading faster. There are entire books on speed reading, but here are a few tips that have stuck with me since I first learned to speed read a few years ago:
Use a pointer. Run your index finger beneath the text on the page. This keeps your eyes focused on a specific point on the page. After a week or two of adapting to using your finger, this can boost your reading rate considerably.
Practice read. Practice reading means “reading†slightly faster than you can actually comprehend. While you won’t get any new information from practice reading, this trains you to read without needing to subvocalize (repeat the words in your head).
Start a Morning Ritual. Recently I decided to set aside time for reading each morning. Following when I wake up at 5:30, I read for an hour and a half. This lets me squeeze in reading time on a schedule that would otherwise be too busy during the day. Even if you can only devote 15-30 minutes of reading each morning you can read 20-30 books each year.
One Book at a Time. Trying to multi-task between books is wasting your time. My rule is that I should continue reading one book until I finish it, or decide to quit it entirely. Putting one book on hold to start another just crowds your to-do list.
Carry a Book With You. If you plan on going anywhere, keep a book with you and you can read if you are forced to wait. Throughout your day there are probably many moments where you have to wait for a few minutes in lines, during breaks or when traveling. Having a book with you means those moments aren’t wasted.
Audio Books. Most popular books have audio versions. While the audio versions are more expensive (use the library), you can have something to play in your car when you are driving or in your iPod when walking around.
LITERARY GLUTTONY
//////////////////////////Amber Fossils Reveal Ancient France Was A Jungle
Research on a treasure trove of amber has yielded evidence that France once was covered by a dense
tropical rainforest with trees similar to those found in the modern-day Amazon. The
55-million-year-old pieces of amber was discovered in the Oise River area in northern France.
http://www.fossilscience.com/research/Amber_Fossils_Reveal_Ancient_France_Was_A_Jungle.asp
//////////////////////////////Without going into exhaustive detail, the general consensus of neurological research today is that consciousness is also just a clever mathematical trick. We know this because messing with the hardware messes with the mind; there are people with damaged brains that cannot tell the difference between faces, or identify horses even when they aren't painted blue (and yet, some of those people can still ride a horse even while they can't name the beast).
So consciousness turns out to rely solely on the brain; again we find that the supernatural is not necessary to explain the ordinary day-to-day functioning of our minds, including morality (which is just the product of our social existence and theory of mind, or the idea that we can imagine being in the other guy's shoes). And again God is forced out by parsimony to some earlier stage; perhaps God created existence itself.
////////////////////////////////////What we have shown, then, is that in the absence of evidence, it is irrational to believe. Anything, really; God is merely one object that it is irrational to assert the existence of without evidence for. The standard atheist argument for this can be summed up in one sentence: "Explain to me why you don't believe in Zeus, and then I'll explain to you why I don't believe in God." Or, as has been said, "We're all atheists here; you just disbelieve in one fewer God than I do." People generally reject tales of Zeus and the Easter Bunny as fiction, precisely because they fail to confine themselves to the rules of reason: that is, they lack evidence that cannot be explained by recourse to fewer entities and simpler explanations. Why wouldn't God be in the same basket?
This does not mean God is not true; nor does it mean we will never prove that God is or is not true. It merely means that it is irrational to commit to a belief for which you have no evidence. Lacking evidence, and here we mean real evidence, the kind that cannot be explained by recourse to fewer entities and simpler explanations, belief in God is irrational.
Micheal Planck
///////////////////////////////////
PPLS AND PLAGUES
History can be written from two major vantage points. From the top of a mountain, with broad brush strokes, showing the major streams and landmarks, the BIG picture. Spenser and Toynbee are such historians, so is this book. The other view is from the trenches, the pieces, the small connections that we find so fascinating and absorbing. I believe that the big picture view of this book is a result of how it came into being as an elaboration of a single constellation of ideas that the author discovered while working on _The Rise of the West_, he found they interesting and continued to build the structure around these ideas in this book.
The book is about a collection of related ideas:
Parasitism--as he defines two types macro and micro.
Micro is the form we are familiar with as disease, the times viruses, bacteria, protozoan begin to use us as their energy and food source, to our consternation. He further defines two flavors: epidemic and endemic. Epidemic is the form in bubonic plague that swept Europe for 500 years at regular intervals. endemic is the idea of a parasitic form like the liver flukes that effect irrigated agriculture the world over, or like the civilized childhood diseases that effect the body politic like measles, mumps, smallpox.
Macroparasitism is this author's contribution to the discussion, unique to him as far as i know. Those other human's that prey on the weaker, less organized, less mobile etc. Epidemic macro are the Mongols(which are the topic of what i think is the best chapter in the book) or those horseman like in the movie the "Seventh Samari" who sweep out of the steppes or mountains to seize the harvest. Endemic macro are the priests, kings, emperors, tax farmers, etc who take the hard earned food from the producers without adequate recompense.
Using these ideas he ventures to paint those broad strokes, those vistas in history to show how the major currents, the big pieces fit. To this end the book is very well done, always absorbing, always enough detail to support but not to overwhelm the reader. Yet pithy and curiosity arousing enough to drive you to look into his sources, the real mark of good history.
I was pleased enough to get _Rise of the West_ and will start it next.
thanks for reading the review, i hope you get as much out of the book as did i.
richard williams
////////////////////////EDGE=LIFE,WHAT A CONCEPT?=Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn't matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chomosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chomosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn't know if it would work or not. Now we do. This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It's not a question of 'if', or 'how', but 'when', and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.
The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery o life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.
Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.
Physicist Freeman Dyson envisions a biotech future which supplants physics and notes that after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. He refers to an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer, a subject explored in his abovementioned essay.
Craig Venter, who decoded the human genome, surprised the world in late June by announcing the results of his lab's work on genome transplantation methods that allows for the transformation of one type of bacteria into another, dictated by the transplanted chromosome. In other words, one species becomes another.
George Church, the pioneer of the Synthetic Biology revolution, thinks of the cell as operating system, and engineers taking the place of traditional biologists in retooling stripped down components of cells (bio-bricks) in much the vein as in the late 70s when electrical engineers were working their way to the first personal computer by assembling circuit boards, hard drives, monitors, etc.
Biologist Robert Shapiro disagrees with scientists who believe that an extreme stroke of luck was needed to get life started in a non-living environment. He favors the idea that life arose through the normal operation of the laws of physics and chemistry. If he is right, then life may be widespread in the cosmos.
Dimitar Sasselov, Planetary Astrophysicist, and Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, has made recent discoveries of exo-planets ("Super-Earths"). He looks at new evidence to explore the question of how chemical systems become living systems.
Quantum engineer Seth Lloyd sees the universe as an information processing system in which simple systems such as atoms and molecules must necessarily give rise complex structures such as life, and life itself must give rise to even greater complexity, such as human beings, societies, and whatever comes next.
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"Life/ Consists of propositions about life."
— Wallace Stevens ("Men Made out of Words")
LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!
An Edge Special Event at Eastover Farm
Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, Seth Lloyd
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The essential idea is that you separate metabolism from replication. We know modern life has both metabolism and replication, but they're carried out by separate groups of molecules. Metabolism is carried out by proteins and all kinds of other molecules, and replication is carried out by DNA and RNA. That maybe is a clue to the fact that theystarted out separate rather than together. So my version of the origin of life is that it started with metabolism only.
FREEMAN DYSON
FREEMAN DYSON is professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. His professional interests are in mathematics and astronomy. Among his many books are Disturbing the Universe, Infinite in All Directions Origins of Life, From Eros to Gaia, Imagined Worlds, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, and most recently A Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe.
Freeman Dyson's Edge Bio Page
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FREEMAN DYSON: First of all I wanted to talk a bit about origin of life. To me the most interesting question in biology has always been how it all got started. That has been a hobby of mine. We're all equally ignorant, as far as I can see. That's why somebody like me can pretend to be an expert.
I was struck by the picture of early life that appeared in Carl Woese's article three years ago. He had this picture of the pre-Darwinian epoch when genetic information was open source and everything was shared between different organisms. That picture fits very nicely with my speculative version of origin of life.
The essential idea is that you separate metabolism from replication. We know modern life has both metabolism and replication, but they're carried out by separate groups of molecules. Metabolism is carried out by proteins and all kinds of small molecules, and replication is carried out by DNA and RNA. That maybe is a clue to the fact that they started out separate rather than together. So my version of the origin of life is it started with metabolism only.
You had what I call the garbage bag model. The early cells were just little bags of some kind of cell membrane, which might have been oily or it might have been a metal oxide. And inside you had a more or less random collection of organic molecules, with the characteristic that small molecules could diffuse in through the membrane, but big molecules could not diffuse out. By converting small molecules into big molecules, you could concentrate the organic contents on the inside, so the cells would become more concentrated and the chemistry would gradually become more efficient. So these things could evolve without any kind of replication. It's a simple statistical inheritance. When a cell became so big that it got cut in half, or shaken in half, by some rainstorm or environmental disturbance, it would then produce two cells which would be its daughters, which would inherit, more or less, but only statistically, the chemical machinery inside. Evolution could work under those conditions.
LLOYD: These are naturally occurring lipid membranes?
DYSON: Yes. Which we do know exist. That's stage one of life, this garbage bag stage, where evolution is happening, but only on a statistical basis. I think it's right to call it pre-Darwinian, because Darwin himself did not use the word evolution; he was primarily interested in species, not in evolution as such.
Well then, what happened next? Stage two is when you have parasitic RNA, when RNA happens to occur in some of these cells. There's a linkage, perhaps, between metabolism and replication in the molecule ATP. We know ATP has a dual function. It is very important for metabolism, but it also is essentially a nucleotide. You only have to add two phosphates and it becomes a nucleotide . So it gives you a link between the two systems. Perhaps one of these garbage bags happened to develop ATP by a random process. ATP is very helpful to the metabolism, so these cells multiplied and became very numerous and made large quantities of ATP. then by chance this ATP formed the adenine nucleotide, which polymerized into RNA. You had then parasitic RNA inside these cells, forming a separate form of life, which was pure replication without metabolism. RNA could replicate itself. It couldn't metabolize, but it could grow quite nicely.
Then the RNA invented viruses. RNA found a way to package itself in a little piece of cell membrane, and travel around freely and independently. Stage two of life has the garbage bags still unorganized and chemically random, but with RNA zooming around in little packages we call viruses carrying genetic information from one cell to another. That is my version of the RNA world. It corresponds to what Manfred Eigen considered to be the beginning of life, which I regard as stage two. You have RNA living independently, replicating, traveling around, sharing genetic information between all kinds of cells. Then stage three, which I would say is the most mysterious, began when these two systems started to collaborate. It began when the invention of the ribosome, which to me is the central mystery. There’s a tremendous lot to be done with investigating the archaeology of the ribosome. I hope some of you people will do it.
Once the ribosome was invented, then the two systems, the RNA world and the metabolic world, are coupled together and you get modern cells. That's stage three, but still with the genetic information being shared, mostly by viruses traveling from cell to cell, so it is open source heredity. As Carl Woese described it, evolution could be very fast.
That's roughly the situation as Carl Woese described it—you have modern cells with metabolism directed by RNA or DNA, but without any private intellectual property, so that the chemical inventions made by one cell could be shared with others. Evolution could go in parallel in many different cells, so it could go a lot faster. The best chemical devices could be shared between different cells and combined, so evolution would go rapidly in parallel. That was probably the fastest stage of chemical evolution, when most of the basic biochemical inventions were made.
Stage four is the stage of speciation and sex, which are the next two big inventions, and that's the beginning of the Darwinian era, when species appeared. Some cells decided it was advantageous to keep their intellectual property private, to have sex only with themselves or with the members of their own species—thereby defining species. That was then the state of life for the next two billion years, the Archeozoic and Proterozoic eras. It was a rather stagnant phase of life, continued for two billion years without evolving fast.
Then you had stage five, the invention of multicellular organisms, which also involved death, another important invention.
Then after that came us—stage six. That's the end of the Darwinian era, when cultural evolution replaces biological evolution as the main driving force.
"Cultural" means that the big changes in living conditions are driven by humans spreading their technology and their ways of making a living, by learning from one another rather than by breeding. So you are spreading ideas much more rapidly than you're spreading genes.
And stage seven is what comes next.
The question is whether any of that makes sense. I think it does, but like all models, it's going to be short-lived and soon replaced by something better.
The other thing I was going to talk about was domesticated biotech, which is a completely separate subject. That comes from looking around at what's happened to physics technology in the last twenty years, with things like cell phones and iPhones and the things that I see around me at the table.
Personal computers of all kinds. Digital cameras. And the GPS navigation system. All those wonders of technology, which have suddenly descended from the sky to the earth. They have become domesticated. That has been a tremendous change, something we never predicted.
I remember when von Neumann was developing the first programmable computer at Princeton. I happened to be there, and he talked a lot about the future of computing, and he thought of computers as getting bigger and bigger and more and more expensive, so they belonged to big corporations and governments and big research labs. He never in his wildest dreams imagined computers being owned by three-year-olds, and being part of the normal upbringing of children. It's said that somebody asked him at one point, how many computers would the United States need? How large would the market be? And he answered, eighteen.
So it went in totally the opposite direction.
VENTER: Well, it went in both directions.
DYSON: To some extent, but even the biggest computers are not much bigger than they were in those days. It's remarkable—I remember the very first computer in Princeton, and it was a huge thing—a room about as big as this tent, full of machinery. This was in 1951, '52. It was actually running smoothly around '53.
VENTER: But that was less powerful than your laptop.
DYSON: Oh, much less. The total memory was four kilobytes. And he did an amazing lot with that. Especially a biologist who was there at the time, called Nils Barricelli, did simulated evolution amazingly well with a memory of four kilobytes. He developed models of evolving creatures forming an ecology, and they showed punctuated equilibrium, exactly the way real species do. It was astonishing how much he could get out of that machine.
LLOYD: The problem is that computers get faster by a factor of two every year and a half, but computer programmers conspire to make them run slightly slower every year and a half, by junking them up with all sorts of garbage.
DYSON: Because von Neumann thought that he was dealing with unreliable hardware, he made another mistake. The problem was how to write reliable software so as to deal with unreliable hardware. Now we have the opposite problem. Hardware is amazingly reliable, but software is not. It's the software that sets the limit to what you can do.
My prediction or prognostication is that the same thing is going to happen to biotech in the next 50 years, perhaps 20 years; that it's going to be domesticated. And I take the example of the flower show in Philadelphia and the reptile show in San Diego, at both of which I saw demonstrations of the enormous market there is for people who are skilled breeders of plants and animals. And they're itching to get their hands on this new technology. As soon as it's available I believe it's going to catch fire, the way computers did when they became available to people like you.
It's essentially writing and reading DNA. Breeding new kinds of plants and trees and bushes by writing the genomes at home on your personal machine. Just a little DNA reader and a little DNA writer on your desk, and you play the game with seeds and eggs instead of with pictures on the screen. That's all.
LLOYD: One of the reasons computers became ubiquitous is the phenomenon of Moore's Law, where they became faster and more powerful by a factor of two every two years. Is there an equivalent here?
DYSON: Exactly the same thing is happening to DNA at the moment. Moore's Law is being followed as we speak, both by reading and writing machines.
LLOYD: At roughly the same rate?
DYSON: Yes.
VENTER: It's happening faster. I had this discussion with Gordon Moore and I said that sequence reading and writing was changing faster than Moore's Law, and he said, but it won't matter, as you're ultimately dependent on Moore's Law.
DYSON: I agree with that. At the moment it's going fast.
CHURCH: Unless we build bio-computers—right now the best computers are bio-computers.
BROCKMAN: It took two weeks for a 17-year-old to hack the iPhone—and here we're talking about DNA writers and readers. That same kid is going to start making people.
DYSON: That's true, the driving force is the parents, not the scientists. Fertility clinics are a tremendously large and profitable branch of medicine, and that's where the action is. There's no doubt this is going into fertility clinics as well. For good or evil, that's happening.
BROCKMAN: But isn't this a watershed event because of our ideas about life? What's possible will happen. What will the societal impact be?
DYSON: It's not true that what's possible will happen. We have strict laws about experimenting with human subjects.
BROCKMAN: You can't hack an iPhone either; certain activities along these lines are illegal.
DYSON: But it's different with medicine. You do get put in jail if you break the rules.
BROCKMAN: Not in Romania.
DYSON: There are clear similarities but also great differences. Certainly it is true that people are going to be monkeying around with humans; I totally agree with that. But I think that society will put limits on it, and that the limits are likely to be broken from time to time, but they will be there.
SHAPIRO: I just want to bring in one distinction here, because two things are getting confused. To go to computers, I remember that perhaps 30 years ago there was something called Heathkit and the idea was, why buy a computer when you can build your own computer in your basement? Well I don't see anyone constructing their own computers in their basements any more.
If you purchase from computers from Dell or from IBM they will assemble them for you. But the actual construction, the difficult part, takes place in specialized institutions and then they make their products available. Everyone has a cell phone, but I doubt that most of the people, if they dropped it, could repair their cell phones. And that the new biotechnology—while humans would get the benefit, even now I think, one can contract to put the green fluorescent proteins into all sorts of animals and one artist has done just that and arranged to have specialized laboratories put it in, and then he had an exhibit where he made it seem as if he himself had done it. That isn't the case. DNA sequencing will be done massively, and engineering will be done massively, and new organisms will be constructed. But they will be done in specialized facilities. Only the products will become available to the general public. No child will go into his basement and set up the necessary DNA synthesizers, or DNA sequencers and proceed to make his own new organisms.
DYSON: You're thinking like von Neumann, and I disagree.
VENTER: That used to be a compliment.
DYSON: It's true: what you will sell to the kids is kits—you won't sell the whole apparatus for doing things but you will sell a kit that will do the things that are fun, just as you do with computers that are sold for children to play games. The computers only play games, they don't actually calculate numbers.
LLOYD: In fact there's a good analogy in the history of computation—30 years ago MIT freshmen arrived having built a computer, and then shortly after that they stopped building computers. Twenty years ago, or fifteen years ago, they arrived knowing how to program computers. But nowadays when freshmen arrive, far fewer of them have actually programmed a computer before, in the sense of writing a program in a language such as Java. But they use computers far more, and they're great users of software. They know vast amounts about how computers work and what you can do with the software. Why? Because it's a lot easier to do—why program a computer if somebody can enable you to just use the software and program it—of course when you're playing Grand Theft Auto, you're effectively programming the computer at the same time. So I suspect that what Freeman says is right, people will be using this new genetic technology, but maybe there's an analog of programming in the constructing new organisms which will enable people to do it—an analog of software so people will become the users of the software.
SHAPIRO: I see children being able to purchase lizards, say, that glow in the dark—with green fluorescence, but I don't see them creating them in their basement.
DYSON: I think both are going to happen.
SASSELOV: Maybe the question is, what is the time scale for the second thing happening? That is, by then the technology will be so developed that we may be different as a species, and not care as much as we do today whether some kid is capable of tinkering with a human. Because we will have tinkered enough, in the regulated way, by then, so that it wouldn't matter as much.
DYSON: Yes, nobody can ever know in advance; all these things always turn out differently than you expected.
LLOYD: In fact this is a real specter—because as you say, we're not allowed to tinker with humans, but we are allowed to tinker with rats, that we very rapidly will develop rats who surpass us in all abilities.Whereas we're just stuck in the dark ages.
BROCKMAN: Freeman, last night I asked Richard Dawkins if he cared to comment on your chapter suggesting "the end of the Darwinian interlude". He sent the following comment with the caveat that it is a hastily written response solely for the purpose of this meeting. He writes:
"By Darwinian evolution he [Woese] means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species."
"With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them."
These two quotations from Dyson constitute a classic schoolboy howler, a catastrophic misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution, both as Darwin understood it, and as we understand it today in rather different language, is not based on the competition for survival of species. It is based on competition for survival within species. Darwin would have said competition between individuals within every species. I would say competition between genes within gene pools. The difference between those two ways of putting it is small compared with Dyson's howler (shared by most laymen: it is the howler that I wrote The Selfish Gene partly to dispel, and I thought I had pretty much succeeded, but Dyson obviously hasn't read it!) that natural selection is about the differential survival or extinction of species. Of course the extinction of species is extremely important in the history of life, and there may very well be non-random aspects of it (some species are more likely to go extinct than others) but, although this may in some superficial sense resemble Darwinian selection, it is not the selection process that has driven evolution. Moreover, arms races between species constitute an important part of the competitive climate that drives Darwinian evolution. But in, for example, the arms race between predators and prey, or parasites and hosts, the competition that drives evolution is all going on within species. Individual foxes don't compete with rabbits, they compete with other individual foxes within their own species to be the ones that catch the rabbits (I would prefer to rephrase it as competition between genes within the fox gene pool).
The rest of Dyson's piece is interesting, as you'd expect, and there really is an interesting sense in which there is an interlude between two periods of horizontal transfer (and we mustn't forget that bacteria still practise horizontal transfer and have done throughout the time when eucaryotes have been in the 'Interlude'). But the interlude in the middle is not the Darwinian Interlude, it is the Meiosis / Sex / Gene-Pool / Species Interlude. Darwinian selection between genes still goes on during eras of horizontal transfer, just as it does during the Interlude. What happened during the 3-billion-year Interlude is that genes were confined to gene pools and limited to competing with other genes within the same species. Previously (and still in bacteria) they were free to compete with other genes more widely (there was no such thing as a species outside the 'Interlude'). If a new period of horizontal transfer is indeed now dawning through technology, genes may become free to compete with other genes more widely yet again.
As I said, there are fascinating ideas in Freeman Dyson's piece. But it is a huge pity it is marred by such an elementary mistake at the heart of it.
Richard
DYSON: Good. Yes, I have two responses.
First, what I wrote is not a howler and Dawkins is wrong. And I have read his book.
Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size. So big steps are most likely when populations are small, giving rise to the "punctuated equilibrium'' that is seen in the fossil record. The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.
Second, it is absurd to think that group selection is less important than individual selection. Consider for example Dodo A and Dodo B, competing for mates and progeny in the dodo population on Mauritius. Dodo A competes much better and has greater fitness, as measured by individual selection. Dodo A mates more often and has many more grandchildren than Dodo B. A hundred years later, the species is extinct and the fitness of A and B are both reduced to zero. Selection operating at the species level trumps selection at the individual level. Selection at the species level wiped out both A and B because the species neglected to maintain the ability to fly, which was essential to survival when human predators appeared on the island. This situation is not peculiar to dodos. It arises throughout the course of evolution, whenever environmental changes cause species to become extinct.
In my opinion, both these responses are valid, but the second one goes more directly to the issue that divides Dawkins and myself.
VENTER: I have trouble with some of the fundamental terms. What's your definition of "species"? That's something I have great difficulty with lately out of our research.
DYSON: Yes, it is a problem—it's supposed to be just a population that breeds within the population but not outside, but of course there are all sorts of exceptions.
VENTER: That ignores most of biology.
DYSON: Yes, so I don't know what the real definition is. But that's the conventional definition.
VENTER: It's a human definition.
DYSON: It is fuzzy. Like most things.
LLOYD: So for sexually reproducing species, then, it's less fuzzy than for bacteria.
DYSON: Right.
VENTER: But it really comes down to one or two recognition molecules that determine the species—if it's based on interbreeding, it's the sperm recognition sites, right?
DYSON: Yes.
VENTER: So that determines the species, then.
DYSON: Well, amongst other things.
CHURCH: Chromosome dynamics, morphology, behavior—many things. Depending on how complex the organism is.
VENTER: It's easy to tell a human from a giraffe, and we can call that a different species.
DYSON: One of the books that I've learned most from, is The Beak of the Finch, which describes evolution as it's observed in the Galapagos by Peter and Rosemary Grant. It's remarkable that they can actually see from year to year species starting to hybridize when conditions are good and then separating again when conditions are bad. So even on a year-to-year time scale you can actually see this happening, that species are not well-defined.
LLOYD: Sorry, I'm not familiar with this work. So they hybridize when times are good, and when times are bad they separate into smaller populations. Is this so that they can evolve more rapidly?
DYSON: Yes. So they can specialize. Because in bad times you have to specialize on chewing particular seeds.
VENTER: During droughts, all that was left were these really hard seeds. Finches that survive have Arnold Schwarzenegger beaks.
DYSON: Not only those—you can also have a separate population which specializes on the small seeds, which have small beaks. It happens because of the geography that you have violent swings in climate. During El Niño conditions are wet, and between El Niños, conditions are dry. So selection is brutal—almost every year about half of them get selected out.
VENTER: One of the highlights of my round-the-world expedition was meeting up with the Grants in the Galapagos, and their little tent on the site of Daphne Major. They spent three months on this island in this little tent, there's no fresh water, there's nothing there. And they live off of bottled water and cans of tuna fish. And I took them a bottle of chilled champagne. It became a happier eco-system. Remarkable what they've done.
DYSON: The enormous advantage that they had was that the birds are completely tame. You can just walk up to a bird and put a ring around its leg and it doesn't fly away. That's what made it all possible. They know every bird personally.
VENTER: Better than tame—if you walk on their path, the boobies and stuff will peck at your leg. It's their island. The humans become non-tame after a while.
But so that's an important part of the definition. Are the finches with the larger beaks a different species, in your view?
DYSON: Yes, according to Darwin they are. In fact they do interbreed quite extensively.
VENTER: So two base pair change in a genome could be sufficient to create a new species out of 1.5 billion.
DYSON: Yes.
VENTER: I'm not sure everybody will buy that definition... So that makes you a very different species than George.
DYSON: The real problem is the lawyers. You have the endangered species act; that means you have to make a legal definition of the species.
CHURCH: That's true. We're all endangered.
LLOYD: I gather human beings are a genetically very non-diverse species. We take two squirrels on this tree right here—they're much farther apart genetically than we are with any other human being on the face of the earth. So we're inclined to see things in our own light.
VENTER: What's your evidence for that?
CHURCH: It's true for chimpanzees; I don't know about squirrels.
LLOYD: But homo sapiens is a quite recent species—and also the mitochondrial DNA evidence suggests that we're descended from common ancestors in the not very distant past—within the last hundred thousand years or so. So there seems to have been a genetic bottleneck in the human species, compared with hominids as a whole, within the last hundred thousand years. Which makes us much less diverse than, for instance, squirrels.
SHAPIRO: The thrust of what Freeman was saying if we accept most of what he said, which I certainly do, is that concepts like species and interbreeding are about to become in a sense extinct. Because entering the new era, laboratories will exist which will recreate species or combine qualities of one species with qualities of another and it will be up to the designer the extent to which they interbreed or interbreed with existing organisms and so on. So that perceivably, if civilization continues we will then be in charge of what species may come into being and what species do not.
LLOYD: I have a query: is that actually important, actually? Freeman, you said we reached the end of Darwinian evolution, where human beings are the dominant species on earth, and species that can't co-evolve with humans are probably doomed. But this means that in this end of Darwinian evolution, then genes are no longer so important, and instead ideas, which can be generated more rapidly, and—dare I even say—things like computations and software are more important. Are you envisaging an era where genetic information returns to the predominant position that it had for billions of years on earth?
DYSON: No, I don't look very far. I'm quite conservative as far as human society is concerned. We would be wise to keep ourselves as much as possible the way we are, and I hope we'll be successful in it. I don't see any great likelihood if you monkey around with humans that you'll produce anything much better.
BROCKMAN: This sounds like an engineer's approach, rather than a thinker's approach. As a scientist, aren't you talking about a huge watershed concerning our ideas of what it means to be human or even what it means to be alive? Can you imagine what ideological factions or religious groups would do with some of the statements that have been made this afternoon?
LLOYD: Ironically many religions are sets of ideas, and one of the things that many religions tend to do is to try to sequester themselves genetically. Keep the gene pool within this religion from people within this religion—prevent intermarriage with people of other faiths. You could say religion is almost an attempt by ideas to get back to the good old days of rapid evolution via genetic engineering in small populations.
DYSON: I'm not familiar with this feeling that culture is collapsing. All these millions of people who are now publishing blogs on the Web are to my mind producing something you might call culture. Of very uneven quality, but it's easier to publish now than it used to be. And that to me is not necessarily a disaster. It may be a step forward.
LLOYD: In fact it's easier to preserve information as well. In the past one of the main problems with culture is it would disappear because there was only one copy. When there's only one copy, things get easily destroyed. And yes, maybe because in the United States we don't have as much culture so we're not so worried about losing it.
Perhaps worrying about the wholesale copying and monkeying with genetic information might open people's eyes to the danger of copying and monkeying with ordinary cultural information—for instance, violating copyrights. While I am usually for any kind of information manipulation I can think of, it does seem a little strange to try to manipulate human genomes. Of course, the primary way of manipulating genomes in the past, which people have been doing for ages, is by breeding. People are rather squeamish about attempts to manipulate human genomes to create perfect human beings just by breeding,. This is an old fear among people and and an old temptation as well. We may not be so culturally bereft with the mechanisms that we need to cope with these kinds of issues as we might think. It is scary. But anything fun is scary.
COREY POWELL: This may be a bridging question: is open source sort of an inexorable direction that we're moving in—as people blog openly, and copyrighted music seems to be losing out to open and tradable music—is that the way you expect it's going to be with genomics as well, that ultimately this information is all going to be openly and freely available, and that's the way this whole system is going to progress?
DYSON: Not necessarily. Bill Gates is still around. But that remains to be seen. Clearly this is the alternative.
CHURCH: Genomics for the most part has been quite open historically—even in profit-making sectors they will publish papers and so forth, and the genome project went so far as to try to publish things within one week of collecting the data. So it's really quite aggressive so far. Almost every genome that you could possibly want, including some that some people would prefer not to be in open source, like small pox, which Craig helped to do, and the 1918 flu virus—all those things are available. So I think that is a trend.
DYSON: It's unfortunate that small pox is out there—the world would be a lot safer if that hadn't been published.
VENTER: I can disagree very violently with you on that.
DYSON: Good. That's a minor exception, but as a general rule, openness is by far preferable.
VENTER: Even with that, I think I could convince you openness is far more important. There were two states that were funding an incredible amount of secret research—the U.S. and the former Soviet Union—on trying to modify small poxes, make them more dangerous, et cetera. So if it was not open source, those states would be the only ones with access to this information. There would be nothing out there for either tracking it, understanding it, making better vaccines, et cetera, if it was even a real threat. And on the synthetic biology side, it's a very, very low threat because the DNA is not infective. It's a hypothetical threat that people like to use to scare people, but in reality it's really not one.
CHURCH: DNA is not infective but you can make infective viruses with the DNA in the lab…
VENTER: Hypothetically. But nobody's done it yet.
CHURCH: With other pox viruses you can do it—so it's not that hypothetical.
VENTER: There's probably a few thousand pox viruses out and very closely related species that could easily become small pox. I'll argue for open source of information—my genome is on the Internet, but I'm much more selective who I share my biological materials with. There's open source and there's open source.
SHAPIRO: You did raise an interesting point there, though, because genetic privacy is something which is often debated—the rights of individuals to genetic privacy, not to have their genomes known.
VENTER: But that's driven by fear, not by knowledge.
SHAPIRO: But what I'm saying is, that genetic privacy actually maybe impossible. Let us say that I wish that he hadn't put his genome on the Internet and wanted it secretive, say he was running for public office and had some gene for some mental instability, and therefore wanted no one to have his genome; yet someone wanted his genome. All I'd need to do is swipe your glass, and shake your hand.
VENTER: This is issue that we could talk about that George and I have been facing that's counteractive to what our government is doing. Francis Collins is setting up data bases, where you have to have retinal scans and finger prints to have access, and we're publishing our data on the Internet. So, open source is not a guarantee of any means at all.
We hope by making human genetic data available, people will find in fact that it's almost impossible for your scenario, wherein you can look at one gene and say this person's going to have mental illness. Even the entire genetic code doesn't provide that answer. You have to know the environment, you have to know a lot of other things.
Perhaps 50 years from now we can get much closer to those answers of predicting things, but we are not just genetic animals. My dangerous idea is that we're probably far more genetic animals than society is willing to accept. But we're not purely genetic animals, so I don't think it's going to be as predictive as some people think.
SHAPIRO: Well, certain specific things will be predictive — for example, Huntington's disease is due to a repeat of certain letters in DNA.
VENTER: There are some very rare exceptions, yes.
SHAPIRO: You can even tell what onset is likely at what age by counting the number of repeats that are present.
VENTER: But that's the exception that doesn't make the rule. That's what every geneticist has used as the few early examples of success in genetics of single gene disorders.
SHAPIRO: But there are cases where individuals themselves didn't want to know whether or not they had inherited the gene for Huntington's disease, or if they did, whether they were going to have a severe form. Yet if some external person wanted to inform himself as to whether that individual did carry the gene, it would almost be impossible to prevent that individual from getting the information. You would practically have to live in seclusion, with all of your clothing, all of your artifacts destroyed on contact.
LLOYD: It's interesting because in fact the digital nature of genetic information, the fact that it's seven billion bits that can easily be written into a computer hard drive, makes genetic information much more like the information in computers and it can be manipulated in that way. Whereas strangely enough, our mental information, the information that's in our brains, is much less digital in a fashion, and much harder to get hold of.
And in fact it does suggest that, since this information has been digitized, and will continue to be digitized and manipulated, and be more available, the question of how secrecy and privacy for genes is rather similar to the privacy of your iPhone — How privately are you allowed to keep the information in your iPhone? How privately are you allowed to keep the information in your genes? Because it will be available, and it will be possible to get it and to digitize it so then the question is, do you need codes for protecting your genetic code? Maybe everybody should be issued their own public key cryptic system so they and only they can have access to their own genetic code.
CHURCH: We're kind of in a state of change where we're deciding what's the right thing. For example, consider our faces. Some people keep their faces completely masked; in most situations it's considered anti-social to keep your face completely masked. Like walking into a bank, for example. But it's extraordinarily revealing—it not only reveals something about your physiology, your current health, your relationship with the person you're talking to, whether you're angry or very happy—it's very revealing. And so we've made a conscious decision in society, for the most part, to not keep that private. We might do the same thing for genomes, it could be, who are we protecting? But it's an open question.
SHAPIRO: Well we shed cells so easily unlike faces that it's almost impossible to keep your genome private, if there is someone out there determined to have it.
CHURCH: I agree with you. We'll all become bubble people, living in our little hermetically sealed bubbles so nobody can get in.
LLOYD: Who steals my genome steals trash, right?
//////////////////////////////How does one get around this? Entropy is like a business. It doesn't matter if one subsidiary of the business loses money as long as the others show enough profit to offset it. What you need is a larger system, the environment, and part of it absorbs energy and gets organized, and in payment for that, the rest of the environment gets disorganized, usually by going up a little bit in temperature, which is the common denominator of entropy. If you convert other kinds of energy to heat, you can pay for a lot of organization.
////////////////////////////////////But the same type of reasoning that Richard Dawkins uses to explain evolution could apply equally well to what could be called thermo-dynamic evolution. In fact natural selection may just be one special case of thermo-dynamic evolution; there may be other forms of evolution undetected by us. So his schoolboy howler is the section on the origin of life. He writes brilliantly elsewhere. If you want to write that to him, Freeman—He hasn't written an email to me; I keep my hands off evolution, I don't claim to know very much about it.
////////////////////////////I said How would one detect advanced mineral life and he said, well there are always fresh starts. And he would invest money in looking for unusual minerals—following the activity of minerals that are out of place, or growing unusually in different areas, or having interesting interactions with organic compounds, unusual catalytic effects. I would have told him my idea would just be to set up a culture medium consisting of rich minerals—someone was talking jokingly about the ultimate diet where you're not a meat-eater, you're not a vegetarian, you're not even a vegan because even vegetables are alive, you're a mineral. You eat only minerals and breathe only carbon dioxides, and that's the ultimate in dietary purity.
////////////////////////////////Basically, in order to explain to you why this is interesting, I want to first of all convince you about three things, which are important to my approach. The first one is that what we are looking for is baryonic in nature. What I mean by that is something of which I don't need to convince you, I believe, but you should bear it in mind because this is a feature of our universe, the one we observe. Baryons are all the particles that make up atoms and all that is around us, including ourselves. But that's not necessarily the most common entity in the universe, as you—I'm sure—know about dark matter and dark energy. I think we have to agree that what we are looking for and would call life is baryonic in nature, and there is good reason to believe that dark matter and dark energy are not capable of that level of complexity in this universe yet—or at all.
////////////////////////////////////The second point which I want to convince you of—or use as my background for what I'll tell you here—is that we should agree that what we are looking for, what we call life, is a complex chemical process. Basically, the ability of those atoms to combine in non-trivial ways. This is actually my point of departure, where I would be looking at life more from the purely thermodynamic aspect, that is from the point of view which Robert here described and H. Morowitz has been very eloquent in defining and actually done some research on. That is, what is the parameter space in which you can have chemistry which is complex enough to lead to a qualitatively new phenomenon, a phenomenon which we don't see in the rest of the universe. That's actually an important point here.
//////////////////////////////But it is one of those steps that we now understand as the development of our world, that is of our universe, of starting with very simple baryonic structure for that matter, which then becomes more and more complex. Stellar evolution is one of those phenomena that did not exist in the first half billion years of the universe. And this is not a hypothesis; we know it. We actually can observe a lot of it, and we know that there were no stars during the epoch of recombination, which is the cosmic microwave background, with all the structure that we see in it. And then there were stars, and then stars started a new process, which did not exist in the universe before, which is the synthesis of the heavy elements. That is—baryons working together as elementary particles and building a structure—the Mendeleev table, which then would lead to chemistry.
///////////////////////////////VENTER: How many years ago was this?
SASSELOV: 13.7 billion years ago is where we see the precursor of the microwave background radiation, so that's our first very well-studied piece of evidence. Then about half a billion later is the time when the first stars can form, from the gas, and they're mostly made of hydrogen and helium. Then they go through a period where over a time of five billion years they produce enough carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and all the heavy elements, where you start effectively producing planets. And then we come to 4.5 billion years, which is the origin of our own solar system and the Earth. And almost within a half billion years, some complex chemistry which we now see covering entirely and co-opting the geophysical cycles of this planet. So that's to give you a quick idea about the time scales.
/////////////////////////////////In that sense life is an integral part of that global development that we see. And although we know only one example of it, it doesn't seem unusual when you think of it that way—as a progression of complexity that the baryonic aspect of this—baryonic matter—in this universe has actually the propensity to lead to. So the question then is what is this good for understanding the origins of life, or possible pathways? And even more generically, could we design experiments in which we can find out whether all these possible baryonic pathways really merge into one—the one that produces life here on Earth—or are there multiple pathways? Even if you could answer that question, that would be very exciting, because it will tell us something about the general rules of complexity that baryonic chemistry can really lead to.
//////////////////////////////////The question then is, the third aspect which I want to convince you of, is we know quite a bit about the universe, but there are only a few places in the universe where you can think of that complex chemistry being capable to survive over a sufficiently long period of time. And vacuum is not one of them, in the sense of surviving in which you were talking about the origin of life; starting with smaller molecules, which then have enough time to lead to more complex ones. And when I think of vacuum, I don't mean the surface of a comet, but really the inter-stellar medium, with its very low density.
I can imagine life that started on some surface then migrating to live in the inter-stellar medium. But I cannot imagine, as an astrophysicist, from what I know, that there is an environment which is stable enough over the time scales necessary for that chemistry to take place. So I am a little bit biased in that sense to planets and planetary systems as the only environment that we know of today, as far as we know in the universe, which has all of those factors put together—that is, stability over long periods of time, but sufficiently low or moderate temperatures. (Stars are very stable over billions of years, but they all have very high temperatures, all throughout.) And basically the overall thermodynamic window that Morowitz is talking about, which allows complex chemistry. That's actually much broader than simply having water.
////////////////////////////////////SETH LLOYD: I'd like to step back from talking about life itself. Instead I'd like to talk about what information processing in the universe can tell us about things like life. There's something rather mysterious about the universe. Not just rather mysterious, extremely mysterious. At bottom, the laws of physics are very simple. You can write them down on the back of a T-shirt: I see them written on the backs of T-shirts at MIT all the time, even in size petite. IN addition to that, the initial state of the universe, from what we can tell from observation, was also extremely simple. It can be described by a very few bits of information.
So we have simple laws and simple initial conditions. Yet if you look around you right now you see a huge amount of complexity. I see a bunch of human beings, each of whom is at least as complex as I am. I see trees and plants, I see cars, and as a mechanical engineer, I have to pay attention to cars. The world is extremely complex.
If you look up at the heavens, the heavens are no longer very uniform. There are clusters of galaxies and galaxies and stars and all sorts of different kinds of planets and super-earths and sub-earths, and super-humans and sub-humans, no doubt. The question is, what in the heck happened? Who ordered that? Where did this come from? Why is the universe complex? Because normally you would think, okay, I start off with very simple initial conditions and very simple laws, and then I should get something that's simple. in fact, mathematical definitions of complexity like algorithmic information say, simple laws, simple initial conditions, imply the state is always simple. It's kind of bizarre. So what is it about the universe that makes it complex, that makes it spontaneously generate complexity? I'm not going to talk about super-natural explanations. What are natural explanations—scientific explanations of our universe and why it generates complexity, including complex things like life.
I claim that there is a very basic feature of the universe, which makes it natural for it to generate complex systems and complex behaviors. We shouldn't be surprised by this. It's intrinsic in the laws of physics. This is what Craig Venter was asking, what is it about the laws of physics that give us things like life? Not only that, we know what this feature is. Let me tell you what it is, and then I'll tell you what it has to do with life. Because the spontaneous generation of complexity is important for lots of things other than life. Remember, life is overrated. There's plenty of other interesting stuff going on in the universe other than life. Long after we're all dead, and maybe other biological forms—carbon-based forms—of life are dead, I hope that other interesting things will still be going on.
Okay. What is this feature that is responsible for generating complexity? I would say that it is the universe's intrinsic ability to register and process information at its most microscopic levels. When we build quantum computers, it's one electron: one bit, to paraphrase the Supreme Court. Because of quantum mechanics, the world is intrinsically digital. That's what the 'quantum' in quantum mechanics means: it says the world comes in chunks. It's discrete. And this discreteness implies that elementary particles register bits. Their state can be described by a certain number of bits. In the case of the electron spin, one bit. In the case of photon polarization, one bit of information. Bits are intrinsic to the way the universe is. It's digital. And this digitality at the level of elementary particles gives rise to a very digital nature for chemistry, because chemistry arises out of quantum mechanics together with the masses of the elementary particles and the coupling constants of nature and the electro-magnetic force, et cetera.
Quantum mechanics means that there are only a discrete number of species of chemicals. You can only put together two hydrogens and an oxygen to make a molecule in one way that I know of. This means that we can catalog chemicals in a discrete list—chemical number one, chemical number two, chemical number three—you can order it any way you want according to your favorite chemicals. But it's discrete. This digital nature of the universe actually infects everything, in particular life. It's been known since the structure of DNA was elucidated that DNA is very digital. There are four possible base pairs per site, two bits per site, three and a half billion sites, seven billion bits of information in the human DNA. There's a very recognizable digital code of the kind that electrical engineers rediscovered in the 1950s that maps the codes for sequences of DNA onto expressions of proteins. There's a digital nature to the universe, and quantum mechanics makes this happen.
But the digital nature of the universe doesn't immediately tell you why the universe is complicated, and why something like life should spontaneously arise. The fact that we're here doesn't tell us anything about the probability that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Because we're here, and so we have to be here in order to contemplate this question, this tells us nothing about the probability of life except that it can exist. That's why this kind of question that Dimitar is trying to answer by looking for planets and signatures of life elsewhere is so important. We really don't know how likely it is that life should arise.
So why does complex behavior arise? Well, the universe is computing at its most microscopic scales. Two electrons, two bits of information, every time they collide, those bits flip. It's just these natural interaction and information processing that we use when we build quantum computers. Now I claim—and I can claim this because this is a mathematical theorem, which is different from just mere observational evidence—that when you have something that is computing and you program it at random, just tossing in little random bits of programming, that it necessarily generates complex behavior.
////////////////////////////// claim that there is a very basic feature of the universe, which makes it natural for it to generate complex systems and complex behaviors. We shouldn't be surprised by this. It's intrinsic in the laws of physics. This is what Craig Venter was asking, what is it about the laws of physics that give us things like life? Not only that, we know what this feature is. Let me tell you what it is, and then I'll tell you what it has to do with life. Because the spontaneous generation of complexity is important for lots of things other than life. Remember, life is overrated. There's plenty of other interesting stuff going on in the universe other than life. Long after we're all dead, and maybe other biological forms—carbon-based forms—of life are dead, I hope that other interesting things will still be going on.
///////////////////////////////Okay. What is this feature that is responsible for generating complexity? I would say that it is the universe's intrinsic ability to register and process information at its most microscopic levels. When we build quantum computers, it's one electron: one bit, to paraphrase the Supreme Court. Because of quantum mechanics, the world is intrinsically digital. That's what the 'quantum' in quantum mechanics means: it says the world comes in chunks. It's discrete. And this discreteness implies that elementary particles register bits. Their state can be described by a certain number of bits. In the case of the electron spin, one bit. In the case of photon polarization, one bit of information. Bits are intrinsic to the way the universe is. It's digital. And this digitality at the level of elementary particles gives rise to a very digital nature for chemistry, because chemistry arises out of quantum mechanics together with the masses of the elementary particles and the coupling constants of nature and the electro-magnetic force, et cetera.
//////////////////////////////////Quantum mechanics means that there are only a discrete number of species of chemicals. You can only put together two hydrogens and an oxygen to make a molecule in one way that I know of. This means that we can catalog chemicals in a discrete list—chemical number one, chemical number two, chemical number three—you can order it any way you want according to your favorite chemicals. But it's discrete. This digital nature of the universe actually infects everything, in particular life. It's been known since the structure of DNA was elucidated that DNA is very digital. There are four possible base pairs per site, two bits per site, three and a half billion sites, seven billion bits of information in the human DNA. There's a very recognizable digital code of the kind that electrical engineers rediscovered in the 1950s that maps the codes for sequences of DNA onto expressions of proteins. There's a digital nature to the universe, and quantum mechanics makes this happen.
///////////////////////////////////Einstein said, God doesn't play dice with the universe. Well, it's not true. Einstein famously was wrong about this. It was his schoolboy howler. He believed the universe was deterministic, but in fact it's not. Quantum mechanics is inherently probabilistic: that's just the way quantum mechanics works. Quantum mechanics is constantly injecting random bits of information into the universe. Now, if you take something that can compute, and you program it at random, then you find is that it will spontaneously start to generate all possible computable things. Why? Because you're generating all possible programs for the computer as you toss in information at random.
//////////////////////////////So why does complex behavior arise? Well, the universe is computing at its most microscopic scales. Two electrons, two bits of information, every time they collide, those bits flip. It's just these natural interaction and information processing that we use when we build quantum computers. Now I claim—and I can claim this because this is a mathematical theorem, which is different from just mere observational evidence—that when you have something that is computing and you program it at random, just tossing in little random bits of programming, that it necessarily generates complex behavior.
///////////////////////////////////In fact the universe is computing. I know this, because we build quantum computers—in addition, I can see a computer over there, so the universe clearly supports computation. And if you program it at random to start exploring different computations, if you go out into the infinite universe, (observational evidence suggests the universe is infinite), then somewhere out there every possible computation is being played out. Every possible way of processing information is occurring somewhere out there.
//////////////////////////////////DARWIN WAS JUST A PHASE
(Darwin war nur eine Phase)
Country Life in Connecticut: Six scientists find the future in genetic engineering
By Andrian Kreye
The origins of life were the subject of discussion on a summer day when six pioneers of science convened at Eastover Farm in Connecticut. The physicist and scientific theorist Freeman Dyson was the first of the speakers to talk on the theme: "Life: What a Concept!" An ironic slogan for one of the most complex problems. Seth Lloyd, quantum physicist at MIT, summed it up with his remark that scientists now know everything about the origin of the Universe and virtually nothing about the origin of life. Which makes it rather difficult to deal with the new world view currently taking shape in the wake of the emerging age of biology.
The roster of thinkers had assembled at the invitation of literary agent John Brockman, who specializes in scientific ideas. The setting was distinguished. Eastover Farm sits in the part of Connecticut where the rich and famous New Yorkers who find the beach resorts of the Hamptons too loud and pretentious have settled. Here the scientific luminaries sat at long tables in the shade of the rustling leaves of maple trees, breaking just for lunch at the farmhouse.
The day remained on topic, as Brockman had invited only half a dozen journalists, to avoid slowing the thinkers down with an onslaught of too many layman's questions. The object was to have them talk about ideas mainly amongst themselves in the manner of a salon, not unlike his online forum edge.org. Not that the day went over the heads of the non-scientist guests. With Dyson, Lloyd, genetic engineer George Church, chemist Robert Shapiro, astronomer Dimitar Sasselov and biologist and decoder of the genome J. Craig Venter, six men came together, each of whom have made enormous contributions in interdiscplinary sciences, and as a consequence have mastered the ability to talk to people who are not well-read in their respective fields. This made it possible for an outsider to follow the discussions, even if at moments, he was made to feel just that, as when Robert Shapiro cracked a joke about RNA that was met with great laughter from the scientists.
Freeman Dyson, a fragile gentleman of 84 years, opened the morning with his legendary provocation that Darwinian evolution represents only a short phase of three billion years in the life of this planet, a phase that will soon reach its end. According to this view, life began in primeval times with a haphazard assemblage of cells, RNA-driven organisms ensued, which, in the third phase of terrestrial life would have learned to function together. Reproduction appeared on the scene in the fourth phase, multicellular beings and the principle of death appeared in the fifth phase.
The End of Natural Selection
We humans belong to the sixth phase of evolution, which progresses very slowly by way of Darwinian natural selection. But this according to Dyson will soon come to an end, because men like George Church and J. Craig Venter are expected to succeed not only in reading the genome, but also in writing new genomes in the next five to ten years. This would constitute the ultimate "Intelligent Design", pun fully intended. Where this could lead is still difficult to anticipate. Yet Freeman Dyson finds a meaningful illustration. He spent the early nineteen fifties at Princeton, with mathematician John von Neuman, who designed one of the earliest programmable computers. When asked how many computers might be in demand, von Neumann assured him that 18 would be sufficient to meet the demand of a nation like the United States. Now, 55 years later, we are in the middle of the age of physics where computers play an integral role in modern life and culture.
Now though we are entering the age of biology. Soon genetic engineering will shape our daily life to the same extent that computers do today. This sounds like science fiction, but it is already reality in science. Thus genetic engineer George Church talks about the biological building blocks that he is able to synthetically manufacture. It is only a matter of time until we will be able to manufacture organisms that can self-reproduce, he claims. Most notably J. Craig Venter succeeded in introducing a copy of a DNA-based chromosome into a cell, which from then on was controlled by that strand of DNA.
Venter, a suntanned giant with the build of a surfer and the hunting instinct of a captain of industry, understands the magnitude of this feat in microbiology. And he understands the potential of his research to create biofuel from bacteria. He wouldn't dare to say it, but he very well might be a Bill Gates of the age of biology. Venter also understands the moral implications. He approached bioethicist Art Kaplan in the nineties and asked him to do a study on whether in designing a new genome he would raise ethical or religious objections. Not a single religious leader or philosopher involved in the study could find a problem there. Such contract studies are debatable. But here at Eastover Farm scientists dream of a glorious future. Because science as such is morally neutral—every scientific breakthrough can be applied for good or for bad.
The sun is already turning pink behind the treetops, when Dimitar Sasselov, the Bulgarian astronomer from Harvard, once more reminds us how unique and at the same time, how unstable the balance of our terrestrial life is. In our galaxy, astronomers have found roughly one hundred million planets that could theoretically harbor organic life. Not only does Earth not have the best conditions among them; it is actually at the very edge of the spectrum. "Earth is not particularly inhabitable," he says, wrapping up his talk. Here J. Craig Venter cannot help but remark as an idealist: "But it is getting better all the time".
Translated by Karla Taylor
////////////////////////////////RICHARD DAWKINS [8.27.07]
Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The God Delusion
"By Darwinian evolution he [Woese] means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species."
"With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them."
These two quotations from Dyson constitute a classic schoolboy howler, a catastrophic misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution, both as Darwin understood it, and as we understand it today in rather different language, is NOT based on the competition for survival of species. It is based on competition for survival WITHIN species. Darwin would have said competition between individuals within every species. I would say competition between genes within gene pools. The difference between those two ways of putting it is small compared with Dyson's howler (shared by most laymen: it is the howler that I wrote The Selfish Gene partly to dispel, and I thought I had pretty much succeeded, but Dyson obviously hasn't read it!) that natural selection is about the differential survival or extinction of species. Of course the extinction of species is extremely important in the history of life, and there may very well be non-random aspects of it (some species are more likely to go extinct than others) but, although this may in some superficial sense resemble Darwinian selection, it is NOT the selection process that has driven evolution. Moreover, arms races between species constitute an important part of the competitive climate that drives Darwinian evolution. But in, for example, the arms race between predators and prey, or parasites and hosts, the competition that drives evolution is all going on within species. Individual foxes don't compete with rabbits, they compete with other individual foxes within their own species to be the ones that catch the rabbits (I would prefer to rephrase it as competition between genes within the fox gene pool).
The rest of Dyson's piece is interesting, as you'd expect, and there really is an interesting sense in which there is an interlude between two periods of horizontal transfer (and we mustn't forget that bacteria still practise horizontal transfer and have done throughout the time when eucaryotes have been in the 'Interlude'). But the interlude in the middle is not the Darwinian Interlude, it is the Meiosis / Sex / Gene-Pool / Species Interlude. Darwinian selection between genes still goes on during eras of horizontal transfer, just as it does during the Interlude. What happened during the 3-billion-year Interlude is that genes were confined to gene pools and limited to competing with other genes within the same species. Previously (and still in bacteria) they were free to compete with other genes more widely (there was no such thing as a species outside the 'Interlude'). If a new period of horizontal transfer is indeed now dawning through technology, genes may become free to compete with other genes more widely yet again.
As I said, there are fascinating ideas in Freeman Dyson's piece. But it is a huge pity it is marred by such an elementary mistake at the heart of it.
Richard
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FREEMAN DYSON [8.30.07]
Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study, Author, Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe
Dear Richard Dawkins,
Thank you for the E-mail that you sent to John Brockman, saying that I had made a "school-boy howler" when I said that Darwinian evolution was a competition between species rather than between individuals. You also said I obviously had not read The Selfish Gene. In fact I did read your book and disagreed with it for the following reasons.
Here are two replies to your E-mail. The first was a verbal response made immediately when Brockman read your E-mail aloud at a meeting of biologists at his farm. The second was written the following day after thinking more carefully about the question.
First response. What I wrote is not a howler and Dawkins is wrong. Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size. So big steps are most likely when populations are small, giving rise to the ``punctuated equilibrium'' that is seen in the fossil record. The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.
Second response. It is absurd to think that group selection is less important than individual selection. Consider for example Dodo A and Dodo B, competing for mates and progeny in the dodo population on Mauritius. Dodo A competes much better and
has greater fitness, as measured by individual selection. Dodo A mates more often and has many more grandchildren than Dodo B. A hundred years later, the species is extinct and the fitness of A and B are both reduced to zero. Selection operating at the species level trumps selection at the individual level. Selection at the species level wiped out both A and B because the species neglected to maintain the ability to fly, which was essential to survival when human predators appeared on the island. This situation is not peculiar to dodos. It arises throughout the course of evolution, whenever environmental changes cause species to become extinct.
In my opinion, both these responses are valid, but the second one goes more directly to the issue that divides us. Yours sincerely, Freeman Dyson.
/////////////////////////////Harvesting Rainwater by Not Letting It Go to Waste
An illustration of Lancaster's property in 2006 shows that no runoff leaves the site. Street runoff is directed to basins and trees along the curb. All graywater is directed to and recycled within the landscape. With palm trees removed, winter solar access is regained. Courtesy Brad Lancaster
Morning Edition, January 10, 2008 · Big rains slammed the West this week — big news in a region that has gotten used to dry weather.
Now some city governments are looking to rain to ease their water woes.
///////////////////////////////The Science of Siesta: Research Finds That Napping Improves Brain Functioning
Let’s hear it for siesta time. What better news than to hear that taking midday naps are good for your grey matter? Companies that want smarter employees should let them take 90 minute midday nap-time. Researchers at the University of Haifa in cooperation with the Sleep Laboratory at the Sheba Medical Center and researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of Montreal recently concluded that a daytime nap changes the course of consolidation in the brain in several positive...
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The book is about a collection of related ideas:
Parasitism--as he defines two types macro and micro.
Micro is the form we are familiar with as disease, the times viruses, bacteria, protozoan begin to use us as their energy and food source, to our consternation. He further defines two flavors: epidemic and endemic. Epidemic is the form in bubonic plague that swept Europe for 500 years at regular intervals. endemic is the idea of a parasitic form like the liver flukes that effect irrigated agriculture the world over, or like the civilized childhood diseases that effect the body politic like measles, mumps, smallpox.
Macroparasitism is this author's contribution to the discussion, unique to him as far as i know. Those other human's that prey on the weaker, less organized, less mobile etc. Epidemic macro are the Mongols(which are the topic of what i think is the best chapter in the book) or those horseman like in the movie the "Seventh Samari" who sweep out of the steppes or mountains to seize the harvest. Endemic macro are the priests, kings, emperors, tax farmers, etc who take the hard earned food from the producers without adequate recompense.
Using these ideas he ventures to paint those broad strokes, those vistas in history to show how the major currents, the big pieces fit. To this end the book is very well done, always absorbing, always enough detail to support but not to overwhelm the reader. Yet pithy and curiosity arousing enough to drive you to look into his sources, the real mark of good history.
I was pleased enough to get _Rise of the West_ and will start it next.
thanks for reading the review, i hope you get as much out of the book as did i.
richard williams
////////////////////////EDGE=LIFE,WHAT A CONCEPT?=Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn't matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chomosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chomosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn't know if it would work or not. Now we do. This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It's not a question of 'if', or 'how', but 'when', and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.
The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery o life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.
Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.
Physicist Freeman Dyson envisions a biotech future which supplants physics and notes that after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. He refers to an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer, a subject explored in his abovementioned essay.
Craig Venter, who decoded the human genome, surprised the world in late June by announcing the results of his lab's work on genome transplantation methods that allows for the transformation of one type of bacteria into another, dictated by the transplanted chromosome. In other words, one species becomes another.
George Church, the pioneer of the Synthetic Biology revolution, thinks of the cell as operating system, and engineers taking the place of traditional biologists in retooling stripped down components of cells (bio-bricks) in much the vein as in the late 70s when electrical engineers were working their way to the first personal computer by assembling circuit boards, hard drives, monitors, etc.
Biologist Robert Shapiro disagrees with scientists who believe that an extreme stroke of luck was needed to get life started in a non-living environment. He favors the idea that life arose through the normal operation of the laws of physics and chemistry. If he is right, then life may be widespread in the cosmos.
Dimitar Sasselov, Planetary Astrophysicist, and Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, has made recent discoveries of exo-planets ("Super-Earths"). He looks at new evidence to explore the question of how chemical systems become living systems.
Quantum engineer Seth Lloyd sees the universe as an information processing system in which simple systems such as atoms and molecules must necessarily give rise complex structures such as life, and life itself must give rise to even greater complexity, such as human beings, societies, and whatever comes next.
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"Life/ Consists of propositions about life."
— Wallace Stevens ("Men Made out of Words")
LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!
An Edge Special Event at Eastover Farm
Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, Seth Lloyd
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The essential idea is that you separate metabolism from replication. We know modern life has both metabolism and replication, but they're carried out by separate groups of molecules. Metabolism is carried out by proteins and all kinds of other molecules, and replication is carried out by DNA and RNA. That maybe is a clue to the fact that theystarted out separate rather than together. So my version of the origin of life is that it started with metabolism only.
FREEMAN DYSON
FREEMAN DYSON is professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. His professional interests are in mathematics and astronomy. Among his many books are Disturbing the Universe, Infinite in All Directions Origins of Life, From Eros to Gaia, Imagined Worlds, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, and most recently A Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe.
Freeman Dyson's Edge Bio Page
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FREEMAN DYSON: First of all I wanted to talk a bit about origin of life. To me the most interesting question in biology has always been how it all got started. That has been a hobby of mine. We're all equally ignorant, as far as I can see. That's why somebody like me can pretend to be an expert.
I was struck by the picture of early life that appeared in Carl Woese's article three years ago. He had this picture of the pre-Darwinian epoch when genetic information was open source and everything was shared between different organisms. That picture fits very nicely with my speculative version of origin of life.
The essential idea is that you separate metabolism from replication. We know modern life has both metabolism and replication, but they're carried out by separate groups of molecules. Metabolism is carried out by proteins and all kinds of small molecules, and replication is carried out by DNA and RNA. That maybe is a clue to the fact that they started out separate rather than together. So my version of the origin of life is it started with metabolism only.
You had what I call the garbage bag model. The early cells were just little bags of some kind of cell membrane, which might have been oily or it might have been a metal oxide. And inside you had a more or less random collection of organic molecules, with the characteristic that small molecules could diffuse in through the membrane, but big molecules could not diffuse out. By converting small molecules into big molecules, you could concentrate the organic contents on the inside, so the cells would become more concentrated and the chemistry would gradually become more efficient. So these things could evolve without any kind of replication. It's a simple statistical inheritance. When a cell became so big that it got cut in half, or shaken in half, by some rainstorm or environmental disturbance, it would then produce two cells which would be its daughters, which would inherit, more or less, but only statistically, the chemical machinery inside. Evolution could work under those conditions.
LLOYD: These are naturally occurring lipid membranes?
DYSON: Yes. Which we do know exist. That's stage one of life, this garbage bag stage, where evolution is happening, but only on a statistical basis. I think it's right to call it pre-Darwinian, because Darwin himself did not use the word evolution; he was primarily interested in species, not in evolution as such.
Well then, what happened next? Stage two is when you have parasitic RNA, when RNA happens to occur in some of these cells. There's a linkage, perhaps, between metabolism and replication in the molecule ATP. We know ATP has a dual function. It is very important for metabolism, but it also is essentially a nucleotide. You only have to add two phosphates and it becomes a nucleotide . So it gives you a link between the two systems. Perhaps one of these garbage bags happened to develop ATP by a random process. ATP is very helpful to the metabolism, so these cells multiplied and became very numerous and made large quantities of ATP. then by chance this ATP formed the adenine nucleotide, which polymerized into RNA. You had then parasitic RNA inside these cells, forming a separate form of life, which was pure replication without metabolism. RNA could replicate itself. It couldn't metabolize, but it could grow quite nicely.
Then the RNA invented viruses. RNA found a way to package itself in a little piece of cell membrane, and travel around freely and independently. Stage two of life has the garbage bags still unorganized and chemically random, but with RNA zooming around in little packages we call viruses carrying genetic information from one cell to another. That is my version of the RNA world. It corresponds to what Manfred Eigen considered to be the beginning of life, which I regard as stage two. You have RNA living independently, replicating, traveling around, sharing genetic information between all kinds of cells. Then stage three, which I would say is the most mysterious, began when these two systems started to collaborate. It began when the invention of the ribosome, which to me is the central mystery. There’s a tremendous lot to be done with investigating the archaeology of the ribosome. I hope some of you people will do it.
Once the ribosome was invented, then the two systems, the RNA world and the metabolic world, are coupled together and you get modern cells. That's stage three, but still with the genetic information being shared, mostly by viruses traveling from cell to cell, so it is open source heredity. As Carl Woese described it, evolution could be very fast.
That's roughly the situation as Carl Woese described it—you have modern cells with metabolism directed by RNA or DNA, but without any private intellectual property, so that the chemical inventions made by one cell could be shared with others. Evolution could go in parallel in many different cells, so it could go a lot faster. The best chemical devices could be shared between different cells and combined, so evolution would go rapidly in parallel. That was probably the fastest stage of chemical evolution, when most of the basic biochemical inventions were made.
Stage four is the stage of speciation and sex, which are the next two big inventions, and that's the beginning of the Darwinian era, when species appeared. Some cells decided it was advantageous to keep their intellectual property private, to have sex only with themselves or with the members of their own species—thereby defining species. That was then the state of life for the next two billion years, the Archeozoic and Proterozoic eras. It was a rather stagnant phase of life, continued for two billion years without evolving fast.
Then you had stage five, the invention of multicellular organisms, which also involved death, another important invention.
Then after that came us—stage six. That's the end of the Darwinian era, when cultural evolution replaces biological evolution as the main driving force.
"Cultural" means that the big changes in living conditions are driven by humans spreading their technology and their ways of making a living, by learning from one another rather than by breeding. So you are spreading ideas much more rapidly than you're spreading genes.
And stage seven is what comes next.
The question is whether any of that makes sense. I think it does, but like all models, it's going to be short-lived and soon replaced by something better.
The other thing I was going to talk about was domesticated biotech, which is a completely separate subject. That comes from looking around at what's happened to physics technology in the last twenty years, with things like cell phones and iPhones and the things that I see around me at the table.
Personal computers of all kinds. Digital cameras. And the GPS navigation system. All those wonders of technology, which have suddenly descended from the sky to the earth. They have become domesticated. That has been a tremendous change, something we never predicted.
I remember when von Neumann was developing the first programmable computer at Princeton. I happened to be there, and he talked a lot about the future of computing, and he thought of computers as getting bigger and bigger and more and more expensive, so they belonged to big corporations and governments and big research labs. He never in his wildest dreams imagined computers being owned by three-year-olds, and being part of the normal upbringing of children. It's said that somebody asked him at one point, how many computers would the United States need? How large would the market be? And he answered, eighteen.
So it went in totally the opposite direction.
VENTER: Well, it went in both directions.
DYSON: To some extent, but even the biggest computers are not much bigger than they were in those days. It's remarkable—I remember the very first computer in Princeton, and it was a huge thing—a room about as big as this tent, full of machinery. This was in 1951, '52. It was actually running smoothly around '53.
VENTER: But that was less powerful than your laptop.
DYSON: Oh, much less. The total memory was four kilobytes. And he did an amazing lot with that. Especially a biologist who was there at the time, called Nils Barricelli, did simulated evolution amazingly well with a memory of four kilobytes. He developed models of evolving creatures forming an ecology, and they showed punctuated equilibrium, exactly the way real species do. It was astonishing how much he could get out of that machine.
LLOYD: The problem is that computers get faster by a factor of two every year and a half, but computer programmers conspire to make them run slightly slower every year and a half, by junking them up with all sorts of garbage.
DYSON: Because von Neumann thought that he was dealing with unreliable hardware, he made another mistake. The problem was how to write reliable software so as to deal with unreliable hardware. Now we have the opposite problem. Hardware is amazingly reliable, but software is not. It's the software that sets the limit to what you can do.
My prediction or prognostication is that the same thing is going to happen to biotech in the next 50 years, perhaps 20 years; that it's going to be domesticated. And I take the example of the flower show in Philadelphia and the reptile show in San Diego, at both of which I saw demonstrations of the enormous market there is for people who are skilled breeders of plants and animals. And they're itching to get their hands on this new technology. As soon as it's available I believe it's going to catch fire, the way computers did when they became available to people like you.
It's essentially writing and reading DNA. Breeding new kinds of plants and trees and bushes by writing the genomes at home on your personal machine. Just a little DNA reader and a little DNA writer on your desk, and you play the game with seeds and eggs instead of with pictures on the screen. That's all.
LLOYD: One of the reasons computers became ubiquitous is the phenomenon of Moore's Law, where they became faster and more powerful by a factor of two every two years. Is there an equivalent here?
DYSON: Exactly the same thing is happening to DNA at the moment. Moore's Law is being followed as we speak, both by reading and writing machines.
LLOYD: At roughly the same rate?
DYSON: Yes.
VENTER: It's happening faster. I had this discussion with Gordon Moore and I said that sequence reading and writing was changing faster than Moore's Law, and he said, but it won't matter, as you're ultimately dependent on Moore's Law.
DYSON: I agree with that. At the moment it's going fast.
CHURCH: Unless we build bio-computers—right now the best computers are bio-computers.
BROCKMAN: It took two weeks for a 17-year-old to hack the iPhone—and here we're talking about DNA writers and readers. That same kid is going to start making people.
DYSON: That's true, the driving force is the parents, not the scientists. Fertility clinics are a tremendously large and profitable branch of medicine, and that's where the action is. There's no doubt this is going into fertility clinics as well. For good or evil, that's happening.
BROCKMAN: But isn't this a watershed event because of our ideas about life? What's possible will happen. What will the societal impact be?
DYSON: It's not true that what's possible will happen. We have strict laws about experimenting with human subjects.
BROCKMAN: You can't hack an iPhone either; certain activities along these lines are illegal.
DYSON: But it's different with medicine. You do get put in jail if you break the rules.
BROCKMAN: Not in Romania.
DYSON: There are clear similarities but also great differences. Certainly it is true that people are going to be monkeying around with humans; I totally agree with that. But I think that society will put limits on it, and that the limits are likely to be broken from time to time, but they will be there.
SHAPIRO: I just want to bring in one distinction here, because two things are getting confused. To go to computers, I remember that perhaps 30 years ago there was something called Heathkit and the idea was, why buy a computer when you can build your own computer in your basement? Well I don't see anyone constructing their own computers in their basements any more.
If you purchase from computers from Dell or from IBM they will assemble them for you. But the actual construction, the difficult part, takes place in specialized institutions and then they make their products available. Everyone has a cell phone, but I doubt that most of the people, if they dropped it, could repair their cell phones. And that the new biotechnology—while humans would get the benefit, even now I think, one can contract to put the green fluorescent proteins into all sorts of animals and one artist has done just that and arranged to have specialized laboratories put it in, and then he had an exhibit where he made it seem as if he himself had done it. That isn't the case. DNA sequencing will be done massively, and engineering will be done massively, and new organisms will be constructed. But they will be done in specialized facilities. Only the products will become available to the general public. No child will go into his basement and set up the necessary DNA synthesizers, or DNA sequencers and proceed to make his own new organisms.
DYSON: You're thinking like von Neumann, and I disagree.
VENTER: That used to be a compliment.
DYSON: It's true: what you will sell to the kids is kits—you won't sell the whole apparatus for doing things but you will sell a kit that will do the things that are fun, just as you do with computers that are sold for children to play games. The computers only play games, they don't actually calculate numbers.
LLOYD: In fact there's a good analogy in the history of computation—30 years ago MIT freshmen arrived having built a computer, and then shortly after that they stopped building computers. Twenty years ago, or fifteen years ago, they arrived knowing how to program computers. But nowadays when freshmen arrive, far fewer of them have actually programmed a computer before, in the sense of writing a program in a language such as Java. But they use computers far more, and they're great users of software. They know vast amounts about how computers work and what you can do with the software. Why? Because it's a lot easier to do—why program a computer if somebody can enable you to just use the software and program it—of course when you're playing Grand Theft Auto, you're effectively programming the computer at the same time. So I suspect that what Freeman says is right, people will be using this new genetic technology, but maybe there's an analog of programming in the constructing new organisms which will enable people to do it—an analog of software so people will become the users of the software.
SHAPIRO: I see children being able to purchase lizards, say, that glow in the dark—with green fluorescence, but I don't see them creating them in their basement.
DYSON: I think both are going to happen.
SASSELOV: Maybe the question is, what is the time scale for the second thing happening? That is, by then the technology will be so developed that we may be different as a species, and not care as much as we do today whether some kid is capable of tinkering with a human. Because we will have tinkered enough, in the regulated way, by then, so that it wouldn't matter as much.
DYSON: Yes, nobody can ever know in advance; all these things always turn out differently than you expected.
LLOYD: In fact this is a real specter—because as you say, we're not allowed to tinker with humans, but we are allowed to tinker with rats, that we very rapidly will develop rats who surpass us in all abilities.Whereas we're just stuck in the dark ages.
BROCKMAN: Freeman, last night I asked Richard Dawkins if he cared to comment on your chapter suggesting "the end of the Darwinian interlude". He sent the following comment with the caveat that it is a hastily written response solely for the purpose of this meeting. He writes:
"By Darwinian evolution he [Woese] means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species."
"With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them."
These two quotations from Dyson constitute a classic schoolboy howler, a catastrophic misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution, both as Darwin understood it, and as we understand it today in rather different language, is not based on the competition for survival of species. It is based on competition for survival within species. Darwin would have said competition between individuals within every species. I would say competition between genes within gene pools. The difference between those two ways of putting it is small compared with Dyson's howler (shared by most laymen: it is the howler that I wrote The Selfish Gene partly to dispel, and I thought I had pretty much succeeded, but Dyson obviously hasn't read it!) that natural selection is about the differential survival or extinction of species. Of course the extinction of species is extremely important in the history of life, and there may very well be non-random aspects of it (some species are more likely to go extinct than others) but, although this may in some superficial sense resemble Darwinian selection, it is not the selection process that has driven evolution. Moreover, arms races between species constitute an important part of the competitive climate that drives Darwinian evolution. But in, for example, the arms race between predators and prey, or parasites and hosts, the competition that drives evolution is all going on within species. Individual foxes don't compete with rabbits, they compete with other individual foxes within their own species to be the ones that catch the rabbits (I would prefer to rephrase it as competition between genes within the fox gene pool).
The rest of Dyson's piece is interesting, as you'd expect, and there really is an interesting sense in which there is an interlude between two periods of horizontal transfer (and we mustn't forget that bacteria still practise horizontal transfer and have done throughout the time when eucaryotes have been in the 'Interlude'). But the interlude in the middle is not the Darwinian Interlude, it is the Meiosis / Sex / Gene-Pool / Species Interlude. Darwinian selection between genes still goes on during eras of horizontal transfer, just as it does during the Interlude. What happened during the 3-billion-year Interlude is that genes were confined to gene pools and limited to competing with other genes within the same species. Previously (and still in bacteria) they were free to compete with other genes more widely (there was no such thing as a species outside the 'Interlude'). If a new period of horizontal transfer is indeed now dawning through technology, genes may become free to compete with other genes more widely yet again.
As I said, there are fascinating ideas in Freeman Dyson's piece. But it is a huge pity it is marred by such an elementary mistake at the heart of it.
Richard
DYSON: Good. Yes, I have two responses.
First, what I wrote is not a howler and Dawkins is wrong. And I have read his book.
Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size. So big steps are most likely when populations are small, giving rise to the "punctuated equilibrium'' that is seen in the fossil record. The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.
Second, it is absurd to think that group selection is less important than individual selection. Consider for example Dodo A and Dodo B, competing for mates and progeny in the dodo population on Mauritius. Dodo A competes much better and has greater fitness, as measured by individual selection. Dodo A mates more often and has many more grandchildren than Dodo B. A hundred years later, the species is extinct and the fitness of A and B are both reduced to zero. Selection operating at the species level trumps selection at the individual level. Selection at the species level wiped out both A and B because the species neglected to maintain the ability to fly, which was essential to survival when human predators appeared on the island. This situation is not peculiar to dodos. It arises throughout the course of evolution, whenever environmental changes cause species to become extinct.
In my opinion, both these responses are valid, but the second one goes more directly to the issue that divides Dawkins and myself.
VENTER: I have trouble with some of the fundamental terms. What's your definition of "species"? That's something I have great difficulty with lately out of our research.
DYSON: Yes, it is a problem—it's supposed to be just a population that breeds within the population but not outside, but of course there are all sorts of exceptions.
VENTER: That ignores most of biology.
DYSON: Yes, so I don't know what the real definition is. But that's the conventional definition.
VENTER: It's a human definition.
DYSON: It is fuzzy. Like most things.
LLOYD: So for sexually reproducing species, then, it's less fuzzy than for bacteria.
DYSON: Right.
VENTER: But it really comes down to one or two recognition molecules that determine the species—if it's based on interbreeding, it's the sperm recognition sites, right?
DYSON: Yes.
VENTER: So that determines the species, then.
DYSON: Well, amongst other things.
CHURCH: Chromosome dynamics, morphology, behavior—many things. Depending on how complex the organism is.
VENTER: It's easy to tell a human from a giraffe, and we can call that a different species.
DYSON: One of the books that I've learned most from, is The Beak of the Finch, which describes evolution as it's observed in the Galapagos by Peter and Rosemary Grant. It's remarkable that they can actually see from year to year species starting to hybridize when conditions are good and then separating again when conditions are bad. So even on a year-to-year time scale you can actually see this happening, that species are not well-defined.
LLOYD: Sorry, I'm not familiar with this work. So they hybridize when times are good, and when times are bad they separate into smaller populations. Is this so that they can evolve more rapidly?
DYSON: Yes. So they can specialize. Because in bad times you have to specialize on chewing particular seeds.
VENTER: During droughts, all that was left were these really hard seeds. Finches that survive have Arnold Schwarzenegger beaks.
DYSON: Not only those—you can also have a separate population which specializes on the small seeds, which have small beaks. It happens because of the geography that you have violent swings in climate. During El Niño conditions are wet, and between El Niños, conditions are dry. So selection is brutal—almost every year about half of them get selected out.
VENTER: One of the highlights of my round-the-world expedition was meeting up with the Grants in the Galapagos, and their little tent on the site of Daphne Major. They spent three months on this island in this little tent, there's no fresh water, there's nothing there. And they live off of bottled water and cans of tuna fish. And I took them a bottle of chilled champagne. It became a happier eco-system. Remarkable what they've done.
DYSON: The enormous advantage that they had was that the birds are completely tame. You can just walk up to a bird and put a ring around its leg and it doesn't fly away. That's what made it all possible. They know every bird personally.
VENTER: Better than tame—if you walk on their path, the boobies and stuff will peck at your leg. It's their island. The humans become non-tame after a while.
But so that's an important part of the definition. Are the finches with the larger beaks a different species, in your view?
DYSON: Yes, according to Darwin they are. In fact they do interbreed quite extensively.
VENTER: So two base pair change in a genome could be sufficient to create a new species out of 1.5 billion.
DYSON: Yes.
VENTER: I'm not sure everybody will buy that definition... So that makes you a very different species than George.
DYSON: The real problem is the lawyers. You have the endangered species act; that means you have to make a legal definition of the species.
CHURCH: That's true. We're all endangered.
LLOYD: I gather human beings are a genetically very non-diverse species. We take two squirrels on this tree right here—they're much farther apart genetically than we are with any other human being on the face of the earth. So we're inclined to see things in our own light.
VENTER: What's your evidence for that?
CHURCH: It's true for chimpanzees; I don't know about squirrels.
LLOYD: But homo sapiens is a quite recent species—and also the mitochondrial DNA evidence suggests that we're descended from common ancestors in the not very distant past—within the last hundred thousand years or so. So there seems to have been a genetic bottleneck in the human species, compared with hominids as a whole, within the last hundred thousand years. Which makes us much less diverse than, for instance, squirrels.
SHAPIRO: The thrust of what Freeman was saying if we accept most of what he said, which I certainly do, is that concepts like species and interbreeding are about to become in a sense extinct. Because entering the new era, laboratories will exist which will recreate species or combine qualities of one species with qualities of another and it will be up to the designer the extent to which they interbreed or interbreed with existing organisms and so on. So that perceivably, if civilization continues we will then be in charge of what species may come into being and what species do not.
LLOYD: I have a query: is that actually important, actually? Freeman, you said we reached the end of Darwinian evolution, where human beings are the dominant species on earth, and species that can't co-evolve with humans are probably doomed. But this means that in this end of Darwinian evolution, then genes are no longer so important, and instead ideas, which can be generated more rapidly, and—dare I even say—things like computations and software are more important. Are you envisaging an era where genetic information returns to the predominant position that it had for billions of years on earth?
DYSON: No, I don't look very far. I'm quite conservative as far as human society is concerned. We would be wise to keep ourselves as much as possible the way we are, and I hope we'll be successful in it. I don't see any great likelihood if you monkey around with humans that you'll produce anything much better.
BROCKMAN: This sounds like an engineer's approach, rather than a thinker's approach. As a scientist, aren't you talking about a huge watershed concerning our ideas of what it means to be human or even what it means to be alive? Can you imagine what ideological factions or religious groups would do with some of the statements that have been made this afternoon?
LLOYD: Ironically many religions are sets of ideas, and one of the things that many religions tend to do is to try to sequester themselves genetically. Keep the gene pool within this religion from people within this religion—prevent intermarriage with people of other faiths. You could say religion is almost an attempt by ideas to get back to the good old days of rapid evolution via genetic engineering in small populations.
DYSON: I'm not familiar with this feeling that culture is collapsing. All these millions of people who are now publishing blogs on the Web are to my mind producing something you might call culture. Of very uneven quality, but it's easier to publish now than it used to be. And that to me is not necessarily a disaster. It may be a step forward.
LLOYD: In fact it's easier to preserve information as well. In the past one of the main problems with culture is it would disappear because there was only one copy. When there's only one copy, things get easily destroyed. And yes, maybe because in the United States we don't have as much culture so we're not so worried about losing it.
Perhaps worrying about the wholesale copying and monkeying with genetic information might open people's eyes to the danger of copying and monkeying with ordinary cultural information—for instance, violating copyrights. While I am usually for any kind of information manipulation I can think of, it does seem a little strange to try to manipulate human genomes. Of course, the primary way of manipulating genomes in the past, which people have been doing for ages, is by breeding. People are rather squeamish about attempts to manipulate human genomes to create perfect human beings just by breeding,. This is an old fear among people and and an old temptation as well. We may not be so culturally bereft with the mechanisms that we need to cope with these kinds of issues as we might think. It is scary. But anything fun is scary.
COREY POWELL: This may be a bridging question: is open source sort of an inexorable direction that we're moving in—as people blog openly, and copyrighted music seems to be losing out to open and tradable music—is that the way you expect it's going to be with genomics as well, that ultimately this information is all going to be openly and freely available, and that's the way this whole system is going to progress?
DYSON: Not necessarily. Bill Gates is still around. But that remains to be seen. Clearly this is the alternative.
CHURCH: Genomics for the most part has been quite open historically—even in profit-making sectors they will publish papers and so forth, and the genome project went so far as to try to publish things within one week of collecting the data. So it's really quite aggressive so far. Almost every genome that you could possibly want, including some that some people would prefer not to be in open source, like small pox, which Craig helped to do, and the 1918 flu virus—all those things are available. So I think that is a trend.
DYSON: It's unfortunate that small pox is out there—the world would be a lot safer if that hadn't been published.
VENTER: I can disagree very violently with you on that.
DYSON: Good. That's a minor exception, but as a general rule, openness is by far preferable.
VENTER: Even with that, I think I could convince you openness is far more important. There were two states that were funding an incredible amount of secret research—the U.S. and the former Soviet Union—on trying to modify small poxes, make them more dangerous, et cetera. So if it was not open source, those states would be the only ones with access to this information. There would be nothing out there for either tracking it, understanding it, making better vaccines, et cetera, if it was even a real threat. And on the synthetic biology side, it's a very, very low threat because the DNA is not infective. It's a hypothetical threat that people like to use to scare people, but in reality it's really not one.
CHURCH: DNA is not infective but you can make infective viruses with the DNA in the lab…
VENTER: Hypothetically. But nobody's done it yet.
CHURCH: With other pox viruses you can do it—so it's not that hypothetical.
VENTER: There's probably a few thousand pox viruses out and very closely related species that could easily become small pox. I'll argue for open source of information—my genome is on the Internet, but I'm much more selective who I share my biological materials with. There's open source and there's open source.
SHAPIRO: You did raise an interesting point there, though, because genetic privacy is something which is often debated—the rights of individuals to genetic privacy, not to have their genomes known.
VENTER: But that's driven by fear, not by knowledge.
SHAPIRO: But what I'm saying is, that genetic privacy actually maybe impossible. Let us say that I wish that he hadn't put his genome on the Internet and wanted it secretive, say he was running for public office and had some gene for some mental instability, and therefore wanted no one to have his genome; yet someone wanted his genome. All I'd need to do is swipe your glass, and shake your hand.
VENTER: This is issue that we could talk about that George and I have been facing that's counteractive to what our government is doing. Francis Collins is setting up data bases, where you have to have retinal scans and finger prints to have access, and we're publishing our data on the Internet. So, open source is not a guarantee of any means at all.
We hope by making human genetic data available, people will find in fact that it's almost impossible for your scenario, wherein you can look at one gene and say this person's going to have mental illness. Even the entire genetic code doesn't provide that answer. You have to know the environment, you have to know a lot of other things.
Perhaps 50 years from now we can get much closer to those answers of predicting things, but we are not just genetic animals. My dangerous idea is that we're probably far more genetic animals than society is willing to accept. But we're not purely genetic animals, so I don't think it's going to be as predictive as some people think.
SHAPIRO: Well, certain specific things will be predictive — for example, Huntington's disease is due to a repeat of certain letters in DNA.
VENTER: There are some very rare exceptions, yes.
SHAPIRO: You can even tell what onset is likely at what age by counting the number of repeats that are present.
VENTER: But that's the exception that doesn't make the rule. That's what every geneticist has used as the few early examples of success in genetics of single gene disorders.
SHAPIRO: But there are cases where individuals themselves didn't want to know whether or not they had inherited the gene for Huntington's disease, or if they did, whether they were going to have a severe form. Yet if some external person wanted to inform himself as to whether that individual did carry the gene, it would almost be impossible to prevent that individual from getting the information. You would practically have to live in seclusion, with all of your clothing, all of your artifacts destroyed on contact.
LLOYD: It's interesting because in fact the digital nature of genetic information, the fact that it's seven billion bits that can easily be written into a computer hard drive, makes genetic information much more like the information in computers and it can be manipulated in that way. Whereas strangely enough, our mental information, the information that's in our brains, is much less digital in a fashion, and much harder to get hold of.
And in fact it does suggest that, since this information has been digitized, and will continue to be digitized and manipulated, and be more available, the question of how secrecy and privacy for genes is rather similar to the privacy of your iPhone — How privately are you allowed to keep the information in your iPhone? How privately are you allowed to keep the information in your genes? Because it will be available, and it will be possible to get it and to digitize it so then the question is, do you need codes for protecting your genetic code? Maybe everybody should be issued their own public key cryptic system so they and only they can have access to their own genetic code.
CHURCH: We're kind of in a state of change where we're deciding what's the right thing. For example, consider our faces. Some people keep their faces completely masked; in most situations it's considered anti-social to keep your face completely masked. Like walking into a bank, for example. But it's extraordinarily revealing—it not only reveals something about your physiology, your current health, your relationship with the person you're talking to, whether you're angry or very happy—it's very revealing. And so we've made a conscious decision in society, for the most part, to not keep that private. We might do the same thing for genomes, it could be, who are we protecting? But it's an open question.
SHAPIRO: Well we shed cells so easily unlike faces that it's almost impossible to keep your genome private, if there is someone out there determined to have it.
CHURCH: I agree with you. We'll all become bubble people, living in our little hermetically sealed bubbles so nobody can get in.
LLOYD: Who steals my genome steals trash, right?
//////////////////////////////How does one get around this? Entropy is like a business. It doesn't matter if one subsidiary of the business loses money as long as the others show enough profit to offset it. What you need is a larger system, the environment, and part of it absorbs energy and gets organized, and in payment for that, the rest of the environment gets disorganized, usually by going up a little bit in temperature, which is the common denominator of entropy. If you convert other kinds of energy to heat, you can pay for a lot of organization.
////////////////////////////////////But the same type of reasoning that Richard Dawkins uses to explain evolution could apply equally well to what could be called thermo-dynamic evolution. In fact natural selection may just be one special case of thermo-dynamic evolution; there may be other forms of evolution undetected by us. So his schoolboy howler is the section on the origin of life. He writes brilliantly elsewhere. If you want to write that to him, Freeman—He hasn't written an email to me; I keep my hands off evolution, I don't claim to know very much about it.
////////////////////////////I said How would one detect advanced mineral life and he said, well there are always fresh starts. And he would invest money in looking for unusual minerals—following the activity of minerals that are out of place, or growing unusually in different areas, or having interesting interactions with organic compounds, unusual catalytic effects. I would have told him my idea would just be to set up a culture medium consisting of rich minerals—someone was talking jokingly about the ultimate diet where you're not a meat-eater, you're not a vegetarian, you're not even a vegan because even vegetables are alive, you're a mineral. You eat only minerals and breathe only carbon dioxides, and that's the ultimate in dietary purity.
////////////////////////////////Basically, in order to explain to you why this is interesting, I want to first of all convince you about three things, which are important to my approach. The first one is that what we are looking for is baryonic in nature. What I mean by that is something of which I don't need to convince you, I believe, but you should bear it in mind because this is a feature of our universe, the one we observe. Baryons are all the particles that make up atoms and all that is around us, including ourselves. But that's not necessarily the most common entity in the universe, as you—I'm sure—know about dark matter and dark energy. I think we have to agree that what we are looking for and would call life is baryonic in nature, and there is good reason to believe that dark matter and dark energy are not capable of that level of complexity in this universe yet—or at all.
////////////////////////////////////The second point which I want to convince you of—or use as my background for what I'll tell you here—is that we should agree that what we are looking for, what we call life, is a complex chemical process. Basically, the ability of those atoms to combine in non-trivial ways. This is actually my point of departure, where I would be looking at life more from the purely thermodynamic aspect, that is from the point of view which Robert here described and H. Morowitz has been very eloquent in defining and actually done some research on. That is, what is the parameter space in which you can have chemistry which is complex enough to lead to a qualitatively new phenomenon, a phenomenon which we don't see in the rest of the universe. That's actually an important point here.
//////////////////////////////But it is one of those steps that we now understand as the development of our world, that is of our universe, of starting with very simple baryonic structure for that matter, which then becomes more and more complex. Stellar evolution is one of those phenomena that did not exist in the first half billion years of the universe. And this is not a hypothesis; we know it. We actually can observe a lot of it, and we know that there were no stars during the epoch of recombination, which is the cosmic microwave background, with all the structure that we see in it. And then there were stars, and then stars started a new process, which did not exist in the universe before, which is the synthesis of the heavy elements. That is—baryons working together as elementary particles and building a structure—the Mendeleev table, which then would lead to chemistry.
///////////////////////////////VENTER: How many years ago was this?
SASSELOV: 13.7 billion years ago is where we see the precursor of the microwave background radiation, so that's our first very well-studied piece of evidence. Then about half a billion later is the time when the first stars can form, from the gas, and they're mostly made of hydrogen and helium. Then they go through a period where over a time of five billion years they produce enough carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and all the heavy elements, where you start effectively producing planets. And then we come to 4.5 billion years, which is the origin of our own solar system and the Earth. And almost within a half billion years, some complex chemistry which we now see covering entirely and co-opting the geophysical cycles of this planet. So that's to give you a quick idea about the time scales.
/////////////////////////////////In that sense life is an integral part of that global development that we see. And although we know only one example of it, it doesn't seem unusual when you think of it that way—as a progression of complexity that the baryonic aspect of this—baryonic matter—in this universe has actually the propensity to lead to. So the question then is what is this good for understanding the origins of life, or possible pathways? And even more generically, could we design experiments in which we can find out whether all these possible baryonic pathways really merge into one—the one that produces life here on Earth—or are there multiple pathways? Even if you could answer that question, that would be very exciting, because it will tell us something about the general rules of complexity that baryonic chemistry can really lead to.
//////////////////////////////////The question then is, the third aspect which I want to convince you of, is we know quite a bit about the universe, but there are only a few places in the universe where you can think of that complex chemistry being capable to survive over a sufficiently long period of time. And vacuum is not one of them, in the sense of surviving in which you were talking about the origin of life; starting with smaller molecules, which then have enough time to lead to more complex ones. And when I think of vacuum, I don't mean the surface of a comet, but really the inter-stellar medium, with its very low density.
I can imagine life that started on some surface then migrating to live in the inter-stellar medium. But I cannot imagine, as an astrophysicist, from what I know, that there is an environment which is stable enough over the time scales necessary for that chemistry to take place. So I am a little bit biased in that sense to planets and planetary systems as the only environment that we know of today, as far as we know in the universe, which has all of those factors put together—that is, stability over long periods of time, but sufficiently low or moderate temperatures. (Stars are very stable over billions of years, but they all have very high temperatures, all throughout.) And basically the overall thermodynamic window that Morowitz is talking about, which allows complex chemistry. That's actually much broader than simply having water.
////////////////////////////////////SETH LLOYD: I'd like to step back from talking about life itself. Instead I'd like to talk about what information processing in the universe can tell us about things like life. There's something rather mysterious about the universe. Not just rather mysterious, extremely mysterious. At bottom, the laws of physics are very simple. You can write them down on the back of a T-shirt: I see them written on the backs of T-shirts at MIT all the time, even in size petite. IN addition to that, the initial state of the universe, from what we can tell from observation, was also extremely simple. It can be described by a very few bits of information.
So we have simple laws and simple initial conditions. Yet if you look around you right now you see a huge amount of complexity. I see a bunch of human beings, each of whom is at least as complex as I am. I see trees and plants, I see cars, and as a mechanical engineer, I have to pay attention to cars. The world is extremely complex.
If you look up at the heavens, the heavens are no longer very uniform. There are clusters of galaxies and galaxies and stars and all sorts of different kinds of planets and super-earths and sub-earths, and super-humans and sub-humans, no doubt. The question is, what in the heck happened? Who ordered that? Where did this come from? Why is the universe complex? Because normally you would think, okay, I start off with very simple initial conditions and very simple laws, and then I should get something that's simple. in fact, mathematical definitions of complexity like algorithmic information say, simple laws, simple initial conditions, imply the state is always simple. It's kind of bizarre. So what is it about the universe that makes it complex, that makes it spontaneously generate complexity? I'm not going to talk about super-natural explanations. What are natural explanations—scientific explanations of our universe and why it generates complexity, including complex things like life.
I claim that there is a very basic feature of the universe, which makes it natural for it to generate complex systems and complex behaviors. We shouldn't be surprised by this. It's intrinsic in the laws of physics. This is what Craig Venter was asking, what is it about the laws of physics that give us things like life? Not only that, we know what this feature is. Let me tell you what it is, and then I'll tell you what it has to do with life. Because the spontaneous generation of complexity is important for lots of things other than life. Remember, life is overrated. There's plenty of other interesting stuff going on in the universe other than life. Long after we're all dead, and maybe other biological forms—carbon-based forms—of life are dead, I hope that other interesting things will still be going on.
Okay. What is this feature that is responsible for generating complexity? I would say that it is the universe's intrinsic ability to register and process information at its most microscopic levels. When we build quantum computers, it's one electron: one bit, to paraphrase the Supreme Court. Because of quantum mechanics, the world is intrinsically digital. That's what the 'quantum' in quantum mechanics means: it says the world comes in chunks. It's discrete. And this discreteness implies that elementary particles register bits. Their state can be described by a certain number of bits. In the case of the electron spin, one bit. In the case of photon polarization, one bit of information. Bits are intrinsic to the way the universe is. It's digital. And this digitality at the level of elementary particles gives rise to a very digital nature for chemistry, because chemistry arises out of quantum mechanics together with the masses of the elementary particles and the coupling constants of nature and the electro-magnetic force, et cetera.
Quantum mechanics means that there are only a discrete number of species of chemicals. You can only put together two hydrogens and an oxygen to make a molecule in one way that I know of. This means that we can catalog chemicals in a discrete list—chemical number one, chemical number two, chemical number three—you can order it any way you want according to your favorite chemicals. But it's discrete. This digital nature of the universe actually infects everything, in particular life. It's been known since the structure of DNA was elucidated that DNA is very digital. There are four possible base pairs per site, two bits per site, three and a half billion sites, seven billion bits of information in the human DNA. There's a very recognizable digital code of the kind that electrical engineers rediscovered in the 1950s that maps the codes for sequences of DNA onto expressions of proteins. There's a digital nature to the universe, and quantum mechanics makes this happen.
But the digital nature of the universe doesn't immediately tell you why the universe is complicated, and why something like life should spontaneously arise. The fact that we're here doesn't tell us anything about the probability that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Because we're here, and so we have to be here in order to contemplate this question, this tells us nothing about the probability of life except that it can exist. That's why this kind of question that Dimitar is trying to answer by looking for planets and signatures of life elsewhere is so important. We really don't know how likely it is that life should arise.
So why does complex behavior arise? Well, the universe is computing at its most microscopic scales. Two electrons, two bits of information, every time they collide, those bits flip. It's just these natural interaction and information processing that we use when we build quantum computers. Now I claim—and I can claim this because this is a mathematical theorem, which is different from just mere observational evidence—that when you have something that is computing and you program it at random, just tossing in little random bits of programming, that it necessarily generates complex behavior.
////////////////////////////// claim that there is a very basic feature of the universe, which makes it natural for it to generate complex systems and complex behaviors. We shouldn't be surprised by this. It's intrinsic in the laws of physics. This is what Craig Venter was asking, what is it about the laws of physics that give us things like life? Not only that, we know what this feature is. Let me tell you what it is, and then I'll tell you what it has to do with life. Because the spontaneous generation of complexity is important for lots of things other than life. Remember, life is overrated. There's plenty of other interesting stuff going on in the universe other than life. Long after we're all dead, and maybe other biological forms—carbon-based forms—of life are dead, I hope that other interesting things will still be going on.
///////////////////////////////Okay. What is this feature that is responsible for generating complexity? I would say that it is the universe's intrinsic ability to register and process information at its most microscopic levels. When we build quantum computers, it's one electron: one bit, to paraphrase the Supreme Court. Because of quantum mechanics, the world is intrinsically digital. That's what the 'quantum' in quantum mechanics means: it says the world comes in chunks. It's discrete. And this discreteness implies that elementary particles register bits. Their state can be described by a certain number of bits. In the case of the electron spin, one bit. In the case of photon polarization, one bit of information. Bits are intrinsic to the way the universe is. It's digital. And this digitality at the level of elementary particles gives rise to a very digital nature for chemistry, because chemistry arises out of quantum mechanics together with the masses of the elementary particles and the coupling constants of nature and the electro-magnetic force, et cetera.
//////////////////////////////////Quantum mechanics means that there are only a discrete number of species of chemicals. You can only put together two hydrogens and an oxygen to make a molecule in one way that I know of. This means that we can catalog chemicals in a discrete list—chemical number one, chemical number two, chemical number three—you can order it any way you want according to your favorite chemicals. But it's discrete. This digital nature of the universe actually infects everything, in particular life. It's been known since the structure of DNA was elucidated that DNA is very digital. There are four possible base pairs per site, two bits per site, three and a half billion sites, seven billion bits of information in the human DNA. There's a very recognizable digital code of the kind that electrical engineers rediscovered in the 1950s that maps the codes for sequences of DNA onto expressions of proteins. There's a digital nature to the universe, and quantum mechanics makes this happen.
///////////////////////////////////Einstein said, God doesn't play dice with the universe. Well, it's not true. Einstein famously was wrong about this. It was his schoolboy howler. He believed the universe was deterministic, but in fact it's not. Quantum mechanics is inherently probabilistic: that's just the way quantum mechanics works. Quantum mechanics is constantly injecting random bits of information into the universe. Now, if you take something that can compute, and you program it at random, then you find is that it will spontaneously start to generate all possible computable things. Why? Because you're generating all possible programs for the computer as you toss in information at random.
//////////////////////////////So why does complex behavior arise? Well, the universe is computing at its most microscopic scales. Two electrons, two bits of information, every time they collide, those bits flip. It's just these natural interaction and information processing that we use when we build quantum computers. Now I claim—and I can claim this because this is a mathematical theorem, which is different from just mere observational evidence—that when you have something that is computing and you program it at random, just tossing in little random bits of programming, that it necessarily generates complex behavior.
///////////////////////////////////In fact the universe is computing. I know this, because we build quantum computers—in addition, I can see a computer over there, so the universe clearly supports computation. And if you program it at random to start exploring different computations, if you go out into the infinite universe, (observational evidence suggests the universe is infinite), then somewhere out there every possible computation is being played out. Every possible way of processing information is occurring somewhere out there.
//////////////////////////////////DARWIN WAS JUST A PHASE
(Darwin war nur eine Phase)
Country Life in Connecticut: Six scientists find the future in genetic engineering
By Andrian Kreye
The origins of life were the subject of discussion on a summer day when six pioneers of science convened at Eastover Farm in Connecticut. The physicist and scientific theorist Freeman Dyson was the first of the speakers to talk on the theme: "Life: What a Concept!" An ironic slogan for one of the most complex problems. Seth Lloyd, quantum physicist at MIT, summed it up with his remark that scientists now know everything about the origin of the Universe and virtually nothing about the origin of life. Which makes it rather difficult to deal with the new world view currently taking shape in the wake of the emerging age of biology.
The roster of thinkers had assembled at the invitation of literary agent John Brockman, who specializes in scientific ideas. The setting was distinguished. Eastover Farm sits in the part of Connecticut where the rich and famous New Yorkers who find the beach resorts of the Hamptons too loud and pretentious have settled. Here the scientific luminaries sat at long tables in the shade of the rustling leaves of maple trees, breaking just for lunch at the farmhouse.
The day remained on topic, as Brockman had invited only half a dozen journalists, to avoid slowing the thinkers down with an onslaught of too many layman's questions. The object was to have them talk about ideas mainly amongst themselves in the manner of a salon, not unlike his online forum edge.org. Not that the day went over the heads of the non-scientist guests. With Dyson, Lloyd, genetic engineer George Church, chemist Robert Shapiro, astronomer Dimitar Sasselov and biologist and decoder of the genome J. Craig Venter, six men came together, each of whom have made enormous contributions in interdiscplinary sciences, and as a consequence have mastered the ability to talk to people who are not well-read in their respective fields. This made it possible for an outsider to follow the discussions, even if at moments, he was made to feel just that, as when Robert Shapiro cracked a joke about RNA that was met with great laughter from the scientists.
Freeman Dyson, a fragile gentleman of 84 years, opened the morning with his legendary provocation that Darwinian evolution represents only a short phase of three billion years in the life of this planet, a phase that will soon reach its end. According to this view, life began in primeval times with a haphazard assemblage of cells, RNA-driven organisms ensued, which, in the third phase of terrestrial life would have learned to function together. Reproduction appeared on the scene in the fourth phase, multicellular beings and the principle of death appeared in the fifth phase.
The End of Natural Selection
We humans belong to the sixth phase of evolution, which progresses very slowly by way of Darwinian natural selection. But this according to Dyson will soon come to an end, because men like George Church and J. Craig Venter are expected to succeed not only in reading the genome, but also in writing new genomes in the next five to ten years. This would constitute the ultimate "Intelligent Design", pun fully intended. Where this could lead is still difficult to anticipate. Yet Freeman Dyson finds a meaningful illustration. He spent the early nineteen fifties at Princeton, with mathematician John von Neuman, who designed one of the earliest programmable computers. When asked how many computers might be in demand, von Neumann assured him that 18 would be sufficient to meet the demand of a nation like the United States. Now, 55 years later, we are in the middle of the age of physics where computers play an integral role in modern life and culture.
Now though we are entering the age of biology. Soon genetic engineering will shape our daily life to the same extent that computers do today. This sounds like science fiction, but it is already reality in science. Thus genetic engineer George Church talks about the biological building blocks that he is able to synthetically manufacture. It is only a matter of time until we will be able to manufacture organisms that can self-reproduce, he claims. Most notably J. Craig Venter succeeded in introducing a copy of a DNA-based chromosome into a cell, which from then on was controlled by that strand of DNA.
Venter, a suntanned giant with the build of a surfer and the hunting instinct of a captain of industry, understands the magnitude of this feat in microbiology. And he understands the potential of his research to create biofuel from bacteria. He wouldn't dare to say it, but he very well might be a Bill Gates of the age of biology. Venter also understands the moral implications. He approached bioethicist Art Kaplan in the nineties and asked him to do a study on whether in designing a new genome he would raise ethical or religious objections. Not a single religious leader or philosopher involved in the study could find a problem there. Such contract studies are debatable. But here at Eastover Farm scientists dream of a glorious future. Because science as such is morally neutral—every scientific breakthrough can be applied for good or for bad.
The sun is already turning pink behind the treetops, when Dimitar Sasselov, the Bulgarian astronomer from Harvard, once more reminds us how unique and at the same time, how unstable the balance of our terrestrial life is. In our galaxy, astronomers have found roughly one hundred million planets that could theoretically harbor organic life. Not only does Earth not have the best conditions among them; it is actually at the very edge of the spectrum. "Earth is not particularly inhabitable," he says, wrapping up his talk. Here J. Craig Venter cannot help but remark as an idealist: "But it is getting better all the time".
Translated by Karla Taylor
////////////////////////////////RICHARD DAWKINS [8.27.07]
Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The God Delusion
"By Darwinian evolution he [Woese] means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species."
"With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them."
These two quotations from Dyson constitute a classic schoolboy howler, a catastrophic misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution, both as Darwin understood it, and as we understand it today in rather different language, is NOT based on the competition for survival of species. It is based on competition for survival WITHIN species. Darwin would have said competition between individuals within every species. I would say competition between genes within gene pools. The difference between those two ways of putting it is small compared with Dyson's howler (shared by most laymen: it is the howler that I wrote The Selfish Gene partly to dispel, and I thought I had pretty much succeeded, but Dyson obviously hasn't read it!) that natural selection is about the differential survival or extinction of species. Of course the extinction of species is extremely important in the history of life, and there may very well be non-random aspects of it (some species are more likely to go extinct than others) but, although this may in some superficial sense resemble Darwinian selection, it is NOT the selection process that has driven evolution. Moreover, arms races between species constitute an important part of the competitive climate that drives Darwinian evolution. But in, for example, the arms race between predators and prey, or parasites and hosts, the competition that drives evolution is all going on within species. Individual foxes don't compete with rabbits, they compete with other individual foxes within their own species to be the ones that catch the rabbits (I would prefer to rephrase it as competition between genes within the fox gene pool).
The rest of Dyson's piece is interesting, as you'd expect, and there really is an interesting sense in which there is an interlude between two periods of horizontal transfer (and we mustn't forget that bacteria still practise horizontal transfer and have done throughout the time when eucaryotes have been in the 'Interlude'). But the interlude in the middle is not the Darwinian Interlude, it is the Meiosis / Sex / Gene-Pool / Species Interlude. Darwinian selection between genes still goes on during eras of horizontal transfer, just as it does during the Interlude. What happened during the 3-billion-year Interlude is that genes were confined to gene pools and limited to competing with other genes within the same species. Previously (and still in bacteria) they were free to compete with other genes more widely (there was no such thing as a species outside the 'Interlude'). If a new period of horizontal transfer is indeed now dawning through technology, genes may become free to compete with other genes more widely yet again.
As I said, there are fascinating ideas in Freeman Dyson's piece. But it is a huge pity it is marred by such an elementary mistake at the heart of it.
Richard
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FREEMAN DYSON [8.30.07]
Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study, Author, Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe
Dear Richard Dawkins,
Thank you for the E-mail that you sent to John Brockman, saying that I had made a "school-boy howler" when I said that Darwinian evolution was a competition between species rather than between individuals. You also said I obviously had not read The Selfish Gene. In fact I did read your book and disagreed with it for the following reasons.
Here are two replies to your E-mail. The first was a verbal response made immediately when Brockman read your E-mail aloud at a meeting of biologists at his farm. The second was written the following day after thinking more carefully about the question.
First response. What I wrote is not a howler and Dawkins is wrong. Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size. So big steps are most likely when populations are small, giving rise to the ``punctuated equilibrium'' that is seen in the fossil record. The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.
Second response. It is absurd to think that group selection is less important than individual selection. Consider for example Dodo A and Dodo B, competing for mates and progeny in the dodo population on Mauritius. Dodo A competes much better and
has greater fitness, as measured by individual selection. Dodo A mates more often and has many more grandchildren than Dodo B. A hundred years later, the species is extinct and the fitness of A and B are both reduced to zero. Selection operating at the species level trumps selection at the individual level. Selection at the species level wiped out both A and B because the species neglected to maintain the ability to fly, which was essential to survival when human predators appeared on the island. This situation is not peculiar to dodos. It arises throughout the course of evolution, whenever environmental changes cause species to become extinct.
In my opinion, both these responses are valid, but the second one goes more directly to the issue that divides us. Yours sincerely, Freeman Dyson.
/////////////////////////////Harvesting Rainwater by Not Letting It Go to Waste
An illustration of Lancaster's property in 2006 shows that no runoff leaves the site. Street runoff is directed to basins and trees along the curb. All graywater is directed to and recycled within the landscape. With palm trees removed, winter solar access is regained. Courtesy Brad Lancaster
Morning Edition, January 10, 2008 · Big rains slammed the West this week — big news in a region that has gotten used to dry weather.
Now some city governments are looking to rain to ease their water woes.
///////////////////////////////The Science of Siesta: Research Finds That Napping Improves Brain Functioning
Let’s hear it for siesta time. What better news than to hear that taking midday naps are good for your grey matter? Companies that want smarter employees should let them take 90 minute midday nap-time. Researchers at the University of Haifa in cooperation with the Sleep Laboratory at the Sheba Medical Center and researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of Montreal recently concluded that a daytime nap changes the course of consolidation in the brain in several positive...
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