Biology

Catching up on Genetic Dispositions

This entry was posted in Biology Politics Psychology Religion on by

Well, by mistake I decided to read Kristoff’s column from yesterday:

Instead, modern science is turning up a possible reason why the religious right is flourishing and secular liberals aren’t: instinct. It turns out that our DNA may predispose humans toward religious faith.
Via previous education I knew just where to look for the antidote to this stuff and Myers was P.Z. on the spot:
It�s nothing but modern molecular preformationism. Palmistry for the genome. We�ve been fighting against this simplistic notion of the whole of the organism prefigured in a plan or in toto in the embryo since Socrates, and it keeps coming back. We�ve moved from imagining a little homunculus lurking in the sperm to one hiding in the genome. It�s just not there. You can�t point to a spot on a chromosome and say, �there�s the little guy�s finger!�, nor can you point to a spot and say, �there�s his fondness for football!�.
Kristof, for instance, points to a particular gene as the source of piety. Piffle. Here�s his shining locus of sacredness, VMAT2:
It won’t hurt you to read the rest of the post yourself…
Over at Crooked Timber John Quiggen provides additional curative resources by working through some statistical, logical, and definitional failings in Kristoff’s piece and more generally with pop evolutionary psychology.
As usual the comment threads to both posts provided plenty of stimuli for both my chuckle gene and my thinking gene.

Frog Day

This entry was posted in Biology Friday Ark Humor Science on by

Click through at The Presurfer to find out “What Kind of Frog are You?”
Today:
pixiefrog.jpg The African bullfrog, or Pixie frog as it is often called (because of it’s latin name, not because it’s as cute as a fairy!), is one of the largest frogs in South Africa. Usually, they hang out in open grassland, and if there are any to be found, they’ll sit around in puddles. When startled, these frogs will blow up like balloons to scare away the intruder! In the dry season, they will burrow into the ground. These guys eat lots and lots of really big bugs, fish, mice, lizards, and even other frogs.
Or, also courtesy of The Presurfer, if you just want to look at frogs go see a random one.

A Modest Proposal to Solve the Social Security Problem

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There is a guy named Aubrey de Grey who makes some fairly strong arguments that significant human life extension is achievable between 25 and 100 years from now and that it is funding that will make the difference between the low and high end of the range.
So, on the off chance that he is right, let’s make sure he gets adequate funding to achieve the short end of the range. It will take just a fraction of the trillions of dollars involved in Social Security over the next 50-60 years, heck, even a small fraction of this years deficit would likely be enough.
If he is successful then we can convert those future retirees back into into productive participants in the economy and they can support themselves and in the process provide us the option of eliminating the social security system and other retirement plans. There should be significant reductions in age related health care costs as well.
Not everyone thinks de Grey is playing in a full deck or that his goals are admirable. In this Technology Review article popular author and former surgeon Sherwin Nuland sums up a lengthy interview with de Grey by suggesting:

If we are to be destroyed, I am now convinced that it will not be a netural or malevolent force that will do us in, but one that is benevolent in the extreme… If we are ever immolated, it will be by the efforts of well-meaning scientists …
It is a good thing that his grand design will almost certainly not succeed. Were it otherwise he would surely destroy us in attempting to preserve us.
I do recommend the article if you are not familiar with de Grey and his work.
But, beware! Nuland is successful at two things in this article: first, the less than subtle hatchet job that Nuland does on de Grey, partially exemplified in the above quote, is rather unbecoming a respected surgeon and renowned author. Nuland makes it clear early on that he wants to die and he wants it to be sooner, 80-120, rather than later and that he is very uncomfortable even contemplating the change that would be wrought by extending life spans beyond this normal length. So you have to wade through the digs, slams, and slightings to get to the meat.
It is, though, worth the effort because, second, he does introduce us to a fascinating guy with grand ideas, the kind that can both energize and change a world. I plan on spending quite a bit more time reading the material at de Grey’s site and the linked articles.