Genetics collides with human nature - scared yet?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, genetic engineering, crispr, futurism, trends

I try to keep up to date with certain trends, including genetic engineering. When a technical field such as that is so productive and active, however, it is easy to get behind, and even to be blind-sided by developments. Prompted by a friend, I saw a podcast about gene editing, an interview with Jamie Metzl, so I got his latest book, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity. I find the possible futures outlined by the author deeply disturbing, even frightening.

Consider a doctor's visit in 2030; you want to have a baby with your spouse. You have been advised to seek pre-natal screening. You find that, rather than starting the baby with "ordinary" sex, it is now advisable to use In-Vitro Fertilization, followed by egg harvesting, and genetic testing of each of the several embryos thus produced (one cell taken from each embryo). Within a couple of days on a follow-up visit, the doctor shows the two of you a kind of dashboard with dozens of indicators showing how the embryos differ. Some will grow a little taller than the rest; some might be smarter; there are even a few subtle shades of skin color available; and while two embryos are likely to grow to be more intelligent, one of those also carries a significant risk of a troubling birth defect. You can't have everything, but you and your spouse go aside and weigh the options. If none is appealing, you can always try another batch, though it'll double the cost. Once an embryo is chosen, it is implanted and the others are frozen, where they will probably remain until you decide they can be discarded. Consider; this could happen before 2030!

Try to wrap your mind around the possibilities after another ten years: 2040. It is likely by then that you don't need to do egg harvesting from the female spouse; a cheek scraping or a drop of blood contains cells that can be turned into stem cells, and after a further process, thousands of ova, which the male spouse's sperm can fertilize. The dashboard not only has many more embryos to choose from, the number of genetic indicators now numbers in the thousands. Thankfully, the flurry of data has been pre-screened using Artificial Intelligence, and profiles for only a handful of embryos are presented, and for each, the top twenty most-important indicators are shown, though you can drill down into them all if you wish. As before, this process may be available before 2040.

Why would you do this? If, quite literally, everyone is having babies this way, there is great competitive pressure to set your baby up to be smart, strong, long-lived, tall, and good looking. If you take the "primitive way" of "winging it" with "ordinary" sex, you are most likely to have a child who would be average, or hopefully a bit above average (if both spouses are already a little above average). But that child will be way, way below average compared to nearly everyone else. Just by having "average" good health, he or she will pay more in medical insurance premiums, in anticipation of living a shorter life in poorer health than the norm.

Is this the kind of world we want to live in? Will we have a choice?

The bulk of Hacking Darwin explains the literal flood of new technologies being developed right now that portend this kind of future. The competitive nature in all of us ensures that any slight advantage to be gained by these new genetic techniques will be extremely popular. Will they be used by the rich (the first to be able to afford all of the techniques) to produce children who will easily become even richer, leaving the rest of humanity in the dust? They will most certainly try! When "designer babies" (not a new term, but now a reality on the horizon) become affordable for the rich, "Boom!", they'll go for it. A generation later, when the price has dropped to 1% of what it was, the middle class can try to play catch-up, but they'll be a generation behind.

In the last chapter or two of the book the author discusses the kinds of regulations that governments the world over will need to implement to even out the playing field. One look at history tells me he's spitting into a strong wind. Firstly, different nations will adopt different regulations and at different times. The present emotional battles over GM (genetically modified) crops and abortion will be as a friendly game of checkers compared to what will result. Medical tourism is going on now, for procedures that cost less elsewhere (Go to France for a bone marrow transplant, for example, where it costs 1/10 of the cost in the U.S., and the French have a better track record). Genetic tourism will soon be all the rage. Live in a country that outlaws the "big dashboard"? No problem. Take a month's vacation to somewhere less restrictive. Lie through your teeth about why you went…or don't return, if the questioners will be gun-toting officials. 

Put it all together, and an era of post-humanism is rapidly approaching. By 2050 or so, "Engineer your own Baby" kits will be available over-the-counter. By 2100, who will be left that would be recognizable as an "ordinary human" today? Maybe many, maybe few, possibly none. To the friend who suggested I listen to the podcast, I wrote, "I hope Jesus returns while there are still humans to return to."

Do common themes mean common origin?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, early america

We lived in Ohio when I was a teenager. On one occasion we drove downstate to see the Serpent Mound, shown here in a recent view from a drone. We walked all around it and marveled at its size. The linear size is about 540 feet, the length along the approximate arc from tail to head, including the "egg" in its mouth, is about 740 feet, and to walk the full length along the snaking ridge is a bit over a quarter mile, about 1,340 feet. It was apparently constructed of earth carried in baskets and dumped and tamped into place, probably about 2,300 years ago, but maybe much earlier.

A detailed study of the construction, timing, and significance of Serpent Mound, located in Adams County, Ohio, opens the latest book by Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to America's Lost Civilization. Researchers he consulted while visiting the mound have reached the conclusion that a mound of some kind was first built about 5,000 years ago, and extensively renovated centuries later, perhaps twice. 

Pay attention to the oval and the "mouth" of the serpent at the upper-right corner of the picture. From the apex of the "jaws" through the center of the oval, the sight line intersects the horizon at the location of the Summer Solstice Sunset. However, it is not exactly the sunset point today. The earth's axis shifts a little, a degree or two, over many centuries. That sight line more accurately picks out a point on the horizon where the solstice sunset was about 3,500 years ago, plus or minus a century or two. That is the most likely era of the first "reconstruction" of an ancient mound that was already about 1,500 years old.

This mound is just the most spectacular of the "monuments" left by the "mound builders" of early North America. There were once hundreds of thousands of mounds and mound complexes, mostly in the continent's midsection, from Louisiana northward. Most have been plowed over. Several hundred are left, in various conditions, and traces of thousands more can be seen using radar or lidar. For decades the "archaeological establishment" has claimed that they were not so very old, at most a couple of thousand years. That view remains among a few archaeologists, mostly those who call Graham Hancock a "pseudoarchaeologist". But many, many more "real" archaeologists have gathered evidence for much greater age, and a greater range of ages, for these mysterious structures.

A guiding theme of America Before is that many major cultural paradigms seem to have been inherited from one older (much older) civilization. Evidence is seen in the astronomical alignments found in many ancient structures in both North and South America, and in Europe and Africa. Whether Stonehenge in England is actually a big calculator for predicting eclipses or not (I think it is, but I'm probably in the minority), what is certain is that it contains several notable alignments with equinoctial and solstitial sunrise, sunset, and also the extrema of the lunar cycle. Further, there is the similarity of funerary practices and beliefs between cultures of the late stone age around the world, most importantly the belief that the soul of the recently-deceased undergoes a journey among the stars, beginning in the constellation of Orion, and proceeding along the Milky Way, with ordeals and a final test that may result in either blessing or obliteration. There is also much mention of similar geometric features to be found world-wide in funerary and ritual art, such as collections of squares, circles, and triangles, and also squares inscribed in circles or vice versa.

I do not wish to be dismissive, but I don't find the geometry arguments very interesting. I used to experiment with pressing on my closed eyelids to see phosphenes. After some initial fireworks, various geometric patterns typically followed. Many of these look like the artwork used to claim cultural similarity. Apparently such patterns are also seen when under the influence of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drug of the Americas, one of several related drugs used worldwide. I see such phenomena as rooted in common structures in the retina and brain, not in cultural dissemination or inheritance.

Considering the journey of the soul, the phenomena described in books such as Life After Life by Raymond Moody (1975) may have a common basis in biology, not culture. Regardless of culture or religion, the experience of a "white tunnel" and a meeting with an awesome being, whether a loving one or judging one, very frequently accompany near-death experiences. I know a few people who have had such experiences. Whether they "prove" an afterlife, or are also rooted in "what the brain does when shutting down", these experiences can lead to soul-journey myths regardless of culture.

The connection with Orion is an interesting feature. The big Hunter in the sky is the brightest constellation, and its proximity to the Milky Way is suggestive that it might be related to a "soul road". The constellation is just south of the Sun's path on the sky, tucked below and between Gemini and Taurus. Its southernmost bright stars, Rigel and Saiph, are just under 30° south of the Sun's path, which means that ancient people all along middle North America and North Africa, at a latitude of about 30° north, would see either of these stars as a first step to the "sword" of the hunter, and up to its belt, which leads to the Milky Way, just a bit farther in that direction. I think it is significant that the three biggest pyramids at Giza, and a couple of other sets of three large pyramids or mounds in the Americas, seem to echo the belt of Orion. Such an "as above, so below" theme is a common reaction to the beauty of the sky.

A fun side note: when I was about ten, I was given a couple of sheets of glow-in-the-dark stars to stick on the walls and ceiling of my bedroom. I was already very interested in astronomy, so I used a cheap sky-sighting viewer that was available for $1 from Edmund Scientific, to locate stars of appropriate size such that when my head was on my pillow, my room appeared as the mid-Autumn sky. It took days!

Given that the sky was a much more evident presence at any time prior to the invention of street lights, and the fascination nearly everyone has with the sky when they get under a really dark, clear sky, the shapes seen in it were once a common inheritance of all peoples.

So we come to the theme of the book. Was there a high civilization in the ice age, before some 13,000 years ago? This seems to be a theme of Mr. Hancock's life. If such a civilization existed, and it was centered in North America, a comet-induced extinction event seems to have wiped out all evidence for it. Much of the book discusses the Younger Dryas period, which began with abrupt cooling of the Earth around 12,800 years ago. Whatever else was driven to extinction at this time, the Clovis culture was extirpated; it was once thought to represent the earliest human settlements in the Americas.

These distinctive fluted Clovis stone points are unique, found nowhere (and nowhen) else. We don't know what preceded them. They are found only below a soil horizon called the Black Mat, that represents continent-wide, and perhaps global, burning of vegetation, that occurred intensively for about two years around 12,800 years ago. According to evidence found in ice cores from Greenland, the burning interval was 12,830-12,828 years before 2018, or 10,813-10,811 BCE (noting that there is no "year zero").

There are numerous proxies of cometary impact, including nanodiamonds and a spike in abundance of platinum and iridium, found from 12,836-12,815 years ago, or 10,819-10,798 BCE. Author Hancock, following others, posits a series of impacts from a comet that broke up, possibly one associated with the Taurid meteor stream, leading to about 8 major impacts by multi-kilometer ice-and-rock bodies and many more smaller impacts. Maps in the book show an impacted area across all of North America and reaching to mid-Europe. Considering that the Laurentide ice sheet was still partially present, still melting in a relatively "new" interglacial interval, these impacts are presumed to have mainly blasted out large masses of ice.

There is a further set of geomorphological features that may indicate just such an "ice splash". This map from the book (p. 414) shows a possible oblique crater that we now call Saginaw Bay, in Michigan, and the "butterfly pattern" of splashed-out ice that would result from impact of a multi-km scale impact on a glacier a mile or two thick.

The "East Arc" corresponds to features called the Carolina Bays in the Carolinas, and by several other names in Delaware, Maryland, Georgia and Florida. The "West Arc" corresponds to the Nebraska Rainwater Basins. Areas north of the line marked "Extent of Ice Sheet" should have no remaining features because the chunks of ice landed on thick ice.

Geomorphologists and others who pooh-pooh the idea of such an ice splash claim the Bays and Basins are fluvial features somehow related to sand ripples, caused by rapid melting of the ice cap. Note, however, that the Carolina Bays, as seen in this aerial photo, are oriented northwesterly, as they should be due to oblique impact of big chunks of ice coming from Saginaw Bay, and the Nebraska Basins are oriented northeasterly, also pointing toward Saginaw Bay. They only occur where there were thick, soft sediments.

I know something about fluvial structures, having interned on several very interesting projects while studying Geology in graduate school. This picture shows an area of the Channelled Scablands in Washington State. These are fluvial, scoured out by rapid melting of the ice sheet. There are no series of oriented ovals.

Thus, so far as physical evidence goes, it is pretty clear to me, and to anyone who doesn't have an axe to grind, that a 21-year bombardment by a fractured comet is the best explanation of these and many other features, and that the timing of other impact evidence does explain the sudden end of the Clovis culture in America.

Other matters, such as what preceded Clovis, include evidence going back at least 30,000 years, and perhaps much longer (130,000 y!). I have long thought that there was more than one "immigration pulse" to the Americas, and that walking along a Bering Strait land bridge, exposed by lowered sea levels, was just one possibility. Coastal navigation in rafts or boats is another. Humans have been seafaring for at least 50,000 years; witness the peopling of Australia, which could never have been accomplished by walking. Such things are not yet clear enough to draw firm conclusions.

Late chapters take a different turn, and there the author leaves me. He posits spiritual things, even a "psychic technology" that he calls on to explain features of certain megalithic monuments. Let me state that as a Christian who knows the Bible well, I do not discount that some psychic phenomena may indeed be possible. However, rather than dig into that here, let me refer an interested reader to The Latent Power of the Soul by Watchman Nee. Mr. Nee discusses the scanty descriptions of human abilities before the "fall of Adam", and considers that certain extraordinary powers have been "imprisoned" in the human body. If we all could easily accomplish telepathy and telekinesis, we would be so dangerous to one another that the human species would have been wiped out within the first generation from the time these powers were attained. Occultic practices are attempts to subdue the body in various ways so as to regain these forbidden powers. Fortunately, they don't work very well. To any atheist or agnostic reading this: understand that any Bible-believing Christian who takes the faith seriously believes there are actual entities such as demons and angels (separate orders of being) and that God permits certain miracles to be performed. But in this era in particular, supernatural phenomena are severely restricted, as the New Testament writers predicted.

Mr. Hancock dives deep into such things, with very little to go on but speculation. In that regard, I think he is not really a "pseudo-" anything, but just dramatically wrong in this regard. He is no charlatan, and he is no "pseudoarchaeologist". He is as "real" an archaeologist as the more "official" crowd, with numerous ideas about physical archaeology and geology that the rest ought to follow up. He points out (with relish) how wrong the "in crowd" have been in the past, such as with the "Clovis First" theory, which is now quite out of date. We have verified evidence for pre-Clovis people in the Americas 25,000-30,000 years ago. We also have plenty of evidence that the Amazon basin was gardened using biochar for thousands of years. With much left to find, it would be best for the "established" scientists to dig deeper than their prejudices. Much deeper.

Science Fiction trial balloons

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, triple review

Hunting among e-books for science fiction short stories I came across a low-cost set of three small books by Celesta Thiessen. I got them and I thoroughly enjoyed them. First, some stats:

A "page" comes to about four screens on my phone. With all but four stories in the one-to-three page range, these are "short shorts"; most "short stories" exceed 10 pages.

The three books, all self-published by the author in 2013, are Science Fiction Short Stories (8 stories, including the 7- and 10-page stories), Sci Fi Short Stories (8 stories, including the 16-page story), and Apocalyptic and Dystopian Tales (14 stories, including four of the six one-pagers).

The range of ideas is impressive. There is an unusual take on the invention of a Faster-than-Light spacecraft, a vampire (this is implied) seeking life "in the light", stories of research gone awry or going right, one that ends in nuclear incineration, and several either about or from the viewpoint of Christians and other religious minorities under persecution. Many stories feature acceptance or forgiveness. One story ends with a quotation from Revelation. From a quick look at her website I see that the author is an ardent Christian. Her stories reveal that she is pessimistic about the future of liberty on Earth. But then, so was the Apostle John when he wrote Revelation.

The shorter pieces take the notion of High Concept to a new level, being intensely focused on outlining a new idea. I re-read most of them to firm up my impression that they are test projects for material to work into longer stories or books. Indeed, one story, "Research" in Apocalyptic and Dystopian Tales, is followed by the suggestion to get the novel Hope & Shiny Things (It's out of print and I find no e-book. I'll put it on a want list). I like Ms Thiessen's writing: straightforward, unpretentious narratives that either pose a problem and solve it (John Campbell's dictum) or show why not.

The population bomb goes PFFT

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, population, demographics, futuristics

As Yogi Berra (probably) said, "Prediction is hard, especially about the future." That doesn't seem to stop anyone. When I was growing up, projections of future gloom and doom, particularly about population, were periodical literature. Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb was a best-seller in 1968. The Club of Rome issued Limits to Growth in 1972.  As recently as 2015 we have The End of Plenty by Joel Bourne. Much further back, the "granddaddy of gloomy prophets" is probably Thomas Malthus, with An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, in 1798.

All of these based their predictions on the fact that population grows exponentially while agricultural productivity grows linearly. Each author called on us to expect disaster within a generation. However, 8 or 9 generations have passed since Malthus wrote, and about 2 generations since Ehrlich. Not only haven't we starved to death, the population has risen from just under a billion in 1798 to almost 7.8 billion today (late 2020), yet the proportion of that population who are starving is at a historic low, and there is actually abundant food for all, but corrupt governments and failed states are responsible for every food shortage that currently exists.

What happened to all the predictions? This chart, from The World in Data, sums up one factor nicely:

The curves after 2019 are a projection. Note the peak of the pink curve, which shows the global rate of population growth. That peak was in 1968, when Dr. Ehrlich's book was published. I wonder if he takes credit for the dramatic reduction in growth rate that followed. Had a growth rate of 2.1%/year (actually 2.08%) continued for the next 52 years, world population today would be not 7.8 billion but nearly 10.4 billion.

However, it is critical to understand that 2.1%, or any other figure on this chart, is not the birth rate, but births minus deaths. In those years, birth rate was around 3.7%/year, but that is not the criterion that economists use to calculate future population. That is fertility, or the number of births per woman, a lifetime figure. Projecting the chart above further into the future, its authors would conclude that the global population growth rate would reach zero about the year 2130, and then go into negative territory, meaning that population would begin to fall below a peak that they expect to be just above 11 billion.

The fertility of the whole world expected by the chart's authors in 2130 would be 2.1 births per woman, which is called "replacement rate". If nobody died before adulthood, a fertility of 2.0 would provide full replacement, but of course some do. In a much safer world, perhaps replacement fertility could be 2.05 or less.

The second factor is, I would say, a series of "white swans" (as opposed to "black swans", which are unpleasant surprises) in agriculture. In the Parable of the Soils (Matthew 13:1-23), Jesus speaks of the "good ground" yielding fruit 30-, 60-, or 100-fold. Thirty-fold harvests were good for the time, and 60- to 100-fold harvests must have seemed incredible to the disciples. Grain harvests today exceed 300-fold. That is just one element in the agri-revolution that can feed 8 billion right now. Another is factory farming; some hate it but you can't argue with the results. Land that once couldn't be farmed, is now arable, cranking out those huge harvests.

One final point before getting to the current book. The wiggles in the growth curve above represent generational trends. The upward burst after 1910 shows the effect of public health measures that led to safer water and less cholera and malaria; a steepening in the 1940's is the "baby boom" that affected mainly the West; the near-plateau about 1950-55 shows the "birth dearth" after decolonization and the breakup of the British, French, Portuguese and other empires; the "pop-up" that peaked in 1968 and then fell just as rapidly shows the twin effects of the X Generation's births followed by "the pill"; and then the blips in the 1980's and early 2000's are late "echoes" of the Baby Boom, which produced the Millennials (Y Generation) and the Z Generation. But the continuing trend of lower growth rate remains to be explained, and that is the job of today' authors.

Authors Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson are not economists, but they think like economists. Their book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline analyzes the data used by the authors of the above chart, and even more the data and reports published by the United Nations, on the population trends that the U.N. expects for the rest of this Century. To be blunt, Bricker and Ibbitson claim the above chart is incorrect, that the growth rate is most likely to fall to zero and below by about 2050, and that world population will barely exceed 9 billion in that year, and perhaps not even that. They expect world population in 2100 to be close to what it is today, or a little less, and that it will continue to fall.

They base their contentions on a thorough study of trends in many regions and countries. The biggest factor in fertility is education, particularly education of women. The big trend that underlies access to education is urbanization. In 2007, for the first time, more than half the world population lived in cities on in major urban areas. By 2050, this proportion could reach 2/3 (67%) or more. The US and other Western nations hit 50% in the 1920's. Quite a number of countries, mostly smaller ones, are 100% urban, which means they import all their food.

The two biggest countries, by population, are China and India. Chinese urbanization is 61.4% as of early 2020, and India's is 34.9; both are rising fast. Urban, educated people have low fertility; in nearly all nations with large urban populations, fertility is between 1.5 and 1.9. Even in rural areas, which show higher fertility, education is spreading such that there are few places with fertility greater than 3.

The authors write of many things, but emphasize just a few: educated women learn how to control the number of children they have and more of them aspire to a career, so they put off having children, which also reduces the number of children they might bear; and while children on a farm are a benefit—grow your own farm workers!—in a city they are unproductive mouths to feed and their post-secondary education is very costly. For urban people, small families are a survival strategy. Talk to ten millennials; it will be hard to find more than two who think they will have any children, and certainly not before age 30 or 35.

What will happen in the long run? Let us suppose that the year 2100 is ushered in by just 7 billion earthlings, and with a fertility well below replacement, in the range of 1.6, population will continue do decrease. It's not a bad picture, actually. There will be less pollution, global warming will be (or will soon be) a thing of the past, and less of the Earth will be needed for farmland.

Until then, for some countries at least, immigration can ameliorate the problems of an aging population. But eventually there will be few immigrants. However, is decreasing population a disaster, as the authors claim? The biggest problem with a decreasing population is that it is an aging population, and old people need more services, and not just medical. When there aren't enough younger folk available to perform those services, then what?

I expect a "gig economy" to arise for the semi-retired. The healthy ones can do things for those who need it (or are willing to pay for things they just don't want to do). For example, we have a neighbor, a widow in failing health, aged 81. She has a caretaker to lives with her part of the time, for a few days at a time, a woman aged 83 in robust good health! If my wife and I get too frail (or too fed up) to mow our lawn any more, we might employ a lawn care company, or we might look on Craigslist or a similar place for a retiree who likes mowing lawns for a fair price. He or she may be slower at it than the young fellow with a 48-inch riding mower, but I bet more careful. In their dotage, my parents employed a gardener who was older than they, but healthier. I could go on…

Every book I've read on these subjects is based on the premise that continued growth is a requirement for economic health. Where are the economists who are planning what is needed for a future in which the "growth rate" of a country's or planet's GDP is negative? We do have a couple of points of reference. One is the Black Death that removed a third of the population of Europe. Once the survivors got everyone buried and began to pick up the pieces, they found lots of land and "stuff" left behind for the taking, and there was an economic boom. The current Covid pandemic isn't likely to have nearly as great an effect (death rate overall is less than 1%, not 35%), and we don't expect any sudden drop in population to disrupt society the way the Black Death did. With a slower, gradual decrease we can adapt, and it is likely that we are adaptable enough to adjust and thrive.

One production value I must commend: the end notes are all references, with hardly any "extended explanations." I prefer that; if an author has something worth writing about, it is worth putting in the text. When I find that a book's end notes are full of added material, I put a second book mark there, so I can refer to an end note on-the-spot to see what else was written, and read it while the referring material is fresh in my mind. I prefer not to have to do that.

Sturgeon's Law validated

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, fictional influences, science, technology

I don't recall the year that famed science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon took a friend to a conference about science fiction and science fiction writing. In the middle of yet another lecture, the friend said in an aside to Sturgeon, "This stuff is 90% junk!". Sturgeon replied, sotto voce, "90% of everything is junk!" This anecdote has been retold and reprinted numerous times, and Sturgeon's reply has attained the status of a folkloric law.

Joel Levy, author of Reality Ahead of Schedule: How Science Fiction Inspires Science Fact, wasn't setting out to do anything at all related to Sturgeon's Law, but has validated it by omission. The 18 chapters of the book present historical reviews of subjects in five areas, Military, Lifestyle, Space Transport, Medicine, and Communications; all the subjects, including lasers, 3-D printing, self-driving autos, antidepressants and the Internet, were foreshadowed in fiction between a few decades to two centuries ago. For example, there is a clear correlation between the discovery of X-rays by Roentgen in 1895 and a great increase in the use of "ray gun" weapons in fiction. The actual development of lasers in 1960 led to a further increase  and more focused speculation (the "phasers" of Star Trek, for example). Many inventors have confessed to being inspired by science fiction.

It was fascinating to read of the many prescient writers of past generations. I already knew of the prediction of synchronous satellite communications by Arthur C. Clarke, also the author of Sentinel, the story that was made into the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 also has one of many stories of computers becoming self-aware and running amok. He and Jules Verne are examples of writers who knew science and were careful to use it well, avoiding outright fantasy.

In a period of self-imposed exile, during about two years I read every science fiction volume in the city library where I lived. Thereafter, I became more selective in my reading, but I continue to read a certain amount of science fiction, half a century later. I know the field rather well. The author of Reality Ahead has unearthed quite a number of authors and stories I hadn't encountered, but also omitted a great many others, stories that have gripping tales, interesting speculative technology, and sympathetic characters, but that haven't inspired much of anything in today's science or technology. I don't fault him for such omissions.

Of course, we have to set aside all the variations of faster-than-light travel, mentalism (such as psychokinesis or telepathy), and direct use of materials such as neutronium. And while Isaac Asimov became rightly famous for setting up the Three Laws of Robotics, hardly anyone has pointed out that most of his stories about robots were actually exploring neuroses, such as people dealing with neurotic robots, or neurotic people faced with utterly stable robots. I wonder if there is a book in the works about Asimov's influence on psychiatry?

Now, what validates Sturgeon's Law? The fact that 90+% of science fiction doesn't foreshadow anything. Many, many stories shelved as science fiction are more about wish fulfillment or coming of age with only the vaguest reference to anything technical. Many others I call "psychological science fiction", exploring mental aberrations but with less expertise than Asimov had. A look at my local library reveals that a majority of modern "science fiction" is sword-and-sorcery, just set on other planets or on a purported future Earth, and the "technology" is more magical or fantastical than scientific. A few years ago the local library stopped distinguishing between science fiction and fantasy; now they shelve them together.

Once in a while I encounter some real, solid, fiction with a scientific basis that works with known physics, or that at least explains extensions of physics needed to make "new stuff" work. That is the most satisfying to me.

All that aside, I enjoyed the book. Great writers such as Verne, Wells, Gernsback and Clarke were careful to write plausibly, while stretching the limits of that plausibility. Sometimes, they hit the nail on the head. Joel Levy found a lot of those "nails".

Is anthropomor-fear finally behind us?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoology, animal studies, cognition

By one common definition, Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. Among zoologists, it has been considered a serious fallacy to use "anthropomorphic language" when speaking about animal behavior and the possible "internal state" of an animal. The fear of making animals "too human" has actually held back the valid study of animal thought and behavior, purposes, and feelings for more than a century.

The recent book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Franz de Waal, is a kind of manifesto that explores and validates studies of the ability of many species of animal to plan, use tools, make tools and even toolkits, deceive one another (and experimenters), and think in all sorts of ways that we, in our hubris, have long denied they can do.

Consider the opening story, of a female chimpanzee who takes straw bedding outside her sleeping enclosure, where we must surmise she expects to encounter chilly conditions. Dr. de Waal expresses the surprise he felt when she first did this. It was entirely unexpected. Later in the book we find that creatures as small as some spiders can also anticipate future conditions and make plans to deal with them. They are not just acting by "instinct," a term for which I have not encountered a satisfactory definition or explanation.

As a college student taking the occasional course in biology (I was a chemistry major at first, later a geology major), I heard the typical series of canards, that "animals will never do" something or other. When Jane Goodall reported tool creation and use by chimpanzees, Louis Leakey wrote, "…scientists are faced with three choices: They must accept chimpanzees as man, they must redefine man, or they must redefine tool." That was in 1967. Have we learned anything in the past half-century? Some have, but I fear most haven't. The author writes, "We routinely deny [animals] capacities that we take for granted in ourselves." (p. 7) He calls this attitude anthropodenial. (p. 30)

Some may be willing to "move the goalposts" a little, saying that chimps and perhaps other apes might do these things, but zoologists and naturalists continue to report more and more species that make and use tools, including crows, elephants, sea otters, and octopuses. Would Louis Leakey advocate accepting octopuses as humans? The brain of an octopus is only partly localized; most of it is spread through the body, such that a severed arm can move about on its own for quite a while. How can a human and an octopus "get into each other's heads", when those heads are so different? But scientists are trying.

Rather than belabor examples, let me come to his most useful conclusion: "There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival." So, whether the cognition of a snail, for example, is "simpler" than ours, all we can say for certain is that it is different. Snails aren't as social as we are, for example, but they do prefer the company of their kind, unlike most felines, which prefer solitude and only meet to mate or fight. Whatever amount of brains they need, however, snails are certainly a successful group of species: by the latest count there are about 70,000 species of them, and half of those are terrestrial, the land snails and tree snails. There is only one species of human.

I wonder how our best athletes would fare in a track meet proctored by cheetahs or antelopes, both of which can run faster than 50 mph? How about a rock-climbing meet, competing with bighorn sheep? Could we compete in color discrimination with snapping shrimp, which have ten kinds of color receptors in their eyes, whereas we have four (one works in low light, the other three by daylight)? We have a hard time seeing in murky water. Bullfrogs can see infrared light, which cuts through the murk better. Many creatures also see ultraviolet light that we can't see. Different senses (there are many more!) mean that animals sense a world we don't sense, and so to cope with it they must think thoughts we don't think, and cannot think.

What about feelings? Ask any pet owner. We all know dogs are very loving. Cats? usually not so much, but some are and some aren't (kind of like many people). And take a look at these three animals, rescues, who turn to one another for companionship and comfort.

When we lived in Oklahoma, one of the farmers that lived a few miles north of town plowed with draft horses. He said, "Their feed costs less than gasoline for a tractor, they start right up on a cold morning, and they greet me enthusiastically every day." I've seen his horses rubbing against him with great affection. There's no other way to describe it. I've also seen a very resentful look on our cat's face when we must delay giving her a meal or a treat, if the delay goes on too long. Yes, I know cats don't have so mobile a face as humans, but they can show feelings, and we soon learn to "read" them. Dr. de Waals reports lab studies that also show now emotional animals are.

This points up a contention I have long had, which the book notes in its own way, that it is quite logical to attribute thinking and feeling to animals that is similar to ours, because we came from them. Our feelings didn't arise by magic when our brains grew to a size of 3 pounds. Great apes, with their one-pound brains have the same feelings, and probably with nearly equal intensity. But they also can show remarkable self-restraint. When we say someone is "behaving like an animal", we are condemning lack of self-control. Actually, many animals are better at that than most people!

I also understand why so many people are unwilling to allow that any animals have a self-concept, or thinking ability. Some still claim they don't feel pain the way we do. Why is this? It is so our conscience won't feel bad when we abuse them. That explains nearly everything about poor treatment of animals. Maybe this book and others sure to follow will begin to break the logjam of scientific opinion and, even more, the thick-headed attitude that we can treat other thinking and feeling creatures just any way we like.

Truth be told, there are at least a few billion political views

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, political science, textbooks

In addition to The Politics Book, which I reviewed about two weeks ago, I got Political Science for Dummies, by Marcus A. Stadelmann, PhD. The former book is mainly on the practical side, presenting history and practice. This book is more theoretical, plus broader in scope, because it deals more with international politics, and it is not until the fourth section (Chapters 14-17) that we find an explanation of the development of modern political camps across the spectrum. It is also more "textbook-y", and thus less pleasant to read, but I got through it.

When I took a Civics course in Seventh Grade, we learned this political spectrum, from Left to Right:

Radical – Liberal – Moderate – Conservative – Reactionary

However, other terms, that perhaps belong on different spectra, have showed up and are being bandied about as though people understood them. I suspect most do not. I see terms such as Progressive, Fascist, Authoritarian, and Totalitarian. We also hear much lately about Socialism, a little about Communism, and even less about Capitalism.

From my reading in recent months, and particularly from Chapters 16 and 17, I learned that modern Conservatism (I'll skip the fancy font from here on), in the U.S. at least, is derived from Classical Liberalism; that Pre-FDR Conservatism was a kind of Fascism in disguise; that Progressivism in the time of Teddy Roosevelt was a Moderate-and-rightward stance, which Wilson moved leftward, and FDR moved even further leftward, almost into Radicalism. That shift was carried out primarily in the Democratic Party, which in the early 1800's was so pro-Slavery that the Civil War resulted, and which created Jim Crow America for about 80 years, but then morphed into a super-Liberal party by embracing the Civil Rights Movement (mainly after the murder of Dr. King), jumping in front of that parade as though they'd created it. This movement to the Left had the result that the Republican Party, which was originally Liberal in the Classical Liberal sense, was labeled Conservative. Republicans eventually embraced the label. But from about 1940 to 1970, it was hard to tell who was a Liberal and who was a Conservative, even with a scorecard.

(Side note: A Conservative conserves, keeping what works already, and making change slowly. Environmentalism is at its core a Conservative value, for example. Liberalism is more about freedom than about change, but Liberals are more willing to embrace change, particularly in the direction of more freedom for a greater number. Progressivism as now practiced is for changing everything, discarding the old regardless of its possible value.)

The left-shift of the D party, while the R party largely stayed put, has been called "switching places", but that's only if you accept that the midpoint between the political stance of the R's and the D's has been a straight line through time axis. It was anything but.

Where do Socialism and Capitalism come in? They are not political entities, but economic. When Marx and Engels published their theory of Communism in The Communist Manifesto, more than 170 years ago, they thought a changeover to Communism would be almost automatic. As it turned out, Socialism is so against the grain of human nature that it has to be enforced, and Communism as they envisioned it was rendered moot by welfare programs that modified Capitalism without eliminating it. So Communism changed, primarily under the iron thumb of Joseph Stalin, leading to the modern understanding that Socialism has to be enforced by a strong central government, and such enforcement is Communism. I am reminded of this statement:

If people were perfect, Socialism would work; but if people were perfect, Socialism wouldn't be needed. (No source found)

I do know who said this:

If a man under age thirty is not a Socialist, he has no heart. If a man over forty is still a Socialist, he has no head. —Winston Churchill

Politics and Economics overlap, and feed on one another. Why? I summarize them thus:

• Politics is about the use of power (I like to say, it is about forcing people to do what most people will do anyway)
• Economics is about the allocation of money (more broadly, resources)

Money by itself is useless, unless you have the power to make use of it. Power by itself is useless, if you can't afford to engage it. They need each other.

By taking a step back, we can identify the core tenets of true Liberalism, now called Conservatism in the U.S.:

• Liberty for persons, independent of one's citizenship.
• Minimal government interference in the private affairs of persons.
• Each person is responsible for his or her own decisions and actions. Corollaries:
• If such actions result in damage to another, the government may sanction the offender.
• Persons may request legal remedies for damages against an offender.
• Taxation is kept to the minimum required to carry out governmental functions.

Those last few items indicate that some amount of government is necessary, to prevent anarchy, or the rule (at least locally) by the strongest. How the powers of government are defined and shared with the people are the subject of most political writings. The usual framework is that laid out by Aristotle nearly 2,400 years ago. Without getting into the details here, the usual, and growing, preferred form of government is the Constitutional Republic, in which the Constitution defines the power-sharing arrangement. Long ago I learned this proverb about the difference between Republicanism (representative Democracy) and Communism:

In a Democratic Republic, whatever is not forbidden is allowed. In a Communist Dictatorship, whatever is not mandatory is forbidden.

Look at the four items listed above, ignoring for the moment the two sub-points. More could be added, but these are sufficient to show that modern American Conservatism has taken the mantle of Classical Liberalism, and still holds it.

A conclusion the book's author reaches echoes that of a number of philosophers of politics: while many nations carry on republicanism within their borders, the world as a whole is anarchical, in which the nations, thought of as persons with a great variation in power and control, act selfishly. Although wars for territorial acquisition are now outlawed by (mostly) general agreement (AKA treaties held by the United Nations), other kinds of wars happen. These days war is more likely to occur along ideological lines. Thus, we've been in a slow-burning World War III since the first set of attacks by Muslim extremists against America in the late 1990's. The attacks of 9/11/2001 were their main successful "battle". Don't think Radical Islam has given up. They've been beaten back temporarily. If nothing else works, Islam in general has a program of outbreeding the rest of the world until it can become the new superpower.

Looking inward, I find that, while I have thought of myself as Conservative for decades, I find I am actually a Liberal, in the classical sense. In the U.S. I pass for Conservative, but I suspect my political and economic views are considered Liberal and Capitalist in the rest of the world.

Those being called "Liberal" by the "Conservative" talk show hosts aren't Liberals, not really. They are Totalitarians. Consider the four points above again, with their contrasts:

• Individual Liberty versus Nanny Statism that "protects" people from themselves.
• Minimal governmental interference versus Total government control.
• Personal responsibility versus Universal guilt.
• Minimal taxation versus Income redistribution.

The items on the right are the fundamental tenets of the leaders of today's Democratic Party. That is about as far from Liberalism as you can get. Politically, it is Fascism. Economically, it is Communism.

I have done more ranting than reviewing here. I'm not ashamed of that. The current state of affairs is worth a good rant. This book just gave me the tools to rant more accurately.

An anchor of my life has been removed

kw: memorials, photo essays, photographs

Those of us lucky enough to grow up with an active, extended have wonderful "home-grown friends," our cousins and their parents. The boy cousin on my father's side, whom I called Gordon, was the only son of my father's sister Martha and her husband Jim Noyes. They were a stalwart Christian family, and I learned I could rely on "Uncle Jim and Aunt Martha" for counsel and valuable advice, which I sorely needed a few times.

Martha was born October 17, 1919. She passed away earlier today, November 13, 2020, age 101. After my father died 2½ years ago, preceded by my mother in 2004, Martha was my last connection to her generation.

This kind of infant photo was very popular at the time, and for a generation or two earlier. I have a photo like this of her mother, my grandmother.

In this photo Martha and her brother Buddy or Bud, my father Jim, are about six and four years old, respectively. They were close all their lives. Cute kids!

About fifteen years later she had grown into a beauty. She and a Navy man, Jim Noyes, were married October 22, 1940. They were married 58 years.

Here, Martha and Jim's son Gordon is the small boy on the lap of our great-grandfather J.G. Nye. His daughter Inez, our grandmother, is at the far right and her husband Earl, our grandfather, is in back, near center, next to Jim Noyes. 

My mother and father are at far left, and I am in my father's arms. Martha is next to her father, peeking between my dad's cousin Paul and his wife.

This picture was taken about 1950 in Alhambra, California.

This is how I remember Jim and Martha, once their son and I were young adults, and I was still living in California and could see them frequently. Later when I was there on a business trip I would see them.

I remember going to church with them a couple of times, years earlier, when I would stay over for a visit. My family was Methodist, and in that near-Episcopal tradition, "God's frozen chosen", church services were quiet, and sermons were more like lectures.

The Noyes family went to a Baptist church, the congregation was more vocal, and the preacher could do Fire-n-Brimstone with the best of them. I was impressed, and perhaps a little apprehensive.

I don't know when it was; a few years earlier when I was still in high school, the family spent a year in India. Although it was business-related for Jim, they took advantage of the opportunity to work with missionaries on Gospel work. Later they also spent a few months in Israel using Christian films to proclaim the Gospel.

These two pictures, taken in 1990 and 1996, show Martha and Jim and my parents together, first as new retirees, and then at my parents' Fiftieth Anniversary party. The other couple at their table are my mom's sister and her husband.

After my father passed away early in 2018 my brothers and I and other relatives went to Fremont, California, where Martha lived after her husband died in 1998.

This picture was taken in her assisted living facility in Fremont, where we held a memorial for my father. Here she is talking to my wife and a few others, wearing an expression I like, her "I'm messing with your mind" look. I don't recall what she had just said.

We promised to return the following year for her birthday.

Many of us went to Fremont the following year for her hundredth birthday. A party for her was held in the recreation hall of the church she attended.

Here she is, wearing a little crown. She has two grandsons. One is at the second "0" in "100", and the other at the far left, behind a family friend holding a guinea pig. The others are some of the 100 or more people who came to the party. Martha was a kind of mother hen and spiritual adviser to many, many people.

Finally, back at her living facility, we got this photo of Martha with my brothers and I, plus her grandsons and other relatives and friends including our son (in purple).

Monday this week she called me to tell me "Happy Birthday". One of her grandsons had been keeping us up to date on her failing condition. She sounded a little weak, but still quite clear. I am so glad for that phone call.

May God richly reward her for something like ninety years of faithful and loving service to Him.

Politics in a nutshell

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, textbooks

As the 2020 general election approached, I found myself reading about political science, and getting confused. As one proverb has it, the two major American political parties "switched sides" a half-century ago. I found this isn't strictly true. I knew already that the Republican Party was originally liberal, with "liberal" referring to personal liberty for individuals, and that from that stance, slaves were individuals who deserved liberty. The Democratic Party of the time was considered conservative, focusing on "conserve" what is and don't change it.

Then I learned that classical liberals stood for several critical matters, principally:

• Individual Liberty
• Personal Responsibility
• Small Government
• Low Taxes

Furthermore, classical liberalism was most prevalent in England in the 1600's, and came to America where it became American conservatism over the next century or so. The four matters listed above are considered "conservative" by modern commentators.

So did the R's and the D's really switch sides? No, in the post-WW2 period, when the civil rights movement began to prevail, leading Democrats were against integration of society and defended the Jim Crow legislation that subjugated the Blacks. But after about 1970, the D's changed. The earlier tension during anti-war (anti-Vietnam war) demonstrations, between "America, love it or leave it!" and "America, change it or lose it!", led to the "change it" folks going to law school and running for office. These neoliberals—they avoid the term "radicals"—have since taken over the Democratic Party and embraced the label "liberal", seeing that the Republican Party had settled into being called "conservatives". Classically, the R's have actually remained liberal, as the term is properly defined, while the D's jumped two spaces to the left to become radicals. As I write this we are awaiting the outcome of the election, with little clear direction as to what will emerge.

To help myself think through these things I got a couple of books about politics and political science. The first is The Politics Book, published by DK, a Random House imprint, with a host of contributors and editors. As with other The X Book volumes by DK, the subtitle is "Big ideas simply explained."

I included the book cover, something I seldom do, to show the style of the illustrations within. I call this "brutal chic", and it reminds me of Soviet poster art of the 1950's. Inside, each major era is prefaced by a two-page spread of gigantic black text on stunning red. I wonder if the editors know that a red/black banner symbolizes Anarcho-Syndicalism?

According to the book's glossary, Syndicalism is a relatively new ideology, less than 100 years, described thus:

"An early 20th-century ideology that emerged as an alternative to capitalism and socialism. …it advocated the seizure of a nation's means of production—and the overthrow of its government—in a general strike by workers' unions, and the organization of production through federation of local syndicates."

Based on that description, the more recent prefix "Anarcho-" is redundant. The ideology is popular in Europe. May it stay there!

The book has articles between one and six pages in length based on the writings and ideas of 102 major political figures and philosophers, from Confucius to Robert Pape, plus short items (~100 words) on another 37 persons.

Based just on the quantity of coverage, the compilers are most sympathetic to liberal and neoliberal and socialist ideologies. I was hoping for better explanation of conservatism, but the handful of items are sloppy and uninformative. Of course, I understand that the English conservatism of the 1600's and 1700's didn't migrate to America, or rather, Toryism died away after 1776. But the shift from classical liberalism to American conservatism is unmentioned in this book.

I read the book carefully, realizing its bias, as an exercise in "know your enemy." I retain my orientation to classical liberalism, while adding that I strongly support conservative foreign policy and a strong defense. Both R's and D's have allowed the Federal government to get too big and too intrusive. I call it creeping totalitarianism. If it can be rolled back without bloodshed, that's good. I fear it cannot.

You want to bring WHAT back to life?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, genetics, de-extinction

I find that it has been longer than usual since my last review. I shot myself in the foot by reading two books at the same time. It just stretched out the time for both, but it means that in another couple of days I'll have finished the second one also.

As I was reading Life Changing by Helen Pilcher I saw a footnote about an earlier book she had written, so I got that one also. This book, published in 2016, is Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-Extinction. The author worked as a cell biologist, and as a stand-up comic, so her science writing is delightfully upbeat and equally informative.

If you could choose just one extinct creature to bring back to life, which would it be? Would it be a dinosaur, à la Jurassic Park, perhaps even Tyrannosaurus rex? Or the most abundant bird of the recent past, the Passenger Pigeon? How about a Woolly Mammoth, or even a Neanderthal? These and a few others are discussed in Bring Back, with an emphasis on two questions: "Can it be done?" and "Should we do it?"

Several years ago an extinct species of goat was cloned from cells taken from the last living Bucardo while it lived. In hundreds of attempts, seven embryos were produced, and one was born but died within a minute. So the Bucardo was de-extincted for this brief moment. Animals for which living cells, or recently frozen ones, can be obtained may one day be restored by cloning.

Extensive searches for ancient DNA have been going on since before Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in 1990 (the film was released in 1993; as good as it is, the book is even better). Recently, a mosquito was found in amber, with an abdomen apparently filled with its last blood meal. Of course, the delicate work of extracting some of the blood was undertaken. Nothing remotely resembling DNA or any of its constituent bases and sugars could be derived. However long the insect had been entombed, it was too long for DNA to survive.

Under the best of conditions (amber is too reactive), DNA is stated to have a half-life of about 700 years. It isn't clear what this means. Do half of the DNA strands remain pristine for 700 years, or is only half the material still recognizably derived from DNA after 700 years, or something different? Let's just consider a charitable interpretation: that half the bonds between pairs of ACGT "letters" in a strand remain unbroken after 700 years, and applying a Poisson distribution to the sizes of fragments remaining, in only a few thousand years the longest fragments would be no longer than three or four "letters", and most of the "letters", which consist of a deoxyribose sugar bonded to a base, would have broken to pieces themselves. So dinosaurs are apparently out of the question. So are Archaeopteryx, the first known bird and even Woolly Mammoths. Or so we thought. The above doesn't account for freezing.

It seems that frozen in the tundra, DNA does retain its integrity quite a bit longer, and the author reports that the entire Woolly Mammoth genome has been sequenced. Constructing the sequence had to be done by comparing snippets with the genome of an Asian elephant, to which Mammoths were closely related. 

Personally, I'd like to see Woolly Mammoths brought back somehow. So would George Church, who has determined that there are about 3 million changes in the DNA between elephant and Mammoth. Which ones are most important? Will he be able to make a set of Mammoth chromosomes and put them in the ovum of an elephant to make a Mammoth fetus and, one hopes, a baby Mammoth?

His aspiration is presently more modest: to use a subset of Mammoth DNA to make a hairy, cold-resistant elephant, what our author calls an "elemoth" (or "mammophant"). A bit of Siberian prairie called "Pleistocene Park" is waiting for the outcome. Its Russian curators have been using tanks to blunder around pushing over vegetation and small trees to simulate Mammoth activity. The other cold-adapted animals they have gathered, plus their tank-tread work, is having a salutary effect on the Park, so having real Mammoths, or mammophants, could restore a Pleistocene ecology and, they hope, reduce the effects of warming and save the permafrost.

Other candidates for restoration are more problematic. If a single passenger pigeon is produced, the species hasn't been restored. Their social life depended on living among millions of their fellows. They were prone to pretty much demolishing all the plant and insect life in an acre or two of ground, leaving behind a few hundred tons of guano, and moving on. Do we want that again? I suspect it wasn't just tasty meat and pretty feathers that doomed the passenger pigeon!

Striking closer to home, if some historical person could be cloned and raised to adulthood, could we get that person back? Consider Socrates. Getting his DNA could be problematic, because his burial place, if there is one, is unknown. More recently, who's your favorite? Washington, Lincoln, M.L. King, or even "The King", Elvis? Here the nature-nurture rubber hits the road. To get someone who is not just genetically Abraham Lincoln (plenty of his DNA is found in numerous souvenirs), but who thinks like him, is not just tricky, but onerously difficult. Would he have to grow up in a tiny cabin (I've been to his boyhood cabin in Kentucky)? Would his surrogate parents have to know and use the disciplinary methods used by Thomas and Nancy? Would there be anyone to teach him how to make a split rail fence? Would he have to study by candlelight and fireplace illumination? Do we even know all the books he read as a young person, or as an adult? How to arrange for "Nancy" to die when he is 9, so he can help construct her coffin? And on and on… And we haven't come to ethical questions; I agree with the author that these are insurmountable. We ought not try to clone Lincoln or Elvis or anyone. Not now, not ever.

In later chapters, the techniques of de-extinction are brought closer to home in another way. A few of them are already being used to increase the "birth" rate of some nearly extinct species. I call that "de-extinction before the fact". The black-footed ferret is a success story, but only in part. A disease that almost wiped out the last few colonies of ferrets is still prevalent in their home range, and so nearly all living black-footed ferrets are in captivity. Some genetic editing may be necessary to make them disease resistant. These kinds of efforts are things that should be done, yes, indeed.

Reading Bring Back the King is very enjoyable, and not just because of the frequent humor. Ms Pilcher writes delightfully, and the reading was like sitting with an old friend, listening to stories.

Messing with DNA — it's what we do

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, genetics, domestication, genetic engineering, sociology

DNA is practically designed to be tinkered with. It isn't hard to do. At age ten I was hybridizing tulips. I produced some pretty varieties. Then a master of DNA tinkering showed up: an infection by the Tobacco Mosaic Virus produced many "parrot" coloration varieties. Within a couple of years, things settled down, and some of the tulips went back to being the mostly solid-colored ones Mom had originally planted, plus a few of my 2- and 3-color hybrids, but some striped ones remained, apparently now breeding true to their new appearance.

Some time between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, a subtler change occurred in an animal that hung around human encampments. Wolves had probably been stealing from garbage dumps for thousands of years already. Some, most likely younger ones, got used to continuing to gnaw on cast-off bones even if a human showed up, if the person didn't make threatening noises or moves. Did people domesticate wolves, did wolves domesticate themselves, or did both species domesticate each other? I suspect most humans were originally rather displeased about having scavengers around, so I favor the latter version. 

Whatever narrative appeals to you, at this remove of time, the main thing we know is that even very wolf-like dogs remain like juveniles. It's like dogs all have Peter Pan syndrome and never grow up. If you ever get acquainted with a wolf, as I have, you'll realize that an adult wolf is all business. Reach out a hand, and get back a stump. Make the kind of "hand-on-knees" play gesture that'll make almost any dog trot over to play tag, and a wolf will most likely fix you with a cold stare, "Seriously, human?" That's if it knows you well enough to stand there to watch your antics.

The critters we call "farm animals", "pets", and "livestock" are genetically very different from their ancestors. Cattle came from Aurochs, for example. On a camping trip I once awoke in the tent to find cattle grazing all around. I went out and swatted a few butts and said things like, "Get along now, my wife has to get up." They placidly moved on. Try that with Aurochs (you'd need a time machine), or even Bison. Your remains will soon be well mixed with mud.

Domestication and selective breeding are the traditional way to mess around with DNA. More recently we've gone from simple domestication to hyper-tinkering, still by cross-breeding and such. Your great-grandma's chicken weighed a pound and a half. Now a roasting chicken can weigh as much as eight pounds, and they cook twice as fast as a turkey of the same size, so when my wife and I have Thanksgiving alone (that may be what we have to do this year…will 2020 never go away?), we roast a chicken. But even fryers in the 3-4 pound range frequently have broken legs so frequently, because they have been bred to grow so fast their bones can't keep up.

Then there are all the plants we call "crops", plus "garden plants" and "house plants". Unless you go to the wilderness to get plants for your garden, everything in your environment has been genetically changed in the past centuries or longer. A long time ago I collected ferns for a large terrarium I made from a leaky fish tank. Forty years later I still have two or three of them. They are "wild", even thogh I keep them in "captivity". But the vegetables in one garden, and the lilies and irises and such in others, are far removed from their wild ancestors.

Dogs and domestic animals of all kinds are the backdrop to the opening chapters of Life Changing: How Humans are Altering Life on Earth by Helen Pilcher. The various kinds of selective breeding are just the start. Hybridization is another, like what I was doing with tulips, but more persistently and permanently. The mule is an ancient hybrid. Even though it is famously stubborn, it is stronger than a horse or donkey and eats less. It's the prototype of a sterile hybrid, which makes it a made-to-order animal that won't breed a herd of wild mules and take over a chunk of forest or field. Other hybrids are fertile and sometimes they settle down to become a new, stable species.

There are chapters that get into molecular engineering and genetic engineering, mainly the newest tool: CRISPR-Cas9. Humans didn't invent this tool, we discovered it. Microbes have been using it for a couple of billion years for their own purposes. It turns out that we can use it to cut-and-paste DNA however we like. Getting DNA from some cells and patching stuff in and out is pretty easy these days. The next step is harder. So hard, we're very early on the learning curve for putting the edited DNA into a working cell or a virus that can insert it into a living cell without horrible or fatal side effects. The next couple of decades ought to be interesting.

Methods more similar to the traditional interest me more. In vitro fertilization (IVF: test tube babies were the first human products, including some of my relatives) is one way to speed up the breeding process, or to cause it to happen when there are natural barriers to natural breeding (in humans, these are summed up as "infertility"). For example, IVF is being used to breed corals rapidly or to cross-breed them in an effort to produce varieties that can survive in the oceans as we expect them to be for the next couple of centuries.

That introduces another aspect of "altering life". The life we ignore, except when we go "enjoy nature" or do some "ecotouring", is being affected a lot more than we realize. Consider this: 96% of warm-blooded animals on Earth are domestic; 2/3 are birds and 1/3 are mammals. Most living birds are chickens, about 24 billion. We breed them so fast, though, that there is a total turnover about every six months because worldwide consumption of chickens is 50 billion. Cattle number about a billion. They breed more slowly; about 300 million are slaughtered for food yearly. They outweigh the chickens, probably about ten to one. Besides the space taken up by all the livestock, about half of all farmland grows crops to feed the chickens and cattle, plus swine, sheep, goats, turkeys, and so forth. The 4% of total animals that make up all the wildlife on earth have a much smaller Earth to host them.

It is heartening to read in the later chapters of efforts to "rewild" some places. The author highlights a few, such as the Knepp Estate in Sussex, England and Pleistocene Park in Siberia. Large and largish keystone species such as boars or elephants will, for free, "engineer" a landscape such that it is attractive to such a great variety of other plant and animal species, and the variety and beauty multiplies. Rare creatures (the Purple Emperor butterfly is a great example) are found at Knepp that are seldom seen elsewhere. Sturdy, Arctic-hardy horses are making Pleistocene Park better and better as a habitat for numerous small animals and the plants they favor. Mammoths, or cold-adapted Asian elephants if the Woolly Mammoth cannot be "re-evolved", would do much more to return that area to its earlier splendor.

It was such a pleasure reading this book that when the author put in a plug for her earlier book, I snapped up a copy. Stay tuned on that. In the meantime, this book is a lot more than a "gee whiz" compendium of things we can do with DNA. It emphasizes the hopeful trends that are arising. It points toward an Earth in which humans begin to play a little nicer, as we realize just how interdependent we are with "the rest of nature."

Applying a scalpel to a city

kw: book reviews, historical fiction, mysteries, plagues, folklore

New author K. Avard is a family friend. His sort-of-fiction-sort-of-nonfiction novel First, Do No Harm was released earlier this month. By his own account, he reads a great deal, possibly more than I did at his age. He spent more than a year in Austria and nearby countries, which clearly provided fodder for this book.

Background facts: 

• Vienna suffered a Great Plague in 1679, which was almost certainly bubonic plague. There is a monument to the event near city center.
• Vampires were considered very real around that time, and some historical events seemed to confirm their reality. This led to the impaling and burning of disinterred corpses that apparently had not "rotted enough".
• Alpen (plural of Alp, not related to the word for "mountain" but to "elf") were folkloric creatures similar to incubi, thought to sit on a sleeping person and suck either their breath or their blood. There is a sexual element to incubus stories that is absent in stories of the Alpen.
• Plague doctors who went to afflicted places and claimed to be able to cure the plague have been accused of spreading it as asymptomatic carriers.

I have not asked Mr. Avard of these things. They are matters of my own knowledge and research I did while reading the book. There may be another thread as well. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, a side narrative concerns an insane man in a mental hospital who worships the vampire at a distance. This man does things such as breed flies, feed them to spiders, and then eat the spiders, under the delusion that consuming so many lives, at first and second hand, will increase his own stock of "life stuff". This narrative was ignored in the various vampire movies and follow-on vampire books and films and TV dramas. But it may underlie a character in the book named Thomas, self-named Belial.

The protagonist Dietrich is a medical doctor who finds himself in the middle of a sudden onslaught of plague. He becomes the central player as he and several companions, including his formidable sister and a very compassionate bishop, must become detectives to determine whether the epidemic is an entirely natural phenomenon, or is there a supernatural element? Are Belial and the plague doctors partly angelic, as they claim, and thus doing God's work? Are they Alpen? If they are angels, are they angels loyal to Jehovah, or are they fallen angels loyal to God's enemy? The denouement provides only a partial answer to all these queries, which testifies to the author's skill and understanding of the ambiguities of real life.

If I go into more details of the plot, it could spoil the enjoyment of other readers. Some may be like me and enjoy comparing the narrative to the facts of history. Others may prefer to read it undistracted by such things. The book offers delights for both.

The absence of a colophon and some other indications show that the book was self-published. The author did speak to me of a distributor, so he apparently did nearly all the work himself but found it best to farm out the advertising and distribution. One result of self-publishing is the lack of a copy editor. I am a compulsive proof-reader, so I found a few items that I'll pass on to Mr. Avard, so he can brush up the text if he decides on a second printing. Most will escape notice by most readers. 

I would advise him and other self-publishers: Locate a friend who can read with care and clear up typos and solecisms, or hire a professional copy editor to give the text a run-through. The rather small number of items I found testify to the author's care, but also show that nobody's perfect. I read and copy-edit everything I write, and I sometimes find things I missed when I read again at a later date.

I hope author K. Avard continues writing, and offers lovers of mystery and historical fiction further delights in the future.

A narrow view of art

kw: musings, poetry, art

I work the puzzles in the daily newspaper, including a feature titled Cryptic Byword, compiled by Luis Campos. A few days ago the deciphered quote was this:

"The best poetry jolts and shocks; it mines language for what we have not seen, have not heard" —Canadian Poet Dionne Brand.

My first reaction was, "What a stupid statement! This 'poet' lacks imagination." Of course, I had to look her up. Ms Brand has impressive credentials, including a term as the Poet Laureate of Toronto (9/2009 - 11/2012). From the bits of her writing available on various web sites, I find she is indeed an very talented writer. She has also, as a past Professor of Women's Studies and now a Research Professor of Theater and English Studies, ensconced herself in a narrow academic setting in which perpetual outrage is encouraged and rewarded. She is doing great work in her chosen field, so I do not blame her for the view expressed above, though the adjective "polemic" should be inserted before "poetry".

Before looking up her vitae, I mused about poetry, and about art in general, and its purposes. I like poetry, but I don't obsess over it as some do. I have bought precious few of the multitude of poetic anthologies, and most of those I own were gifts. According to the accepted taxonomy, poems come in three species:

• Structured verse with meter and rhyme. For generations this was "poetry," whether the heroic couplets of so much English verse including Shakespeare's frequent rhymed couplets, the dactylic hexameter of Homer and classical Greek poetry in general, or the tight structures of the few subspecies of Sonnet. Even Limericks and Clerihews, which the "serious" literati might despise, have solid structures that require creativity.
• Blank verse. This is a specialty of playwrights of the Elizabethan theater. There is the metrical structure (variously violated, particularly by Shakespeare) of the ten-syllable iambic line, but with no rhyme scheme.
• Free verse. This is the prevailing genre of the Poetry Slam, where jolts and shocks abound. I look upon most free verse as prose with the lines broken in sundry places. Some free verse is very well written. Some.

Whichever species a poem belongs to, what functions does it perform? Must it shock? I have at hand Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The turns of language may induce the occasional jolt, but such is not the poet's aim. She was expressing her emotions during her courtship with Robert Browning, before they married. A simple view is that her aim was to express Love. In a more nuanced view she was working through the cloud of feelings surrounding her growing love, first her doubt and fear and then affection and awe, and finally acceptance and comfort. They show her growth until, in the 43'd of the 44 sonnets, she could pen one of the most famous lines in English: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." She goes on to enumerate seven, with clear indications that she is just beginning, but has run out of "sonnet space"!

My all-time favorite books of poetry are When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne. I have the 1956 editions, given me by my parents when I was about ten years old. Surprised? Although I love Frost and Dickinson and Stevenson (I have A Child's Garden of Verses), it is to Milne I most frequently turn…for what? For humor, for insight into the child within, and for their lovely sound! I read them aloud. Our son used to love it when I would recite "Disobedience", which begins

James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree
Took great care of his mother, though he was only three.

Opening each line with a dispondee (two long, stressed syllables) is genius personified! The following anapestic feet, and variations on them, keep the poem galloping along. Although there is a shock when a reader realizes the boy's mother is not returning, the light tone of the poem indicates it is an object lesson, not a report of a tragedy. It is a poem of turning-the-tables.

A.A. Milne's children's poems remind me to smile, to slow down and smell the flowers. I have a rather dour personality, and therein I find balm for my soul.

While I prefer rhyming verse, I can be stirred by blank verse…but it has to be very good! There is nothing better than the inspiring speech from Henry V by Shakespeare known as "St. Crispin's Day", which brought "band of brothers" into the English vocabulary. This is poetry that both ennobles and motivates.

Do I have any favorites among the lengthy ranks of purveyors of free verse? Not a one. Having read a few poems by Professor Brand, I can admire her skill, but I am otherwise left cold. I have also partaken of portions by Tony Morrison; though she was not a poet, her prose has poetical power (I have read only portions, no complete novels, because they go places I don't wish to go), and is frequently polemical also. I can analyze a work and discern its polemical intent—and so far, everything of Brand's I have seen has polemical intent—but I am not motivated. Polemics are for motivating, but you have to hit the right buttons. Sorry, Ms Brand!

And what of the other arts? There are painters and sculptors who make it their business to jolt and shock, but they are generally inferior, if not in craft, then in vision. There is "art" that demeans, and I don't mean only pornography. In the performance arts in particular, a few modern comedians carry on the uplifting tradition of Jack Benny or Red Skelton, but they are few. Far more must be "blue" to be funny, although they elicit mostly snickers rather than honest laughter.

In my folk-singing-in-coffee-shops years, I was sometimes asked why I sang certain songs. I would reply that I wished to raise my audience up, not knock them down. Every artist, of any genre, has this choice: ennoble others, or debase them.

I would agree with the second half of the quote above, that poetry ought to "mine language". To what purpose? Here is my shorter proverb (and you can substitute "art" for "poetry"):

The best poetry helps the reader grow.

The Jurassic wasn't all dinosaurs

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, monographs, paleontology

After reading a monograph about paleontology in northern Egypt, published by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, I saw the museum has a series of monographs available freely as e-books. I followed up with their Bulletin 23, Paleoecological Analysis of the Vertebrate Fauna of the Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic), Rocky Mountain Region, U.S.A., by John R. Foster. The contents of the monograph, published in 2003, form the major part of Dr. Foster's PhD dissertation.

This is not light reading for "escape", unless you are like me and can wade through the necessary details that are the stock in trade for scientific monographs. Paleontology is one of my loves, and who doesn't love dinosaurs? The Morrison Formation, composed of rock layers with ages from 155 to 148 million years, is the most famous dinosaur fossil source in the world. Thousands of dinosaur specimens have been recovered from a great many quarries around the Rocky Mountain region that includes portions of the states of Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.

I have a particular fondness for the Morrison Formation because it makes up one "ring" of exposures around the Black Hills, where I spent several years during graduate school. Although my study area required rock samples of the Precambrian rocks in the core of the Hills (granite, gneiss, graywacke, and schist, primarily), I hiked all over the area and enjoyed seeing the spectacular cliffs of Morrison mudstones and limestones.

After an Introduction, the author proceeds in standard form, beginning with Methods and closing with Results and Discussion, and Conclusions. The three chapters between these bookends describe the localities and quarries from which specimens were obtained, the species studied, and the ecological categories found in the various areas where the Formation crops out.

Boiling down the science-speak, I can share a few of many interesting matters. Firstly, the number of species of all sizes is impressive. While big dinosaurs get all the press, and had a combined biomass that totaled perhaps half of all animal biomass, smaller dinosaurs, lizards, turtles, frogs, salamanders, mammals of many kinds (all small), one snake specimen, and several kinds of fish were the components of a complex food web, or rather several food webs in environments ranging from semiarid to stream-and-lake areas.

The Camarasaurus and Allosaurus shown in the image above were the most common larger dinosaurs. However, the more familiar Brachiosaurus, at 44 tons, was much larger than the Camarasaurus, which weighed 14 tons (these are averages for large adults). A grown Allosaurus weighed around one ton. It is unlikely that an Allosaurus, or even a pack of them, could overcome a grown Camarasaurus, let alone one of the larger sauropods. Juveniles, when they could be separated from a herd, were more likely prey, as were smaller herbivores and smaller carnivores such as Velociraptor. This is a similar to the situation today with lions, that leave mature elephants alone, but will sometimes go after a young one. Lions prefer animals their size or smaller. A grown wildebeest (gnu) weighs about the same as a lioness.

Secondly, the variety of mammals was greater than I had considered before: 29 genera, frequently with more than one species represented, although the author studied them only at the genus level. The mammals were numerous but small. I had to learn some new terms to get a clear impression of the mammal ecology. For example, I was rather intrigued by the name Triconodont, which means "three-cone-tooth." The molars of modern carnivorous and omnivorous mammals (including humans) have either two or four cusps. These small carnivores (half the weight of a small house cat, maybe 1.5-2.5 pounds) had molars in one jaw with three cusps, such as the four on the left illustrated here, and a single cusp in the opposing jaw, which fit between the three, as seen in the three teeth on the right.

This reconstruction of Triconodon mordax, with neutral coloring (I had to hunt for something not fanciful and stripey; this is from Encyclopedia Britannica), shows an animal a little smaller than a common opossum. It probably had a similar diet, unless it ate no plant matter at all; opossums are omnivorous, but prefer meat whenever possible.

Rather than go on and on, I'll close here with the note that the author writes well, with a readable style that comes through the required stodginess of scientific monograph writing. This Bulletin is worth reading to learn about what was living all around the dinosaurs in their day.