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.