The always readable Steven Pinker has a new book out titled THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined arguing that there has been a steady drop in violence over time. The equally readable Peter Singer has a very positive review of the book, of which the following is an excerpt.

Against the background of Europe’s relatively peaceful period after 1815, the first half of the 20th century seems like a sharp drop into an unprecedented moral abyss. But in the 13th century, the brutal Mongol conquests caused the deaths of an estimated 40 million people — not so far from the 55 million who died in the Second World War — in a world with only one-seventh the population of the mid-20th century. The Mongols rounded up and massacred their victims in cold blood, just as the Nazis did, though they had only battle-axes instead of guns and gas chambers. A longer perspective enables us to see that the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were, sadly, less novel than we thought.

Since 1945, we have seen a new phenomenon known as the “long peace”: for 66 years now, the great powers, and developed nations in general, have not fought wars against one another. More recently, since the end of the cold war, a broader “new peace” appears to have taken hold. It is not, of course, an absolute peace, but there has been a decline in all kinds of organized conflicts, including civil wars, genocides, repression and terrorism. Pinker admits that followers of our news media will have particular difficulty in believing this, but as always, he produces statistics to back up his assertions.

The final trend Pinker discusses is the “rights revolution,” the revulsion against violence inflicted on ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals that has developed over the past half-century. Pinker is not, of course, arguing that these movements have achieved their goals, but he reminds us how far we have come in a relatively short time from the days when lynchings were commonplace in the South; domestic violence was tolerated to such a degree that a 1950s ad could show a husband with his wife over his knees, spanking her for failing to buy the right brand of coffee; and Pinker, then a young research assistant working under the direction of a professor in an animal behavior lab, tortured a rat to death. (Pinker now considers this “the worst thing I have ever done.” In 1975 it wasn’t uncommon.)

It looks like the search for the elusive Higgs particle is getting close. The so-called Standard Model of particle led to the existence of the Higgs being proposed 1964 as an explanation of how elementary particles get their mass and it is the final particle of the model to be yet directly detected. If it is not found, that would require us to re-think some important theories of particle physics.

They are hoping for something definite to emerge within the next year. But if the Higgs is not found by then, the search may drag on longer because concluding that something is not there is more difficult than concluding that it is.

I have speculated before that a lot of clergy may be closet atheists and that over time more and more will emerge. This article says that, “A study by the Free University of Amsterdam found that one-in-six clergy in the PKN and six other smaller denominations was either agnostic or atheist.”
[Read more…]

Rachel Maddow has compiled the great thoughts of the religious people invited to Texas governor Rick Perry’s day of prayer on August 6 to which he has invited all his fellow state governors. (Via Pharyngula.)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

There is an outfit called ‘The International House of Prayer’? Who knew? Why isn’t IHOP suing for trademark infringement?

The group Lulzsec briefly hacked into website of the Murdoch tabloid The Sun and published a spoof front page.

I received the following joke from my sister that I thought was worth sharing:

In a small town, a person decided to open up a brothel, which was right opposite to a church. The church and its congregation started a campaign to block the brothel from opening with petitions and prayed daily against his business.
Work progressed. However, when it was almost complete and was about to open a few days later, a strong lightning struck the brothel and it was burnt to the ground.
The church folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, till the brothel owner sued the church authorities on the grounds that the church through its congregation and prayers was ultimately responsible for the destruction of his brothel, either through direct or indirect actions or means.
In its reply to the court, the church vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection that their prayers were reasons for the act of God. As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork at the hearing and commented, “I don’t know how I’m going to decide this case, but it appears from the paperwork, we have a brothel owner who believes in the power of prayer and we have an entire church that doesn’t.”

In an article titled Patently Unjust in the June 2010 issue of The Progressive (not available online), Kari Lydersen describes a similar issue to the one involving Henrietta Lacks, where private companies are making a bundle out of publicly funded research. In this case, the publicly funded Human Genome Project has made freely available the full human genome but some private companies have obtained patents over individual genes.

The particular case that Lydersen deals with involves the genes known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. Certain mutations in these genes are predictors of breast and ovarian cancer, since women with such mutations are five times more likely to develop breast cancer and ten to thirty times more likely to develop ovarian cancer. We are now able to test if a woman has these mutations in which case they have to make difficult decisions about whether to preemptively remove their breasts and ovaries. These genes were discovered as part of the genome project.

It turns out that a single company named Myriad Genetics holds several patents on the genes and as a result claims exclusive rights to the tests they developed to detect the mutations. They charge about $3,000 for the test, which prices many women out of the market. They claim that if companies could not make money, they would not have the incentive to develop the tests. There is some truth in this but it is also true that a huge amount of federal (i.e. public) research funding went into the research that provided the basis for the company’s work, which should also be a factor. If the public funds something, the public should also benefit.

The reasons given by the company’s founder for the high price they charge for the tests is revealing about the why medical costs are so high in the US. He says, “In the U.S. what you charge for a test is a complex equation of what it costs you to do it and what people will pay” (my italics). This is part of the problem in a system with employer-based private health insurance coupled with monopoly providers. Well-to-do groups with power can pressure their insurance companies to cover the costs of tests which enables the testing companies to charge higher prices than they need to merely cover costs and provide a reasonable profit. The price then becomes prohibitive for those without insurance and drives up the cost of health care. I have written about this before.

As Lydersen writes, this is a widespread problem.

Myriad is far from the only patent holder on human genes; about 20 percent of the human genome is patented. This basically means that only the patent holder can offer testing and other services related to a specific gene. Patents currently cover genes related to other diseases, including Alzheimer’s, asthma, colon cancer, muscular dystrophy, and spinal muscular atrophy, a hereditary disease that kills children at a young age.

What is worse, because the company claims exclusive rights to the genes, women cannot get a second opinion on such a major question. At a minimum, what is needed is at least for more than one company to be able to provide services so that they can compete with each other. Giving private companies monopoly power over the use of research results that were largely publicly funded seems wrong.

The intricacies of patent law are too subtle for me to get into but on the surface the U. S. Patent Office seems to have been too generous in allowing companies to patent genes. It is illegal to patent a product of nature but the US Patent Office has granted Myriad and similar outfits patents on the genes on the basis that they were able to isolate them from their natural state and purify them. But others argue that this is far too expansive a view. After all, just because you develop a technique to highly purify gold (say) should not enable you to claim the patent to gold. I can understand patents being awarded to the purifying process because that is something the company did develop. That would reward their intellectual contribution while yet preserving the right of other companies to invent alternative methods of purification of the same gene and thus develop competing tests.

The right of private companies to patent genes was litigated and Lydersen writes that in March of 2010 US District Judge judge Robert W. Sweet ruled that Myriad’s claims did not meet the test of what makes something derived from nature patentable and invalidated the patents, saying in his ruling:

“The patents issued by the USPTO are directed to a law of nature and therefore were improperly granted,” Sweet wrote. “DNA represents the physical embodiment of biological information, distinct in its essential characteristics from any other chemical found in nature…. DNAs existence in an ‘isolated’ form alters neither this fundamental quality of DNA as it exists in the body nor the information it encodes. Therefore, the patents at issue directed to ‘isolated DNA containing sequences found in nature are unsustainable as a matter of law and are deemed unpatentable subject matter.”

Patents are valuable things and protect the rights of inventors and other creative people but the Patent Office should be wary of taking the claims of private companies too much at face value, especially when it comes to patenting things in nature like bits of DNA.

Myriad has appealed the ruling to the US Court of Appeals and much hangs in the balance.

She talks to Stephen Colbert about the Henrietta Lacks case.