Exciting!
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
(For other posts in this series, see here.)
The idea of scientific infallibility, that the knowledge generated by science should be true and unchanging, suffered a series of blows in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that saw the repeated overthrow of seemingly well-established scientific theories with new ones. Even the venerable Newtonian mechanics, long thought to be unchallengeable, was a casualty of this progress. Aristotle’s idea that scientific truths were infallible, universal, and timeless, fell by the wayside, to be replaced with the idea that they were provisional truths, the best we had at the current time, and assumed to be true only until something better came along.
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John Walker Lindh seems to have disappeared from the news. Now his father has a long article in the Guardian outlining in detail the events leading up to his capture and arguing that his son was an innocent and naïve person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and thus became one of the first casualties in the ‘war on terror’ run amuck, in which anything goes as long as it is supposed to be ‘fighting terror’.
Almost all human beings have 46 chromosomes (23 pairs) and being born with an extra or missing one usually signifies that the person will have serious medical problems such as Down syndrome.
On the other hand, our close relatives the chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes (24 pairs). The chimps and us shared a common ancestor about 6-8 million years ago. So how did we end up with fewer? This is because about a million years ago, two of the 24 chromosomes in a human fused together end-to-end to form a single longer chromosome. Since the crucial genetic information in each chromosome was preserved by this fusion process, the organism could survive. The evidence suggests that it was chromosomes #12 and #13 that fused to form the present chromosome #2.
The interesting question is how that mutation might have occurred and why it took hold in the human population so that 46 chromosomes is now the standard.
In this fascinating article (sent to me by reader Fu DaYi), Barry Starr of Stanford University describes a recent discovery in China of a man who seems to have undergone a similar reduction process with chromosomes #14 and #15 becoming fused, and now has just 44 chromosomes (22 pairs). His case sheds light on how the chromosome reduction process might have occurred in our own ancestors.
It seems like every time the US wants to attack another country, we hear stories of appalling atrocities committed or about to be committed by that country that requires that “WE MUST ACT NOW! THERE IS IMMINENT DANGER OF SOME VAGUE CATASTROPHE! NO TIME TO WEIGH THE OPTIONS! NO TIME TO CONSULT CONGRESS! NO TIME TO SEEK PEACEFUL RESOLUTIONS! WE MUST START BOMBING IMMEDIATELY TO AVOID DISASTER! AND DON’T FORGET HITLER!”
And once the war is well under way, we are told, “Oops, sorry, things were not so bad after all but nobody could have known that then. We cannot change course now because it would only show weakness. So the war must go on”
Patrick Cockburn tells us that the Libyan war is no exception to this pattern.
Say you are a Tea Party true believer. Where could you send your child to summer camp so that that they are not in danger of being brainwashed by camp counselors all of whom are well known as seeking to advance the Commie-gay-atheist agenda? You create your own camp, of course, based on those run by Christian groups like the one shown in the film Jesus Camp.
So what delights await the lucky children sent to such camps?
One example at Liberty: Children will win hard, wrapped candies to use as currency for a store, symbolizing the gold standard. On the second day, the “banker” will issue paper money instead. Over time, students will realize their paper money buys less and less, while the candies retain their value.
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Still another example: Children will blow bubbles from a single container of soapy solution, and then pop each other’s bubbles with squirt guns in an arrangement that mimics socialism. They are to count how many bubbles they pop. Then they will work with individual bottles of solution and pop their own bubbles.“What they will find out is that you can do a lot more with individual freedom,” [Jeff] Lukens said.
They certainly will, Jeff Lukens!
But I think that this does not go nearly far enough and the camp could be made even better. So here are a few of my suggestions for improvement.
I offer these suggestions gratis purely to advance the cause of wingnuttia. No need to thank me, Jeff Lukens.
NPR had an interesting story on a new type of artificial heart. Older models had tried to replicate the human heart with its pumping mechanism but have been unable to create models that work without problems for a long time.
This new heart is radically different in that it foregoes the pumping action and has motors that continuously drive blood through the body. This makes for a much simpler design with less chance of breakdown. It seems as if the pumping action is not essential for the working of the body, though it is still early days and we do not have long-term data on the effects.
If the results hold up and a heart that beats is not really necessary, it means that the beating heart is a product of evolution that is functional but not optimal. This would illustrate once again that the processes of evolution do not necessarily produce the best design but merely a design that works. This will not be the first time that thinking that nature’s design is the best and trying to copy it has sent us in the wrong direction. Early experiments with flight tried to emulate the flapping wing action of birds with little luck.
What is kind of weird is that with this new artificial heart, there will be no heartbeat, no pulse, and the EKG signal will be a flat line. So the most common markers we currently use to see if someone is dead or alive would indicate that the person is dead.
One of the crucial steps by which the US entered a state of permanent warfare was when acts of ‘terror’ (however one defines that politically malleable word) shifted from being criminal acts that could and should be treated as lying within the province of law enforcement agencies, to political acts that required a military response such as bombing and invading countries or extra-judicial ones such as setting up kangaroo courts where the normal processes did not apply but convictions could be easily obtained or even where people could be held without trial indefinitely.
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Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), exposes all the myths and lies about Social Security being in crisis and requiring a radical overhaul.
Fortunately, the program is fundamentally solid. While you can sound really smart in Washington by saying that Social Security is going bankrupt, the facts say the opposite. According to the Social Security trustees’ report, if we did absolutely nothing the program could pay every penny of scheduled benefits through the year 2036.
Even if we never did anything, Social Security could always pay near 80 percent of scheduled benefits.
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Social Security is a great program that does exactly what it was supposed to do. It provides a core retirement income as well as insurance against disability and support for survivors. It has extremely low administrative costs and little fraud. The only problem is the politicians who say they want to save it.
The News of the World, one of England’s largest circulation newspapers, will close down after this Sunday’s edition, ending a 168-year run. It is the first major casualty of the phone-hacking scandal involving the Rupert Murdoch empire.
It is reported that Andy Coulson, a former editor of the paper who was British prime minister David Cameron’s director of communications until January when he resigned over early hacking allegations, will be arrested tomorrow and that other arrests are expected.