We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A story here which says that fans of computer games are not all weird. I have never quite understood this whole media fixation with games just because they are on a screen rather than face-to-face. A lot of games draw on all kinds of creative energies and are arguably far better for cognitive development than just passively watching TV. As for the arguments about various social pathologies, well, this book is an excellent corrective to the social scolds, pointing out that games involving superheroes and vanquishing monsters is actually a very healthy thing.
Coming next, research shows that people who like to play poker with their mates on a Friday night, play tennis on a Sunday afternoon, do the Times crossword, are also normal. (Sarcasm alert).
Of course, by some yardsticks of social behaviour, gamers, or other hobbyists, are “weird”, but then what counts as normal, exactly?
Personally, I think the world could use a bit more eccentricity, not less.
Could we bring back a Dinosaur? It is a fascinating idea. After watching a documentary on the ‘Dinosaur Mummy’ found in the badlands of the Dakotas I was forced to ponder the idea once again, Since last night I saw adverts for a Discovery documentary on this very topic that will be on next week I decided I should record my ideas on the subject post haste.
Pretty much everyone has seen the movie ‘Jurassic Park’ where scientists find strands of dino DNA inside assorted biting dino-pests preserved in ancient amber. The problem with this scenario is no such viable DNA has ever been found. It is highly unlikely any has survived intact over the many millions of years seperating us from the end of the Cretaceous when dino-kind had a very bad day.
Given the unlikelihood of finding a T Rex blueprint, one might think the idea of bringing them or any of their relatives back is an idea well and truly dead. “Time to consign the idea to the pages of fantasy stories!”, one might say… but not so fast!
There are other approaches to the problem. Researchers are churning out genomes of many, many species per year even now, including that of the Mammoth and the Neaderthal. The rate at which this happens is expected to reach a species per day per machine in less than a decade. That opens up a whole new possibility: reverse engineering.
Let us say we have the genomes of most living dinosaurs sequenced and sitting in databases on our computers of the 2030’s. “Living dinosaurs? Where?”, you say.
Open your window. Listen to those little dinos chirping, cheeping, singing and in general making a racket as they fly about. They are direct descendants of the dinosaur Raptor clade. Not a side shoot: a direct, bona-fide descendant.
So for a start let us run our AI programs and use our species genome data base to work our way backwards through bird ancestors. The results will not be a full dinosaur genome but we will be getting closer. We might even find some 100,000 year old bits of DNA from dead species in the Russian tundra with which we can cross check our calculations.
We can work the other direction to some extent as well, if we work backwards in the mammalian, crocodilian and reptilian trees until we get to the common ancestor between each of them and the dinosaur clan. It will be rough and full of holes, but it adds constraints and that is what we need.
It is still not enough though. The next step requires we that we understand how DNA and DNA regulation actually builds a creature. If we can infer the DNA required for a feature we can tweak our model genome to fit. Now the coup de grace: if you have seen a documentary called ‘Dino Lab’ you will know where I am going. We now have the ability to roughly model the entire animal and to use AI learning programs to understand how it moved and what its metabolism was like. We have fossilized stomach contents. We have examples of skin and organs fossilized in the ‘Dino Mummy’. With a few more orders of magnitude of computing power, we might run Monte Carlo simulations of entire sections of ancient ecosystems until we find the best match to fossil evidence.
With those constraints on reality we will, before the end of this century, be able to infer with reasonable confidence the genome of a dinosaur and, if we wish to do so, bring it back. It will not be a perfect reproduction but it will certainly be good enough to make a day at the zoo a rather exciting affair!
Let us welcome the work of John Harris, (Professor of Bioethics, University of Manchester) in popularising the potential of enhancement in relation to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill would allow for inter-species embryos that will not only enable medical science to overcome the acute shortage of human eggs for research, but would provide models for the understanding of many disease processes, an essential precursor to the development of effective therapies.
Whilst I support many of the liberal arguments promoted by Harris in favour of enhancement, and understand that the limitations of an article in The Times circumscribes argument, the points that he raises point to his wider positions. They also denote a more political argument on how they should be debated at a popular level.
The first concern is Harris’s timeline for the future: with the replacement of homo sapiens sapiens with a posthuman speciation, that is more intelligent and better adapted than we are. This sits at odds with a picture of radical technologies that would allow the enhancement of existing individuals.
Darwinian evolution has taken millions of years to create human beings; the next phase of evolution, a phase I call “enhancement evolution”, could occur before the end of the century. The result may be the emergence of a new species that will initially live alongside us and eventually may entirely replace humankind.
There is an uncomfortable Darwinian ring to this replacement theory. It will discomfort many and undermines liberal arguments for enhancement at an individual level. Enhance now, die later. The solution is that we may indeed, as individuals, bridge the transition from old to new species, from human to posthuman: and that the inspiration for this concept is Moravec and Kurzweil, not some future genocide that we should welcome with open arms. If it were not, why should this differ from those green anti-humanists who support a dieback of our species.
Harris uses some extraordinary examples in support of his argument: and there is a neatness in looking back to simple but radical changes when supporting self-enhancement without restraint from the state.
Before fires, candles, lamps and other forms of man-made light, most people went to sleep when it got dark. Candles enabled social life and work to continue into and through the night and conferred all sorts of advantages on those able and willing to benefit from it, at the expense of those who couldn’t or didn’t.
Contemporary and future biological enhancements may create problems of injustice both in that they provide a means for some to gain an advantage (those who read by candlelight gain in a way that others do not), and because they may create unfair pressures as a result of the capabilities conferred by enhancement (like the pressure to stay up late and read or work because one can).
The solution is establishing “fair” working hours and provision, at public expense if necessary, of sources of light – not banning candles. The solution is a combination of regulation and distributive justice, not a Luddite rejection of technology.
Whilst disagreeing with Harris’s solution, which favours state regulation over market distribution, the clear thrust of his article is to open up the potential opportunities and benefits that could be denied to us by social democratic governments in the name of social equality. For further exploration, you can pick up his book here. One looks forward to an age of bootstrap enhancement.
In a piece of character assassination on Cherie Blair in the Observer (one so comprehensive that she would almost certainly describe it as ‘misogynistic’, if it came from a male writer), Catherine Bennett makes at least one palpable hit. Forget the inane boastfulness and obsessive self-justification against every suggestion of venality:
She complains how the Daily Mail ‘ratcheted up its attacks on me’, demanding to know – though Mr Blair could have answered just as well – if Leo had had the MMR. Doctors were also keen for the Blairs to help subdue a scare which threatened public health. Now she discloses that Leo had, indeed, been vaccinated, though she would not save lives at the time if it gave ‘the press chapter and verse’.
I wonder, though, whether it is not even worse than that. It is possible that the Blairs might have withheld the information, not out of genuine concern for their family’s privacy (effectively discounted by the present revelation, as Bennett points out), nor out of pique at the press, as in Cherie Blair’s current account, but for political reasons: that they preferred to keep silent, and thereby to encourage the spread of dangerous infectious diseases against which they had quite properly protected their own infant, in order not to cross the noisy anti-vaccination lobby.
Since we saw them use family events to political purpose at much the same time, it would be entirely consistent with their known behaviour. The Blairs have never avoided telling other people what to think when they stood to get a tactical political gain, or when they believed it necessary for their great projects for the world. But concealing an actual belief in vaccination looks like sacrificing other people’s children to calculation of the most self-regarding kind.
John Derbyshire, who writes for National Review, the conservative publication, is not a man I always agree with. On the issue of creationism, however, he is wonderfully scornful of some of its advocates. In commenting on the movie, Expelled, put together by Ben Stein, he has this to say:
Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility – from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.
And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world – that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”
Update: Ben Stein has lost it totally.
I am not certain whom I should pity the most: the Intelligent Design advocates of Homo Sapiens or the future Scientists of the next technological species on our planet.
Much of what we know of the past is built on the fossil record and most of the rest upon the exponentially increasing DNA databases of fully sequenced life forms. For us it is an easy matter, in a relative manner of speaking, to follow characteristics through the billions of years of the fossil record and to compare DNA of long diverged species for commonality. In all cases it is the downright bad engineering of life forms that screams out to the designer that these things just grew and developed by a series of random local optimizations.
This will not be true for our future brethren. When they dig up their rocks they will find a point in the fossil record at which there is an explosive radiation of new and interesting lifeforms that have total disconnects with past life forms. They will see a discontinuity in life itself. Geneticists will see the unmistakable evidence of engineering perfection in the deep past of critters of their day.
What will they make of it? Will they accept that a prior technological species lost in deep time re-engineered life? Will their theologians believe in a universe that created itself and then had a God descend and set it right? Or a God that created things imperfectly and came back to fix His screwups? Will they expect Him to return to Fix Things again? Will they have a Cosmic Tinker in place of a Cosmic Watchmaker?
Just a few thought for a Sunday afternoon…
I am not sure if there is an upsurge in what the BBC inaccurately refers to as
part of a popular trend in some Muslim societies of seeking to find Koranic precedents for modern science.
The impact of scientific theories upon Islamic beliefs has not acquired attention from the media. There are strands of creationism in this religion, and an unsurprising bout of natural theology has come to the fore. This differs from arguments concerning design in the nineteenth century, since these accepted and celebrated the successes of natural philosophy, the forerunner of today’s sciences.
Indeed, the attempts of Islamic scholars is to wed Quranic and scientific authority with some perverse results:
Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.
Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers.
The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice. One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.
The odd combination of divine jurisprudence and natural authority is welded by the Islamic scholar in a bizarre Copernican alchemy.
A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim “qibla” – the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray.
These attempts to appropriate and distort the sciences are not the easy option of science versus religion. Let us avoid the old bugbear of faith versus evidence, since most scientists combine the two without difficulty. They do tell us that schools of Islamic jurisprudence recognise science as a source of power and a rival authority.
It is called “Ijaz al-Koran”, which roughly translates as the “miraculous nature of the holy text”.
The underlying belief is that scientific truths were also revealed in the Muslim holy book, and it is the work of scholars to unearth and publicise the textual evidence.
If Islamic scholars attack scientific knowledge, they will sound backward and primitive, reducing their own influence over a society that becomes more literate and educated year after year. The other strategy is to co-opt this power, a power required to strengthen Islam, yet ensure that it does not undermine the truths of the Qu’ran that they perceive as poor.
Science will go hand in hand with awkward manifestations of Islam. But the premutations can amuse:
The meeting also reviewed what has been described as a Mecca watch, the brainchild of a French Muslim.
The watch is said to rotate anti-clockwise and is supposed to help Muslims determine the direction of Mecca from any point on Earth.
Tyler Cowen, the US economics writer, ponders – in the course of responding to a column by the US leftist economist Paul Krugman – whether modern industrial development would have reached its current pitch had it been forced to deal with today’s levels of regulation. On the face of it, had the Industrial Revolution, starting in the 18th Century, had to deal with 21st century levels of state bureaucracy, health and safety rules, and the rest, we’d still be using horses and carts and there’d be no blogging. Or would there? The trouble with these kinds of assertions is that there is no counterfactual universe against which to check it. The best we can reasonably do is to look at those societies that have imposed heavy restrictions on entrepreneurship and technology, and those that have not done so, and see if there are any consistent patterns to give us an idea. I suppose one good example is what happened in China about 600 years ago, when the rulers of that nation decided they’d had enough of all that exploration business and turned inwards. Another might be the extraordinary rise of Hong Kong in the 1940s under the benign laissez faire policy of UK colonial administrator, Sir John Cowperthwaite.
The other point that Cowen and Krugman deals with is the idea that the pace of development in the field of energy and industry has slowed down. Well, up to a point. When the late Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 was made in to a film by Stanley Kubrick, people who watched in the 1960s were led to think that travel from Earth would soon be a relatively normal event. We have not got there yet. Maybe the problem is that there are sometimes periods of history of enormous change compressed into short periods, followed by longer stretches of time when not a lot appears to happen, but actually the incremental changes are quite big. We just need to get used to this rather than become unduly depressed that we are in a holding pattern rather than moving forward.
Note: I appreciate that not everyone accepts that the Industrial Revolution “started” in the 18th Century, but from my own readings, that century is when the critical mass of scientific, technological and economic forces came together, starting in the UK. For a marvellous account of the men who helped shape that revolution, I recommend this by Jenny Uglow.
On the pace of scientific advance in the West, and how it has arguably slowed since about 1950, this Charles Murray book of a few years back is a good read and is absolutely packed with statistics. I am not a professional statistics man so I am not sure I can comment all that intelligently on the rigour of his methods, but they look pretty robust.
Belatedly, I joined the craze and had a go on one of my friend’s Wii games the other weekend. Terrific stuff: I played the golf, tennis, ten-pin bowling and shooter games. Bloody marvellous. You do need to get a large-enough television to make it work; unfortunately, I don’t really want to mess up my sitting room by putting a huge plasma screen on the wall, but some of my friends seem to be less squeamish.
The main downside, I find, is that if you are playing this game and have not stretched and warmed up properly first, you can actually do a bit of damage. The next morning, when I woke up, the left side of my back was quite painful. This is what happens to a 41-year-old wealth management geek who has not spent enough time doing sport for real. Time to turn off the technology and put on the training shoes.
A link to some Wii-related injuries. I wait for the first politician to try and bleat about the “Wii menace”.
Some members of the life-extension fraternity, such as Ray Kurzweil – whom I enjoy reading – have been challenged head-on over the argument that taking vitamin supplements does any good in terms of enhancing overall health or warding off cancer. Here’s today’s lead story in the Daily Telegraph website:
Popular vitamin supplements taken by millions of people in the hope of improving their health may do no good and could increase the risk of a premature death, researchers report today.
They warn healthy people who take antioxidant supplements, including vitamins A and E, to try to keep diseases such as cancer at bay that they are interfering with their natural body defences and may be increasing their risk of an early death by up to 16 per cent.
Researchers at Copenhagen University carried out a review of 67 studies on 230,000 healthy people and found “no convincing evidence” that any of the antioxidants helped to prolong life expectancy. But some “increased mortality”.
The story concludes with the usual call for sale of vitamin supplements to be controlled, blah, blah. Even so, the supplement advocates have just been given a serious challenge. What I do not quite understand, however, is why ‘natural’ vitamins are okay but artificial ones are not. The article does not really explain this point.
Full disclosure: I take multi-vitamins occasionally if I feel under the weather and I have felt slightly better as a result. That is not, of course, proof that they are going to seriously add years to my life.
The whole difference between statistics and astrology is supposed to be that statisticians make statements of statistical significance to determine how likely or unlikely it is that an observed outcome could have happened chance, while astrologers are satisfied with merely anecdotal confirmation of their hypotheses.
– Hu McCulloch
If you want to know why Bishop Hill is one of my favourite bloggers just now, you need look no further than this delightful posting today, which I now reproduce in its entirety:
There’s a lovely anecdote doing the rounds of climate sceptic blogs about Sir David King, the climate alarmist and former chief scientific adviser to the British government.
It seems that President Putin asked some of his leading scientists to meet Sir David when he went to Moscow as part of the entourage of the foreign secretary. King apparently launched into his standard spiel about how we’re all going to fry, but was a bit taken aback when the assembled scientists told him he was talking rubbish. When they had the temerity to list all the scientific evidence which refuted his claims of impending armageddon, our man was left looking a bit of a ninny and turned on his heels and stormed out of the room.
The story is doubly interesting because it’s related by someone called RCE Wyndham in a letter in which he tells Robin Butler, the master of University College, Oxford, that the college can expect no donations from him this year because the appointment of King to head Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
The letter can be read here.
Fascinating. But then I googled Sir-David-King-Putin, and came across this, from about two months ago (you need to scroll down a bit):
Sir David King, who as the Government’s Chief Scientist played a key role in the investigation into Litvinenko’s murder, has accused the Russian president of masterminding the murder of nearly 300 of his own people in the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999, which Putin blamed on Chechen terrorists.
“I can tell you that Putin was responsible for the bombings,” Sir David claimed to Mandrake at the Morgan Stanley Great Britons Awards. “I’ve seen the evidence. There is no way that Putin would have won the election if it wasn’t for the bombings. Before them he was getting 10 per cent approval ratings. After, they shot up to 80 per cent.”
I am not sure which came first, the mass murder accusation or the environmental ambush. I think it was the ambush that began all this. But either way, they really don’t like each other, do they?
It might make a rather good play. It’s always best when appalling people fail to get on. Imagine what the world would be like if they were all on the same side. I know, I know, not that different.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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