Day: January 3, 2002

I Couldn’t Help It — I Had to Post This

Philosophy professor Tibor Machan wrote a nice, succinct broadside against the sort of determinism advocated by philosopher Daniel Dennett. Dennett’s argument is complex, but he essentially believes that there is no such thing as free will and that the behaviors we perceive in our minds as being behavioral choices are in fact as deterministic as the functioning of our bodies.

Machan points out some of the immediate absurdities of this view, though he ignores Dennett’s objections to those absurdities. For example, Machan notes that it does not seem to make such sense to hold people accountable for their actions if they truly have no behavioral choice. Dennett’s response to this is that it is irrelevant — we often hold people accountable for actions even when individuals do not appear to have a behavioral choice (we might do it more humanely than in the past, but society still locks up mentally ill people who commit crimes, for example).

What I have always found bizarre about arguments like Dennett’s is that in order for it to be correct, very deep, basic intuitions that human beings have must be denied. As even Dennett concedes, regardless of whether or not people genuinely possess free will, almost everyone perceives that they have the ability to make choices. Dennett ends up asserting that this is basically an illusion — you might think you can make behavioral choices, but you are wrong.

But once that position is accepted, everything seems to fall apart. If something that is so second nature and obvious is, in fact, a lie, then how can people possibly trust any of their other intuitions? I firmly believe, for example, that ~ (A and ~A), but if I am wrong about free will, how can I ever be certain that this is correct? Since everything I believe must at some point fall back on internal intuitions I have about the nature of reality, if my perception of free will is a lie, the result would seem to be nihilism. There’s simply nothing else meaningful to say, because I can no longer trust anything I believe to be true about the world.

Source:

Does self-control exist. Tibor R. Machan, Laissez-Faire City Times, Dec. 31, 2001.

Japanese Firms Consider Anti-Dumping Action Against Korean Firms

In the 1980s, the United States used anti-dumping laws to prevent cheap Japanese goods from entering the country without steep tariffs. Many people are familiar with the anti-dumping actions against Japanese automobile manufacturers, but fewer remember how the United States pressured Japan into signing successive agreements punishing Japanese semiconductor manufacturers in order to protect domestic companies. Ironically, today Japanese companies are now considering similar actions against Korean semiconductor firms.

The BBC reported in October that Japanese chip makers NEC, Toshiba, Hitachi and Mitsubishi are preparing a report claiming that Korean firms are dumping DRAM chips within Japan. The report would be used to bolster calls for government action against Korean firms.

Which is exactly what American firms tried to do to NEC, et al. in the 1980s. Firms including Intel, Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices financed a study claiming that Japanese firms were illegally selling DRAM chips at below cost. They called for (and receive) special government protection whose main effect was to artificially raise the cost of DRAM chips for American consumers during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Then, as now, the real reason existing firms were being undercut on price had little to do with predatory pricing (undercutting competitors to drive them out of business), but rather with larger trends. In the 1980s it had to do with sunk costs in factories. Today, Korean firms are undercutting Japanese firms largely because of a slowdown in global demand for DRAM chips. In many ways the Japanese firms are in largely the same position today as the American firms were in the early 1980s — they miscalculated the demand and price structure of DRAM and are now paying the price.

Source:

NEC weighs anti-dumping complaint. The BBC, October 24, 2001.

Amtrak Fudged Rider Increase for September and October

Back in November I wrote about reports that Amtrak ridership was increasing dramatically after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. At the time Amtrak claimed that its ridership level was so high that it would need even more aid from Congress, which I lampooned. It turns out, though, that the alleged increase in ridership was a mirage.

That claim was based on call-in reservations rather than actual number of riders. In fact, Fox News reported that the total number of riders on Amtrak declined during September and October. Apparently, even fear of terrorist attacks on airplanes is not enough to attract people to ride Amtrak.

In 1997, Congress gave Amtrak yet another five year plan to become profitable or face liquidation. Of course, Amtrak is a long way from being profitable, so what is Congress going to do? That’s right, set out yet another five year plan in which Amtrak has to become profitable or else (or else they’ll queue up for another five year plan in 2007).

The amusing thing is Amtrak Vice President Jim Schulz who Fox News reported as saying that there is no evidence that Amtrak is less efficient than private enterprises. Yeah, that’s why Amtrak hasn’t turned a profit ever and private transportation companies like FedEx rake in the profits.

Even Amtrak’s critics, however, seem to buy into the notion that the United States needs a national rail system. For goodness sakes why? Fox quoted Amtrak critic Paul Weyrich as saying, “[Amtrak’s failures are] … not a mandate to discontinue the national rail system. We just need to start over.”

Start over? So we can be at the beginning of yet another decades long attempt to make national rail service succeed? Thanks, but not thanks. Liquidate Amtrak and see if private companies can make some of its lines profitable. If not, there is certainly no shortage of transportation options within the United States.

Source:

Amtrak, Postal Service face post-Sept. 11 financial woes. Kelley Beaucher Vlahos, Fox News, December 17, 2001.

Genetically Modified, Cloned Pigs Could Provide Organs for Humans

PPL Therapeutics announced this week that on Christmas Day five genetically modified and cloned Pigs were born that bring the possibility of Xenotransplantation — transplanting organs from animals to human beings — one step closer.

The pigs are genetically modified to make it more likely that an organ transplanted to human beings would not be rejected by the human immune system. Researchers knocked out a gene in the pigs that produces an enzyme that adds a sugar to the surface of the cells. This sugar would be identified immediately by the human immune system which result in an attack and the rejection of the organ.

Which does not mean that organs from these genetically modified pigs are ready to be transplanted into humans. In fact, another gene that performs a similar function would have to be knocked out as well as several human genes added in order for there to be a reasonable chance at transplanted organs not being rejected.

Still, PPL Therapeutics vice-president David Ayares told New Scientist that he hopes human trials could begin within five years. Pigs, by the way, would be ideal for heart transplants since the heart in this particular species of pig is roughly the same size as the human heart.

Since the pigs were cloned, PPL Therapeutics would have the ability to quickly ramp up production of replacement organs should their technology eventually succeed in human trials.

Of course, the animal rights community is opposed to this, with the Campaign for Responsible Transplantation once again raising the red flag about possible pig viruses being passed on to human beings. CRT has spent the last couple of years arguing that the possibility of cross-infection of porcine endogenous retrovirus should lead to an outright ban of xenotransplantation with pigs.

In 1997, researchers proved that, at least in laboratory conditions, PERV could jump from pig cells to human cells. PPL Therapeutics and other companies hoping to market this technology will likely have to create pigs that are free from PERV. The PERV virus has been completely sequenced and patented, however. Another company, Immerge, has bred pigs which it says are genetically modified so they cannot pass along PERV to human beings.

Which is largely irrelevant to the animal rights activists, for whom the argument is largely a smokescreen. Wired, for example, cites an earlier interview with CRT’s Alix Fano in which Fano said,

Every animal has hundreds of retroviruses, and there’s no way you can breed them out. And there could be other viruses lurking in these pigs, not to mention parasites, bacteria, fungi and latent infections of all kind.

Of course if medical technologies are required to meet a criteria of eliminating unknown fears and possibilities, then a lot more has to go out the window than just xenotransplantation. For example, pig heart valves are currently used in valve replacement surgery — and with no reports of cross contamination of pig viruses, parasites, etc. to my knowledge.

Ironically, Dr. Jay Fishman, who sequenced the PERV disease, presented a paper in May 2000 noting that organs transplanted from animals to humans might actually turn out to be safer because common human diseases that cause organ failure would likely not grow in organs transplanted from another species. Wired quotes Fishman as writing in that paper,

Due to the species differences between the host (human) and donor (non-human species), the risk of infection of the transplanted organ … may actually be decreased. This incudes common pathogens such a cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, … herpes, hepatitis B and C, and possibly human immunodeficiency viruses.

Sources:

Cloned pigs as organ donors?. Kristen Philipkoski, Wired, January 3, 2002.

Knock-out pig clones advance transplant hopes. Emma Young, New Scientist, January 3, 2002.

Animal transplants: a step closer?. The BBC, January 3, 2002.

New pig clones born. The BBC, January 2, 2002.

The Latest Round in the Abortion/Breast Cancer Debate

In early December 2001, the anti-abortion group LIFE released the results of an independent study that claimed to find overwhelming evidence that abortion contributes to breast cancer. Upon closer examination, however, this study does not offer any new information.

If the study’s supporters are to be believed, the research by Populations and Pensions Research Institute is a smoking gun that abortion and breast cancer are causally related. Researcher Patrick Carroll told the BBC, “There is no doubt there is a causal relationship.” Carrol want on to claim that fully half of new breast cancer cases in Great Britain were directly attributable to abortion.

But the study’s methodology does not warrant such claims. All the researchers here did was compare breast cancer rates and abortion rates for Great Britain, Finland, Sweden and the Czech Republic. They found an association — namely that both the abortion rate and the breast cancer rate have been rising, and conclude that, therefore, the increase in the abortion rate is responsible for the increase in the breast cancer rate.

This is completely specious reasoning — correlation is not causation, no matter how much Carroll and others would like to think it is.

Sources:

Anger over abortion cancer study. The BBC, December 5, 2001.

Abortion link to rise in breast cancer. Michelle Nichols, The Scotsman (UK), December 5, 2001.