Category: Uncategorized

It Takes Tolerance to Listen to a Really Bad Speech

Ugh. Being bored and sick last night, I figured what the heck — I’d tune into the end of the Grammy awards to see Eminem perform with Elton John. A lot of people I know were upset at the idea that Eminem might win the award for best album. My response to that worry was that there’s only one thing you ever have to know about the Grammy awards — these folks once awarded Milli Vanilli a Best New Artist award. ‘Nuff said.

Anyway, before Eminem performed Recording Academy President and CEO Michael Greene came out and gave a brief little sermon about how art always shocks, our parents hated Elvis, blah, blah, blah. I almost expected him to add that if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing lyrics like contemporary rap stars. Among other things, Greene said,

People are mad, and people are talking. And that’s a good thing because it’s through dialogue and debate that social discovery can occur.

Listen, music has always been the voice of rebellion — it’s a mirror of our culture, sometimes reflecting a dark and disturbing underbelly obscured from the view of most people of privilege, a militarized zone which is chronicled by the CNN of the inner city — rap and hip-hop music. We can’t edit out the art that makes us uncomfortable. That’s what our parents tried to do to Elvis, the Stones and the Beatles.

…Accept the fact that musicians, movie stars and athletes are not perfect, they make mistakes and can’t always be counted on to be role models. Art incites, entices, it awes, and angers, it takes all its various incarnations to maintain the balance, vitality and authenticity of the artistic process. Let’s not forget that sometimes it takes tolerance to teach tolerance.

What an absurd claim about art. Certainly no government official should prevent Eminem from making his music or stop Hollywood from making films in which the brains of a living human being are eaten (as is done in the movie Hannibal), but to say that essentially anything constitutes art is simply wrong.

Do we really need people like Eminem to provoke discussion? I think not. Under this sort of definition, Fred Phelps is a performance artist rather than a hateful bigot. I’m waiting for one of these Hollywood liberals to defend cross burning as artistic expression.

I think The Onion best caught the absurdity of such rhetoric with its classic story, ACLU Defends Nazis’ Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters. In a free society we shouldn’t look to the state to censor distasteful works, but neither should we expect that cultural elites will embrace as art anything that sells millions of copies simply by appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Decoding of Human Genome Unlikely to Make Creationism Go Away

Arthur Caplan claims that the decoding of the human genome should settle the debate over evolution vs. creationism once and for all. That, however, is exceedingly unlikely to happen.

The main problem is that Caplan seems to think there is such a thing as “scientific creationism” but every version of creationism I’ve seen is most decidedly not scientific. Which is not to say that creationism is necessarily false, but that most formulations of it are beyond the realm of science to evaluate.

Take, for example, the critic of evolution Philip Johnson who is quoted by Focus on the Family as saying the evidence is completely against natural selection. In fact the creationists quoted by FOF consider the fact that primates, rats and humans share common genes to be proof of special creation rather than evolution from common ancestors.

But to return to Johnson’s views, in his book Darwin on Trial Johnson argues that the problem at the core of evolution is the widespread acceptance among scientists of what Johnson calls “doctrinaire naturalism.” Johnson essentially argues that scientists simply leave God out of the universe by definition by assuming that any given observed phenomenon occurs through naturalistic processes.

Take something as important as the orbits that planets take around the Sun. Prior to Isaac Newton there were lots of speculations on what caused planets to maintain their orbits including a theist answer — God intervened to make sure planets maintained their orbit and didn’t crash into each other. Newton and other scientists, however, looked for a completely naturalistic cause and Newton was the first person to prove that elliptical orbits of planetary objects was explained by the inverse square law of gravitation.

Johnson essentially argues that by constantly looking for only naturalistic explanations for phenomenon such as the orbit of planets, scientists write God out of the picture without giving him a chance. This is to some extent true, but it’s hard to imagine how to create a theistic science that would involve God unpredictably intervening in the universe. In fact Johnson retreats at this point and has yet to give an adequate explanation of what he would put in place of naturalistic explanations.

The decoding of the human genome will settle nothing as far as the creationism debate goes since it merely adds the longstanding accumulated evidence of the similar genetic composition of a wide variety of species. Evidence which has already been rejected by creationists as proof of natural selection.

Deja Users Whine Over Google Acquisition

Many years ago, Deja News began archiving all Usenet feeds and making its archive publicly available. Back when Deja first started there was a lot of hype about how valuable owning a complete archive of Usenet would be. In fact Deja was just one of several companies who were talking about building a business on top of Usenet.

To my knowledge Deja never came close to being profitable even though it tried every idea under the sun to turn a profit (they certainly deserve an A for effort). It looked like Deja was going to go under and take their Usenet database with them, when Google announced they were purchasing the Usenet database.

That sounded like a perfect arrangement to me. Unfortunately, a lot of Deja users are whining because Google took part of the Deja archive offline for awhile to better integrate the Usenet archive with Google’s other services. A typical comment is from Deja user Frank Davies,

I used Deja three or more times a day. I’m enraged that it has been taken from me. It’s as if a private firm bought and then closed down all of Manhattan’s public libraries for a few months simply because they wanted to rearrange the bookshelves.

Give me a break. As someone on Slashdot added, maybe he should sue and demand his money back!

Since all Usenet posts are available publicly, there is nothing stopping anyone who wants to create their own searchable archive from doing so, and anybody paying attention would have seen the writing on the wall months ago that Deja’s archive was in serious trouble. For these people to whine that Deja and/or Google owes them something — especially the source code Deja uses for searching Usenet — is ludicrous.

Davies claims that, “We simply cannot lose access to the collected wisdom that is contained in Usenet. It’s an important piece of history that must be preserved.” Well, okay, lets see him put up the money needed to maintain such an archive. The bottom line is that doing so is simply not cheap and rather than blasting Google for coming to Deja’s rescue, they should be glad that somebody’s willing to take a risk of putting up real money for the archive.

Researchers Find Mice Bone Marrow Cells Can Transform into Neurons

Researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke published an article in Science in December 2000 reporting on a very surprising finding — bone marrow injected into mice were able to transform themselves into brain cells.

Bone marrow consists of a couple of different types of stem cells which are the source of blood cells in the body. Scientists knew that neural stem cells can transform themselves into muscle, but the accidental discovery that bone marrow stem cells can transform into neurons was a major surprise.

In fact the researchers weren’t even investigating that possibility in their initial experiments. They had injected mice with a genetically altered form of bone marrow that contained a gene that made the stem cells glow in the dark. The researchers were investigating whether or not the stem cells would convert themselves to muscle cells in the mice.

When they performed the dissection of the mice, however, they were surprised to find the animals’ brains contained neurons that now glowed in the dark. Several other experiments, some involving a second laboratory, were done to confirm that in fact the bone marrow was replacing neurons.

Helen M. Blau, senior author of the Science article, told the Associated Press that, “It may be a repair mechanism that is going all the time at a low level.” The bone marrow probably doesn’t work at a high enough level to repair serious brain damage or disease, but it may be on ongoing way that the body replace dying or defective neurons.

A lot more research will need to be done to better understand what is going on here, and this may never lead directly to any treatment for neurological disorders, but it does add an important piece of the puzzle on how adult stem cells can differentiate into a wide variety of other cells which is of great importance in many current efforts to find treatments for Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injuries, and a whole host of other ailments.

Source:

Mice marrow can net neurons. Associated Press, December 1, 2000.

Can Life Expectancy Continue to Rise?

The BBC recently reported on a presentation given by Jay Olshansky, professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. According to Olshansky,

The human body was not designed for long-term use. It was designed for short-term use and in effect what we’re doing is pushing these bodies beyond the end of the warranty period for living machines.

Olshansky notes that while Life Expectancy around the world are still increasing, the rate at which they are increasing is beginning to slow down. Specifically, Olshansky claimed that without significant advances from the biomedical sciences, life expectancy would not reach 100 in the United States until sometime in the 26th century.

When considering such pessimistic predictions, there is one important thing to keep in mind. Olshansky is simply the latest in a long line of public health officials who have said that it would take many centuries to reach certain levels of life expectancy; most of those experts were disproved within their lifetime.

In fact the amazing that about Olshansky’s figures is that he worries about how long it will take to reach a life expectancy of 100. The debate used to revolve around whether or not even developed nations would ever be able to reach life expectancies of 85. Considering that some sub-groups of the American population have achieved life expectancies in excess of 97, very few people today doubt that the 85 year mark will be reached.

The unstated problem underlying Olshansky’s number is that a life expectancy of 100 for a country like the United States would be achievable if people valued long life above anything else, but Americans tend to consider living a good, if moderately shortened life, to be preferable to living a less adventuresome and indulgent — though likely longer — life span. This is especially the case since living to be past 80 still subjects individuals to relatively high risks of diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, that diminish the value of living those extra years. Even given that, however, the United States leads the world in the number of people who are older than 80 years of age.

Olshansky and others underestimate the rate of discovery that biomedical sciences are about to unleash. Researchers have made astounding leaps in knowledge about diseases such as Alzheimer’s since the mid-1980s, and the pace of understanding is clearly accelerating very quickly (a good example of this is the incredibly quick response to AIDS. AIDS activists like to complain that the government and corporations are dragging their feet, but the incredible speed with which AIDS was identified and treatments created is unprecedented in the history of medical science. It took researchers almost 50 years just to decide how polio as transmitted).

It would be very surprising if the life expectancy of the developed nations didn’t reach 100 before the end of this century, and the developing world should begin to catch up too assuming they can work out the interminable problems with war and political illiberalism.

A bigger problem will be how a potential rise in life expectancy could throw off current projections of a stabilization of world population around 2050 AD or so.

Source:

Life expectancy of 100 ‘unrealistic’. Jonathan Amos, BBC, February 19, 2001.