Words From Rob

I just finished reading The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra.  Whoa!  This book was something I really got into.  Some parts seemed boring and drawn out, mainly because I knew that material, but other parts were so enlightening.  Most people won’t really see a reason to read this book.  Others will, such as philosophers, linguists, cognitive scientists, biologists, and ecologists.  I’d recommend it for politicians and managers too.

The subtitle is “A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems,” which seems so abstract to most people, so let me explain.  Classical mathematics and science tends to attempt to reduce complexity into parts and linear equations, and it has worked remarkably well for things that can be reduced.  But what happens when you get a whole bunch of variables that interact with each other in ways that aren’t so linear?  For examples, think of an ecosystem where there’s a balance of plants, prey, and predators; the brain which operates in a highly parallel and networked system; the body which is interconnected on so many levels that you can’t remove an organ without severely affecting the system; a bacterial cell that demonstrates cognition and reaction to its environment through chemical processing; an ant colony that uses simple rules in which a collective intelligence emerges.

How can mathematicians make sense of things so complex?  They don’t, and their thinking is so limited and reductionist, so they fail.  There are some attempts through Dynamical Systems Theory, Nonlinear Dynamics, and Chaos Theory, but those attempt to use the old reductionist tools of the past in attempts to simplify things in neat equations so they can make predictions more easily.

Stephen Wolfram wrote “A New Kind of Science” which I bought, and then he later released it for free over the internet.  While it’s exhaustive and not really new, it points out the need for understanding complexity in terms of very simple rules that interact with each other to form emergent systems and complexity.  By using tools such as cellular automa and simulation, we can actually reduce complexity into simple and interacting rules, not simple equations.  To make predictions, simulations are run instead of equations solved.

So how does this help the layman?  Is it relevant at all to the ordinary guy or gal?  Not really, but it does help provide a new perspective on life and society.  We’re all connected in vast networks of relationships on so many levels.  Even some stoners are especially fascinated by these connections, but it’s difficult for them to comprehend what’s really going on, so it seems so mystical.

In the section on Ecological Literacy, Fritjof points out why living systems theory would be important for society to learn.  The systems that are designed or just put together through societal evolution have enormous impacts on our lives and our communities.  The laws and political systems that govern us, the industries that we depend on for jobs and properity … these are systems that affect us in huge ways.  People in control and extreme idealists attempt to manipulate these systems to their benefit or according to their beliefs of how society should be shaped.  The problem with interconnectedness is that pushing a variable to an extreme (the rich get richer) tends to disrupt not just its local connected points, but it has far reaching effects that can disrupt the whole system.  It’s just like introducing DDT and other pollutants in the environment.  It didn’t just affect a few poor animals, it affected the entire environment.

If we can learn what what rules (laws) and sub-systems (businesses and organizations) benefit the whole societal system the most, we can make our whole society better rather than having it just benefit the few while the majority suffers (only enough to not cause an uprising).

We all want children to grow up healthy and safe, but the real world is fraught with problems. These days, there are many news stories of adults having sex with or maliciously raping children. Then you learn reports of sex offender tracking lists that show there are many men living throughout cities and towns, possibly one or two in your neighborhood who are on the sex offender registry. It’s very scary. Many of those lists don’t tell you the context or type of crime they were charged with. Did the perp rape a full grown woman, molest his own children, or molest someone else’s children? How many times did he commit these crimes? How long ago? Was it planned, impulse, or crime of opportunity? If you had this knowledge, you could draw your own conclusions about how safe you and your children are.
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Female Predators: We know that men are more likely than women to molest children, because females tend to have greater inhibitory controls than males and are more responsive to influences such as shame from society. As a male who has had sexual fantasies about teachers while growing up, I have to question whether we should treat male and female adults equal under the law with regard to having sex with kids. Women are less dangerous than men to kids. Have you have heard of a woman who violently raped a kid? No, they would use persuasion instead. Actually, male kids don’t need a lot of persuasion to act. In fact, some male kids even try to persuade their female teachers through active flirting. At most, in my opinion, female teachers should be punished for breaking the student-teacher relationship (barrier) because of the obvious conflict of interest and breaking the trust of the students’ parents. The remainder of this post will be mainly about male perps.
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Sexual History: As Adam Corolla points out, there were crooners singing about deflowering sixteen year old girls in the 70s and 80s, and no one thought it was a big deal. What’s changed since then? Now that we give education and careers higher importance, and knowing that having children usually impedes a woman’s career goals, we highly discourage them from having sex so they don’t get pregnant. Christian conservatives have become more active in discouraging everyone from having sex outside of marriage, but they especially focus on kids since conservatives have more influence over concerned parents. What conservatives don’t want to acknowledge is that sex is a natural instinct driven by hormones, and evolution has primed us to have sex while in our teens because the human life expectancy was much shorter (at about 25 years old) a long time ago.

It’s easy to dream that a few generations ago, there were barely any child rapes and molestations. I think that there were actually greater rates of rape and molestations in the past than now since the victims were too afraid or shamed to report the crime, if it was considered a crime. But back then, it was hidden and unreported. Fortunately, we now encourage kids to come forward and report sexual abuse, thus there are many more reports of abuse happening. Knowing that kids are more likely to report abuse probably discourages more adults from molesting children. On the other hand, other influences could likely increase sexual desire and impulsiveness, such as: greater access to pornography, more revealing attire on teen girls, openly and non-punished sexual harassment from male teens, public displays of affection, more talk about sex and peer pressure amongst teens, and teens who play songs with sexual innuendo. In my opinion, sexual harassment by teens should be considered a punishable misdemeanor offense so that it will be strongly discouraged. The other influences are protected by free speech to a degree. Private schools have a great advantage over public schools since they can more easily set restrictions on free speech for kids.

Parents have become more protective of their children after reading horror stories in the news and realizing there is more peer sexual pressure for kids these days. It’s easy to blame the media’s influence for increased sexual pressure, but I think it has more to do with school structure and policy where teachers are in the minority and punishments are restricted. Teachers have much less moral influence over kids, and the wild kids have more influence other kids It’s the blind leading the blind. Another issue we have is parents who infantilize and over-protect kids because they saw something horrible in the news. Studies show that kids who are given more responsibility tend to be more responsible and make better judgments than other kids when their parents aren’t their to watch over them. Parents need to start treating their teens as young adults instead of pretending their children will remain forever young and naive. On the other hand, parents also need to be more restrictive about what their kids wear, because what they wear gives non-verbal signals to other kids about how they can be influenced. Don’t allow your kid to dress like a hood rat or slut. Parents should talk to their kids about sex before someone else does, and preaching abstinence-only is just a plain fantasy of hope that nothing will ever happen.
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Real Dangers: It’s great that we have laws and punishment to protect children from child rapists. Unfortunately, child rapists tend to have brains that are wired somewhat differently. They are sexually motivated to seek children, and they can’t seem to control those impulses very well. We have harsh punishments to discourage them, but these laws don’t seem to have a great affect on those sexual predators. What’s worse is that harsh punishments give the sexual predator a greater incentive to murder the child they’ve just raped. Otherwise, the child could report the rapist to authorities. If the child is murdered, there’s a greater possibility that the rapist could get away with the crime. Here’s a tough ethical social policy dilemma: Should we have less harsh punishments that may increase child rapes but decrease murders, or should we keep the harsh punishments that may decrease child rapes but increase murders? After a person is recorded in public as a sexual predator for children, their life is over (difficulty with community, finding a job, etc.). In weighing proper punishments, I think most people would agree that rape should be less punishable than for murder. I favor castration for rapists, but that’s considered cruel and unusual punishment. If the predator’s life is over with, then punishment for murder doesn’t seem much worse, so to them murder may be considered an acceptable risk.
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Hope and Ethical Concerns: This is one of the main issues that makes us willing to compromise ethical concerns over human rights and rights to privacy. Instead of forcefully performing surgical actions upon a convicted criminal to correct their behavior, we can give the criminal option(s) for reduced punishment. Not only should castration be an option, but also neural manipulation of their brains. Since we know their brains are wired differently, it may one day be possible to suppress their sexual motivations for children. Like in the movie, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, scientists have now found a way to suppress memories for victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

So why stop there? This brings up so many possibilities, both incredibly good and bad. Is it a slippery slope to publicly accepted mind-control and repression of culture? There doesn’t exist yet any ethical guidelines for the use of this technology, and from what we’ve seen in other countries like China and Burma, they don’t care about ethics, so they might start using this kind of technology in the future to control their populations whether we ban the use of this technology or not. It was fifty years ago in the USA that free speech was constantly violated by local, state, and the federal government. Christian conservatives want to go back to that supposed idyllic time and push their religious beliefs on the rest of us. They would most likely be the ones in the USA who would want use this technology to brainwash society. Our constitutional right to free speech and privacy should protect our society from forceful use of this technology, so that may give us hope that government cannot use this technology on people without consent. It should be an option for convicted sexual predators (and those who confess their motivations before they have acted on them) to allow this technology to be used on them and re-wire their sexual motivations.

It would be nice if this technology was protected by the US secret munitions laws to prevent this technology from being spread throughout the world, but the technology is probably already available. We don’t have a complete map of the human brain yet, but university labs are on their way to building that map. People have less human rights and constitutionally protected rights in other parts of the world, but hopefully that will change in time.

Warning: This post may contain spoilers. ‘I Am Legend‘ is the story about the possibly last human on Earth struggling to survive after a virus turns humans and other animals into horrid, aggressive mutants. Unlike zombies, these mutants are incredibly fast, nimble, and strong.

Overall, the movie was good, and Will Smith’s acting was great. While it was a horror/thriller/sci-fi movie, it was also a drama, and that led to one of the disappointments: I expected to be on the edge of my seat, but I wasn’t quite there, and I think mixing in good drama was part of that. It had some scary parts that jumped out at me, but it wasn’t enough to get my heart pounding enough.

The main point of this post is to nitpick the scientific elements of the movie regarding genetic engineering, viral biology, and mutations. The other part that left me somewhat disappointed is the bad, imaginary science involved. It seems to follow a trend in sci-fi of whenever there’s a new science or discovery that isn’t well understood yet, sci-fi is there to explore the most imaginative and crazy aspects of it, much like New Age pseudo-scientists (example: the movie ‘What the Bleep do we Know’).

At the beginning, it shows a news report of a genetic engineer who supposedly found a cure for cancer by genetically engineering the measles virus to hunt down and kill or repair cancer cells. Then three years later, civilization is in ruins, which leads you to believe the engineered virus mutated or had unintended consequences.

1. Scientists do rigorous and extensive testing of drugs and genetically engineered life forms to analyze long term consequences. They wouldn’t consider a product safe if it had the tendency to cause unintended mutations in the test animals or if the virus had the undesirable habit of mutating on its own.
2. Unless the viral coating was also altered from the original measles virus, people who’ve had measles vaccinations would have easily beaten this altered virus. It would take intentional immuno-suppressive therapy in order to reduce the immune response so the genetic alternations in human cells can be performed.
3. Mutations aren’t engineered, so it takes a long while (think thousands or millions of years) to develop specific beneficial and complimentary traits that gives an animal (or virus) greater chances of natural selection. In other words, the mutations for the combined strengths and aggression of these mutants wouldn’t have occurred over night nor within three years. Here’s a list of things that would coincidentally (infinitesimal probability) have to happen to make the mutants described in the movie:
   • To give that awesome strength and aggression, the virus would have to wreak havoc on the endocrine system to increase the amount of adrenaline, testosterone, and pituitary hormones. A bad case of ‘roid rage.
   • To make them mindless, primitive, and zombie-like, the virus would have to disrupt the rest of the brain including cognitive thinking processes.
   • The virus would have to tell the body to accelerate and increase the amount of tissue generation for added muscle and bone mass. Apes are very strong and agile like the mutants in the movie.
   • Losing hair and pigmentation, so they fear being burned by UV light. It’s not really an added benefit, but it adds to the suspense of the movie for fear of the dark and unknown.
4. The endocrine system would go haywire, possibly leading to increased fast heart beats and body temperature (the movie points this out), but it would also kill the body. The endocrine system maintains homeostasis, the ability for the body system to maintain systemic balance (think of diabetes and dehydration as being out of balance).
5. If the virus disrupts cognitive processes and the hormone system, then chances are, it’s really messing up the neural system instead of partially disrupting it. Think of cerebral palsy, schizophrenia, autism, and other neurological diseases.
6. The virus was incredibly fast at altering the animals and humans, changing them within a matter of hours. No, diseases don’t work that fast. The body may respond quickly and cause flu-like systems within a day of infection, but that’s a bodily response, not something caused directly by a virus. Rabies usually causes problems within a few weeks, not a few hours.
7. The good scientist finds a cure for the virus, and supposedly, it returns the mutant back to a normal being. An anti-body is supposed to correct all the genetic damage that was already done? Anti-bodies don’t do that. They only get rid of the virus from the body. The mutants would stay in their present physical and mental state, even after their bodies were rid of the virus.

Genetic engineering has the possibilities of many good benefits and bad consequences, and bio-ethicists are there to warn us of the consequences, and we should pay attention to them. Still, I’m not a Luddite and I’m not against GMOs (genetically modified organisms). The benefits are plenty, and the risks can be kept to a minimal with proper oversight (thank big government).

Since most people don’t understand it enough, they have misconceptions, and the zombie movies will make use of those misconceptions. Like other bad science fads in sci-fi, I’m sure this one will pass as society adjusts to scientific realities. I’m sure experts in genetic engineering and medicine can find details in this post that aren’t quite totally accurate, but that’s to be expected.