Want Soup? Try Prebiotic

I love this stuff:

The blue arrows represent the obvious route to RNA, going from prebiotic compounds (marked here by 7,8, and 10) to nucleobases (3) and ribose (4). And the big red X shows the point at which this route fails.

Sutherland and his colleagues started with the same ingredients, but cooked them in a different recipe, marked in green. Instead of trying to build the two parts independently, the scientists instead built a single molecule that had more and more components of the two parts already in place. They used just four reactions, all of which worked efficiently, to get one of the four ribonucleotides, known as cytidine. At the end of the process, the scientists zapped the mix with ultraviolet light (something that would be easy to come by on the early Earth, unprotected by an ozone layer). They eliminated some of the unwanted side products and turned some of the cytidine into another unit of RNA, known as uracil.

The Recipe of Life.  You think the food network would be interested in a show?

Atheist Billboards

Why do we need them?

They make creationists sad:

Driving home from church recently, I spotted one of two new billboards sponsored by a local coalition of atheists. “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone” was their message, an attempt, the group declares, to let the city know that good people in Dallas, like atheists, don’t need God. I’m sad to see the ads go up in my city, but not really surprised. The drift away from conservatism in religion, and in politics, is much more obvious in our nation today.

(HAT TIP: Evolution Blog)

The Release of Torture Photos: Is It a Good Idea?

Andrew Sullivan weighs in on Obama’s decision to suppress the release of torture photos:

The critical point of releasing the photos is that they will help break through to the American public just how endemic the abuse and torture of prisoners under Bush was. It was everywhere, in every field of combat, committed by every part of the armed services, and in identical fashion: no blood no foul, along the lines of the torture and abuse techniques specifically authorized by Bush. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld sent a very clear message that spread throughout the entire military and CIA: terrorists are beneath even baseline Geneva protections, any prisoner might be a terrorist, so do to them what you will. Rewards will go to those who secure “intelligence” regardless of how it’s gotten. Freeze them, beat them, starve them, shackle them, heat them, strip them, destroy them. As an email sent to all military interrogators in Iraq put it, “The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees. Col. Boltz”—Colonel Steven Boltz, the deputy MI commander in Iraq—”has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.”

And so they broke them. The point of the photos is not to demonstrate more gore; it is to have a fresh opening to explain to Americans just how widespread this was, and also to remind them that this led to the deaths of scores. But against this important public interest, the president has another duty – to his soldiers in the line of fire. These soldiers deserve a chance to do their astonishingly difficult job without inflaming those who might be inspired to kill and attack them. I see no reason to suspect that Obama is not genuine about this question, and it’s a fair factor to consider. More importantly, he has not said that suppressing the photos at this time means suppressing them for ever, and has not indicated that he will prevent justice being done. In fact, his statement said the opposite.

And here’s Matt Yglesias:

I don’t have a great deal to say about this business of Obama refusing to release photos of detainee abuse. I briefly had myself convinced that this is a complicated issue, but it really isn’t. There ought to be an overwhelming presumption that the American people have the right to see the facts about what our government is doing in our name, with our money. There has to be some secrecy in the name of national security—it’s good that we don’t publish our nuclear codes or the details of the presidential security detail—but the notion that vague invocations of national interest or policy expediency should be permitted to sweep things under the rug is repugnant.

Of course if you want to think about why this is happening, ask yourself when’s the last time a politician lost an election because he was too deferential to the attitudes and institutional prerogatives of the national security apparatus of the United States. I don’t think it’s happened since the early 1970s. And it’s a not a coincidence that back then we got FISA and the Church Committee and so forth. But until it happens again, things will get worse and worse and worse in general even if there are spots of improvement.

Both guys were rabidly anti-torture, and both want to have the photo’s released.  But, I think Andrew is right to suggest that Obama’s politicking of the issue isn’t wholly unwarranted.

Democraphobia

Will Wilkinson describes a democracy phobia amongst many Libertarians.  It’s a view he doesn’t share, and neither do I.

If you’re a new-school classical liberal (neoclassical liberal?) like me, you like democracy just fine. This puts you somewhere between (a) modern liberals in the post-Rawlsian vein who tend toward not-actually-very-liberal Rousseuvian romanticism about democracy and (b) libertarians who tend toward often not-very-liberal renunciations of democracy. I want to talk about these libertarians. Here are some off-the-cuff (that means disorganized) thoughts.

First, I think it’s important to recognize that libertarian democraphobia often comes from a deeply liberal place. The libertarian non-coercion principle is a good abstract first approximation of the liberal presupposition that persons are free and equal. No one has a natural right to rule over another, and no one has a natural duty to obey. The liberal presupposition sets a high bar for the justification of coercion, and thus the justification of the state. Many libertarians think there is no justification. Therefore the only acceptable rule of collective choice is unanimity or full consensus. This is one focus of the debate between anarchist and limited-statist libertarians. On the anarchist side, political power cannot get off the ground, and thus the design of mechanisms to control political power is a non-issue. On the limited-statist side, political power does get off the ground, and thus so does the design of constitutions and democratic institutions. I think this divide is far wider than is reflected in the libertarian community, and part of the reason is that limited-government libertarians tend to internalize more of the anarchist framework than they logically should.

He goes on to discuss the choice some Libertarians prefer which is to take a page out of American Settlers Handbook and take off to some DIY frontier.   Wilkinson see’s this as a head-in-sand solution.

But I don’t think they take seriously enough the problem of governance in the DIY frontier. One can avoid politics and democratic conflict in the short-run through self-segregation. But this tends not to last that long. (See: the Pilgrims in Massachusets; the Mormons in Deseret/Utah) And I have questions about how well the Friedman plan can scale, as newcomers come to the settled frontier, and as pioneers raise children who do not share the consensus of the initial settlement. Sooner or later the problem of pluralism and moral disagreement will rear its head, and there are liberal and illiberal ways to respond. If the response is to maintain the consensus of self-segregation by evicting inevitable dissidents, one begins to wonder what to call those with the power to evict. At a certain point, the differences between a sovereign monarch and a monopoly landlord becomes semantic.

In other words, it’s important for Libertarians who really aren’t Anarchists to accept that government is here to stay, and then think practically about how to deal with that.

The underlying libertarian ideals of individual sovereignty and dignity are universal.  Many people I talk to, after I explain why I feel comfortable calling myself a libertarian, realize that they agree with me on a large number of issues.  But, as a group, we Libertarians have never done much of a good job at instigating the necessary PR campaign to get the Montana-cabin-dwelling-old-prospector image of Libertarians out of the minds the public.

Democrats have tree-huggers, Republicans have religious fanatics, and Libertarians have the Unibomber.  Not good!

Will finishes with a great point:

Most libertarians don’t want to move to man-made islands. Most don’t even want to help take over New Hampshire. If libertarians are going to shift the politics of the countries we live in, we’ve got to get it through our thick skulls that many people have considered libertarian ideas and have rejected them for all sorts of decent reasons. We’ve got to take those reasons, and those people, fully seriously and adequately address them. Otherwise, we should probably just accept that libertarianism is a niche creed for weird people and reconcile ourselves to impotent, self-righteous grousing. Or get serious about life on the sea. For my part, I’m going to continue to try to convince people that free markets and limited goverment are better than they might have thought.

For me, this is more reason to align with Democrats, and stop griping so much about taxes.  As far as “wrongs” committed by the state against a free people go, taxing them is pretty low on the list.  The goals of legalizing gay marriage, marijuana, promoting equality in the work place, and opening the boarder more to immigrants who want to work are all FAR more important.  The Dems tend to agree with us on these things, and the Republicans are fanatically (and religiously) against them!

We have three choices:  run off to the woods and cry about an “unjust” government; join with Republicans who think our support of gay rights will land us in Hell;  or join with democrats who will chastise us for our free-market tendencies, but otherwise dig our ultra-leftist stance on social issues (more left than many of their views).  That’s an easy choice for me.

More College Cost Inflation

By Matthew Yglesias:

I used to think that cost inflation in higher education was driven by a lack of productivity improvements. Therefore, I thought, when people invented productivity-enhancing technologies that made undergraduate education cheaper, we’d be on the road to curbing cost inflation. Then I read this eye-opening article by Kevin Carey in The Washington Monthly. Kevin points out that we actually have seen a bunch of things like Aplia that are making aspects of undergrad education more efficient. They’re just not making it any cheaper for students and their parents

Four Stone Hearth #66

The 66th Four Stone Hearth, a fortnightly collection of anthropology blogging is being hosted over at Aardvarcheology.  including a monster of a study on African population genetics.

Excerpt:

The scientists’ first step was to collect DNA from a diverse set of
Africans. Africa is the most culturally and linguistically diverse
place on Earth, so it was important to take a wide sample of
individuals from all corners of the continent. In total, they collected
2,432 DNA samples from 113 diverse and distinct groups of people from
across the African continent as well as 60 non-African groups. They
sampled everyone from the Mozabite Berbers of Morocco to the
hunter-gatherer San of the Kalahari Desert, and many in between.

But the hard work didn’t stop there. The scientists then examined
1,327 genetic markers across the human genome for each individual
studied. While many studies focus on a particular part of the genome
such the mitochondrial DNA or the Y chromosome, this study took a
comprehensive approach. Finally, the researchers used sophisticated
statistical techniques, piecing together how these populations from
Africa and around the world were the same, and how they were different.

The results confirmed that Africa has the highest genetic diversity
of any continent, as many scientists have proposed. In fact, the
authors found genetic diversity to decrease the further one traveled
away from Africa. Genetic diversity is often used as a measure of how
long ago humans inhabited a region — conventional wisdom places the
earliest humans in East Africa, which had exceptionally high genetic
diversity according to this study, though an analysis by the
researchers put the origin of the human expansion farther south near
the border of Namibia and Angola.

And a hat-tip on this crazy-ass picture:

Swine Flu Propaganda

Help!

Blazers Mania: Rip City 2009!

I spent a lot of years avoiding watching Basketball.  First of all, the players are too tall.  I can’t relate.

But, seriously, Portland wasn’t exactly top notch for a long long time.  When I was a kid I was really into them.  Back in the Kevin Duckworth days.  It’s been nearly 18 years and finally the Blazers are doing something worth getting excited about.  I’ve been watching the playoffs for the first time since 1992!

I’m not alone.  Rip City was dormant for a spell, but it’s coming back in droves.  Tuesday nights win over the Rockets only wet the appetite.

We’ll likely not get past this first round, but it feels like a victory anyway.   Over the last ten years or more, the Blazers were largely known as the dumping ground of the the NBA’s asshole players that no other team wanted.  Now we’ve got a group of really good guys who we can be proud of.  And that’s more important than a winning record.  (Though, that’s nice too!)

Goldwater on Christianism

Andrew Sullivan quotes Barry Goldwater:

“There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent.

If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism,’” – Barry Goldwater, Congressional Record, September 16, 1981.

Sexual Cannibalism: Worse Than Swine Flu?

Stephanie Pulford warns us of the evolutionary dead end that is sexual cannibalism.

At least once a year, Cosmo’s cover story is about how to have better, longer sex: a turgid treatise on positions and anatomy.  Our finest ladies’ mags are ignoring the obvious. To improve the mating of our species, we must learn from the mistakes of garden spiders and band together to end sexual cannibalism once and for all.