Sure it was a Stunt

The vote on the Iraqi pullout was a political stunt, but so is what the democrats are doing. Trying to rewrite history to their advantage. The idea that democrats were somehow duped into voting for the Iraqi war is laughable. These guys (and gals) didn't get to capitol hill by being easily duped.

However, I agree with Larry Kudlow and Professor Reynolds that an affirmative bill would have been better. Trap the democrats into being either for or against a free and democratic Iraq as the mission of the war.

Now if conservatives could somehow trap Bush into slashing spending...

Why We Age and Die

Many scientists are studying the pathways involved with the aging process, or as I like to think of it the breakdown of the “keeping-our-cells-young” process. Why do these processes break down in the first place? This is where you get the evolutionary process. There is no evolutionary benefit to an infinite lifespan in a natural setting. The environment changes all the time as continents move, the sun brightens and dims, the Earth’s rotation around the sun changes, impacts of space objects, and innumerable local condition changes such as landslides, droughts, floods, fires etc. The inability to change and adapt to a different environment would mean death. It is harder to change if you have a long lifespan, because change involves more than just rearranging the genetic bits you have but creating new ones as well. Animals don’t have the natural ability to change their DNA throughout the body. Changes in DNA can only be passed on to offspring. Depending on how fast you have to change your lifespan is adjusted accordingly.

Once one starts having offspring the only things that matter are getting them to reproductive age and having them reproduce. Natural selection breaks down after this. A few examples in humans (in caveman days):

1) A mutation that causes your death at 20. You have already likely passed on your genes to offspring but are still very important to their survival to reproductive age. This mutation has some pressure be selected out because your kids won’t survive as well without you around.

2) A mutation that causes your death at 30. You have already passed this gene onto your offspring, but a couple of them have reached or are almost at reproductive age. Less pressure for this mutation to be selected out since at least a few of your kids should get along fine without you around.

3) A mutation that cause your death at 40. Most of your offspring have started reproducing and are getting along fine. Very little pressure on this mutation since if you die most of your offspring should be fine.

4) A mutation that causes your death at 50. Some of your offspring’s offspring are reproducing. Virtually no pressure on this mutation. If you die now it is unlikely your death will affect three generations.

As one can see it’s hard to get natural selection to "care" about imortality. Eventually there will be something "wrong" with you that will manifest itself. However, the clever apes that we are can fix this. We can fix it one of two ways. We can fix the DNA either as it is broken, or fix the inherent problems with the genetic code since evolution only got us so far. The second way is to develop drugs or treatments that will either force the cells to fix their DNA or mediate the processes that lead to aging. It is just a matter of time.

We are Just Machines

Humans are incredibly complex machines but machines none the less. We came without an owner’s manual but we are slowly piecing one together. None of this sort of news surprises me. For me the last surprising news from the biological sciences was the “real” cloning of sheep (I don’t consider tearing apart a blastocyst to make twins “real” cloning, but technically it is). If you would have asked me or almost any other well trained biologist a week before the announcement I doubt anyone would have said “mammalian cloning is imminent.” Now nothing is surprising to me as scientists exponentially grow our biological knowledge.

Some of you religious types out there will insist that we are not “just” machines but so irreducibly complex that we will never be able to figure out how we work. Well my friends that is just not true. On a small scale we understand how everything works, this protein is modified, that piece of DNA gets turned on and creates a protein which then binds to that protein etc. What we don’t quite understand yet is the exquisitely complex interactions between all of our different parts. There are literally thousands of different cellular bits all interacting in different ways. The same protein can be chemically modified in multiple ways, with each different modification capable of different functions. The scary part is that our knowledge of these interactions is growing at an exponential pace. When I started graduate school in 1992 there was virtually nothing known about these interactions. We knew that signals were traveling from the outside of the cell to the nucleus, but in most cases no idea how. Now we have mapped literally thousands of different signaling pathways and the challenge is figuring out the interactions between these different pathways.

The rapid advancement of our biochemical/molecular biological knowledge will have huge ramifications on our culture. How will the culture or our society change with a 25% increase in lifespan across the board? What if it was 50%, 100%, 1000%? The consequences are enormous, but I fear we have already passed the event horizon on this and it is only a matter of time.

Insurgent My Ass

The opening line of the relevant Washington Post article on the Jordanian bombings:

The insurgent organization Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility Thursday for the blasts that tore through three hotels here Wednesday night, the deadliest terror attack ever carried out in Jordan.

How the hell is Al Qaeda in Iraq an insurgent operation? The leader is a Jordanian. Can’t we all agree that Al Qaeda, at least, is a terrorist organization?

Then the writer (Jonathan Finer) contradicts himself in the first sentence. Shouldn’t an insurgent organization perform insurgent attacks? How can it be a terror attack if it is done by insurgents? If it’s not the reporter what moron editor at WP demanded that Al Qaeda not be called a terror organization?

And they wonder why the papers are loosing readership.