Would you take gene therapy for monogamy?

Eventually, gene therapy might be perfected as a mechanism of modifying people's courtship and mating behaviors, but "can do" and "should do" questions remain.

Behold, the humble vole. It mostly looks like an extra plump, longer-haired field mouse; but, in its different varieties, it has begun revealing that there might be a genetic basis for different styles of mating and family rearing among mammals.

First, consider the prairie vole, common to North America's grasslands

What makes it unusual among mammals is that it is both sociable and monogamous. Prairie voles groom each other, nest with one another, collaborate to guard their territory and are affectionate and attentive parents who form, for the most part, devoted couples.[1]

This behavior is in contrast to its relative, the meadow vole, which "prefers a solitary, promiscuous existence."[1] But the meadow vole can be modified: "it is possible to inject a viral vector for the vasopressin receptor into the brains of the fickle meadow voles and make them better partners and parents."[1]

The differences in behaviors between these two species of vole are due only to a small set of genetic differences:

a hormone called vasopressin and the protein molecule that acts as its receptor. Prairie voles have many vasopressin receptors in the reward centres of their brains. It seems as though these are wired up in a way that causes the animal to take pleasure from monogamy.[1]

Vasopressin receptor variations in people have been linked to problems in marriages as well. So now arises a bioethics issue:

Suppose you find yourself dating a high quality person: she or he is intelligent, healthy, physically attractive, and from a very stable family environment. As these things go, you both declare your love to one another, solely and forever, and your intentions to have a family together. One day, the partner of your dreams says s/he has a really serious question to ask you.

S/he reminds you that s/he has worked for some time at a major research center for mammalian genetics, and that there is now no doubt about the tripartite vasopressin to brain function to monogamy behavioral link. In fact, even mammals that do not usually exhibit monogamous or child-labor sharing behaviors can be induced to do so by a simple injection of a viral-implanting vector. Your partner (rightly, it turns out) says that your mutual declarations of eternal love and commitments to family participation could now rely upon more than just the too often unreliable, existential exercise of the will, but upon the assurance of a strong, undeniable natural urge (likeunto the strong, undeniable natural desire for sex or food). It would only be a one-time, simple injection.

"My love," s/he asks, "shouldn't we guarantee our commitment forever?"


O.



REFERENCES

[image] evenhappier.com

[1] "Monogamouse" The Economist Dec. 30, 2009.

AAAS Podcasts the Top Science Advances of 2009

Ah, December -- when lots of different organizations give their "best of the year" lists. I'm always interested in the round-up of science discoveries, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science has a nicely done podcast which gives a full accounting of this year's top Science advances. It's free too, so that counts as a gift under the blog-o'-tree.

O.

REFERENCES

"Science Podcast" AAAS Dec. 18, 2009.

Why Religion Won't Go Away

In a book review of God is Back: How The Global Rise of Faith Is Changing The World by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, reviewer Mark Vernon gives an excellent overview of why the U.S. is such a religious nation and, more generally, why religion has hung on in the face of modern developments in science and advance commerce:

The more modernity undermines people's sense of identity, through the leveling forces of globalization, the more they seek a distinctive identity through religious commitment. The more turbulent people's work lives become, the more appealing a stable church life can seem. The more people suffer under a harsh capitalism, the more religious organizations offer welfare and help, thereby drawing folk in.[1]

This is probably the best, pithy analysis of religion's continued influence as I've seen. I have to admit, I utterly believe it. Importantly, it gives the reason why religion survives, and what it's proper function should be in society. Also, it tacitly acknowledges that even were market forces and goods distributed equitably among all people, the desires for identity would still make religion attractive. Next, Vernon goes onto talk about how religion functions specifically in U.S. culture:

But there are certain political conditions that have aided God's return too, or rather sustained his presence, for he never really went away. Top of the list, the two authors argue, is America's constitution, and its First Amendment: "that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The first part of that clause is the one that is commonly remembered, in effect, the separation of church and state. But the second part is equally important when it comes to creating the right conditions for religion to thrive. It forms what might be called a free market for religion, in which everyone can set out their stall, and moreover can do so in the public square. What America's modernity has not tried to do is force religion into the private sphere, a tendency that has characterised European reactions to belief. At the same time, though, it has ensured that there is at least a theoretical distance between religion and the exercise of political power.[1]

So when religious groups are allowed to exist, but not allowed to run each other out of the country (or worse), then this forces pluralism upon society, whereby "every day people rub up against belief systems and lifestyles different from their own."[1] I would also add that in a pluralistic, open environment, where religions have to compete with one another for advocates, the weak systems will die, and the stronger ones will morph and become even more attractive to its advocates. Of course, people's psychological profiles and regional preferences will differ, so there will always be a plurality of religions in a pluralistic socio-political environment.


REFERENCES

[1] Mark Vernon "Why God is back" guardian.co.uk, 18 May 2009 (Accessed 5 Dec. 2009)

O.

"Life on Mars" Hypothesis Given New Life

It looks like the life on Mars hypothesis has been given new life.

Not a long time ago, in a universe not far away -- speaking in geological and astronomical terms, of course -- a meteorite, called ALH84001 was blasted from the surface of a dusty read planet, Mars, 16 million years ago. Then, after a really L-O-N-G side trip, it eventually lands on Earth at about 11,000 BC. Finally, one of those naked primates that wander about looking for trouble (a scientist) happened to stumble upon it while tooling around Antarctica in 1984.

Back in 1996 a formal announcement was made after extended study. But there was some debate whether what was claimed to be bacteria fossils could really be so for life forms on such a small scale. "The structures found on ALH 84001 are 20-100 nanometres in diameter, similar in size to the theoretical nanobacteria, but smaller than any known cellular life at the time of their discovery."[1] The worry was that something that small could not contain RNA, the most basic, albeit primitive structure required for life (as we know it). But this worry seems to have been alleviated, because microbiologists have since been able to produce such microorganisms in the laboratory.[2] Also, new developments in high-resolution scanning electron microscopes have allowed better imaging of the meteorite than was available back in 1996, and the images are even more convincing.

All of this is consistent with an announcement by NASA scientists in early 2009 that large quantities of Methane in the atmosphere were highly suggestive of some sort of on-going microbiological activity on that planet:

Their findings, published [...] in the journal Science, show that 19,000 tonnes of methane were released in high concentrations over three specific areas in Mars's western hemisphere. The emissions occurred over a short period in summer 2003. "This raises the probability substantially that life was there or still survives at the present," study author Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said. "We think the probability is much higher now based on this evidence[....] By 2006, most of the methane had disappeared from the Martian atmosphere, adding to the mystery of the gas"[3]

Although Methane can be produced by volcanoes working in conjunction with other geological phenomenon, there is no evidence of any active volcanoes on Mars.


REFERENCES

[image] Recently released by NASA.

[1] "Allan Hills 84001" Wikipedia (Accesed Dec 5, 2009)

[2] Monica Bruckner "Nanobacteria and Nanobes- Are They Alive?" Carleton College Site (Accessed Dec 5, 2009)

[3] "Methane on Mars suggests possible life, NASA scientists say" CBC News (Acessed Dec 5, 2009)

O.

On Books and Popular Books

Lately I've taken on the task of finally organizing my library. I've been using LibraryThing[1] and have been very happy with it, even though I've only had time to enter a small portion of my books. Nevertheless, it's intoxicating to discover all the books I'd forgotten I owned, and even more so when I discover books I'd bought to read and then lost track of them in the shuffle of life. So I've been thinking a lot about books, the book, electronic books, and all that sort of stuff.

I came across this remark on book popularity in The Economist which struck me as worth repeating:

In “Formal Theories of Mass Behavior”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.[2]

No doubt book snobs get quite a thrill from such research.[3]

O.

REFERENCES

[image] Kevin Keenoo blogsite


[1] LibraryThing is nicely over-viewed here in Wikipedia. I can't recommend it too highly. I have deduced that if you have so many books that you need a cloud-based computer program to keep track of them all, then you have too many books. Of course there's strong counter: it's impossible to have too many books. I'm currently agnostic regarding this dichotomy. Perhaps its a paradox. At any rate, I've been initially entering books that are loose or weirdly located into my library database.

[2] "A world of hits" The Economist Nov. 26, 2009. (Accessed Dec. 2, 2009)

[3] I know I did.

Ardipithecus

Seed Magazine has a nice summary of the most important discovery in human paleontology for quite some time. The 4.5 million-year-old Ardipithecus stands at the very initial stage of human evolution, where humans began bipedal walking in earnest. From the article:

What makes Ardipithecus singular is the skeleton: To anatomists, Ardi is not a mere point on a map. It is the map. As paleoanthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy describes it, Ardi gives us a view of a previously unknown “adaptive plateau” among early hominins—a suite of anatomical and behavioral characteristics that lasted for a long, stable period in the early Pliocene environment. The Ardipithecus form might account for the bulk of the whole story of human evolution—a kind of hominin that was different from anything that came before or after. [...] So how close is Ardipithecus to the last common ancestor? In the current issue of Genetics, yet another study of the human and chimpanzee genomes places the divergence between them at only 4.3 million years—a shade younger than Ardipithecus.[1]

Ardipithecus is like humans in that "she had small, human-like canine teeth. Her molars were smaller, but stout—not at all like those of chimpanzees or gorillas." Also her skull "was carried above her spine most of the time, an indication that she saw the world from a vertical, upright posture." The reason that this find is so important to Anthropology is because "the real 'missing link' —the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees—may have been a lot like Ardi."[1]


REFERENCES

[image] Seed Magazine

[1]John Hawks "Uncovering Ardi: What We Know" Seed Magazine October 5, 2009 (Accessed November 1, 2009)

[*] The article mentions where the real research was presented--in Science magazine. I have happened to have that edition, but there is an excellent online version available of all those materials found at their site: Online Extras: Ardipithecus ramidus. There is also an informative summary video to be found there.

O.

Mobile Phones as Leap-Tech for Developing Nations

It's hardly news that adding technology to a developing country's infra-structure boosts its economy, but stating an exact boost for a particular items is informative. From The Economist:

"An extra ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts GDP growth by 0.8 percentage points, according to the World Bank, by helping small entrepreneurs flourish."[1]

The importance of the mobile phone as a communication device is well known, but as mobile computing and mobile phone technologies fully merge, I believe that the GDP growth by countries which leverage such "leap tech" will become even more amplified. Imagine if mobile phone users in such countries were instead issued iPhones. Even if such countries don't (yet) have the bandwidth to use all of the internet features efficiently, just the presence of a mobile computing device that allows its users to download very cheap applications would have broad impact on individual entrepreneurs, and hence on the economy overall.

Also, developing nations sometimes lack a reliable or fully expanded power-grid infrastructure. Power is often generated by fuel, which supply can be iffy due to such common contingencies as localized wars and weather disasters. But the low-power requirements of devices like mobile phones and mobile computers gets around this problem, since they can be recharged by fairly cheap, reasonably efficient solar charging devices.

Finally, it is possible to determine and analyze how people move around by examining mobile phone usage. Different social groups within a country interact in different ways. Traffic and disease patterns could also be easily tracked, since governments can note such usage and report on it much more efficiently, where before the presence of these devices such information would have been practically impossible to collect. Properly data-mined, the millions of mobile phones in developing nations can function as ad hoc sensors for national data-collection networks.

Mobile devices quickly come down in price and are easily introduced into developing nations. Thus, these nations will have a much shorter path to development than would have been otherwise expected just a few years ago.


REFERENCES

[1] "Fish Out of Water" The Economist Oct. 29, 2009

[*] The trend is their friend, and ours, since commerce most benefits when everyone can participate:


O.