Bio-Scientific Problems and Quandaries

More companies, agencies and NGOs are openly referring to science fiction as a tool for exploring trends and possible repercussions of rapid change. (I just did 25 speeches around the world in 90 days.) Here the CEO of SCOUT, Berit Anderson, discusses how her company applies SF-style thought experiments to vital topics ranging from climate change to communications and info-warfare. 

"She cited Scout’s analysis of what it called the “weaponized AI” of Cambridge Analytica and what it might mean for future elections. Published in February 2017, the analysis led to Scout’s team being called conspiracy theorists — all before, Anderson said, many of the details became common knowledge from mainstream media coverage," writes Frank Catalano in Geekwire.

== Indignation and sanctimony… the drugs that are wrecking all our hopes ==

I still get mail about my proposal to widen our interpretation of the word “addiction” to include all ways that behaviorw get reinforced in human brains. These range from positive things - like love of family and dedication to skill - all the way to chemicals like opiates that hijack our natural reinforcement systems. For decades I've pointed at a realm in between – self-reinforcing mental states – that merits urgent attention.  

Both online and in in the book Pathological  Altruism, I had a well-regarded article on indignation addiction… or our tendency to return repeatedly to the drug high released in our brains by mental-state addiction that can manifest benignly - in spiritual prayer or meditation - or else in furious tribalism or the sanctimony and self-righteous rage that boomers imbibed from Hollywood, all their lives. (The "I'm as mad as hell" scream of the movie Network, for example.) 

People write to ask whatever happened to my campaign, which took me to deliver a talk at the Centers for Drugs and Addiction. (Nothing much came of it, alas.)  Especially since this exact, vile habit/addiction is what enemies of the West have been turning against us. The very thing killing the American genius at pragmatic problem solving and negotiation.  You could do some good by spreading the word about this, among intellects you know.

Though at this point the rage is open. So stand up, now. Choose someone to support in a swing district and fight for a few months. Then talk about ways to stop fighting.

== Aging - and evolving? ==

George Church drew fame in many ways. A top investigator in genetics at Harvard, he also notoriously spoke of resurrecting extinct species, as he explicated in his book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. (Something I portrayed in Existence.) He’s also doing research into life-extension and longevity, as described here, starting with seeking ways to improve the health span of dogs, something that folks will certainly pay for. The problem is our tendency to extrapolate lifespan expansions in flies and mice and yes, dogs, into hope that similar feats can be achieved for humans.

Alas, you can read my infamous paper – hated across the “live forever” community – pointing out strong reasons why there may not be any such “low-hanging fruit” for pushing us past 115 or so. It’s likely we used up all the easy techniques, hundreds of thousands of years ago. That is not to say science can’t give us a ladder to reach higher fruit! But it won’t be a matter of anything simple, like a dietary supplement or caloric restriction.

But are we still evolving? Between 9000 and 7000 years ago, there appears to have been a plummet in genetic diversity among human males, in what’s called the ‘Neolithic bottleneck.’ An undergrad is now credited with coming up with an explanation. Heck the surficial hypothesis is obvious – that across that time, combative males prevented other males from breeding. But apparently this study's methodology for using available data to exclude other hypotheses was very clever.  “Zeng surmised that intense warfare between patrilineal clans killed off so many men, only one was left for every 17 women.”

This should come as no surprise. Historical accounts show numerous societies doing this, even in historical times. Polynesia, for example, and the Mayan states. All of the adult males in a valley or on an island might be wiped out and replaced by the invaders who were likely related. (Indeed, I wonder that the authors of this study haven't zeroed in on those more recent episodes.) Nearly all of us are descended from the harems of the fierce men who won these struggles... helping to explain the "quirks" or unpleasant proclivities we see in many modern males, traits that are unsuitable for civilized living. Indeed, if this cycle were allowed to continue, it might help to explain the “Fermi Paradox” of why we don’t see high, alien civilizations.

This may also offer insight into an artistic mystery, regarding "Venus figurines" of the Neolithic.  Some feminists have posited that these figures, with exaggerated breasts, hips and other female traits, reveal a mother goddess cult that was peaceful and respectful, before it was replaced (as agriculture made male strength more valuable than gathering) by patriarchic thunder gods. But this study lends support to the other leading hypothesis... that such art-pieces served the same purpose as other figures with exaggerated breasts, hips and other female traits, in all known societies.

If such brutal cycles were endemic in the human past, we must gird ourselves to face a challenge and an opportunity. It is in our modern, scientific civilization that we have decided we don’t want to be like that!  And the first step - in moving decisively and forever away from all that-  is to follow the beam of modern, scientific feminists like Sarah Hrdy, who show how understanding our animal and quasi-animal roots is exactly what we must do, in order to choose a better path toward what we want to be.

See the original paper in Nature.

 == Is is down to anecdotes? ==

One of the insidious lies told often about climate change is that “scientists in the 70s believed we were heading to an ice age.”  Oh, surveys show that cooling theories constituted a minuscule minority of climate papers since World War II, and they were swiftly debunked. But if you offer statistics, confederates blank out.

So let’s go to anecdotes, their prime food. Like the 1970s film “Soylent Green,” immensely popular, depicting greenhouse broiling in a near future Earth.

Also in the 1970's Steven Spielberg directed a short movie predicated on global warming and air pollution, Los Angeles 2017. It was an episode of the TV show Name of the Game.

One member of my blog community (Jerry E.) cited a science series that became a film shown in schools from Sputnik to the 1980s. An episode of Bell Science program The Unchained Goddess - on February 12, 1958 - discussed human-caused global warming. “I remember watching it on television, and I also remember it being shown in my "red state" rural school several times when I was a young child." The most relevant two minutes are on YouTube.  

And yes, warming was the trend most-widely credited by a vast majority of the scientific community even back then, without satellite data.

This is what we are reduced to. The all-out war on every fact profession, from science to the FBI, from journalism to military officers, has reached the point where we cannot deal with our mad uncles with evidence and statistics.

Only anecdotes.

But remember how we started this missive. These neighbors of ours are mostly decent folks. They are just afraid and have been filed into hostility toward every "elite" of fact or skill or curiosity -- every profession that might stand in the way of a return to feudalism. 

These neighbors aren't the enemies of confidence and problem solving and progress.  It isn't even the ignoramus lords who finance the riling-up.

It is fear, itself.