Superprez

It's a bird, it's a plane! - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I’ve been busy moving to a new office at work and repainting 3 rooms of my house – I guess it’s good to stay busy. It’s kept me from my blog though, so there’s some catching up to do… Today’s topic is all political and I’ll start with a brief remark about Rick Perry’s recently ended campaign.

PERRY CAMPAIGN EULOGY
The fourth grader who forgot his lines in “Sleeping Beauty” still dwells deep in my psyche. I froze up, and my teacher, Mrs. Conwoop (on stage right), had to feed me every line for 5 minutes… The horror! The embarrassment! That part of me feels for Rick Perry’s various campaign freeze-ups – he forgot the government agency he’d like to cancel twice. He thought the Supreme Court had 8 justices. His infractions were actually minor and human if not for the fact he was running for POTUS. His positions were actually Neanderthal and poorly spoken – a columnist for Dallas Morning News condensed them as “more conservative than thou”. Turned out more was needed, even with this weak field of GOP candidates.

Perry’s poor performance actually says more about his fellow Texans than it says about Perry… we’ve had him as governor for twelve years. He skated by in a couple of election cycles with nary a debate and very few interviews. Do Texans want to repeat that cycle? We could just as easily send a door stop or a hat rack to the governor’s mansion. How about a suit on a hanger and a pair of cowboy boots? Texas needs to rethink its red meat/red state mentality. Maybe governance needs people who’ve thought through the issues and know how to present their ideas coherently. This is all something to chew on as we proceed to our next political topic…

ANDREW SULLIVAN and SUPERPREZ
Andrew Sullivan is a talented Newsweek columnist who recently kicked a hornet’s nest with his provocative cover story – “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?” On wonky web sites like realclearpolitics.com, Sullivan’s article prompted a handful of retort articles like “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Smart?” Any article which prompts 5 reply articles merits a read – it got under peoples’ skin….

Andrew Sullivan used to be a contradiction to me. Until Obama came along, he was a conservative, gay Republican. He fell under the “Log Cabin” moniker which strikes me a little like being a black Dixiecrat (were that still possible, thankfully not). He became an “Obamican” in 2007, and in his recent Newsweek article he articulates Obama’s 1st term achievements. Here is but a short list for “Superprez”….

o Rescued GM and Chrysler from bankruptcy
o Passed $787 billion stimulus that probably steered us around a depression
o Added 2.4 million jobs, more than entire W Bush years
o Actually lowered taxes – 1/3 of stimulus was middle class tax cuts
o Enacted Obamacare, an approach which encourages individual responsibility.
o Took out Osama Bin Laden and Khadafy, seriously weakened Al Qaeda
o Ended DADT and ended US pursuit of the “Defense of Marriage Act”
o Ended the Iraq war

These are fairly remarkable achievements – any two of them would be lifetime bragging rights for an aspiring, progressive politico. They're all the more impressive coming from a political novice like Obama... I must confess that I myself was for Hillary back in 2008. Obama seemed like an untested “dark horse” (no racial pun intended :-) ) and I wondered what we were in for. It irked me that Caroline Kennedy and her Uncle Ted were pushing Obama – I blogged tirelessly about the unwarranted adulation in articles like “Obaminable”.

Have to say I was mistaken -- I’m impressed by Obama’s achievements. Sullivan describes him as a “long game, show-don’t-tell” politician. He’s more interested in doing than telling (or bragging). I myself think that the watershed moment was killing Bin Laden. Taking out this elusive, evil cancer was important – probably important enough to explain why the GOP has sent in only their “B” Team (maybe their “C” Team) for 2012. The GOP establishment wants to keep the “A” players primed for 2016.

To people all over, who have a secret envy and dismay over a wunderkind newbie with a middle name of “Hussein” no less, I know whereof you sputter with exasperation… how dare he? Well he dared and he did. And in all fairness, we have to give credit to this remarkable Superprez. What might he pull off in another 4 years?

© 2012 blogSpotter

Vertical Evolution

DaVinci's Vitruvian Man - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Who was Gordon Rattray Taylor? He was a little known British journalist who wrote on niche topics such as biotechnology and evolution. As he was dying of cancer in 1981, he put the finishing touches on his magnum opus, The Great Evolution Mystery. The book was a commercial dud when it was published in 1983, but has since been reevaluated and much more appreciated. Taylor doesn’t answer any long-standing questions, but in the book he asks several very worthy questions about evolution.

We have now, as in 1983, two prevailing paradigms to explain the origin of life. In the ivied towers of academia there is the theory of Natural Selection – it basically asserts that life has evolved from an accumulation of beneficial mutations in organic matter. Those mutations are random in nature and have happened over eons. Gordon Rattray Taylor pointed up some problems – particularly with organs of extreme perfection such as the human eye. Such complexity would be unlikely to happen from “happy accidents” – the delicate structure would require special timing and tuning. Taylor’s objections were embraced by the religious community who likened Taylor’s eye concept to the pious William Paley’s watch.

The (Christian) religious community itself believes that a super human intelligence created life in one great instance, in the Garden of Eden. The time is “backed in” by religious scholars using the genealogy of the Old Testament – anywhere from 6,000 BC to 4,000 BC. Even supposing some forbears lived to be 100, this date would be in glaring contradiction to modern geological data. 6,000 BC is recent in geological time and fairly standard techniques have established the earth itself to be nearly 5 billion years old. Life itself probably surfaced over 3 billion years ago. Taylor wasn’t devoutly religious nor was he trying to promote a particular faith – he didn’t adhere to the Bible genealogy idea. Taylor was accepting of basic earth and fossil facts … he just wanted to have all the evolutionary elements fall in place and make sense.


Taylor's book - cover and contents - Pictures courtesy of Secker and Warburg

Taylor was likely on to something. In chapters like “Puzzles and Plans” he notices that evolution seems to follow a winnowing, narrowing process which would almost imply intelligent selectivity. I would join Taylor in posing these kinds of questions. If we go with Darwin’s theory, we must inquire:

- Why have we observed no new species?
- Why have we observed no seriously, naturally mutated species?
- Why is there not one other species of animal that offers competition to humans?

Biology texts of the last 50 years love to point out an English moth which switched from white to black so its wings would be well-camouflaged against factory soot. Another text talked about a species of fish in Africa which changed the color of its scales. In both cases, we’re looking at a minor variation – probably the activation of a preexisting gene. Nowhere have we seen anything sprout horns or wings unexpectedly – unless via deliberate lab tinkering. With due respect to beavers who make dams and ants who build nests, no other species is a master architect. Chimps and gorillas, our closest natural relatives, live in primitive clans. They can poke ant hills with sticks and make grass beds.

WATCHING THE WATCHERS

Taylor suggested, but didn’t say outright, that there might be some other kind of force at work. I myself think that organized religion is partly right – there is a super human intelligence. However it is fallible and it works through evolutionary process. There was no grand concoction in the Garden of Eden.

Here are some speculative answers to the questions above. Let me emphasize that these are my own ideas and not Taylor's…

- Humans are the last major new species. Evolution is intelligently driven and doesn’t reinvent the wheel.
- There are many amazing new mutations – but they are subtle and they happen almost entirely in humans. The greatest debates about physical design have already been won and lost – most mutations are to the soft brain tissue of humans. They are probably too minute for even the most advanced human geneticists or DNA experts to unravel.
- Evolution is efficient, selective and intelligently directed. Once a species has a major “design victory” the intelligence driving other species has some ability to realign itself with a “superior” animal. There is some type of dissociative and mobile property in the driving intelligence.

These ideas would probably be disturbing to conventional theists in several ways. Humans are still "superior" by way of evolutionary selection, but the process isn't as tidy as one would like. We actually are derived from animals and the distinction between adjacent species is murky, somewhat clouded. There is an uncomfortable nearness, even overlap with creatures we'd just as soon consign to a zoo.

This idea might also open other cans of worms – are some human subspecies “selected” over others and if so, which ones. What would be the criteria or the signs to see? We live in a world rife with clues – clues planted by a fallible super (but not supernatural) intelligence. There are biological signs all over the place – the truth is immutably there with much of it spelled out in our DNA and other parts spelled out in rich fossil deposits. If we can get past our own self-centered concerns and petty materialism, we can crack these biological riddles once and for all. In the meantime, we can give credit to Gordon Rattray Taylor for asking the right questions.

© 2011 blogSpotter