tomrenz | This article is pretty science heavy so at this point I also want to
acknowledge two additional points. First, I am not a Peter
McCullough/Harvey Risch type scientist. I am a lawyer with some science
background. That means that I am not the guy that will be creating
science, but to do my job as an attorney litigating in this area I have
to be able to read and understand the science. I do those things quite
well. Second, the information in this article is based simply on reading
and understanding the science. There is nothing here I’ve created - I
just know how to read.
Disclaimers aside, I want to open this
article with a confession. This article was titled using the acronym
mRNA but that was intentionally misleading. For purposes of this article
- mRNA actually stands for modRNA which is different from mRNA. mRNA is
messenger RNA and is found all over in life. modRNA is laboratory
modified RNA that has been synthetically created for a purpose. It can
be more durable, and have substantially greater impact than a true mRNA
and can do many other things.
Why does this matter? Well let’s start with the COVID “vaccines”.
Because mRNA is a weak particle and breaks down easily with a relatively
lower risk of messing with your genetics than other gene therapy
products (like modRNA) that is what is always talked about in the jabs.
The problem is that it is a lie. Here is the FDA label for the Pfizer
jab:
You can find the entire label here: https://labeling.pfizer.com/ShowLabeling.aspx?id=14471.
Note that different vials are different (denoted by the cap color) but
also, under number 3, that one of the ingredients is modRNA. No one is
talking about this but it is crucial.
Life as we know it is specified by the genomes of the myriad organisms with which we share the planet. Every organism possesses a genome that contains the biological information
needed to construct and maintain a living example of that organism.
Most genomes, including the human genome and those of all other cellular
life forms, are made of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) but a few viruses have RNA (ribonucleic acid) genomes. DNA and RNA are polymeric molecules made up of chains of monomeric subunits called nucleotides.
To give you an idea of how complicated the genes that make up our body are this description from the same webpage follows:
The human genome, which is typical of the genomes of all multicellular animals, consists of two distinct parts (Figure 1.1):
*The nuclear genome comprises approximately 3 200 000 000 nucleotides of DNA, divided into 24 linear molecules, the shortest 50 000 000 nucleotides in length and the longest 260 000 000
nucleotides, each contained in a different chromosome. These 24
chromosomes consist of 22 autosomes and the two sex chromosomes, X and Y.
*The mitochondrial genome is a circular DNA molecule of 16 569 nucleotides, multiple copies of which are located in the energy-generating organelles called mitochondria.
*Each of the approximately 1013
cells in the adult human body has its own copy or copies of the genome,
the only exceptions being those few cell types, such as red blood
cells, that lack a nucleus in their fully differentiated state. The vast
majority of cells are diploid
and so have two copies of each autosome, plus two sex chromosomes, XX
for females or XY for males - 46 chromosomes in all. These are called somatic cells, in contrast to sex cells or gametes, which are haploid
and have just 23 chromosomes, comprising one of each autosome and one
sex chromosome. Both types of cell have about 8000 copies of the
mitochondrial genome, 10 or so in each mitochondrion.
So
think about how complex that makes us. The nuclear genome contains 3.2
billion nucleotides & the mitochondrial genome contains 16.5k. Each
of these were designed by God and have evolved over the millennia to
work as a singular machine. Now imagine a watch. The watch tells perfect
time because a bunch of tiny gears all work perfectly together to move
the hands the appropriate amount to point to the proper minutes and
seconds. If one of these gears becomes damaged or the wrong size gear is
put into place the entire watch would go haywire and fail to work. A
watch may have hundreds of parts - our bodies have billions.
With
that in mind let’s talk about modRNA (or worse - saRNA). Rather than
taking my word for what this is let me share this explanation from
Pfizer you can find at https://www.pfizer.com/science/innovation/mrna-technology until they change it (which will likely happen shortly after I publish this):
So Pfizer’s modRNA and saRNA vaccines modify the nucleosides that make up the genes that make up our body.
I’ve
watched this debate for more than a decade. It’s the same wreck, over
and over. A person with a taste for puncturing taboos learns about
racial gaps in IQ scores and the idea that they might be genetic. He
writes or speaks about it, credulously or unreflectively. Every part of
his argument is attacked: the validity of IQ, the claim that it’s
substantially heritable, and the idea that races can be biologically
distinguished. The offender is denounced as racist when he thinks he’s
just defending science against political correctness.
I know what it’s like to be this person because, 11 years ago, I was that person. I saw a comment from Nobel laureate James Watson about the black-white IQ gap, read some journal articles about it, and bought in.
That was a mistake. Having made that mistake, I’m in no position to
throw stones at Sullivan, Harris, or anyone else. But I am in a position
to speak to these people as someone who understands where they’re
coming from. I believe I can change their thinking, because I’ve changed
mine, and I’m here to make that case to them. And I hope those of you
who find this whole subject vile will bear with me as I do.
Here’s
my advice: You can talk about the genetics of race. You can talk about
the genetics of intelligence. But stop implying they’re the same thing.
Connecting intelligence to race adds nothing useful. It overextends the science you’re defending, and it engulfs the whole debate in moral flames.
I’m
not asking anyone to deny science. What I’m asking for is clarity. The
genetics of race and the genetics of intelligence are two different
fields of research. In his piece in the Times, Reich wrote about
prostate cancer risk, a context in which there’s clear evidence of a
genetic pattern related to ancestry. (Black men with African ancestry in
a specific DNA region
have a higher prostate cancer risk than do black men with European
ancestry in that region.) Reich steered around intelligence where,
despite racial and ethnic gaps in test scores, no such pattern has been
established.
It’s also fine to discuss the genetics of IQ—there’s a serious line of scientific inquiry
around that subject—and whether intelligence, in any population, is an
inherited social advantage. We tend to worry that talk of heritability
will lead to eugenics. But it’s also worth noting that, to the extent
that IQ, like wealth, is inherited and concentrated through assortativemating, it can stratify society and undermine cohesion. That’s what much of The Bell Curve was about.
The
trouble starts when people who write or talk about the heritability of
intelligence extend this idea to comparisons between racial and ethnic
groups. Some people do this maliciously; others don’t. You can call the
latter group naïve, credulous, or obtuse to prejudice. But they might be
open to persuasion, and that’s my aim here. For them, the chain of
thought might go something like this: Intelligence is partly genetic,
and race is partly genetic. So maybe racial differences on intelligence
tests can be explained, in part, by genetics.
Late last year, I was compelled to keep my foot planted deep in William Saletan's ignorant, overreaching backside. Saletan was down to the same insidious and habitual stupid human tricks that certain of our visitors seem to be perennially stuck on. Shame. As it turns out, Saletan has finally come around to the errors and omissions plaguing his thinking. While it's at least five months and some years too late to warrant respect (I mean really, only a true simpleton could go down this path in the first place) - at the very least - his epiphany is worth noting;
policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can't find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you're a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks.
By itself, this problem isn't decisive. After all, racial analysis did lead to the genetic findings about beta blockers. But as the conversation shifts from medicine to social science, and particularly to patterns laden with stereotypes, the moral cost of framing such patterns in racial terms becomes unsupportable. We can't just be "race realists," as believers in biological distinctions among races like to call themselves. We have to be realists about racism. No fact in human history is more pervasive than our tendency to prejudge, fear, despise, persecute, and fight each other based on even the shallowest observable differences. It's simply reckless to feed that fire.
Of course Saletan equivocates waaaaay too much, understandable given that it's humiliating to be found out as intellectually underendowed. That said, at least he's taken the first step toward scientific and intellectual sobriety. He's no longer in complete denial of what's trivially obvious to those of us with the eyes to see. Let's hope everyone is capable of bootstrapping themselve up and out of the psychological stone age.
As allegedly independent agents within the consensus reality, one of the things each of us has to do in our lives is to discover, as far as possible, the grounds for believing what we are asked to believe. Theories of human nature are inherently controversial because they are socially constructed. This includes allegedly scientific theories of human nature. Whenever you see something presented under the rubric of human nature: science, technology, and life - question it ruthlessly.
No amount of special pleading on behalf of the alleged moral and ethical neutrality of genomic science should be allowed to obscure the fact that the conceptual and material deliverables of scientific research are not value-free. Yet, we have recently been beset by precisely such special pleadings within two dominant organs of the mainstream media which have each sought to make the case that the long-standing theories of genetic determinism of IQ is in fact a useful, helpful, and value-free research domain. Nothingcould befurther fromthe truth. Racists in America, the UK, and Germany have believed in and pursued these value-laden and heavily politically charged notions for well over a century, long prior to the advent of the scientific realization that there was even such a thing as a "genome".The story of eugenic pseudo-science is one of manifold superstitions and cruelties and measures and meanings invented, fostered, and propagated for no other reason than to provide an excuse for the exercise of social and political power that would otherwise be completely morally and ethically inexcusable. Those who govern employ a variety of methods to control the contents of the consensus. Much of that content is engineered to provoke fear and to foster ignorance between groups because a divided and fearful populace is a more readily controlled and manipulated populace. Often as not, what induces human groups to fear and destroy one another is the prevalence of false ideas about human nature.Last friday, I wrote that the NY Times and Slate.com have each published a series of articles drawing from the blogs of ill-informed people who do not warrant respectful attention in the case of the Times, and in the case of Slate - a conservative commentator draws from both racist blogs and a hardcore racist pseudo-scientist backed by strategic capital going back to the Nazi era. Slate and the New York Times are supposed to know better. Because I know that they know better - this leads me to one inescapable conclusion. Decision makers at these two media giants have decided for whatever reason to editorially back the reintroduction of racist pseudo-science into the public and political discourse.I was not aware at the time I wrote this opinion that Slate is a property of the Washington Post. Now knowing this fact, I find the assertion that elements of the Establishment are injecting eugenic themes back into the public discourse even more compelling. If I can find an instance where the Wall Street Journal is also involved with the eugenic revival, I'll consider it a media Establishment trifecta. What brings me back to this topic is William Saletan's pathetic mea culpa published in yesterday's Slate.
Many of you have criticized parts of the genetic argument as I related them. Others have pointed to alternative theories I truncated or left out. But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia.
For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresyAmerican Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences. ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called
I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.
Oh Hells to the Gnaw - Saletan categorically must not be given a pass for his "dog ate my homework excuse" of sloppy fact checking! This was not merely an instance of sloppy fact checking, rather, it was a demonstration of the willful deceit which would have people to believe that research into the genetic determination of IQ is value-free, morally and ethically neutral, scientific research for the common good. What an audacious and ahistorical crock of conservative nonsense. Such nonsense trading on the collective amnesia and historical ignorance of the public demonstrates the free and easy interlocks between conservative and racist politics and serves as a tour de force illustration of the extent to which the latter ideology perniciously infects and pervades the political and scientific expressions of the former. Only a month earlier, writing in defense of James Watson, Saletan drew the following conclusion;
Well, if he wants to paper over his bruised ego, that's his business. But racism, genetics, culture, black America, and the future of Africa are too important to be papered over.
It's clear from Watson's revisionism, reticence, and retirement that he wants to make his hypothesis go away. But wanting it isn't enough. That's not science. It's politics.
Saletan is a liar, plain and simple. That he was exposed very quickly and decisively is to the good. The fragemented state of the American political world is one tiny click less fragmented for these disclosures. That the attempt to misuse tidbits of genomic "evidence" in support of socially and politically defined objectives is evidence of a larger scheme of fragmentation that is very widespread and backed by some very serious strategic capital. The process of fragmentation maintained by elements in the U.S. establishment makes it very difficult if not impossible for most folks to put the world and its contents in a proper perspective. Fragmenting theories of human nature comprise a continuing exercise on the part of certain evil elements in society to excuse the inexcusable aspects of their past and continuing conduct.
Marquette | The wholesale destruction of Jews and other ethnic minorities
in Europe by Nazi Germany before and during World War II has been
widely and justly condemned as a crime against humanity. Literally
thousand of books and articles have been written on this particular
genocide, highlighted by extensive testimony presented to the
Nuremberg criminal trials after the war.
We have been conditioned since World War II to believe that
such a horrible human tragedy cannot, or at least should not, happen
again. Particularly in the Western World, schooled in the Judeo-
Christian ethic, we believe that another Holocaust could not happen and
particularly not in the United States. It cannot happen here, we saybecause we live under democratic forms of government and our U.S.
Constitution guarantees us protection of our lives as a God-given right.
Until this current century, we were no doubt justified in relying
on these guarantees to our human existence. But will these guarantees
survive the very dangerous new trends in the Western world's regard for
the protection of life? Is a new and different kind of Holocaust in the
offing, not against Jews or other minorities, but a Holocaust against the
elderly, the chronically ill, the terminally ill and the disabled, right here
in our own country? This proposition might appear preposterous at
first glance, but the issue is important enough to merit a closer look.
It is a surprising historical fact that in the United States, we are
wittingly or unwittingly following the same steps that led Germany to
the disastrous conclusion that some lives are "life not worthy of life"
and can be legally extinguished to suit the needs of society and the
desires of the family and the state. Germany progressed from the
adoption of genetics theories in the last century to sterilization to
abortion to euthanasia to the indiscriminate murder of ethnically and
politically undesirable races and aliens. Except for timing, the United
States is proceeding along the identical path, with only the legalization
of euthanasia. or assisted suicide, remaining before the flood gates
open. Indeed, we are now facing this last and fatal step on the "slippery
slope".
In January 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court began to hear, on
appeal, oral arguments for Vasco v. Quill and Washington v.
Glucksberg, the New York and Washington cases which struck down
anti-assisted suicide laws in each state earlier in 1996.
If the U.S. Supreme Court follows the unfortunate precedent
which it established in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision in which it
created with very questionable constitutional basis a new "right" to
abortion, then they may now create another new "right" to assisted
suicide. If this happens, we will have taken the final step toward
undermining the very foundation of our American democracy in which
the government has the constitutional responsibility both to protect the
lives of its citizens and not destroy those lives.
Ideas do have consequences and the legalization of assisted
suicide would have momentous implications for the future of American
society, families, medicine and the ultimate evaluation of the worth of
a human life, as well as the very foundations of our American form ogovernment. Ultimately, the lives of our citizens may well be
subordinated to the desires and interests of the government, which will
decide directly or indirectly who will live and who will die. In fact,
some U.S. authorities already are beginning to talk about the future
demands on the resources of Medicare and Medicaid to maintain
patients who might be kept alive for many years by modem medical
technology, at great public expense, unless they can be dispensed with
through assisted suicide.
It is well known that in the Netherlands today, where assisted
suicide is widely practiced, serious abuses are being perpetrated against
people who have not given their consent. In almost one-half of the
assisted suicide cases in the Netherlands, the decision is being made by
third parties without consulting the patient or the family. If the state or
its agents can kill targeted people at will, then democracy as we know
it will have perished. The next Holocaust, if and when it comes, will
thus not be of the same character as the Nazis'. But the end result will
be the same, namely, the wholesale killing of undesirables whether they
be unborn, partially born, old, ill, or just tired of living.
Let us review the historical steps that both Germany and the
United States have passed through since Darwin's theory of evolution
originated in the middle 1850s and jolted the scientific world, including
scholars, philosophers and even some misguided theologians. We will
see how the seeds of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany preceded the
Hitler era by several generations
cell | We report genome sequence data from six individuals excavated from the
base of a medieval well at a site in Norwich, UK. A revised radiocarbon
analysis of the assemblage is consistent with these individuals being
part of a historically attested episode of antisemitic violence on 6
February 1190 CE. We find that four of these individuals were closely
related and all six have strong genetic affinities with modern Ashkenazi
Jews. We identify four alleles associated with genetic disease in
Ashkenazi Jewish populations and infer variation in pigmentation traits,
including the presence of red hair. Simulations indicate that
Ashkenazi-associated genetic disease alleles were already at appreciable
frequencies, centuries earlier than previously hypothesized. These
findings provide new insights into a significant historical crime, into
Ashkenazi population history, and into the origins of genetic diseases
associated with modern Jewish populations.
The deaths of 17 medieval Jews: An incredible new genetics paper has just dropped: The earliest Jewish genomes and the story of where they are from and how they died is incredibly important, and central to the origin of contemporary antisemitic conspiracy hatred. 🧵
In 2004 construction workers excavating land in central Norwich, UK, as part of the Chapelfield shopping center development recovered human skeletal elements from their spoil.
Subsequent archaeological investigations led to the discovery and excavation of a probable well containing the commingled remains of at least seventeen people. The stratigraphic position of the remains, their completeness, and state of articulation suggested that they had all been deposited in a single event shortly after their death. The overrepresentation of subadults and the unusual location of the burial outside of consecrated ground suggested that they may have been victims of a mass fatality event such as famine, disease, or mass murder.
Pottery sherds from the well were dated typologically to 12th–14th centuries CE, and two initial radiocarbon determinations on the skeletal remains placed these in the 11th–12th centuries.
The most prominent historically attested mass death in Norwich within this date range was in 1190 CE when members of the Jewish community were killed during antisemitic riots precipitated by the beginning of the Third Crusade although the number of individuals killed is unclear.
Norwich had been the setting for a previous notable event in the history of medieval antisemitism when, in 1144 CE, the family of William of Norwich claimed that local Jews were responsible for his murder, an argument taken up by Thomas of Monmouth through the first documented invocation of the blood libel myth. This represents the beginnings of an antisemitic conspiracy theory that persists up to the present day.
The possibility that the remains found at the Chapelfield well site were those of the victims of antisemitic violence is given further support by the site’s location just to the south of the medieval Jewish quarter of the city.
However, no additional archaeological evidence linked the human remains to a specific historical event or group of people. During the High Medieval period (ca. 1000–1300 CE), Norwich witnessed a number of outbreaks of large-scale violence, and additional data were therefore required to test the hypothesis that these individuals were of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.
Judaism is a shared religious and cultural identity, with endogamous marriage practices and distinctive diasporic histories of communities worldwide, particularly a Levantine origin and complex history of migrations over the last ∼2.5 millennia. Present-day Ashkenazim are descendants of medieval Jewish populations with histories primarily in northern and eastern Europe. As a result, they carry distinctive ancestries, and Jewish and non-Jewish medieval individuals living in the same regions would likely show characteristic patterns of genetic variation.
Hereditary disorders in Ashkenazi Jewish populations have been the focus of considerable medical research, with genetic screening now commonplace to mitigate risks.
Their prevalence is generally attributed to strong genetic drift during Ashkenazi population bottlenecks coupled with high endogamy although other processes such as heterozygote advantage have been proposed.
Candidate population bottlenecks include the phase of dispersion following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the formation of Ashkenazi communities in northern Europe during the medieval period, antisemitic persecution arising from the Crusades, unfounded reprisals for the Black Death, and the movement from western and central Europe to eastern Europe that preceded rapid population growth from the 15th to 18th centuries.
No genomes from known Jewish individuals are currently available from the medieval period or earlier, largely because exhumation and scientific testing of Jewish remains are prohibited. Such data could inform on the migration and admixture histories of Jewish populations. Furthermore, the presence of any pathogenic variants would provide valuable clues to the origins and spread of Ashkenazim-associated genetic disorders. Here, we examine results from radiocarbon dating and genetic analyses of the Chapelfield individuals to better establish who they were, when they died, and the nature of their death and burial, and identify potential broader implications for Ashkenazim population history and genetics.
axial | Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and was exiled
from his native home Austria after the nation was annexed by Nazi
Germany. He moved to Ireland after he was invited to set up the Dublin
Institute of Advanced Studies. This follows the past history of Ireland
acting as a storehouse of knowledge during the Dark Ages. After decades
of work, biology was becoming more formalized around the 1940s. Better
tools were emerging to perturb various organisms and samples and the
increasing number of discoveries was building out the framework of life.
With the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on genetics, scientists probably
most importantly Thomas Hunt Morgan and his work on fruit flies (Drosophila) set up the rules of heredity - genes located on chromosomes with each cell containing a set of chromosomes. In 1927, a seminal discovery
was made that irradiation by X-rays of fruits flies can induce
mutations. Just the medium was not known where Schrödinger was thinking
through his ideas on biology. At the same type, organic chemistry was
improving and various macromolecules in the cell such as enzymes were
being identified along with the various types of bonds made. For
Schrödinger, there were no tools to characterized these macromolecules
(i.e. proteins, nucleic acids) such as X-ray crystallography. Really the
only tool useful at the time was centrifugation. At the time, many
people expected proteins to be the store and transmitter of genetic
information. Luckily, Oswald Avery published an incredible paper in 1944 that found DNA as probably the store instead of proteins.
With this knowledge base Schrödinger took a beginner’s mind
to biology. In some ways his naivety was incredibly useful. Instead of
being anchored to some widely-accepted premise that proteins transmitted
genetic information (although he had a hunch some protein was
responsible), the book thought from first principles and identified a
few key concepts in biology that were not appreciated but became very
important. Thankfully Schrödinger was curious - he enjoyed writing
poetry and reading philosophy so jumped into biology somewhat
fearlessly. At the beginning of the book, he sets the main question as:
“How
can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial
boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and
chemistry?”
Information
In the first chapter,
Schrödinger argues that because organisms have orderly behavior they
must follow the laws of physics. Because physics relies on statistics,
life was follow the same rules. He then argues that because biological
properties have some level of permanence the material that stores this
information then must be stable. This material must have the ability to
change from one stable state to another (i.e. mutations). Classical
physics is not very useful here, but for Schrödinger his expertise in
quantum mechanics helped determine that these stable states must be held
together through covalent bonds (a quantum phenomena) within a
macromolecule. In the early chapters, the book argues that the gene must
be a stable macromolecule.
Through discussion around the
stability of the gene, the book makes its most important breakthrough -
an analogy between a gene and an aperiodic crystal (DNA is aperiodic but
Schrödinger amazingly didn’t know that at the time): “the germ of a
solid.” Simply, a periodic crystal can store a small amount of
information with an infinite number of atoms and an aperiodic crystal
has the ability to store a near infinite amount of information in a
small number of atoms. The latter was more in line with what the current
data suggested what a gene was. Max Delbrück had similar ideas along
with J.B.S. Haldane, but the book was the first to connect this idea to
heredity. But readers at the time and maybe even still overextended this
framework to believe that genetic code contains all of the information
to build an organism. This isn’t true, development requires an
environment with some level of randomness.
wikipedia | In chapter I, Schrödinger explains that most physical laws on a large
scale are due to chaos on a small scale. He calls this principle
"order-from-disorder." As an example he mentions diffusion,
which can be modeled as a highly ordered process, but which is caused
by random movement of atoms or molecules. If the number of atoms is
reduced, the behaviour of a system becomes more and more random. He
states that life greatly depends on order and that a naïve physicist may
assume that the master code of a living organism has to consist of a
large number of atoms.
In chapter II and III, he summarizes what was known at this time
about the hereditary mechanism. Most importantly, he elaborates the
important role mutations play in evolution.
He concludes that the carrier of hereditary information has to be both
small in size and permanent in time, contradicting the naïve physicist's
expectation. This contradiction cannot be resolved by classical physics.
In chapter IV, Schrödinger presents molecules,
which are indeed stable even if they consist of only a few atoms, as
the solution. Even though molecules were known before, their stability
could not be explained by classical physics, but is due to the discrete
nature of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, mutations are directly linked to quantum leaps.
He continues to explain, in chapter V, that true solids, which are also permanent, are crystals.
The stability of molecules and crystals is due to the same principles
and a molecule might be called "the germ of a solid." On the other hand,
an amorphous solid, without crystalline structure, should be regarded as a liquid with a very high viscosity.
Schrödinger believes the heredity material to be a molecule, which
unlike a crystal does not repeat itself. He calls this an aperiodic
crystal. Its aperiodic nature allows it to encode an almost infinite
number of possibilities with a small number of atoms. He finally
compares this picture with the known facts and finds it in accordance
with them.
In chapter VI Schrödinger states:
...living matter, while not eluding the "laws of
physics" as established up to date, is likely to involve "other laws of
physics" hitherto unknown, which however, once they have been revealed,
will form just as integral a part of science as the former.
He knows that this statement is open to misconception and tries to
clarify it. The main principle involved with "order-from-disorder" is
the second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy only increases in a closed system (such as the universe). Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining negative entropy in an open system.
In chapter VII, he maintains that "order-from-order" is not
absolutely new to physics; in fact, it is even simpler and more
plausible. But nature follows "order-from-disorder", with some
exceptions as the movement of the celestial bodies
and the behaviour of mechanical devices such as clocks. But even those
are influenced by thermal and frictional forces. The degree to which a
system functions mechanically or statistically depends on the
temperature. If heated, a clock ceases to function, because it melts.
Conversely, if the temperature approaches absolute zero,
any system behaves more and more mechanically. Some systems approach
this mechanical behaviour rather fast with room temperature already
being practically equivalent to absolute zero.
Schrödinger concludes this chapter and the book with philosophical speculations on determinism, free will, and the mystery of human consciousness.
He attempts to "see whether we cannot draw the correct
non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (1) My
body functions as a pure mechanism according to Laws of Nature; and (2)
Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing
its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and
all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for
them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that
I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every
conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' – am the person, if any,
who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature".
Schrödinger then states that this insight is not new and that Upanishads
considered this insight of "ATHMAN = BRAHMAN" to "represent
quintessence of deepest insights into the happenings of the world."
Schrödinger rejects the idea that the source of consciousness should
perish with the body because he finds the idea "distasteful". He also
rejects the idea that there are multiple immortal souls that can exist
without the body because he believes that consciousness is nevertheless
highly dependent on the body. Schrödinger writes that, to reconcile the
two premises,
The only possible alternative is simply
to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of
which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what
seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this
one thing…
Any intuitions that consciousness is plural, he says, are illusions. Schrödinger is sympathetic to the Hindu concept of Brahman, by which each individual's consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe
— which corresponds to the Hindu concept of God. Schrödinger concludes
that "...'I' am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the
atoms' according to the Laws of Nature." However, he also qualifies the
conclusion as "necessarily subjective" in its "philosophical
implications". In the final paragraph, he points out that what is meant
by "I" is not the collection of experienced events but "namely the
canvas upon which they are collected." If a hypnotist succeeds in
blotting out all earlier reminiscences, he writes, there would be no
loss of personal existence — "Nor will there ever be."[8]
royalsocietypublishing | Biological
systems are dynamical, constantly exchanging energy and matter with the
environment in order to maintain the non-equilibrium state synonymous
with living. Developments in observational techniques have allowed us to
study biological dynamics on increasingly small scales. Such studies
have revealed evidence of quantum mechanical effects, which cannot be
accounted for by classical physics, in a range of biological processes.
Quantum biology is the study of such processes, and here we provide an
outline of the current state of the field, as well as insights into
future directions.
1. Introduction
Quantum
mechanics is the fundamental theory that describes the properties of
subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, molecular assemblies and possibly
beyond. Quantum mechanics operates on the nanometre and sub-nanometre
scales and is at the basis of fundamental life processes such as
photosynthesis, respiration and vision. In quantum mechanics, all
objects have wave-like properties, and when they interact, quantum
coherence describes the correlations between the physical quantities
describing such objects due to this wave-like nature.
In
photosynthesis, respiration and vision, the models that have been
developed in the past are fundamentally quantum mechanical. They
describe energy transfer and electron transfer in a framework based on
surface hopping. The dynamics described by these models are often
‘exponential’ and follow from the application of Fermi’s Golden Rule [1,2].
As a consequence of averaging the rate of transfer over a large and
quasi-continuous distribution of final states the calculated dynamics no
longer display coherences and interference phenomena. In photosynthetic
reaction centres and light-harvesting complexes, oscillatory phenomena
were observed in numerous studies performed in the 1990s and were
typically ascribed to the formation of vibrational or mixed
electronic–vibrational wavepackets. The reported detection of the
remarkably long-lived (660 fs and longer) electronic quantum coherence
during excitation energy transfer in a photosynthetic system revived
interest in the role of ‘non-trivial’ quantum mechanics to explain the
fundamental life processes of living organisms [3].
However, the idea that quantum phenomena—like coherence—may play a
functional role in macroscopic living systems is not new. In 1932, 10
years after quantum physicist Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize for
his work on the atomic structure, he delivered a lecture entitled
‘Light and Life’ at the International Congress on Light Therapy in
Copenhagen [4].
This raised the question of whether quantum theory could contribute to a
scientific understanding of living systems. In attendance was an
intrigued Max Delbrück, a young physicist who later helped to establish
the field of molecular biology and won a Nobel Prize in 1969 for his
discoveries in genetics [5].
All
living systems are made up of molecules, and fundamentally all
molecules are described by quantum mechanics. Traditionally, however,
the vast separation of scales between systems described by quantum
mechanics and those studied in biology, as well as the seemingly
different properties of inanimate and animate matter, has maintained
some separation between the two bodies of knowledge. Recently,
developments in experimental techniques such as ultrafast spectroscopy [6], single molecule spectroscopy [7–11], time-resolved microscopy [12–14] and single particle imaging [15–18]
have enabled us to study biological dynamics on increasingly small
length and time scales, revealing a variety of processes necessary for
the function of the living system that depend on a delicate interplay
between quantum and classical physical effects.
Quantum biology is
the application of quantum theory to aspects of biology for which
classical physics fails to give an accurate description. In spite of
this simple definition, there remains debate over the aims and role of
the field in the scientific community. This article offers a perspective
on where quantum biology stands today, and identifies potential avenues
for further progress in the field.
2. What is quantum biology?
Biology,
in its current paradigm, has had wide success in applying classical
models to living systems. In most cases, subtle quantum effects on
(inter)molecular scales do not play a determining role in overall
biological function. Here, ‘function’ is a broad concept. For example:
How do vision and photosynthesis work on a molecular level and on an
ultrafast time scale? How does DNA, with stacked nucleotides separated
by about 0.3 nm, deal with UV photons? How does an enzyme catalyse an
essential biochemical reaction? How does our brain with neurons
organized on a sub-nanometre scale deal with such an amazing amount of
information? How do DNA replication and expression work? All these
biological functions should, of course, be considered in the context of
evolutionary fitness. The differences between a classical approximation
and a quantum-mechanical model are generally thought to be negligible in
these cases, even though at the basis every process is entirely
governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. What happens at the
ill-defined border between the quantum and classical regimes? More
importantly, are there essential biological functions that ‘appear’
classical but in reality are not? The role of quantum biology is
precisely to expose and unravel this connection.
Fundamentally,
all matter—animate or inanimate—is quantum mechanical, being constituted
of ions, atoms and/or molecules whose equilibrium properties are
accurately determined by quantum theory. As a result, it could be
claimed that all of biology is quantum mechanical. However, this
definition does not address the dynamical nature of biological
processes, or the fact that a classical description of intermolecular
dynamics seems often sufficient. Quantum biology should, therefore, be
defined in terms of the physical ‘correctness’ of the models used and
the consistency in the explanatory capabilities of classical versus
quantum mechanical models of a particular biological process.
As
we investigate biological systems on nanoscales and larger, we find that
there exist processes in biological organisms, detailed in this
article, for which it is currently thought that a quantum mechanical
description is necessary to fully characterize the behaviour of the
relevant subsystem. While quantum effects are difficult to observe on
macroscopic time and length scales, processes necessary for the overall
function and therefore survival of the organism seem to rely on
dynamical quantum-mechanical effects at the intermolecular scale. It is
precisely the interplay between these time and length scales that
quantum biology investigates with the aim to build a consistent physical
picture.
Grand hopes for quantum biology may include a
contribution to a definition and understanding of life, or to an
understanding of the brain and consciousness. However, these problems
are as old as science itself, and a better approach is to ask whether
quantum biology can contribute to a framework in which we can repose
these questions in such a way as to get new answers. The study of
biological processes operating efficiently at the boundary between the
realms of quantum and classical physics is already contributing to
improved physical descriptions of this quantum-to-classical transition.
More
immediately, quantum biology promises to give rise to design principles
for biologically inspired quantum nanotechnologies, with the ability to
perform efficiently at a fundamental level in noisy environments at
room temperature and even make use of these ‘noisy environments’ to
preserve or even enhance the quantum properties [19,20].
Through engineering such systems, it may be possible to test and
quantify the extent to which quantum effects can enhance processes and
functions found in biology, and ultimately answer whether these quantum
effects may have been purposefully selected in the design of the
systems. Importantly, however, quantum bioinspired technologies can also
be intrinsically useful independently from the organisms that inspired
them.
axial | Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and was exiled
from his native home Austria after the nation was annexed by Nazi
Germany. He moved to Ireland after he was invited to set up the Dublin
Institute of Advanced Studies. This follows the past history of Ireland
acting as a storehouse of knowledge during the Dark Ages. After decades
of work, biology was becoming more formalized around the 1940s. Better
tools were emerging to perturb various organisms and samples and the
increasing number of discoveries was building out the framework of life.
With the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on genetics, scientists probably
most importantly Thomas Hunt Morgan and his work on fruit flies (Drosophila) set up the rules of heredity - genes located on chromosomes with each cell containing a set of chromosomes. In 1927, a seminal discovery
was made that irradiation by X-rays of fruits flies can induce
mutations. Just the medium was not known where Schrödinger was thinking
through his ideas on biology. At the same type, organic chemistry was
improving and various macromolecules in the cell such as enzymes were
being identified along with the various types of bonds made. For
Schrödinger, there were no tools to characterized these macromolecules
(i.e. proteins, nucleic acids) such as X-ray crystallography. Really the
only tool useful at the time was centrifugation. At the time, many
people expected proteins to be the store and transmitter of genetic
information. Luckily, Oswald Avery published an incredible paper in 1944 that found DNA as probably the store instead of proteins.
With this knowledge base Schrödinger took a beginner’s mind
to biology. In some ways his naivety was incredibly useful. Instead of
being anchored to some widely-accepted premise that proteins transmitted
genetic information (although he had a hunch some protein was
responsible), the book thought from first principles and identified a
few key concepts in biology that were not appreciated but became very
important. Thankfully Schrödinger was curious - he enjoyed writing
poetry and reading philosophy so jumped into biology somewhat
fearlessly. At the beginning of the book, he sets the main question as:
“How
can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial
boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and
chemistry?”
Information
In the first chapter,
Schrödinger argues that because organisms have orderly behavior they
must follow the laws of physics. Because physics relies on statistics,
life was follow the same rules. He then argues that because biological
properties have some level of permanence the material that stores this
information then must be stable. This material must have the ability to
change from one stable state to another (i.e. mutations). Classical
physics is not very useful here, but for Schrödinger his expertise in
quantum mechanics helped determine that these stable states must be held
together through covalent bonds (a quantum phenomena) within a
macromolecule. In the early chapters, the book argues that the gene must
be a stable macromolecule.
Through discussion around the
stability of the gene, the book makes its most important breakthrough -
an analogy between a gene and an aperiodic crystal (DNA is aperiodic but
Schrödinger amazingly didn’t know that at the time): “the germ of a
solid.” Simply, a periodic crystal can store a small amount of
information with an infinite number of atoms and an aperiodic crystal
has the ability to store a near infinite amount of information in a
small number of atoms. The latter was more in line with what the current
data suggested what a gene was. Max Delbrück had similar ideas along
with J.B.S. Haldane, but the book was the first to connect this idea to
heredity. But readers at the time and maybe even still overextended this
framework to believe that genetic code contains all of the information
to build an organism. This isn’t true, development requires an
environment with some level of randomness.
FT | Paul Dabrowa does not know if it is illegal to genetically modify beer at home in a way that makes it glow. The process involves taking DNA information from jellyfish and applying it to yeast cells, then using traditional fermenting methods to turn it into alcohol. But he is worried that it could be against the law given that it involves manipulating genetic material.
“This stuff can be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I did that in an accredited lab,” he says, adding that he himself has only got as far as making yeast cells glow in a Petri dish.
For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun.
In recent years the community of hobbyists and amateurs Dabrowa considers his kin has been energised by the falling cost and growing accessibility to gene-editing tools such as Crispr. This has led to an explosion of unchecked experimentation in self-constructed labs or community facilities focused on biological self-improvement.
Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime. The positive results he’s seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor. He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly.
Much of his knowledge — including the complex bits related to gene-editing — was gleaned straight from the internet or through sheer strength of will by directly lobbying those who have the answers he seeks. “Whenever I was bored, I went on YouTube and watched physics and biology lectures from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he explains. “I tried the experiments at home, then realised I needed help and reached out to professors at MIT and Harvard. They were more than happy to do so.”
At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience. Zayner’s start-up, The Odin — to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser — has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA.
These garage scientists might seem like a quirky new subculture but their rogue mindset is starting to generate consternation among those who specialise in managing biological threats in governments and international bodies.
In 2018 the states that are signatories to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) identified gene editing, gene synthesis, gene drives and metabolic pathway engineering as research that qualifies as “dual use”, meaning it is as easy to deploy for harmful purposes as it is for good.
aeon | In late summer of 1976, two colleagues at Oxford University Press,
Michael Rodgers and Richard Charkin, were discussing a book on evolution
soon to be published. It was by a first-time author, a junior zoology
don in town, and had been given an initial print run of 5,000 copies. As
the two publishers debated the book’s fate, Charkin confided that he
doubted it would sell more than 2,000 copies. In response, Rodgers, who
was the editor who had acquired the manuscript, suggested a bet whereby
he would pay Charkin £1 for every 1,000 copies under 5,000, and Charkin
was to buy Rodgers a pint of beer for every 1,000 copies over 5,000. By
now, the book is one of OUP’s most successful titles, and it has sold
more than a million copies in dozens of languages, spread across four
editions. That book was Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and Charkin is ‘holding back payment in the interests of [Rodgers’s] health and wellbeing’.
In the decades following that bet, The Selfish Gene has come
to play a unique role in evolutionary biology, simultaneously
influential and contentious. At the heart of the disagreements lay the
book’s advocacy of what has become known as the gene’s-eye view of
evolution. To its supporters, the gene’s-eye view presents an unrivalled
introduction to the logic of natural selection. To its critics,
‘selfish genes’ is a dated metaphor that paints a simplistic picture of
evolution while failing to incorporate recent empirical findings. To me,
it is one of biology’s most powerful thinking tools. However, as with
all tools, in order to make the most of it, you must understand what it
was designed to do.
When Charles Darwin first introduced his theory of evolution by
natural selection in 1859, he had in mind a theory about individual
organisms. In Darwin’s telling, individuals differ in how long they live
and how good they are at attracting mates; if the traits that enhance
these strengths are heritable, they will become more abundant over time.
The gene’s-eye view discussed by Dawkins introduces a shift in
perspective that might seem subtle at first, but which comes with rather
radical implications.
The idea emerged from the tenets of population genetics in the 1920s
and ’30s. Here, scientists said that you could mathematically describe
evolution through changes in the frequency of certain genetic variants,
known as alleles, over time. Population genetics was an integral part of
the modern synthesis of evolution and married Darwin’s idea of gradual
evolutionary change with a functioning theory of inheritance, based on
Gregor Mendel’s discovery that genes were transmitted as discrete
entities. Under the framework of population genetics, evolution is
captured by mathematically describing the increase and decrease of
alleles in a population over time.
The gene’s-eye view took this a step further, to argue that
biologists are always better off thinking about evolution and natural
selection in terms of genes rather than organisms. This is because
organisms lack the evolutionary longevity required to be the central
unit in evolutionary explanations. They are too temporary on an
evolutionary timescale, a unique combination of genes and environment –
here in this generation but gone in the next. Genes, in contrast, pass
on their structure intact from one generation to the next, ignoring
mutation and recombination. Therefore, only they possess the required
evolutionary longevity. Traits that you can see, the argument goes, such
as the particular fur of a polar bear or the flower of an orchid (known
as a phenotype), are not for the good of the organism, but of the
genes. The genes, and not the organism, are the ultimate beneficiaries
of natural selection.
This approach has also been called selfish-gene thinking, because
natural selection is conceptualised as a struggle between genes,
typically through how they affect the fitness of the organism in which
they reside, for transmission to the next generation. At an after-dinner
speech at a conference banquet, Dawkins once summarised the key
argument in limerick form:
An itinerant selfish gene Said: ‘Bodies a-plenty I’ve seen. You think you’re so clever, But I’ll live for ever. You’re just a survival machine.’
In this telling, evolution is the process by which immortal selfish
genes housed in transient organisms struggle for representation in
future generations. Moving beyond the poetry and making the point more
formally, Dawkins argued that evolution involves two entities:
replicators and vehicles, playing complementary roles. Replicators are
those entities that copies are made of and that are transmitted
faithfully from one generation to the next; in practice, this usually
means genes. The second entity, vehicles, are where replicators are
bundled together: this is the entity that actually comes into contact
with the external environment and interacts with it. The most common
kind of vehicle is the organism, such as an animal or a plant, though it
can also be a cell, as in the case of cancer.
newyorker | Last summer, an anonymous intermediary proposed to
Harris and Harden that they address their unresolved issues. Harden
appeared on Harris’s podcast, and patiently explained why Murray’s
speculation was dangerously out in front of the science. At the moment,
technical and methodological challenges, as well as the persistent
effects of an unequal environment, would make it impossible to conduct
an experiment to test Murray’s idly incendiary hypotheses. She refused
to grant that his provocations were innocent: “I don’t disagree with you
about insisting on intellectual honesty, but I think of it as
‘both/and’—I think that that value is very important, but I also find it
very important to listen to people when they say, ‘I’m worried about
how this idea might be used to harm me or my family or my neighborhood
or my group.’ ” (Harris declined to comment on the record for this
piece.) As she once put it in an essay, “There is a middle ground
between ‘let’s never talk about genes and pretend cognitive ability
doesn’t exist’ and ‘let’s just ask some questions that pander to a
virulent on-line community populated by racists with swastikas in their
Twitter bios.’ ”
Harden
is not alone in her drive to fulfill Turkheimer’s dream of a
“psychometric left.” Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher’s book, “The
Genome Factor,” from 2017, outlines similar arguments, as does the
sociologist Jeremy Freese. Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult
of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been
trammelled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation. Views
associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by
the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter
Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that I
have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that
contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more
difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” He added,
“There’s a politically correct left that’s still not open to these
things.” Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher, told me he thinks
that Harden’s book might create its own audience: “There’s so much
toxicity in this debate that it’ll take a long time to change people’s
minds on it, if at all, but I think Paige’s book is just so clear in its
explanation of the science.”
The nomenclature has
given Harden pause, depending on the definition of “hereditarian,”
which can connote more biodeterminist views, and the definition of
“left”—deBoer is a communist, Alexander leans libertarian, and Harden
described herself to me as a “Matthew 25:40 empiricist” (“The King will
reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these
brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’ ”). The political
sensitivity of the subject has convinced many sympathetic economists,
psychologists, and geneticists to keep their heads below the parapets of
academia. As the population geneticist I spoke to put it to me,
“Geneticists know how to talk about this stuff to each other, in part
because we understand terms like ‘heritability,’ which we use in
technical ways that don’t always fully overlap with their colloquial
meanings, and in part because we’re charitable with each other, assume
each other’s good faith—we know that our colleagues aren’t eugenicists.
But we have no idea how to talk about it in public, and, while I don’t
agree with everything she said, sometimes it feels like we’ve all been
sitting around waiting for a book like Paige’s.”
Harden’s
outspokenness has generated significant blowback from the left. On
Twitter, she has been caricatured as a kind of ditzy bourgeois
dilettante who gives succor to the viciousness of the alt-right. This
March, after she expressed support for standardized testing—which she
argues predicts student success above and beyond G.P.A. and can help
increase low-income and minority representation—a parody account
appeared under the handle @EugenicInc, with the name “Dr. Harden, Social
Justice Through Eugenics!” and the bio “Not a determinist, but yes,
genes cause everything. I just want to breed more Hilary Clinton’s for
higher quality future people.” One tweet read, “In This House We
Believe, Science is Real, Womens Rights are Human Rights, Black Lives
Matter, News Isnt Fake, Some Kids Have Dumb-Dumb Genes!!!”
In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times,
arguing that progressives should embrace the potential of genetics to
inform education policy. Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology,
and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, strongly
disagreed: “There’s just no way that genetic testing is going to lead to
a restructuring of society in a just way in the future—we have a
hundred years of evidence for what happens when social outcomes are
attributed to genetic differences, and it is always to stigmatize,
control, and punish the people predicted to have socially devalued
traits.” Darity, the economist, told me that he doesn’t see how Harden
can insist that differences within groups are genetic but that
differences between them are not: “It’s a feint and a dodge for her to
say, ‘Well, I’m only looking at variations across individuals.’ ”
There
is a good precedent for this kind of concern. In “Blueprint,” Robert
Plomin wrote that polygenic scores should be understood as “fortune
tellers” that can “foretell our futures from birth.” Jared Taylor, a
white-supremacist leader, argued that Plomin’s book should “destroy the
basis for the entire egalitarian enterprise of the last 60 or so years.”
He seized on Plomin’s claim that, for many outcomes, “environmental
levers for change are not within our grasp.” Taylor wrote, “This is a
devastating finding for the armies of academics and uplift artists who
think every difference in outcome is society’s fault.” He continued,
“And, although Blueprint includes nothing about race, the implications
for ‘racial justice’ are just as colossal.” Harden has been merciless in
her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary
salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right.
In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA
matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing
that matters is scientifically outlandish.” (Plomin told me that Harden
misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing
people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s
suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and
arguing with them.”)
With the first review of
Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a
conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity”
movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was
put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his
once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly
thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do not come to this
work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the
non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at
times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from
expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his
Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t
be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden
sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks.
It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity
on the other.”
gov.uk | The ability to enhance one’s physical, psychological or social capability has been a source of power throughout history, and warfare is the epitome of this dynamic. The paradox of war is that humans are central to its conduct but are also the weakest link. We want ‘war fighters’ – whether they be cyber specialists, drone pilots or infantry soldiers – to be stronger, faster, more intelligent, more resilient and more mobile to overcome the environment and the adversary. We have designed increasingly complex technologies to enhance lethality, survivability and mobility. As technology has become more sophisticated our thinking has become more focused on the machine rather than the person, but this needs to change if we are going to be effective in the future.
Recent advances in the life sciences and related technologies have led to the emergence of the interdisciplinary field known as human augmentation which has the potential to disrupt every aspect of our lives. The interdependencies and potential implications of human augmentation are so vast and complex that it is difficult to make sense of what it means for the future of society and Defence. The aim of this strategic implications project is to take the first step in making sense of these potential changes to human capabilities. It offers a conceptual model for thinking about human augmentation, its future direction and identifies key implications for Defence and its stakeholders.
Human augmentation will become increasingly relevant, partly because it can directly enhance human capability and behaviour and partly because it is the binding agent between people and machines. Future wars will be won, not by those with the most advanced technology, but by those who can most effectively integrate the unique capabilities of both people and machines. The importance of human-machine teaming is widely acknowledged but it has been viewed from a techno-centric perspective. Human augmentation is the missing part of this puzzle.
Thinking of the person as a platform and understanding our people at an individual level is fundamental to successful human augmentation. Industrial Age warfare saw people as interchangeable components of military units or the material with which to operate the platforms – vehicles, aircraft and ships. These platforms are routinely monitored and analysed but it is remarkable that our ability to understand our most critical capability – the human – is so under-researched. Successful application of human augmentation demands a more sophisticated approach to understanding our people and their capabilities. Defining the key elements of the ‘human platform’ – physical, psychological and social – provides a conceptual baseline to enable a multidisciplinary conversation.
Physical performance is the capability to affect the physical environment and move within it. Strength, dexterity, speed and endurance are key components and there is often a trade-off between them.
Psychological performance comprises cognition, emotion and motivation. Cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses. It includes processes such as attention, the formation of knowledge, long-term and working memory, reasoning, problem solving and decision-making. Emotion describes the subjective human experience and is closely linked with motivation, which is the force that energises, activates and directs behaviour.
Social performance is the ability to perceive oneself as part of a group and the readiness to act as part of the team. It is founded on self-awareness and the ability to understand the behaviour of others. It is tightly linked to communication skills, collaboration and trust. The core tenet of social performance is group cohesion.
Human augmentation is not a shortcut – getting the basics of human physiology, biochemistry and psychology right is a prerequisite to human augmentation and will become more important in the future. Research into human augmentation has shone a stark light on how little we know about how to do the basics well. We need to do more to understand the precise effects of nutrition, sleep and hydration, and their relationship with other areas of the body to realise significant, yet untapped potential. Technology that improves monitoring will make it possible to individually optimise sleep, nutrition and other factors to deliver transformational gains across an organisation at relatively low cost and limited ethical risk.
Human augmentation is not just tomorrow’s business, there are short-term and long-term opportunities that require engagement today. The following matrix illustrates the technical maturity and the magnitude of policy considerations of human augmentation technologies. It shows that there are technologies that could be integrated today with manageable policy considerations. The most transformative technologies (for example, genetics and brain interfaces) currently sit at a low level of technological maturity but we must be prepared for this to change quickly. Bioinformatics and collection and analytics (encompassing sensors, artificial intelligence-enabled processing) are particularly important enablers for other human augmentation technologies and warrant focused research and development attention.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
