the inevitable demise of the fossil fuel empire...,

guardian | The latest data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and other sources proves that the oil and gas majors are in deep trouble. 

Over the last decade, rising oil prices have been driven primarily by rising production costs. After the release of the IEA's World Energy Outlook last November, Deutsche Bank's former head of energy research Mark Lewis noted that massive levels of investment have corresponded to an ever declining rate of oil supply increase:

"Over the past decade, the oil and gas industry's upstream investments have registered an astronomical increase, but these ever higher levels of capital expenditure have yielded ever smaller increases in the global oil supply. Even these have only been made possible by record high oil prices. This should be a reality check for those now hyping a new age of global oil abundance."

Since 2000, the oil industry's investments have risen by 180% - a threefold increase - but this has translated into a global oil supply increase of just 14%. Two-thirds of this increase has been made-up by unconventional oil and gas. In other words, the primary driver of the cost explosion is the shift to expensive and difficult-to-extract unconventionals due to the peak and plateau in conventional oil production since 2005.

The increasingly dislocated economics of oil production

According to Lewis, who now heads up energy transition and climate change research at leading investment firm Kepler Cheuvreux:

"The most straightforward interpretation of this data is that the economics of oil have become completely dislocated from historic norms since 2000 (and especially since 2005), with the industry investing at exponentially higher rates for increasingly small incremental yields of energy."

The IEA's new World Energy Investment Outlook published last week revised the agency's estimates of future oil industry capital expenditures out to 2035 even higher, from $9.4 trillion to $11.3 trillion – an increase of 20%. 

Oil prices could in turn increase by $15 per barrel in 2025 if investment does not pick up. Most of the investment increase required would be devoted not to new sources of production, but "to replace lost production from depleting fields," said Lewis.

In the IEA's own words:

"More than 80% of this spending [of between $700 and $850 billion annually by the 2030s] is required just to keep production at today's levels, that is, to compensate for the effects of decline at existing fields. The figure is higher in the case of oil (at close to 90% of total capital expenditure)."

But as Lewis pointed out, the "risk of insufficient investment" is not a hypothetical matter that might occur a decade from now, but is "already today a clear and present danger" as most of the oil and gas majors have revised down their plans for capital expenditure in recent months.

biggest waste of wealth in all of human history...,

energyskeptic |  Introduction - At 47,000 miles long and four plus lanes wide, the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways is the largest public works project in history, dwarfing Egypt’s pyramids, the Panama Canal, and China’s Great Wall.  To build it, forests were felled and mountains were leveled and overlaid with over three hundred million cubic yards of concrete.

Roads are essential and define the physical United States, and so taken for granted they’re almost invisible.

The interstates are just 1% of the nation’s road mileage but carry a trillion of the 4 trillion miles Americans travel each year. Many of the vehicles are heavy trucks, which hammer bridges and pavements, shortening road and bridge lifespans so much that to fix them, we’d need to spend  $225 billion a year for the next 50 years, and if we don’t, replacement will cost three times as much. One in four of the country’s nearly 600,000 bridges is structurally deficient or obsolete. Most were designed to last 50 years. In 2008, they averaged 43 years old (p 319).

Peak Oil Makes Roads and Vehicles Obsolete – Why Fix them?

Swift says that these roads represent “a spectacular investment in a mode of transport that will wither without new fuel sources” (page 6).

We don’t have new fuel sources and never will, so why repair the roads? That would only throw good money after bad. To avoid the hardest possible landing, we might want to keep a few key local and regional roads repaired, and let the thousands of miles of interstate between regions go.  Replace cars with buses, which are flexible, scalable, easily re-routable, and cheap compared to passenger trains since they can use existing roads.

What we have lost  

When horses were the main mode of transportation, American towns were compact, tightly settled, and roughly circular in layout. In the days of the horse and buggy the road served as company. As a cart joggled by, the farmer in the field or the housewife on her porch could hail it; the horse would stop almost of his own accord, and a chat would follow. But once the country road becomes a highway, filled with fast traffic with cars driven mostly by strangers, not neighbors, the whole situation is changed: the road ceases to be a symbol of sociability; it becomes very largely a curse.

As John Steinbeck observed in 1962′s Travels with Charley: In Search of America: “When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”

A pilgrim of centuries past would have had much to report about the country he’d traversed—the details of flora and fauna, the land’s shape and character, the sounds and smells of village and field. He would have noticed the moss on tree bark, the fast-moving stream, the lacework of afternoon light on the forest floor. He might have startled deer and bear, unalerted by his soft approach, or reveled in bird song. A later traveler, riding horseback, might have spoken of the views he’d enjoyed, but they would have been limited views, next to the walker’s. He would have moved at a faster clip, and thus missed the tiny details of his surroundings that only a leisurely pace revealed. Further on, a stagecoach passenger had an even tighter range of experience; he beheld landscape not only from a road’s fixed path, but as a moving picture framed by his window, and his description of a long trip would likely dwell less on the scenery than on the discomforts of the stage, the bumps in the road, the passage itself. Trains erected a pane of glass between traveler and country, and further insulated him by boosting his speed. But with the modern car on the modern freeway, the modern traveler was left with practically nothing to celebrate but the ever-briefer time he had to devote to getting from one place to another. He was sequestered not only from his setting, but from fellow passengers, insulated from sound, smells, and climate. The details of all that surrounded him were blurred by speed, too distant to make out, or too distracting to enjoy. Scenery was held at arm’s length, beyond the well-manicured right of way.

if a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst..,

energyskeptic | James Howard Kunstler has written that Suburbia will be the largest waste of money and physical assets in human history.

The end of the age of oil means that just about everything will be useless too.  Below is just the transportation component of private and government assets.

$6.1 Trillion dollars of Transportation equipment and structures.

Total private and public fixed assets were $46.4 trillion in 2011 (current U.S. dollars). Transportation equipment and structures (private and public) accounted for nearly 12% percent of the total.

The components of transportation fixed assets and their values are

• private transportation equipment ($1.04 trillion)
• private transportation structures ($680 billion)
• government transportation structures ($3.77 trillion)

Fixed assets include both passenger and freight transportation. See the Bureau of Economic Analysis at www.bea.gov/national/FA2004/index.asp, tables 2.1, 3.1s, and 7.1b.

2011 Private Sector Transportation Equipment1 1,037 Transportation Structures2 680 Public Sector Highways 3,132 Transportation Structures2 635 Federal 15 State and Local 621

1 Includes trucks, truck trailers, buses, automobiles, aircraft, ships, boats, and railroad equipment.

2 Includes physical structures for all modes of transportation. Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Economic Accounts, Fixed Assests Tables, tables 2.1, 3.1s, and 7.1b

the very worst elements of elite rule at home and abroad that only nimrods could have supported...,

wikipedia |  On May 1, 2003, Bush became the first sitting President to make an arrested landing in a fixed-wing aircraft on an aircraft carrier^[3][4] when he arrived at the USS Abraham Lincoln in a Lockheed S-3 Viking, dubbed Navy One, as the carrier lay just off the San Diego coast, having returned from combat operations in the Persian Gulf. He posed for photographs with pilots and members of the ship's crew while wearing a flight suit. A few hours later, he gave a speech announcing the end of major combat operations in the Iraq War. Far above him was the warship's banner stating "Mission Accomplished."

Bush was criticized for the historic jet landing on the carrier as an overly theatrical and expensive stunt. For instance, it was pointed out that the carrier was well within range of Bush's helicopter, and that a jet landing was not needed.^[5] Originally the White House had stated that the carrier was too far off the California coast for a helicopter landing and a jet would be needed to reach it. On the day of the speech, the Lincoln was only 30 miles (48 km) from shore but the administration still decided to go ahead with the jet landing. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer admitted that Bush "could have helicoptered, but the plan was already in place. Plus, he wanted to see a landing the way aviators see a landing."^[6] The Lincoln made a scheduled stop in Pearl Harbor shortly before the speech, docked in San Diego after the speech, and returned to her home port in Everett, Washington on May 6, 2003.

The S-3 that served as "Navy One" was retired from service and placed on display at the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida on July 17, 2003. The museum makes it clear that Bush was a passenger – not the pilot – of the plane.^[1] While Bush trained and served as a jet pilot in the Air National Guard flying F-102 fighter-interceptors, he was never trained to land on a carrier.

The banner stating "Mission Accomplished" was a focal point of controversy and criticism. Navy Commander and Pentagon spokesman Conrad Chun said the banner referred specifically to the aircraft carrier's 10-month deployment (which was the longest deployment of a carrier since the Vietnam War) and not the war itself, saying "It truly did signify a mission accomplished for the crew."^[7]

The White House claimed that the banner was requested by the crew of the ship, who did not have the facilities for producing such a banner. Afterward, the administration and naval sources stated that the banner was the Navy's idea, White House staff members made the banner, and it was hung by the U.S. Navy personnel. White House spokesman Scott McClellan told CNN, "We took care of the production of it. We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up."^[8] According to John Dickerson of Time magazine, the White House later conceded that they hung the banner but still insists it had been done at the request of the crew members.^[9]

Whether meant for the crew or not, the general impression created by the image of Bush under the banner has been criticized as premature, especially later as the guerrilla war began. Subsequently, the White House released a statement saying that the sign and Bush's visit referred to the initial invasion of Iraq. Bush's speech noted:

"We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous."^[10]

"Our mission continues...The War on Terror continues, yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide."

The speech also said that:

"In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."^[10]

iraq crisis: isis militants close in on baghdad

guardian | At least half a million people are on the move in Iraq after insurgent force the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis), continued its offensive towards Baghdad, reportedly taking the city of Tikrit – home town of former leader Saddam Hussein – overnight. The assault comes on the heels of Wednesday’s takeover of Mosul and surrounding regions, where a reported 30,000 Iraqi troops fled from just 800 insurgents after three days of sporadic fighting.

In the insurgents' most significant gain so far, Isis fighters entered Mosul and stripped the main army base, released hundreds of prisoners from jails and may have seized up to $480m in cash from Mosul banks. Fighters also seized the Turkish consulate, kidnapping 25 staff including the diplomatic head of the mission.

The swift capitulation of Iraq army forces in the city prompted condemnation and suspicion from the government.

"The army and police and the security organisations are much stronger than they [Isis] are, but there was a trick and a conspiracy," said Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. "We will deal with it, but after we end their presence."

Tikrit, believed to have been taken by the insurgents overnight, lies less than 200km from capital Baghdad.

In July of last year Isis freed hundreds of convicted terrorists when it overran Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, and in December the group retook parts of former al-Qaida strongholds Fallujah and Ramadi.

christian iraqis have no place to go...,

HuffPo |  Sunni insurgents from an al Qaeda splinter group extended their control from the northern city of Mosul on Wednesday to an area further south that includes Iraq's biggest oil refinery in a devastating show of strength against the Shi'ite-led government.

Security sources said militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - Sunni militants waging sectarian war on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian frontier - drove into the town of Baiji late on Tuesday in armed vehicles, torching the court house and police station after freeing prisoners.

The militants offered safe passage to some 250 men guarding the refinery on the outskirts of Baiji, about 200 kilometers south of Mosul, on condition they leave.

Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari called on his country's leaders to come together to face "the serious, mortal" threat. "The response has to be soon. There has to be a quick response to what has happened," he said during a trip to Greece.

Zebari said Baghdad would work with forces from the nearby Kurdish autonomous region to drive the fighters from Mosul.

Baiji resident Jasim al-Qaisi said the militants had also asked senior tribal chiefs in Baiji to persuade local police and soldiers not to resist their takeover.

"Yesterday at sunset some gunmen contacted the most prominent tribal sheikhs in Baiji via cellphone and told them: 'We are coming to die or control Baiji, so we advise you to ask your sons in the police and army to lay down their weapons and withdraw before (Tuesday) evening prayer'."

The Baiji refinery can process 300,000 barrels per day and supplies oil products to most of Iraq's provinces and is a major provider of power to Baghdad. A worker there said the morning shift had not been allowed to take over and the night shift was still on duty.

The push into Baiji began hours after ISIL overran Mosul, one of the great Sunni historic cities, advancing their aim of creating a Sunni Caliphate straddling the border between Iraq and Syria.

the mullahs demand more cannon fodder...,

churchandstate |  When I visited Iran in the mid 1970’s the then hated Shah was in power, but women were more likely then than now to receive good reproductive health care including birth control. This policy produced a stable birth rate which carried over for decades after the Shah was deposed by the present religious hierarchy.

Now we find that this same new religious hierarchy has begun offering incentives to Iranian women to produce more children.

According to the 6/8/14 NY Times article, “Urged to Multiply, Iranian Couples Are Dubious” by Thomas Edrbrink,

In their early 30s, married, and with prospects for successful careers, Bita and Sherag could be contemplating the logical next step in their lives: becoming parents.

But for them and an increasing number of young, middle-class Iranians who are deeply pessimistic over their country’s future, raising a child is one of the last things on their minds.

Bita, who like her husband asked for her family name to be withheld so they could speak freely, said she had had two abortions, which are illegal in Iran. “We are really serious about not having kids,” she said.

Iran’s leaders have taken notice. Worried about a steep decline in fertility rates that experts are predicting could reduce population growth to zero within 20 years, Tehran has started a broad initiative to persuade Iranian families to have more children.

Seems a bit redundant to worry about any scarcity of human beings on Earth when you consider that our plundered planet had added 5 billion humans since I was born in 1931.

Who was the environmentalist who noted that endless growth reminded him of the behavior of a cancer cell? As my OP ED pieces have noted for years, the only true solution to the population crisis will come when all women have access to modern methods of birth control and not be intimidated or coerced by the world’s reprehensible male dominated monotheistic religions!

Will the planet survive until that happens? The jury is still out on that one.

matthew 26:34 - cowards always deny truth...,

tdf |  For though is possible that we will see an escalating conflict rise across the face of the earth in the days and months to come, it is essential to realize that these external battles are only a reflection of the conflict that is raging within the hearts and souls of so many across the world today.

In accordance with the universal law "as above so below, as within so without", the increasing tensions that are rising on our global stage are surfacing in an effort to help us recognize the conflict that is taking place in the consciousness of each one of us.

For today there are many who are awakening to the truth that humanity has lost its way. People from all over the world are beginning to realize that the race of men is walking on an unsustainable path and that our governments, to whom we've entrusted the care of our planet and its populace, are willfully destroying the Earth and its inhabitants in their tireless conquest for war and wealth.

However, because we have become so dependent on the existing system and structures for our comfort and survival, many people feel powerless to step off the path and live a life that is in alignment with the truth that is growing in their hearts. For they fear that if they remove their support from the system they depend on, the threat to the system will then result in a threat on their own survival.

And so ironically we have a growing number of people around the world who are denying the truth of their hearts for fear of the possible threat it may pose to their comfort and survival in the present. While these same people are beginning to realize that their continuing support of the existing system along its current path will at some point in a not too distant future lead to an inevitable destruction of the planet.

the great white nope: a deliciously timely little discursion into notseeism...,

medialens |  When corporations own the news and advertisers 'sponsor' the shows, journalists know they are above all answerable to the company managers and allied interests who pay their salaries. The mere public, especially voices of dissent, can be treated with indifference, even contempt. Journalists have power without responsibility, and they know it.

On March 6, the fast-talking presenter of ABC Radio Triple 6's Mornings with Genevieve Jacobs in Canberra described the shameful suffering of indigenous Australians exposed by John Pilger's important film, Utopia.

'What veteran filmmaker John Pilger had to present for his film was in many ways a Third World country, a place where there is despair and dispossession, desperate injustice.'

Jacobs quoted football legend and 'Australian of the year', Adam Goodes, on 'mainstream' Australia's response to Pilger's film:

'Our response, our muted response, is a disgrace. It is disturbing and hurtful that we just don't evidently care all that much.'

Jacobs then interviewed Pilger, asking him:

'So what does that say about the state of the national debate?'

It was a good question, one that would soon return to haunt the questioner.

Like so many journalists responding to so much serious criticism, Jacobs breezily insisted that her organisation was different, it had embraced all points of view: 'John, that's a debate we're very aware of here in Canberra... I think we're well aware of that, John!' she told Pilger repeatedly, who exposed the usual, key flaw in the argument:

'Intensely discussed, yes, you're absolutely right. But discussed in the narrowest terms.'

This recalled the sublime moment when Noam Chomsky rendered a brash young Andrew Marr temporarily speechless, after the BBC interviewer had commented of the Gulf War:

'There was a great debate about whether there should have been a negotiated settlement.'

Chomsky interrupted: 'No, sorry, no, that's not [the] debate...'

Jacobs, though, was insistent:

'Certainly here in Canberra we do have that discussion vigorously and often... I have spoken to people in the studio... I think that has been widely discussed.'

Given that the issues had in fact been endlessly discussed, what on earth was the point of Pilger's film? Jacobs asked again:

'That's my question though – what do you bring that is new to this?'

Pilger replied: 'Well, have you seen the film?'

Jacobs: 'I haven't seen the film, but...'

Like her audience, Jacobs knew exactly what was coming next:

'Well then, how can we...? This is the problem, you see. And forgive me for raising it. How can you have a discussion with me about a film you haven't seen?... You say you're having a lot of debate there, but you apparently haven't watched the film that we're supposed to be talking about!'

Pilger's voice dropped and slowed as he circled the flailing interviewer like a 'Saltie' croc:

'I'm giving you the opportunity to explain to me and your listeners why you haven't, why you haven't watched the film before you discuss with the filmmaker the film?'

Jacobs explained that she hadn't seen the film 'because my producer suggested to me this morning that it would be a really good idea to discuss this'. But there was no place to hide:

'You run a programme, and with all respect to you, that's what Adam Goodes is talking about - that people like you cannot be bothered! And that's what he's writing about. Don't you find this so exquisitely ironic?'

Jacobs instantly shut down the debate and turned to emailed comments sent in by listeners. Would these be favourable to the guest who had just sunk the host? Jacobs blurted:

'Gus says to me, "Doesn't 'Triple 6' ever get tired of having people on the radio to lecture us about how racist we are? Didn't we say sorry? Are we going to move on?"'

And by way of balance:

'Rob says, "While I don't disagree with Pilger on many issues he's tackled over the years, his holier than thou, patronising tone alienates those who support his efforts and hardens the attitudes of those who don't."'

chomsky's been combatting rampant notseeism for generations...,

attributing awareness to oneself and to others

princeton |  This study tested the possible relationship between reported visual awareness (“I see a visual stimulus in front of me”) and the social attribution of awareness to someone else (“That person is aware of an object next to him”). Subjects were tested in two steps. First, in an fMRI experiment, subjects were asked to attribute states of awareness to a cartoon face. Activity associated with this task was found bilaterally within the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) among other areas. Second, the TPJ was transiently disrupted using single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). When the TMS was targeted to the same cortical sites that had become active during the social attribution task, the subjects showed symptoms of visual neglect in that their detection of visual stimuli was significantly affected. In control trials, when TMS was targeted to nearby cortical sites that had not become active during the social attribution task, no significant effect on visual detection was found. These results suggest that there may be at least some partial overlap in brain mechanisms that participate in the social attribution of sensory awareness to other people and in attributing sensory awareness to oneself. 

Significance:  What is the relationship between your own private awareness of events and the awareness that you intuitively attribute to the people around you? In this study, a region of the human cerebral cortex was active when people attributed sensory awareness to someone else. Furthermore, when that region of cortex was temporarily disrupted, the person’s own sensory awareness was disrupted. The findings suggest a fundamental connection between private awareness and social cognition.

attention-seeking in canines creates a stronger bond

dailymail |  Badly behaved dogs can be a source of embarrassment for their owners.

But if your canine companion displays attention-seeking behaviour, you may have a better bond with them than owners with perfectly-mannered pooches, a new study claims.

The research looked at human-animal attachment among 60 dog-owning families, including parents and children. It is the first study to examine attachment in children in this way.

Participants completed questionnaires to provide details about their attachment to their pet dogs, how responsible they feel towards them, and how often they feed and walk their canines.

They were also asked to rate their dogs on behavioural characteristics such as excitability, trainability, stranger fear and aggression, separation problems and attention-seeking behaviour.

Christy Hoffman, assistant professor of animal behaviour at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, said that people who care for their dogs well and take more responsibility for them are more attached to their pets than those who have a more hands-off approach.

While this is not surprising, her study also found that the more dogs act out and try to catch their owners’ attention, the more their owners are likely to love them. Interestingly, children were not affected by this behaviour.

the first religion devoted to evolution

io9 |  Huxley's genteel progressivism seems at odds with the popular image of eugenics. While many eugenics enthusiasts were racists on the the far right of the political spectrum, Huxley was part of a "reform eugenics" movement which was popular among British socialists like H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.

For these reform eugenicists, social equality was a necessary prerequisite for identifying genetic inequality. And that's where Huxley's notion of evolutionary humanism came in. He wrote that evolutionary humanism elevated this mission to a religious quest:

The lineaments of the new religion ... will arise to serve the needs of the coming era... Instead of worshipping supernatural rulers, it will sanctify the higher manifestations of human nature, in art and love, in intellectual comprehension and aspiring adoration, and will emphasize the fuller realization of life's possibilities as a sacred trust.

The key to achieving these aims was to educate the public, enabling them to think in evolutionary terms. In Huxley's mind, a widespread acceptance of an evolutionary worldview represented the process of evolution "reaching self-consciousness [and] becoming aware of itself."

In order to make sense of evolutionary humanism as a religion, however, you also have to understand Huxley's somewhat idiosyncratic approach to evolution itself. Biologists generally define evolution in terms of allele frequencies, mutations, selection, and drift. For Huxley, this was just a small part of a much broader picture. He radically expanded the concept so that all directional change was evolution. In Huxley's view, "the whole sum of reality is, in a perfectly legitimate sense, evolution." It was also, for Huxley, inherently progressive. Evolution necessarily moved towards "higher," or more complex, states of being.

Huxley broke this universal process of evolution down into three stages: cosmic, biological, and psychosocial. Cosmic evolution was the slow development of complex structures through physical and chemical processes; the formation of stars and production of heavier elements, the gradual formation of planets, and the emergence of simple organic chemistry. Biological evolution was more or less what we think of by the word "evolution" today, although Huxley believed that most biological progress ended roughly five million years ago, and that only minor improvements, especially among early hominids, had occurred since. Progress was the whole point of evolution, but had only just gotten started in the last, psychosocial stage.

the social brain meets the reactive genome neuroscience, epigenetics and the new social biology

frontiersin |  The rise of molecular epigenetics over the last few years promises to bring the discourse about the sociality and susceptibility to environmental influences of the brain to an entirely new level. Epigenetics deals with molecular mechanisms such as gene expression, which may embed in the organism “memories” of social experiences and environmental exposures. These changes in gene expression may be transmitted across generations without changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the most advanced example of the new postgenomic and context-dependent view of the gene that is making its way into contemporary biology. In my article I will use the current emergence of epigenetics and its link with neuroscience research as an example of the new, and in a way unprecedented, sociality of contemporary biology. After a review of the most important developments of epigenetic research, and some of its links with neuroscience, in the second part I reflect on the novel challenges that epigenetics presents for the social sciences for a re-conceptualization of the link between the biological and the social in a postgenomic age. Although epigenetics remains a contested, hyped, and often uncritical terrain, I claim that especially when conceptualized in broader non-genecentric frameworks, it has a genuine potential to reformulate the ossified biology/society debate.

Profound conceptual novelties have interested the life-sciences in the last three decades. In several disciplines, from neuroscience to genetics, we have witnessed a growing (and parallel) crisis of models that tended to sever biological factors from social/environmental ones. This possibility of disentangling neatly what seemed to belong to the “biological” from the “environmental” and to attribute a sort of causal primacy to biological factors (equated with genetic) in opposition to social or cultural ones (thought of as being more superficial, or appearing later in the ontology of development) was part and parcel of very vocal research-programs in the 1990s. These programs were all more or less heirs of the gene-centrism of sociobiology: from evolutionary psychology, to a powerful nativism that was very influential in psychology and cognitive neuroscience with its obsessive emphasis on hardwiring culture or morality into the brain.

These programs have always received a barrage of criticisms from several intellectual traditions (Griffiths, 2009; Meloni, 2013a), particularly those with roots in ethology (Lehrman, 1953, 1970; Bateson, 1991; Bateson and Martin, 1999), and developmental biology (West and King, 1987; Griffiths and Gray, 1994; Gottlieb, 1997; Oyama, 2000a[1985],b; Oyama et al., 2001; Griffiths, 2002; Moore, 2003). However, never as in this last decade, we have had scientific evidence that the dichotomous view of biology vs. society and biology vs. culture is biologically fallacious (Meaney, 2001a).

Paradoxically, it was exactly the completion of the Human Genome Project that showed that the view of the gene as a discrete and autonomous agent powerfully leading traits and developmental processes is more of a fantasy than actually being founded on scientific evidence, as highlighted by the “missing heritability” case (Maher, 2008). The image of a distinct, particulate gene marked by “clearly defined boundaries” and performing just one job, i.e., coding for proteins, has been overturned in recent years (Griffiths and Stotz, 2013: 68; see also Barnes and Dupré, 2008; Keller, 2011). Although discussions are far from being settled, the work of the ENCODE consortium for instance has been crucial in showing the important regulatory functions of what, in a narrow “gene-centric view”, was supposed to be mere “junk DNA” (Encode, 2007, 2012; Pennisi, 2012). Not only does a very small percentage of the genome (less than 2%) act according to the classical definition of the gene as a protein-coding sequence, but most of the non-protein coding DNA in fact plays an important regulatory function. The genome is therefore today best described as a “vast reactive system” (Keller, 2011) embedded in a complex regulatory network with distributed specificity (Griffiths and Stotz, 2013). An important part of this regulatory network is involved in responding to environmental signals, which can cover a very broad range of phenomena, from the cellular environment around the DNA, to the entire organism and, in the case of human beings, their social and cultural dynamics.

To sum up a decade of empirical and conceptual novelties the conceptualization of the gene has become dynamic and “perspectival” (Moss, 2003), in what can be called the new “postgenomic view¹”; it addresses genes as part of a broader regulative context, “embedded inside cells and their complex chemical environments” that are, in turn, embedded in organs, systems and societies (Lewkowicz, 2010). Genes are now seen as “catalysts” more than “codes” in development (Elman et al., 1996), “followers” rather than “leaders” in evolution (West-Eberhard, 2003; Robert, 2004). The more genetic research has gone forward, the more genomes are seen to “respond in a flexible manner to signals from a massive regulatory architecture that is, increasingly, the real focus of research in ‘genetics’” (Griffiths and Stotz, 2013: 2; see also Barnes and Dupré, 2008; Dupré, 2012).

As Michael Meaney (2001a: 52, 58) wrote more than a decade ago: “There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment, and there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome… . At no point in life is the operation of the genome independent of the context in which it functions.” Moreover, “environmental events occurring at a later stage of development … can alter a developmental trajectory” making meaningless any linear regression studies of nature and nurture. Genes are always “genes in context”, “context-dependent catalysts of cellular changes, rather “controllers” of developmental progress and direction” (Nijhout, 1990: 444), susceptible to be reversed in their expression by individual’s experiences during development (Champagne and Mashoodh, 2009).

of course we would never use the methods we went to the trouble to pioneer...,

telegraph |  A new genetic engineering technique pioneered by Professor Robert Winston could lead to countries like North Korea embarking on risky eugenics programmes, he has warned. 

Lord Winston, 73, who is Britain’s leading fertility doctor, has just published new research showing it is possible to splice new genes into sperm.

It is hoped the development will be used to create pigs which have enough human DNA in their organs that they could be transplanted into humans without rejection.

But in theory, it also means that designer babies who are stronger, faster or more intelligent could be created through artificial insemination.

Currently the technique is only possible with an embryo, which is time-consuming and requires harvesting an egg and embarking on IVF.

Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, Lord Winston warned that the procedure opens the door to eugenics, particularly in countries like North Korea. 

“You could easily see how this kind of thing could be used in North Korea for example. 

“I don’t think it’s very likely it will be used in the UK in a mischievous way but I’ve no doubt that given the burgeoning market, given the desperation of people who want to enhance their children in all sorts of ways, humans might be tempted to use this and that therefore it does become a form of eugenics. 

“Every piece of science has an upside and a downside. There comes a point where you have to publish what you’ve been doing. 

“I’m not trying to make an exaggerated claim for what we have done at all but I think the reproductive technologies are being misused in my view. 

“This is far more likely to be a serious threat than cloning. Cloning seems a useless technology. You can choose the attributes you might want to try and produce. If you can make a mouse run faster, which we can, if you can make a mouse bigger, which we can then maybe people might want to try the same thing in humans.”

if violence is in your genes, ta loco...,

theverge | In 2009, an Italian court reduced a murderer's sentence by one year because doctors had identified a gene in the defendant's DNA, called MAOA, that had been linked to violent behavior. The ruling was controversial and some scientists objected to the sentence reduction. "MAOA findings have been generally used in murder trials, sometimes to suggest diminished capacity of the defendant to premeditate his criminal behavior," but most often to reduce a sentence, writes Paul Appelbaum, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, in an essay published today in Neuron. In the essay, Appelbaum explains that genetic evidence demonstrating a defendant's predisposition for antisocial behavior or mental illness is showing up in courtrooms at an ever-quickening pace. And that pace, he warns, might be outrunning the legal system's ability to interpret it.

"Premature introduction of genetic evidence in court carries a number of risks," said Appelbaum in an email to The Verge. "The most obvious is that the purported associations [between genetics and behavior] are not real and will be disproved over time." But even the most replicated and widely accepted findings, he said, can be misinterpreted by judges and jurors.

In the case of the Italian court, the gene that was used has indeed been associated with impulsiveness and criminal behavior among men in a number of studies. Moreover, childhood maltreatment has been linked to lower MAOA activity — providing a great example of how a genetic predisposition can be triggered by environmental factors. Most experts agree, however, that even evidence as strong as that surrounding MAOA shouldn't be used to absolve someone of responsibility for their actions. "The major mistake the people make is to think that if you've identified a cause, it must mean that people are excused or mitigated," says Stephen Morse, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania who has written on the subject. But that isn't how the law works. Only a limited number of impairments — such as failing to appreciate the wrongfulness of one's acts — are considered exculpatory. So "if someone is a rational agent," Morse says, "I don't care if they have bad genetics."

Jorim Tielbeek, a neuroscientist and criminologist at VU Medical Center Amsterdam who has studied the effects of genetics on antisocial behavior, agrees with Morse, stating in an email to The Verge that a "higher genetic liability towards committing a crime doesn't necessarily mean a lessened responsibility." Although scientists have made links between certain genes and antisocial behavior, Tielbeek says, there is "no clear predictive relationship between a single gene and a criminal act — especially since hundreds of genes are involved in criminal behavior, and that each have a very small effect."

the double-helix takes the witness stand

cell |  Advances in understanding genetic predispositions to behavioral and neuropsychiatric syndromes are squarely in the sights of the legal profession. With data suggesting substantial genetic contributions to the risk for criminal behavior (Tuvblad et al., 2011), attorneys have begun to explore the potential uses of genetic evidence in their clients’ defense (Denno, 2011). In addition, the first signs that genetic data may be of interest to the civil justice system have begun to appear. As is true whenever scientific data are introduced in court, these developments hold potential for assisting judges and juries with some of the difficult judgments that they face—but they also bring a substantial risk of misinterpretation and misuse.

In considering current and future uses of behavioral and neuropsychiatric genetic evidence, the unhappy history of genetics in the courtroom cannot be ignored. Even before the structure of DNA was identified and the transmission of genetic information elucidated, courts recognized that behavioral traits could be handed down in families. However, judges’ understanding of genetics typically reflected the science of the day, and the consequences of their reliance on contemporary knowledge were not always salutary. For example, in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Buck v. Bell (274 U.S. 200, 1927), which upheld Virginia’s involuntary sterilization statute, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, appealing to the popular view that intellectual disability was passed from parent to child and was associated with promiscuity and crime, notoriously declared, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

Presumptions about the relationship between crime and hereditary intellectual deficiencies appear to have influenced the lower courts as well, with defendants who were viewed as “defective delinquents” often sent to state institutions where they could be confined indefinitely, rather than being sentenced to a fixed term in a correctional facility (Willrich, 1998). But the first use of genetic tests in the courts for their presumed relationship to criminal behavior did not arrive until the late 1960s and was based on data purporting to show that the XYY karyotype was linked to violent crime (Denno, 1996). Derived from a number of studies demonstrating overrepresentation of XYY men in correctional populations, the data were recruited by enterprising defense attorneys to argue that their clients’ violence was driven by genetic factors beyond their control, and thus that they could not be held criminally responsible for their behavior. Courts, however, were skeptical about the validity of data suggesting a causal link between the XYY karyotype and violent behavior and generally declined to admit karyotyping of defendants into evidence. As it turned out, the courts’ skepticism was fully justified—the purported link between XYY and violence has never been generally accepted (Stochholm et al., 2012).

to be a christian is to be a mystic: jesuits gonna work it out...,

kcstar | Are American nuns paying for the sins of a Jesuit priest who died in the 1950s?

It might seem that way, given the ongoing showdown between doctrinal hard-liners in the Vatican and leaders representing more than 40,000 U.S. sisters, with one of Rome’s chief complaints being the nuns’ continuing embrace of the notion of “conscious evolution.”

To many ears, “conscious evolution” probably sounds like a squishy catchphrase picked up after too much time in a New Age sweat lodge, and that’s pretty much how Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, leader of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, views it.

The German theologian bluntly told the Leadership Conference of Women Religious last month that the principles of “conscious evolution” — that mankind is transforming through the integration of science, spirituality and technology — are “opposed to Christian Revelation” and lead to “fundamental errors.”

That’s tough talk, and Mueller warned them that if the nuns persist in pursuing such dangerous ideas, Rome could cut them loose.

Yet those principles, and indeed the very term “conscious evolution,” also lead directly back to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit who was by turns a philosopher and theologian, geologist and paleontologist.

It was Teilhard’s thinking about original sin and humanity’s future evolution that got him in trouble with church authorities, however.

Teilhard argued, for example, that creation is still evolving and that mankind is changing with it; we are, he said, advancing in an interactive “noosphere” of human thought through an evolutionary process that leads inexorably toward an Omega Point — Jesus Christ — that is pulling all the cosmos to itself.

“Everything that rises must converge,” as Teilhard put it, a phrase so evocative that Flannery O’Connor appropriated it for her story collection. This process of “complexification” — another of his signature terms — and Catholic theology could aid in that process if it, too, adapts.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/living/religion/article495984/U.S.-nuns-get-a-stern-warning-about-following-one-Jesuit%E2%80%99s-principles.html#storylink=cpy

pitiful, dying, southern baptist convention tapped for ideas, crying "respeck my authoritay!"

kcstar | For Southern Baptists, it’s happened again: Another annual report shows the denomination is losing members and baptizing fewer people.

The Rev. Fred Luter, outgoing president of the Southern Baptist Convention, thinks old-time methods to spread the Gospel have met a culture that’s younger, more diverse and doesn’t necessarily see the pew — or even sin — as a priority.

“Our society is just not what it used to be,” said Luter, who admitted he’s discouraged by the reports. “When I grew up there was a challenge by parents in the home that our sons and daughters would be in church. It was a given.… That day and time is gone.”

Luter said he and others will address the issue at this year’s annual meeting, which takes place Tuesday and Wednesday in Baltimore. But beyond calls for reversing the trend, there’s little sign of agreement on a way forward.

Though some have said the 15.7 million-member denomination needs to be more racially and ethnically inclusive, Luter, its first African-American president, thinks the main reason for decline is that all congregations need to take a role in evangelism.

“We have just not been very active in doing what we can to reach the lost and the unchurched in our nation,” said the 57-year-old New Orleans pastor.

Weeks before the denomination’s annual meeting, a task force charged with helping Southern Baptists “own the problem” released a report that noted these recent signs of trouble:

One-quarter of Southern Baptist churches reported “0 baptisms”

60 percent said they had baptized no youth (ages 12-17)

80 percent reported one or fewer young adult baptisms (ages 18-29)

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/living/religion/article495948/Southern-Baptists-face-yet-another-glum-report.html#storylink=cpy

you can't be catholic and libertarian

Alan Dershowitz claims Cardinal Maradiaga an Anti-Semite

WaPo |  For years, American Catholics have been under pressure to vote Republican.

Though no church leader ever put it quite that baldly, Cardinal Raymond L. Burke came close when he said the Democratic Party was in danger of becoming a “party of death.” Bishop Michael J. Sheridan of Colorado Springs has repeatedly suggested that Catholics shouldn’t be able to receive Communion if they vote for politicians who differ from church teaching on a few “non-negotiable” matters: abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, same-sex marriage — and more recently, the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.

The most intense call to the ballot box came from Peoria Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, a Holy Cross priest who referred to the “calculated disdain of the president of the United States” in a homily ahead of the 2012 presidential election. “Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments,’’ Jenky said, “would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care. In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama — with his radical pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda — now seems intent on following a similar path.”

None of the protests that followed claimed that Jenky hadn’t made himself clear.

Now, though, the red papal loafer may be on the other foot, with economic conservatives being called out.

In Washington this week, the cardinal some consider the pontiff’s “vice-pope’’ mocked them outright at a conference called “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism.” The Religion News Service story on the smackdown of trickle-down ran under the headline, “Catholic and libertarian? Pope’s top adviser says they’re incompatible.”

That adviser, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, was introduced by AFL-CIO president Richard L. Trumka, and preached against deregulation and “worshipping idols, even if that idol is called ‘market economy.’ ’’ Rodríguez also called trickle-down economics a “deception,’’ and said the “invisible hand” of the market steals from and strangles the poor: “We are no longer to trust the blind forces and the invisible hand of the market. This economy kills. This is what the pope is saying.”

Some libertarians have described the pope’s economic views as naive and uninformed — and Rodríguez returned the favor. “Many of these libertarianists do not read the social doctrine of the church, but now they are trembling before the book of Picketty,’’ he said, referring to French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-seller, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” on the wealth disparities that have us headed into a new Gilded Age.

In some ways, the fight is over competing interpretations of the American story, said Meghan J. Clark, a moral theologian from St. John’s University. The libertarian telling of that story stars a frontiersman who carves the American West out of nothing, in radical autonomy, with only a hunting knife. Only, doesn’t that self-made man creating something out of nothing sound a lot like God? “That’s the [Catholic] problem with libertarianism,’’ Clark said. “It depends upon a human person who creates himself, and there’s no way to make that harmonious with Christ.”

The economy created by all those frontiersfolk is the unfettered free market, and Pope Francis himself recently reiterated his view that it is “an inhumane system. I didn’t hesitate to write in . . . “Evangelii Gaudium’ (“The Joy of the Gospel”) that this economic system kills,’’ Francis told reporters on his plane en route to Rome from Jerusalem. “And I repeat this.”