It's a Bug and a Feature!

Today's (UK) TimesOnline reports "Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol." The scientists in question are the Silicon Valley variety and the bugs in question are the genetically engineered variety. The report goes on:

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

So it is, or will be. How soon, however, is another question and another month is, to put it mildly, a tad optimistic.

But who knows? That's the thing about technological revolutions. While they do, indeed, build on what has been discovered or invented before, there really are "Eureka!" moments that change everything forever, too. I have little doubt that as physics, engineering, electronics and computer science were the motive forces of 20th century technology, genetic engineering and genetic medicine will be the big stories of the 21st century, certainly revolutionizing medicine and quite possibly revolutionizing energy production, too.

Meanwhile, no word so far on whether scientists have had any luck bioengineering bugs who eat politicians and excrete productive people.

This Gives "Extra-Vehicular Activity" A Whole New Meaning

You think you have a hard time getting a plumber when you need one? Pity the poor astronauts awaiting a spare part to fix the toilet on the international space station. "Okay, that'll be $37.50 for the pump, $150 labor and $2,000,000 for the service call." (I admit it. I don't know how much each flight of the the space shuttle Discovery actually costs and just pulled a figure from my... well, never mind that.)

But my favorite quote from the story is as follows:

The space station's Russian-built toilet has been acting up for the past week. The three male residents have temporarily bypassed the problem, which involves urine collection, not solid waste.

Not What The Doctor Ordered

Today's New York Times is running a fairly scathing report of Administration attempts "to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations" during Dr. Richard H. Carmona's four year tenure as Surgeon General.

According to the Times, those reports included such topics as embryonic stem cell research and "a landmark report on secondhand smoke [that] concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm."

Reasonable people can reasonably disagree about the moral status of human embryos. As such, that issue, itself, is a legitimate policy matter for the Bush Administration. What is not a legitimate policy matter but a purely scientific question is whether or to what extent embryonic stem cells are essential or vitally important in medical research. Again, one might hold that human embryos being persons, no medical advances would justify their intentional destruction, but we should at least know as best we can what the likely payoff of such research would be and what, if any, alternatives exist.

So, too, many have questioned the scientific validity of the aforementioned study on secondhand smoke. I haven't read the study or the criticism, so I won't offer an opinion beyond acknowledging skepticism about the sweeping nature of some of the claims reported in the press. Be that as it may, scientific research needs to be made available precisely so it can be challenged scientifically. Ethical and policy concerns remain, but we should at least have the benefit of a full examination on the scientific merits of such studies first.

Beyond that, though, it seems clear to me that if the nation is going to have a Surgeon General at all, the office must be accorded greater independence from both political branches of government. As matters stand, the office falls under the Department of Health and Human Services which is, frankly, a prime target for political manipulation regardless of the party controlling the White House.

Conversely, we could simply eliminate the office or relegate it to its primary function as head of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and create some independent medical advisory authority in its place. Science and health policy is properly the responsibility of policy makers, not of scientists and physicians, themselves. But it is equally true that the soundness of the scientific or medical research required to make those policy decisions must remain in the unfettered province of the scientific and medical community, itself.

Oh, and for goodness sakes, drop the silly uniforms.

Freeman Dyson's Optimistic Biotech Future

Freeman Dyson is the sort of intellectual one must take seriously even when writing what may amount to little more than a review of his own book and, along the way, a tribute to microbiologist Carl Woese. Those of us who have not read The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (and that would include me) might well find their appetite whetted by this New York Review of Books article from one of the best minds of the 20th century.

Scientists Confirm Cats Domesticated Humans

No, not really. Humans, after all, aren't entirely domesticated yet and cats, as it turns out, domesticated themselves. That's the thinking, anyway, as reported today in the Washington Post. The short version here, according to researchers from the National Cancer Institute and the University of Oxford, is that a particular species of wildcats (Felis sylvestris) started populating the outskirts of the Near East's Fertile Crescent when large scale grain agriculture and grain storage began attracting a large rodent population some 12,000 years ago.

Our old friend natural selection gave an adaptive advantage to the feral wildcats who dared the occasional human contact, as humans recognized the symbiotic advantages of the cats in rodent control. These cats thus became the ancestors of all domestic cats today worldwide. Had wild cats been domesticated by humans as was the case with other animals, it supposedly would have been much more likely that, e.g., China's and Europe's different wildcat species would show up at the trunk of the family tree. Not so, however, leading to the single-species self-domesticating thesis.

[BROKEN LINK - LOLCat Picture]

This explains much about our longstanding relationship with cats. Remaining mysteries include where and why they are getting cameras and computers for all those annoying posters on the internet and why, if they're smart enough to do all that, they haven't learned yet how to use the spell checker.

UPDATE: LOLCat idea thanks to Stevo Darkly. (See comments.)

"Wii Admitted We Were Powerless Over Video Games -- That Our Lives Had Become Unmanagable."

Given the choice between, oh, say, saving his life by fleeing a burning building or staying a bit longer to reach the next level in whatever video game he was playing at the time, I'm reasonably sure my younger son would, reluctantly, flee. Lower the stakes, however, and the video game would almost certainly win. So, is he addicted?

At least for now, the American Medical Association is saying no. That's the right call, which is no guarantee it will remain the AMA's position and that Video Game Addiction won't find itself next to alcoholism and drug addiction in the next edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in five years.

Whatever one thinks about the science underlying the notion of addiction as a medical disease or disorder, it is unlikely that the supposed Video Game Addiction "sufferer" will be affected greatly one way or the other by the medical experts' decision. What would change is that "[s]uch a move would ease the path for insurance coverage of video game addiction." Follow the money, in other words.

With the usual disclaimer about how, among the myriad other things I'm not, medical expert is high among them, here's my take. Issues of actual chemical dependence aside, and we'll get back to that later, when you strip the concept of addiction of any sort from its negative connotative baggage it reduces to little more than the notion that people like doing what they like to do and, as a corollary, when they like doing something very, very, very much it is hard for them to refrain from doing it. So hard, in fact, that in many cases those who have decided they would be better off not doing it so much find it much easier not to do it at all rather than trying to try to do it in moderation.

I'm not arguing that a life spent shooting heroin or smoking crack cocaine or drinking a quart or more of whiskey a day or gorging on food constantly or betting the rent money or even playing video games for six to eight hours a day is a life well spent. It is unquestionably dysfunctional by any reasonable objective standard. Also, some addictions are more dysfunctional than others, posing serious health and even life threatening risks.

But we don't manage our own lives by reasonable objective standards, though. We might think we do, but the best we can do is to view ourselves by reasonable subjective standards, the reasonable part being our adaptive success at learning from our own and others' experience and changing, when necessary, accordingly. I can't say how much satisfaction you get from your preferences, you can't really know how much satisfaction I get from my preferences. We can, of course, figure out what each other's preferences are and maybe even what their ordinal value to others are by how they in fact behave' but it doesn't follow that your number one preference, say, smoking crack, isn't so far ahead of number two and the rest that you're not making a rational decision by hanging out at the crack house no matter what I may think of your decision.

That said, many people who come to believe that their lives are being ruined by their alcohol or drug habits or whatever, can and do manage to stop. They probably need help doing so in most cases, but I don't know of a single person who stopped what others deemed an addictive habit solely because those others wanted him to do so. Society -- family, friends, employers, etc. -- can raise the stakes, but that's it. As the old psychology joke goes, the light bulb has to want to change.

Chemical dependency, a reality in some addictions despite what some naysayers claim, isn't really the issue. If it were, alcoholics and drug addicts could quite cheaply and quickly be detoxed and that would be that. It is the psychological dependence that is the far tougher nut to crack. No doubt that, too, is physiological. Perhaps the brain gets hard wired with "memories" of how much fun the alcohol or cocaine or, let's not forget, nicotine is. That's why the patient has to want not only to quit but to keep quit. That, too, is why there is some logic to lumping, say, a gambling addiction into the same psychiatric category as alcoholism or drug addiction. The problem is, the logic leads to precisely the wrong conclusion. What we should be learning from our ever expanding list of "addictions" is that, medical assistance with the chemical dependence aspect of certain such addictions during withdrawal aside, they are no different than the rest, which is to say that they're not really diseases or, in the medical sense, disorders at all.

Which, in turn, is why it isn't ongoing (expensive) medical treatment but recourse to Twelve Step programs and their like that tend to be the most effective method for people who want to quit and keep quit of whatever their addiction may be. My title here is a play on the First Step of such programs: substitute "Wii" with "We" and "Video Games" with "Alcohol" and you have the version of the granddaddy of all such programs, Alcoholics Anonymous. What they claim, at least for themselves, is that coming to believe that they really did have a problem and couldn't fix it by themselves was the first, essential step toward its solution. There may be many other ways for people who want to stop drinking or gambling or playing video games incessantly to do so. But at least in this one celebrated and successful (and, sure, highly criticized and controversial) way we're back to the psychologist and the light bulb; that is, it is the individual, himself, who must want to change; otherwise, all is for naught.

Meanwhile, my son is indulging his "addiction" at the moment playing some sort of video game in the other room and temporarily safe from being clinically labeled even as I type this (indulging in my, um, computer "hobby"). Just as we don't set out a big bowl of candy in the living room and tell our kids to help themselves as much as they want, we limit his access to the video games. He plays other, i.e., non-electronic, games and sports, does his homework (grudgingly) during the school year and so forth. I'm sure he'd rather play video games than do his math homework and, left to his own devices, would do precisely that. But he's a child, our home is ruled by (benign) despots and he doesn't get that choice. Not yet. Libertarianism is for grown-ups.

It would be bad enough in the case of adults that we infantilize them by telling them they can't do what harms only themselves because they have a disease that gives us power over them "for their own good," but it's worse than that. It doesn't even work until, ironically, they want to change anyway. Unlike light bulbs, there's little point in screwing with them until the light has already come on.

Shoes News, Part Deux!

Credit where credit is due: however else failed Glenn Greenwald believes the Bush Administration may be, if George W. Bush's wearing a pair of Crocs -- complete with snazzy black anklet socks, no less! -- causes sales of these fashion monstrosities to plummet, I shall doff my hat to him in thanks.

Speaking of which -- presidents, sartorial standards and hats, that is -- John F. Kennedy shall always have a place of honor in fashion hell for the death of men's hats in American society.

(Yes, I know Snopes says this is urban legend, but they fail to account for JFK's continued hatlessness accelerating this terrible fashion trend.)

Incarcerex: Ask Your Spin Doctor About It

Brilliant! Absolutely f*ckin' brilliant!

(H/T to Reason's Jacob Sullum.)

So, Why Would God's Design Include Malaria In The First Place?

University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne reviews Lehigh University biochemist Michael J. Behe's latest attempted defense of Intelligent Design, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. To no one's surprise, he is unimpressed.

Science, Sanity and the Law

If you have never entertained, however fleetingly, the prospect of killing your children, you're probably not spending enough time with them. Fortunately for the species, few of us ever act on such feelings. So few, in fact, that the rare parent like Andrea Yates, who in 2001 killed her four small children, strikes us immediately as monstrous or insane or both.

Reason's Brian Doherty posts a very fine article today about our struggles as a society with the notions of sanity, responsibility, free will and the law. The legal so-called insanity defense continues to fascinate us precisely because it touches so many deep mysteries about life, typically arising under the most gruesome and horrifying of situations. "Insanity" is a term long ago abandoned by the psychiatric profession, but the relationship between what is, at bottom, a legal defense justified on moral grounds and what purports to be increasing scientific evidence against the notion of free will of any sort continues to lie at the heart of the issues raised.

It is a basic tenet of ethics that ought implies can; that is, that holding someone blameworthy (or praiseworthy) for an act can be meaningful and justifiable only if that person could have done other than he did, in fact, do. Logically, it must also hold that "ought not" implies that the person could have refrained from doing whatever was done. Those who deny the existence of volitional or intentional human agency (i.e., free will) but contend that society must nonetheless indulge in the useful fiction of contending otherwise and holding people 'responsible' for their 'acts' are not, I think, all that far removed from those who hold that belief in God is necessary for there to be any moral order. Of course, by their own theory they are incapable of holding contrary views, so perhaps we can forgive them this conceptually muddled attempt to have their determinist cake and freely eat it, too.

In fairness, one can make a case for the notion that in society at large 'pretending' that criminals could refrain from committing their crimes so to justify 'punishing' them may well have a general deterrent effect. That is to say, 'punishing' certain acts raises the known consequences of their commission and people in general respond to such incentives and disincentives, whether freely or not.

But at the fringes of "people in general" lie those whose minds are so deranged (or, if you will, whose brains are so disfunctional) that the notion of general deterrence breaks down completely. These are, ironically, the people who are the most likely candidates for the insanity defense. Put simply, punishing the truly psychotic is unlikely to have any effect on the behavior of other truly psychotic persons. Indeed, it is almost definitional that such persons do not respond to the world as you and I do.

If we are only play-acting at a belief in free will in our criminal justice system as it deals with ordinary people, then surely we must be indulging in a play within a play when we go through the motions of a criminal trial with such persons, grappling with questions such as the (in)famous M'Naghten test whether "...at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, arising from a disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong."

Society must, of course, remove or restrain those who, for whatever causes or reasons, pose a deadly threat. But what possible difference can knowing what one is doing or knowing it is deemed wrong by others make if one cannot act otherwise anyway?

[EDIT: The first posted version read "scientific evidence of free will" and should have read and now does read "scientific evidence against the notion of free will."]

My Baby Just Wrote Me A Letter ... Now Where The Hell Is It?

Like the government itself, the U.S. Postal Service rarely misses an opportunity to be both arrogant and inefficient. Recently, as the Washington Post reports, the Post Office (it will always be the Post Office to me) has taken to “delivering mail to communal cluster boxes as a way to keep pace with booming residential growth while controlling labor costs” or, more simply, to keep providing less and less service for more and more money.

"Instead of going from door to door, from lawn to lawn, from driveway to driveway, we have a central location," said Luvenia Hyson, a postal service regional spokeswoman.

But see, Luvenia, that’s the problem. People don’t want a central location, they want their mail delivered right there to their homes, and not, by the way, by having the mailman – he or she will always be a mailman to me – traipsing all over our lawns, dammit! Sure, multiple residence locations have central mail delivery; but, um, you know, that’s one of the down sides of living in an apartment or condominium complex, not one of it’s friggin’ advantages. (Where do they get these spokesmen – they’ll always be spokesmen to me – from Microsoft, fergawdsakes?)

First class mail, the only sort we still care about at all, is less and less convenient and more and more expensive all the time. Perhaps it simply isn’t possible to run a mail delivery service the size and scope of the postal system efficiently or economically or well enough to satisfy customers. Possible or not, though, it sure as hell isn't going to get done by a government protected monopoly.

But first class mail is also less and less important all the time. There really aren’t any good arguments left why the postal system shouldn’t be entirely privatized and opened to competition. If the wiring infrastructure of telephone service and electricity isn’t a sufficient reason to preclude competition, there sure as hell is no reason why mailboxes should be.

Okay, so this isn’t exactly up there with Iraq, health care or immigration, but the candidate who was willing to say let’s get rid of the postal monopoly once and for all would certainly pick up more than a few votes from those suburbanites who have to go fetch their mail down the block.

Be Happy! Pay Taxes!

New "research" indicates (?) we feel better when we pay taxes! Giving to charity makes us even happier! (That much I believe.)

Well, now. This little tidbit made the memeorandum aggrigator, so I took a peek. Sooooo.... let's take a look at the experiment here: Nineteen (count 'em, 19!) all female university students at the University of Oregon? $100 at stake? Yeah, that sounds to me like a tightly controlled experiment, a representative sample and statistically significant results.

That the researchers did detect some correlation between MRI readings and revealed preferences, I don't doubt. Conclusions beyond that?

Geez!

And The Standard Here Would Be... ?

Okay, so by now everyone knows there is a new Creation Museum in Kentucky. Well, it seems they have various videos portraying the Creationist perspective and these videos use actors. Apparently, Eric Linden, the actor who portrays Adam (of "and Eve" fame) in one 40 second spot has been accused of "participation in projects that don't align with ... biblical standards" and the accusations are now being, um, investigated by Creation Museum personnel.

I have two questions:

(1) If by "biblical standards" is meant anything like how the overwhelming majority of persons described in the Bible (okay, Jesus excepted) actually behaved, how high can those standards be?

And,

(2) Investigate? Since when did these folks care about evidence?

What Sam Brownback Thinks About Evolution

Today's New York Times includes an op-ed column by Kansas Senator Sam Brownback explaining in more detail his views on evolution.

Brownback is a lawyer and not the dumbest guy in Congress, but as public intellectual credentials go, not only is he no Daniel Patrick Moynahan, he's not even Newt Gingrich. Whatever good it may do him politically, the column is an intellectual muddle.

First, Brownback sets the stage by asserting "the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason." That's a nice touch, actually. The problem is that "faith" is a very ambiguous term. Faith of what sort and in what, exactly? We might reasonably claim that scientists, themselves, have faith in reason (and in evidence and so forth), but it is certainly not the sort of faith of which Brownback writes. What he means to imply but does not outright say is faith in the truth of certain specific doctrinal beliefs he happens to hold to be true, so it isn't the existence or nonexistence of faith, per se, that is at issue here but faith as belief in the correctness of certain substantive claims. Brownback writes:

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

Let's dissect that. Why can't we "drive a wedge between faith [as Brownback understands it] and reason"? Because he wholeheartedly believes they cannot be contradictory? Why is that? Here he starts out reasonably well, noting that science and (Brownback's) faith address different questions; namely, questions about how nature operates and what he calls "spiritual truths." That's not so bad so far. If he had gone on to claim that their areas of concern were not complementary but incommensurable or merely that they bore no relationship to each other at all, rather like, say, there is no overlap between questions about auto mechanics and questions about music, I'd gladly agree with him. But he doesn't. What he does instead is simply assert his belief in God's agency. I don't happen to disagree with that belief as such, but the belief itself is no evidence or argument that scientific assertions and theological assertions cannot or do not contradict each other. As Brownback states it, it is merely a conclusion, an assertion of faith, actually, without any supporting argument or evidence. Viewed as an purported argument, it is entirely question begging.

Brownback then shifts from the notion that science and faith are complementary to the notion that faith supplements the scientific method "by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose." Certainly, religious beliefs can provide a context for and even, insofar as they are believed, a rationale for one's values, etc. But they are not the only possible such contexts or rationales, nor is it at all clear how any of these things supplements the scientific method any more than my discussing jazz with my mechanic supplements his ability to fix my car. What Brownback might have said is that, just as a knowledge of both mechanics and jazz lead to a fuller life, a life focused only on the sorts of questions science can answer is a less full life than one that includes other concerns. But that isn't what he said and what he did say, insofar as it is intelligible, is false.

Brownback tips his hand when he writes, "If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true." Implicit in this statement is that he does not believe, in particular, that our species evolved from other species (whether accidentally or not). This, of course, belies his purported belief that science and faith do not contradict each other, but we'll let that alone for now.

He goes on with the fairly typical Intelligent Design gambit of dropping the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis as evidence that real scientific questions remain unanswered in evolutionary theory. As others have written extensively, this is both true and irrelevant. What is especially relevant is Brownback's rejection of "arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality." This is the real heart of the matter and Brownback gets it exactly wrong.

I don't know a single scientist who believes as a matter of science that divine causality is impossible. I know some who do entirely reject the notion of divine causality as I know some who believe in it, but in neither case are they making a scientific claim and in neither case are their views at all relevant to evolutionary theory. The critical point here is that as far as the science of evolutionary theory is concerned, (1) its working hypothesis that divine causation is not necessary to explain how nature works has so far proved successful and (2) it is impossible, in any case, to either verify or falsify divine causation as we have come to understand what that assertion entails. I note, in passing, that some would claim the assertion is unintelligible or incoherent and, thus, incapable of being either true or false, but we'll leave that for another time.

Let's return to my mechanic friend who does not want to discuss why Miles Davis was one of the all time jazz greats but wants me to understand, instead, why I should get the oil changed regularly in my car and so explains how internal combustion engines work. He describes the pistons moving up in their cylinders, compressing gas vapors, then how the vapors are ignited, causing a controlled explosion pushing those pistons back down and, at the same time others on the crankshaft up, etc. He describes how the gears and such transfer that power from the rotating drive shaft to turn the wheels and so forth and why, therefore, the engine must be properly lubricated. Let's pretend I follow him but insist at every point in his explanation that this all happens because my personal deity, Mechano, makes it happen.

My mechanic, a more philosophically astute fellow than most politicians, points out to me that, while Mechano may indeed be the unseen force behind the workings of engines and motors, he does not need to believe in Mechano's existence to understand or to repair automobile engines. Maybe he does believe in Mechano, but none of the repair manuals and none of his training and experience have mentioned Mechano. In that sense, neither my nor his beliefs one way or the other about Mechano either complement or supplement his work. Whether they complement or supplement his or my life outside the area of auto repairs is another matter. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. In any case, this is the rough equivalent to evolutionary theory vis a vis Sen. Brownback's faith and this is why, again only roughly speaking, efforts to include non-evolutionary accounts of the origin of man in biology class curricula are met with the same sort of reaction I would get if I tried to pressure General Motors to include a chapter on Mechano in their service manuals.

There are any number of other problems with Brownback's column, but I'll just make one final point. He writes, "While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order."

Whether the final sentence of that claim is true or not, it is worth noting that one can be certain in one's convictions but nonetheless entirely wrong.

* * * * *

P.S. -- John Derbyshire likens Brownback on evolutionary biology to Paris Hilton on partial differential equations. The Derb goes on, as I did not, to do a nice job of tearing apart the implicit "science" of Brownback's weaseling over "micro" versus "macro" evolution.

At Least Now We Know Why They're Pink

It sounds like the log line for the next John Waters movie -- Gay flamingos pick up chick. "A pair of gay flamingos have adopted an abandoned chick, becoming parents after being together for six years, a British conservation organization said Monday," reports the APF. Of course, Andrew Sullivan was one of the early bloggers to cover the story.

I admit to almost invincible ignorance when it comes to animal homosexuality. I mean, I've known lots of gay men and a few lesbians over the years (sure, I've know even more than I know about -- I'm just talking about the ones I knew were homosexual), but aside from these suspiciously recent press reports of allegedly homosexual behavior in animals, this is not a topic I've paid much attention to since I stopped watching the adventures of Yogi Bear and Booboo.

If, in fact, Carlos and Fernando, the flamingos in question, are gay, then following Sullivan's lead I think this raises all sorts of interesting theological issues. I suppose, for example, homosexuality among non-humans could still be considered theologically "disordered" and thus contrary to the will of God. One would be hard pressed to call whatever occurs naturally to be unnatural, however, and the theological nexus between sin, original or otherwise, and free will would seem at the very least to be a bit strained. Indeed, I'm not sure it makes any sense whatever to talk of sinful animals. Yes, I know, the notion of sin among humans is problematic enough for many people, but we're just doing a bit of conceptual analysis here.

On the other hand or wing, as it were, when Carlos and Fernando are referred to as a "gay" couple, does this really mean what, well, what one assumes it means when we're talking about people? I mean, what sort of sex lives do "straight" birds have, for that matter?

Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge near Bristol (a Wodehousean name if there ever was one) representative Jane Waghorn claims that gay flamingos are not uncommon. "If there aren't enough females or they don't hit it off with them, they will pair off with other males," she said.

Of course, if there aren't enough females in, say, prison... well, you know. So there's my question. Were Carlos and Fernando living the avian equivalent of La Cage aux folles these last six years or were they and are similar "gay" flamingo couples merely playing The Odd Couple?

"There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long run."

So writes Nina Plank in an op-ed column in today's New York Times, discussing the death of 6 week old Crown Shakur, whose vegan parents fed him mainly soy milk and apple juice. The infant weighed 3.5 pounds and died of starvation. His parents were subsequently convicted of murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty.

I don't know Plank's qualifications, though I assume the Times vetted her before running the piece. Further, while I am definitely omnivorous, I have no problem with vegetarians of any sort so long as the ones who refrain from eating meat on what they believe to be moral grounds refrain as well on prudential grounds from trying to argue the point with me. If free range tomatoes are your cuisine of choice, more power to you as long as we're talking only about what you, personally, choose to eat.

The case of Crown Shakur's death, however, points dramatically at what are and properly should be the limits of social tolerance of parental authority over children. That isn't a controversial notion among either liberals or conservatives; they differ for the most part only in the sorts of personal liberty they enthusiastically wish to prohibit. It is, however, a controversial notion among too many libertarians.

Too bad. Reasonable people can reasonably disagree whether, say, corporal punishment ought to be illegal or what minimal level of education parents should be responsible to ensure their children receive or even whether certain vaccinations or other medical attention should be required.

But there is no such thing as a reasonable case for permitting parents to starve their infant children to death. None whatsoever. And those who would argue on ideological grounds for complete parental control over children, unfettered by state interference, are on an equal moral footing with those whose merely different ideology could result in this sort of senseless and entirely avoidable death.

Sex in Space? Shiny!

There's good news and bad news on the Final Frontier Front. The good news, NASA plans a manned landing on Mars 30 years from now. The bad news, NASA plans to still be around 30 years from now. The AP reports:

With NASA planning to land on Mars 30 years from now, and with the recent discovery of the most Earth-like planet ever seen outside the solar system, the space agency has begun to ponder some of the thorny practical and ethical questions posed by deep space exploration.

Come to think of it, if the Earth-like planet in question is Gliese 581c, NASA plans on being around for a mission requiring traveling a one-way distance of 20.5 light years, by comparison with which a round trip to Mars and back of 110 to 200 kilometers is a walk around the block. Either we're much closer to Warp Drive than NASA is letting on, or those boys really believe in long term planning.

Based purely on anecdata, there is a surprisingly large percentage among those of us who generally oppose big government to make an exception when it comes to space. I don't think it has anything to do with economic arguments about capital investment costs, commercial viability or even funding for scientific research. I think space exploration is simply one of those exceptions libertarians are often willing to make to their principles because we grew up reading Heinlein, watching Star Trek, etc. and think space travel is just too damned nifty to let principles intrude. My basic position is that when it comes to wasting vast sums of tax dollars on failed foreign adventures, failed social welfare programs or (even failed) space exploration, I'd rather the money be wasted on space. Your mileage (or light-yearage) may vary.

Still, as fans of, for example, Firefly, realize, one of the real down-sides of humanity finally escaping our terrestrial prison via the likes of NASA is that where the government goes, government goes. Which also means that government consultants, special interest advocates and other parasitic life forms will soon be infecting space, as well.

There are, I suppose, all sorts of things to consider about life in space, though the laundry list of issues currently being considered by NASA seems to range from the sensible to the pointless to the absurd. Were you worried you might have to put in too many hours of overtime in space? Fear not, NASA has already established the 48 hour work week. Should genetic screening, currently prohibited, be used to select crews for long-term space missions? NASA's chief health and medical officer, Richard Williams, says "Genetic screening must be approached with caution ... because of limiting employment and career opportunities based on use of genetic information."

I trust the worry here is over leaked genetic information affecting the person's terrestrial opportunities and not the idiotic notion that we shouldn't screen crews because it would be prejudicial to deny someone with a high likelihood of developing a mission threatening disease or disorder during a long-term mission. But, hey, this is the government we're talking about, so you never know. Medical concerns are real enough, but chances are pretty good that medical advances will keep pace with or outdistance advances in space exploration technology as the decades roll by.

My guess is that, whatever the so-called experts are planning and predicting at this point, by the time there is significant human traffic in space, the model we will rely upon most heavily will be our history of ships at sea and how they, for example, have dealt with medical emergencies and shipboard deaths on the high seas. Unfortunately, I won't live to see much of it happen, anyway. Then again, if we leave the likes of NASA in charge, neither will my great grandchildren.

Oh, If Only There Was a Green Party to Save the Red Planet from Itself!

The (U.K.) Sunday Times reports:

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Money quote:

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

Known life or not, my money's on Martian conservatives and interplanetary corporations being behind it all.

"Honey, the babysitter has arrived."

Following yesterday's robotic servant problem post, and with a hat tip to Reason's Ronald Bailey, here's some vital public safety information on the looming threat of a Robot Uprising.

Would You Settle for Just Humming the Body Electric?

From the (U.K.) Daily Mail comes a report entitled “Are we safe from robots that can think for themselves?” Curiously enough, it does not concern the chances of Al Gore running again for president. Rather, we are told some scientists “predict that in the next five years robots will be available for child-minding, to work in care homes, monitor prisons and help police trace criminals.” No word, so far, on whether such robots will dream of electric sheep.

Stories such as these crop up periodically, invariably asserting the imminence of “thinking” machines of the sort we routinely find in science fiction stories and dredging up references to Asimov’s three laws of robotics. Perhaps we shall see the advent of genuinely thinking machines some day – I hope I live to see it and will even join People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots when the time arrives – but the difference between state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and human intelligence remains vast. Five years?

Still, the public debate called for in the article is a good idea. Whether “autonomous” robot “soldiers” or “caretakers” for the very young and very old are on the near-term horizon, robotics will make a substantial difference in our eventual future and we are well advised to consider the implications of that emerging technology now. Will the “soldiers” now under development soon be able to act independently of their programmed “rules of engagement” or robot “caretakers” soon be able to change diapers? Not a chance. But when the robotics boys finish beta testing and work out all the bugs in the first production model Pris, give me a call.