The Libertarian Scientist

A silly hypothetical question is answered

2006-11-14T23:57:00.000-08:00

I just found out, via digholes.com, that if I were to dig a hole straight through the center of the earth I would come out almost exactly on a line linking the southernmost points of Africa and Australia, a little under half as far from the former. So, if I could build something that could survive passage through all that molten rock, and still have enough energy to overcome the gravitational pull and get back out, I would have plenty of water on the other side to cool my amazing contraption down again at the other end. Nice to know.

The history of drugs in music

2006-11-01T20:45:00.000-08:00

I don't think anyone reading this will be surprised that drugs and musicians tend to go together, particularly in the rock and rap scenes. Nevertheless, I thought I'd post this article from music news site Blender.com for whoever needs to be reminded how much of the musical creativity and productivity we admire has been facilitated by psychoactive chemicals in one way or another. Even if you are like me and don't doubt that fact, unless you are an expert in the history of drugs in the music scene, I bet you will learn something from reading this.

Backwards (pseudo)science

2006-10-14T23:34:00.000-07:00

Most people have probably heard claims of hidden messages in popular songs that are revealed when the sound is played in reverse. I suspect also that most see these things as nothing more than amusing coincidences.

Today I came across the website of a man, David John Oates, who has created an entire business around this idea. He claims things as outlandish as that children learn to speak in reverse when babbling before they learn to speak forward, and that the sound of a lie, when played backwards, will reveal the truth. He ties all this to the hypothesis that human speech contains two components, a conscious forward part and a subconscious reverse part. He claims that this supposedly revolutionary idea is useful for lie detection in criminal trials, selection of the best business strategy, and a bunch of other things, and offers to listen to a 5 minute tape backwards for $125 in order to pick out any subliminal messages.

One piece of "evidence" he uses to back up his theory is a study of recordings of subjects made to read identical passages, which were analyzed to determine if the phrases appearing in reverse were the same for all subjects. Also, the number of reversals for people reading an emotional and neutral passage were compared. The data analysis for this experiment is a brilliant example of bad science. In particular, the authors reason that if the reversals were coincidental, they would be the same for all subjects reading the same phrase forward. Any scientist knows this is a ridiculous assertion--coincidental results show MORE variability than ones that are indicative of some underlying phenomenon. In addition, the authors expected to find more hidden messages in the speech of the people reading the emotional passages, while in fact they found the opposite. Most importantly, any use of statistical tests of significance is totally omitted from the analysis. As there were only two subjects reading each passage, using such tests would inevitably reveal the results to be insignificant.

I seriously wonder who would pay $125 or more to have someone listen for these messages in speech, but seeing the non-trivial popularity of psychics maybe one shouldn't be so surprised.

Bacteriophages to be used to prevent food poisoning

2006-08-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

The FDA has recently approved the use of a mixture of bacteriophages, or viruses that infect bacteria, for spraying on meat before packaging in order to kill the disease-causing bacterium Listeria. This is likely the first significant practical application of bacteriophages outside of the laboratory. Hopefully, the use of multiple types of virus will prevent the emergence of Listeria strains resistant to destruction.

Knocking out stimulant reward

2006-07-29T17:51:00.000-07:00

The article I'm reporting here is a little over a month old, but now that I'm getting around to updating my blog I thought I'd mention it. For those that don't know, the modified amino acids dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, collectively known as monoamines, are neurotransmitters that are released by specific neurons in the brain and activate receptors on other neurons, sending a message from one cell to another. There are "pumps" in the membranes of the neurons that release these transmitters, which "clean up" the released monoamines so that they don't keep activating receptors for too long. These pumps are blocked by many psychotherapeutic and recreational drugs, producing a change in brain function. While each neurotransmitter has multiple effects in the brain, the transmitter dopamine in particular is believed to participate in the behavior-reinforcing properties of both natural (food, sex, etc.) and pharmacological (drug) stimuli. Among many scientists dopamine is still believed to be a kind of "pleasure chemical" whose concentration determines the degree of poitive subjective sensation produced by the environment, regardless of the specific nature of the stimulus. This idea has been called into question especially lately, though, for a number of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with this article. For instance, the effect of drugs that directly activate dopamine receptors is not euphoric in humans.

The finding that concerns us here is one made by Sora et. al. in 1998. To understand the significance of this study, it is important to know that the stimulant cocaine blocks the transporters ("pumps") for all three monoamines. Given the assumed responsibility of dopamine for reinforcement, it has long been assumed that blocking the dopamine transporter (DAT) produces the euphoric effect of cocaine by allowing dopamine to sit around and activate its receptors longer. To test this, Sora et. al. deleted ("knocked out") the gene encoding DAT from mice, and showed that they still prefer to spend time in a chamber in which they have previously received cocaine. This so-called conditioned place preference suggests that cocaine can act as a reward even when it cannot block DAT (because DAT doesn't exist in these mice). Knocking out the serotonin transporter (SERT) also left cocaine reward intact. A follow-up study showed that knocking out both DAT and SERT makes mice that do not prefer an environment they associate with cocaine. Sora et. al. took this to mean that blocking SERT is rewarding as well, which flies in the face of the fact that blocking SERT with drugs like fluoxetine (Prozac) does not produce signs of euphoria. An obvious caveat here is that the brains of DAT knockout mice are flooded with dopamine and the animals are very hyper even when they aren't on any drugs, so findings may not generalize to normal mice.

The new study by Chen et. al. took a different approach. They found that by mutating part of DAT, they could prevent cocaine from binding to it without breaking the pump. When this mutant DAT was added back into DAT knockout mice, cocaine no longer made the mice hyperactive like it does normal mice (paradoxically, it calmed them) and was not rewarding. This confirms what I--and probably many other researchers--suspected was going on: the mice with DAT knocked out only showed a response to cocaine because it slightly amplified the effect of the high baseline dopamine. Possible explanations are that increased activation of serotonin receptors overcomes some negative feedback mechanism limiting dopamine levels, or that lack of DAT induces a form of plasticity in the reward pathway such that SERT blockade becomes rewarding. This still doesn't explain other results questioning the idea of dopamine as a "pleasure chemical", but at least it shows that cocaine, and probably methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamines, do produce their reinforcing effects through inhibition of dopamine reuptake.

What is the soundtrack of our genome?

2006-07-26T17:03:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I took a look at Mendel's Garden #3, and among the featured post is a discussion of the work of Japanese biologist Susumu Ohno. He took a part of the gene encoding the large subunit of RNA polymerase II and converted it into music, considering both the base sequence itself and the properties (size and charge) of the encoded amino acids. He thought that this piece sounded like a Chopin nocturne, so he took the nocturne and "reverse translated" it to a DNA sequence. He proceeded to demonstrate that this sequence contains a 160-codon open reading frame (see this site for more), and went on to make lots of philosophical speculations about how DNA sequences and music evolve in the same manner. The probability that any given sequence of 160 base triples would start with a start codon and not contain stop codons is a little less than 1/130,000. However, this could be artificially raised by many orders of magnitude by assigning the start and stop codons to sequences of notes that are very frequent and rare, respectively, in the nocturne, which shouldn't be difficult to find with the right software.

Perhaps most interesting is the musician Colin Angus of the group The Shamen, who teamed up with biologist Ross King to create the piece "S2 Translation" containing the full sequence of a serotonin receptor. I assume it's the 5-HT2A receptor, important for the actions of hallucinogenic phenethylamines and tryptamines, which fits with the name of the group considering the common use of such substances in plant form in rituals of many cultures.

The program they used for this, called ProteinMusic, is available as a free download. I got the program and tried some random gene sequences, making sure to trim off any bases before the start codon (ProteinMusic doesn't do this automatically). The program went straight through the stop codon at the end of the transcript, calling it "Z". I could not hear any difference in the sound between the actual polypeptide and the 3' UTR. The poly(A) tail was easy to recognize because of its repetitiveness, but that's about it. Someone commented that

"It may be possible for somebody who has heard the pattern of a calcium-binding site or an enzyme active site to recognize its occurrence in a novel protein."

Yeah right. I doubt 1% of bioinformatics scientists could identify the seven transmembrane helices in that serotonin receptor by ear, something that is typically easy to do by eye using hydropathy plots. This isn't to say that the idea of turning DNA sequences into music isn't neat in a purely fun sense, just that it doesn't do anything for science except maybe increase popularity.

The Rhymes of Molecular Biology-Part III

2006-07-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

Just today I searched for MC Coffee Mug on iTunes, and The Thesis up for sale. I recommend for any scientists who like rap to check out this album. I don't think there is any other music like it out there.

A lot of truth is said in jest

2006-06-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

I just recently re-took this political test that claims to be "satirical" but in fact seems to capture the major political philosophies the best of any quiz I have taken. I have taken The World's Smallest Political Quiz and other similar tests before, but the satirical test captures the kind of ideas I have seen out there in politics very well, and the humor in the answer choices more than makes up for the greater length. This latest time I answered the following numbers of questions:

CONS: 21
LIBL: 11
LBRT: 113
COMM: 2
none seem good: 24
several answers apply: 8

Interestingly, the first time I took the quiz I answered:

CONS: 45
LIBL: 5
LBRT: 92
COMM: 0
none seem good: 23
several answers apply: 14

By this, it seems that I got less conservative and more strongly libertarian, though some of it probably has to do with the fact that I read the answers more thoroughly the second time around.

Manufacturer-Consumer Darwinism

2006-06-10T22:06:00.000-07:00

I often get into debates with others over the merits of a libertarian society. One of the areas of most adamant disagreement (due to its extreme importance to me) is often that over drugs, whether they be for recreational or medicinal purposes. I stand wholeheartedly behind the idea that people should have the right to obtain and ingest whichever substances they choose, with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) assuming an informational and certifying function but not a choice-limiting one. Manufacturers of substances could apply to the FDA to have their products certified in exchange for legal protection from harm caused by their products. Many people question the sense of allowing people to experiment with substances whose safety and/or efficacy were not proven to some arbitrary standard. For me, the philosophy of freedom is reason enough to allow this. However, for those looking for a more communal reason, let me offer the following:

Whenever a risk-tolerant person decides to consume a new substance, the result of this personal experiment gives society as a whole a piece of knowledge on the effect of this compound on the human body. If serious side effects occur, or even death, the experimenter is unlikely (or even unable) to recommend the substance to other experimenters. As a result, only drugs whose perceived benefit outweighs their perceived risk for a significant number of people are likely to attract a substantial following of users. Those compounds that are truly life-enhancing are likely to stay around, even if their greatest utility is for conditions the chemists inventing them were unaware of. Of course there will be "snake-oil salesmen" who will tout useless or even dangerous products to make money, but consumers existing in such a world will know that in the absence of the seal of FDA certification or a licensed doctor's assertion (I still support the existence of licensed doctors, as I do FDA certification--neither however limiting peoples' right to self-medicate if desired), such information must be taken with a grain of salt.

The people who take uncertified drugs, the equivalent of unapproved ones today, are those who either believe strongly in their ability to enhance some aspect of life (due to persoanl scientific knowledge, consultation with experts, or simply personal opinion), or who choose to take a chance due to lack of other options or personal lack of concern for safety, or some combination of these. This system will inevitably lead to more serious adverse effects and deaths as people are able to make more mistakes. However, it also increases the chance that a genuinely good idea will become apparent. Pharmaceutical companies pour billions of dollars into research and development, in an attempt to discover new chemical entities with useful biological activities. Financial resources and time are not endless, however, and the risk is always there that research into the next wonder drug will be stalled in the early stages of development due to corporate prioritizing. If some individual sees promise in this drug and manufactures it, allowing other individuals to experiment with its use, this is a low-cost alternative route to realization of the compound's beneficial potential. As long as the users consent and are aware of the risk, the worst that can happen is that someone dies as a result of his or her own free will. The best is that the substance will achieve notoriety among a small set of the population for its benefit, and this will attract those businesses with the means to perform the necessary testing for the less experimental members of society to use it.

This situation, in which there is an increase in death or a decrease in fitness among certain members of a population, but the chance of discovering a novel solution to a problem is simulataneously increased, is reminiscent of Darwinian natural selection. As the mutation rate of an organism's genome increases, the number of organisms with deleterious mutations increases, but so does the adaptability to a threat. It is for this reason that the DNA replication machinery of many viruses such as HIV is much more error prone than that of cellular organisms. Of course, organisms don't choose to have their survival determined by their genes. Increasing the number of consenting "human guinea pigs" by allowing people to self-medicate leads to a kind of rapid selection in which potential pharmceuticals (or even recreational drugs) are "selected for" without dramatic corporate spending. Of course, this does not diminish or negate the role of rational scientific discovery in developing new drugs, making the search random. Not all good ideas, however, can simultaneously be investigated by pharmaceutical companies that have the time and the means to conduct the type of testing required by the FDA.

One could also envision situations, a bit more futuristic in nature, in which potential genetic enhancements are subject to true natural selection. Those who opt to have their genomes altered will experience a corresponding increase or decrease in health and/or happiness due to the change, and those mutations that have drastic deleterious effects alone or in combination may even kill the individuals who induce them. All of this provides information that can be used by others to make more informed choices. Of course, in all of this individual variation must be taken into account, and there is no substitute for a rigorous statistical analysis to support individuals' claims of success. The number of such statistical analyses that need to be done, however, is reduced if prior human experimentation has raised some probable conclusions to test. Also, certain drugs, including recreational ones, may be beneficial for a small proportion of the population and detrimental to others, a scenario that in a statistical test may seem equivalent to no effect, but is very different in terms of implications for treatment.

The year draws to a close

2006-05-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

The semester is almost over, except for finals. I have taken a molecular biophysics class this semester, which introduced me to the simple physical models commonly used to model biopolymers. The subject of biophysics seems interesting, but the type of subject matter my professor is working on (flexibility of nucleic acids, energetics of RNA unfolding) does not seem to present a good opportunity for the engineering-type problems I am most interested in solving. I had a debate a few days ago with a friend over whether we know enough about biological components (enzymes, receptors, etc.) to design functional circuits from "first principles" as one would design an electronic logic circuit. It seems the jury is still out on this one, and will likely determine if I will eventually end up in biology.

The Rhymes of Molecular Biology-Part II

2006-05-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

MC Coffee Mug has finished his album, The Thesis, and the music is available here. My favorite track is Policy, but The Thesis, Methods, and Wreck are good too.

Also, MCCM just recently posted over at GNXP about a new discovery that so-called hippocampal place cells in rats, which selectively fire when the rat is in a particular spatial location, repeat their spike pattern in reverse order after a trajectory of locomotion is completed. That is, the place cells corresponding to the current location fire first, and those corresponding to the starting location fire last. The authors speculates on the reason for this reverse "instant replay".

The Rhymes of Molecular Biology

2006-03-30T23:48:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, I wrote several raps about science. At the time, I thought I was the only one who had come up with that idea. Lately, through Gene Expression, I found out about this great biology rapper called MC Coffee Mug. He writes his lyrics about many scientific topics from genomes to neuroanatomy, and his motto is "knowledging cats flawlessly is my policy". His first album, The Thesis, will soon appear on his MySpace website, though for now you can listen to some of his older recordings. His most popular is "Science Love", which is a song trying to convince a woman why she should go out with a scientist. Also, I suggest you check out his latest post on Gene Expression here.

Here are a few verses I put together in an attempt to compete with his level of science rapping:

"I may not rule the streets like the baddest of rappers/ but what makes me unique's how I analyze patterns/ dynamical atoms rotate in my head/ as I'm walking on paths/ even laying in bed/ graphical networks, far too many to list/ you rappers most often don't know exist/ channels, receptors, feedback through connections/ these raps can't project the depth flat on a mental plane/ maybe that's why my flow seems to stretch out your brain

These thoughts I try to convey/ with these rhymes that I say/ trapped in kinase cascades/ deep inside of your brains/ making memory traces/ embedded for days and/ filling you up 'till your head can't retain them/ MCs better make sure to remember my name/ cause they'll all come to know I'm the best at the game"

There may be more to come, as I think of things.

Why is this argument for government intervention wrong?

2006-01-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

In his opinion piece “why is libertarianism wrong?” Paul Treanor gives the following critique of fundamental libertarian principles:

'interarchy': are libertarians minarchists?
Some libertarians describe themselves as anarcho-capitalists, or simply anarchists, or minarchists. Anarchy means literally 'no rule' and minarchy implies minimal rule, minimal government. Robinson Crusoe, alone on an island, could claim to have a truly minarchic and anarchist system: absolute autonomous self-government. However, isolation is not what libertarians mean when they use these terms. The political structures proposed by libertarians allow any person to interact with another, in any non-coercive way. Libertarianism, and liberalism in general, recognise no 'right to be a hermit'. But most libertarians not only allow interactive society, they positively value it. They claim it allows knowledge to be shared: they value this input of others. Not just in their own life, but as a general social precept. This high-interaction society, of collective decision making, already has a name: Hayek suggested 'catallaxy'. However, the term 'interarchy' seems better. It indicates that no-one in such a society is 'self-governing' in the Crusoe sense. Others affect their lives: in a global economy, about four billion other adult consumers, and millions of business firms. If minarchy means minimal outside influence on the life of the individual, then libertarians are not minarchists. By the same token, they can certainly not be anarchists.

Reading this, I really wonder how much he has paid attention to libertarian ideas, or political ideas in general. He claims that libertarians (and presumably not statists) “recognize no ‘right to be a hermit’.” In fact, if anybody, it is the Republicans and Democrats who fail to do this. If at all unsure, read section III, part 16 of the libertarian party platform. Now this “party line” version of the right to secession is very extreme, and I don’t agree wholeheartedly with it, but at least it leaves no doubt as to the party’s intentions. In a libertarian society, people would be free to do on their private property whatever they wish, as long as it doesn’t infringe the liberty of other people around them. If someone could live solely off of the resources on his or her property, in the “Robinson Crusoe” sense, he or she would not be obligated to interact with the surrounding society at all, except maybe to pay the small amount of taxes to fund protection of his or her property and freedom from attack by outsiders. The other political parties, however, have an overwhelming impulse to consider every human action, no matter how private, in terms of its impact on the surrounding society. For instance, a person may not grow certain plants or produce certain substances on his or her property, simply because consumption of those increases the risk that he or she will later go and put the lives of others in danger. In this system, there is no space into which individuals or small groups of individuals can retreat, as “hermits,” and act autonomously.

If it seems that libertarians “not only allow interactive society, they positively value it,” this is typically for the following two reasons:

1) They are trying to appease those affiliated with other political parties, whose valuation of interactive society so dominates their policy decisions as to surpass individual freedom in many cases, and some of whom believe that a libertarian form of government could only succeed if everyone restricted all contact with others to impersonal economic transactions on the “free market.”

2) Much more importantly, an interactive society is required to attain the standard of living we are currently used to. Bare-bones items such as furniture, plumbing fixtures, and eating utensils, not to mention high-tech ones like appliances and computers, require the work of many people to be made. A society in which everyone lived like Robinson Crusoe would contain nobody who could own all of these items. Libertarians admire freely interactive societies for how they make all these things possible, often without involvement of a central authority, not because they have a moral belief in favor of collectiveness versus isolation. Many others, in contrast, do show moral preferences in favor of certain collective institutions (just listen to any politician and count how many times he uses words like “community”).

The end of insight?

2006-01-07T00:56:00.000-08:00

A post was made on Gene Expression this past Tuesday called "The End of Insight-Monkeys lost in their own castles". It discusses the idea that many scientific explanations may soon be past the ability of the human mind to comprehend. One example is the so-called cellular automata studied by Stephen Wolfram. I happen to have read part of Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science about 3 years ago, so I know the general idea being referred to here.

One important concept is that the simplified equations used to model phenomena in physics and chemistry do not adequately reproduce the complexity observed in nature, particularly in biology, such as the arrangement of spots observed on many animals, but the iterated application of a set of simple rules can. A far more general concept, however, and one far more limiting for human understanding, is the hypothesis that certain systems perform computations that are irreducible-their behavior cannot be predicted by a clever shortcut or intuition, but rather require building a replica of the system, either physically or within a computer, and observing it run.

Fly, who posted on Gene Expression, makes the claim that the limitations of insight “seems likely to afflict us in science.” I In some ways it seems that this shift is already taking place, to my great disappointment. My interest has always lied in mental pattern-finding and trying to predict the function of, or design, complex systems based on the properties of individual components and a mental sense of how things work. This is particularly true when the complexity in question is of a visual or spatial nature.

One of the fields I have been interested in for a while is how protein structure influences function, particularly the binding of small molecules such as metabolites or drugs and/or signaling. It seems more and more that the general consensus is that it is not practical to have humans try to predict these things using their own brains, but to use automated computer search algorithms to test hundreds of thousands of possibilities. This has chased me away from the field of protein structure as a career goal. I am seriously beginning to wonder if there is any place for me in biology, given that I like to predict and design things mostly using my “bare mind” and find using computer simulations to do most of the predicting and explaining boring. It seems in a way that chemistry is running into a similar situation—making any revolutionary or novel prediction tends to only succeed using quantitative number-crunching rather than qualitative mental models, and sometimes even these fail when judged against experiment. I have asked many scientists whether there is a niche for predictions based on mental models or design by human creativity in any field they know of, and very few can give me a straight answer. It may be that the usefulness of talented human pattern-matchers has declined in favor of systematic computer simulation of the type Wolfram describes. In any case, even if all other scientists think a phenomenon is far too complex to be understood by humans, that will not stop me from trying to explain it using my own insight.

2005-A Structural Summary

2006-01-03T17:05:00.000-08:00

This post is highly technical, so if you haven't a clue what I'm saying here don't worry. I will return to my previous style after this. Continuing the year-end theme, I just finished reading Science Magazine's top discoveries of 2005 . As I view and work with protein structures regularly, I thought, for any others who are into structural biology, that I'd give my opinion on the most exciting biomolecular structures released at the RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB) in 2005. I understand this is going to be a rather biased list, as it is based on my personal opinion only, and I am sure I am not aware of many structures deposited in the PDB in the last year.

First on my list would have to be a structure solved by a professor here at Cal whose lab I worked in during Fall 2004, Jamie Cate. In what is surely the largest nucleic acid structure ever solved at near-atomic resolution, he and members of his lab (me not included) have determined the 3.46 Angstrom crystal structure of the entire E. coli ribosome (PDB IDs 2AVY, 2AW4, 2AW7, and 2AWB), offering the first glimpses of how the subunits interact to enable the translation of messenger RNA into protein.

Also notable is the number of membrane protein structures solved in the past year. In February, Nigel Unwin reported a refined (but still rather low-resolution) structure of the channel domain of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (2BG9). Together with the much older structure of snail acetylcholine binding protein, this completes the first full experimental structural model of an ion channel gated by a small molecule, as Roderick MacKinnon's highly controversial structure of the KvAP potassium channel did for voltage gating in 2003. In addition, several new structures of acetylcholine binding proteins with different ligands have been recently published (2BYN, 2BYP, 2BYQ, 2BYR, 2BYS).

While the structural biology of coupled transporters was kicked off when the atomic-resolution structures of two members of the major facilitator superfamily were reported in the August 1, 2003 issue of Science, 2005 has been an especially important year in this area. The structure of a Na+/H+ antiporter was released in July (1ZCD), followed closely by the publication by Eric Gouaux and co-workers at Columbia University of the structure of a bacterial glutamate transporter related to those found in the nervous system, albeit at modest resolution (1XFH). Not to be outdone, however, the same group followed this closely by the structure of a very different transporter. In a paper likely to excite pharmaceutical companies, and some neurobiologists and psychoactive drug enthusiasts, worldwide, they revealed a 1.65 Angstrom resolution structure of a prokaryotic leucine transporter having 20-25% homology to the neuronal reuptake transporters for the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) (2A65). All of these transporters have different and previously unknown folds.

Though not of exceptional structural interest per se, the structures of SARS coronavirus protease in complex with designed inhibitors (2AMD, 2AMQ, 2D2D) are significant in that they exemplify the increasingly common and rapid application of structural biology in medicine.

Politics in Retrospect-2005

2006-01-03T16:16:00.000-08:00

As any year, 2005 has brought mixed news for libertarians. Here are a few issues with commentary. As essentially all of these have been discussed by other libertarian blogs or political magazines such as Reason, I will only discuss them briefly here. After each I have written a number of + or - signs to indicate their reflection of the libertarian ideal.

Social Security reform ++

President Bush's proposal to allow young people to replace government-owned social security with private, individual accounts would be an important step forward for personal liberty. It would provide a feasible solution to the increasing gap between the benefits received by retired Americans and the payments into the system made by the younger generation.

Hurricane Katrina +/-

Unlike the other items on this list, this is not a political development in itself and therefore is not by itself material for evaluation from a libertarian perspective. However, the response to it is a political issue. I am a person who opposes government intervention in many areas of human action, and has witnessed its incredibly strong tendency to regulate consenting acts of individuals. Knowing this, it seems particularly ironic that, from the perspective of many residents of New Orleans, govennment disaster relief efforts for Katrina were far below satisfactory. I believe that natural disasters are one of the situations that most justify government intervention, as they are not the fault of any human and have the potential to harm even those who have done as much as is individually possible to protect themselves. If only more resources were devoted to those who sincerely need AND want government action, rather than those who oppose politicians' meddling or whine in hope of being awarded something, the country may well be running a lot more efficiently.

Gonzales v. Raich ---

Stretching the worn-out "commerce clause" of the United States Constitution ever farther past any reasonable boundaries, this ruling on the issue of medical marijuana essentially gives Congress unlimited jurisdiction over activity within the United States. I believe the Controlled Substance Act itself to be unconstitutional, as I favor a strict constructionist interpretation of the limits on federal power, and this case makes more of a joke out of any claim as to the intentions of the founding fathers in limiting centralized government.

Kelo v. City of New London ---

This supreme court case extended the a priori very questionable concept of eminent domain to a new level of absurdity. Instead of appropriating private property for the construction of a road or because it had fallen out of use, Connecticut homeowners were forced to sell their land so that a real estate developer could build a development of much greater value on it. Calling into question the very definition of private property, this ruling goes against the foundations of the libertarian philosophy.

Contraceptive dispensing vs. religious beliefs +/-

The debate over which is stronger, womens' reproductive rights or pharmacists' rights not to violate their religious creeds, has led to one of the latest battles in the war between the left and right. Conservatives stress that pharmacists should not be forced to dispense contraceptives if they believe that the drugs' potential to end the life of an already fertilized egg makes them immoral. Liberals tend to stress the need that women have ready access to the medications. The suggested compromise, that pharmacists need not dispense the pills but must refer customers to one that will, is perhaps the best possible under our current system. However, in the absence of the current system of prescription drug regulation a licensed pharmacist would not be required in the first place, reducing tension at the pharmacy. An interesting dicussion of this was made at The Price of Liberty, particualrly in regard to problems the new law might create with hiring at pharmacies.

We can't pay for freedom?

2005-12-21T00:50:00.000-08:00

There are many arguments given by the major political parties for the existence of so-called consensual crimes, such as drug use and not wearing a seatbelt, among others. Some of them, in my opinion, merit at least some consideration, such as the fact that these “crimes” will create situations that motivate people to commit violent offenses, and there will be insufficient police resources to prosecute these . One argument that I almost immediately dismiss as holding no weight is the one that it is a legitimate purpose of government to use the force of law to prevent people from doing harm to themselves. A typical discussion with a non-libertarian (stylized from my own discussions with some of them) goes like this:

Lib: People should have the right to do whatever they want as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. Behavior that might harm only the person who engages in it therefore cannot be legitimately prohibited by law.

NL: However, if people make mistakes and get into problems (i.e. overdose on drugs, get injured in an accident because they didn’t use a seatbelt, etc.), then it costs the taxpayers money to provide medical treatment (or another form of help) to these people. This is an unfair burden on the rest of society.

Lib: If it gets to the point where many people engage in an activity that creates problems for them, and they don’t have the money to pay for help, and it becomes a burden on the taxpayers, then some people will have to be denied the help that they need. The limited amount of free medical (or other) services is due a fundamental limitation of resources that no political philosophy, including a libertarian one, can solve. This does not mean that libertarians find this shortage to be a good thing, only that they don’t consider it grounds for government prohibition.

NL: Why do you oppose that free medical treatment be given to people injured in accidents when they were careless? Don’t you believe in giving people a second chance? The technology to provide such help is available, so it makes sense to use it if it means someone’s life is saved.

Lib: But you just said that giving such help to everyone who needs it and can’t pay for it would be an unreasonable burden on society. I have nothing against giving people a second chance. However, don’t you see how your reasoning is kind of contradictory? You say that a risky activity should be prohibited because someone who injures him/herself will need help from society, and people are not willing to pay enough in taxes to match the demand for such services in the case that the activity were legal and widespread. When asked why people would need to pay for those services, you say that they are much easier than letting people die.

I immediately see something strange about this reasoning, but listening to politicians clearly indicates that many do not, or act as if they do not. Most often, they keep such discussion covered up by the use of buzzwords such as “public health” and “providing for the good of the people.” In doing so, they take phrases such as “public health” (which when referring to illnesses like diabetes and cancer is an overwhelmingly positive thing) and turn them into political excuses for restrictive, paternalistic policies.

A questionable form of sex selection

2005-12-21T00:44:00.000-08:00

I found this post on Blogging Baby.com yesterday following a link from the Netscape home page. It claims that parents can increase their chances of giving birth to a boy if one of them enters a profession such as engineering:

"Hoping for a boy? You or your spouse could improve your odds by switching to a ‘masculine’ profession such as engineering, mathematics, or another ‘systemizer’ line of work. According to calculations by a London School of Economics professor, the ratio of boys born to such ‘systemiser’ jobs is 140 to 100 girls, compared to 105 to 100 in the general population and 100 to 135 in ‘feminine’ jobs, like nursing."

The word "systemizer" as used here is undoubtedly a reference to the work of the professor of developmental psychopathology Simon Baron-Cohen. It refers to a type of cognition that concerns the behavior of systems of inanimate objects rather than the manner in which people act or interact, which he calls "empathizing" (note that this usage resembles more what has been popularized as "emotional intelligence" than the more specific everyday meaning of understanding someone's pain or sadness). One of his principal theories is that, individual differences aside, male brains are more adapted to systemizing-type reasoning than female brains, and that autistic brains are an extreme form of this. As someone who is interested in cognitive sex differences, and fits the systemizer type very well, I find his hypotheses quite interesting. However, the author of the post on Blogging Baby seems to be quite ignorant of the biology behind this theory. It is unclear what the factor is that causes engineers and mathematicians to have more sons, and I can't find the original survey results, so I don't know if the father's and mother's professions correlate equally with the child sex ratio, or one substantially more than the other. However, the fact that autism has a large sex difference in prevalence, according to Baron-Cohen, is due to an influence of sex on early brain development, producing a bias toward a systemizer phenotype. It seems from the current results that this may also bias the development of the male reproductive system, increasing the proportion of sperm with a Y chromosome. Also, while "systemizers" are found in large numbers in careers such as engineering, the term "systemizer" does not refer to a set of professions but a pattern of performance on a set of standard psychological tests. Simply taking up a job with Microsoft or Intel doesn't qualify. Therefore, the Lamarckian line of reasoning presented in the above paragraph is amusingly farfetched. It suggests that someone whose brain had not developed to display a strong systemizing bent, and therefore already shown a tendency toward engineering-type fields, would, by taking up a job in a high-tech field, reverse the biological process that links brain function and sex ratio to begin with.

The Summers reaction is out of proportion

2005-11-30T11:52:00.000-08:00

I know this is kind of old news, but as I just started my blog a few weeks ago I am only getting around to posting it now.

The irreparable wrong committed by Harvard president Larry Summers, in the eyes of many, is to claim that scientific studies had pointed to cognitive differences between men and women, and that this could at least partly explain the lack of women scientists, without backing up the link with solid evidence. The fact is that studies have shown sex differences in brain function in a range of tasks (some favoring men, and some favoring women). In a number of cases, differences in the same direction as in humans have been demonstrated in rats, arguing against claims of cultural prejudice as a source of the disparity. For instance, just recently, ratios of 6.5:1 and 1:10 were found for men relative to women in the volumes of gray and white matter, respectively, involved in general intelligence (Neuroimage. 2005 Mar;25(1):320-7, Link to abstract). How this affects intellectual ability is uncertain, though one co-author comments that these differences agree well with previously demonstrated differences in cognition between the sexes
(see the Gene Expression post).

From the point of government and public policy, the question should not be whether men and women are different, how different they are, or whether any differences are good or bad, but whether men and women have the freedom to make their own life choices. If both men and women can be doctors, lawyers, engineers, or even stay at home parents, if they are so inclined, it doesn’t matter if some men dislike women being lawyers, or some women dislike men being teachers, or whatever. There is no need for men and women who praise separate gender roles to be “converted,” for boys to be sent to “sensitivity training” and girls to “empowerment” programs, or for those who suggest a biological basis for sex differences to be labeled evil. Similarly, there is no need for successful career women who enjoy their work to be forced back into the kitchen, or for those who believe men and women are essentially the same intellectually to be convinced otherwise.

I’m not saying that research into biological sex differences isn’t worthwhile—it is just as interesting and meaningful from a purely scientific viewpoint to study how the presence of an X or Y chromosome affects brain function as to investigate how we remember words, how the immune system recognizes pathogens, or why stars are distributed throughout our galaxy the way they are. It’s just that we have people who think that if studies show women inherently tend to be less proficient at or interested in math, that means that women should be rejected from science and engineering programs without regard to individual merit, or conversely that if studies fail to show large cognitive differences that the representation of men and women in all walks of life should be equal and any desire for men and women to be different reflects oppression.

The fact that comments like Summers’s are so intensely politicized is seen in many guises in modern cultural dialogue, surrounding many different groups. It doesn’t need a scientific study to show that many people of all genders, races, and nationalities have a strong tendency to turn to government programs and committees when someone else has an opinion about them that they don’t like, or they feel their group is underachieving in some area of life.

Do we really need to have the political climate dominated by those who whine about oppression of women and vilify anyone who questions their perception, and on the other side by those like feminist critic Christina Hoff Sommers who claim that we need to address the current “war on boys?” Can’t we just let everyone, whether male or female, do what comes most naturally to himself or herself with his or her own unique abilities, and choose to socialize with, work with, and date whomever they want? In that case, ultraconservatives will be forced to accept women who occupy high executive positions in companies, have abortions, and choose not to get married. On the other hand, female doctors will have to accept that some men consider them less feminine for their choice of profession, or even doubt their ability to succeed.

Is intelligent design science?

2005-11-21T15:28:00.000-08:00

As the Kansas school board drama unfolds, and as the discussion has been heating up over at Gene Expression, I thought I'd say a few words about the role of intelligent design in education. I am personally an atheist/agnostic, though I have no objection to religion per se (unless its beliefs are forced on me by way of the law). Most importantly, I think it makes sense to seriously consider what the drive to push ID into the science curriculum says about the status of science and religion in our culture.

Religions are also known as "faiths" for a reason-they all at some point require that followers accept certain tenets as truth without any proof of their validity except for ancient texts of uncertain origin. Intelligent design is one of them. Even more important than the fact that ID is not observable by scientific experiment is the fact that it is a worthless predictive tool. There are no ID-based methods to, for instance, determine what role a gene may play in the development of a particular disease. However, biologists routinely use evolution-based methods to extrapolate genetic information from other species to humans, as well as between genes within a species. Teaching intelligent design in a biology class does nothing to prepare students for future research, it only tells a story that some people would like to believe. It would seem that ID activists should try to pass their theory off as such as story. However, the fact that they try to pass it off as science suggests that they don't understand or don't care why science is taught in the first place-it allows the prediction and explanation of new phenomena-and by that standard ID does not belong in a science curriculum. However, the ID activists are eager to capitalize on the great (and technologically useful) achievements of science to elevate the status of their teachings.

An introduction

2005-11-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

Since this is the first post on this blog (and my first blog post overall), I might as well say a bit abvout what I plan on posting. The format and subject matter may change a little as I get into it, but generally I will focus on a fer topics. These will particularly be as follows.
1) political/legislative issues/news that I wish to present a libertarian angle on
2) cases of political correctness in the news
3) scientific news
4) personal/UC Berkeley happenings
These will most likely overlap considerably, though I will try to make the post titles informative so readers who are mainly looking for one type of news can skim over the rest. By the way, if anything I say on here offends you (if you are an easily offended person this will probably happen at some point), remember that one of my dearest values is free speech, and you have the right to leave this site at any time. That said, I will try to avoid personal, "ad hominem" attacks as much as possible. As far as the frequency of posting, it will vary depending on how much time I have and how many new ideas I have. The first bunch of posts will include some old news, until I get up to date on my commentary.