Showing posts with label Evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Evolution. Show all posts

Sunday, December 11, 2022

Epigenetics: A Graphic Guide by Cath Ennis and Oliver Pugh, Book 44 of 2022


 I first read about epigenetics in Nature magazine almost 20 years ago. The feature article summarized the current state at the time of research into what happens around genes and how it affects our lives--and future generations.  

This fall I have been reading Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer. The two books work well together.  Zimmer shows the reader how difficult it is to draw a line between living and not-living.  

In Epigenetics: A Graphic Guide Cath Ennis and Oliver Pugh demonstrate that the dividing line between the influence of our genes and our environment is as blurry as defining life.  A human genome lives at the center of all our cells. If it were stretched straight it would be a meter long. So those millions of genes that make up our genome are folded thousands and thousands of times. 

All of this folding and the mechanisms protiens use to copy genetic instructions from folded genes mean that the shape of the genome and the cell it is in influence our lives.  Folded genes can be activated and inactivated by attaching and detaching small methyl molecules. This methylation process is part of life, but can go wrong.  Epigenetics studies who these processes outside the genome influence our lives.  

I was left with more questions than answers, but glad to know a little bit more about how deeply complex life is.  

First 43 Books of 2022:

Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough


The Life of the Mind
 by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen



Thursday, December 8, 2022

Life's Edge:The Search for What it Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer, Book 43 of 2022

 


The book for this semester at the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College is Life's Edge: The Search for What it Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer.

Zimmer has been writing about science since the 1990s for the New York Times, Discovery, and National Geographic. He is the author of several books, Life's Edge is the latest.  

Every chapter of the book brings up another question about what it means to be alive, what is life, and what is not life.  

We are intro­duced to a mena­gerie that perches in the gray area bet­ween alive and not-alive: creatures like tardi­grades and nema­todes that can re­emerge from crypto­biosis with the touch of water. 

Zimmer describes pythons whose basal meta­bolic rates can grind almost to a halt, slime molds that display a brain­less kind of mem­ory and problem-solving abil­ity, and a girl named Jahi McMath, who was dec­lared brain-dead yet had a beat­ing heart and con­tinued to grow before dy­ing (again) five years later. 

COVID makes an ap­pear­ance. A book on the def­ini­tion of liv­ing would not be com­plete with­out a look at viruses. Zimmer intro­duces to var­ious def­ini­tions of life, coming from many sources from sci­entists to phil­osoph­ers. From them he derives five special hall­marks of life: meta­bolism, infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing, homeo­stasis, re­pro­duc­tion, and evol­ution. 

The sheer diver­sity with­in these traits is clear in his beautiful writing, as is the elu­sive­ and com­plex nature of life. As Zimmer says, biol­ogy is a "sci­ence in which the most impor­tant object [life] has no defin­ition." 

Wonders abound through the book. Zimmer's description human reproduction and when life begins shows the kind of complexity that makes absolute beliefs on where life begins look hopelessly ludicrous. 

If you are interested in biology, read the book. It's fantastic. 

First 42 Books of 2022:

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough


The Life of the Mind
 by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen



Sunday, September 4, 2022

Evolution Has No Direction--Advanced Cultures Can Sink into Tribalism


In popular culture evolution has a direction, but in reality
evolution is simply adaptation to environment.   

In a session of the weekly book group discussing "The Human Condition" by Hannah Arendt, evolution came up as one aspect of modern science and how science changed the way we humans see the world and changed the world itself.

The comment reminded me about discussions in the Evolution Round Table that evolution does not have a direction. There is no inevitable progression from bacteria to Bruce Lee. Sometimes species that struggled from the water to the land return to the water.  

Evolution occurs when a species in a particular environment endures stress, adapts and passes the adaptation to the following generations. Evolution is most evident when a population is separated into two or more groups and put in different environments with little or no contact.  Over time the members of these groups will become unlike each other, possibly even becoming different species, no longer able to mate.  

Cultures as well as species evolve.  Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Afghanistan and many other countries in the middle east were somewhat free and had intellectual culture at some point in the 20th Century.  In the current century they are all under some form of predatory theocracy which is tyranny with a god label.  

Germany was by some measures the most civilized country in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century.  Then it was the most vile totalitarian autocracy in history. Now it is very civilized again.  

Under tyranny, thinking is discouraged. In its later stages, intellectuals are murdered. A culture that is anti-intellectual brings the corrupt and craven to the centers of power.  Art and science die when the corruption is in control.

People who have risen to the challenge of self government can sink back into tribalism.  Their culture evolved away from the energy required for civilization and sank back into tribalism.  

Recently I read Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut.  He writes that the world ended in 1986 because our brains were (are) too being. The survivors evolved into fish--with small brains. 



Wednesday, April 13, 2022

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters, Book 12 of 2022


Each semester, I read a book on evolution with the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. Until two years ago, the group met Mondays at noon in one of the college houses.  Since March of 2020, like so much of the world, we meet on Zoom. 

The group is mostly retired scientists, but there are also people like me who worked in science museums, libraries and even a few artists and business people.  The group has existed since the 90s. Stephen Jay Gould once visited the campus for a talk and sat in with the group.  Over the years we have read Gould, Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin, and many of the luminaries of evolution. Most of the books focus on biology. Some, like Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, are sweeping histories.  

The current book, A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters, is a sweeping history focused on geology. Andrew H. Knoll writes with the wit and brilliance his title promises.  His outline is by subject, rather than chronology, but flows from the earth's beginnings to our current state.

The chapters:

  1. Chemical Earth
  2. Physical Earth
  3. Biological Earth
  4. Oxygen Earth
  5. Animal Earth
  6. Green Earth
  7. Catastrophic Earth
  8. Human Earth

Each chapter presents the development of earth in a different frame, but the narrative tracks the development of earth from the beginning to the present.  Chemical earth explains some basic chemistry and how chemistry determined the history of the planet we live on.  Knoll focuses on zircons and how they help to show the age of the earth and details of earth's history.  Zircons bond with uranium which allows radiation dating. Knoll ends the chapter:

The remarkable drama of Earth's birth--accretion from ancient star stuff, global melting and differentiation that shaped our planet's interior, the formation of oceans and atmosphere--played out on a timescale of 100 million years or less. By 4.4 billion years ago, Earth had recognizably become a rocky planet bathed by water beneath a veneer of air. ... Earth was swaddled by a thick atmosphere, but it was air without oxygen; human time travelers wouldn't last long on primitive Earth. The world we know of large continents, breathable air--and life--was yet to come.

With each succeeding chapter, the story moves forward through the past four billion years in smaller increments until the final chapter, the brief period that the earth has been home to us humans.   

In the chapter "Biological Earth" Knoll tells us how life developed with an emphasis on the oldest evidence of life.  There are traces of single-cell organisms from more than three billion years ago.   As I read of these shadows of life captured in rock, I thought of the many science deniers who are part of my life through family and the Army and other acquaintances.  

Earlier this year, I spoke with a family member who believes God sprinkled dinosaur bones around to make the earth look older, but really, the earth is just six thousand years old.  He knows no science, did not go to college, but believes he is smarter than every scientist since Isaac Newton. (Creationists like Newton.)

The Greeks said philosophy begins with θαυμαζειν, with Wonder.  Until the 19th century, what we call science was called Natural Philosophy.  Wonder is at the center of innovation in science. I wish I could feel the wonder Charles Darwin felt on Galapagos; the wonder I heard Richard Smalley describe when he said he could feel the 60-carbon atom Buckminsterfullene "snap" into spherical existence; the wonder Einstein must have felt when he knew he could prove Special Relativity. 

There is no wonder in science denial, none of the speechless state in awe of the beauty and majesty and surprise of the reality of nature, from Quarks to Quasars.  

Each year, I experience a little more of that wonder, reading books written by those who made the discoveries that more deeply and beautifully describe the depth and beauty of the natural world and cosmos.  

But I am left to wonder how anyone could turn their back on the wonder of life as it is and trade it for the dull, gray certainty of untested belief.  


First eleven books of 2022:

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough


The Life of the Mind
 by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen


Saturday, June 29, 2019

Evolution: Israelis and American Jews Grow Apart

in the Sinai during the Six-Day War in 1967

I love Evolution. Not only is it one of the most brilliant theories in the history of science, fundamentalists of every kind just hate it and Charles Darwin is not Jewish, not even a little!!

As a Jew, I have heard the sub-text of criticism of science all my life. Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, brilliant Jews without number have been disparaged for their work by people who hate Jews. But the man fundamentalists hate the most is as thoroughly English as Windsor Castle and the family that lives there.

Darwin, the reclusive English gentleman, developed a theory of life so sweeping that critics, especially religious conservatives, are still trashing his theory 150+ years later: a theory that has proven as tough and durable and resistant to flame as cast iron frying pans. 

Most of all, I am delighted at examples of Evolution working right in front of our eyes. The way to see Evolution work is to take a population of any living thing, separate it into two or more parts as far away from each other as possible, a water barrier is especially good, and watch the two populations change.

Darwin famously illustrated his theory with Galapagos finches.  Gil Hoffman, politics reporter at the Jerusalem Post, showed me how evolution occurred with Jews living in Eastern Europe, primarily Poland and Russia and nearby countries, for hundreds of years before the 20th Century, when everything changed.

At the end of the 19th Century, that population began to divide into two parts.  Zionists left to restore Israel as a nation. Others, like my own grandparents, left for America. 

You could say there were three groups: those who left for America, those who left for the land that would become Israel, and those who stayed.  In 1939, those who stayed were the largest group. By 1945, millions were slaughtered and many survivors fled Europe for the Middle East or North America.  Beginning in the 1970s, more than a million Russian Jews would flee to Israel and America, continuing the trend. 

But the early Zionists and my grandparents in America were the populations that separated and evolved.

Jews who fled for America largely assimilated. The tailors and shopkeepers and laborers had children who became doctors, lawyers and the writers who shaped American literature, Broadway and Hollywood.  They were American success stories. The Zionists became pioneers, making the desert green, fighting for survival, eventually gaining independence and becoming one of the fiercest Armies in the world. 

One culture produces Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon. The other gives the world Jerry Seinfeld and Philip Roth.  All four brilliant in their own way, but no doubt who you would call if you were under attack. 

American and Israeli Jews speak a different language, eat different food, celebrate the same religious festivals in different ways and in this century are increasingly separate on politics. 

Gil Hoffman travels regularly between Israel and America.  He spoke at my Synagogue this year.  He worries about the increasing divide between Israel and American Jews.  He did an excellent episode on the subject on his podcast “Inside IsraelToday” on the Land of Israel Network.

In America, three of four Jews identify as Liberal and/or Democrat and in the same numbers, loathe President Trump.  Israel, in sharp contrast, is one of just three countries in the world that have a positive opinion of Trump: nearly 70% of Israelis have a favorable view of Trump.  The other two countries positive about Trump are the Philippines and Nigeria. Apart form those three nations, the 192 member countries of the United Nations have a negative opinion of America’s chief executive, including America.

As more anti-Semitic incidents happen in America, the gulf between the two communities continues to grow.  Over the last century, American Jews have become much more American: rich, largely insulated from the virulent anti-Semitism of the rest of the world, and driven by personal ambition.

Trump made the alt-right and white supremacists his base, infamously saying there were “fine people on both sides” at an event with one side waving Nazi flags and chanting “Blood and Soil.” Anti-Semitism in America increased rapidly as Trump ran and won his racism-centered campaign.

In Israeli society, universal conscription means the path to power and influence is through the Army.  Israel is under constant threat and defines itself by its readiness to fight with enemies on every side. For Israel, surrounded by enemies, Trump is an ally who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and pulled out of the Iran treaty that was so unpopular in Israel.  

The political differences between American and Israeli Jews are likely to get worse no matter what the future holds for the two countries.

When groups split and grow apart, the usual trajectory is to grow further apart.  When Gil Hoffman speaks on this topic, he hopes to be a small part of bringing the two groups closer together, even as he reports the news that shows Jews separated by six thousand miles in distance are separating even further in politics and practice. 

I am going to try to live part of my life on both sides of the divide. I am planning to spend the first three months of 2020 traveling in Israel.  For Jews, anti-Semitism is a question of if, not when. Israel is a place of refuge for all Jews everywhere. So I want to know and experience more of the Land of Israel.  We’ll see how my thinking evolves.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Field Guide to Flying Death: Going Fu#king Ballistic

Today on the bicycle ride, one of the faster riders I know was describing an even faster rider and how he won a race.  "He was f#cking ballistic," my friend said.

Actually he was not ballistic.  He was the opposite.  The picture below is a two Hellfire missiles under power launched by a Predator drone.  The rocket fuel is burning.




The next picture (below) is of a missile in its ballistic trajectory:  after the main rocket motor has fully burned.  Guidance motors still operate, but the missile is not under power, it is slowing down although it is traveling very fast.  From the time the main motor fully burns, the speed of the rocket is slowing and is determined by momentum, gravity, and wind resistance--by the laws of physics. It is flying in a "ballistic" path.
Ballistic means unpowered.  A bullet is ballistic AFTER it leaves the gun.

A missile is ballistic when it's flying toward its target after all the propellant has burned.  It is coasting.

My friend was describing quite the opposite.  The fast rider was under power and had more power than any other rider in the race.  If he were actually "ballistic" he would be coasting.

In terms of missiles, a ballistic missile is one that is launched then travels to by coasting at speed over 4,000 mph. It is no longer under power. It's course is corrected by guidance systems.

A car can't be described as ballistic since it is in contact with the ground. It's path is determined by that contact.  But if someone took a car trip that was like a missile flight, the car would accelerate to say 500 mph and then coast trip it arrived.  That trip would require very level, very straight roads. Both wind resistance and rolling resistance would limit the distance, but it would be possible. The steering wheel would be the guidance system.

Science words, for reasons I don't understand, can enter Pop culture with meanings opposite their scientific meaning.

The most well-known opposite word is Theory.  In science, a theory is the BEST possible summary description of a body of research.  So the Theory of Universal Gravitation describes the motion of all objects including missiles, both under power and in ballistic flight.  

But in Pop Culture, "My Theory" describes nothing more than an opinion with no necessary connection to fact or reality.  My Theory could cover things like believing fluoride is a communist plot or that Stanley Kubrik faked the moon landing.




Exhibit of Contemporary Art from Ukraine and Talk by Vladislav Davidzon at Abington Arts

I went to "Affirmation of Life: Art in Today's Ukraine" at Abington Arts in Jenkintown, PA. The exhibit is on display through...