Thirty-two years ago, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, one of the landmark books of the 20th Century. In it, he set forth the "gene’s-eye" view of life. (See "The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On" on Edge).
"Individuals are not stable things," he wrote, "they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose, we are cast aside. But genes are the denizens of geological time: genes are forever."
"Notions like Selfish Genes, memes, and extended phenotypes are powerful and exciting," notes computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis. "They make me think differently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time arguing against people who have over interpreted these ideas. They’re too easily misunderstood as explaining more than they do. So you see, this Dawkins is a dangerous guy. Like Marx. Or Darwin."
Part of Dawkins’ danger is his emphasis on models derived from cybernetics and information theory, and that such models, when applied to our ideas of life, and in particular, human life, strike some otherwise intelligent people numb and dumb with fear and terror.
According to psychologist Steven Pinker, "Dawkins’s emphasis on the ethereal commodity called "information" in an age of biology dominated by the concrete molecular mechanisms is another courageous stance. There is no contradiction, of course, between a system being understood in terms of its information content and it being understood in terms of its material substrate. But when it comes down to the deepest understanding of what life is, how it works, and what forms it is likely to take elsewhere in the universe, Dawkins implies that it is abstract conceptions of information, computation, and feedback, and not nucleic acids, sugars, lipids, and proteins, that will lie at the root of the explanation."
Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, is Charles Simonyi Professor For the Understanding of Science, Oxford University. His most recent book is the international bestseller, The God Delusion. (SeeRichard Dawkins’s Edge Bio page)
Craig Venter, who decoded the human genome, is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. "I have spent", he says, "the last fifteen years of his career doing, digitizing biology. That’s what DNA sequencing has been about. I view biology as an analog world that DNA sequencing has taking into the digital world."
According to Venter (in his recent BBC Dimbleby Lecture "A DNA-Driven World"), "the future of life depends not only in our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence.
"To some this may be troubling, but part of the problem we face with scientific advancement, is the fear of the unknown — fear that often leads to rejection…Science is a topic which can cause people to turn off their brains".At the end of June, Venter announced the results of his lab’s work on genome transplantation methods that allows for the transformation of one type of bacteria into another, dictated by the transplanted chromosome. In other words, one species becomes another.
In talking to Edge about the research, Venter noted the following:
Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn’t matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chromosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chromosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn’t know if it would work or not. Now we do. This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It’s not a question of ‘if’, or ‘how’, but ‘when’, and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.
Venter is Director, The J. Craig Venter Institute, and the author of the recently published autobiography, A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life
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Craig Venter wants to email life (Craig Venter will Lebewesen e-mailen)
By Christian Stöcker
A pioneer in the field of genetics can envision a fantastic future in which genetic codes are sent by email and then reassembled as living beings at the other end. Or so Craig Venter forecast at an Internet conference in Munich. He also hopes to solve the problem of global warming—with designer microbes. …
CRAIG VENTER: LIFE VIA EMAIL
Start Slide Show: Click on photo (6 photos)
It is a dense network. At the annual gathering of the digital elite, organized by Burda Media in Munich, cell phone networks have barely enough capacity. WLAN and UMTS are groaning under their full load, as everyone calls, surfs the Internet, types—everywhere you look people have their Smartphones and their laptops, and the crowds of Blackberry devotees now also have an iPhone handy.
The event is called DLD. Previously this stood for the "Digital Lifestyle Day," but it is now "Digital Life, Design." The attendees are first-rate—in part because the event is so opportune: many of the international business stars to whom the publisher pays tribute in Munich will subsequently travel on to Davos for the World Economic Forum. And so this year we are running into people like Richard Dawkins and Marissa Mayer of Google in the hallways. And Jason Calacanis, who invented the concept of blogging, chatted with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales—oh yeah, and even Naomi Campbell will make an appearance today.
Bio-revolutionaries amidst technology fans
The excitement is palpable, latching on to topics like the new markets in India and China, social networks, and above all the mobile network. Although it possible that this last issue seems especially urgent because everyone is constantly trying to get on the Internet, and failing.
Amidst all the enthusiasm for technology, one conversation had more explosive potential than the talking points of all the old and new digital entrepreneurs put together. Only hardly anybody noticed. DLD is always so crowded that you have to stand for the interesting events. But when genetics entrepreneur Craig Venter and genetics revolutionary Richard Dawkins, who took on the entire religious Right with his antireligious tome The Selfish Gene, got up on stage yesterday to talk about a "gene-centric world view," noticeably fewer people were standing than is often the case. And this even though their talk contained more revolutionary statements and wild forecasts by far than the other presentations looking toward future.
Venter, who last made headlines when he published his personal genome in full on the Internet, made brazen claims, but nobody reacted. Venter insisted that climate change represents a much greater risk to humanity than genetic engineering, which could actually help fight it. For example, with genetically manipulated microbes capable of absorbing CO2: "We can change the environment through genetic engineering." John Brockman, who is the literary agent of both Dawkins and Venter, had the role of moderator, but let Dawkins take over. When Venter began to speak of specific genetically engineered correctives for the environment, however, he abruptly woke up. Somebody once explained to him that when you talk about these subjects in Germany, "it causes an uproar—but everyone appears so calm!" And he is right.
"Life is becoming technology"
The momentum was building and, always one to provoke, Venter was on the ball. Dawkins’ was inevitably the role of Devil’s advocate and he asked whether Venter considers that all life is technology. "Life is machinery," he answered, "which as we learn how to manipulate it, becomes a technology." Dawkins, who wore shirt sleaves and an eccentric white and gray tie, and who came across a bit like a friendly math teacher, suddenly found himself delivering a tentative warning: the unchecked intermingling of gene pools could have unforeseen consequences. He drew a parallel to the unforeseen devastation that introducing new microbes, plants, or animal species can cause to ecosystems.
Dawkins knows what he is talking about—in the ’70s he acheived fame with his book entitled The Selfish Gene. At the start of his talk, he declared that "genes are information." From this Venter transitioned into the depiction of a future in which genetic information could be sent over email for the receiver to reassemble as a living being: "We can already reconstruct a chromosome in the laboratory." Last October, the Guardian already reported that Venter would soon be the first to create an entirely artificial life form—something he is accomplishing even as he speaks of a future in which genes are software and humans, at their discretion, can produce life that conforms to their wishes. The question of what happens when genes, which behave all too selfishly in Dawkins’ own portrayal of them, breed freely did not come up.
At the same time as this staggering conversation took place on the podium, between a radical genetic engineer and a mastermind in the science of genetics, who evoked a future with artificially designed life and DNA-printers that is already emerging from their current scientific revolution, directly next door a group of Web Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists were engaged in a heated discussion about social networks and earning opportunities. But next to the two dignified grey haired figures onstage, they suddenly seemed a little colorless—almost even a little outdated.
Translated by Karla Taylor
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THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE"
Daniel C. Dennett
The Charles Simonyi Lecture, Oxford University, Feb 17, 1999
Cultures evolve. In one sense, this is a truism; in other senses, it asserts one or another controversial, speculative, unconfirmed theory of culture. Consider a cultural inventory of some culture at some time — say 1900AD. It should include all the languages, practices, ceremonies, edifices, methods, tools, myths, music, art, and so forth, that compose that culture. Over time, that inventory changes. Today, a hundred years later, some items will have disappeared, some multiplied, some merged, some changed, and many new elements will appear for the first time. A verbatim record of this changing inventory through history would not be science; it would be a data base. That is the truism: cultures evolve over time. Everybody agrees about that. Now let’s turn to the controversial question: how are we to explain the patterns to be found in that data base? Are there any good theories or models of cultural evolution
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George Lakoff’s statement that "You cannot think anything without using the neural system of your brain" will be completely obvious to any neuroscientist. What is more difficult is to find clear evidence that the structure of our brains imposes a sharp limit on the patterns of our thoughts. I very much like the idea that much of mathematics is based on metaphors between space, time, number, sets, games, etc. But the metaphor idea remains underspecified. Is the brain so flexible that almost any metaphor is possible? In this case, the presumed limits are essentially inexistent, and one might as well be a functionalist or a dualist.
Like Lakoff, I am convinced that cognitive studies of mathematics will ultimately provide beautiful examples of the limits that our brains impose on our thoughts. As I tried to show in The Number Sense, we have very strong intuitions about small numbers and magnitudes, which are provided to us by a specific cerebral network with a long evolutionary history. But one could probably write another book describing the limits on our mathematical intuitions. Take topology, for instance. At home, I have a small collection of extremely simple topological brainteasers. Some of them (essentially made from a metal ring and a piece of string) are strikingly counter-intuitive ‹ our first reaction is that it is simply impossible to remove the ring, but of course it can be done in a few moves. Thus, our sense of topology is extremely poor. Yet it’s easy enough to imagine a different species that would have evolved a cerebral area for "topo-sense", and for which all of my brain-teasers would be trivial.
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Dawkins points out that we can think of cultural items, memes, as parasites, too. Actually, they are more like a simple virus than a worm. Memes are supposed to be analogous to genes, the replicating entities of the cultural media, but they also have vehicles, or phenotypes; they are like not-so-naked genes. They are like viruses (Dawkins, 1993). Basically, a virus is just a string of nucleic acid with attitude — and a protein overcoat. A viroid is an even more naked gene. And similarly, a meme is an information-packet with attitude — with some phenotypic clothing that has differential effects in the world that thereby influence its chances of getting replicated. (What is a meme made of? It is made of information, which can be carried in any physical medium. More on this later.)
And in the domain of memes, the ultimate beneficiary, the beneficiary in terms of which the final cost-benefit calculations must apply is: the meme itself, not its carriers. This is not to be heard as a bold empirical claim, ruling out (for instance) the role of individual human agents in devising, appreciating and securing the spread and prolongation of cultural items. As I have already noted, the traditional perspective on cultural evolution handsomely explains many of the patterns to be observed. My proposal is rather that we adopt a perspective or point of view from which a wide variety of different empirical claims can be compared, including the traditional claims, and the evidence for them considered in a neutral setting, a setting that does not prejudge these hot-button questions.
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COOL SUPERNOVA
ENHANCE PRODN OF MINI BLACK HOLES
EXPLAIN DISAPPEARENCE OF ANTI-MATTER SOON AFTER BIG BANG
INCR OR DECR HIGGS BOSONS
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