Multicellular yeast and aliens

Tyler Cowen sees bad news in an experiment that showed it's not that hard for yeast to develop from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Cowen:

It suggests that “the filter” lies ahead of us rather than behind us.  The difficulties of producing multi-cellular organisms have been one of the main responses to the Fermi Paradox (“where are they?”).  If it’s not so hard after all, there must be some other obstacle to lots of self-reproducing von Neumann probes.

Maybe, but among the many possible answers to the "where are they" question are ones that put "the filter behind us": that single-cell life is extremely hard to get started in the first place, or that intelligence might not necessarily follow multicellularity. Of course, there's also the possibility that civilizations blow themselves up -- or let their government-funded health plans run amok.

UPDATE: The Atlantic has a fascinating interview with philosopher-of-physics Tim Maudlin that happens to veer into this topic, and Maudlin says something along the lines of what I said, albeit in a considerably smarter way:

I will make one comment about these kinds of arguments which seems to me to somehow have eluded everyone. When people make these probabilistic equations, like the Drake Equation, which you're familiar with -- they introduce variables for the frequency of earth-like planets, for the evolution of life on those planets, and so on. The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don't know.

Evolving free will

Here's some interesting back-and-forth on the age-old question of free will. Biologist Jerry Coyne argues we don't have it. Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci responds that Coyne's dismissiveness is premature and unscientific. Coyne then defends his view on various points, but more or less shrugs off a key point of Pigliucci's. Here's Pigliucci:

[W]hy do we have such a pervasive “illusion” to begin with? Apparently, he [Coyne] knew this was coming, and answered thus in the USA Today article: “where do these illusions of both will and ‘free’ will come from? We’re not sure. I suspect that they’re the products of natural selection, perhaps because our ancestors wouldn’t thrive in small, harmonious groups — the conditions under which we evolved — if they didn’t feel responsible for their actions.”

As far as I can tell there is no empirical evidence whatsoever to support such speculation. To the contrary, we know of plenty of social animal species that seem to thrive very well indeed without requiring the illusion of free will to keep them in line. Certainly social insects don’t need to be fooled that way, and it is hard to imagine even species of social mammals, including most primates, needing to engage in deliberate reasoning before deciding how to behave toward fellow group members.

 Coyne's response:

Note that I said, “We’re not sure.” I really have no idea why we have the illusion of agency, and was just speculating that it may be an adaptation.  But it might not be—it could be an epiphenomenon of having complex brains.  By the way, our brains are far more complex than those of social insects, and we process many more inputs than those of, say, ants. A big ant could not function as a human being.  And we have no idea whether animals engage in deliberate reasoning, though this morning’s kitteh post suggest that cats can, and I certainly think that primates can.

But it doesn’t matter.  I have no idea about why we have the illusion of free agency, nor am I deeply invested in an evolutionary, much less an adaptive, answer.

Me: Given that Coyne's blog is titled "Why Evolution Is True" (and I believe it is true), it is notable to me that he can't mount more of a defense of his natural-selection-did-it speculation about the supposed illusion of free will. It's not just that "we're not sure," it's really that the logic of evolution seems to point in a very different direction. Wouldn't natural selection weed out those creatures that devote so much brainpower to maintaining an illusion? Wouldn't it give preference to the hominids that don't think they have free will and don't care? I'm not the first to ask such questions (philosopher John Searle has asked them for years), nor am I the first to suspect that maybe some kind of free will involving genuine indeterminism arose because it carries a survival advantage (such as by allowing an organism to act in ways that predators can't predict). Of course, lest anyone point out I'm speculating, I have to admit: we're not sure.

Scrubbing carbon

Recommended reading: "Why not scrub CO2 from the sky?" by John Rennie, whom I know from freelancing at Scientific American when he was editor in chief there. Taking proactive measures to engineer the planet, such as getting rid of some of the carbon that's been emitted, is an issue that is on a distant horizon today but is going to cause massive political turmoil and realignments in time. The fear of moral hazard -- that people will see such potential solutions as a license to emit -- constrains advocacy of such engineering at present, as do concerns about the unanticipated consequences (and recognition of the limits of what engineering can do, eg, how do you de-acidify the ocean?). Left-leaning science advocates such as Rennie are careful to bracket ideas about planetary engineering with cautions that it can't be a substitute for reducing emissions. I can imagine various environmentalists never warming up to such engineering, and various conservatives now in denial about the problem coming around to the idea that we have to do something as long as it's not about cutting emissions.

UPDATE: Also of interest: "Climate Proposal Puts Practicality Ahead of Sacrifice."

Creatively therapeutic

Dan Summer, periodic and eclectic co-blogger on this blog (see here and here, for instance), is a creative arts therapist with wide-ranging expertise in helping children and adults. His new website The Art of Playing explains his involvement in this innovative field.

Huntsman's point

Over at the Fiscal Times, Edward Morrissey expresses some puzzlement as to the point of Jon Huntsman's campaign. Morrissey correctly notes that Huntsman has a pretty conservative record and set of positions, notwithstanding his centrist image. However, Morrissey writes:

Huntsman never connected to the Republican base, for a number of reasons.  Conservatives, especially in the Tea Party, didn’t extend much trust to a man who showered praise on President Obama as a “remarkable leader” with “brilliant analysis of world events,” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as having “even more charisma than her husband!”  Nor did the manner of his leaving impress Republicans, having made it known that he wanted to challenge his boss for the White House before officially resigning from his post in the administration.

 If Tea Party conservatives didn’t warm to Huntsman, the feeling was undeniably mutual.  Earlier this week, Huntsman told Politico  that he hoped that the cycles of political thought “ultimately takes us to a sane Republican Party based on real ideas,” after supposedly “losing its equilibrium” in the Obama era....

I'll grant that Huntsman's praise of his onetime boss could've been less fulsome, and also that (as Morrissey elsewhere complains) Huntsman's jokes sometimes fall flat. Plus, Morrissey may be right to second-guess Huntsman's strategy of bypassing Iowa and placing so much political capital on New Hampshire instead.

But what I find manifestly true, and extremely important, is that the Republican Party did lose its equilibrium in the Obama era, and became a vehicle for various ideas and impulses that don't pass a sanity test. These range from birtherism to worries about "Kenyan anti-colonialism" to science denialism on climate change. (Note: there's room for debate as to what policies to adopt in light of climate change, but not for obstinately denying well-established facts that global warming is occurring and anthropogenic.)

A key attraction of Huntsman is that he won't succumb to that Obama-era fever. And if -- unlikely though not impossible -- he wins the nomination, he's far and away the candidate most likely to win the election. Steering the Republican Party away from its worst impulses, while maintaining a broadly conservative stance, and actually winning in the event that he is the nominee: that's the point of the Huntsman campaign.

UPDATE 1/16: Huntsman's out. Which means centrist types who won't vote for Obama can now choose between Romney and Kotlikoff.

Downsize Wall Street

New York Times: "Could Huntsman and the Democrats Ally on Bank Reform?" Explains how the idea of downsizing the biggest banks could win support on right and left, and could gain traction whether or not Huntsman himself is the nominee.

None of which would be a surprise to readers of my January "Political Monitor" column in Research magazine.

Ron Paul speaks

“People who really hold the wealth, it’s mal-distribution because it shifts over due to the regulations that control the government.” Gibberish.

Frum on

David Frum has started blogging at The Daily Beast just in time for the New Hampshire primary. While I was sorry to see FrumForum go into storage, that loss is a big gain for Tina Brown & Co., and unsurprisingly David's off to an interesting and high-frequency start.

Table Mountain

One more Cape Town picture, Table Mountain with its "tablecloth" of clouds.

Cape Town townships

One high point of our trip to South Africa was a tour of black townships. We visited Khayelitsha and, more briefly, Gugulethu, met some friendly people and saw some interesting places. From the highway it may look like chaos, and there is vast hardship and poverty, but there's also entrepreneurship and improvement.

Playing the xylophone.

Visiting a church/school.

At a house that serves as a small church.

Meeting the kids.

Vicky's Bed and Breakfast.

A well-appointed room at Vicky's.

Drinking homemade beer.

I highly recommend our tour guide, Thabang Titotti, who can be reached here.

Candidate Kotlikoff

Laurence Kotlikoff is a distinguished economist whom I met at a conference in Boston in late 2009, when I presented him with an award for retirement income research. There's a photo somewhere of him and me standing arm in arm. I later reviewed his book Jimmy Stewart Is Dead for the (soon-to-be-archived) FrumForum.

Larry now has decided to run for president, as a third-party candidate emphasizing "purple" ideas that appeal across red and blue ideological lines. He's never held public office, but he's a knowledgeable, innovative thinker who's advised institutions all over the world and deserves to be given a serious hearing. In fact, he's far more deserving of that than some of the people who have been taken seriously this year (I'm looking at you, Herman). I'll be watching with interest and likely will have more about the Kotlikoff campaign down the road.

UPDATE 1/10: See Kotlikoff's campaign site and a write-up by my colleague Gil Weinreich.

Save the Rhinos (and RINOs)

Note: I wrote the following for FrumForum this morning — just before learning that FF is closing down.

My wife and I attended a cousin’s wedding in Cape Town, South Africa at year-end and added some time to be tourists in a country we’d never visited. The sites we saw ranged from the black township of Khayelitsha (on a van tour led by a local), where brick houses are slowly replacing tin shacks, to the well-manicured grounds of an elite high school (where our cousin-by-marriage was one of the first two colored, or mixed-race, students upon desegregation in the early 1990s; he studied particularly hard to show academic standards were not slipping on his account, and became valedictorian).

We spent the trip’s closing days at the Aquila Private Game Reserve, a sprawling site two hours’ drive from Cape Town. There, amid many other animals, we saw the southern white rhinoceros in its native habitat. The five rhinos on the reserve were all females, the site’s two males having been killed gruesomely by poachers in August. Rhino horn, valued for putative medicinal properties, makes a lucrative illegal trade in China, Vietnam and elsewhere.

Now, as a FrumForum contributor, I have been called a RINO (Republican in Name Only) and even taken a liking to that term (while scorning the RINO-baiters’ presumption of defining who’s a Republican). The magnificence of real-life rhinos gives the RINO label a cachet that defeats its derisive purpose.

The rhinos’ plight, unfortunately, is a severe one. Africa’s western black rhino has been declared extinct in the wild, and East Asia’s Javan rhino is close to meeting the same fate. As formidable as rhinos look, they have little defense against poachers carrying weapons and chainsaws (to cut off the horns, often leaving the animals alive and in agony).

At night, from our cabin at the Aquila reserve, we saw distant headlights of the security patrols that follow rhinos to protect against poachers. It’s a dangerous business, in which the armed “anti-poachers” easily can be targeted themselves.

Private reserves such as Aquila have been a valuable supplement to Africa’s national parks; the latter have military protection but are vulnerable to budget pressures and corruption. The private reserves, though, need stepped-up security. In response to the August attack, Aquila launched an initiative called “Saving Private Rhino,” to develop funding and support for measures including high-tech surveillance systems; rewards for informants; GPS tracking of microchips in rhino horns; educational centers and more.

Defending rhinos through private property rights and innovative technologies is a cause that should appeal to the conservative imagination, and it’s one that resonates with the longstanding conservationist tradition of Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt. Let RINOs help protect rhinos and ensure their survival through the 21st century.

Political monitoring

My new column at Research magazine, "Political Monitor," aims to track political developments through the election year with an eye toward issues particularly relevant to the magazine's financial-advisor readership. The January column, "Target: Wall Street," is now online.

Back from South Africa

Rhinos photographed at Aquila Private Game Reserve, 2 hours drive from Cape Town. UPDATE: Also see Aquila's Saving Private Rhino initiative.

UPDATE: Much more.

Off the grid

That's it for me for this year. Thanks for coming by, and see you in 2012.

Green Front

I'm slated to be on "The Green Front" (www.thegreenfront.com) on Progressive Radio Network Wed., Dec. 21 sometime between 2 and 3 PM, to discuss my recent climate pieces: "How the GOP Should Explain Climate Change" and "Newt, Your Ad With Pelosi Wasn't Dumb."

UPDATE 12/21: "Talking With the Left About Climate Change," my FrumForum post about the radio spot.

The overly strategic endorsement

Andrew Sullivan endorsed Ron Paul in the GOP primary race. David Frum criticized that endorsement, and then Sullivan defended it thus (excerpt):

Paul's riposte would be that the current long recession was perpetuated by federal intervention, because it did not allow the market to clear more quickly (Thatcher's position in 1981, by the way). I don't buy this, because the extremity of the crisis was so great, passivity in 2008 could have galvanized a crippling global depression and ended our financial system entirely.

But Paul is not internally inconsistent; and he is radical in his libertarian absolutism. My endorsement was not of all his proposals but in part to expose the fallacy of these abstractions in our current context, by airing them openly. An electoral defeat on pure Tea Party grounds would advance the kind of reforms David and I want. We would get a real debate about limited government. And, of course, I regard steep cuts in defense as indispensable to generating the revenues necessary to cushion the socially dangerous inequality that is the singular mark of the last thirty years. A Romney presidency would muddy those waters. And David is still wedded to a neoconservaive foreign policy, which is where another deep difference resides.

Emphasis added. I find it a very odd type of endorsement that's done in the hope and expectation that the candidate will lose so that his bad ideas can be exposed. Even odder is that Sullivan at the same time is genuinely endorsing some of Paul's positions. What makes him think a Paul defeat would discredit the positions Sullivan dislikes while furthering the positions Sullivan likes? Isn't it possible Paul's defeat would do the opposite? And for that matter, isn't it also possible (though I agree, this is unlikely) that a nominee Paul would win the presidency and try to enact all of his positions?

By the way, Margaret Thatcher offered a qualified defense of the mixed economy on the grounds that "as in a cocktail, it is the mix that counts." Would Ron Paul ever say something like that?

Climate stump speech

Today at FrumForum, I explain what I would like a GOP candidate to say about global warming.

UPDATE: The piece has been reprinted at Canada's National Post. Also, on 12/21 I'm slated to have a related discussion about climate policy and politics at "The Green Front" on Progressive Radio Network.

Defending Newt?

At FrumForum, I weigh in on a controversial episode of Gingrich past: "Newt, Your Ad With Pelosi Wasn't Dumb."

Dusk

Twilight over a nature reserve in New Jersey. This blog will remain an occasional thing for the moment.