greg goebel / public domain
* VECTORS is a newsletter of fact and commentary on aerospace, technology, science, and historical topics.
* Ideas for nanotechnology began to come into wide circulation in the 1980s and 1990s, the focus at the time being on tiny nanomachines, the size of viruses, that could do everything from rewire brain to provide immortality to colonize space. The discussions about nanomachines also warned that they could destroy all life on Earth, disassembling it into a "gray goo" that covered the planet. Since nobody had the least practical idea of how to build any sort of nanomachines, it was all hand-waving and sci-fi speculation.
However, at the same time, materials and chemical researchers were learning to perform nanoscale fabrication, acquiring a new level of ability to manipulate matter. Nanomaterials are now being sold and promise to become a very big business. The fact that nanomaterials research doesn't have the least prospect of producing a gray-goo dissassembler doesn't mean that worries have forgotten. In October 2007, Dr. Andrew Maynard, a nanotech specialist at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, stood up in front of a Congressional committee to hold up a packet of carbon nanotubes: Dr. Maynard pointed out that he had got the packet through the posts, and it was described as nothing more than graphite.
Superficially, that is true. Graphite is formed of planes of carbon atoms, with each plane made up of a mesh of hexagonal cells of atoms. Carbon nanotubes amount to the mesh rolled up into a tube, while similar carbon "buckyballs" are spheres formed out of that mesh. It is also true that such carbon nanostructures can be found in natural soot, but are they really as safe as graphite powder? Maybe they are, but given our state of knowledge about nanomaterials, we don't know enough to say one way or another. Another participant in the congressional hearing, Dr. Vicki Colvin -- a professor of chemistry at Rice University in Houston and a leader in nanotechnology risk research -- told the group: "If you fund five teams to understand nanotube toxicity, and they get five different answers, your research investment hurts you because it creates uncertainty. The bad news is that we have way over five different opinions about carbon-nanotube toxicity right now."
* Hundreds of products claiming to be nanomaterials-based are now on the market. In most cases, the only sense in which they are nanotech is that they use materials reduced to powders with particles a few nanometers -- billionths of a meter -- in diameter. In some cases, the particles are manipulated into structures such as rings, shells, beads, cages, and wires.
Some nanotech products are applied directly to the skin, for example cosmetics and sunscreens. Titanium dioxide has long been used as a sunscreen, being generally stereotyped as a white paste -- but the latest sunscreens use titanium dioxide nanoparticles, allowing them to block ultraviolet while passing visible light, making them more or less transparent. Silver nanoparticles are also popular since they can have antimicrobial properties, and they are used in products from bed linen to teddy bears to chopsticks to food preparation gear. The food industry is interested in using nanomaterial processing to include trace metals in foods and to make them less fattening.
Once people start talking about nanoparticles in food, nobody has to be a ranting luddite monkey-wrencher to stop and worry about matters for a moment. To be sure, we inhale and ingest nanoparticles from the environment all the time, but then again, we know that a portion of those nanoparticles, such as particulates from diesel engine exhaust, aren't good for us. Any chemist will freely admit that making supposedly harmless materials into nanoparticles may have unpredictable properties simply due to their small size. Bulk copper is soft, while copper nanoparticles are hard. Bulk gold is nonreactive, while gold nanoparticles react easily. Materials, such as carbon, that are safe enough in bulk form may become unsafe in nanoparticle form.
In fact, there's plenty of good reason to worry that may be the case. The reactivity of materials tends to increase with surface area, and given that volume deceases by the cube of the diameter while surface area decreases by the square, the ratio of surface area to volume gets much bigger at small sizes. Half the atoms of a five-nanometer particle are on its surface. Research suggests that nanoparticles could penetrate the body's defensive systems and accumulate in the brain, cells, blood, and nerves. There are suggestions that nanoparticles could cause pulmonary inflammation; move from the lungs to other organs; demonstrate surprising toxicity; be scavenged up by the lymphatic system; and possibly move across cell membranes. Worse, these phenomena tend to vary according to different nanoparticle configurations.
The applications of nanomaterials perceived as the most sensitive involve those that go in or on the body: food additives, cosmetics, drug delivery systems, new therapeutics, plus textile coatings and treatments. However, there are broader concerns: carbon nanotubes have been used for a number of years in plastics as a stiffener, and to make paints and the like conductive. What happens when products using such plastics and paints are dumped or broken up? Will the nanotubes enter the groundwater?
* In 2004, Britain's Royal Society recommended that nanomaterials be treated as entirely new substances as far as regulatory actions were concerned. Unfortunately, trying to assess the "environmental, health, & safety (EHS)" risks is troublesome.
Some governments don't see a particular issue over nanomaterials. Companies are responsible for the safety of their products to begin with, and so the specific nature of those products shouldn't make any difference -- if the products have been demonstrated to be safe, they will be certified as safe; if they haven't, they won't be allowed on the market. This is a reasonable point of view -- except for the fact that nanomaterials open up such a Pandora's box of ugly questions that it isn't reasonable to simply assume companies can do the job of assessing the EHS risks of nanomaterials themselves.
Many companies involved are not complacent about the issue, either, and are trying to come up with tests of their own so they can determine the nature and extent of problems. Big companies actually have the capability to perform very credible research on the subject, since they're familiar with the regulatory environment and have good research staffs. The same is not necessarily true of the smaller companies, and some of them have simply shrugged the matter off: "Titanium dioxide is a perfectly safe material, isn't it? Why should titanium dioxide nanopowders be any different?" Insurers are in a foggy state as well, and for the moment have simply shrugged and included nanomaterials as part of their general product liability coverage.
However, over the longer term, insurers have a strong vested interest in making sure that nanomaterials don't pose a significant EHS hazard. Governments also have a vested interest in making sure that nanomaterials are safe, since they will shoulder much of the blame if they aren't. The general belief is that government funding being pumped into nanotech development at this time should include money for EHS risk evaluation. The relevant businesses see that as all for the good, with the Nanotechnology Industries Association, a British trade group, calling for better coordination on risk evaluation research.
The Council for Science & Technology, an advisory group to the British government, has warned that research into the EHS risks of nanotech is going much too slowly, and in America some members of Congress have lit into the US government's National Nanotechnology Initiative for its lack of focus on safety issues. The US government currently spends the most money on nanotech research, estimated to be as much as $60 million USD a year. However, Dr. Maynard and his colleagues have suggested a program to perform EHS risk evaluation for nanotech that will need $100 million USD a year, at least until the level of risks are understood.
There is a lot of work to do. Regulation of any sort of materials use is based on measurement, monitoring, and risk estimation, and right now there's little ability to do any of that with regards to nanomaterials. We don't even have common terminology or tools to measure nanomaterials, characterise them, and assess their purity. Work towards that end is being coordinated by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in Geneva, Switzerland, and the general expectation is that it will happen.
Can it happen soon enough? Nobody is promoting a hysterical view of nanomaterials, claiming we're on the edge of a global disaster; the issue is that we simply don't have the knowledge to understand if they are really safe or not. That uncertainty casts a cloud over the nanomaterials industry, even as governments pump in money to ramp up work and produce significant new products -- new therapeutics, better batteries, cleaning up water, generating green energy. Getting rid of that cloud makes work on the EHS risks of nanotech very important; and on the positive side, once the risks are better understood, the money pumped into nanotech will go farther since it won't be sunk into dead-end research paths.
* On 16 July 2002, a survey crew from the Louisiana Department of Transportation found the naked, rotting body of a woman along the banks of the Mississippi near Baton Rouge. The woman was identified as a Pam Kinamore; DNA tests suggested strongly that she had been murdered by a serial killer who had been responsible for the deaths of two other women. The women were all white and middle-class. An FBI profile and an eyewitness set local, state, and Federal law enforcement on a hunt for a young white man who drove a white pickup truck.
The investigation went nowhere, and in December a fourth woman was murdered. Further work went nowhere as well. In March 2003, the authorities finally turned to Tony Frudakis, a molecular biologist who runs a company named DNAPrint Genomics in Sarasota, Florida, for help. Frudakis claimed he could confirm the ethnic background of the killer from the DNA samples that had already been obtained as evidence. Frudakis sounded crankish to the officers of the investigation task force, but they performed a blind test on him, handing him samples of 20 known individuals to test. He nailed the ethnic derivation of all of them.
In mid-March, Frudakis called the Baton Rouge Police Department and told them: "Your guy has substantial African ancestry. He could be Afro-Caribbean or African American but there is no chance that this is a Caucasian. No chance at all." There was a dead silence, followed by a flurry of questions: was he absolutely sure of his results? He said he was, and in fact said the killer was about 85% Sub-Saharan African and 15% Native American. The police were still somewhat suspicious of Frudakis' claims, but a fifth woman had been murdered in the meantime, so they changed the manhunt to find a suspect matching Frudakis' genetic profile. Two months later, the killer was in custody.
* As anyone who watches CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION knows, DNA analysis is in common use in law enforcement, and in fact US law enforcement has access to a database with 5 million DNA profiles -- the "Combined DNA Index System (CODIS)". CODIS, as its name states, is simply a database: it is possible to search through it with a DNA sample to see if a match is found with the DNA of individuals logged in the database, but if the DNA is from an individual not in the database, the search will come up empty. It says nothing about race, and deliberately so, since there were fears that it might bias investigations if it did. When the national DNA Advisory Board selected the gene markers, or DNA sequences which have a known location on a chromosome, for CODIS, they deliberately chose not to include markers associated with ancestral geographic origins to avoid any political fallout.
DNAWitness, the test Frudakis applied in the Baton Rouge case, uses a set of 176 genetic markers selected precisely because they disclose the most information about ethnic derivation. Some markers are found primarily in people of African heritage, while others are found mainly in people of Indo-European, Native American or South Asian heritage. No one sequence can reveal ancestral origin, but by looking collectively at hundreds and analyzing the frequency of the various markers, Frudakis claimed he could predict genetic ancestry with 99% accuracy.
From a genetic standpoint, the evolutionary history of modern humans is fairly straightforward. Humanity arose as a fairly small population in Africa, and then radiated out to the other continents beginning about 200,000 years ago. This is a fairly recent date, given the long generation times of humans, and the implication is that the human genone is highly -- but importantly not completely -- uniform. As Frudakis put it: "There is tremendous genetic diversity among other species of animals, but not among humans because our common history is so recent. We're 99.9% identical at the level of our DNA. It's the 0.1% that makes us different and about 1% of that 0.1% is different as a function of our differing history." DNAPrint Genomics had already helped Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Quincy Jones and Chris Tucker trace their ancestry back to Africa for a four-part PBS series titled AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES. No controversy there.
Armed with the clue provided by Frudakis, the task force sorted through the accumulated evidence to see what might have been missed. Three days before Pam Kinamore had disappeared, a black man had assaulted her in her home, but the assailant had been driven off when her son Alexander Kinamore came in the house. Alexander was badly injured by the intruder but was able to describe him in detail to the police. However, the police were distracted by the eyewitness reports of a white man in a white pickup and never bothered to examine the DNA samples left by the assailant.
The police had also ignored Collette Dwyer, who thought she knew who the killer was: Derrick Todd Lee, a 34 year-old black man with a long criminal record for domestic violence, assault, stalking and peeping. He had stalked Dwyer for two years, and forced his way into her apartment one day, to be driven out by Dwyer's two children and then arrested. He was sent to prison for two years; Dwyer knew when he was let out and noticed that the murders began after that. She repeatedly called the police and warned them. They talked to Lee but, still fixated on the eyewitness report, didn't take his DNA for testing. After Frudakis' bombshell, the police got a subpoena, took a cheek swab from Lee to get his DNA, and found a solid match. Lee fled Baton Rouge before his arrest warrant was issued, but was arrested in Atlanta and brought back for trial.
* Frudakis obtained a doctorate in molecular and cell biology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1995, to then spend the next few years working as a researcher for Corixa Corporation in Seattle. He finally left to start his own company, focused on developing genomic-based or "targeted" drugs. The company ran out of money before it could get a drug on the market, however, and so Frudakis shifted to forensics as a way to make ends meet. The same markers that could be used for targeted drug design could also used to determine physical characteristics for law-enforcement investigations.
By the time Frudakis took on the Baton Rouge case, the DNAWitness test was well-established, having been performed on a large number of test subjects, with a thousand blind trials then performed with the cooperation of various police departments. Since 2003, DNAWitness has been used in over 150 criminal cases in the US and in the UK. It didn't prove useful in most of the cases -- if eyewitnesses or security cameras had already identified a perpetrator as being of a particular race, all DNAWitness could do was agree -- but it some cases it proved extremely important.
Kansas City, Missouri, police had spent four years trying to identify the body of a 3-year-old black girl; Frudakis determined that the child had one white grandparent, a clue that ultimately led to the child's mother, a mixed-race Oklahoma woman. When two women were murdered in Napa, California, Frudakis employed a more sophisticated version of DNAWitness that uses 1,349 genetic markers to peg the killer as 97 percent Northern European -- and the police were able to zero in on a suspect who was blonde and blue-eyed.
* DNAWitness clearly works, but it hasn't taken the world by storm. One issue is that it costs thousands of dollars, and as noted it's not necessarily all that useful if the general ethnic background of the perpetrator has already been solidly identified. It is also not widely known, and there are some forensics researchers who think it is scientific quackery. Even those who admit DNAWitness works are nervous because it is a means of racial classification, a process that in general has a definitely bad history in the law.
Modern civil rights activism has led to a downplaying of race as part of the perfectly appropriate desire to construct a color-blind society. The modern buzzphrase is: "There is only one race -- the human race." That attitude is appropriate in terms of the goal of establishing an egalitarian "color blind" society, but in biological terms, it is nonsense. There are different varieties of apples, there are different breeds of cats, there are different breeds of horses. Organisms typically have varieties, breeds, races, and the fact that the boundaries between them are indistinct and the connections between them confusing doesn't change that fact. There is only one human species, but there are clearly racial variations among that species. No one could look at a group picture of Ban-Ki Moon, Kofi Annan, and Nicholas Sarkozy and not instantly recognize who was asian, black, or white even if the individuals weren't familiar -- and no honest person would refuse to admit it, or see any sensible reason to refuse to admit it.
The fact that Frudakis came up with a genetic test that could distinguish race made some scholars uncomfortable, expressing worries that DNAWitness represents a "slippery slope". Troy Duster, a New York University professor who has written about eugenics: "Once we start talking about predicting racial background from genetics, it's not much of a leap to talking about how people perform based on their DNA -- why they committed that rape or stole that car or scored higher on that IQ test. In this society where race is such a powerful idea, once you head down this path toward predicting race, will the next step be predicting racial behavior?"
Some in law enforcement are also nervous. Tony Clayton, a prosecutor who worked on the Baton Rouge case, is black, and initially thought Frudakis was some lunatic-fringe white racist. Now Clayton flatly admits that "had it not been for Frudakis, we would still be looking for the white guy in the white pick-up truck." But he adds, "We've been taught that we're all the same, that we bleed the same blood. If you subscribe to the [Frudakis] theory, you're saying we are inherently unequal. If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would."
Frudakis finds this sort of reaction exasperating, pointing out that DNAWitness merely determines ethnic derivation, and that's it. It neither makes nor even can make any value judgements, and he sees the suggestion that it does as a leap of logic, not a slippery slope. In practice, it's only used to narrow suspect lists and isn't used as evidence in court -- that's provided by a full DNA test, which renders the DNAWitness analysis irrelevant. A security camera can also determine race, but few have been calling security cameras an inherently racist technology.
Indeed, since the patterns of variation of genetic markers track the evolutionary branching of the human species, DNAWitness affirms the basic unity of humankind: "Our technology is based on the notion that we all share a common ancestry to Africa from a couple hundred thousand years ago, that we are all part of the same family tree."
* JAPAN UNDER SIEGE: The B-29 Superfortress would never have an opportunity to drop a single bomb on Germany, but by the time of the Nazi surrender, it was making up for it by inflicting massive devastation on Japan. The first few months of B-29 raids from the Marianas hadn't delivered much in the way of effective results, and so in early 1945 Curt LeMay had been sent to take charge.
The problems were that Japanese weather tended to be cloudy, making targeting difficult, and there were also very surprising high-speed winds -- what would be later called the "jet stream" -- over Japan that played hell with high-altitude bombing. After some weeks of experimenting, LeMay figured he had the answer: low-level area bombing with clusters of small incendiary bombs -- metal tubes that shot out a stream of burning jellied gasoline on impact.
USAAF doctrine had always pushed precision bombing, few having much enthusiasm for bombing families out of their homes. However, as Superfortress bombing operations in Japan were showing, precision bombing was sometimes impractical and unworkable. It was well known that Japanese cities were full of lightly-built structures that were hideously vulnerable to fire, as had been proven by the disastrous Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which had caused immense damage to Tokyo and neighboring cities. In addition, Japanese manufacturing was structured around a network of small subcontractors, many of which operated out of residential districts or homes. If Japanese industrial facilities were a strategic target, by extension that made a whole city a legitimate target.
There was also the realization that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would cost massive numbers of American lives. The determination of the Japanese to resist had been driven home by this time by the appearance of the "kamikaze", the "divine wind", in which Japanese pilots dived their bomb-laden aircraft directly into American warships. The Japanese were organizing every citizen to fight the invaders, which meant every Japanese citizen had in principle become a warrior, and so a legitimate target. Faced with such determined resistance, if the ugly choice came down to the mass killing of Japanese men, women, and children, or losing endless numbers of American GIs -- that wasn't a choice at all.
LeMay had most of the defensive armament pulled off the Superfortresses. They would come in at low level in the dark, dropping their loads of incendiaries on flares dropped to mark the target. On the night of 9:10 March 1945, LeMay's airmen tried out these tactics for the first time, on Tokyo. Aided by the wind, the fires raged out of control, sweeping across the city like a wall of flame. Much of Tokyo was burned out; roughly 100,000 Japanese lost their lives, a million were left homeless. Losses among the Superfortress crews were light.
LeMay had finally determined the right formula. He turned his attention to the other major cities of Japan, methodically and ruthlessly gutting them out with fire, one by one. The Japanese had been taken by surprise by the Tokyo raid and were better able to take precautions against the later attacks, resulting in considerably fewer civilian casualties. They were, however, unable to stop or even inflict major losses on the Superfortresses as the bombers put the torch to Japan's cities. The only thing that caused a breather in the destruction was when LeMay ran out of incendiaries, but more were being shipped across the Pacific.
The destruction of Japan's cities was all for the good as far as the American war effort was concerned, but it posed a problem for the atomic bomb program. In April, Groves had set up a high-level "Target Committee" to determine appropriate targets for the atomic bomb, but by that time the number of large cities left in anything resembling standing condition was decreasing rapidly. Dropping an atomic bomb on rubble and ashes didn't make much sense; as the committee's notes commented: "Tokyo is a possibility but it is now practically all bombed and burned out and is practically rubble with only the palace grounds left standing." The committee zeroed in on a short list, which included the city of Hiroshima: "Hiroshima is the largest untouched target not on the 21st Bomber Command priority list. Consideration should be given to this city."
The short list also included Kyoto, but Secretary of War Stimson, who found the idea of area bombing cities appalling in the first place, flatly told General Marshall that Kyoto, full of shrines and a center of Japanese cultural traditions, was not going to be bombed. Similarly, Stimson made it clear that reducing the imperial palace in Tokyo to radioactive ashes was not in the cards. That was equivalent to assassinating the Emperor, which few thought was a very good idea since it might well guarantee that every last Japanese fought to the death. Hiroshima increasingly began to seem like the most interesting target.
There was some talk at high levels of simply dropping the atomic bomb on a deserted area to impress the Japanese with its destructive capability. The idea was rejected. If the atomic bomb was dropped on an area where it did no real damage, why would the Japanese be all that impressed? They might simply conclude that they were witnessing some sort of fakery, a bomb that made a big bang but had little in the way of real teeth, and that the Americans were timid. At the time the United States, its leadership worried about a brutally costly invasion of the Japanese home islands, was hammering Japan with every weapon available. Truman was even considering use of poison gases, a notion that Roosevelt had emphatically rejected. If a new weapon became available, no matter how terrible it was, it would be used as well: anything, anything just to put an end to the war and the hideous wastage of American lives.
* TRINITY: By the spring of 1945, the time had come to select a site for the world's first detonation of an atomic bomb. In the spring of 1944, a Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge, brought over from the MIT Rad Lab, had led a team to evaluate candidate sites. Eight locations were identified, with those nearest to Los Alamos regarded as the most convenient and attractive. Oppenheimer came along on the New Mexico field trips, partly because it allowed him to get away from his responsibilities as lab director for a time.
The site selected was on the northwest corner of the military's Alamagordo Bombing Range, about 340 kilometers (210 miles) south of the Los Alamos site. In early 1945, with progress on bomb development steaming along on track, Bainbridge was directed to prepare the site for the test, which was codenamed TRINITY. Bainbridge acquired a hefty staff and high-priority access to resources, with his people installing instrumentation systems at Alamagordo and a steel frame tower from which the blast would take place.
By the end of June, the bombs were going together and a plan, codenamed BRONX as a complement to MANHATTAN, was in place to ship production munitions across the Pacific to the Superfortresses that would deliver them. On 4 July 1945, the word came down from Washington DC to authorize use of the bombs. 4 July had been the initial target date for the TRINITY shot, but there had been minor delays, and there was also the issue of weather: the prevailing winds had to be in a direction that didn't take the dusty radioactive debris or "fallout" of the blast over populated areas. The actual schedule for TRINITY came down to 16 July, though it might have to be put off if the winds were unfavorable.
Los Alamos staff put together a betting pool on how big the blast would be. Enrico Fermi irritated the authorities by starting a pool to see if the bomb would set the atmosphere on fire, and if it did so, whether it would just destroy New Mexico or destroy the entire world. George Kistakowsky and his staff left Los Alamos in a truck convoy carrying the plutonium bomb assemblies just after midnight on 14 July -- the day before, Friday the 13th, hadn't seemed like a good time to head out. The bomb was assembled with great care and apprehension, and by the dark hours of the morning of 16 July 1945, all was ready to go.
Few got much sleep that night, and a thunderstorm lit up the darkness, fraying nerves further. Groves was assured the storm would pass and the test could go ahead on schedule, the decided time being 0530 AM. A Superfortress would be flying overhead at the time of the blast to see how much trouble it would cause a drop aircraft. At 0510 AM, the test countdown was initiated. Witnesses at the Alamagordo command center were told to lie face down in the sand before detonation, though some, such as Edward Teller, put on a welder's mask or smoked glasses so they could watch the explosion, from a distance of about 32 kilometers (20 miles). As the countdown ticked away, in the site command center the visibly stressed Oppenheimer muttered: "Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart." The countdown stepped relentlessly down to zero, and at 0530 AM, TRINITY went off, precisely on schedule.
There had been last-minute fears that the bomb was going to be a dud. It wasn't. Emilio Segre said later that even through dark glasses he had "an impression of an overwhelmingly bright light ... for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and finish the Earth, even though I knew that this was not possible." Another witness compared the flash of heat as like "opening a hot oven." The fireball rose up into the New Mexico sky and drove a hole through the clouds. Bainbridge commented: "Nobody who saw it could forget it, a foul and awesome display." He told Oppie: "Now we are all sons of bitches." Oppenheimer, drawing on his interest in Hindu mythology, thought of the words of the god Vishnu: "Now I am Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Yield was estimated at 19 kilotonnes (21 kilotons) of TNT; I.I. Rabi won the betting pool. There would be no test of the uranium bomb -- in fact, only hours after the test, the guts of the Little Boy weapon were put on board the cruiser USS INDIANAPOLIS in San Francisco. The warship then headed out to sea, bound for Tinian Island in the Marianas. Lighter components would be delivered by air.
* Most of the senior US government leadership was in Potsdam, Germany, at the time of the TRINITY shot, attending what would turn out to be the final high-level conference of the Allies. When War Secretary Stimson got the news there, he told a colleague: "Well, I have been responsible for spending two billions of dollars on this atomic venture. Now that it is successful, I shall not be sent off to prison at Fort Leavenworth." He informed Truman of the event. Although the Roosevelt Administration had been pushing the Soviets to join the war against Japan, the Truman Administration was increasingly suspicious of Soviet intentions and hoped that the atomic bomb could end the war in the Pacific before the USSR jumped in.
There was some reluctance to say much to Stalin about TRINITY, since it might just pressure him to intervene immediately lest he lose out on the spoils of the defeat of Japan. Truman vaguely told the Soviet leader that the United States had a "new weapon of unusual destructive force." Stalin merely nodded and replied that he was glad to hear of it and hoped that America "would make good use of it against the Japanese." Truman wasn't sure he had been understood; when the story got back to Oppenheimer, the physicist commented: "That was carrying casualness rather far."
Stalin was casual because Truman wasn't handing him any news. The Soviets knew all about Los Alamos and the American atomic bomb program, since it had been deeply penetrated by Red spies. Stalin accelerated plans for a military offensive in the Far East, making sure the USSR jumped in before the window of opportunity slid shut.
TO BE CONTINUED
* DAWKINS' MEMES: THE SELFISH GENE also introduced the concept of the "meme", a word Dawkins himself coined, though the notion itself was not entirely new. The meme was a simple idea. Through much of evolutionary history, species had evolved through Darwinian natural selection, acquiring capabilities "hardwired" into their genomes and passing them on to their progeny. However, as animals grew more intelligent, they were increasingly capable of not merely learning, but also of teaching their learning to their children, giving them capabilities that were not hardwired into their genes.
These elements of knowledge were what Dawkins identified as "memes". Purely instinctive creatures, such as insects, had no memes, their actions being completely directed by their genes. Smarter creatures can learn from their actions and teach by example. Of course, the process reached an explosive level in humans; evolution had finally transcended mere "hardware", the propagation of genes, and now involved "software", the transmission of memes through writings, songs, oral narratives, physical training, computer programs, and so on.
Dawkins insisted that memes were every bit as real as genes. A gene, after all, is no more than a coded message, implemented in DNA to be put into operation. A meme is similarly a coded message, implemented in the synapses of the brain to be put into operation. Memes could evolve through competition.
In Dawkins' view, memes gave humans some ability to transcend "the tyranny of the gene". Although altruism in his view had originated from the dictates of the "selfish gene", human ethics had transcended its roots: for example, humans adopt children all the time, without concern for the specific sharing of whatever proportions of genes. Dawkins was not a Social Darwinist, he was not claiming that the imperatives of biology amounted to moral law: just because adoption wasn't an ESS, for example, was no reason for societies to refuse to encourage and support the practice. As Dawkins said, he simply pointed out that if humans aspired to a higher morality, they might not find their genetics were always helpful to that end. In this he was expressing the ancient belief that our "better angels" of our nature were locked in tension with our bestial instincts.
Dawkins went further, suggesting that memes might actually win this battle over the long run. It is often claimed that humans, more or less buffered from natural selection by their technology and social systems, have ceased to evolve, but if the evolution of memes is factored in, human evolution is moving along at a breakneck and accelerating pace. Dawkins speculated that in time humans are likely to develop intelligent machines, and at that a meme-based path of evolution will have arisen, based, with the intelligent machines building ever more intelligent machine progeny. Whether this would be a good thing or not is of course another question.
* There was some controversy over the concept of a meme, with some doubters suggesting that the idea was, if not provably wrong as such, too vaporous to be useful, amounting to mere "arm-waving" that didn't actually tell us anything we didn't already know. However, this controversy was nothing compared to the others that Dawkins went out of his way to provoke, in particular by firing broadsides at religion and pushing notions that sounded like biological determinism on a heavy dose of recreational drugs: "We are survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment."
Critics predictably blasted Dawkins, accusing him of a coldly mechanistic vision of humanity -- some of his readers said that THE SELFISH GENE threw them into a profound depression. Those more familiar with Dawkins wondered what the fuss was about, finding it hard to believe that he saw the notion of "survival machines" as anything but an evolutionary abstraction. No reader of Dawkins' books on science would get the impression that he was lacking in self-esteem and took such a bleak view of himself, and his readers also know he has a tendency to throw bombs, expressing ideas in a provocative fashion to get the reader's attention, and then adding qualifications to bring them back down to earth. This is one of the reasons he's an interesting read, though unsurprisingly it causes him trouble every now and then, forcing him to backtrack a bit.
In fact, he later found his remark about "survival machines" a bit of an embarrassment, saying that he wrote it in a burst of excitement after coming back from a "mind-boggling" conference on artificial intelligence technology, and though he didn't retract the statement he went to considerable lengths to clarify it. What Dawkins meant was that the Darwinian evolution of genes, with some propagating and others dying out, is entirely blind, mechanistic, and robot-like. Genes don't plan out strategies; they're no more conscious than a brick, they can't plan out anything. They are handed strategies in the Darwinian lottery by blind random mutations, to then suffer through the contest imposed by equally blind selection pressures, with some genes proving winners and propagating while the losers fade away.
Dawkins didn't mean that humans were robots under the uncontestable control of genetic instructions, as if they had brain-control chips implanted in their heads. He was not happy to find out that the cover of the German edition of THE SELFISH GENE displayed a puppet on strings, while the French edition had little men in bowler hats, each with a windup key on his back.
* There was really little valid reason to get upset over the notions of "selfish genes" and "survival machines". They made a good deal of sense in terms of evolutionary modeling, but it's hard to think that anyone could usefully apply such notions very far outside of that domain, any more than a socket wrench is useful for baking a cake -- a scientific theory only explains what it explains. Even Dawkins was perfectly willing to still present evolutionary scenarios as selection between organisms and leave gene selection as implied: "Just as it is not convenient to talk about quanta and fundamental particles when we discuss the workings of a car, so it is often tedious and unnecessary to keep dragging genes in when we discuss the behavior of survival machines."
Some evolutionists felt it was just as convenient at times to consider selection at higher levels, with Stephen Jay Gould suggesting that it applied at levels up to that of the species. Advocates of group selection demonstrated that there was no inherent conflict between it and gene selection. Purists didn't claim that such notions were wrong but argued that they could be misleading, as demonstrated by primitive concepts of group selection that show up in the popular literature every now and then.
This was all clearly a debate within the scientific community and of no great interest to the general public. There was no real cause for public controversy over the "selfish gene". However, Dawkins' comments about the evolutionary basis for behavior contributed to a feud that still continues.
* SOCIOBIOLOGY & EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: Fueled by the work of Hamilton and Williams, as well as animal behaviorists such as Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz (1903:1989), the 1960s saw the emergence of something of a "cottage industry" of research on the evolutionary development of behavior, both of animals and of humans. The idea was not new, having been visited by both Darwin and Thomas Huxley, but it had never received such a level of attention before. The result was the introduction of what became known as "sociobiology", or (particularly when applied to humans) "evolutionary psychology" -- the preferred term these days.
The exercise came to a head with a book titled SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW SYNTHESIS, published in 1975 by Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson (born 1929), which provided a comprehensive survey of what was known in the field at the time. Its comprehensiveness made it an intimidating slog for nonprofessionals, but Wilson sensibly followed it up in 1980 with a simplified version for general readership, ensuring that it reached a wide audience.
Wilson, an expert on social insects (particularly ants) read Hamilton's paper during a train ride. It made him angry, since some unknown British graduate student was making major claims about the genetic basis of animal societies, and Wilson didn't think Hamilton -- or for that matter many other biologists -- touched his own level of expertise in the subject. However, Wilson couldn't see any flaw in Hamilton's argument, and by the end of the train ride he was sold, making investigation of sociobiology one of his core interests.
SOCIOBIOLOGY was a thorough text, consolidating what was in circulation in the field at the time, with Wilson's own spin on the matter. Wilson covered the range of behavior in the animal world, which caused no great controversy, but when he applied the same reasoning to humans, he set off a storm -- for example, by describing how selection pressures ensured males were genetically inclined to be promiscuous, scattering their genes, while females had a genetic inclination to be selective, since they invested so much energy in bearing and raising their children.
Such notions had a tendency to sound as like biological justifications for traditional sexual roles -- the guys could screw around while the women were faithful and stayed home to take care of the kids -- and Wilson was not the sort of person to always be overly sensitive in how he presented them. Wilson, a bright, civilized, and gracious Alabama boy to those who knew him, was very driven, coming across as confrontational and dogmatic in print. He had been raised Baptist, and though he had lost the faith he retained its sense of conviction. Comments such as suggesting that ethics "should be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologicized" earned him extreme antagonism. Humans, his critics insisted, could not be reduced to beasts, prisoners of biological determinism, driven solely by instincts, incapable of moral choices or improvement; nature could not be used as a moral role model.
That was an exaggeration of Wilson's position, and he insisted that he wasn't trying to attack traditional ethics. What he claimed was that the old dispute over "nature versus nurture" had swung unrealistically to the "nurture" position, promoting a false idea that behavior could be reshaped as much as needed to conform to ideological correctness, with no consideration of the realities of deeply-ingrained instincts.
Wilson was bitterly attacked not merely by traditional critics of Darwinism, but from within the biological science community as well. Richard Lewontin led the charge against Wilson, being quickly joined by Stephen Jay Gould. Gould labelled many of the evolutionary scenarios of sociobiologists as "just so" stories, and Lewontin and Gould blasted Wilson as a throwback advocating discredited notions: "Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility from social problems."
Wilson hit back, describing Lewontin and Gould in so many words as "deep in the Left outfield" Marxists engaged in what would now be called a "correctness exercise". It was not a wild jab: the New Left was still fashionable among academia in those days, both Lewontin and Gould were unapologetic Reds, and Lewontin in particular was noted for his inability to open his mouth without proclaiming the class struggle. In addition, Gould felt a personal obligation to police any attempts by the evolutionary science community to resurrect Social Darwinism, biological determinism, and eugenics, and he tended towards the vehement in the matter. Anyone who had actually looked through SOCIOBIOLOGY would have hardly found it all that outrageous in general, since even the popular abridged version tended toward the dry and academic in tone.
Others took an even dimmer view of Wilson. In 1978, protesters who labelled Wilson as a racist set on him during an address at a science symposium and dumped a pitcher of water on his head. The audience gave Wilson a standing ovation in sympathy; Gould was in the audience and denounced the attack.
* The controversy actually could not be simply reduced to a simple morality play, with the white hats on one side and the black hats on the other. It is obvious that humans have instinctive behaviors, in many ways not so different from those of animals, particularly their primate relatives. Those who have spent much of their lives in various organizations can't help but think, at least on occasions when things aren't going well, of how their social systems resemble that of a baboon troop, with dominance games played to establish hierarchies. (Organizations that go to great lengths to proclaim they are above such things can turn out to be nastier in this regard than the average.) Very few people honestly believe that there are no innate behavioral differences between men and women, though there's no consensus on what those differences are.
It is also obvious that humans are capable of thinking things out, and adhering to ethical codes that insist they should conduct themselves better than animals: they can decide between right and wrong, however inconsistently they do so in practice. Humans are clearly not complete prisoners of biological determinism; we cannot credibly declare we have no control over our actions, and neither can biological determinism be used, as it once was, as a pretext to prop up social inequalities.
On the other hand, we can't simply declare our instincts irrelevant. Utopias tend to end up as anti-utopias, with dreams of a new humanity gradually bogging down in authoritarianism and corruption -- or in the worst cases falling into vicious purges to eliminate the reactionary elements supposedly holding back progress to the mirage of the new era. It was commented after the fall of the USSR that the Soviet Union had three generations to build the "New Soviet Man", and the effort was as plainly a failure as Lysenkoism.
The question of nature versus nurture, then, is perfectly legitimate, even important. It can certainly be argued that if we hope to triumph over our instincts, we must understand them first. There still is the issue of how much insight Darwinism can provide into such matters. Hamilton's analysis of altruism was clearly useful, since neatly resolved a long-standing evolutionary puzzle. The problem is that it works neatly for ants but not quite so neatly for humans.
Humans carry a "meat supercomputer" in their heads, with many capabilities far beyond the reach of any machine we can build at present, and it is certainly true that our brain has significant hardwired functions that we need to understand -- for example, the clearly innate ability of infants to pick up language implies a spectacular level of elaboration in human instincts. However, as a powerful computer, much more flexible than the purely instinctive and robotlike brain of an ant, the human brain is reprogrammable in unbounded ways. Darwinian evolution produced that supercomputer, but it only happened because it enhanced our ability to survive and procreate. The fact that a supercomputer that arose because it helped us survive also gave us the physics of Einstein and the music of Mozart was just, from our point of view, an added benefit.
There is clearly some fuzzy dividing line between what can be sensibly said about instincts and their origins -- and what amounts to "just so" stories, neither provable nor disprovable, providing no insights that leave us any wiser than we were before, reducing the exercise to something like daytime talk-show pop psychology. The argument is essentially over where that dividing line might be drawn.
Wilson remained committed to his ideas and continued to refine his work. He indeed managed to establish converts to his vision, which at root he claimed simply meant: "Biology matters." Wilson did not avoid controversy, writing that religion was "an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes" and offering the notion that a new religion based on evolutionary insights was in the wings. That idea didn't get many takers.
TO BE CONTINUED
* Website additions for the month include:
Updated documents include:
New reviews include:
This last month's online blog entries include items on: bridge & tunnel infrastructure, Florida road trip, living an online life, alien life-forms on Earth, Monsanto wins big with genetically modified crops, no drugs being developed for kids, Chinese product piracy revisited, electric power plug congestion, the Earth after humankind, Guantanamo being phased out, mysterious natural stone circles, weak bite of the sabretooth tiger, pollution from livestock wastes, and steampunk laptop.
Online update links at: http://www.vectorsite.net/update.html