The Purpose-Driven Pastor

Robert Price answers Rick Warren, in The Reason-Driven Life.

We are all seekers for purpose and meaning. But what happens if someone has the answer? We react, naturally, with a good bit of suspicion and skepticism. For we know instinctively that this search is not only difficult and unlikely to yield definitive answers, but also highly personal. Those peddling pat answers and coookie-cutter solutions may have confidence, but rarely have true answers.

So it is with Rich Warren and his book The Purpose-Driven Life. This has been a fundamentalist staple now for one and a half decades, with sales to rival the Bible itself. "You Were Planned for God's Pleasure." Wow! But what pleasures God? Well, now that we are done with sacrificing chickens and committing genocide, it seems that God is most pleasured by people joining fundamentalist churches like Rick Warren's, imagining they are abasing themselves before God, while lording it over all the sorry sinners who haven't gotten the message. Then they are sent out to spread the word and get more people to join up. Warren's ultimate message is to be a drone for the church: "You Were Made for a Mission". As Robert Price quotes:

'World-class Christians are the only fully alive people on the planet.' The outrageous arrogance of this insane boast never seems to dawn on him. Eric Hoffer has Warren pegged: 'The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himslef as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen shall perish.'

But Robert Price isn't just taking pot-shots. He is a post-fundamentalist, biblical scholar, and church-goer, as well as an atheist. He has great respect and love for the Bible, enabling a critique that makes Warren's literalism and pretensions to a biblical foundation ludicrous. Time and again, citations that seem so pat are exposed as far more complex, even contradictory, both among themselves, and to the points Warren is making. Warren quotes: "He is a God who is passionate about his relationship with you" Exodus 34:14. But his source is a custom version of the Bible for Warren's fundamentalists. The real translation is " The LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God", which lies among a discussion of how the Israelites should storm and desecrate the shrines of other religions.

Likewise, Warren cites "What pleases the LORD more: burnt offerings and sacrifices, or obedience to his voice? It is better to obey than to sacrifice." 1 Samuel 15:22. The language here is accurate, but this is no invitation to tea and scones, or to a Saddleback encounter group. The obedience demanded in this passage is genocide against the Amalek. One wonders whether this is a god that Warren's parishoners have any knowledge of or desire to get to know. The fact is that the Bible is a cobbled-together melange of historical and poetic texts, riven with inconsistencies, cross-purposes, and moral evil. To believe that one can take it literally, as Warren does, (most hilariously with the Noah story), is intellectually dishonest and incoherent.

And that is the fundamental lesson, in this age of fake news. The internet was hardly the first method of purveying falsehoods. Historians such as Homer and Herodotus never let truth get in the way of a good story, and standards were no higher among the many ancient story tellers and scribes who contributed to the Bible. They all had agendas, as does Rick Warren. Their narratives often begin in fact, and then veer into myth and fantasy, as most evident in the book of Revelations. The whole Jesus story is so full of archtypes and "purpose-driven" fables that it is impossible at this point to separate anything out that might have had to do with an actual person.

No, the Bible is an amazing cultural document, from our brutish and benighted, yet hopeful, forebears. It documents substantial moral and intellectual progress on its pages, in its transition towards a more or less pacifist dispensation (though whether that was by choice, or by Roman force is another matter). We have continued that progress in the modern age by, ironically, leaving its fervid fantasies behind and basing our intellectual life on the firmer foundations of empiricism and humanistic empathy. Fundmentalists work double-time to "prove" that their literal views of God and the Bible are true, but they are doomed to failure. That general intellectual failure is seen both in their amazingly corrupt bargain with Donald Trump and the revanchist Republicans, and in the declining numbers of parishoners in the pews. The decline of religion has been far slower than many had imagined, given that its intellectual foundations have been defunct for centuries, but is ever so slowly coming to pass, however purposeful its pastors.

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Economics is All About Redistribution

And new economies need new methods of redistribution.

"Redistributionist" is a dirty word for the right, like gun-grabber, bleeding heart, tree hugger, and statist. Yet we are currently treated to the spectacle of a Republican congress redistributing income, foregone taxes, and wealth to the tune of trillions, upwards towards the wealthy and well-connected. What does repealing the estate tax have to do with putting manufacturing workers back to work, or solving the opioid crisis? Nothing, naturally.

In a state of nature, everyone has a job, which is to wrest bare sustenance from a rich, but complex and mystifying world. No one is "employed", since everyone is self-employed. And if you or the small family you rely on fail in that task, the end comes relentlessly. This represents the primitive "job guarantee". Everyone has a job, and failure to do that job is penalized harshly.

A developed economy has a different relation to work. Most people still live by their labor and wits, but there is so much wealth and technological prowess that most people's work is completely dispensible. Whether we have lawyers, rock bands, and toothpaste is a matter of significant, but not existential, importance. Even the food production system is so broadly based that no single person's work is existentially important to anyone, even themselves, given a modest safety net. And this system can support large numbers of people with no jobs at all, with ease. Yet income remains tied to work, despite the fact that we are moving to a future where the ratio of work needed to labor available is plunging, taking the labor market and incomes with it.

Who runs this system? Whom does it serve?

The trajectory of all this is quite clear. Those with wealth receive the benefits of industrial productivity, which is increasingly capital-based rather than labor-based. Those with only labor to offer, even of a specialized and educated nature, get increasingly locked out of the income / redistribution system. Whether this will lead to a Keynesian crisis of lack of overall income and spending is not clear. The rich spend much less than their income, as witnessed in the recent revelations of overseas tax shelters holding trillions. But so far, the Fed and other institutions (here federal deficits play a critical role) are working mightily to keep the system churning, despite the extensive replacement of good jobs with bad jobs, and consequent declining worker pay (relative to productivity). The system is no longer working- labor is no longer an effective way to keep everyone employed and paid in a manner that befits an advanced society as productive as ours.

This is what the current class war is all about. Republicans are shamelessly doubling down against the very voters who thought they were supporting a better deal on jobs and a restoration of the middle class. Rather, this administration is pulling every available lever to entrench the rich/capital and pull the rug out from under workers, leaving them even more powerless and destitute than before. Who would have thought?

What should we be doing instead? Some propose a basic income, whereby every citizen gets a small income, merely for existing. This neatly cuts the connection between labor and income, but has many problems. First, it is not a decent income, but extremely minimal. So it ends up being miserable welfare, at best, for the poor, and an unnecessary gift to the rich. Second, it does not provide the reciprocal benefits to society, or the individual, that work does. To let so much personal energy go to waste, paying people to do nothing, presents both a moral hazard an an enormous social loss. We can do much better.

Social Security could be cited as an example of a very successful basic income, given to all. But it is explicitly tied to previous work, and serves a specific social function of supporting those who can not work any more. Public services like roads, public buildings, scientific research, and the like are also good examples of implicit income given to all, and surely health care should come under the same universal service category. But income for working-age people represents something quite different- it is the source of their freedom, and represents their service to the larger society. We need to find a way to preserve and enhance those relations while gradually disentangling it from the semi-feudal work-as-labor model in capitalism.

Basically, people should be paid for a wider range of activities. For example, voting could be paid. Serving on juries could be paid, far better than currently. Sending children to school could be paid. Positive social activities should be paid for, not just classed as volunteer activities or duties. Perhaps the biggest opportunity is in the non-profit sector. If the government funded non-profits on a broad basis, while enforcing governance, management, and mission rules, we could end up with endless opportunities for public service and fairly paid work.

Where would the money for all this come from? The main actor in the economic system is, to be frank, the government, not the private sector. The government prints the money, runs the central bank, and has first rights to production such as defense spending, police functions, and other necessities (which becomes particularly clear in war-time). The fact that capitalist enterprise and competition has been a beneficial and innovative way to organize the private economy to provide the bulk of most people's needs does not mean this will always be the case or needs to be the sole form of work and income. As mentioned above, capital is concentrating and the need for labor is gradually uncoupling from the need to produce goods. But it shouldn't be uncoupled from doing social good. Indeed, the capitalist system has led to enormous social harm, and seems to have led to an appalling revolution in values, putting the greediest and most predatory people in the most successful positions.

Thanks to mind-boggling political and intellectual corruption by which they have gained power through a supposedly populist political movement, these arch-capitalists are right now trying to entrench their feudal powers over workers by relieving themselves of taxes, by empowering corporations to rule more of our lives, enhancing the legal immunities of corporations and relieving them of any public purpose (especially in the case of media companies), by weakening our democracy and the state, and by keeping the labor market weak and workers dependent on the private sector for income. It is the last gasp of a system that will either turn towards an even uglier feudalism, or be turned back and regulated into a progressively smaller share of our economic, social, and political lives.

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How Did I Get Here? (From the Primordial Soup)

Review of recent speculations about the origins of protein translation.

DNA may be the biological master code, but proteins are the soul of the machine- the shakers and makers that do everything, or almost everything, around a cell. Given how different these chemicals are in their roles and nature, how did they arise in evolution, and come to the indirect but essential relationship they have today? That is the story of translation and the origin of life. One of the exceptions to the current ubiquity of proteins in active roles is the ribosome- seat of protein synthesis- whose catalytic core is RNA throughout. Indeed the only molecule that can do it all- code for information, survive for reasonable lengths of time, (at least under acidic conditions), and do catalytic reactions, is RNA. This has led to a rough consensus that the very beginnings of chemical reproduction and life-ish chemistry began with an "RNA world". This does not exclude other chemicals, like amino acids and membrane-like lipids participating, but they would not be active in the central reproductive and coding operations that characterize life.

Envisioning the addition of DNA is easy. DNA is similar enough to RNA that there are only a couple of alterations needed to make this far more durable form. Copying is also similar enough to whatever mechanism RNA had to copy itself that the transition between the two is relatively straightforward to envision. And of course, RNA remains the universal carrier of transitory codes- between the durable DNA store and the translation system.

The modern flow of biological information: DNA->RNA->protein.

But getting from the RNA world to the protein world of today remains very hard to envision. There has been quite a bit of recent speculation on the matter, presenting several divergent stories for how this key transition came about. It is an interesting time to take a look at the field, even though it is possible that we may never have a definitive, or even consensus, answer.

The first interesting point to make is that copying RNA is intrinsically a perilous and questionable practice. We naturally think of nucleic acid copying with the model of DNA in mind: making the reverse complement by zipper-like Watson-Crick base pairing. This is the strongest form of nucleic acid interaction, and it takes helicases or other energy typically to pry the resulting duplex nucleic acid pair apart. The product of this reaction is also only a reverse complement, not a precise copy of the original. To copy a functional ribozyme, a second reverse complement would be needed to come up with a true copy of the original. This leads several authors to speculate about "direct" RNA copying systems, where the reverse complement is avoided, thereby sparing the system from these two perils, the first of which is actually the more serious. Reverse complementary sequences form a black hole of stable pairing, from which their originators would have a very difficult time extricating themselves under pre-biotic conditions.

One author (Taylor) proposes an obscure set of base pairing bonds, less strong than the Watson-Crick base pairs, that might form a basis for direct instead of reverse copying. This is highly speculative, and such effective pairing is not shown explicitly in the model, or elsewhere to my knowledge. Thankfully, this property plays no role in his model, which goes on to draw on tRNAs as models for an RNA-based adapter that might have originally brought their nucleotide ends to a ribozyme to carry out this parallel replication into direct RNA copies. This naturally leads to an evolution into carrying amino acids, and the replicative ribozyme transforms into a ribosome.

Proposal from Noller for a double-bridging system for RNA replication that uses a minimal system of adapter RNAs, which are then pre-adapted for later use in ribosomal protein synthesis. 

Another author (Noller) later proposed a similar RNA replication mechanism that produces direct copies at the cost of a similarly non-direct mechanism. In this theory, two identical tRNA-like structures serve as the intermediate bridge between the template and product RNAs in an early RNA replicase, cleverly using short (and normal Watson-Crick) base-pairing interactions to build the copied product RNA, triplet by triplet. Again, the proposal of an indirect (not zippering basepair-mediated) mechanism solves the problems of making reverse complement copies and two-stage copying, at the cost of substantial complexity. But it also obviously lays the foundation of the future ribosome, which uses a similarly indirect (tRNA) means to bring amino acids together bit by bit as directed by a coding RNA template.

Not so fast, claims another group (Harish and Caetano-Anolles). They do an exhaustive analysis of the phylogenetic history of all the RNA and protein components of the ribosome, and come to the somewhat startling conclusion that proteins were there from the very start, co-evolving with the ribosomal core and playing roles in the origin of translation. They allude to non-ribosomal peptide synthesis as a possible source for the early portions of this partnership, which seems under-developed. Phylogenetic analysis is notoriously murky at these early times, especially using RNA sequences, and can be confused with conserved functionality. Perhaps most pursuasive, however, is their specific set of findings that various protein and RNA portions of the ribosome each have, as one would expect, a variety of different ages, and that the oldest protein portion is in contact with the oldest RNA portion, at the mRNA decoding and ratcheting region. This implies not only that proteins were very early partners in whatever this ribozyme was at the time, but also that the peptidyl transfer center, previously thought to be the most ancient heart of the ribosome, only came later. They suggest that this complex was at the time an RNA replicase, but avoid saying much about it.

This raises more insistent questions about how useful, large, and ultimately conserved proteins could be devised at a time before the ribosome arrived, and also, if proteins were present, why weren't their superior catalytic capabilities used to engineer the (later-arriving) peptidyl transferase site, instead of the RNA-based mechanism that still exists?

Lastly, a fourth proposal (Ma) takes another approach to the bridging RNA system, proposing that small RNAs were capable of binding amino acids from very early times, and could have been used for a primitive form of templated protein synthesis. Indeed, they may have started out as RNA-bound co-factors for special ribozyme reactions, rather than as units for peptide synthesis at all. But the amino acid carriers then became standardized, and once they exposed an anticodon, could be harnessed into templated protein synthesis, given some energy, perhaps from the "charged" state by which their amino acids were attached. This theory is a tRNA-first class of theory, and leaves a great deal unsaid and unaccounted for, yet has the virtue of simplicity, plus the recognition that amino acids were common in the prebiotic soup, and likely played some kind of important role from early times.

As one can tell, this field is in ferment, with very interesting ideas deployed to explain a momentous transition of which we can see (and feel and experience) the consequences, but have only the most speculative view of its ingredients, key problems, and context. Origin of life research is a little like string theory in that respect, with little hope of experimental validation, premised on a faith that drawing out the consequences of what is known about the world must, (with a little guessing about what is not known), clarify a world that is at its heart remorselessly logical.

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Travels up the Cilium, and Back Down Again

Cilia are far more than wavy arms.  They are key sensory organs for most cells and have complex internal dynamics.

Cilia are the fuzz of Paramecia, and the sweepers of our respiratory system. They can be flagella, but are structurally unrelated to bacterial flagella. They are yet another eukaryotic innovation, bound by a membrane and composed of a microtubule bundle with complex boundary and transport mechanisms to construct themselves and provide unique functions. While some cells have lots of cilia, virtually all eukaryotic cells have at least one, and that one is called the primary cilium. It arises from the microtubule organizing center left over after cell division, which then migrates to the cell surface (via a vesicle intermediate) and grows a new bundle of microtubules pointed outside to create a key sensory organ. Indeed, primary cilia are the eyes, ears and noses of many eukaryotic cells.

Comb jellies move using cilia.

The cilium membrane is kept distinct from the bulk membrane of the cell via a collar or "necklace" of proteins around the base, implying special transport mechanisms for membrane components as well as for the many internal components needed to build and maintain cilia. This allows various signaling molecules to specialize to the cilium, forming a concentrated and specialized sensory platform.

For example, the photoreceptors in our retinas sit inside modified primary cilia, elaborated and evolved from the more primitive sensory system common to all eukaryotic cells. Fat cells have a primary cilium that displays G-protein coupled signal receptors that receive status updates from the body, and are defective in at least one genetic syndrome of obesity. Other genetic syndromes of ciliary function result in developmental defects, kidney disease, diabetes, and cancer.

The primary cilium is a product of the centriole or MTOC previously used in cell division.

A recent paper (review) investigated the intgernal dynamics that makes all this possible, a train system of cargo carriers that travel up and down the microtubule bundles of cilia. The microtubules are oriented in a single direction, minus at the base to plus at the tip. Two classes of motor proteins go in opposite directions, kinesins going up towards the plus end, or anterograde, and dyneins going in opposite fashion, towards the base, or retrograde. How cargoes attach themselves to these motors, and how their transport is regulated, makes up a very interesting field of study.

This paper observed the transit time of transport carrier complexes (IFT) at the tip, before heading back down to the cilium base.

These researchers used a fluorescent technique to look at individual cargoes as they were making this trip. If cargoes are made fluorescent, and then most of them are bleached out by overexposure, then a few remaining ones can be tracked. Their questions were mainly about how long these materials spent at the tip, and how the decision was made to reverse course. The operative acronym here is IFT, for intra-flagellar transport. Multiple cargoes seem to gang up into literal trains, which seems to depend a special coupling mechanism. For example, the authors labeled one of these dedicated transport proteins, called intraflagellar transport 27, or IFT27. They found that it takes about three seconds for this protein to hold up at the tip before being re-organized into a retrograde train. One of the cargoes being carried up the cilium is dynein, the motor required for all the return trips.

Experimental image set, showing time slices (going down). The fluorescent train comes up the cilium (towards the right) a first, then waits around for a couple of seconds at the tip, before dissociated fluorescent components start their return trips (on two different train sets, here) going back towards the left.

On the other hand, kinesin, which powers the trip up the cilium, does not get actively carried back down, but diffuses back, which is ten times slower. The authors suggest that this may be the rate limiting step restricting cilium length, since as the cilium grows, more of the kinesin is clogging its length, and less is available at the base to serve new anterograde trains. but since kinesin is expressed cytoplasm-wide, this is not an entirely compelling speculation.

In contrast to the train protein tracked above, fluorescently labeled kinesin powers its way up the cilium, but then dilly-dallies about, diffusing slowly back down without joining any powered trains.

What regulates all this? The motors and train proteins are nucleotide binders of various sorts, powered by ATP or GTP, so there is ample precedent for fine regulation using such systems. Perhaps just coming to the (+) end of a microtubule fiber sets switches in the kinesin and train proteins, priming them for the return conformation. What turns the dyneins on at the right time, and what regulates cargo attachment/detachment is still a mystery, however. As for cargo proteins like signaling receptors, some are known to have special targeting sequences which let them bind to the vicinity of the ciliary base, where they are transferred to the IFT train system. Others are sent to the primary cilium via the golgi protein sorting and vesicle generation system. If the targeting is high enough in affinity, such receptors can be essentially vacuumed from the rest of the cell and localized entirely to the cilium, thereby explaining the extreme localization/specialization of some signaling pathways and receptors to the primary cilium.

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