The gene for ... ?

Just how do they pack a human into 23,000 genes?

An interesting aspect of biology in this "post-genomic" age is how it has frustrated many researchers. Here we had expected genes "for" alcoholism, schizophrenia, autism, and all the other ills that ail us, but the road to find them has been rocky, tortuous, and has, in many cases, petered out to nothing. It turns out that genomes are complicated and don't come with user manuals. They didn't develop over evolutionary time in tidy ways that generate bodies and behaviors linearly from the DNA. Fruit flies have 15,000 genes, yeast cells have 6,000, and bacteria have 3,000. Most human genes are shared with bananas (i.e. the encoded proteins would function interchangeably). 99% of our DNA is shared with chimpanzees. So what makes us different, and oh-so-much better?

For every condition like eye color that can be attributed to simple mendelian variation in one or a couple of genes, there are a multitude of other conditions whose origin is not simple, but arises from the network of interaction of many genes. Coat types in dogs is another example of simple genetics, outlined in a very nice paper recently, where three genes suffice to explain most of the variation in dog hair types, from short/smooth (the wild-type) to curly, long, wavy, and wiry:

Combinations of novel alleles at three genes (FGF5, RSPO2, and KRT71) create seven different coat phenotypes: (A) short hair; (B) wire hair; (C) "curly-wire" hair; (D) long hair; (E) long, soft hair with furnishings; (F) long, curly hair; and (G) long, curly hair with furnishings.

But most aspects of biology are not so simple. Autism is the example I will focus on most, though similar observations apply to cancer, schizophrenia, personality/temperament, and on down the list of interesting and important conditions/traits.

Genes function in complex networks of regulation, both from the upstream direction of receiving regulatory signals, and downstream in the gene product's (a protein, usually) modification by other systems like phosphorylation and degradation, to eventual roles in combination with other gene products. It's all a big mess of interacting effects. What we see as the ultimate phenotype is the end result of complex mechanisms and lengthy development. Just as a cello has only four strings but an infinitude of musical expression, so genes can be played in different tissues, at different times, and in different volumes to accomplish many tasks.

For example, one set of genes, BMP1 to 20, (bone morphogenic protein), is an evolutionarily related (i.e. duplicated and diverged multiple times) family encoding small proteins that induce developmental events, like formation of cartilage and bone, when secreted by nearby cells. BMP4 is used repeatedly through development to induce notochord formation, eye formation, bone, and tooth formation, and pituitary formation, among others. To quote from one resource:

"Defects in BMP4 are the cause of microphthalmia syndromic type 6 (MCOPS6) also known as microphthalmia and pituitary anomalies or microphthalmia with brain and digit developmental anomalies. Microphthalmia is a clinically heterogeneous disorder of eye formation, ranging from small size of a single eye to complete bilateral absence of ocular tissues (anophthalmia). In many cases, microphthalmia/anophthalmia occurs in association with syndromes that include non-ocular abnormalities. MCOPS6 is characterized by microphthalmia/anophthalmia associated with facial, genital, skeletal, neurologic and endocrine anomalies."

Not a simple story, is it? BMP4 is used, reused, and reused again for similar purposes all over the body. A drug that inhibits its action would have devastating effects, though if that drug could closely control the timing and place of its effects, it might be very useful. That is one of the many challenges of drug development today.

Conversely, a single trait can be composed of the work of many genes. Down syndrome results from the duplication of an entire chromosome- many genes with slight increments in amount of product produced seems to cause a wide spectrum of altered traits. Autism seems similarly be be the consequence of the action of many genes, defects in any one of which can have similar effects. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has strong heritability (70% to 90% estimated), yet searches for the responsible genes have come up with not one, but scores of genes. I'll focus on one study that contributes to this story: "Efforts to map disease genes using linkage analysis have found evidence for autism loci on 20 different chromosomes." That is quite a statement, considering that we only have 24 chromosomes [a reader helpfully points out we have only 23!].

This paper used high-tech genomics to look for tiny deletions and other genetic variations throughout the genomes of families afflicted with ASD. Out of 195 autism patients and 196 controls, they found variants in 14 patients versus 2 in the control set. All the variants were heterozygous, indicating that, like in Downs, small increments or decrements in gene function may be responsible, with one normal gene copy remaining in each case. Some of the genes were expressed in the brain, while others were known to participate in retardation disorders, and others have little known about them.

Two other observations stand out. First is that most of these small genomic duplications or deletions are novel- they happened recently, and being deleterious, will die out rapidly as well. Autism "runs" in some families, but most cases result from spontaneous defects in a wide variety of genes. Second is the large number of genes estimated to be in this pool of possible ASD causers- at least 29 found so far between this and other studies, with more to come as more families are analyzed with ever more comprehensive methods. This is relevant to the rate of occurrence of this disorder, which is very high for genetic disorders, and possibly rising. It is known that autism rates go up dramatically for children of older parents.

So ASD seems to be the result of rare defects in any of numerous genes, many known to be involved in synapse formation and activity. It might be that an over-arching pathway of early brain development channels many genetic problems into the same syndrome, much as many problems with cars result in the common syndrome of "it won't start". Thus to think of genes "for" such diseases is problematic, given the complicated relations. There appears to be a developmental process that generates the syndrome, driven by many genes and susceptible to many distinct defects. And the case of ASD doesn't even touch on the separate issue of genetic variants that individually have tiny phenotypic effects on a trait, (such as height, for instance), but combine with many others to determine the overall trait quantitatively.

More deeply, for the genome at large, it isn't size that matters. Soybeans have almost three times the number of genes we have (though one-third the overall amount of DNA). It is how you use what you've got, in complex networks of regulation, combination, and reuse that makes a brain out of a bunch of cells. As the old Sun slogan had it, the network is the computer.

• A relevant review of genome-wide association studies of "disease genes."
• Climate disasters, a tad overdrawn.
• The casually callous and obtuse David Brooks does in health care.
• Does the Economist know economics?

Treating patent addiction

Is the pharmaceutical patent system working for us, or against us?

An interesting web-book by Dean Baker makes the case that our government is socialist- but for the benefit of the rich rather than the poor. The general case has quite a bit going for it, with several trenchant points, though others are pretty weak, such as Baker's discussion of the role of the Federal Reserve.

Baker hints that there are better ways of fighting inflation than raising interest rates. And he maintains that raised rates have their main effect in cutting employment, putting the poor out of work, insinuating that this is some nafarious soak-the-poor policy. I'm not so sure. Raised interest rates raise the price of money and restrict new loans, which are the primary motor of money creation (and of economic activity, in our fallen age) and seem to efficiently combat the core issues of inflation. That this disproportionately hurts those on the bottom rung of the ladder is an automatic consequence of the overall capitalist structure of the economy, not any special property of Fed action. Could the Fed collect dollar bills and burn them? I'm not so sure, for who would give them up without compensation? Baker doesn't actually lay out his alternative plan, (other than direct wage and price controls, which are a singularly wretched tool), probably with good reason.

At any rate, Baker does present one fascinating case study- of the drug industry- which I think is on much firmer ground. To summarize, the current major pharmaceutical industry makes its money from the 20 year patent. Once a compound is discovered and filed for a patent, the clock starts ticking on this government-granted license to sell the resulting drug for whatever the company wishes to charge. (This is typically a function purely of maximizing the product of price times sales into what they imagine the market will bear, rather than recouping actual costs of research and production, or competing against other producers). This system gives drug companies huge potential incentives to create important drugs that they hope become a standard of care, with high resulting market demand.

Drug companies say that they spend an average of $800 million to bring a new drug to market, so their standard of sovency has become the "blockbuster" drug with annual revenues over $1 billion. This system has served the US well in many respects, with leading-edge pharmaceutical research, a continuous flow of new drugs in the pipeline, and a vibrant generic industry to offer rapid price reductions once drugs go off patent.

On the other hand, the system is also riddled with inefficiencies and incentives contrary to the common good. The $800 million figure is, I believe, quite inflated, since much of the work of the drug industry is devoted to making drugs with modest beneficial effects- drugs that may slightly ameliorate chronic conditions like depression, diabetes, or Alzheimer's disease. These drugs are can be extremely difficult to test because their small effect size requires large populations for trials, followed by ornate, if not ambiguous, statistics. Consider penicillin- its ability to cure infections was immediately apparent, and did not require large trials with thousands of patients.

In comparison, consider a drug like donepezil for Alzheimer's disease. It improves cognition slightly for a few months, costs ~$220 per month (still under patent in the US). Numerous studies have been done, covering thousands of patients. (The Cochrane meta-analysis says "23 trials are included, involving 5272 participants"). They typically show just-detectable benefits, which, calculated in cost-of-care terms offers no discernable benefit (cost of drug vs cost of increased care of untreated Alzheimer's sufferers).

Not only that, but each other drug company that wants a part of the action makes a copy-cat drug with slightly different chemistry and similarly marginal benefits, requiring similarly exhaustive and expensive trials to gain FDA approval. And then the drug companies complain that that the FDA is too restrictive! But the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, or in our government bureaucracies, but in the quality of the drugs being created.

The drug industry has a big problem right now- its pipelines are drying up, despite the huge advances in molecular biology and genomics over the last few decades. As the technology of drug discovery is taking quantum leaps in efficiency and comprehensiveness, there seem to be fewer drugs coming out the other end. This might be due to a true shortage of targets- we only have 23,000 genes, after all, and many of their products have multiple functions, making drug-based inhibition a perilous business, frought with side-effects. There may just be a limited number of ways to use small molecules to interfere with human biology.

New drugs approved (blue- formulations and combinations,

red- underlying novel molecular entities)

On the other hand, the problem might also be institutional in the pharamaceutical industry. To make money, drug companies have to sell lots of drugs. That means large markets and common diseases, hopefully chronic. But not all diseases are chronic or common, or afflict people with ability to pay. Diseases of the third world are notoriously under-researched and so-called "orphan diseases" and infectious (i.e. acute) diseases are likewise underfunded. Rather than do innovative research in to basic disease mechanisms, drug companies spend much of their money making copy-cat drugs in popular categories (think cholesterol reduction, acid reflux, depression, erectile dysfunction). And, of course, drug companies also spend roughly twice as much money marketing drugs than in researching them.

I think both problems are serious and getting worse. Viagra offers an interesting example. This drug was discovered serendipitously when Pfizer researchers looking for drugs for angina and hypertension, (classic categories for profitable drug hunting), all based on publically funded research on NO2 signalling, discovered a completely unexpected effect of one candidate. Now several companies have created similar drugs and great happiness has been rendered to millions. But note that this drug was found by accident, and the condition was not even on the company's radar screen. A double-accident plus a lot of publically funded research brought us this new drug category, which has made drug companies three billion dollars annually for a decade.

Does society really have to pay these exorbitant prices for such modest effort and accidental benefits? Baker claims that the excess cost of the drug patenting system over making all drugs generic from the start is roughly $400 billion per year. Is that a fair price for the research and market motivation that the current system gives us? Remember that the entire NIH, upon whose basic research virtually all pharmaceutical innovations depend in whole or in part, only costs $30 billion annually, less than one-tenth the industry figure.

Baker makes a proposal that with a doubling of the NIH buget to replace the research and development functions of the pharmaceutical industry, including modest prize incentives for development successes, we could gain all the benefits of the current pharmaceutical industry and more (i.e. targeting diseases more equitably, and focusing on significant rather than on marginal effectiveness), for a small fraction of the societal cost. I can't but agree that this is a very reasonable idea.

Indeed, the NIH is already dipping its toes into this pool of drug development, setting up programs to develop drugs for neglected diseases, one sector where our current system is AWOL. If corporate neglect where purely a function of the prevalence and harm of each respective malady, this market structure might be defensible. But often it is a function of the prospective length of treatment, (hopefully forever), the depth of the prospective patient's pockets, and prospective prevalence as juiced by energetic "informational" campaigns for what may have been unknown or minor maladies.

The clamor for buying drugs in Canada has been a sorry commentary on the dysfunction of our patent and drug system. The domestic drug industry uses its corrupt political influence to induce the government to pay whatever the patent holders ask, even for such enormous government programs as Medicare. Canada, not beholden to these companies, and given to more rational social policy generally, does negotiate prices down, attracting the interest of US consumers saddled with uncontrolled costs. Then US politicians, frustrated with their own corruption, get on the bandwagon, either cynically to gain a few votes, or possibly as a way to indirectly pressure the domestic drug industry to moderate prices. It's an insane way to get to where we should be going, which is to rethink the whole rationale of the patented drug sector.

This sector is just one example of the inefficiencies in our sclerotic political-economic system that is saddled with enormous legacies of infrastructure and vested interests as we enter this new century and try to battle our way to a better future. Current Senate rules, for instance, allow Senators representing barely 12% of the population to block any action. Deliberation is one thing, gridlock is another.

1. Kaufman M. Decline in new drugs raise concerns: FDA approvals are lowest in a decade. Wash Post. 2002; Nov 18:A1
2. Pollack A. Despite billions for discoveries, pipeline of drugs is far from full. N Y Times. 2002; Apr 19:C1.
3. Dyer G. Anaemic patient needs to take its medicine: investors have fallen out of love with an industry with fewer products in the pipeline. Financ Times. 2003; Apr 16:2.

• Others have problems with the drug industry too.
• Meanwhile, military health care remains abysmal.
• Religion is natural, after all.
• Gosh- another atheist dilemma.
• Just how does Goldman mint its gold? (But also here.)
• For the love of Islam!
• Another interesting story on synaesthesia, a fascinating window into consciousness and yet another argument against souls, versus a rather fallible circuitry.

The warrior religion

Brief review of Glubb's history of early Islam

I am glad to report finding yet another gem in the hoary stacks of the local Catholic library, this time a history of early Islam, The Great Arab Conquests, by Lietenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb (string of British orders & honors omitted here), 1963. If Amazon is to be believed, this book is out of print, and not only that, but its title was swiped by another author in 2007. This is most unfortunate, since Glubb's work is fabulous- exceedingly well written, frank, pre-politically correct, yet full of sympathy for his subject. Glubb spent his career in the Middle East, serving in both world wars and running the Arab legion, later part of the Jordanian military. He takes particular pride in clearing up a few scholarly confusions using his intimate knowledge of the ground in the Middle East, and of its military uses.

The book focuses on the first fifty years of Islam, retelling the story of Muhammad's life, background, and call, then going on to detail the careers of the first five khalifs ("successors"). Glubb is a military man and focuses on the military aspects of the story, with excellent maps throughout. But as a long-time associate of Arabs, Bedouins, and people throughout the Middle East, he also evinces sensitivity and admiration for their cultures, some of which have persisted with little change from the seventh century. Military affairs were central to the early history of Islam, and to the mindset of Muslims of that time, so this focus is incisive as well as stimulating.

One thing to note is that the quality of the khalifs was highly variable, from the high of Abu Bekr who directly followed Muhammad, to the pathetic impotence of Ali ibn abi Talib, who, along with three others of the first five, was assassinated. Glubb's portrait gives precious little evidence supporting the many partisans of Ali (Shia, or Shiatu Ali), vociferous as they are, since despite having high religious credentials and the closest personal connections with Muhammed, Ali was evidently passed over for the khalifate several times for what ultimately proved to be quite good reasons.

I won't try to retell the whole story, but just say that if you are interested in this history, you could hardly do better that this presentation, be it ever so hard to find! Glubb also wrote a sequel and several other books on the Arab cultures and his experiences.

Let me cite a few of the more striking passages, indicating Glubb's view of Islam and our relations to it.

Speaking of the first two khalifs,

We have already seen that almost the last act of Abu Bekr was to receive Muthanna ibn Haritha, who had ridden in hot haste from the Euphrates to beg for help on the neglected Persian front. The first act of Umar ibn al Khattab on assuming the Khalifate had been to dismiss Khalid ibn al Waleed from the supreme command in Syria. The second has been, as the dying Abu Bekr had ordered, ro raise a new levy for Iraq. Volunteers were at first slow in coming forward, for the Persians seem to have enjoyed the reputation of being more formidable than the Byzantines in war. As a result, recruiting proceeded by slowly, even though Muthanna himself made a speech in the mosque calling for assistance, and describing the immense plunder obtainable by those who followed the path of God and fought against the fire-worshippers. p. 160

In the book's conclusion...

The momentum of the great conquests had been so tremendous that they swept irresistibly forward without organization, without pay, without plans, and without orders. They constitute a perpetual warning to technically advanced nations who rely for their defense on scientific progress rather than the human spirit.

...

A cosmopolitan empire, with subjects professing different religions, could not constitute a devoted and homogeneous people of high morale, such as the Central Arabians had been twenty-five years earlier. p.359

Since the seventh century, many Muslim state have, at various times, established efficient legal systems and police forces, rendering private retaliation unnecessary, but the idea of revenge dies hard. In a wider sense, the right, and even the duty, of revenge has survived all modern reforms, for as a result of these early origins, it has become an accepted moral principle. This, it seems to be, is one of the directions in which Christianity differs most from Islam. Christians are never entitled to return evil for evil. In Islam, retaliation is a right, in some cases being even regarded as a moral duty. p. 367

Particularly is it noticeable that the idea of government by groups of men- cabinets, parliaments or committees- has no precedent at all in Arab history. Their idea of government is always one man. In theory he is chosen by the people. He must be humble, accessible, benevolent, pious and hospitable. Arrogant despots cannot be tolerated but nevertheless executive power must be vested in one man alone. All these traditions can be traced from the seventh century.

At various times since 1918, the Western Powers have painstakingly built up democratic, elective institutions in the countries of the Middle East. In every case, within a few years, these constitutions have collapsed and military dictators have assumed power. Perhaps this is not to be wondered at, for the military dictator is nearer the time-honoured Arab tradition than is Western Democracy. p.369

And this last parting shot:

This long-standing rivalry between Christians and Muslims has been due to political and geographical accident rather than to basic religious differences. Now that materialist atheism is challenging all spiritual values, the two religions might well make common cause against those who deny the existence of God altogether. There is, I believe, an immense field in which the two could co-operate. p. 371

One observation that struck me was the relation of Islam to power. Humans worship power- that is an unfortunate, but consistent, part of our nature (with obvious Darwinian origins). Power is an aphrodisiac to women, the source of male status, and the goal of youthful striving and careerist competition. Religion is little more than an expression of this emotion in over-wrought terms, since God is all-powerful, Jesus is Lord, and prayers and beseeching are our mode of intercession/intercourse with the imaginary beings.

Islam as refined this simple fact of human nature to the highest possible pitch, instituting and naming itself by universal submission to Allah who is great, while at the same time borrowing a bit of that greatness and demanding submission from all non-Muslims as a matter of right, whether the Dhimmi, (Christians and Jews), who are made second class citizens, or the outright infidels, who are offered conversion or death.

That is why terrorism works. The early Muslims used terror repeatedly, in quelling dissent in Medina under Muhammad, and in displaying power to quell resistance in the early conquests, when they didn't have the manpower to fully occupy the countryside (Glubb gives vivid examples in the conquest of Egypt). Terror cheaply communicates raw power and extreme dedication to one's cause, regardless of legitimacy or aims. And people respect, if not worship, power, combining a natural ability to tell which way the wind blows with a true respect for such dedication and will power. As Reagan said, "Nothing succeeds like success."

• Religion and murder
• Socialism in the US
• Johnny Cash's politics

Gray matter talks

New work on how the brain computes speech production.

A recent issue of Science had a few interesting articles on neuroscience, including one on how Broca's area in the brain processes language. But another article on functional brain imaging brought up a factoid that makes for an interesting introduction:

"Questions about functional segregation are constrained by the resolution of fMRI. For example, a voxel (volume element of several mm cubed) contains on average 5.5 million neurons, 10e10 synapses, 22 km of dendrites, and 220 km of axons."

Wow- I didn't know the brain was quite so dense. So why aren't we smarter? Honestly, one gets the impression that the brain is not very efficiently designed. No wonder vast regions of the brain can be destroyed in dementia before much of a deficit is noticed.

The current work (accompanied by a review) has its origin in rare people who have epilepsy and who get the unnerving procedure of having electrodes stuck into their brains. I have no idea why such an invasive test is done, but for Sahin et al., it was a godsend, allowing them to do the kind of electrophysiology normally restricted to other animals such as monkeys, rats, and cats. Such work has told us huge amounts about the visual system and other brain circuits, but cats can't talk, so such work can't tell us much about that human ability.

Image of Broca's area and fMRI activation by a speech task, in patient A.

Broca's area and a few others are well-known to be involved in speech production, by way of strokes and other lesions that specifically affect those abilities. But how does it work? Is processing sequential, like the visual system, where a hierarchy of processing takes signals from raw retinal input to various color, edge, motion, and shape detection, up to object recognition? Or is language different, capable of being processed in a more parallel fashion, with all elements (word choice, grammar, phoneme production) coming together at once?

Patient A, with the surface of Broca's area exposed and electrode paths indicated.

This paper supports the former model, finding sub-locations in Broca's area that activate during specific stages of speech production, indicating that, while the full region involved is far smaller than the huge areas devoted to visual scene interpretation, it is also hierarchically arranged, with computations happening sequentially.

Electrophysiology like this is still a pretty quaint and brutal way to look at the brain. Electrodes, resembling dipsticks, are stuck right into the grey matter, with the hope that not too many cells are killed, no blood vessels are blown, and that whatever neurons are near the active surfaces of the electrode give off enough electrical buzz for detection (called a local field potential). Each electrode has several channels (i.e. openings) along its length, so you can listen in to several discrete depths once it is inserted.

Illustration of probe location, with channels indicated in yellow.

The experiment was to cue the patient with a fill-in-the-blank sentence, such as "Yesterday, they ____" plus a generic word to fill in, such as "to walk", or "to think". The patient had the task of computing the right form of the verb (walked, thought) and speaking it silently. (How speaking silently actually works in these experiments is a little hard to understand.) The observation was that reading the cue sentence correlated with a small activation near the Broca area electrodes, while producing the requisite word correlated with much larger activations.

Mix of electrode traces from a few channels. The sentence with blank is presented at the cue time, and the word to be filled in is presented at the target time zero milliseconds (ms). The colored arrows point to the segments discussed below at 200, 320, and 450 ms.

The second observation was that the activations related to speech production were complex, taking place over roughly 600 milliseconds (ms), with distinct peaks and troughs at 200, 320, and 450 ms after presentation of the fill-in word, depending on the channel and electrode location. The point of the experiment was to vary the fill-in words such that more or less complex processing demands could be correlated with more or less complex electrophysiology during these periods of proccessing in Broca's area.

The strategy is much like trying to figure out how a computer works by holding a few electrodes to a computer chip while it is working- a ludicrously difficult and primitive approach to reverse engineering. But it is all we've got for the moment, until functional imaging and non-invasive EEG technologies reach higher resolution. The observations are thus correspondingly crude- that the processing of incipient speech can be broken down into sequential phases (three in this paper) of word identification, inflection processing, and phonology processing. Here is the variation they observe in word identification:

Here, the brown curve around 200 ms is higher for rare words (no examples given) than for common words (but not for short vs long, or multi-syllable vs monosyllable), indicating that this activity is related to word identification.

These curves at 320 ms indicate variation in response to verbal inflection processing- past tenses, irregular forms, etc. "Read" is the control, with no fill-in work. The patient just reads the sentence. "Null-inflect" is when a fill-in is asked for, but the proper form happens to be the same as what is cued, so there is no phonological processing, only implicit grammatical/inflection processing (Every day they ____ [walk]). And "overt" is when the fill-in demands both grammatical processing and changes to the word (suffix or change in form). (Yesterday they ____ [walk]). The experiments were run repeatedly, with flashed cards and randomized orders, with the curves reflecting averages, and curve differences given P-values of 0.01 or less.

Curves at 450 ms (note the different channel (depth) used) correlate with processing for sound construction- related to number of syllables, changes in word form, etc.

The author's conclusions are that they have dissected some aspects of speech production based on where their electrodes penetrated the patient's brains and the timing of observed electrical events, coupled with experimental variation of tasks given to the patients. While most of this was surely known indirectly, based on the many patients with known defects of Broca's and other areas from strokes and other ailments, seeing this activity and its variations in real time is certainly unprecedented, and will contribute to ongoing refinement of the functional mapping of the brain, which, as noted above, has so very far yet to go.

As a stutterer, this is fascinating, and I hope that far more is learned about the nature of speech construction, to the point that the miswiring involved in stuttering might be diagnosed (if not fixed). And of course it also indicates yet again that our behaviors are not magical products of souls, but are computational products of brains.

• Holy App! The universal translator is coming ... to your iPhone.
• Green trade?
• A classic ethical dilemma in skepticism.
• Mr. Deity does the trinity
• A taste of Sir Glubb
• Another interesting optical illusion

Management, or feudalism?

How management captured the economy, and what we can do about it.

Americans are so cowed by this point that they hardly register a flicker of resentment when Wall Street executives give themselves billions in bonuses after flushing trillions down the drain and saying a begrudging "thank you" for more trillions in government life support. How did we come to this pass?

One of the great changes in the last 50 years has been the broadening of stock ownership. Out with the smoke filled rooms and blue-chip bespoke trading, in with mutual funds, etrade, and all-in dot-com stock investing. This has been great in many ways, putting more money to work in productive enterprises and earning regular people substantial gains (at times, at least).

But it also had the paradoxical effect of diluting ownership of corporations. When everyone owns a company, no one does. And management eventually learned what this meant- that they could run their companies as they wished, subject only to the whims of stock "analysts", but not to their true owners, who might have a longer-term interest. Boards of directors, previously direct representatives of the shareholders, now became hand-picked cronies of the management, ready to "motivate" management with lavish pay in an arms race of executive generosity.

The Reagan era helped generate the latest edition of this culture, claiming that America's greatness lay in its executives, and its economic prospects in trickle-down economics. Cultural progress emanated from the boardroom, not from the shop floor. Unions were there to be broken, not negotiated with. While the cult of entrepreneurialism remains a positive aspect of this culture, the cults of MBA-ism, management consulting, cronyism, and open corruption in boardrooms and in government lobbying has been anything but. And the bonuses and guaranteed stock options now being paid out of tottering or under-water balance sheets clarifies just what management meant by that "motivation" that was supposed to tie them to market "discipline".

It's a mess, and a recent article in the New Yorker article about a few corporate do-gooders who urge large stockholders (pension funds, mutual funds) to militate against a few of these excesses was nice, but far, far short of what is needed. We need a revolution in corporate governance that recognizes the limitations of the new corporate ownership model where some benefits are shared broadly, but many (sometimes most) are concentrated in the hands of a feudal management, which is left by the current owning, legal, and cultural regime to run its show unmolested, for its own benefit.

In the economics literature, this is called the agency problem, and pervades all sorts of interactions. We hire someone to do something for us, like build a wall. This requires supervision, but how can we comprehensively supervise the process without giving up and doing it ourselves? We can't. At some point, one has to either have faith that the person hired is honorable and will not make hidden errors, or one has to delay the payment so much that any errors become apparent prior to payment, perhaps postponing payment for 25 years or more. The latter is neither practical or palatable, so we put up with uncertainty in contractors, paying them before we really know the quality of their work.

With corporations, the agency problem is likewise enormous, and getting bigger all the time as ownership dilutes and legal protections, often legislated from the courts, expand. Specifically, the problem boils down to a few points:

1. Management is overly free of supervision by owners, leading to orgies of empire-building, vanity projects, short-term stock pumping, political freelancing, and other problems.

2. Management is paid in an undisciplined way, neither accounting for true long-term impact, nor being immediately subject to a coherent system of checks and balances. The "labor market" for executives is not just inefficient, but riddled with corruption.

3. Management meddles in government by lobbying, attaining disporportinate influence. The recent ruckus over the Chamber of Commerce only shines a brief and flitting light on this cancer in the body politic.

Corporations are creations of the state. They are not free associations of citizens in the classic sense, but are a special class of association (by charter) with several government sanctioned benefits, including limited liability, special tax structures, separate legal personality, regulatory services (not to mention bailout services), and more. Thus it is entirely reasonable, contra the supreme court, to restrict the free speech "rights" of corporations (i.e. their right to corrupt the political process by lobbying and political activism by management with corporate funds).

So we don't have to put up with corporate lobbying, corporate political donations, or corporate meddling in the political process. We don't need Wall Street bankers designing their own bailouts, and we don't need health "insurers" telling us whether we can or can not legislate health insurance reform.

Secondly, corporate governance needs to be reformed in a basic way. Pay must of course be reformed to reflect long-term incentives and the more prosaic recognition that management skill is neither as rare nor Empyrean as often portrayed by managers. But this will never happen while management appoints its own overseers. While ideally, corporate democracy would be re-established with true control by shareholders, this is impossible at the current levels of dilution, and at the level of apathy appropriate to the reciprocal form of dilution- which is to say that each individual investor in vehicles like pension funds and mutual funds has miniscule levels of any particular stock and thus miniscule interest in its governance. So some other mechanism is needed to guard the public good along with the shareholder interest.

I would recommend addition of a public board to all public corporations. This board would be legally superior to the private board constituted by current rules, able to fire that board and managment, run shareholder elections, and otherwise control the corporation in times of urgency. Such a board would in normal times represent the government and regulatory interests, keeping an eye on the company's affairs. Two of its members would attend private board meetings, and vice versa as well. Extra activity of this public board (beyond monitoring and regulation) would be decided by shareholders in a simple voting system, where rather than vote for specific people, (such as nominees of the management to a private board), votes would be for a level of confidence, perhaps from one to five.

In this way, shareholders would have a simple and direct way to register general concern with the enterprise, which in turn would tell this public board, appointed by the chartering government, (or the federal government for inter-state and international corporations), to either (#5) stay out of the affairs of the company, it is doing just fine, or (#1) take all actions necessary to correct a bad situation and right the affairs of a problematic management.

This idea recognizes that most corporations behave appropriately most of the time. It adds a check in cases of problems where a public board can be automatically activated at shareholder discretion, expressed in a straightforward way that gets around the difficulties of evaluating particular candidates and allows a general no-confidence attitude by shareholders to result in action to discipline management and resolve the situation. Such boards could also aid in the liquidation of businesses the government is otherwise reluctant to touch (see Lehman).

Naturally, there would need to be rules of various sorts to stipulate the kind of public boards that could be formed, insulated from political as well as corporate influence, perhaps diversified by origin in the civil service, academy, party affiliation and private sector. It would not be a board of expertise, but one of oversight, able to hire new executives and private board members in extreme circumstances, and to investigate the other actors. Members would be paid minimally, perhaps by the chartering institution or by general fees, similar to how the FDIC is funded.

There may be many other (and perhaps better) ways to approach this issue in corporate governance. The no-confidence vote system might directly remove a current board or management, instead of empowering a public board. It is a complicated issue, but the existence of the problem is not complicated at all- it is patent and in need of deep reform. It is eating at our politics, economic system, and culture, and we can only hope that capitalism is capable of undergoing further evolution for the common good.

---

PS- I have a special solution for the financial industry, whose gambling addiction appears to be more serious than previously suspected. Which is to levy a small tax on every transaction. Every share bought, sold, every derivitive conjured and sliced, would be taxed at a small rate, say 0.5% of value. This would have several beneficial effects- it would slow down financial transactions, of which there is far too much churning. It would enforce visibility of all such transactions, going into all relevant markets, whether currently regulated or not. It would raise huge amounts of revenue, which we could really use at this point (ahem!). And when applied to international currency speculation, it would lend some stability against being whipsawed by vast in/outflows of money. The recent program of super-fast trading by way of special computer networks by Goldman is exhibit A of trading that is simply contrary to the common good, and for which we need a systematic solution.

• Bob Herbert, and sputtering rage.
• A bit of corporate history, on the charter, etc.
• A searching article on inequality, and the connection between military and economic inequality.
• Oh, Russia!
• Super-tarp
• The family- fundamentalism without morals.
• Tax corruption
• Some call it god. Some call it epilepsy.
• Cool graphic on scale in (micro) biology.

Skeletons rule!

On the superiority of endoskeletons

There are two great instances in the history of life of skeletons appearing on the inside versus the outside of organisms- the vertebrate skeleton, compared with precursors like insects with their exoskeletons, and the eukaryotic cytoskeleton, compared with the cell wall of typical bacteria. Both instances paved the way for great innovations of size and complexity.

It has often puzzled me that squishy naked mammals should have risen to the top of the food chain, rather than the more abundant insects or other, better protected, better architected, and handsome-er species. We seem so vulnerable, with pathetic teeth, muscles, and skin, barely-existent hair, let alone armor. Of course, we've got brains, and that's pretty much it.

At the beginning of life, creatures didn't need protection. Proto-cells had enough to do to survive- no predators existed. And before the pre-Cambrian explosion, the first known animals were flaccid pillows of cytoplasm. But once predators came on the scene, body plans quickly adapted, becoming enclosed in bacterial cell walls in the first instance, and in shells, chitin, and the like among the animals, leading to the long reign of Trilobites and similar creatures.

However the first response to a crisis is not always the best one, and many organisms kept their heads down and did not adopt external protection, making do with other strategies, like burrowing, distastefulness, speed, etc. Often these were predators themselves, like amoebae and jellyfish. External protections can also be discarded in evolutionary time, if they are not too deeply embedded in the body plan, as happened with aplacophora and nudibranches, both subclasses of mollusks.

On the micro scale, bacteria had little in the way of internal structure for billions of years, other than a few optimizations in locating their DNA near their membranes, which helped coordinate cell division with division of the DNA, the membrane, and the cell wall.

But then came along eukaryotes, formed from the fusion of two vastly different types of bacteria- by one theory, for metabolic cooperation, or by another, through simple phagocytosis. At any rate, this fusion created a revolutionary new type of cell that dispensed with the exterior wall (later re-made in fungi and plants from different materials) and developed instead an interior, or cyto-skeleton.

Mitosis, where the cytoskeleton (green microtubules) temporarily reforms to manage division of DNA (blue).

The cytoskeleton makes two basic contributions over the preceding bacterial cell wall- one, allowing cells to become protean- flexible and active protoplasmic blobs that can seek prey, as do many of our immune system cells. And second, helping manage the increased internal complexity of eukaryotes, facilitating their great size with membranous organelles, multiple chromosomes ... bits and pieces that need to be located consistently, moved occasionally, and inherited reliably. Our cells are not just bags of protoplasm, but ecosystems of molecules and larger structures, in which the cytoskeleton plays an organizational role.

The cytoskeleton also provided a cabling system to allow different cells to interact, paving the way for multicellularity. Eukaryotic cells touch at cytoskeletal attachment points, which are not just passive anchors, but also active participants in migration and signaling, helping cells touch and talk with their neighbors.

Later on in the Cambrian, once oxygen levels rose to respectable levels, allowing larger life forms, and Earth's climate got past a devastating series of ice ages, a new kind of skeleton emerged... the organismal endoskeleton. Compared to the armor of insects, skeletons are far more efficient, exchanging a surface-proportional structure for a linear structure with consequent reductions in weight. This allowed animals with skeletons to become far larger (think elephants, dinosaurs, and whales).

But what about the vulnerability of an unarmored exterior? There is where the story gets interesting, since being naked gives priority to reducing harm through smarts or size rather than through armor. Unarmored microbes are the predators and behemoths of their world. Think amoeba and paramecium. On the macro scale, the implications of endoskeletons are similar, with large size becoming its own form of defense. But more importantly, if the exterior skin is turned into a sensitive sensory system, with sensing hairs, whiskers, various forms of touch, all abetted with remote sensors like vision, hearing, and smell, plus a big brain, then the weakness of surface vulnerability can be turned into a strength.

The endoskeleton allowed for a greater range of evolvability, including encouraging organisms to turn themselves into multi-sensory platforms, much as our modern navy has become more effective by developing over-the-horizon sensing and attack rather than turning ships into super-armored tankers. Humans are, of course the ultimate expression of this evolutionary trend, not just mammals with endoskeletons, but nakedly hairless besides, vulnerable to every slight of the elements and enemies. Yet they have succeeded by replacing dumb armor with a combination of efficient and sensitive physiology and formidable intelligence.

• Science depends on technology, which agrees with my post about science in ancient Greece- That it was the lack of technology which kept philosophy from becoming science.
• An important story on chronic fatigue syndrome.
• You call this insurance?
• Alas for atheism.
• Creationism, muslim style.
• Nice overview of common good economics.
• Are fundamentalists running the drug trade?
• A fond look back at the Clintons.

To warm or not to warm

Is the science of global warming really settled?

I recently listened to an interesting podcast from the CBC (the Deniers), interviewing a skeptic of global warming. Many other deniers are out there, so it is a pressing question. Its importance is huge.. none could be greater, so I will try to get to some data. Of course, a true firehose of debunking comes from the blog climateprogress, so go there if you want chapter and verse.

What I am reading in the scientific literature clearly indicates that global warming is happening, will get substantially worse, and needs to be mitigated to avert rapid global change. Unfortunately, the catastrophe is more relevant for our silent co-passengers on planet earth than it is for humanity. And it will be far more serious for our poorer human co-passengers than for inhabitants of rich countries who are making all the mess. If global warming is true and imminent, the most important case for its mitigation is moral and aesthetic- the duty we have to our fellow creatures and to the biosphere generally to keep it healthy and beautiful instead of turning it into a science fiction dystopia. Warming is just one more facet of harm we are doing to the biosphere, in addition to fishing out the oceans, filling them with trash, driving species to extinction, and destroying ecosystems by a thousand cuts.

The CBC interview was with Lawrence Solomon, head of Energy Probe Research Foundation, a Canadian environmental organization. This is a right-wing think tank with apparently serious environmental credentials (only in Canada!), one of whose aims is to solve common goods problems by extending private ownership over common goods. How that would work with the atmosphere.. well, their web site is unhelpful on that score.

In the interview, Solomon brings up several substantive points:

1. The famous "hockey stick" curve was based on bad science and bad statistics, and has since been withdrawn, even by its sponsor, the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

2. Prominent scientists are lining up on the denier side, such as Freeman Dyson. Typically, scientists at the end of their careers are the only ones free enough to take this position, since it can be deadly to anyone still building a career, in view of the heavy bias in the scientific community on the other side.

3. The current decade has been cooler than the last one, and the last one was not the warmest ever, as advertised, but only the second warmest, second to the 1930's.

4. Climate models are not well-made and the climate is not as well undestood as some would have us believe. How do clouds affect the system? How is their origin related to CO2? How much do aerosols cool the earth? How, if regular weather forcasts are poor just 7 days in advance, are we to take seriously climate models that purport to forcast decades ahead?

5. Isn't CO2 the gas of life? OK- this is not a serious point, but he does raise it towards the end, as both participants seem to let down the guard of the interview as a serious, scholarly dialog.

I'll take these points in reverse order.

5. Solomon said nothing about the general theory that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and thus by any reasonable model, that more CO2 leads to higher heat retention from solar radiation. The example of Venus is instructive and frightening. The real question is whether the amounts of CO2 in question (the recent rise from pre-industrial levels of ~280 parts per million [ppm] to the current 380 ppm and rising) are significant- how much warming they (and future increases) might cause. This was not discussed. To say that they cause no warming is not plausible. To say that they cause so little as to be noise in the system might be conceivable, but my impression is that the data disagree strongly.

The history of the earth is quite interesting in this respect. We started out much like Venus, with large amounts of CO2, but with our larger distance from the sun (getting roughly half the light per unit area), we were not trapped in a greenhouse from the start. Additionally, the sun was less luminous at earlier times and earth was blessed with huge amounts of water. Over time, earth's CO2 was mostly withdrawn from the atmosphere by mineral deposition (limestones, etc.), and by life, which in turn created all the atmosphere's oxygen (which was strictly absent from the early atmosphere). An interesting illustration in a recent Science magazine graphs out what we know of the relative CO2 levels over the last half-billion years:

The "RCO2" on the Y-axis is relative CO2, relative to the present level of ~350 ppm at one. The end of the high-CO2 era (400 to 300 MYA) corresponds to the Carboniferous period of geologic history, which is to say, the time when huge amounts of carbon were withdrawn from the atmosphere and deposited in coal beds and other geologic formations by living organisms. Oxygen levels were also high, allowing some insects to grow to enormous proportions, like desk-size dragonflies with 75cm wingspans. The whole earth was a big sauna, apparently, though the era ended with glaciations, as one can infer from the plummeting CO2.

For the last 800,000 years, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has varied cyclically between ~180 and ~280 ppm. (Indeed the paper I am taking this from extends this observation to "These results show that changes in pCO2 and climate have been coupled during major glacial transitions of the past 20 myr, just as they have been over the last 0.8 myr, supporting the hypothesis that greenhouse gas forcing was an important modulator of climate over this interval via direct and indirect effects." So we are going in an unprecedented direction, which alone is cause for trepidation and action.

4. Climate models are indeed rather complex affairs, and not all variables are equally easy to model. For instance, geenhouse forcing is easy to model- the infrared heat emitted from the earth after absorbing sunlight is trapped by CO2, water vapor, methane, and the other greenhouse gasses. On the other hand, the formation of clouds seems to be less easy to model, depending more on the dynamics of the winds and interactions between layers of different temperature. So there is quite a bit that is not known, and the specter of chaos theory and complexity hangs over some of these issues. Yet on the other hand, physics-based climate models have gotten very good, being able to model past events as a test for forward predictions. And of course the news lately has been that warming in the arctic has been faster than virtually all models predict, so they may be excessively conservative (possibly due to positive feedback effects that accelerate climate change and may not be modeled yet).

3. The current decade is the hottest on record, as shown by the following graphs taken from a recent Science article (and see these graphs for up-to-the-minute data). The interesting thing is that the current decade should instead have been cooler, based on slight declines in solar flux (due to a quiet phase in the sunspot cycle, among other issues). So this persistent rise in temperature is all the more significant.

Indeed, one other interesting aspect of this graph is that it tracks a long-term cooling trend for the rest of the last 2000 years (gray line, which focuses on temperatures in the arctic). The top-most line (F) tracks a slight long-term decline in solar input to the northern hemisphere due to solstice precession, which provides a rationale for this long-term cooling trend. So we might possibly have been headed for a new ice age. We may be thankful to our emissions staving off that catastrophe, but it is obvious that we are over-shooting in the other direction.

2. A few scientists have been casting suspicion on global warming. Well, a few scientists cast suspicion on HIV as the source of AIDS as well. There are good reasons why the scientific consensus has coalesced around global warming for well over a decade, some of which are given above. The combination of solid data and solid theory makes for a compelling case. The fact that the data had not, up until the last few decades, risen above the climate noise in a way apparent to the most jaded and critical observer is unfortunate, but no reason to criticize those who were right rather than those who have been wrong.

A countervailing view of eminent scientists is that they often wade into areas about which they know very little (Freeman Dyson), and they may hunger for a larger spotlight, which they can only gain by bucking a consensus (Richard Dawkins), whether sensibly or not. The history of Nobel Laureates is littered by such crankiness (Nobelesse oblige?). Criticism of this kind serves a critical function, of course- to hold a consensus's feet to the fire, as it were.

As a biologist, some of the most convincing evidence for me (aside from sea level rise and many other indicators) has been the relentless migration of plant and animal ranges northward. This process is just the kind of long-term, slow change that evens out noise from the system and reflects underlying changes of climate. Montane species, like pikas in the Sierras, can not just pick up and head north into the Yukon- they may run out of habitat entirely.

1. Lastly, the hockey stick graph. As shown above, despite all the controversy about earlier versions and their somewhat exagerated data, the basic graph is correct. It may have been a little ahead of its time, as was true for Gregor Mendel as well, as some scientists compromise the integrity of their process (data collection and presentation) while tripping over themselves to show a result they have become convinced of, and which may be vindicated by later, more careful work. Such shoddiness can not be excused, but climate change is one more classic case where the truth was due to come out sooner or later, and is now on completely firm ground.

In this case, the better jump we have on the phenomenon, the more rational and moderate our policy response can be. So spending the last decade on disinformation from the fossil fuel industries, the Lomborg acolytes, and George Bush's imitation of an ostrich, has been extremely damaging for our long-term ability to mitigate the climate change that is already happening, much more of which is set in concrete for decades to come. Since the climate is the ultimate commons, it is particularly difficult to address from a game theory/economic perspective, making this loss of time doubly damaging.

• NYT covers the IPCC blues
• Arctic warming, NYT.
• Northwest passage- opened for the first time in 2007, then also in 2008
• No impact guy on what we would gain, even if the science was all wrong
• Ooops- I missed blog action day!
• A nice philosophically couched discussion of global warming and scientific uncertainty.
• A sample skeptic blog
• A delightful essay on science, over at the Oracle blog
• On the evolution of the ear, with intermediate forms!
• Religion on Wall Street
• A fine page on Schopenhauer
• Gregor on the vise of recession + rising oil prices
• OK, let's just clear the air on this whole religion thing!

Afghan reboot

What should we do now? Boots or no boots?

The Afghan war/nation building/counterinsurgency/hearts-and-minds operation has largely gone down the drain. A recent report described the utter futility of our training efforts for the Afghan army and police force, whose members are cashing out and disappearing as fast as we "train" them, then coming back for more pay and more training with new names. Pakistan remains likewise uncontrolled, with their border home sweet home for insurgents and jihadists of all sorts.

The core of the problem is corruption. While there is plenty of corruption and stupidity on the part of US and its contractors, the more serious problem is that the Afghan government is fully corrupt, with little hold on the affections and respect of the populace or any plausible way to engage with it, certainly not after the shameful election antics just witnessed. In Iraq, the US faced a population that had long been used to a powerful central state. However frightfully it fell apart into a lord-of-the-flies free-for-all, Iraqis generally nurtured the hope that eventually chaos would recede, either at the hands of another strongman, or directly at the hands of the US occupiers, and they could resume something like normal life in a semi-developed country.

But in Afghanistan, the political culture has never gotten to the point of effective centralization, let alone parliamentary democracy, checks and balances, technocracy, and the many other ingredients of modern statehood. Decades of civil war have eviscerated basic expectations of normalcy. The situation is reminiscent of the rotten governments of South Vietnam, successively installed by the CIA via coups d'état as the US blindly tried to prop up the South with hardly any knowledge of its culture or history. In effect, the US was busily turning the population of the South against its government instead of for it, giving them over into the arms of the Vietcong.

As the Taliban are today, the Vietcong were indigenous (i.e. grass-roots), nationalistic, ruthless, and far more efficient than the government or US forces. They had inherited a mantle of anti-imperialism, first against the Japanese, then the French, as the Taliban have against the Russians and the Americans. Their all-important currencies were credibility and sympathy- sympathy by being of the rural South Vietnamese culture, and credibility both through their history and by way of their organizational skill and successes against their enemies.

How are we winning the sympathy of the population of Afghanistan? It is a complicated question, but basically, the answer varies between not very well and not at all. The vision of a well-run state with women's rights, security, and economic development is, in the Afghan context, a far-away utopia. The competing vision of traditional Islam and plenty of money from poppy cultivation makes a good deal more immediate sense, at least to the middle power-brokers- the warloads, tribal leaders and family heads. And if the Taliban has more effective grass-roots mafia-like enforcement of power and security, then that would be icing on the cake, despite other problems with their vision- that unremitting and barbaric shariah is hardly palatable to most Afghans either.

My take on all this is that our numbers of soldiers is not the issue. The issue is the nature of the government, and how well-aligned it is in the near and far term with its people's aspirations. The situation is worth saving, both for our own interests, for our historical debt to Afghanistan, and for purely humanitarian reasons. The answer is to boot the government out as soon as possible and replace it with direct temporary control by NATO.

The local nation-building process needs to begin not from the top down as it did with power-brokers held over from prior puppet governments, tribal organizations, mujahideen and civil war antagonists. These may well end up being the relevant powers in a new Afghanistan, but they should get there from the bottom up. A caretaker central government organized by NATO could rapidly organize a skeletal federal system and local civic processes and elections (supplemented by jirgas where those might offer extra inclusion and participation). There should be a step-wise process working up the ladder of governance, from local to provincial to national, focusing on each in sequence so that there are civic institutions and experience at each level before the next level is put under local control.

Such a government would not be filled with Europeans, but have a mix of Afghans and NATO / UN officers enforcing rules against corruption and ineffectiveness, with accountability flowing from the top, and all the churn and active firing and hiring that would imply. It will take time to assemble an effective government and weed out bad elements, but it will take less time through reconstitution than it will by jollying the current system along while also fighting a war at the same time. We should honestly recognize that we gave it a good shot through the original Loya jirga, national elections, etc., but need a do-over at this point, from strictly empirical criteria. In most measures, Afghanistan's government rates worst in the world right now, roughly even with that of Somalia.

A new provisional government would not be terribly strict or controlling in most aspects. For instance, poppy cultivation should be legalized and freely allowed. Given the choice between losing the war, the country, and the war on drugs, or just the war on drugs, the latter is the better choice. Likewise, if local communities choose to install tribal elders as their representatives, (through local elections with secret ballots), that is fine as well. Land reform should be encouraged, buying out large landholders and assuring individuals of right of tenure. Credit reform is needed as well, encouraging microlending and other modern instruments for farmers on all scales. The point is to make citizen service, efficiency, and non-corruption the focus of government, all sheltered under an umbrella of security that assures citizens that the Taliban won't be coming back unless it is their free choice. This is best done from the ground up with civic processes starting at the grass roots.

That is the lesson I take from Vietnam- that politics is critically important. Terrorism/insurgency has no pull or point to it without a political background, which in most cases is a government that is incompetent, uncaring, and corrupt. Winning hearts and minds is not just a figure of speech, but the essential element to giving Afghanistan hope. The current government has demonstrated its inability to provide that hope. While foreigners automatically have many liabilities in winning local hearts and minds, and in running the upper levels of the Afghan government, it would be difficult to do a worse job than our chosen government is doing right now. Whatever we do militarily, it will not have any point without a better solution to the core political problem.

• George Packer on Holbrook and Afghanistan.
• Frank Rich on Obama's choice in Afghanistan.
• Vietnam- read A Bright and Shining lie, by Sheehan, among many others.
• Cohen on individualism in America.
• Apparently, we are a Christian nation, after all!
• Is the Vatican a state? If so, shouldn't the Dharamsala with the Dalai Lama be as well? And others?
• Another bubble in its infancy.
• Lie about climate change? Who would ever do such a thing?
• On death and philosophy

Islam and the yellow submarine

What makes the Ummah different from the European nation-state?

Another week, another book. "God's Rule" by Patricia Crone, describes the first 600 years of Islam through the eyes of its thinkers about community, salvation, and government. The point she hammers home time and again is that Muslims think of their polity very differently than we do in the European tradition. She invokes a very nice metaphor of the caravan, (which I have updated using a Beatles song), to say that Muslims equate community with religion with government. They are all the same thing- they hang together in an idealized community that travels along a straight and narrow path, obeying the will of God in this life and, if right-guided, obtaining salvation in the next. Given this conception, it only makes sense that stragglers, detractors, and skeptics would be harshly punished for imperiling the community, and that religious leaders would tend just as much to the community as a body as to any individuals within it.

The Muslim conception derives straight from the Arabic tribal situation where one's leader was in charge of everything- war, women, worship, navigation, inspiration, punishment, ... the whole operation, top to bottom, as eventually modelled by the perfect man, Muhammad. This unitary organization obviously became untenable when the Muslim world rapidly bloomed to vast proportions after their conquests. Yet it took hundreds of years for Muslims to break apart any of these communal elements in principle, and when they did, it was not to separate religion from the community at large (as we have in the secularized and individualized West), or to separate mosque from state on a principled basis. The Islamic compromise was to resign themselves to governments that were hopelessly imperfect, even corrupt. By their conception, living with ill-guided governments was a way to avoid civil war, since no government could be perfect. But at the same time, governments were never viewed as unislamic:

"As far as medieval Islam is concerned, it [separation of government and religion] stands for a change in the manner in which God's government was executed on earth, not for a process whereby government was emptied of religious significance. It means that there ceased to be a single person endowed with the fullness of God's delegated power: scholars took over the task of guiding people; the deputy of God was left with the coercive role, which eventually passed to kings. This was a separation of power and religion comparable to that which obtained in medieval Europe, in which God kept His sword in one institution and His book in another. But in both cases, the sword and the book alike continued to be God's. He just did not assign both to the same keeper anymore. Similarly, when amirs, sultans, and kings are referred to as secular rulers, it means that they were rulers of a type that could appear in any society rather than rulers of the specific type called for by the Sharia: there was nothing specifically Islamic about them. It does not mean that they had no religious role to play. However external they were to Islam by origin, and sometimes outlook too, their prime role was still as protectors of a religious institution."

And of course, just as Europeans had their fairy tale visions of benevolent states helmed by happy kings and queens with stable and wise lines of succession populated by princes and princesses, Muslims had their own fairy tale of state- the Islamic Ummah as a vast whole, (indeed the entire world!), helmed by Islamic scholars of the highest rank and merit (such as Ayatolla Khomeini) who would be sure to guide the yellow submarine in the most godlike direction, for the benefit of everyone's salvation. At the core is a communitarian interpretation of what God wants- not so much individual hearts dedicated to him, (indeed, Muslims can be rather blasé about what happens behind closed doors- they may be totalitarian, but they tend not to be Orwellian), but mass and public obeissance, exemplified in the incredibly durable phenomenon of Friday prayers.

Unfortunately, here is where the tale turns a little dark, since we have to deal with jihad. Crone gives little attention to the post-9/11 platitudes of Islam being a religion of peace, or the pleasant and popular postion that perhaps it is the "inner" jihad that is most significant in Islam. No, while "jihad" means striving (in the path of God) and thus has gotten various connotations, especially among the Sufis, the original verse outlining this pillar of Islam uses the word "al-quital", which means fighting and warfare quite explicitly. Crone mentions ".. it is a bit of a mystery that jihad came to be the technical term for holy war." And of course the historical and scholarly records bears this out abundantly, with conquest of infidels and their land one of the favorite activities of Muslims, promoted by their scholars up to the present day.

And conversion in the sense of Christian individual conversion was not even the point, again in keeping the communal/imperialist ethos of Islam. If an adversary was offered the truth of Islam and refused it in advance of battle, that was it- if defeated, they were put under Islamic/Arabic rule, and their conversion was no longer a prime issue. They or their descendents would convert in due time, given the many political, financial, and social disabilities they would otherwise be under. This is the story of Iran, which struggled for centuries to come to terms with its traumatic subjugation to Arabic Islam.

Today, the Islamic world struggles with this unitary and communal mind-set which makes the perfect (scriptural guidance) the enemy of the good (liberal, effective government). The decently-governed Islamic states tend to be on the periphery or have other unusual conditions, like benevolent monarchs- Turkey, Jordan, UAE, Indonesia. The Islamic world remains unable to fully comprehend or assimilate the political science revolutions of the European world- strong, constitutional, and federally governed national states anchored in liberal domestic freedoms, set in a competitive international system (too competitive at times, looking back over history, but that is another matter).

A prime example is the Palestinian dilemma. When European Jews first colonized the lands of Palestine, their fervent hope was to found a state in the European model, which they did at the first possible opportunity. In that state, they found both a psychic homeland and the kind of strength possible under a well-run government. In contrast, the Palestinians have never taken statehood very seriously, being easily corrupted and divided by the British during the mandate period, then succeeding to a series of clownish excuses for governments down to the present day, exemplified by both Fatah and Hamas. The Palestinians beseeched the Ummah to save them, and while the Arab community did make a couple of disastrous stabs at Israel well over thirty years ago, it could not do one essential task for the Palestinians, which was to organize them.

Power comes from organization, and to leave temporal power in the hands of venal, corrupt tribal leaders while awaiting salvation through the five pillars of Islam, complete with the regular Friday rehearsal of misdirected grievances and prayers, is to give up any hope of effective politics and community power. At one time, sheer audacity and ferocity was enough to win an empire. No more. Modern states have awesome powers commensurate with their organization and based on broad, internal support generated by good governance. The perennial corruption and misgovernment of Muslim states, whether due to tribalism / feudalism (not to say feud-ism) that predates Islam, or to the misplaced ideals of Sharia and a certainty that political science was solved 1400 years ago, is fatal to the basic aspirations of Muslims, nowhere more so than in Palestine. (Though Afghanistan comes a close second- more on that next week.)

• An important corrective, or at least adjunct, to Keynes, on rebalancing the role of central banks. It conceives of recent economic growth as being a succession of bubbles inflated by increasingly permissive monetary policy jags in response to each prior bubble. It claims that bubbles can be fought in advance by monetary policy, and should be, so that economic performance is better controlled over the long term.
• How well do medical markets really work?
• Deeply insightful article on American geostrategy in the broadest sense.
• Off-the-hook blog post from San Diego State University.
• Props to Trotsky
• What comes of the theory of religious law superceding secular law, here in the US.