High Intelligence is Highly Overrated by Highly Intelligent People

AI, the singularity, and watching way too much science fiction: Review of Superintelligence by Nic Bostrom.

How far away is the singularity? That is the point when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence, after which it is thought that this world will no longer be ours to rule. Rick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, doesn't know when this will be, but is fearful of its consequences, since, if we get it wrong, humanity's fate may not be a happy one.

The book starts strongly, with some well argued and written chapters about the role of intelligence in humanity's evolution, and the competitive landscape of technology today that is setting the stage for this momentous transition. But thereafter, the armchair philosopher takes over, with tedious chapters of hairsplitting and speculation about how fast or slow the transition might be, how collaborative among research groups, and especially, how we could pre-out-think these creations of ours, to make sure they will be well-disposed to us, aka "the control problem".

Despite the glowing blurbs from Bill Gates and others on the jacket, I think there are fundamental flaws with this whole approach and analysis. One flaw is a failure to distinguish between intelligence and power. Our president is a moron. That should tell us something about this relationship. It is not terribly close- the people generally acknowledged as the smartest in history have rarely been the most powerful. This reflects a deeper flaw, which is, as usual, a failure to take evolution and human nature seriously. The "singularity" is supposed to furnish something out of science fiction- a general intelligence superior to human intelligence. But Bostrom and others seem to think that this means a fully formed human-like agent, and those are two utterly different things. Human intelligence takes many forms, and human nature is composed of many more things than intelligence. Evolution has strained for billions of years to form our motivations in profitable ways, so that we follow others when necessary, lead them when possible, define our groups in conventional ways that lead to warfare against outsiders, etc., etc. Our motivational and social systems are not the same as our intelligence system, and to think that anyone making an AI with general intelligence capabilities will, will want to, or even can, just reproduce the characteristics of human motivation to tack on and serve as its control system, is deeply mistaken.

The fact is that we have AI right now that far exceeds human capabilities. Any database is far better at recall than humans are, to the point that our memories are atrophying as we compulsively look up every question we have on Wikipedia or Google. And any computer is far better at calculations, even complex geometric and algebraic calculations, than we are in our heads. That has all been low-hanging fruit, but it indicates that this singularity is likely to be something of a Y2K snoozer. The capabilities of AI will expand and generalize, and transform our lives, but unless weaponized with explicit malignant intent, it has no motivation at all, let alone the motivation to put humanity into pods for its energy source, or whatever.

People-pods, from the Matrix.

The real problem, as usual, is us. The problem is the power that accrues to those who control this new technology. Take Mark Zuckerberg for example. He stands at the head of multinational megacorporation that has inserted its tentacles into the lives of billions of people, all thanks to modestly intelligent computer systems designed around a certain kind of knowledge of social (and anti-social) motivations. All in the interests of making another dollar. The motivations for all this do not come from the computers. They come from the people involved, and the social institutions (of capitalism) that they operate in. That is the real operating system that we have yet to master.

• Facebook - the problem is empowering the wrong people, not the wrong machines.
• Barriers to health care.
• What it is like to be a psychopathic moron.

Investing in the Future

People's Capitalism- the economics of James Albus.

A curious thing happened on the way to a recent post about the cerebellum. One of its primary theorists was not a neurobiologist, but an engineer, roboticist, and control system designer. It turned out that James Albus, mild-mannered government employee all of his career, had several side projects, another one of which was an odd blend of libertarian and communist economics, which he called peoples' capitalism. It incorporates some unconventional monetary theory, and throws in a proposal for oceanic algae harvesting as a bonus. All in all, Albus is clearly a fellow crank.

This book "Path to a Better World" is not easy to find, probably for good reason. Putting aside its lengthy self-encomiums and visions for a peaceful and problem-free future, the basic proposition is that the government should issue credit to everyone for the purpose of setting up a personal investment fund, which over time would then generate on everyone's behalf a steady and growing stream of income that will replace that lost from the automation revolution to come (and pay back the original loan). He estimates that if the annual increment is $5,000, the portfolio would be worth $1.5 million after 50 years, generating $55,000 of income. This would all be invested in government-approved vehicles like mutual funds, thereby increasing total capital investment. And lastly, to offset inflation, he proposes a payroll deduction-style system whereby some proportion of each person's income could be forcibly diverted to savings when inflation threatens.

One of the core justifications of these schemes is gaining a higher rate of overall capital investment. Albus recounts some of the interesting literature in economics that shows that productivity growth, overall growth, and an increased living standard all come mostly from capital investment. It is capital (as opposed to straight consumption of short-lived items like food and services) that funds the machinery, education, and training that continues to give back, year after year, productive services like roads, new inventions, manufacturing plants, and housing. We all know that the US has had a low rate of capital investment, which Albus contrasts with China's extraordinarily high rate, and thus high growth which is overtaking us.

Albus shows fanciful graphs going far into the future of the US maintaining a 9% economic growth rate, which would enable us to stay ahead of the Chinese indefinitely. The problem is that not all investment is productive. We learned from Japan that the dizzying rates of capital formation and investment in a developing economy that is committed to catching up with the first world do not last forever. As long as one is behind the technological frontier, productive investments are easy to find- just steal them from more advanced cultures. But once one reaches the technological frontier, the search is far more difficult. Much more investment is wasted in exploratory research, and it is less attractive to rip out current sunk investments to keep up with every tiny increment on the slowly advancing frontier. This explains why China's growth will inevitably slow, as did Japan's and ours.

This is not to say that we should not raise our capital investment rate, but that we need to be more judicious than simply shovelling more money into mutual funds. Since the value of the stock market is based on a relatively coherent estimation of future income flows to corporations, pouring in more money on behalf of passive small investors will mostly just nudge out other, more liquid, investors, keeping the overall level of investment stable (with the caveat that price/earnings ratios have indeed risen (perhaps doubled) over the last few decades as a larger pool of investors has flooded the market). This would be a good thing from an economic justice standpoint. One of the points of Albus's plans is to distribute capital ownership more widely, in preparation for the time when none have jobs, but all need income. But it is unlikely to raise net capital investment much or raise economic growth rates.

The ironic thing (given Albus's government career in the highest levels of its research enterprise) is that he is so focused, perhaps due to libertarian leanings, on pumping money into the private capital markets, that he neglects the real capital shortfall- that of public investment. It is now a common mantra that our infrastructure is crumbling, and that education is too expensive. Both are areas where government investment is the most productive way we have to build for future economic and social returns.

Otherwise, there are some positive aspects to these ideas. What goes unmentioned is that the personal investment scheme will have to be heavily controlled by the government, since most people getting that kind of money are going to spend it. That is why so many poor people exist, after all, and so few capitalists. And the inflation control scheme is also rather heavy-handed, if effective, though one has to ask where this savings would go so as to not be inflationary. Putting it into mutual funds would put it into the markets again, and thus be ultimately inflationary. It would probably have to go into newly issued government bonds, which is to say, into a money black hole.

But the idea of spreading around capital and its income stream is very interesting. It is a far better idea than a simple UBI, which is structured as a sort of pittance handed out to keep the jobless from gathering into mobs with pitchforks. As we enter an economic era where capital is ever more dominant, through its comprehensive ability to generate economic value with ever fewer workers, the whole economic system needs to be rethought, with an eye to the middle class, not just the homeless and jobless. We already have vast pension funds and mutual funds, which have spread around the income flows from capital, if not taken effective control of the system from capitalists of the traditional variety. We already tax income and capital gains and inheritances to divert some of those gains to the common good. More of that kind of redistribution, of both capital and its proceeds, needs to happen in order to achieve the economic justice and stable future that Albus seeks.

• A criminologist takes a look at our president ... the dark triad.
• Who are the oligarchs?
• MAGA movie.
• Steps to fascism.
• Oligarchy in business isn't so good either.
• What does a financial risk manager say about climate change? $120 per ton of carbon.
• Economic democracy.

Cells Put Their Best Face Outward

Structure and function of the flippase enzyme.

This dates me a little, but when I was in grad school, the fluid bilayer hypothesis of membrane lipids was still new and exciting. Now canonical, it proposed that cellular membranes have no more structure than a soap bubble, being flat fluids of phospholipids that self-organize into a bilayer with two leaflets, each leaflet keeping its polar or charged head groups out towards aqueous solution, and their lipid tails on the inside, facing the complementary leaflet. At our scale, it seems shockingly fragile and structure-less. But at the micro scale, it is a pretty tough affair. Typical membranes are about 5 nm thick, which seems negligible, but it takes a protein at least 7 alpha helical turns, or 25 amino acids, to span it. Given that the fatty tail length is freely adjustable, as is the chemical nature and charge of the head groups, evolution has evidently optimized the thickness of membranes to provide an optimal tradeoff of structure and lightness. They are tougher than they look.

In this microscopic technique, cells are frozen and cleaved sideways, causing some of the membranes to split along their inner leaflet boundaries. This highlights the proteins and other material embedded within them. Note at the top that a small portion of the plasma membrane of this cell has a quasi-crystalline raft of proteins- a sign of active signalling taking place.

Membranes are also chemically tough, impervious to charged molecules due to their fatty interior. These features made membranes incredibly successful- one of the key foundations of life. Eukaryotes developed a whole second frontier of membranes, as internal organelles like the nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum, golgi, lysozome, and mitochondria. Mitochondria particularly use the imperviousness of membranes to set up complex charge and chemical asymmetries, to serve as batteries, storing up electromotive force from respiration of food and using it to synthesize ATP.

But it turns out that there are some forms of structure amid all the fluidity of the fluid bilayer. There are the proteins, of course, which can organize into crystalline rafts, or hook onto cell walls (in plants and bacteria) or cytoskeletal supports to enforce overall cell shape. There are features of composition that can make membranes more stiff, such as using more rigid, more saturated lipid tails, or having more cholesterol, which serves as a plate-like stiffener. And it also turns out that the two sides of membranes can have markedly different compositions, another indication of just how stable and tough these tiny structures are.

A recent paper revealed the structure of an enzyme (flippase) that helps to enforce the asymmetry of composition between the inner and outer leaflets of eukaryotic plasma membranes. Why would such asymmetry exist? The reasons are not all clear, really. One aspect is the charge imbalance, whereby the inner (cytoplasmic) leaflet has more heavily charged phospholipids. There could also be defense issues, particularly among bacterial, which might want to present certain lipid head groups externally, and use other ones internally. Another is signaling, where certain phospholipids are chemically modified to serve as protein attachments and other forms of signaling, and thus need to be on the correct side of the wall. One prominent example is phosphotidylserine, which is usually kept on the inner leaflet. During cell suicide, (apoptosis), however, the (flippase) enzymes that keep it there are cleaved and disabled, while other enzymes (scramblases) that degrade the membrane composition asymmetry are activated, causing phosphatidylserine to be shown on the cell's outside, which is in turn a signal to traveling macrophages to attack and eat that cell.

So flippases spend their lives scavanging phophotidylserine from the outer membrane leaflet and transferring it to the interior leaflet, constituting one sign to the outside that yes, I am still alive. The process violates the concentration gradient of phosphatidylserine, so needs energy, which comes in as ATP. We end up with a rather complex two protein system that itself has to be consistently oriented the right way in the plasma membrane, cleaves ATP, phosphorylates itself briefly, grabs phosphatidylserine specifically from the outer leaflet of the membrane, and then transports it across to the inner membrane.

This schematic illustrates the enzymatic cycle. The phosphatidylserine to be transported is at bottom, in green, on the external face of the membrane. A complex ATP=>ADP cycle dramatically alters the shape of the top of the enzyme on the cytoplasmic face, which at the E2P step is propagated down to a gap which opens between the two proteins- the portions colored purple and beige, which are situated in the membrane. This lets a phosphatidylserine to slip into a pocket that binds it selectively, after which the phosphate leaves the upper part, the enzyme recloses, and the phosphatidylserine is released to the other face of the membrane.

This structure was arrived at with the new techniques of electron microscopy that have allowed protein structures to be determined without crystallization, a development that has been particularly beneficial for membrane proteins that tend to be very hard to crystallize. The project also used a series of ATP and phosphatidylserine analogs that helped freeze the proteins in certain conformations through the reaction cycle, providing the data that informs the model above.

A closeup of the phosphatidylserine binding site, the lipid tails pointing upward. Ther are numerous amino acid side chains from the protein (such as asparagine (N) 353, serine (S) 358, etc. that coordinate the phosphatidylserine specifically, making this a transporter almost exclusively for this phospholipid alone. Other hydrophobic side chains such as phenylalanine (F) 107 and 368 form congenial interactions with the lipid tails.

Binding of phosphatidylserine is specific, but it can not be very strong, since the point of the reaction cycle is to release it again rapidly. Once binding has established specificity, it induces dephosphorylation, which then induces further conformation changes that lock the outward access of the phospholipid and destabilize its binding to the protein.

A cross-section of the full structure (right), and schematic showing (left) the series of structural elements of the two proteins of the transporter (CDC50A, now called TMEM30A in red, and ATPA1, the ATPase, in all the other colors.) The full structure (with no phospholipid or ATP present) has the ATPase on a large domain sticking out into the cytoplasm, and the key phosphatidylserine binding cleft (between the purple and beige sections, buried in the membrane.

It is wonderful to live in an age when such secrets of life, once utterly unsuspected, and then veiled in unreachable technical obscurity, are revealed in mechanistic detail.

• A voyage through the cytoplasm. Warning- extreme colors.
• What an anti-corruption platform looks like.
• Whither Afghanistan?
• The pending impeachment, cont.
• The birds are not happy.
• What is earth's carrying capacity?

Goal: One Billion

The Earth can't take 10 billion people. 

We have environmental and cultural problems at all scales, from the local to the global. From water shortages, drought, plastic pollution, overfishing, and species extinction, to global warming, authoritarianism, social fraying, anti-immigrant fervor, and gridlocked traffic and real estate markets. There is a common thread, which is that there are way too many people. We have (at least in some places) remediated some of the worst practices we used to take for granted, like killing whales for oil, using explosives for fishing, or dumping chemical wastes into rivers and soils. But there are are few practical ways to remediate our carbon emissions, water scarcity, or need for vast farmlands. We need to take a long look in the mirror and realize that the Earth can't take it, and we are the problem- the shear number of us.

Consider the range of problems like housing costs gone wild, traffic choked to a standstill, rising education costs and competition, and political gridlock. Are these related to overpopulation as well? I think very much so. Real estate is self-explanatory. As the old saying goes, they aren't making more land. Even while plenty of land is worthless, the need for people to live near other people means that we need to live together in what have become increasingly choked megalopolises. While rich metropolises like San Francisco and London struggle with traffic congestion and decaying public services, poorer ones like Lagos, Sao Paulo, and Mumbai had few services to start with and attract ever widening circles of destitute slums.

Lagos

A deeper issue is why our political systems are breaking down as well. Public services are decaying for a reason, which is that solidarity has weakened. Half of the US electorate has checked out of communal projects of good governance, rational and positive foreign policy, and caring for others. After two centuries of extraordinary growth, first sponsored especially in the US by a marvelously depopulated New World, and then again by bounding over technological frontiers such as fossil fuels, electricity, and the green revolution, we seem to have reached a general growth plateau, (barring development of robots who will do everything for us, but burn ever more fuel in doing so), and the expansive mood has ground to a halt. One consequence is that the elites of the culture, principally the rich, no longer subscribe to an egalitarian ethic. Growth can not be relied on to lift all boats, rather it is now every class for itself. Which class wins, when money runs politics and the media, and has been turned into "free speech" by the supreme court, is obvious.

It used to be, in the "population bomb" 1970's, that we thought that famine would be the limit on population. But it turns out that, given enough fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer production, machinery, and clearing new arable land, plus a green revolution in crop breeding, food is not the limiting factor. It is a thousand other things that we are doing to the biosphere and to our societies. The tide against immigrants is clearly borne of fear, that the number of the poor who want to flee their wretched conditions is essentially limitless, and thus that prosperous countries, i.e. Europe and the US, can not offer the relatively free immigration conditions they have heretofore. The US gained vast goodwill throughout the world over the last couple of centuries by admitting countless immigrants and playing a central role in many of the technological improvements that have allowed populations to grow everywhere.

But that process seems to have reached an end point. We have picked much of the low-hanging fruit, and have come up against insurmountable barriers. Fusion power has not happened. Space colonization is completely impractical. Even electricity storage is presenting tremendous difficulties, making a large scale switch to renewable electricity virtually impossible. And the biosphere is being degraded every day. We have come up against Malthusian limits that are more subtle than famine, but need to be heeded, lest we relentlessly immiserate ourselves.

There are two general political responses to all this. The Left response is to cooperate as best we can and tighten our belts to fit in a few billion more. Open borders, save the children, conserve water and reduce electricity usage, so that all can have at least a share of whatever resources are left. The Right response is to deny that there are significant ecological limits, cast whatever limits there are in economic terms and compete to take what we can while we can, and devil take the hindmost. Neither response is very forward-looking. One can make the argument that development is the only proven way to reduce demographic growth. Therefore, we should promote development, and bring everyone up to first world standards of resource consumption, which will in turn bring birth rates down to what in Europe and Japanare less than replacement rates. But the Earth can't take that policy either. Global heating is already having dire effects. The biosphere is already decimated and impoverished.

Thus we need an even more impractical, impolitic, and direct strategy, which is to aim to dramatically reduce the human population. A rigorously enforced one-child policy over three generations would get us from the current 7+ billion people to 1 billion, which, I think, given the current technological state, is reasonably sustainable. China did an amazing thing with its one-child policy, nipping in the bud its most significant problem- that of vastly too many people for its capabilities and resources. China is now reaping the rewards of that policy, though it hardly went far enough, and China remains heavily overpopulated and rapacious as it ascends the ladder of development.

If combating climate change is a problem from hell, structurally diffuse and resistant to responsible policy, then population control is far more so. National power is to a great extent dependent on economic and population size. We have for centuries had a mania for growth, embedded in every fiber of our economic policy and national outlook. We are Malthusian to the core, and our major religions are even worse offenders, propagating the most Darwinian of reproduction policies, even while they so ironically decry Darwin's intellectual bequests. No, it is not an easy problem. But at very least, we should not fear declining birth rates as some existential catastrophe and sign of general decline. No, they should be welcomed as the least we can do, and a small part of our path to a sustainable future, for ourselves and for the biosphere that is our home.

• Jupiter flyby.
• Accounting for Iraq.
• What the Kochs and their ilk have wraught.
• Are the Taliban more trustworthy than Donald Trump?
• Have richer people have become more handsome?
• Bonus quote of the week, from "If We Can Keep It", by Michael Tomask.

We are in trouble. Our political culture is broken, but it is not broken for the reasons you often read that it's broken- because Washington is 'dysfunctional' or because politicians have no 'will'. No. It's broken because some people broke it. It was broken by the people who pushed the economic theory on the rest of us that has driven trillions of dollars that were once in middle-class people's pockets to the comparative few at the very top. Who refused to invest in the country anymore. Who will not even negotiate real investment. Who have been telling us for years that the market will take care of all our needs, while the market has in fact left thousands of towns and communities strafed and full of people addicted to drugs- the drugs, by the way, tht the same free market is pumping out in vastly greater quantities, and for vastly greater profits, than it did twenty years ago. And who have built up a parallel media universe in which any of these commonsense assertions are dismissed as socialist, and in which anyone who doesn't endorse the thesis of Donald Trump's greatness is denounced as un-American. 

They broke it. They broke it to gain power and to remake society in a way that was less communitarian, explicitly less equal, than the society we were building from 1945 to 1980. And- let me not forget this part- less democratic. I wrote earlier of Donald Trump's contempt for our institutions, our processes, put another way, for the democratic allocation of power. Many observers (me included, sometimes) have wondered why this didn't make Republicans recoil. The typical explanation has to do with fear of his base, but I've come to believe that the simplest explanation is the best: They didn't recoil because they're not especially bothered. They find him embarrassing at times, and they disagree with him here and there, but his demagogic approach doesn't really trouble them on the whole. They- not all of them, but certainly a critical mass of elected officials, operatives, and billionaires- no longer want to compete with and merely defeat liberalism on a level democratic playing field. They want to destroy it. This is why they do things like aggressive gerrymandering, the voter suppression laws, the attemt to change the way we elect senators, the blocking of Merrick Garland- all of which preceded Trump. They want to change the rules so they they never lose. And if destroying liberalism requires breaking the system- as it surely does- then so be it as far as they're concerned.

Altruism Through Execution

Does our good behavior arise from artificial selection against norm-violators?

This is a companion piece to the prior "Altruism Through Genocide", which presented a group selection theory for our human moral nature. In that piece, group cohesiveness was the driving force that benefitted those cooperative people who could effectively conduct warfare to exterminate their enemies, who were, on balance, less effective in their in-group altruism/cooperation.

Now we are considering a new book, "The Goodness Paradox", by Richard Wrangham, which presents an alternative, only slightly less grisly, theory. The book generally argues that humans show many signs of selective domestication- a syndrome common in animals that we have domesticated- of arrest in many aspects of development, towards more juvenile characteristics, such as docility, lower aggression, floppy ears, white fur patches, and skeletal and especially facial juvenilization. That much is clear. Despite our love of warfare, we are on balance, and compared to our chimpanzee relatives and most other wild creatures, far less violent, less reactive, and far more effectively cooperative. This is not just a cognitive development, but an emotional change and a deep change to our moral natures. So who or what did the domestication?

Remember in Western movies how good it feels when the bad guy gets killled? It is an archetype of deep power, and we hardly think about its moral and genetic implications. Chimpanzees don't have this moral sense, as far as we know. Wrangham cites various experiments and natural observations to show that no matter how terrible some chimpanzees are, the others of their group will not or can not cooperate effectively to ostracize or disable them. It just isn't done. In the modern world, we have grown squeemish about capital punishment, but primitive cultures had no prisons, thus pervasively practiced ostracism or death as the only practical punishments for serious crimes and unredeemable people. It turns out to have been common for communities (typically the men of the group) to gang up on a member who got egregiously out of line and kill that person. Wrangham places this development at roughly the emergence of modern Homo sapiens, two to three hundred thousand years ago. Thus there is quite a bit of speculation about the relative backwardness of Neanderthals, who had much more limited cooperative capacities, though being roughly as intelligent as moderns, and having many advanced characteristics such as complex stone technology and control of fire.

For a Few Dollars More ... Clint Eastwood hunts down the bad men.

The development of advanced hunting and killing technologies made each person, and especially each man, in primitive human bands quite powerful. But even more important was language and great scope it offered to organize, to collude with and against others, This created enormous incentives to maintain a good reputation. Primitive societies are characterized by an almost pathological fear of rising above one's peers- there is a notable lack of ambition, for the very good reason that the group is all-powerful, and signs that one wants to rule others, abuse them, or collude against them, are all treated very harshly. The idea, then, is that the unique human ability and motivation to detect and eliminate threats inside the group led to a process of natural selection that quickly domesticated the species in superficial metrics of reactive aggression, while advancing our organizational, deceptive, and language capabilities, which have made us by far the most deadly species when it comes to organized hunting and warfare.

The explains rather easily the intense motivation that teens have to conform to their groups, to party, to bond and seek power, and to be forever uncertain about their status. It explains conventionality. But does it explain the nature of the morality that human groups generally express? The posses that hunt down criminals, and the modern state apparatus that does the same on a more legalistic basis, the value we put on altruism and kindness? Not quite. For example, the morality could have become one of extermination, where leaders would use all their guile to eliminate, one by one, each of the other males of the group, thus gaining all the females for themselves. This harem structure is common among other animals, and has occurred occasionally in humans in historical times. But it has obvious defects. If such an endpoint is common knowledge, then coalitions would be difficult to build, though perhaps not necessary since even crude technologies allow relatively easy killing, even one-on-one, given a small amount of planning. More importantly, however, such an endpoint would leave the group very weak relative to other groups.

So both overall hypotheses are relevant, I think, the group selection hypothesis and the execution hypothesis, to explain the complexity and explosiveness of our group relations, and the generally pro-social and cooperative instincts that form our group values most of the time. There is a complex calculation to be made, in light of the status of the whole group, with regard to the value of each person, each one of whom would on the face of it benefit the group in any outward encounter, but who might also be so disruptive and destructive of group cohesion as to instead be a net negative asset. Wrangham unfortunately finesses this problem, of the actual content of our moral group ethics, and suggests instead that pure relativism prevails- that our groupishness / conformity / docility is genetic, but our morals are not, and become whatever the leading (male) coalition says they should be. One can grant that human groups have adopted very unusual moral codes, like sacrificing their own children into volcanoes, or conducting constant ritual slaughter as the Aztecs did, or making a fetish of celibacy, as the Buddhist and Catholic theocracies do. Nevertheless, there is a core of cooperativity and deep-seated conceptions of right and wrong (including the rightness of killing when the target is damaging the group, or is an enemy outside the group) that demand a better evolutionary explanation, one that focuses on the value of the group as a unit.

Wrangham also finesses another issue- that of eugenics. His theory is essentially eugenic. We have been our own selective agents, however unintentionally. In an afterword, he gives a brief case against capital punishment. Though it has had such positive effects by his theory, capital punishment is now unnecessary, since we have prisons and other mechanisms of social control. Yet the deeper issue is whether genetic selection is still needed to bias reproduction towards the well-behaved and away from the aggressive, psychopathic, misogynistic, and congenitally sleazy. Not a word on this, since it is a far more explosive and difficult issue, not to mention politically tinged at the moment.

• Mind control in North Korea.
• Insurers are promoting, rather than fighting, ransomware. Make sure to keep backups!
• "This administration is ultimately driven by sociopathic disregard for our future"
• North Carolina finally puts a nail in gerrymandering.
• Figuring out common threads in the diverse genetics of autism.
• Notes by Veblen.
• Just because ....

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Ephrins are cell surface receptor-ligand pairs that create boundaries throughout the body.

Ever wonder how organs form and stay distinct? All our DNA is the same, yet the cells it gives rise to differentiate, migrate all over the place, through each other's neighborhoods, and then form various distinct tissues, including 700 unique muscles. Cells don't have eyes or brains, so the mechanism is more like ants following pheromone trails rather than an architect following a masterplan of the body. It is a far more complicated story than anyone understands at the moment, but some of the actors are known.

There are a lot of cell adhesion proteins, such as integrins, cadherins, NCAMs. and selectins. But adhesion can't be the whole story, lest every cell adhere to every other. That is where Ephrins come in, which are a family of cell surface molecules which typically have repulsive effects, when they find and bind to their receptors (called Eph). They are widely used in development and mature tissues to keep proper boundaries and help guide that way for migrating cells and cell processes.

It has long been known that if you dissociate embryonic tissue and allow the cells to float about, they will re-associate in an organized (though far from perfect) way, like sticking to like, with boundaries forming between those from different tissues. This indicates the power of selective adhesion and repulsion to help cells position themselves, which operate in conjunction with other systems that keep their identity straight- what organ or tissue they are supposed to be. Each such cell type expresses its own complement of adhesion and repulsion surface molecules, forming part of the code that helps it to find and keep its place, as well as deciding whether to continue dividing and moving, or to stop when the local structure has reached its expected proportions.

On the left, one tissue expressing an Eph receptor keeps separate from another tissue expressing the  Ephrin ligand which it recognizes, thanks to repulsive effects that counter-act several other adhesive interactions. On the right are a few of the details of the mechanism. Each side of the Ephrin-Eph interaction can tell its cell that an encounter has happened.

These mechanisms take another quantum leap in the nervous system, which involves a particularly high level of cell migration during development, and pathfinding of dendrites and axons throughout life. Axons travel huge distances, both in the central nervous system and in the peripheral nervous system, using adhesion and repulsion cues all along the way. Ephrins are used dynamically to guide growth cones. For example in the serotonin network, serotonin neurons traveling from the dorsal raphae (B7) to the forebrain olfactory bulb pass by the amygdala. Do they stop there to extend some input fibers? Normally they do. But not if the amygdala has been genetically altered (in these mice) to express the EphrinA ligand, which pairs with the EphrinA5 receptor that is normally expressed on these neurons.

EphrinA is typically expressed in the hypothalamus, keeping serotonergic projections from the dorsal raphae (on the left, B7) from innervating. But if it is expressed (in mice) in the amygdala, it prevents that normal innervation as well, as these neurons travel during development into the forebrain, in this case the olfactory bulb (OB).

• Review of muscle development.
• Review of cell migration.
• Rising Asia.
• Sweden is more entrepreneurial than the US- because incumbents have less power and people have more power.

Incarnation and Reincarnation

Souls don't reincarnate. Heck, they don't even exist. But DNA does.

What a waste it is to die. All that work and knowledge, down the drain forever. But life is nothing if not profligate with its gifts. Looking at the reproductive strategies of insects, fish, pollen-spewing trees, among many others gives a distinct impression of easy come, easy go. Life is not precious, but dime-a-dozen, or less. Humanity proves it all over again with our rampant overpopulation, cheapening what we claim to hold so dear, not to mention laying the rest of the biosphere to waste.

But we do cherish our lives subjectively. We have become so besotted with our minds and intelligence that it is hard to believe, (and to some it is unimaginable), that the machinery will just cease- full stop- at some point, with not so much as a whiff of smoke. Consciousness weaves such a clever web of continuous and confident experience, carefully blocking out gaps and errors, that we are lulled into thinking that thinking is not of this world- magical if not supernatural. Believing in souls has a long and nearly universal history.

Reincarnation in the popular imagination, complete with a mashup of evolution. At least there is a twisty ribbon involved!

Yet we also know it is physical- it has to be something going on in our heads, otherwise we would not be so loath to lose them. Well, lose them we do when the end comes. But it is not quite the end, since our heads and bodies are reincarnations- they come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the DNA that encodes us. DNA incarnates through biological development, into the bodies that are so sadly disposable. And then that DNA is transmitted to new carnate bodies, and re-incarnates all over again in novel combinations through the wonder of sex. It is a simple, perhaps trite, idea, but offers a solid foundation for the terms (and archetypes) that have been so abused through theological and new-age history.

• The Taliban still stands with Al Qaeda.
• Trauma and the Ring.
• Those darn astrocytes.
• Impeachable offenses? Plenty.
• Corporations are at best amoral, and routinely immoral.
• Fisheries are running thin.

The End of Theology

Final part of three posts on Mormonism- into the current age. Review of "The Mormon People", by Matthew Bowman.

Prophets found religions, but bureaucrats run them. It has ever been so, an evolution that is recapituated in Mormonism. Mormonism's phophet, Joseph Smith certainly existed, which is more than we can say for sure about Jesus, though his golden tablets have a more tenuous grip on reality, to say nothing of the pseudohistory he cooked up in the Book of Mormon. The enthusiasm which Mormonism generated at the start, and the strong, if not universal, attachment and devotion its converts had to Joseph Smith as the self-proclaimed revelator and prophet, is incredible in a skeptical age, to skeptical people. Thousands of converts were eventually moved to pile their possessions on handcarts in Iowa, and wheel them on foot over a thousand miles to Salt Lake City. Smith's successor, Brigham Young, received roughly one revelation, and after that, further (highly infrequent) revelation was left to the committee that runs the church.

It has been a rapid evolution from crazy inspiration to buttoned-down middle-of-the-road-ism, exemplified in the newest temple in Salt Lake City, the LDS conference center, an incredibly lush and expensive building (on the inside), built with enormous discretion mostly below-ground and well-screened from the outside, with only a slight, modernist spire. Mormonism started with a revolutionary mind-set, moving out of reach of the US to set up its own theocracy, which grew and flourished for several decades. But after a war, enormous pressure from the US, and some strategic changes of course, it has shifted its outlook and become a bulwark of American-ism, spreading middle class values all over the world among its converts.

The LDS conference center, in Salt Lake City. Which is also a temple, under the covers.

Along the way, Mormon theology has shifted as well. There were the explicit accommodations discarding polygamy and racism. There were more subtle changes from strict adherence to Smith's revelation to progressive scientific inquiry and reasoned argument, popular in the early twentieth century when Christianity was still widely and generally thought to be consistent with the newest findings in astronomy, physics, archeology and other sciences. And then a turn to creationism when the realization began to dawn that science presented insurmountable problems and needed to be opposed or co-opted, not only on the main front of the origin and nature of man, but particularly for Mormons on the archeological evidence (or lack thereof) for the Jewish origin of native Americans, the existence of whiter Nephites vs the redder Lamanites, the great culminating battle between them, and the travels of Jesus in the New World, among many other issues.

This all led to the main evolution of Mormonism, which has been to de-emphasize theology altogether, in favor of a strong social system with sufficient ritual to awe, but more focus on keeping its adherants so busy with offices, committees, gradations of status, services to all ages from youth to old age, that little time or energy is left for theology. The mission is a good example. This task is unimaginably arduous. All young men and many women go out for two years as a culmination of their upbringing in the church, to hand out Books of Mormon to unwilling passers-by, and serve by their clean-cut appearance as advertisements for the LDS church. Are they theological experts? Hardly. While the main point seems to be to re-affirm the missionary's own dedication to the church by this boot camp experience- a sense of being part of an elite or a despised few, with a special mission in fallen times- the proposition to potential converts revolves far more around the concrete social structures of the church than its miscelleneous revelations and claims to be the true and restored priesthood of Jesus. Indeed, seeing youngsters of nineteen called "elders" and "Aronic priests" does not inspire respect for such claims of superiority in god-given revealed priestly authority, in comparison with such more staid institutions as, say, the Orthodox and Catholic churches.

The problem of theological and spiritual decline. LDS elders distribute the sacrament.

This analysis was one unexpected pleasure of Matthew Bowman's book on the history of Mormonism, that while the founding of Mormonism is naturally the most curious and remarkable part of the story, his treatment of the later evolutions of the instution and its rationalizations is fascinating, subtle, and well worth reading.

It is thus difficult to pin down what precisely orthodox Mormon belief is. Mormons who wish to enter the temples must affirm their belief in Jesus Christ's devine sonship and atonement, in the truth of Joseph Smith's divine mission to restore Christ's church, and in the priesthood authority of the present leaders of the church. That is all, and particular key terms in those beliefs remain intentionally undefined. Through the church's 180 year existence, Orson Pratt, B. H. Roberts, Bruce McConkie, and many other authors have each offered up versions of Mormonism, and though ideas from many Mormon writers have seeped into the common discourse of the church, none is considered a final authority on what Mormons must believe. In an interview with Time in 1997, a journalist asked Gordon B. Hinckley about the doctrine that God was once a man, which Joseph Smith seemed to advocate. "I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it," he said. The reply was less an evasion than a recognition of the modern place of theology in the church: the focus of Mormonism is very much not on the particulars of belief but whether a member is in the pews every week, holds a calling, and can be relied upon if a bishop is looking for somebody to drive an elderly widow to the hospital. 

There is no trained Mormon clergy. The Church Educational System today espouses not only the conservative theology of Bruce McConkie but also his lack of interest in scholarship outside his own tradition. CES's work resembles a youth ministry more closely than it does the seminaries of other faiths. Similarly, leaders of the church today, unlike James Talmage or John Widtsoe or McConkie, avoid writing books about theology in favor of devotional or homiletic texts. This trend is likely intentional. After the public disputes over evolution in the 1930's and after correlation (a preemptive strike against potential doctrinal schism) the leaders of the church have decided to leave theological dispute alone.

Theology is like clothing. We know implicitly and unconsciously what course matter lies beneath, but do not want to see. Truth is hidden, and what covers it is not truth, really, but a contrivance developed to enhance our self-image and social existence, via bright dramatic colors, a stylish cut that, while following the natural form in some respects, alters and improves as well. Clothes ease social life, helping us keep boundaries, announce our allegiances, beliefs, and status. Many people like to wear uniforms, as a sign of belonging and status. Yet the impulse to innovation and novelty is irrepressible as well, creating sects of fashion and adornment. Styles change with the times, for incidental, technogical, or no reasons at all, fostering constant change in which theologies and theological institutions best meet the anxieties of the moment. Clothing builds progressively in an unending evolution, from work fabrics to jeans, to riveted jeans, to prewashed, stretch, and now ripped. So do theologies, which build one upon the next, each claiming to be the restored and true church.

Death is probably that truth which it is most urgent to hide, so theologies take its amelioration or suppression most seriously, even when each person, in their bones, knows the truth. Even that most sensible of theologies, Buddhism, professes reincarnation, though it violates some of its own central tenets and is obviously a cultural inheritance from Hinduism. Not even those who have escaped rebirth die, in the Buddhist system, but dwell permanently in nirvana, a sort of heaven. Temperamental differences lead to a great variety of styles and approaches, some people reveling in dense fabrics and shell-like protection, others in flamboyant display, still others yearning for nudism. The varieties of spiritual clothing are just as obvious, and just about as arbitrary. Great designers and other creators (think David Bowie, James Harden, Japan of the Edo era) come up with new approaches to clothing, while most hew to conservatism, which shapes the uniforms of millions. Clothing has both mundane and exalted elements, just as church life has its ecstatic moments and humdrum ones- its inspired creators and the trailing edge of missionaries struggling to get even one person to listen to the good news.

In clothing, all this obfuscatory effort of hiding reality has been practically rewarding and artistically elevating, and at worst harmless. In religion, on the other hand, for all its artistic dividends, theology has been a philosophical disaster of the first order. New versions always appear, as the need for spiritual clothing appears to be timeless. Yet we can only celebrate the cooling and bureaucratization of previously extreme theologies into bland uniforms of conventionality.

• Once I was a beehive, a charming, if sappy, look into Mormon culture.
• Fake news, from DOJ.
• Classic projection lie, to distract from the Trump=Epstein equation. Who elected this psychopath?
• Election security is not going very well.

Domestic Terrorism

For all the mass shootings, domestic violence kills more people and terrorizes them far more severely. A tribute to Andrea Dworkin.

We are enraged by the continuing insanity of the NRA and the legion of gun nuts it represents. A murderous phallic-worship cult so transfixed by the object of their adoration that simple human decency, let alone humility, fall by the way. But the mass shootings by young brain-washed men with automatic rifles, which form the media focus, are a minor problem compared with the more prevalent and damaging form of domestic terrorism and murder: domestic violence.

Roughly 2,000 people die yearly from domestic violence, half of which involve guns, and some of which are familicides that also count as mass shootings. In comparison, about 300 people have been dying in mass shootings per year over the last decade, though the statistics are disparate under various definitions and research methods. The gun violence archive lists 253 so far in 2019, 340 in all of 2018; 346 in 2017, 382 in 2016, 335 in 2015, and 269 in 2014.

Mass shootings count as terrorist incidents, since they are typically driven by an ideology of hatred that is expressed explicitly as motivation, and may also target a hated group, or, out of frustration, just a vulnerable group of opportunity. The intention is evidently to instill fear in society, excite copycats, and change the culture towards the desired hatred setting. But how effective are they? Not very effective at all, since their rarity insures that we as general citizens need not have, and do not have, fear of public places or other venues where such shootings take place. Yes, we are angry about the senseless carnage made possible by military fixations and equipment prevalent in some of our not-very-mentally-healthy subcultures. Yes, we are disgusted by the ideology, such as it is, and its leaders, first and foremost our dear president. But terrorized? Not at all. The elaborate security theater introduced in airports, and increasingly in schools, is a sad and wasteful consequence, but hardly bespeaks "terror". Rather, it represents the best our bureaucracies can manage to raise increments of policing and prevention, with the end result of keeping the populace calm, if not irritated and bored out of its collective mind.

Terror is something else entirely. Terror is when you are trapped in a place with no escape. A place where, if you try to leave, your chances of being killed are higher than if you stay. A place, where if you stay, you can look forward to unending torment, vicious abuse both physical and mental. A situation where, if you leave, you can count on being hunted for years, with lethal weapons. That is the reality of domestic violence. Andrea Dworkin blamed pornography, which I do not. But pornography is part of a larger culture of dehumanization and objectification, consisting of casual rapists like our president, pimps who traffic in women and girls, dedicated patriarchies such as the Catholic and Mormon churches, even Sports Illustrated, which traffics in a yearly turn into soft porn, among many other social institutions.

Objectification is not unique to sexuality, but results from any desire. The store clerk is a mechanism to obtain what we want, and is of little personal importance to us as shoppers. War could not happen without the objectification of the enemy. Nothing personal! But it is certainly ironic and distressing that the most personal relationship of all is driven by desires that can so easily head down impersonal, even spiteful, hateful, and violent channels when thwarted and frustrated, or even if let run free, by way of ideological or psychological perversion.

It is noteworthy that much of our language around sex is violent and used to express violence. Being "screwed" is not a good thing, but a bad thing. The gun nuts mentioned above marinate in a cult of masculinity and sexualized power so divorced from reality and humanity that it should form an intrinsic "red flag". Again, it is the powerful, even existential, motivating desire of sexuality which generates a quest for other forms of power and control, leading some down a path of violence and dehumanization.

As Andrea Dworkin wrote, in her inimitable style:  "Life and Death"

"These are women who thought that they had a right to dignity, to individuality, to greedom- but in fact they couldn't walk down a city block in freedom. Many of them were raped as children in their own homes, by relatives- fathers, uncles, brothers- before they were 'women'. Many of them were beaten by the men who loved them- their husbands, lovers. Many of them were tortured by these men. When you look at what happened to these women, you want to say, 'Amnesty International, where are you?'- because the prisons for women are our homes. We live under martial law. We live in a rape culture. Men have to be sent to prison to live in a culture that is as rapist as the normal home in North America. We live under what amounts to military curfew, enforced by rapists. We say we're free citizens in a free society. But we lie. We lie about it every day."

So it is a deep issue, a pressing issue of human rights, health and well-being, and continues in the age of #MeToo, which is only slowly filtering through the culture. What should be done? We can not all go back and get better upbringings, probably the single most influential causal / protective factor. A great deal has been done to set up hotlines and women's shelters, and to recognize that leaving an abusive situation is very difficult. But I think more can be done, principally by taking the position that a relationship where one person has reached out to police, or an abuse hotline, or a shelter, is already dead, and the helping institutions should do all they can to enable its parties to dissolve it and move on. That means not getting bogged down in a lot of mediation. Rather, the focus should be on setting the battered spouse into a new life, rapidly putting all the shared assets and income flows into escrow, and using them fairly, under official supervision and eventual division, to help each party live independently. Whether the batterer is charged criminally is a separate matter. The evidence in these cases tends to be poor, the parties unwilling to extend their trauma and drag their lives through the courts. Either way, separation is the more urgent and practical need, and one party's witness is quite sufficient for that.

Q: People think you are very hostile to men.
A: I am.
Q: Doesn't that worry you?
A: From what you said, it worries them. 

• How not to build infrastructure- Australian broadband whipsawed between right and left.
• Real gun nuts can't stand the NRA.
• And naturally, the answer is more guns.
• Methods of bad faith.

Awash in Authoritarian Atavism

Most institutions in the US are authoritarian, not democratic. 

How far we have come from the independent, agrarian ideal of Thomas Jefferson! Through the first century of the Republic, most citizens were self-employed, principally as farmers and shopkeepers. This bred an ethic of independence, self-reliance, and self-motivated political and civic participation, as noted by de Tocqueville. Then we all started working for corporations, and were sucked into a political system of work that was anything but democratic. Unions were an attempt to re-inject democratic principles into this workplace, at least in opposition to the main actor, management. But they have withered as well in our current age, as the corporation has become ascendent, and state regulation has largely taken the place of unions to remediate the worst problems of corporate amorality.

It all starts with the family, which, at least from the child's perspective, is very much an authoritarian institution. Care is exchanged for obedience. Hopefully love is exchanged as well. Viewing powerful people is known to be psychologically valent- we are to some extent inherently authoritarian. Churches generally replicate this structure, most explicitly in the Catholic system, with El Papa at the top, giving stern, loving, and infallible leadership. One of our most characteristic home-grown churches, the Mormon church, has an equally top-down authoritarian and patriarchal hierarchy. It was with the most extreme reluctance that its leaders gave up polygamy which had served as an extra reward and evidence of divine / patriarchal favor, to be followed by an eternity of connubial bliss.

The current LDS leadership of prophets, seers, and revelators.

These templates pervade our society, with even small towns that should be run by town councils giving up their executive functions to town managers. One of our political parties is dedicated to the proposition that authoritarianism is better than democracy, and pursues every possible means to make that transition. But it is really the corporation that takes up most of our waking lives and exemplifies the pervasiveness of authoritarianism today. In a typical corporation, there is an oligarchical board that is supposedly in charge of corporate strategy. But its members are typically chosen by management and are managers of other corporations, so fully entrenched in the authoritarian power structure. There are shareholders who supposedly own the corporation, elect the board, and supposedly vote about critical strategic issues. But nothing could be further from a democracy. It is management that proposes all the candidates, issues, and conducts all communications, and it is extremely rare for any contrary perspective or action to come to light. And the recent movement back to private corporate ownership has moved the dial even further away from any semblance of democracy.

The effects of this are clear, in the amorality and growing destructiveness of American corporations. For all the talk of "stakeholders", they steer all spare money to management and shareholders, and think nothing of destroying communities and workers, to be replaced with offshored supply chains or automated machinery as feasible. Our main streets have been eviscerated, our media prostituted, our environment abused, our government corrupted. The public good, which is what democracy exists to safeguard and nurture, means nothing to authoritarian institutions whose only purpose is the capture money by any means fair or foul and whose governance gives no place to greater considerations. Corporations have also invaded our democratic processes by way of the modern intermediaries of political participation- political consultancies, mass advertising, and PACs, not to mention old-fashioned funding / corruption of individual politicians, parties and institutions, and capture of regulatory agencies.

No wonder that our fellow citizens, after marinating their lives away in undemocratic social institutions, have little experience or taste for the rigors of democracy, and fall to the mean morality, domineering presumptions, and infantile ideas of demagogues. This will require some grass-roots psychotherapy to correct. One such corrective might be the work council system, as practiced in Germany. Every work place of any size has a democratically elected council of workers, which discuss and agitate for worker interests. They also elect worker representatives to the corporate board, up to half its members, depending on company size. This system gives workers real power in the workplace and a practice of participatory democracy, both of which are sorely lacking in the US.

• The eggs are OK.
• Explicit... tiny desk by Lizzo.

Thomas Paine

Target of more than one early American smear campaign. Review of "The life of Thomas Paine", vols 1 and 2.

For an immensely talented, intelligent, and well-meaning man, Thomas Paine had remarkably bad luck at several key junctures of his life. The first was in marriage. No one knows what happened, but he and his wife quickly separated, more or less amicably, leading in part to his desire to move the American Colonies from his native England. Next was in his business dealings. He was not in the least a man of business, and gave away all his writings. This helped make them popular, but left him ultimately penniless. And the little money he had, he gave away freely. Lastly were his political problems in France and with enemies from the American Revolution, which landed him in prison during the French Revolution, and within a hair's breadth of the guillotine.

But he was very fortunate in his biographer, Moncure Conway, who published "The Life of Thomas Paine" in 1892, when lore and records about Paine were still reasonably fresh. Conway was a free-thinker, with deep sympathy with his subject, and this book is as detailed and supportive a biography as one might wish. We all know that Paine published "Common Sense", which cast the arguments for the American revolution in clear, populist language and sparked the national resolve to leave the British empire. He also published a series of follow-up pamphlets during the war, which he served as a foot soldier in Washington's army, that had equally important roles in supporting and funding the war effort, which was continually on the verge of financial and military collapse.

Paine was also an inventor, obsessed with building better bridges, using the improved forms of iron available at the time. This pursuit brought him back to England briefly, where he wrote "Rights of Man", as a response to Edmund Burke's somewhat reactionary "Reflections on the Revolution in France". "Rights of Man" was a comprehensive wrecking ball against monarchichal rule, and was very popular both in England and France. For this, the British government carried out an extensive campaign of villification, prosecuting him for sedition and libel. Paine escaped capture in just the nick of time, crossing the channel and entering France as a hero, feted with parades, and immediately elected to the National Convention.

There, he co-authored a constitution, whose fate illuminates those of the French Revolution in general, and Paine in particular. The National Convention was supposedly a temporary body, empowered, as were the American Continental Congresses and Constitutional Convention, to manage transitional affairs (at first, in France, in collaboration with the king), and to come up with a new constitution. But as crisis piled on crisis, the Convention split into parties- the Girondins and the Montagnards- the latter of whom decided that they didn't need a constitution anyhow, and could rule directly via revolutionary committees. The constitution was scuttled, rule of law went out the window, and the Montagnards, under Robespierre, proceeded to the Terror.

The most interesting and revelatory part of Conway's biography is his detailed account of how Thomas Paine ended up in prison. As a Girondin, and having argued forcefully against executing the king, Paine was definitely on the political outs. The Montagnards soon barred foreigners from serving in the Convention, depriving Paine of his seat. But why send him to prison in December 1793? Here we come to the machinations of the American ambassador to France, Gouverneur Morris. Morris is portrayed as a semi-Tory, supportive of George Washington's nascent reapproachment with Britain, which was consummated in the Jay Treaty of 1795. (Whose fruits would later arrive in the war of 1812.)

Unbeknownst to Paine, Morris also had personal enmities against Paine, who was the most famous and leading American in Paris, functioning in many ways as America's main envoy. The French government sought to remove Morris as ambassador, due to his pro-British, royalist sympathies, but were rebuffed by Washington, helped along by various misreprentations and lies from Morris. This left the French in an awkward position, vis-a-vis their only ally in the world, at which point they started listening to Morris and doing his bidding. And Conway strongly suggests that Morris let it be known at this point that the US would like Paine to be imprisoned, due to insinuations that Paine was a British citizen, a thorn to the Americans, and that Paine had encouraged the activities of the French ambassador to the US, Edmund Genet, who had angered Washington (and his sponsors in the Convention) by organizing pro-French millitias in the US to harry the Spanish in Florida, harass British shipping, and generally encourage party strife, among other vexations.

Conway puts Morris in the center of a plot to imprison, and preferably execute, Thomas Paine, of which just a couple of samples:

"But the fatal far-reaching falsehood of Morris' letter to Jefferson was his assertion that he had claimed Paine as an American. This falsehood, told to Washington, Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, paralyzed all action in America in Paine's behalf; told to the Americans in Paris, it paralyzed further effort of their own."
...
"It may be wondered that Morris should venture on so dangerous a game. But he had secured himself in anything he might choose to do. So soon as he discovered, in the previous summer, that he was not to be removed, and had fresh thunderbolts to wield, he veiled himself from the inspection of Jefferson. This he did in a letter of September 22, 1793. In the quasi-casual way characteristic of him when he is particularly deep, Morris then wrote: 'By the bye, I shall cease to send you copies of my various applications in particular cases, for they will cost .you more in postage than they are worth.' I put in italics this sentence, as one which merits memorable record in the annals of diplomacy."
...
"Told that they must await the action of a distant government, which itself was waiting, for action in Paris, alarmed by the American Minister's hints of danger that might ensue on any misstep or agitation, assured that he was proceeding with the case, forbidden to communicate with Paine, .they were reduced to helplessness. Meanwhile, between silent America and these Americans, all so cunningly disabled, stood the remorseless French Committee, ready to strike or to release in obedience to any sign from the alienated ally, to soothe whom no sacrifice would be too great. Genet had been demanded for the altar of sacred Alliance, but (to Morris' regret) refused by the American government. The Revolution, would have preferred Morris as a victim, but was quite ready to offer Paine."

Paine was eventually freed by the next minister, James Monroe, whom Morris did everything in his power to impede. Monroe claimed Paine as an American Citizen, and that was that. Morris, for his part, escaped in 1794 across the border to Switzerland after getting embroiled in various plots in Paris and becoming even more non-grata than before, and wound up his career in Europe as a royal toady, as Conway puts it: "The ex-Minister went off to play courtier to George III and write for Louis XVIII the despotic proclamation with which monarchy was to be restored in France."

Paine's final landmark work was "Age of Reason", his defense of deism. This led to the most thorough campaign of villification of his life, and long after. What was to the aristocrats of his day and particularly of the American Revolution a common philosophy became in Paine's treatment a popular and populist attack on established religions of all sorts, and the sanctity and veracity of the Bible in particular. Paine derided its fables and contradictions, and proclaimed a simple faith in god, whose evident works were plenty to engender belief, with no need for thrice-told miracles or gold-embroidered priests. While twenty or thirty years before, such a work might have been taken in the revolutionary spirit, America had fallen into a revivalist spirit by this time, and the resurgent methodists and other preachers led a campaign that blackened Paine's reputation for decades, and from which it has only gradually and partially emerged.

One wonders what the Quaker Paine would have made of his religion after Darwin and Lyell, who so thoroughly demolished the deistic reliance on god to explain the most far-reaching and perplexing natural phenomena. I am confident that Paine's intellect, which shines through his writing, would have grappled honestly with these changed circumstances and come out with either a far-attenuated deism, or given it up in favor of full atheism.

• There are many authoritarian institutions in our country.
• It is hard to negotiate with the Taliban.

We'll Keep Earth

The robots can have the rest of the universe.

The Apollo 11 aniversary is upon us, a wonderful achievement and fond memory. But it did not lead to the hopeful new-frontier future that has been peddled by science fiction for decades, for what are now obvious reasons. Saturn V rockets do not grow on trees, nor is space, once one gets there, hospitable to humans. Earth is our home, where we evolved and are destined to stay.

But a few among us have continued taking breathtaking adventures among the planets and toward other stars. They have done pirouettes around the Sun and all the planets, including Pluto. They are our eyes in the heavens- the robots. I have been reading a sober book, Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, which works through in painstaking, if somewhat surreal, detail what artificial intelligence will become in the not too distant future. Whether there is a "singularity" in a few decades, or farther off, there will surely come a time when we can reproduce human level intelligence (and beyond) in machine form. Already, machines have far surpassed humans in memory capacity, accuracy, and recall speed, in the form of databases that we now rely on to run every bank, government, and app. It seems inescapable that we should save ourselves the clunky absurdity, vast expense, and extreme dangers of human spaceflight and colonization in favor of developing robots with increasing capabilities to do all that for us.

It is our fleet of robots that can easily withstand the radiation, weightlessness, vacuum, boredom, and other rigors of space. As they range farther, their independence increases. On the Moon, at 1.3 light seconds away, we can talk back and forth, and control things in near real time from Earth. The Mars rovers, on the other hand, needed to have some slight intelligence to avoid obstacles and carry out lengthy planned maneuvers, being roughly 15 light-minutes from Earth. Having any direct control over rovers and other probes farther afield is increasingly impossible, with Jupiter 35 minutes away, and Neptune four light hours away. Rovers or drones contemplated for Saturn's interesting moon Titan will be over a light hour away, and will need extensive autonomous intelligence to achieve anything.

These considerations strongly suggest that our space program is, or should be in large part joined with our other artificial intelligence and robotics activities. That is how we are going to be able to achieve great things in space, exploring far and wide to figure out how we came to be, what other worlds are like, and whether life arose on them as well. Robots can make themselves at home in the cosmos in a way that humans never will.

Matt Damon, accidentally marooned on Mars.

Bostrom's book naturally delves into our fate, once we have been comprehensively outclassed by our artificial creations. Will we be wiped out? Uploaded? Kept as pets? Who knows? But a reasonable deal might be that the robots get free reign to colonize the cosmos, spreading as far as their industry and inventiveness can carry them. But we'll keep earth, a home for a species that is bound to it by evolution, sentiment, and fate, and hopefully one that we can harness some of that intelligence to keep in a livable, even flourishing, condition.

• Some impressive mind reading.