Historikerstreit

On the moral and historical bequests of Christianity

A correspondent is carrying on a long campaign of polemic about how great the Christian tradition is, how it is still holding up our moral universe, and how we are going to end up in heck when it dies. Putting aside the question of whether the historical origin of moral ideas is relevant to their continued utility and propagation, and also putting aside the question of how our culture ever swallowed the tribal propaganda of "Christianity=goodness", the simple question is: would we have gotten to the rights-granting, cosmopolitan, quasi-egalitarian, humanistic western culture of today faster or slower had it not been for Christianity?

The question is one of alternative histories. What was Christianity really responsible for? What would have happened in its absence? While it is easy to point to the high-lights and low-lights of Christian history, it is much more difficult to do more than speculate about what would have happened in its absence. In scientific terms, with a single sample and no controls, how can the historian draw any conclusions?

Economists also have a term for this problem- "opportunity cost". These are the costs of all options and opportunities foregone when one makes a choice to invest money one way. If I put my money into a savings account, I forego the opportunity of investing it in the next big stock ... or the next big ponzi scheme. Only in hindsight do such opportunity costs become even partly clear, to our pleasure or regret, though of course we never know the half of what would really have been possible. But in the larger swaths of history, such alternatives are neigh-well incalculable. We do not know how a western culture bereft of monotheisms might have fared. We know how things were going in the classical world, but then Constantine, Justinian, and Muhammed arrived.

Christians typically point to the bad aspects of antiquity- slavery, infanticide, and brutal entertainments. Non-Christians can point to many bad aspects of the age that followed- economic collapse (whether due to religious naval-gazing and un-realism or to other issues of cultural decline coincident with Christianity), intolerance and persecution, the evaporation of serious philosophy, sciences, etc.

Ironically enough, the learning of pre-Christian antiquity was revered by all sides right up into the enlightenment and beyond, though understood rather differently by humanists and by the theists influenced by Augustinian and Thomist re-readings of classical works. Edward Gibbon certainly took a very sour view of Christianity, blaming it for sapping the ancient vitality of Rome and leaving it in ruins. And slavery was hardly foreign to more recent Christian cultures such as the American South. Each side has plenty of ammunition, but can the causality of any of this be nailed down? Can we conclude anything about what would have happened in the absence of Christianity? Was it bad or good?

Speaking rigorously, I don't think we can. We have no time machines and no alternative universes for experimentation. Relative to scientific experiment, history is both endlessly complex and unrepeatable, not to mention recorded with bias the minute anyone puts pen to paper. Thus it is likewise impossible to say based on historical arguments whether losing Christianity in the present age will be good or bad either. Nevertheless, I am happy enough to paint my own picture of the situation, calling out what historical scholarship there is and emphasizing the progress that had taken place in the ancient world, with Hellenism being a strong progressive influence as Rome softened in its various cruelties as time went on.

Perhaps the most pointed question is- did the ancients have any concept of human rights, and was this concept ascendant or not in the pre-Christian age? That may be the most likely wedge into the door of alternative history, indicating whether antiquity was on a path to modernism which Christianity nipped in the bud, delaying for over a millenium, or on the other hand whether Christianity revolutionized the moral order of the ancient world in a way that laid the foundations, as nothing else could have, of the goodness of our current system.

The modern history of formal human rights traces a complex enough path, from the Magna Carta to the American and French revolutions, and on to World War 2 and its aftermath. But there are plenty of ancient antecedents as well. It is fair to say that every culture, insofar as it differentiates itself from the state of nature, has ideas about personal rights and moral status that, while rarely giving equal status to all, accord some kind of status and thus right to each person, be she at the lowliest level of untouchability in traditional India.

The Greek and Roman worlds had highly developed philosophies of morals and ethics- which the early church held in substantial reverence, insofar as they could be reconciled with its own systems. Plutarch's ethics have been appreciated up to the present time, including his advocacy of humane treatment of slaves and animals, as have those of Plato and Aristotle, though none (other than the Stoics, in a spiritual sense) speak of universal egalitarianism. Several cultures of the ancient world had complex written forms of law, including Hammurabi's code (1750 BCE) and its descendents in Babylonia, and Rome, with its baroque constitution and primary division between plebians and aristocrats/senators dating to the 300's BCE. So while the Magna Carta is a touchstone of Anglophone jurisprudence and rights, it is far from the first word on the matter.

Slavery in the ancient world was a substantially different affair from what it was in the American South, with substantial mobility between the status of free, slave, recently liberated, and back to fully free. Large influxes of slaves arrived with military capture, and their fate was various- a practical death sentence when sent to the mines or sea galleys, less harsh in agricultural work, crafts, industry, or domestic service. Slaves were employed in all sorts of work, skilled and unskilled, with very few lines of work deemed exclusive either to slaves or to nonslaves. Slaves of the imperial household could become very high-ranking administrators throughout the empire. (The Bible's story of Joseph in Egypt makes the same point at an earlier time.)

The system in some ways resembled the early US colonial system of indenture as much as the more radical system of negro slavery. Slaves were often trained in advanced technical arts/crafts and treated as income-producting investments. Slaves could be and often were freed, and while they then still lacked some rights, their children became full Roman citizens, completing the cycle of mobility. Free persons could be sold into slavery for debt or children by their parents, but this became rarer with time as society became less comfortable with slavery, and by far the main source was conquest, so that when the Roman empire ceased to expand, the population of slaves gradually declined as well. Another general trend was the common subjection of all to the state, which became more onerous in taxation as time went on, to some extent levelling the status of free and slave, ultimately arriving at the common position of feudal tennancy for each.

The cultural trend was towards increased rights for slaves, and while slavery continued to be accepted throughout antiquity, by Christian and pagan alike, it is not hard to imagine that had other systems of thought and economics prevailed, especially if the ancient economy hadn't taken a nosedive, slavery might have been abolished long before it actually was in the West.

---

My primary source is a book by William Westerman (1955) "The slave systems of Greek and Roman antiquity", from which (by way of Google books) I offer a series of quotes below. Another source is Rodney Stark's "The rise of Christianity", where he estimates the overall numbers of Christians in the period (based on a 40% growth rate from an estimated 1000 adherents circa 30 CE), from which we can conclude that before about 300 CE, they would have had no general influence in society. By 200 CE, the population of Christians in the empire was by this estimate roughly as high as the number of Hindus, Buddhists, or Muslims in the US currently- visible in some settings, but more exotic than influential.

• 50 0.0023%
• 100 0.0126% (7,530 in the entire empire)
• 150 0.07%
• 200 0.36%
• 250 1.9%
• 300 10.5%
• 350 57%

"It is generally conceded that the condition of the slaves of Italy and the public attitude toward them, as compared with that which had existed previously in Italy and Sicily, had undergone a marked change during the first two centuries of the Empire [roughly 30 BCE to 170 CE] in the direction of an increased humanity in respect to them. At this time the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana [3 BCE to 97 CE] states that everyone except barbarians accepts the fact that slavery is degrading, and that only barbarians will heedlessly sell their children into slavery. This indicates that the society of the time had reached the humanitarian realization that, in the institution of slavery, damage other than that of purely material kind was inflicted upon a human being by the simple fact of his enslavement. This movement may be connected with the growth of the prerogatives gained by the servi publici throughout Italy and in the Roman and Latin colonies of the West: it was probably abetted by the honorable position attained by the slaves and freedmen of the imperial household through their efficient services in the administration of the Empire."

"One may respect Seneca as an early and bold exponent of this general change in feeling regarding slavery which was so characteristic of the early Empire. But the sources our of which this transformation arose in the acceptance of slaves lay deeper than the teachings of the Roman Stoicism of Seneca. Chronological reasons regarding the spread of Christianity, and the acceptance of the institution of slavery by the new religion, make it apparent, also, that the new attitude did not spring from Christian doctrine. This does not mean, however, that Christian teaching did no contribute, within the limits of its own communities, to the feeling or equality between slave and free labor which appeared in the early Empire."

As late as 410, well after the triumph of Christianity in the Empire, slaves were still about:

"It is, nevertheless, not to be denied that a fairly large group of Gothic, German, and Hunnish were to be found in Italy who must be classified as legally enslaved persons, subject to transfer by sale and lacking recognized legal personality. This become clear from the terms dictated in A. D. 410 by Alaric, the Visigothic chieftain, to ensure his withdrawal from Rome. This lay in the demand that all the barbarians held as slaves in Rome must be turned over to him if he were to leave the city. This stipulation would have no meaning if these captives were men free to move and so to join the forces of Alaric."

Conversely, Constantine participated in the reduction of free labor to virtual slave status:

"The reduction of free agrarian workers to a state of actual bondage is officially recorded in a mandate of Constantine I issues A. D. 332. It provided that the coloni who might flee or might plan to flee from their overlords must be returned to them and be shackled in irons- 'so that they might fulfill, under the compulsion of a merited condemnation to servitude, the obligations which befitted them as free men.'"

.. "The bestowal upon the landowners, by the enactment of Constantine I in A. D. 332, of the right of punishing their coloni as they might punish their own slaves is clear."

.. " the coloni later come to be referred to as 'slaves of the land itself to which they were born.' This change in terminology expresses realistically the degree of the descent toward enslavement which the coloni had undergone."

"A distinct tendency to lessen the old Roman Republican harshness in the treatment of slaves had already become evidence in special enactments of the first two centuries of the Empire. Generally these took the form of legislation designated to better specific external conditions of enslavement practice which obviously needed to be changed. The continuation into the post-Diocletian period of legislation of this type may be regarded both as an indication and as a result of the drying up of the older sources of slave supply."

"So long as the Christian communities were unconcerned about the underlying justice and injustice of enslavement as a part of the labor system it was impossible for Christian doctrine to conceive the idea of its abandonment, much less formulate a plan to that end. A contradiction was thus established, which continued for many centuries, between Christian acceptance of slavery and its tenet of the equality of all in the sight of God. Anti-Christian writers had been conscious of that paradox between Christian ownership of slaves and their tenet of equality of all who accepted Jesus as the Anointed One."

"An unexpressed feeling of malaise about the institution of slavery was neither new to Christianity in antiquity nor peculiarly the result of its teachings. In the history of the system of slave labor, from the time of the earliest written records of man's experience with it, a certain discomfort about it can be detected in the applied or suggested restrictions which were imposed upon its operation."

"In the formulation of the Christian attitude toward slavery the discussion of it by the Apostle Paul was the determining factor. Fundamentally, Paul's view of the institution did not diverge widely from that of the early and middle Stoic teaching. For those converted to the belief in Christ, free or slave status was not a matter of consequence."

"To Saint Augustine, also, the explanation of the system of slavery in the world at large, presumably including enslavement of Christians to fellow Christians, lay in the fact that it existed by the decision of God as punishment for original sin. In God there is no injustice. Therefore the slave system is justified since God nows how to assign different punishments according to the deserts of the wicked."

"The canons of the Council of Elvira are now customarily dated to A. D. 306. At this meeting it was provided that freedmen whose patrons were of the laity should not be appointed to positions in the clergy. This is a retrogressive movement, presumably in protection of the property interests of slave-owners, whether they be Christians or non-Christians. The same type of decision, in this case respecting the admission of slaves into the monastic life, was taken by the council of Chalcedon held in 451. At that meeting it was provided that slaves should not be accepted by the monasteries except with the express consent of their owners. Anyone concerned in an evasion of this canon was threatened with excommunication."

"There is another facet of the problem which must also be evaluated. If Christian thought was, from its origin in the teaching of Jesus, invested with ideas so incompatible with slavery that it must in the end break the long hold upon human societies which the system had held, why was this inevitable consequence delayed for eighteen centuries after the brief mission of the Nazarene?"

On the slave trade ...

"The food supplied the slaves was probably neither good nor too abundant. We hear no such complaint about it in the ancient literature- which may not mean much. Despite the comparison, favorable as it may be to antiquity in this one respect, [the hardships of slave trafficking being worse in the modern age], one still misses in the Christian literature some note of protest against the trade in slaves or against those who participated in it. For in the pagan literature, both that in Greek and that in Latin, the slave trader stood in low esteem."

And Westermann concludes:

"The failure of Christianity over the succession of the centuries to bring the inner opposition of its ideal into an open conflict with the stark realism of slavery must be acknowledged and faced. It can only be explained in terms of time-conditioning and of difference of environment.

...

The lines on which he [Alfred North Whitehead] has sketched the moral bases of the antislavery feeling are, nevertheless, boldly and correctly drawn. He ascribes its beginnings to Plato's evaluation of the supreme importance of the human soul and carries it through the long period of the influence of Christian thought in developing it.

...

'In the Middle Ages institutional Christianity became an instrument of conservatism instead of an instrument of progress.' It was the convergence of the effects of different ideas- those of Christianity, the humanitarianism of the eighteenth century, and finally the idea of democracy- which eventually brought about the abolishing of human enslavement. It was the necessity of the development of these ideas, and the long wait for their convergence until the time arrived when the material conditions were favorable to it, which best explains the failure of the anti-slavery feeling for so many centuries to culminate in abolition."

As a side-light on our current upheaval, slavery could be seen as a primitive form of bankrupcy law, with insolvent debtors first, in historical sequence, becoming slaves, then feudal tenants, then imprisoned paupers, and finally now, liberated entrepreneurs, trailed only by the faintest whiff of their latest bankruptcy.

Anyhow, the conclusion I would draw from all this is that Christianity was by no means the essential ingredient in the rise of human rights, liberality, and egalitarianism in the West. What would have happened in its absence is unknown, but many threads of antiquity were already trending in the direction of amelioration and humane treatment, which are the typical precursors to abolition.

• Plutarch on animal rights, and here.
• Plutarch on superstition.
• Origins of religious and general toleration.
• Westermann on liberty.

The spiritual atheist

Does spirituality have anything to do with the supernatural?

Julian Baggini recently wrote that he overheard a traveller claiming "I don't believe in God, but I'm a spiritual person". I'd guess that this person was saying that she does not believe in supernatural entities (let alone in beseeching them for benefits), but nevertheless experiences spiritual emotions (which is to say, love) and believes in the human spirit- the mental and social existence by which we develop personal meaning and express love for the world we find ourselves in and the people who populate it.

The word spirit is widely used in secular ways- team spirit, human spirit, high spirits. This is a sign that the language already makes room for what we all sense- that what we see before us is the core meaning, and that the common assumption that this "spirit" has a supernatural component or origin is an added hypothesis, not the core meaning. If we, given the evidence of contemporary biology, neurobiology and psychology, conclude that there is no such thing as an afterlife, a Cartesian soul, angels, or holy ghosts, then animal and human spirits remain as a practical matter, even if supernatural spirits are a dead letter.

This accords with the various spiritual movements that have found a home here in California, from EST to the summer of love, to burning man, most of which have little to do with supernaturalism, or if they do, of a very tempered sort.

Jesus was right that man does not live by bread alone, but wrong in his physics- that an invisible being shrouded in inscrutible writings tells us how to live or needs our prayer, that Jesus was the son of god, that believers live everlastingly after death and nonbelievers are damned forever to hell, etc. These were all metaphorical issues at best, if not self-serving propaganda, and to take them literally was and remains an error. The ancient Egyptians located the soul and its capacity for communal responsibility and gratefulness to creation in the heart, carefully embalming hearts of the deceased for eternity while scooping out and discarding their brains. That scientific error had no effect, of course, on their capacity to exercise their spiritual emotions. As Barak Obama says, his mother was intensely spiritual, without believing in god, spirits, or anything of the sort.

Thus, whether believing in supernatural spirits or not, spirituality labels our capacity to express enjoyment in connecting with others, in experiencing love for our surroundings, and even in listening to new-age music and meditating. The deeper forms of this enjoyment tend to fall on the instinctive axes of purity and sacredness, which form our responses to dirt vs cleanliness, bodily functions vs abstraction, courseness vs nobility, mundane versus unusual events (rainbows, waterfalls, thunderstorms .. beauty of all kinds). In this way we keep our ideals in sight and subjectively transcend the mundane day-to-day of the human condition. Whether there is some other reality to escape to is a separate, scientific question whose answer appears strongly negative. At any rate, it is the inspiration of these feelings and this quest that is critical, with usually positive results.

Indeed spirituality could be described as a form of love, focused on entirely intangible objects in the case of religion, complete with attendant blindness, infatuation, and jealousy, such as we see expressed by the lovers of Allah in the Middle East. The terminology of religion is drenched with such romantic displacement, referencing the heavenly father, the love he has for us, the marriage of nuns with Jesus, his everlasting mercy, our desperation and desolation were he to desert us, hatred for those who fail to appreciate the same love we do, etc. and so on. However, infatuations with invisible beings are liable to misuse by those entrusted to interpret the desires of the love-object, as well as being over-amplified by particularly imaginative devotees. Thus keeping this kind of love directed to real objects, such as visible people and surroundings, is psychologically healthier than the alternative, forming a grounded spirituality rather than a religion whether dogmatic or mystical.

Another way to approach the cognitive origins of spirituality is through the work of psychologist Carl Jung. Jung's focus was on the unconscious, which runs our lives, is deeply mysterious, is (as far as we are concerned) omniscient and omnipotent, is the source of our energies, and generates fantasies and dreamscapes that recapitulate time and again the basic forces of human nature. The unconscious is central to understanding ourselves and our meaning in life, and is the subject of endless symbolic representations in religion and myth ... of the center, yin and yang, the inner core, the foundation stone, the cross, the mandala, etc.

Myths of the hero's quest usually symbolize this inner core of the self as an object of great power, often hidden in a cave, a body of water, or an underworld, such as the pearl of great price, the grail, the ring, or the magic sword, which when found may make the hero whole, healed, or help her save the world. It is really the image of god within, though its valence may occasionally be dark and demonic instead. It is what religions commonly term the soul, whose supposed supernatural properties symbolize the unfathomable ground of personal existence which, because it encompasses our existence, also generates the existence of the entire world on our behalf, in a manner of speaking.

It appears to be natural to flip what is internal, deep, and personal into the most cosmic conceivable entity ... the supernatural god that is everything, inheres in everything, knows everything. While polytheistic gods represent only parts of our psychological selves, whether anger, love, dedication, selfishness, creativity, etc., monotheism amplifies the entire subconscious foundation (the inner cosmos, one might say) into a correspondingly lofty and over-inflated projection. Thus it is that believers are so "deeply" attached to belief- not because it makes rational sense or models the external world, but because it represents the most important and personal element of existence, with which they are in continual communion, from which they receive counsel, and with which they seek a closer relationship.

How else to explain such things as the phantasmagoria of the book of Revelation? These are in no way visions of reality whether past or future, but expressions of extreme inner turmoil and pain- of the powerlessness and humiliation of an oppressed sect, salved by a fantasy of world domination by the righteous in a hopefully imminent future. Similar dynamics lie behind the hidden twelfth Imam of Shia Islam and other millennial and salvational ideas, clear up to Communism and its mythical classless, stateless society.

One instance of this tension between inner and outer (projected) depths has been the contest between Gnosticism and Christian Orthodoxy, where Gnosticism (subject of a future post) tends to be mystical, concerned with personal, even occult, spiritual experience and whole-ness, tied to a conception of the divine as lying within, rather than without. The early chuch patriarchs fought long and hard against such "heresies", despite their abundant concordance with much of Jesus's teachings. And they had to fight them over again in the modern age, as first the Protestants sought personal intermediation with Jesus and the Bible, and now post-Nietsche, when the whole idea of an exterior god appears increasingly ludicrous, and new age and psychotherapeutic movements find spiritual expression once again in a quest for, or study of, the internal cosmos.

Jung described these tensions 90 years ago:

The barrage of materialistic criticism that has been directed against the physical impossibility of dogma ever since the age of enlightenment is completely beside the point. Dogma must be a physical impossibility, for it has nothing whatever to say about the physical world but is a symbol of "transcendental" or unconscious processes which, so far as psychology can understand them at all, seem to be bound up with the unavoidable development of consciousness. Belief in dogma is an equally unavoidable stop-gap which must sooner of later be replaced by adequate understanding and knowledge if our civilization is to continue. (Symbols of Transformation, 1916)

Ritual practices of mental journey such as prayer, fasting and meditation accomplish the purification and separation from mundane life that help many people pay attention to deeper sensibilities which are the wellspring of spiritual feeling. The circumambulation of the Kaaba during the hajj is an example that symbolizes a return to the center- of the universe, of the religion, of the original tribal tradition, and of the soul/self. Specially noteworthy are the hallucinogenic drugs used to attain what participants routinely cite as highly meaningful spiritual states, such as ayahuasca, peyote, and perhaps marijuana. These clearly enhance spiritual sensibilities as they alter consciousness, providing an awareness that consciousness is a dynamic construction built on a highly mysterious, even foreign, unconscious and neurochemical foundation, as they also amplify feelings of connection with what is coming through the opened doors of perception.

But there is a fine line between recognizing, even participating in, the significance of spiritual practices and symbologies, and lending them personal belief. Each person appears to have individual thresholds of suggestibility and sensibility in this all-important field of personal meaning. But the dangers of "drinking the Koolaid" should not keep atheists from appreciating the psychological powers such belief systems, or from engaging with them as metaphorical vehicles for personal expression and communal understanding.

Cognitive science is just beginning to evaluate how the most basic decisions and concepts are made, and is relatively far from analyzing how the brain creates feelings like consciousness and spiritual emotion (what Freudians tend to call "infantile regression"). Depth psychology is currently neglected because it deals with complex psychological themes that have yet to be seen in an MRI, even as they inform every movie, cartoon, and novel. This resembles, ironically, the occultation of all mental contents during the scientific behaviorism heyday of the 1950's, when technical limitations created an analogous conceptual blindness. We know that the fount of meaning and motivation, not to mention religious theology, lies inside the brain. Can atheists be comfortable experiencing and expressing spiritual emotions, even as we simultaneously analyze their origin and their misappropriation into the rationalizations of religion?

Incidental links:

• NYT columnist Charles Blow gets it.
• It is rather ironic that the pope, of all people, would deprecate witchcraft in Africa, when Jesus himself cast out devils in Mark 1, and the Vatican still employs an exorcist and trains them. Is there is a bit of professional jealousy here?
• Bart Ehrman's quest for truth and reason.
• Why do we tell stories? Our brains are social modeling machines.
• Theology, as presented on YouTube.
• ... or as presented on the Philosophy bites podcast.
• A very nice professor of religion discusses meaning.
• Psychologists are studying goodness.
• Somewhat lighthearted philosophical discussion of reason vs religion, aiming for reconciliation, but admitting that he can't get there.
• Daniel Dennett gives an excellent talk about cognition and religion- far better than his book, actually.
• The cartoonist gives me a hard time!

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. -Keats

The ribosome as ancient relic

The ribosome is a fascinating and enormous vestige of the RNA world

One little problem of biology is its ultimate origin. Darwinian biology traces back to something called the "last common ancestor" (LCA for short)- a bacterium-like species from which all life appears to have diversified, containing DNA, proteins, and a membrane. But what came before the LCA? Much of the machinery of the LCA descended from a lengthy process of prior evolution, partly chemical in nature, which is to say that heritability of traits might have been due more to replication of the individual parts of the proto-cell (e.g., by natural expansion of its membrane with like-structured compounds), than by a segregated informational molecule that encoded everything else. For membranes, this is still the case. There is no gene that "encodes the membrane", though there are now plenty of genes that encode proteins that manage membranes and synthesize their components.

One way-station on the path to the LCA, prior to the appearance of DNA, appears to have been a period called the RNA world. RNA (ribonucleic acid) is not as chemically stable as DNA, and is also not as physically rigid as DNA. Being chemically stable is great for DNA (by virtue of a single oxygen subtraction from RNA, thus the "deoxy"), but having chemical reactivity and flexibility is an interesting property of RNA, making it capable of catalyzing reactions as well as carrying information. Thus was born the idea that RNA embodies in one molecule two of the key parts of the original aspects of life- metabolism and heritable information, though quite inefficiently for each.

Scientists now fall over each other to create clever catalytic schemes using RNA, which can cleave other molecules and ligate RNAs, depending on its sequence and shape. A nobel prize has been awarded in this field, and quite a bit of in-vitro evolution has been done to optimize what are called "ribozymes". A quasi- self-reproducing system has recently been devised whose input is short fragments of RNA, which get ligated together by their large products, leading to amplification of the catalytic RNAs, as well as selection and diversification.

But the main evidence for the RNA world comes not from the proof-of-principle experiments, but from the many vestiges that remain in modern cells, first and foremost of which is the translation system. Translation is the process of making proteins from the genetic code- currently DNA. DNA is copied into "messenger" RNA, the mRNA is spliced (by an RNA-based "spliceosome"), capped, and transported out of the nucleus, where it docks to ribosomes which synthesize the encoded protein by reading off three-nucleotide codons.

The ribosome is a huge scaffold (~3,000 kDaltons, or about 20 times the size of an average protein) composed of RNA and proteins that holds the participants and synthesizes the protein, but it does not actually do the codon reading- that part is done by yet another RNA species, the transfer RNAs, which are small L-shaped RNAs that expose an "anti-codon" at the top of the stem of the "L" which hybridize with and "read" codons on the mRNA, and which on their other end carry a single amino acid. Once the ribosome has the right tRNA docked to the mRNA codon, it then spends a little energy to add that tRNA's amino acid to the protein chain it is synthesizing.

Schematic of the translation cycle, with tRNAs pictured in blue,

mRNA in green, and the ribosome in gray.

The key observation, proven only in the last decade, is that the core catalytic activity of polymerizing proteins is in the RNA part of the ribosome, not the protein parts. Indeed, deduced structures of the ribosome show an RNA core decorated with numerous peripheral proteins, as one would imagine if the core were the ancient site of catalytic action, which was later enhanced with various proteins that help efficiency, stability, and regulation. And this RNA is also extremely ancient and well-conserved, recognizably similar in its sequence between all organisms, no matter how distant.

So to recount, translation of proteins involves RNA at every stage- the message/template, the critical bridging function (tRNA) between information code unit and amino acid unit, and lastly the catalytic activity to put them together. I have not even mentioned the RNA catalysis involved in splicing and processing the mRNA, and the RNA core (SRP) involved in docking ribosomes to membranes when making membrane proteins, nor the incredibly ornate pathways of RNA synthesis and modification involved in making ribosomes themselves.

Detailed structure of the inner face of half of a ribosome,

showing key portions of RNA (in red) that interact with the

complementary half. Proteins are in purple.

"There is now strong evidence indicating that an RNA World did indeed exist on the early earth. The smoking gun is seen in the structure of the contemporary ribosome (Ban et al. 2000; Whimberly et al. 2000; Yusupov et al. 2001). The active site for peptide bond formation lies deep within a central core of RNA, whereas proteins decorate the outside of this RNA core and insert narrow fingers into it. No amino acid side chain comes within 18 Å of the active site (Nissen et al. 2000)." - Joyce and Orgel, The RNA world, 2005

Taking the long view, the ribosome is absurdly large and inefficient. DNA and RNA polymerases typically clock in at ~500 kDa, or a fifth the size of ribosomes. The cell spends a huge part of its mass and effort on these little machines. The E. coli cell devotes between 15% to 45% of its dry mass to ribosomes. A rational designer would base the whole mechanism on proteins, which are much better catalysts, and make it far smaller, replacing tRNAs with much smaller protein-based bridging units as well. But no. This is a classic case of sunk costs, of path-dependent development, of sclerotic infrastucture. Cells can not just redesign their most critical function- their method of translation, so we appear to have a luxuriant and wasteful remnant of what we began with- a world where efficiency might not have been the top priority, given the difficulty of making anything work reliably.

So what came before this putative RNA world? Did RNA arise out of the chemistry of early earth spontaneously (highly unlikely), or did it have precursors in the form of crystalline minerals that aided stereo-specific polymerization other organic chemicals? There are plenty of theories, and growing knowledge of the environmental and chemical conditions, which seem to have been propitious, but evidence is extremely thin, if one wishes to stick to evidence.

Do Bankrupt Companies Dream of Electric Cars?

The future of cars comes into electrifying focus, courtesy of Israel.

A recent NYTimes article outlined a way to make electric cars practical even at modest battery capacity- by replacing the battery as needed on the fly, rather than waiting around to recharge. I found it a very persuasive idea, clarifying the future of the automobile.

There have been several schemes floating around for this future:

• Renunciation- cars are bad and we should do without them, building transit for short and long distances that is more efficient than single cars.
• Virtual reality- we eventually plug into a Matrix-like virtual reality where it would make no difference where we are. Telecommuting is only the beginning!
• Hydrogen- a clean, light-weight fuel to replace gasoline, producing no CO2.
• Biofuels- gasoline made from recently deceased plants rather than long-deceased plants stored courtesy of earth's geology.
• Electric vehicles- Electricity is easy to use, and clean, like hydrogen. Whatever the fuel source, all cars are becoming electric cars for efficiency and usability reasons, as shown by today's hybrids, so there is an inherent advantage to also using electricity as the fueling medium.

I think that hydrogen is the most significant loser here, demanding a huge new infrastructure with few significant advantages over the other options. Hydrogen doesn't grow on trees- it has to be made from some other energy source. And on top of that, hydrogen is absurdly difficult to handle and transport safely and cheaply. Indeed, one suspects that hydrogen has been some kind of enormous car industry head-fake plus government boondoggle, based on a prejudice for liquid or quasi-liquid fuels.

Biofuels are impossible as far as large scale use goes, though they will be an important source of specialty chemicals and feedstocks. It is not clear that there are enough recently deceased plants to go around. Making fuel from corn that takes more petroleum to grow than it yields ... that has turned out to be a very bad idea. Shortages of arable land and water are bad enough for growing food- growing fuel is simply not possible or desirable on very large scales.

Renunciation is not going to happen if there is any technological means around it, with the developing world becomming as car-mad as the US (and rightly so, if not for the environmental costs). Virtual reality is sure to be a long-term winner, especially for long-range travel, but bodily travel will still be required for some decades at least. One problem to keep in mind, however, is that making cars themselves is energy and resource-intensive, so some amount of moderation in usage can not but be a good thing, from an environmental perspective.

Electricity, like hydrogen, has to be made somewhere else, and battery storage is not yet at the density of gasoline, making trip range small in current electric cars. It is amazing, really, how slow and painful progress has been in this field, similar to the difficulties in storing large amounts of hydrogen in adsorbed form, or making solar electric panels a few percent more efficient. Electricity storage seems likely to make significantly more progress once market incentives rise, but so far, batteries are not quite ready to substitute for gas tanks, as shown by the price of a truly practical vehicle based on the most advanced technology- the $100,000 Tesla.

The article cited above described an innovative way to deal with the problem of low battery storage capacity, which is to swap out batteries as needed, virtually on the go. A car could make a one-minute pit stop after going 50 miles, get a new battery, and be off in a jiffy with a full charge. While normal use would involve recharging one's own battery after a daily commute, the prospect of being able to swap out batteries on the fly during a long trip is enormously freeing, completing the set of basic conditions needed for an electric car future, even assuming no advances in battery performance at all. Then as battery technology slowly improves, swapping would become less frequent, batteries would weigh less, and the whole system would get increasingly efficient and convenient.

The article profiled the entrepreneur who has started operations in Israel, benefiting from key political support and a dense, small market that would benefit greatly by kicking its oil habit. They are partnering with Renault, which (alone among car companies) has promised to produce an electric vehicle with swap-able batteries. The Israeli company then would set up service stations with stocks of batteries, charging customers at profitable rates over very low cost of the electricity needed.

With peak oil, Middle East entanglement, and Climate change all looming to crisis proportions, transcending fossil fuels can not happen soon enough, and having a clear, practical path to the future of cars should have a galvanizing effect. All that is needed is one simple policy change: charge more money for fossil fuels, in accordance with their true holistic costs. But shamefully, Congress is eviscerating Obama's cap-and-trade program into a giveaway to big polluters.

This is the time to act. As the auto industry resets, we have a golden opportunity to reorient to the future, not with government regulation and meddling, but with simple, economy-wide incentives that will get us past these dirty, indeed lethal, fuels. If American car companies do not fall over each other setting up partnerships and standards to allow battery swapping in their future electric vehicles, the domestic car industry may never recover from its current insolvency, ever.

• The sorry story of the GM EV-1
• Tom Friedman chimes in on carbon pricing
• Ditto Paul Krugman

It's all about power

Sharia, Pakistan, and what it says about theology

One of the oddest experiences in a culture war debate is when the theist says that, in the absence of his own moral code ruling the world, all that would be left would be "power". Apparently his lack of power means that power in the hands of others would be bad, reverting to a power-mad mad-max world of dog-eat-dog Darwinism. As power-grabbing gambits go, it is one of the more audacious and obvious, but the propaganda certainly gets some traction.

The rationalist reels back and wonders ... "where on earth did that come from?" Of course it did not come from earth at all, but from the imagination of the theist, by way of that most common psychological phenomenon, projection.

Power is an ever-present dynamic in human affairs, and enlightened systems have progressively found ways to limit and legitimate power on relatively sensible and equitable foundations- on the commonalities of the human condition, on the consent of the governed, on reasoned debate, and on realistic analysis of conditions. Historical examples abound of startling descents into Machiavellianism prompted ironically by unrealistic/idealistic ideologies of many kinds, including Communism, Fascism, Islamism, and the Protestant-Catholic conflict.

The example of modern Europe shows that profound secularism is compatible with, and indeed leads to, progressive and peaceable government. So what is going on in the theist argument? Assuming that the argument is not just pure tribal narcissism, (we are good, you are bad, especially when you threaten our core ideology), or a misreading of history, (Bolsheviks were atheist, therefore all atheists are Bolshevik), one is left with the proposition that this argument is about the same thing the culture war in general is about- influence, especially over the next generation. About power.

Power is the ability to have other people do what you want rather than what they want. They can be coerced or pursuaded, cowed or propagandized, but the aim is the same. We all want the world to be as we wish it, so we all want power over others to make it so. Being in charge of morals is one traditional path to such power, cooking up theological directives behind a curtain of god-talk. Maturity is in large part the realization that this aim is not only impossible, but undesirable, given our individual limitations and variation. A better way is to support a system where as many people can follow as many of their own inclinations as possible, and what rules do need to be made are made with maximal consciousness, consultation, and consensus among a people with cultivated minds and public spirit (if I can be somewhat idealistic!). The current gay marriage movement is an outstanding example of this process.

But the wish never goes away, and the negotiation of morals is perpetually vexing. The invention of gods has many more sources in our cognitive apparatus and neuroses than a communal need for morals, but it certainly is a cherry on top to have one's favorite diety tell everyone else what to do. Now the administration of power comes into the hands of shamans, priests, and so forth, who are (ideally) intuitive and humanistic geniuses providing a brake on the raw (less cloaked in spirituality) power-drive of other members of the society, providing the much-needed check to militarism and regular politics. This was the conception of most ancient societies, such as Rome. Yet who signs up to be a priest or Imam? And who vets them, and what institution restrains them? That is the practical question of the quality of spiritual leadership where virtually all institutions, notably the Catholic church and the amorphous world of Islam, leave a great deal to be desired.

The clever part of this scheme is the false humility involved. Theists humbly "serve" their deity, praise its power and wallow in their own worm-like (or sheep-like) insignificance. They may be "fallen", worthless "sinners". God may be "incomprehensible", all-powerful, and all-good. Yet when all is said and done, it is the priests who tell others what to do, not the other way around. A new social hierarchy is established, with priests in the middle and all other humans below them, with god, conveniently invisible, inscrutible and only professionally detectable/interpretable, above all.

Isn't that what is going on in Pakistan right now? Those who watch religious currents could see this battle for power brewing for years, indeed ever since the internally conflicted "islamic republic" was conjured by M. A. Jinnah. There may be practical arguments for Sharia over the existing legal system of Pakistan. But that is not why militants have forced the government install Sharia law in the Swat valley. That is not why they kill their fellow citizens in a growing war on the civil society of Pakistan. It is part of a culture war, with Islamists pursuing power over their fellows via the most base means of terrorism and intimidation while cloaking themselves in religion, of which they are apparently outstanding exemplars, being more deeply, extremely, "objectively", inhumanely, and exhibitionistically devoted than all others. Thus they want and deserve power to tell others what to do. Sickening, isn't it? Our own theists are usually prevented by relatively recent tradition from taking up arms, but are their justifications any better?

• NYT magazine review of conditions in Pakistan.
• Pakistani Taliban have larger goals.
• Excellent discussion of religion ascendent.
• To see the quality of theist morality and Orwellian "love", just take a look at their "Storm" advertisement against gay marriage.
• Quiverfull and theological Darwinism.
• Pakistan and regression on polio.
• Another dire analysis of Pakistan, in the Nation.

Mimus polyglottus

Spring means birds singing. But at 2 AM?

We've been serenaded by a mockingbird for the last week, at all hours, at top volume, mixing samples collected from all over the western hemisphere to create a crazy-wild DJ scene on the premises. The bird is awe-inspiring to say the least, giving pitch-perfect renditions of titmice, crows, blue jays, and frogs, as well as a few call-and-response numbers, among many other turntable classics.

Why? What is the origin of this bird and its behaviors? A recent article in science laid out the DNA-based phylogeny of birds, of which there are over 10,000 species. It upset quite a few previous classifications, and definitively, since sequence-based phylogenies have greater resolution than character-based ones. Mockingbirds reside in the largest group, the passeriformes, along with other songbirds. I had assumed, from its shape, size, flight style, wing bars, and aggressive behavior that they are closely related to jays, which are related to corvids/crows. But not true! Mockingbirds are cousins of starlings, showing that vocal facility, which starlings share in spades, is also a crucial diagnostic trait. Indeed, an incredibly charming book, now out of print, relates how one starling was taught to speak (and sing) passable English.

The study of birds continues to fascinate the evolutionary community, with new specimens of Archaeopteryx being lovingly studied as it becomes common knowledge that birds are our only living connection to the dinosaur lineage. The fossil record in this case, as is true for whales and other organisms, is filling out to give us an ever-fuller account of complexity and gradualism in the history of life. Additionally, studies of bird memory were the first to demonstrate the birth of new neurons in adult brains, concomitant with the memorization of new songs. Subsequent work found the same phenomenon in humans- an important focus of contemporary neurobiology and even stem cell-associated hopes.

Archaeopteryx from the Jurassic (~150 to 200 million years ago).

Note the claws at the end of the wing/fingers.

Mockingbirds have upwards of 150 song samples at their command, and change their repertoires between spring and fall. The function of their singing, other than attracting mates, is not clear. But one could speculate that the high volume and enormous fund of mimicked songs functions to keep other species at bay, creating better-quality territories for the omnivorous mockingbird. The utility of this trait would in turn create a sexual selection rationale for females (who also sing, just not a 2 AM) to select mates with larger repertoires, more accurate reproduction, and higher volume.

As our culture gradually transitions away from the Christian fetishes of false hope, blood, and death at this time of year to the much more ancient themes of life, fertility, and birth, it is wonderous to participate (if unwillingly!) in the rituals of birds who are so diligently and flamboyantly engaged in the tasks of life.

• Subscription site at Cornell is the leading resource for general bird knowledge.

Head eraser

Scientists selectively erase memories from mice.

Memory is who we are, the essence of being human, the thread of individuality. Losing memory means losing the narrative of self, as happens in Alzheimer's. Memories can be evoked by associations of all kinds, especially by physical cues such as the famous madeleine. Where are memories stored? How are they stored? Are they material? Theists would refer to a "soul", and leave it at that, but scientists have pushed a bit further.

The going scientific model of memory is that it is a pattern of neural activity stored by enhancing the connections (synapses) between the most active neurons so that future nearby activations trigger re-activation of the same pattern. In other words, memories are stored in a distributed way in the mass of the brain, like holograms, and are reactivated when some approximation of the original activity takes place, such as when tasting a long-forgotten delicacy. Anatomically, there is also a complex short-term/long-term issue, where recent memories are stored in the hippocampus, before being transferred to the neocortex for long-term storage. Another system in the amygdala is both short- and long-term, rapidly storing emotionally laden memories such as fear responses, which are then virtually impossible to erase.

In molecular terms, memory storage involves strengthening the synapses between more-active neurons, essentially encoding past activity patterns by strengthening them and making them easier to activate. The best-known gene involved in this process encodes a transcription activator called CREB, for cyclic AMP response element binding protein. CREB binds to DNA and activates a variety of genes in response to the messenger molecule cAMP, which is generated inside activated neurons (in response to dopamine or serotonin stimulation, for instance), though it is used for many other signals in other cells. CREB appears to activate a bunch of genes that build up synapses near the sites of activation, making permanent what is marked temporarily by other activity-dependent molecules.

The current report in Science shows that if those few cells showing activated CREB during a training event are killed, then the memory is lost forever. The first trick is to use mice that are programmed with a diphtheria toxin receptor gene in a re-arrangable cassette. This cassette can be turned on by a DNA recombinase which is in turn activated by a CREB-inducible promoter sequence. Now they have mice whose memory/CREB-activated neurons specifically express a receptor for diphtheria and can be killed by applying diphtheria toxin, which the researchers do by injecting it directly into their amygdalas (which does not sound so easy, incidentally).

One control for the experiment is to treat other mice with another promoter-DNA recombinase setup not involving the CREB activator which in the end kills approximately the same number of cells in the amygdala (presumably randomly) after injection of diphtheria toxin. The experimenters then trained the mice to fear a sound, tested them for having learned it, (at which point select memory-involved cells in their brains would be expressing both CREB and the experimental diphtheria receptor), then injected the toxin, and assayed for both how many cells were killed, and how the mice now responded.

Where 50% of the mice had learned the response to start with, after the injection only 20% continued to respond- a significant erasure of memory. No difference was seen in the control mice with other neurons killed, or those not treated with toxin at all. The erasure persisted for 15 days, thus appearing to be permanent. The mice could also go on to learn and remember from later training experiences, showing that their memory systems were generally intact and relatively few cells had been deleted. Likewise, the experience did not erase earlier memories formed before the treatment with the CREB-DNA recombinase system that allowed actively learning cells to be deleted.

Fig 3. Bottom- Schematic of amygdala neurons after diphtheria toxin (DT) or saline (PBS). Blue, DNA-labeled neuronal nuclei; pink, neurons activated by memory; and white, ablated neurons. CREB-cre stands for CREB-activated DNA recombinase cre (introduced by vector injection), which recombines and activates the DT receptor gene.

What is the bottom line? That our memories (and thus conscious person-hood) are physically encoded in our brains. Hopefully this is another reason to take better care of them. It may be possible eventually to treat trauma victims in ways that impair their memories, or otherwise use this information in a beneficial way. I could certainly use better memory, or the ability to forget some things, like a certain film!

Notes on animal cruelty.. This type of research can be quite cruel to animals, and just because mice are small does not mean that they do not feel pain much as we do. Indeed we would not use them as models for this type of work if they didn't. So I'll note my hopes that the experimenters used anaesthesia properly at all stages of intervention (as claimed), minimized the aversive stimulus program, and euthanized humanely. In my experience in the lab, euthanization protocols leave a great deal to be desired. And would it be so difficult to train mice on a positive stimulus rather than always relying on the amygdala-fear system? Let's have a little compassion!

• Incidental link- Calvin does capitalism.
• Greenwald cries corruption at treasury and the white house.
• Moyers' stunning show on finance fraud with William Black.

Write like an Egyptian

I've read an excellent book on Egyptian history and theological development by Jan Assmann, a German Egyptologist. The book is a bit more convoluted than I had hoped, but herewith is an outstanding excerpt that provides insight into the book, into the mind of Egypt, and into human nature generally.

Selected parts of an Egyptian hymn of the daily ritual, dating to the middle kingdom, ~2040-1650 BC:

The king

worships the sun god in the early morning

upon his emergence when he "opens his orb,"

when he flies up to heaven as scarab

he enters the mouth,

he emerges from the thighs,

at his birth in the eastern sky

His father Osiris raises him up,

the arms [of the air gods] Hu and Hauhet receive him.

He sets himself down in the morning bark.

The king knows

this mysterious speech that the "eastern souls" speak,

when they make jubilant music for the sun god

at his ascent, his appearance on the horizon

and when they open for him the wings

of the gates of the eastern horizon

so that he can voyage forth on the ways of the heavens in his boat.

He knows their aspect and their incarnations,

their mansion in God's-Land.

He knows their locations,

when the sun god goes forth at the beginning of his journey.

He knows that speech uttered by the crews

when they pull the bark of the orb of the horizon

He knows the birth of Re

and his transformation in the flood.

He knows that secret gate through which the great god came forth,

he knows him who is in the morning bark,

and the great image in the night bark.

He knows his landing places on the horizon

and your steering equipment in the heavenly goddess.

...

Re has set up the king

on the earth of the living for ever and ever

to speak justice to the people, to satisfy the gods,

for the generation of ma'at [good/justice], for the destruction of isfet [bad/chaos].

He gives the divine offerings to the gods,

and mortuary offerings to the transfigured.

The name of the king

is in heaven like [that of] Re.

He lives in joy

like Re-Horakhty.

The dignitaries rejoice when they see him.

The subjects give him ovations

in his role of the child.

...

Assmann comments:

This text enumerates everything the king must know for the worship of the sun god in the morning: the nature of the cosmic process, its various stages, its scenic and constellational arrangements, and its salvational meaning as rebirth; he knows the deities involved, their actions, their speech, the circumstances of their lives; and he knows the spatial framework of the process- heavenly gates, barks, landing places, steering equipment. The king must know all this precisely in order to be able to intervene effectively in the cosmic process with his worshipful speech. His fears are less that one day the sun might no longer rise than that the salvational meaning of the process might be lost or forfeited. The king, then, performs an officium memoriae. He must summon all his mnemonic power to keep this salvational knowledge present. The world thus maintained is a world of meaning, of language, of knowledge, of relations and reflections, an anthropomorphic reading of the universe with a correspondingly cosmomorphic image of human order. The hourly ritual bans cosmic chaos, and with it the chaos in man himself.

pp210-211, The mind of Egypt., 1996/2002

• An Assmann festschrift
• The scarab

Green comments in passing

Cap and trade

I'm deeply disappointed over the casual brushoff that congressional Democrats have given the greenhouse gas cap-and-trade (C&T) portion of the Obama budget.

The government desperately needs ongoing revenue sources to ameliorate future debt, fuel prices are low enough to make an increment for C&T relatively painless, and the rate of climate change is accelerating, so it is the perfect time to bring this system online. It looks worrisomely like the congress is hopelessly in the pocket of industrial interests, even on the Democratic side.

Ideally, instead of C&T, a straight carbon tax would be instituted, which would be transparent, easy to apply, and would rise over time to reduce emissions as needed. The C&T system is more complex to administer, and prone to corruption and mis-pricing, as has been seen in Europe. The amount of emissions have to be ascertained somehow, which, short of simply taxing fuel, is difficult to measure.

Some would surely say that the economic recession already decreases emissions, thus making the whole project of reducing emissions less urgent. Nothing could be more irresponsible. The last decade has been lost in policy terms. Temperature rise is gathering steam, and the lag in the system means that substantial further temperature rise will still take place in the next decades were our emissions to halt immediately.

In addition to the physical lag, there is also a political lag, where our leadership will only slowly translate into action in other countries, just as our lack of leadership and action over the last decade has provided the excuse for others, especially in the developing world, to match our do-nothing policy.

It is high, high time to ask for the small sacrifice that will get us going in the right direction of stewardship of this precious and delicate planet.

• Oil is still getting short, despite the downturn, so purely in peak oil terms, we need to plan ahead.

And what's up with Paul Krugman?

Paul Krugman has emerged as the prime critic of the administration's newest plan to set up a market in toxic assets. His articles and interviews have been a bit vague, but I think what he is saying is that the program conjures buyers (with federal sweeteners), but will not create sellers. The government's example shows an asset face value $100 being bought at $86 by new investors. If that was all we had to worry about, we wouldn't be in a crisis. No, banks are carrying assets worth $5, $0, or even deeply negative values, thanks to "sophisticated" financial filleting, and they are petrified at having to sell them or honestly value them on their balance sheets.

Thus the danger is that the most toxic assets will stay right where they are- hidden in the vaults of zombie banks who will continue to lurk in the economic shadows, waiting desperately for the general economic upturn that will magically re-value those assets to something rather than nothing. That is why the other half of the strategy- the stress-testing and recapitalization [ed- strike recapitalization, how about orderly bankruptcy of insolvent banks?] of problem banks- is equally important. Most commentators seem to think that this stress-testing is merely window dressing, since Geithner is a Republican at heart, has little money to play with right now, and little immediate prospect of getting more. Hopefully not, is all I can say.

• For a more conspiratorial and pessimistic take on this, read Glen Greenwald.

Balancing economic morals

Thoughts about our continual navigation between the extremes of socialism and capitalism

The further we get into our current economic mess, the clearer its connections to psychology and morality become. Trust is the coin of the realm, and if trust breaks down, nothing can paper it over. With respect to this week's storm over the AIG bonuses, is the trust represented by written contracts sacrosanct, however corruptly arrived at, or is the more important trust that among citizens- that they treat each other fairly and take a measure of responsibility for their actions?

Taking a longer view, a persistent tension exists between idealistic economic morals, represented by family-related concepts, communitarianism, socialism, communism, and realistic, competitive economic morals, represented by Darwinian competition and capitalism. We are experiencing a deep shift from several decades celebrating the second (with the active support of religious conservatives, who so readily jettisoned communitarianism they supposedly valued) to the first, via the ascendence of Democrats, and the realization that we had gone too far towards free (and chaotic) markets.

On the one hand, communitarian values accord with a great deal of human nature, since we can be peaceful, loving, and caring to the point of altruism. We want to be loved, not only for what we do, but for simply being. Christianity claims to stand for love, even of enemies, whatever its actual history records. (Check this for a fascinating look at the business of morals.) The communist ideal spoke most definitively to this ideal in economic terms, saying that we could indeed have our cake and eat it too- give freely according to our capacity and get according to our needs. No wonder communist regimes were atheistic- they were poaching on the same utopian turf as Christianity.

As we know, such idealism is insufficient to run a real economy, and the alternate morality of competition, realism, and capitalism has carried the day. This also accords with human nature (not to mention game theory more generally), since we are competitive at the same time as we are loving, and no amount of ideology can wish that nature away. Even if 90% of humans were totally altruistic, the other 10% could mess things up royally in an idealistic economy. Beyond our internally divided natures, the structure of society also conspires to promote competitive morals, since there is always inequality of talent and resources, leading to inequality of returns, whose owners will, by nature, usually be in favor of further inequality.

The rich have the money to make more money by the magic of capitalism, and they also have the resources to play the political system to best advantage. Historically, they have, as a rule, authored the political system outright, in the forms of oligarchies, kingships, and so forth. Our own enlightened system, for all its ideals, was authored by the most well-to-do specimens of the age, and reflected that dominance in many ways (such as the perpetuation of slavery). Thus by both economic and political means, capitalism inexorably creates economic inequality by a rich-getting-richer and the poor-getting-poorer ratchet effect, just as biology observes that organisms inherit and achieve inquality in their struggle for existence and propagation.

Even in Darwinian terms, however, systems are not all one or the other- cooperation coexists with competition. The greatest strides in evolution (the union of cells to form eukaryotes, and the collaboration of cells to form multicellular organisms) were instances of cooperation in a sea of brutal competition. The question for us is how to balance idealism and realism, using the conscious levers of politics to ameliorate the natural workings of capitalism.

From the early history of Rome through the French revolution and on to today, societies grapple with this problem, trying to stave off chaos and revolt in reponse to gross inequality either through more effective oppression by those who have (Sparta, Soviet Russia), or by creating egalitarian processes to counteract the ratchet effect of competitive economics, hoping to buy off, co-opt, or even truly integrate the have-nots and have-less's.

The legitimacy of the political system hangs in the balance too, since while some inequality is inevitable, and quite a bit can be sanctioned by religious fiat, traditions of nobility, and the like, it seems ultimately impossible for humans to see bitter economic hardship and opulent luxury side by side without coming to the conclusion that something needs to change, often radically. We are too idealistic for that, as are, incidentally, monkeys as well.

In pre-history, intensely competitive tribes and city-states didn't bother with even the rhetoric of egalitarianism, killing each other to gain land, goods, and trade. The rich killed the poor. In antiquity, richer cultures developed the innovation of enslaving the poor- an advance, considering the alternative. This was the accepted reality of Greece and Rome.

But it was an unstable system, since after a few generations, slaves captured from far-away battles became full participants in the culture, with claims of native citizens, in practice if not in name. A novel egalitarian ethic was certainly one attraction of the nascent Christian movement in Imperial Rome, though in the beginning it attracted the upper crust and especially women, not slaves themselves, and Christianity ended up being quite compatible with slavery in the early US and elsewhere. In the middle ages slavery was transformed into feudal serfdom, as the Roman state broke down, centralization was lost, and new economic conditions gave a modicum of power to the lower classes, especially after bouts of the plague.

Skipping ahead to the French revolution, again the economic system was a shambles of vast inequality, and the new breath of enlightenment, given vibrant reality by the American experiment, rudely pulled away the veil of false consciousness- of the superiority of the nobility, of the inerrancy of the clergy, of the divinity of the King. The peasantry was fed up and ready to take its place at the table which it had laid. Thereafter, European societies fitfully moved towards increasingly egalitarian economic systems, exemplified by the Scandanavian countries of today. The process has been a political one of regulating and counter-acting the natural workings of the capitalist system to soften its Darwinian destructiveness and spread its wealth, while preserving its intrinsically productive aspects.

Where are we in the US on this scale? We have had our own brushes with slavery, serfdom, and peasantry in a dizzyingly dynamic and condensed history. While there are plenty of rags-to-riches stories of those who have parlayed their labor and smarts into wealth, our system remains classic in its tendency to reward capital and connections, and to tax labor and consumption. This process led to the huge inequities of the gilded age, which were then addressed by the legislated expedients of anti-trust, trade unionism, the estate tax, and the progressive income tax.

It is a commonplace that we are in another guilded age, after each of the above expedients were weakened in the last decades of Republican dominance, resulting in huge and growing disparities of wealth. Once again in industry after industry, winners and the well-connected get paid huge amounts. Miniscule differences in capability are remorselessly amplified by a bidding war into dizzying highs and lows of pay. Losers get paid less and less, as a perennial excess of low-skilled labor competes for lower wages, helpfully globalized to evade domestic social and political accommodations. Those in the middle make do on two salaries where one would have sufficed a generation ago, because that is exactly what the labor market will bear. Those who have been entrusted with the money of others have been particularly flagrant in rewarding themselves, under the philosophy that they needed to "share" the wealth in order to be properly "motivated". Yet the motivation of others farther down the ladder of connections and capital is left to the bare exigencies of survival in an atomized labor market.

At any rate, one can see a pendulum swinging back and forth, between natural capitalist differentiation and popular indignation and revolt, adjusted by the technical possibilities of each epoch. Now that a new administration proposes to raise the progressivity of the tax code in an effort to mitigate wealth disparity, the media, at the behest of its owners, cry "class war", uttering their worst fear and taking belated refuge behind the state that they had worked so hard to degrade and defang. But it is not war that the majority want, but a re-balancing of the system. It is simply another step on the long road to the golden mean of a morally defensible (in idealistic terms) as well as practical society with optimal prosperity. (Prosperity itself being a moral good, leading to cosmopolitanism and peace, while poverty leads to more desperate competition, violence, chaos.)

In the end, each extreme, either of idealistic utopianism or of pitiless capitalism, is catastrophic in both moral and practical terms. Ancient Rome died essentially of unfettered crony capitalism, where the rich garnered vast resources on huge estates, and used their political power to relieve themselves of taxation. The result, once new resources stopped flowing in from foreign conquests, was decay of the economic system which had become top-heavy and corrupt. We see this today when our own guilded ages become so top-heavy that the economy shrinks because all the riches at the top can not make up for the far larger lower class virtually unable to participate in economic activity.

The golden mean of moderated, regulated capitalism/socialism keeps the creative energies of humanity flowing, both in the form of competition between people and firms, and in the form of cooperative creativity that rests on freedom to innovate and fail without personally disastrous consequences. Universal health care makes us free in important ways, just as low taxation makes us free in different ways.

Incidental link:

• My favorite correspondent reaches a new low of sputtering hatred.
• A closely related economics article at salon.
• And yet another related review of Karl Marx, by Hitchens
• Cringely calls the bailouts immoral, later on.

---

To decrease contemporary corporate cronyism, a few suggestions for revised corporate governance:

1) Prohibit any corporate director from serving on more than one board. This job is important enough to be done well. Bringing more talent into this system is important- into the upper echelons of corporations generally. Being on a board should be a serious job, not a chummy spa trip.

2) Prohibit executives from serving on a board of their own or of other companies. They already have a job. That should be what they are doing and focusing on. Serving on another board automatically compromises their responsibilities to their own company. As for their own company's board, this is even more important. The company's board needs to be distinct from its management, so that they actually check each other, rather than scratch each other's backs.

The special case of a founder being involved in a company would present them with the choice of being an executive or a board member. For private (non-public) companies, something more lenient could be arranged, such as allowing large shareholders (owning 10% or more shares, perhaps) to be on the board, whether they are executives or not.

3) The board organizes and runs annual meetings and shareholder voting, including the election of new board members and the review of executive performance. They should have their own small staff or be able to outsource details of this task so that the executives of the company can, again, focus on running the business of the company, not the business of the board. Conversely, the management would have a voice at the annual meeting and elsewhere to say whether the board had run off the rails (or to resign if needed), but they would never be the same as the board.

4) Stock options should be given on a 5-year plan. They can not be redeemed until five years from grant date, and then would be redeemed at the mean price of the ensuing year, not the spot price at time of redemption (to be organized by an escrow system of automated selling). This means that redemption decisions need to be made a year in advance. Companies would publicize all requests for year-out redemption by executives, sharing key information with the public, including size of options and when they decide to sell. The bottom line is that managers, if incentivized with stock, should be tied to it similarly with long-term stockholders, rather than day-trading against them. Large bonuses and other forms of non-salary pay should be treated similarly, paid only after some time has passed to make clear whether past performance actually merited it.

Hallucinations

A little more of the plumbing underlying hallucinations comes to light.

One fascinating sub-field of molecular biology, particularly pharmacology, is the hunt for things called "orphan receptor ligands". Receptors are proteins at the cell surface that recognize hormones, neurotransmitters, inflammatory molecules, and other signaling molecules, and then alert their cell about that message. They are the eyes and ears of the cell, and humans have over 800 of one family of them, the GPCR receptors, including ~350 olfactory receptors that sit in nasal membranes a detect aromatic chemicals. This family mediates many important messages in the body, and more to the point, constitutes the single largest class of drug targets, since interfering with such specialized signaling systems is an effective way to influence a cell's functions. Getting drugs to these receptors is also easy, since they sit right on the surface of the cell, pointing outwards. In contrast, getting drugs inside cells can be quite difficult.

The human genome project identified the genes encoding all these receptors, (which occur only in eukaryotes), but could not tell us what they do. Evolutionarily, they all arose as accidental copies of an ancestral version, forming a family with conserved sequences and structures. But our interest is all in their differences- what distinct signalling molecule (or ligand) each one binds, and what that signal means to the cell. Currently about half of all human non-olfactory GPCR receptors have known ligands, and the rest are called "orphan" receptors, since their partners in signalling ("ligands") are unknown. Thus the search for orphan receptor ligands, especially by drug companies, who stand to benefit enormously from new ways to twiddle with our biology. Recent successes have found receptors for the appetite hormone orexin, the circadian hormone melatonin, adrenaline, nociceptin, and many others.

Recent papers in Science nail down some new data about two erstwhile orphan GPCR receptors in the brain- one, the receptor for the hallucinogen DMT, and the other, active in the development of Alzheimer's disease. The second study does not identify the ligand for its orphan receptor (GPR3), rather, it demonstrates that it is expressed in areas of the brain typically affected in Alzheimer's, that its overexpression stimulates excess amyloid peptide production, the hallmark of Alzheimer's, and that deletion of the gene both eliminates amyloid peptide production and reliably prevents the disease in mice that otherwise develop it. Finding the ligand of this receptor will be even more interesting now that its importance is so clearly laid out.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is the first article reporting that another orphan GPCR (sigma-1) turns out to be the receptor for the hallucinogen DMT. Several hallucinogens have already had their receptors characterized. Marijuana binds to a sub-family of GPCRs called the cannabinoid receptors, which also bind the endo-cannabinoids which have physiological roles in, as one would expect, mood, learning, pain, and general cognition. LSD binds to a variety of dopamine and serotonin GPCR receptors, of which a serotonin receptor appears to be the key mediator of action.

Little is known about the sigma-1 receptor, other than that it might influence functions as diverse as schizophrenia, cell death, immune suppression, and sterol metabolism. It is known to be a receptor for the antipsychotic haloperidol as well as cocaine, but (before this work) not for any endogenous ligand. Yet mice with this gene knocked out appear fine- viable and fertile. The one assay that this article reports for DMT action is hypermobility, where mice placed in an open space move twice as much when under the influence. This effect was completely abrogated when the gene for the sigma-1 receptor was deleted, indicating that at least some of what the mice experience during their bout of exogenous DMT is due to the action of this GPCR receptor.

It is, however, quite frustrating to not know more about what the mice are experiencing- are they hallucinating? Do they have spiritual experiences on DMT? Does loss of this receptor make their lives dull? With this new knowledge, however, drugs can be devised to specifically (and reversibly) activate and de-activate this receptor, which should eventually lead to better (non-recreational) experiments in humans.

Thus one more receptor has found an endogenous ligand, and one more hallucinogen has found its binding partner in the brain. DMT is the key ingredient of one of the most potent hallucinogens- the ayahuasca mixture from South America, and is closely related to the active chemical in psilocybin mushrooms. It is quickly metabolized and non-addictive, and seeing increased use in Europe and the US. Not much is known about DMT's role or action in the brain, since it is a minor and very transient metabolite. However one article indicates that at lower doses, it might function as a relaxant:

"In these studies, administration of a non-hallucinogenic dose of DMT (0.05 mg/kg) produced a relaxed and comfortable mental state in many subjects. We propose that the main effect of endogenous DMT may resemble low-dose, non-hallucinogenic DMT administration, providing a homeostatic response to alleviate, rather than promote, psychotic symptoms."

"At intravenous doses of 0.2 and 0.4 mg/kg, there was a “nearly instantaneous onset of visual hallucinatory phenomena, bodily dissociation, and extreme shifts in mood, which totally replaced subject’s previously ongoing mental experiences.”"

"At low levels, DMT may be an endogenous anxiolytic, whereas higher, “unnatural” levels (such as those associated with psychedelic/hallucinogenic activity) produce extreme shifts in consciousness."

The near-death experience may then be a final spasm of DMT production, passing from the calming amounts that relieve anxiety and pain to the prodigious amounts that induce hallucinations.

This receptor-ligand system is extremely complex and far from understood- the many roles of the sigma-1 receptor and those of DMT indicate that hallucination is probably a side-effect rather than the central point of their function. Indeed, why do hallucinations happen at all? We live in what might be termed a finely tuned hallucination all the time, with one's brain constantly spinning scenarios, images, and ideas, more or less tethered to reality. Dreaming is even more clearly a matter of ongoing hallucination. One of the most important recent themes of neurobiology is that cognition is a creative process, where our inner structures and activities play a leading role in shaping perceptions, focusing attention, and filtering emotions. Perception is as much a top-down process as it is a bottom-up process driven by the sensors of the eyes, ears, etc.

The tuning by which consciousness is created and kept on an even keel requires complex timing adjustments, keeping various inputs in register and adjusting perceptual time for our state of attention, whether bored, focused, or doodling. The same goes for conscious contents, such as daydreams, perceptions, ideas, emotions. It all seems a terrible mess, since a huge amount of unconscious material needs to get in, and yet not overwhelm the thread of consciousness.

Clearly, natural selection would promote accuracy of perception and focus on critical tasks in the outside world, such as when time slows down dramatically during dramatic events, and our minds become oddly clear. But the need to accommodate many other contents and situations necessitates major and ongoing adjustments, which may be what DMT and other chemicals may be doing at a gross level, tweeking normal consciousness in ways that cause what we call hallucinations when pumped to extremes.

One last question is why people routinely take hallucinatory experiences to have great spiritual significance. Many practices tread this path, such as meditation, fasting, ecstatic prayer, and Sufi whirling, not to mention peyote, ayahusca, and the Delphic visions of ancient Greece. Muhammed is thought to have had a form of epilepsy that is associated with intense visions, and the desert sojourn of Jesus laid the foundation of all his later preaching.

Naive views of spirituality assume that there are other planes of existence or reality where spirits reside, in accordance with our dreams, fairy tales, and native intuition- the supernatural, of which we get glimmers through this smoky glass of psychedelia. But there has to be more. Hallucinations are not just perceptual voyages through uncharted ethereal realms, but also affective experiences of great power, notoriously subject to the emotional tenor of the setting (causing good or bad "trips" on LSD). This is the forte of the shaman, who sets the parameters of such activities with great care. A single extraordinary emotional experience can motivate a lifetime of dedication, so it should not surprise that drugs that send the mind to its emotional and conceptual boundaries might leave unshakeable imprints.