Less than a Virus

We animals are susceptible to a bewildering array of infections. On the largest scale we can be infested by other animals. Worms, lice and other parasites can rather literally get under our skin and cause great harm. Smaller than the animals are bacterial infections. Single celled organisms that reproduce far more rapidly than our own cells, bacteria are often controlled by killing them with antibiotics, exploding their cell walls and leaving the remnants to be cleaned away by our immune system. Smaller again than bacteria are viruses. Not even truly alive, viruses are strands of DNA or RNA wrapped in a protein sheath. Unable to reproduce by themselves if left in the open they will often degrade into something that is harmless. But put them near one of our cells that they can attach onto and something else happens. They invade the host cell, often pulled in by the cell itself which sees the virus as something useful. Inside the cell the complex apparatus goes to work and ends up creating more of the virus, reproducing it as if it were part of the cell. Some viruses will then be pushed out of the cell which continues making more of the virus, in other cases the cell simply fills up with virus particles and explodes releasing the virus to continue infecting neighbouring cells.

Each of these three type of infection can be bad enough, but there is a fourth type the we have only begun to really understand since the 1980s. Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD) is a rare inheritable disease that attacks the brain and is always fatal. It seems that a particular mutation can cause the malformed creation of prions, and these malformed prions cause damage to the brain. We all have prions in our brains, a protein called PrPC sits at the surface of our nerve cells and is believed to help with signalling or transmembrane transport. Those who have the defective gene for creating this protein end up with CJD instead. But this disease is not just inherited, it can be passed on as well. In Papua, New Guinea people who took part in elaborate funeral rituals which included eating the brain of the deceased contracted a disease called Kuru which was strikingly similar to CJD. Experiments revealed that by injecting the malformed protein (PrPS) into an animal, the animal would develop a similar disease. So now an inheritable disorder was also caused by an infectious agent.

Comparisons of PrPC (the healthy protein we all have) and PrPS revealed something startling. There was no difference in the amino acid chain that made up these proteins, they were identical in makeup, but different in the way they folded. Proteins are made up of long strings of amino acids which fold into three-dimensional shapes, and these shapes determine their properties. By folding in a different way the PrPS becomes lethal. It also affects normal PrPC – for some reason the PrPC reforms itself into PrPS when it comes into contact with the PrPS. So by eating the brain of someone who has PrPS, or by having surgical instruments that have the PrPS on it stuck into you, you may end up having your normal proteins changed into something deadly.

In the UK in the 1980s, cattle were being destroyed to prevent the spread of BSE, another prion disease. In the 1990s a small number of people died vCJD (a variant of CJD) which was identified as having come from BSE infected beef. The ten people who died from vCJD were all very young (average age of 27) compared to classical CJD where the average age of onset is 65. This leads to the thought – what is the incubation period for vCJD? And how variable is it? In a worst case scenario, the people who have already died from vCJD represent an outlying anomaly and the full force of the disease has yet to reveal itself. The average length of time for CJD to express itself after someone is infected by contaminated surgical instruments is 15 years. It has been more than 15 years since the BSE was removed from the vast majority of british beef and the rate of vCJD has not spiked so we may be looking at a best case scenario where only a few hundred die of this disease.

In any case, proteins are not susceptible to our normal methods of sterilising (radiation and heat do not ‘kill’ them since they are not alive anyway) so unless we increase our understanding of prions we face a fatal disease, already within a number of people, with no hope of a cure.  Doctor’s advice: don’t go eating anyone’s brain. At least it wont spread that way.

Medical Ethics

Often in life we are faced with problems that we cannot solve ourselves. In many cases we can go to specialists who will be more able to analyse the problem and give us a solution. When your car breaks down and you take it to the garage to be repaired you trust that the service people know what they are doing, although you may get a second opinion. The same with getting a mortgage or any other major decision. When it comes to our health the decisions we make can be literally life or death and so we would like to arm ourselves with as much information as possible. Yet some decisions on, say, whether to try a treatment or not may require more information than we can absorb in a timely manner. Risk analysis can be difficult when weighing up, say, a 99% chance of chronic pain for the rest of your life versus a treatment that has a 2% chance of giving you cancer. In most countries with a modern health service, patient consent is a something that has to be explicitly gained. Some consent forms can be daunting though, and perhaps put patients off of getting treatment simply be being so dense with information. In many cases it is difficult to say whether one choice or the other would be best, and if a trained doctor can’t tell you, then what chance do non-specialists have? Of course as autonomous individuals it seems right that we should make our own medical decisions, but this can be dangerous.

Vaccinations are without a doubt one of the greatest life savers humanity has ever produced. Some are better than others though. Flu vaccines are variable in their effectiveness since each season’s shot is based on a subset of the viruses that are out in the wild. The flu shot will protect most people (after a couple of weeks) against that subset, but not against others that may be more widespread than predicted. In addition many of the most vulnerable people cannot create the antibodies that the flu shot should allow them to generate. Herd immunity is the best protection for the elderly, that is, if everyone was to get the flu shot there would be less flu going around and less of a chance for any individual to catch it. Most countries deem the expense of giving everyone the flu shot every year to be too high compared to the benefits of reduced mortality. This may be the sensible choice, but it is arguable.

Other diseases are much more troublesome. The measles vaccine is far more effective and only in rare cases will someone not get immunity from taking the vaccine. But such people exist, they take the vaccine, fail to develop immunity and don’t get measles simply because there isn’t that much of the disease around since everyone else took the shot. But what about when people opt out? By not getting the vaccine and allowing yourself (more likely your child) to get the disease you are increasing the chance of those non-immune people getting the disease as well. Even though they did all that could be done to prevent it, by quirk of fate, poor genetics, they get no help from the vaccine, and no help from herd immunity. Should vaccines therefore be mandatory? Should this medical decision be taken out of our hands?

Broad powers are granted to medical staff in the cases of outbreaks of especially dangerous diseases. Indeed we would probably not want someone to make their own medical decisions if they had been infected with Ebola and wanted to leave the isolation unit. It is not all or nothing, and an accommodation must be reached between, for example, the Human Right of Vaccination (as described by Mary Robinson) and the Human Right of freedom to do to our own bodies what we wish.

The ethics of testing drugs is also fraught with difficult, arguable choices. There are a large number of new treatments available now that have never been tested on pregnant women. This is entirely understandable, since who would risk unknown harm to their unborn child? Yet the result of this is that many conditions have treatments that cannot be given to people when they are pregnant simply because we don’t know the effect, and indeed probably never will. For some diseases, such as AIDS, it is often difficult to get people to try new drugs since the existing treatments are a ‘gold standard’ and work very well. Sure the new drug may be even better, but is it ethical to ask people to risk their lives with something that may be no better, or even worse than placebo, when there is an available, and worthwhile treatment? In all cases, whether searching for new treatments and cures, or even administering the existing ones, ethics plays a large part in the medical world.

Infinity

The manager of Hilbert’s Hotel had a problem. He prided himself on the fact that his hotel, having an infinite number of rooms, was always open and had space for new guests. It was what made Hilbert’s that little bit special. The hotel could afford to run since an infinite number of guests had arrived the previous week and generated an infinite amount of income, which was just as well as the cleaning bill was infinite too. The manager was going through the bills when disaster struck – another guest arrived! Flustered for a second, since all the rooms were taken, the manager realised a solution. He moved the guest in room 1 to room 2, the guest in room 2 to room 3 and so on and so on. This left room 1 free for the new guest, and the crisis was averted. When later that day an infinite number of new guests arrived the manager took their appearance in his stride, and knew just how to fit these visitors into his very unique hotel.

The above idea, the Hotel with infinite rooms, was created by the German mathematician David Hilbert to highlight some of the paradoxical thinking that is required when dealing with the infinite. Mathematicians use infinities in many different ways. One of the first ways we are introduced to a mathematical notion of infinity is in calculus. Infinities here are used as limits for sequences. Many sequences will tend towards an actual number, for instance the sequence of 1, followed by a half, then a quarter, then an eighth and so on, will tend towards zero. The sum of such a sequence will tend towards 2, and we can define 2 as the limit of the sum of the series. When a series diverges, say 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 … then we can define the limit as infinity. This particular use of infinity doesn’t seem to bring in too many paradoxes, and we can safely use calculus without the spectre of the infinite hotel.

Is space infinite? This is still an open question in cosmology. The evidence at the moment implies that there is no boundary to the universe. This does not however immediately imply that the universe is infinite, it could exist in a particular finite shape. To use an analogy, from a two-dimensional viewpoint there is no boundary on a globe. We can walk any way we wish around the world and we will never leave it, yet it is finite. The latest evidence from the cosmic microwave background radiation suggests however that the universe is flat, and this leaves open the possibility that it is infinite in size. Not that we will be able to see much of this infinite universe, beyond what is called the ‘observable universe’. Due to the action of dark energy the universe is expanding at such a rate that eventually the only stars we will be able to see will be those of our local galaxy group. Our observable universe is shrinking in size within this infinite universe, although it will take trillions of years until all we see is the one galaxy we are in.

Speaking of trillions of years, is there an infinite amount of time? It doesn’t seem too difficult to imagine that there will be no end to time, things will just keep happening. But what about the other way? Can we imagine no beginning to time? That one seems a little bit more fraught with difficulty, though for psychological reasons rather than any physical reasons. The evidence does indicate that there was a beginning to time as we understand it. As for an end, when the universe experiences heat death and there is no more energy flowing around, when even protons have decayed into nothingness, will there be anything occurring to distinguish one moment from another? Will time have any meaning then?

Theologians often use the idea of infinity. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is shown a vision of the ultimate – Brahman, that which is without end, that which is without qualities. When approaching this infinite being we cannot say anything about what it is, it would be a paradox to do so. All that can be said is what is is not, Neti, Neti, not this, not this. Well of course it doesn’t take too long for people to start saying what the ultimate is, and it happened fairly quickly in some forms of Hinduism. Meanwhile the monotheist philosphers of the west had decided that God was three things – all good, all knowing and all powerful. Omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent. By giving God these infinite characteristics the theologians could start to answer some of the difficult question. Infinities lead to Hilbert’s Hotel and paradoxes, and what better way to describe God than through paradoxes. How does the theist explain suffering in a world created by an all good God? One imaginative way is to say that we offend God in some small way, but due to his infinite nature such an offence warrants an infinite punishment. His all good nature is what is stopping such an awful punishment but leaves in the suffering we see in the world. Once infinities are posited, explanations can get quite paradoxical. And would a God who wasn’t all powerful, say 99% powerful, be worthy of worship? Is an unending nature required for a God?

The infinite is a concept that has flowed through our culture since ancient times, from Zeno’s paradoxes to Escher’s paintings. It is useful, indeed necessary for vast amounts of our scientific understanding of the world. And yet, one can still posit that the universe has no actual infinities, that they are a trick of mathematics, and the actual is finite indeed. Like this article, there may be an end to everything.

The Revelation at Kurukshetra

Arjuna stood in the chariot and gazed out over the valley. Thousands of warriors had gathered here at Kurukshetra, alliances of Kings bound together into two great forces. Spearmen, archers, chariots and elephants filled Arjuna’s sight. The larger force was on the other side of the valley, lead by Arjuna’s cousin. This was a family war, Arjuna and the other Pandavas against their cousins the Kauravas. The Kauravas had taken the Kingdom from Arjuna’s brother who was the rightful King. Now, after many years in exile, the Pandavas had returned to take what was theirs. Arjuna maneuvered his chariot to the front of his battle group and looked into the faces of the enemy.

There he saw his cousins, and his uncles. Friends from childhood and his mentors stood across the field waiting to deliver death to Arjuna and his brothers. Arjuna knew his skill with the bow was great and knew he would kill many people today. The thought turned his stomach, and a sadness bore down upon him. The warrior turned to his charioteer, the noble Krishna, a godling who was friend to both sides of the conflict.

“Krishna, we are about to do something hateful. How can I lead my men into battle against my family, against my friends? Look, there is Drona who taught me how to use my bow and arrow when I was so young. Am I truly to kill him? How can this be my dharma?”

Krishna the godling replied, “Oh Arjuna, do not worry about this coming battle. There will be death on both sides, indeed few will survive this glorious battle at the end of this glorious age. All you must do is perform your sacred duty as a warrior. Do not expect and anticipate the result, just be the best you can, act without attachment and know that it will only be the bodies that you kill, their souls will go on forever.”

Arjuna listened to Krishna’s wisdom and steeled himself for the fight. “Very well, I shall do as you ask. You show much wisdom as always. I never quite understood how you could know so much of the way of things.”

“Oh Arjuna, have I been with you so long and yet still you do not recognise me? I am no mere descendant of the gods as you are, I am the one, the only, that which is greatest made manifest in human form.”

Arjuna felt a shiver along his spine. Could this be? Was Krishna an avatar not merely of a god, but of the eternal? “Show me. If I am to die in this battle then so be it, it is my karma, but before I fight I must see with my own eyes, show me your glory! If I can ask but one more thing of you my friend, let it be this!”

Krishna smiled and the air stilled. All was silent, no bird was singing, no horse neighing. The armies were frozen in time, only Arjuna and Krishna moved. Krishna touched Arjuna on the forehead, his finger opening a divine sight within the warrior. And then Arjuna saw.

He saw infinite eyes and mouths. He saw a body that went on forever, unbounded, unchained, eternal. Were a thousand suns to rise at once they could not outshine the magnificence Arjuna saw. The lotus flower floated beneath the being that Arjuna’s mind struggled to comprehend. All the gods were contained within it, all of creation was encompassed by it. Arjuna then saw his cousins and the enemy forces running headlong into the mouths of the glorious one, all being devoured and absorbed.

“What are you?”

“I am Time, and I am Death, destroyer of all worlds. Those who you fight will die with or without you. You have to decide to do what is right. Follow your dharma.”

Arjuna trembled with dread, the numinous shaking him to the bone. The forms swayed, they drifted away from Arjuna and his divine sight too was lost. Arjuna opened his mortal eyes and gazed upon the human form of Krishna once again. His lips trembled, his arms still shook. The banner of Hanuman that he wore on his shirt was dark with sweat and tears.

“No words…”

Krishna smiled. “You have glimpsed understanding, but that is all that you can ever achieve. But even a glimpse is better than living in the dark. Do you understand now the oneness of the universe?”

Arjuna nodded. “Yes, I see now. I understand. I know what must be done. All is one. And I must fight this war.”

The horns blew and the battle commenced. Arjuna drew his bow and he killed and he killed and he killed.

The Spiritual Centrist

When Siddhartha Gautama was born, his father the King sent for the wise men to foretell his future. After examining the infant child they all proclaimed the same thing: “Siddhartha is destined to become either a great ruler whose Empire will cover the world, or else to become a great prophet, who will discover the means of salvation for all of mankind.” The King was not one for philosophy, or meditation. He asked the sages how he could ensure the child would become a great ruler. The wise men replied “He must not receive any religious teachings. Keep him away from the sacred scriptures, the Vedas and the Upanishads. Do not let him eat after midnight and above all do not let him see suffering!” The King agreed to these terms and kept the young Prince in an indulgent idle lifestyle. No suffering or torment was allowed within the walled Palace-city where Siddhartha grew up, and on his sixteenth birthday he was given a beautiful and kind cousin to marry and a party to rival all other sweet sixteens for thousands of years. Life was easy for the Prince, and no thoughts of becoming a saviour entered into his head. Alas for his father, he did not seem too interested in ruling a great Empire, but he was still young and there was plenty of time for him to become King of the World.

Meanwhile, in the realm of the Gods, trouble was stirring. The Gods themselves, although powerful, could not escape the greater powers of Karma and Fate. Through reincarnation they knew that they too could die and perhaps be reborn as a lower life-form. Although this prospect was many millions of years away for them, they were aware that salvation for all beings was at hand, if only Siddhartha could escape his indulgent lifestyle. And so they sent messengers down to the mortal world in order to bring the young Prince to his destiny.

When he was twenty nine years old Siddhartha found himself longing to see the world outside of the Palace. He asked his father to let him ride down to a neighbouring city and the King agreed, but not before he had sent an order to remove the old, the sick and those who suffered from the streets. On his chariot Siddhartha rode through the city, enjoying this new experience. But the Gods forced an old man onto the street and the Prince ordered his charioteer to stop.

“What has happened to that man? His skin is wrinkled, his hair gone and he walks so crookedly.”

The charioteer had been ordered by the King to say nothing, but the Gods loosened his tongue. “Oh Prince, that is a man struck by old age. All people, if they are lucky, will experience this, even you.”

“If they are lucky? You speak nonsense charioteer. Ride on!”

And so they did, but then they encountered a man who was severely ill. Again the Prince was horrified, and again the charioteer explained that illness came to us all. After this they encountered a corpse, and the Prince wept. “This is your fate too my Prince” said the charioteer.

On their way back to the Palace, Siddhartha was quiet. He spoke only once as they passed a mendicant monk. “Who is that fellow there? What brings him to live in rags and beg on the side of the street?” The charioteer replied, “He is a monk, an ascetic who renounces the ways of the world in order to achieve enlightenment and uncover the true nature of things.”

That night Siddhartha made a decision. Faced with suffering he could no longer live in his idyllic pleasure palace. He kissed his sleeping wife goodbye and rode out again in the night with his charioteer. Near the forest he took off his clothes and all signs that he was royalty. He gave them to the charioteer and went alone into the forest, to starve himself and live a life of denial.

Days passed, and then weeks. Siddhartha meditated and grew stronger in spirit but weaker in body. He became gaunt, a hollow reflection of his former self. Always he tried to find the truth of things but as he grew weaker his thoughts began to spiral away from him. Eventually he collapsed by a pool of water, too weak to drink.

Fortunately a group of dancing girls came by, singing a song about tuning a sitar. The lyrics told the listener that one shouldn’t leave the strings too slack or the sitar would be out of tune. One also shouldn’t tighten the strings too much or they would snap and be useless. At that point Siddhartha had a revelation and asked for some food and water. The girls gave him fruits and after getting his strength back he followed them for a while.

Now he had experienced extreme luxury and extreme deprivation. Neither was enough, neither was satisfying, neither led to the truth and to the virtuous life. Siddhartha knew now that he must walk a new path, he called it the Middle Way. Extremes were interesting, and good to be experienced, but could not hold all the truth. With this in mind he left the dancing girls and headed into the forest again. There he sat beneath the Bodhi tree and meditated. He was ready to become the Buddha, and bring salvation to everyone.

The problem with parody

It has often been noted that in some cases parody becomes almost impossible. The idea of parody is to take ideas to their extremes, but what if your subject is more extreme than can be believed? This is most apparent in trying to distinguish parody like the Landover Baptist church from the real (if equally insane) Westboro Baptist church. At what stage of ridiculous can you tell that something is parody? Fox News has in the past, on occasion, trumped the Onion for laughs – until you realise they are being serious.

With ancient writings distinguishing between serious statements and humour can also be difficult. The Golden Ass, an ancient Latin novel written by Lucius Apuleius, is at first glance a ribald vaudeville. The main plot of the book is broken up with many sub stories (ala The Arabian Nights), most of which are bizarre and amusing. Indeed the overall story, wherein the narrator is turned into an ass and searches for a rose to eat in order to transform back into a human, is hardly the stuff of serious literature. And yet in the end it is not a flower that enables the hero (perhaps protagonist is a better description) to regain his humanity, but a revelation from the Goddess Isis. The final chapter of the book stands in contrast to the others showing the redemption of the ass-like narrator and his new life as an initiate of the cult of Osiris.

The writing and description of his revelation has been compared to others who have written conversion stories, notably St. Augustine. Many are convinced that by the change in style of this final chapter that it is an authentic description of the real life conversion of the author. And yet it is not beyond the realms of possibility that this chapter too is a caricature, a continuation of the life lead as an ass. He finally wanders around Rome with his head shaved – a buffoonish character as seen by contemporaries. It is still a matter of debate amongst scholars over whether this final chapter is a revelation, or yet another caricature of the credulous.

At the very start of the novel, the narrator encounters a traveler who sneers at the notions of magic. This skeptic proclaims: “These lies are just as true as it would be to say that because of magic rivers can suddenly reverse their flow, the sea be becalmed, the winds cease to blow, the sun stand still, the moon be milked of her dew, the stars uprooted, the daylight banished, the night prolonged.” In response to this disbelieving of the power of magic Lucius has to respond. He relates of the fact that he had recently eaten a cheesecake and it had become trapped in his throat. He was very nearly a goner. And yet in contrast to this he had seen a sword swallower take a lance and push the blade into his throat and down further, and then on the shaft of the lance a boy had appeared and danced around the wooden pole. Surely, the reasoning goes, if such a miraculous thing is possible, then anything is possible.

Such shoddy logic is still used today by many people who see something a little unusual and so assume something else implausible sounding must be true. Was Lucius agreeing with this notion? Or was he pillorying it? I like to assume that Lucius was a satirist, it certainly makes the novel funnier and more enjoyable for it. And who knows, perhaps in several thousands years scholars will wonder if Westboro was satire, and if the Landover Baptists were real.

Echo

It was often the case that the goddess Juno would search for her errant husband in order to catch him at his most beloved hobby, that of seducing the fair nymphs that lived on the mountainsides and in the streams of the world. But during her search she would often be waylaid by one particularly clever Nymph who went by the name of Echo. Echo would prattle on to the goddess about this and that and distract her long enough that Juno’s husband would have time to get back to Mount Olympus and pretend that nothing had ever happened. It was not for the sake of mighty Jupiter that Echo would slow down Juno’s rampage, but for her own sisters who would often be on the business end of the goddess’ tantrums. Alas for Echo it was only a matter of time before Juno grew aware of the trick and as punishment she altered Echo’s speech so that she could only speak when others had spoken, and could only repeat what she had heard. The loquacious Echo was devastated by her lack of speech and fled from her sisters to wander the world.

After a time Echo spied a young man walking in the woods. He was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen and Echo immediately fell madly in love with him. He seemed lost in thought, but Echo ran out to talk to him. She beamed in delight but could say no words until he spoke first. Alas for poor Echo she had encountered a man who was under his own curse. He could not fall in love with anyone less beautiful than himself, and although Echo was a nymph of exceptional splendour, she was not quite the equal of the young man. He had never known love, only the attentions of many who he could never find companionship with. Now yet another woman was gazing at him but saying nothing. He turned away but she was insistent and followed his every move.

“You are quite the most annoying creature!”

“Annoying creature” she replied.

“What do you want?”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to go away and leave me!”

“leave me?”

“Yes, I just want to be left alone!”

“alone…“

Echo fled from the young man, weeping as she did. She could not communicate with him, could not speak and explain what had happened. She fled to a lonely mountain and stayed there, crying and sobbing, never sleeping, always awake. For weeks she cried and neither ate nor drank and she slowly wasted away until nothing of her remained but her voice.

Many months later Echo returned to the woods. No longer a nymph, merely a spirit, she once again spied the young man. This time he was kneeling by the edge of a calm and clear pool of water. He looked as if he had been there some time and he spoke to his reflection.

“Oh my love, I hate this barrier between us, how I long to kiss your lips. How I wish you would talk to me.”

“Talk to me.” replied Echo.

“You speak! Finally you speak to me! Oh how I have waited for this moment, to ask do you love me?”

“Do you love me?”

“Oh yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I love you!”

“I love you.” she replied.

“Then answer me this one question and I will happily live here forever, but if you should not I would sooner die than stay here.”

“Stay here!”

“Oh I will, but I must say this quietly, I may have to come closer.”

“Come closer.” said Echo.

The young man bent over the pool and bowed down until his lips kissed the waters. There he whispered his question, but it was so quiet that Echo could not hear it and could not reply. The man waited for an answer but when none came tears started to run down his cheeks.

“Is that your answer then? Can you not speak aloud the thing that I cannot?”

“I cannot.”

“Then I cannot live.” He pulled a dagger from his side and plunged the blade in deeply. Blood welled up around his mouth and he collapsed at the side of the pool.

“Live!” cried Echo, but it was too late. The handsome man was dead, his curse played out. Echo left the forest again vowing not to return. She would stay in the canyons and the caves, and perhaps the vaulted chambers of the cities. But never again would she speak in the woods, and a whisper would always bring a tear to her eye.

Darwin, Incest and Plant Sex

In the heart of Berlin in the 1790’s a theologian named Spengel was hard at work investigating the sex of plants. Up until that time it was generally assumed that many plants, having both male and female parts, would fertilise themselves. Spengel spent much time examining plants and came to rather different conclusions that he published in his opus Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen. It went down like a lead balloon. No one was interested and his work languished unheeded and Spengel moved on from botany. If he was remembered at all it was by his fellow professors who would rather not talk about plant sex at all thank you very much.

Half a century later Charles Darwin was worried about incest and inbreeding. For his theory of Natural Selection to work there had to be enough variety within a population. Sex provided this variety but what if a population kept breeding within a small group? This was more than just idle curiosity for Darwin, he had married his first cousin and indeed his family and that of his wife had been interbreeding for many generations. It was well known amongst livestock breeders that closely related breeding pairs gave rise to poor offspring. Three of Darwin’s ten children died in childhood – he wondered if his close relationship to his wife had left him with weaker children. With these thoughts on his mind he did what he excelled at – doing an insane amount of experiments.

Darwin performed thousands of experiments in search for evidence for his theories. No armchair philosopher, Darwin was the epitome of the experimental scientist. He turned his attention to flowers, which he felt needed an explanation to fit with Natural Selection – why would plants have created these beautiful and complex structures unless there was a reason for them? It was known that insects sometimes carried pollen between plants but this was seen as a rare occurrence. Darwin set out to show that this was the main way in which the flowering plants reproduced and, inspired by Spengel’s work, he devised some simple experiments to demonstrate what would happen if flowers self fertilised as was thought to be the case.

He created two groups of plants. One group was forced to self fertilise. This is a rather easy thing to do – essentially a bag is placed over the flower so that the only interaction can come from the same plant – if fertilisation occurs it has to have been from the same plant. For the other group he castrated the flowers – pulling out the stamen before the plant was fully fertile and thus any fertilisation would have to come from another plant. After a few generations the results were clear. There were fewer self-fertilised plants, and those that had survived were stunted compared to the cross-fertilised crop. This had to mean that the main strategy for reproduction for those plants was cross-pollination, which meant the insects were pivotal in the process. And this gave an answer to why the plants had flowers – they were there to attract insects.

Darwin’s experiments and results (published in his book On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing ) convinced the world in a way that Spengel hadn’t. Perhaps it was the snappy title, or that his experiments were more convincing than the theologians. In any case, plant sex had finally come into its own and took its place as part of the scientific knowledge of the age.

Idol Words

Postmodernism is often taken a little too far. One idea that springs up a lot from the university campus is that since we cannot have any concrete foundation on which to place our knowledge, all knowledge is relative and interchangable, a cultural imposition rather than anything ‘real’. Of course such people live their lives as if there is knowledge (they don’t try to walk out of third floor windows since they ‘know’ that’s a bad idea), so it can get a little annoying to hear postmodern ideas in the face of genuine inquiry. Nonetheless there is one aspect of postmodern literary criticism that I find can come in useful. This is the idea that what a text means is not necessarily what the author intended it to mean. Or rather, that a text can have more than one meaning based on what the audience brings to it. Personally I always like to find out what the author intended (to me that’s a pretty good ‘true’ meaning), but what happens when that’s not possible?

The bible has been read in many different ways. Christians looked at the Hebrew Bible and turned it into the Old Testament. It was the same words, but now they viewed it as a prophecy, a prediction of their saviour. Only someone with this idea in their head could possibly see this, but see it they did. The advent of christianity has changed many peoples view of what some ancient stories meant, but then so has the Enlightenment and the advancement of human knowledge, and not in the way that might be expected.

As an example, the first chapter of Genesis (the seven day creation) is not mythology. The second chapter story of Adam and Eve most certainly is, but when it come to finding a genre for the seven day creation it is more like that of the natural philosophers of the Ionian School. The ancient warring serpents have been toned down and removed – God is seen as acting at a distance, well beyond the anthropomorphic deity of the next chapter. This is the Hebrew equivalent of Empedocles or Thales naturalistic explanations. If any ‘message’ is to be taken from Genesis 1 it is that the world is God’s creation and that it is good. Quite a lot of time is spent on that point alone. This idea of the world being a good place stands in contrast to the Gnostics or Encratites or those Hindus who saw this world of Maya (illusion) as being an evil place. For them the world was to be denied, earthly delights were but temptations and the true world could be experienced by escaping from this world (through fasting and celibacy). The Genesis story stands starkly opposed to that idea, instead it instructs people to enjoy the fruits of your labours in this world.

A few thousand years later we discovered that Thales, Empedocles and Genesis were wrong. The world is not made up of four elements, the Earth does not float on water and the cosmos was not created in seven days. Can the message of Genesis survive this revelation? Well, not if you take it (as some do today) as the literal way that the world came into being. The author of Genesis may well have imagined that his was the best theory for the creation of the world, but would he have written the same if he had more knowledge? What would the author change if he knew of fossils, or saw a picture of the Earth from space?

The story of Jonah (a fun and somewhat odd book) has a message that can be fairly easily understood. Jonah is sent to Nineveh to warn the evil Assyrians that if they don’t repent of their wicked ways then Yahweh will destroy them. Jonah doesn’t want to risk going to Nineveh so he tries to run away, but Yahweh sends a fish to swallow him. After three days Jonah relents and promises to preach to the Assyrians. The King of the Assyrians hears Jonah and what do you know, he repents! So does the entire city! Jonah goes off in a huff since he was looking forward to these wicked people getting their comeuppance. In the hot sun he finds shade under a bush which Yahweh then destroys. Jonah gets all upset and Yahweh reprimands him for being more concerned over a bush than he was about millions of human beings. Who are we to judge that people are beyond salvation? That would be one message from this story. And yet this story pops up most with apologists arguing that someone could survive inside a fish for three days, as if that were important to the story. Does it matter whether any of the story ever happened? Could the same be said of the book of Job? Or even about the gospels of the New Testament?

We bring our own ideas and opinions to any text we read, in this the postmodernists are correct. The literalist has made an idol of the bible and will read the words as truer than reality itself. The liberal christian will seek positive meaning from tales that may well be allegorical. And the anthropologist will try to read the text as the author intended, requiring knowledge of the cultural milieu, the sitz im leben. My own bias shows now, as though I agree that the text means different things to different people, I do feel there is one meaning which is closer to ‘truth’ and here I must part with the postmodernists who might indeed have taken things a little too far.

Dark Energy Makes Us Special

The darkness of the soul when contemplating the cosmos

Nobody likes Dark Energy. The name itself, like Dark Matter, tells us that we don’t know what it is. It’s a placeholder name for some anomalies between theory and observation. It started in 1998 with some distant supernovae that suggested that the rate at which the universe is expanding is increasing. There is a type of supernova (Type Ia) that is used as a so called ’standard candle’. They always give off the same amount of light and so by measuring how bright they appear to us we can tell their distance. And the further away they are, the further back in time we see them, and from this (and some snazzy mathematics) it was becoming clear that the universe wasn’t just expanding, but getting quicker and quicker at expanding. Suddenly we were living in a special time.

It’s a general assumption in physics that we don’t live in a particularly special place or at a particularly special time. Sure we happen to live on a planet that supports life, and we live after a certain time – certainly life as we know it could not exist until the first generation of stars had burned the higher elements into existence. But we could safely have lived a few billion years ago and the universe would be much the same, and we could live a few billion or trillion years into the future and everything would be essentially the same as now.

Dark Energy changes this. Now the past is receding with an alacrity that will one day hide the evidence of the Big Bang. A lot of what we know about the early universe comes from observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. But with the acceleration of the spreading of space the radiation will one day slip away and no longer be a clue that we can look at to discover our past. Less than a hundred years ago it was thought that the Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe – a massive collection of stars surrounded by an infinite empty void. Improved telescopes have shown us that this is not the case. The 400 billion stars of our galaxy have cousins in the hundreds of billions of other galaxies we have seen. Yet in the dim and distant future when space is stretched further and further our local group of galaxies will be all that is visible to the civilisations that exist then. Not for them the discovery of receding galaxies, no clues to lead them to the idea of a singularity from which all we know has come. Indeed by then the local group of galaxies may all have merged into one super galaxy and the ideas of the early twentieth century, the island universe surrounded by infinite void, will be in exact accord with the evidence.

Unless… What if we are not living in a special time, but a special place. Every way we look the universe is the same, but what if we were in the centre of a region of space which was emptier than normal. In astronomy we look far away and look back in time, but what if it’s not that things were different back then, but that things are different ‘over there’. If the rests of the universe is denser than where we are it will restrict the expansion of the universe. Our observations say that the universe did not expand as quickly in the past, but maybe it’s just that the universe didn’t expand so quickly in denser areas. If this is the case then we will have no need of dark energy to make sense of things. Within ten years we will have telescopes capable of measuring enough of a sphere around us to test if this theory is true. Then we will know whether we live in a special place, or just in a special time.