Poetry: Critique of Genetic Engineering

Posted by Chengde Chen *

“Genetic engineering technology is designed to enable genes to cross species 
barriers.” – Martin Khor, New diseases as viruses break species barriers 


Genetic engineering has a million benefits,

While I have only one reason against it.

But, any number multiplying a zero becomes a zero.

Science is supposed to support human existence;

If genes are written by all historical conditions of nature,

Isn’t quoting them out of context man outlawing himself?
 


The temperature on the Earth’s surface is within ±50ºC

A very small range in the grand thermometer of the universe,

But just the home for us – the creature of 37ºC – to survive.

Believers marvel at God’s arrangement, yet it’s only nature.

All existing species are adapters to this condition;

Those not, either never had a chance, or have been eliminated.

 

Should God, seized by a whim, play at “planet engineering”

Rearranging the order of the solar system, what would happen?

If Earth moved one step inwards to the position of Venus,

The mighty 480ºC would evaporate us into clouds.

If Earth moved one step outwards to the position of Mars,

The minus 140ºC would cast us into super-ice.



Earth is in our genes.

Genes are nature’s vertical memory and horizontal logic.

The process of adapting and eliminating carves all specifications.

The billions of codes are billions of doors and locks without keys,

Shutting out foreign viruses with DNA incompatibility

So we don’t catch cats’ flu, nor do dogs get our hepatitis.
 


Yet, manufactured genes come suddenly

Sharing no responsibility of history but short-circuiting species.

When transgenic pig organs are implanted into humans, 

Pig viruses also leap over millions of years to join us.

To gain medical benefits by dismantling the species barriers, 

It’s self-disarming to the bone or tying oneself up to WMD?
 


The biological world is a self-contained all-dimensional computer;

Messing up one sequence could throw the whole system into chaos,

Which is asking God to restart His creation all over!

So He’d rather we mess about with the planets than modify genes.

“If you must,” He may say, “modify Mine first to have a GM god 

To recreate the world, I’d need enhanced energy and perseverance.” 


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* Chengde Chen is the author of the philosophical poems collection: Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde.chen@hotmail.com

The Quiet Revolution That is Replacing Traditional Financing Models?

'The Moneylender and His Wife' by Quentin Metsys, 1514.

Posted by Emile Wolfaardt

Around the circumference of the globe and across the stage of history, the engines of almost all labor and commerce enterprises turn with one common goal in mind – to be financially profitable. This is true individually and collectively. We go to work each day with the goal of making money – of acquiring some sort of currency that we can use to exchange for goods or services. We earn ‘purchasing power’ – or units that we can exchange for something we want or need.

While most of us use some sort of currency, these units of purchasing power have not always been in the forms of coins and bills. Shells, stones, metals, and other animate and inanimate objects have been used in our history. And for the most part – the value is assigned as opposed to being intrinsic. Paper money is said to have assigned value and precious metal and gems intrinsic value. Yet, if sand was scarcer than diamonds, and was necessary – it would have an even greater value than diamonds - so perhaps all value is assigned.

But some people today claim that there is a revolution taking place in the financial world. Up to now – currency and purchasing power has been controlled by governments and financial institutions. Currency is determined to be ‘legal tender’ but it belongs to the government. In most countries, it is illegal to damage currency - it is considered damage to government property. The government and the financial institutions charge you to use the money. You pay when you deposit it, when you withdraw it, when you borrow it and when you are given it. Some banks will waive some of these fees under certain conditions and the government will waive taxes or reduce them in certain circumstances. In this model, Providers have custody of the wealth and grant access to the owners. This is called Banking. 

But a new form of financing has emerged that is not controlled by the government or the financial institutions. Rather, it is peer to peer financing – and it is structured around blockchain, and the currency is called crypto currency. Bitcoin is the largest of these and it constitutes about 80% of the market. In Blockchain, Owners have custody of the wealth and grant access to Providers. Its supporters say that instead of being controlled centrally by some body, it is ‘decentralised’ and controlled by the millions of people who own it.

Bitcoin was founded in in 2009.

The first few years of cryptocurrencies were hectic, and the investment opportunities were more like gambling. Lots of people made millions of dollars, but many more lost their money. As more and more people became interested in a blockchain financing model, the governments and financial institutions started to rail against it. Financial institutions like JP Morgan, Morgan Stanly, the IMF, Barclays Bank etc. all condemned them. 

Nonetheless, in 2019, it was institutional money and the Whales of Wall Street that were the biggest investors in Crypto Currency. Apparently, the FBI is the second largest holder of Bitcoin in the world (although their holdings do not come from investments). Currently, the big institutions are spending millions of dollars on crypto investments, and many countries are embracing it – some as a replacement currency to their own. Many mainline vendors like Apple, Google, etc. now accept Bitcoin as legitimate payment. And yet governments are recognising they do not have the ability to control it. Mike Crapo, United States Senate Chairman of the Banking Committee:

'If the United States were to decide ... we don’t want cryptocurrency to happen in the United States ... we couldn’t succeed in doing that because this is a global innovation.'

Not everyone is an enthusiast for the new money. Writing at Forbes.com, Saeed Elnaj says:

“Bitcoin’s promise was to bypass the centralized economic system and enable peer-to-peer exchange of value using the digital currency. But with the fluctuating price of Bitcoin, it is very hard to buy a cup of coffee or an album online. It is also impractical given the delay required to complete time-sensitive transactions. In fact, since Bitcoin’s astronomical rise in December 2017, the number of Bitcoin transactions has dramatically plunged.”

 And he suggests that rather the primary attraction of the currency is irrational.

“It seems that Bitcoin will likely cease to have meaningful value, defeating the whole point and philosophy imagined by Satoshi Nakamoto, the alleged inventor of Bitcoin. Its current value appears to be purely psychological, and the hype seems to be driven by irrational exuberance, greed and speculation.”

Money has gone through several revolutions, among them barter, precious metals, paper money, banking, money wires, credit cards ... and now, cryptocurrencies. Will this be a true revolution? Or a false dawn? Time will tell.

What Is It to Be Human?

Hello, world!

Posted by Keith Tidman

Consciousness is the mental anchor to which we attach our larger sense of reality.

We are conscious of ourselves — our minds pondering themselves in a curiously human manner — as well as being intimately conscious of other people, other species, and everything around us, near and remote.

We’re also aware that in reflecting upon ourselves and upon our surroundings, we process experiences absorbed through our senses — even if filtered and imagined imperfectly. This intrinsically empirical nature of our being is core, nourishing our experience of being human. It is our cue: to think about thinking. To ponder the past, present, and future. To deliberate upon reality. And to wonder — leaving no stone unturned: from the littlest (subatomic particles) to the cosmic whole. To inspire and be inspired. To intuit. To poke into the possible beginning, middle, and end of the cosmos. To reflect on whether we behave freely or predeterminedly. To conceptualise and pick from alternative futures. To learn from being wrong as well as from being right. To contemplate our mortality. And to tease out the possibility of purpose from it all.

Perception, memory, interpretation, imagination, emotion, logic, and reason are among our many tools for extracting order out of disorder, to quell chaos. These and other properties, collectively essential to distinguishing humanity, enable us to model reality, as best we can.

There is perhaps no more fundamental investigation than this into consciousness touching upon what it means to be human.

To translate the world in which we’re thoroughly immersed. To use our rational minds as the gateway to that understanding — to grasp the dimensions of reality. For humans, the transmission of thought, through the representational symbols of language, gestures, and expressions — representative cognition — provides a tool for chiseling out our place in the world. In the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein laconically but pointedly framed the germaneness of these ideas:

‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’.

Crucially, Wittgenstein grounds language as a tool for communication in shared experiences. 

Language provides not only an opening through which to peer into human nature but also combines  with other cognitive attributes, fueling and informing what we believe and know. Well, at least what we believe we know. The power of language — paradoxically both revered and feared, yet imperative to our success — stems from its channeling human instincts: fundamentally, what we think we need and want.

Language, to the extraordinary, singular level of complexity humankind has developed and learned to use it as a manifestation of human thought, emanates from a form of social leaning. That is, we experiment with language in utilitarian fashion, for best effect; use it to construct and contemplate what-ifs, venturing into the concrete and abstract to unspool reality; and observe, interact with, and learn from each other in associative manner. Accumulative adaptation and innovation. It’s how humanity has progressed — sometimes incrementally, sometimes by great bounds; sometimes as individuals, sometimes as elaborate networks. Calibrating and recalibrating along the way. Accomplished, deceptively simply, by humans emitting sounds and scribbling streams of symbols to drive progress — in a manner that makes us unique.

Language — sophisticated, nuanced, and elastic — enables us to meaningfully absorb what our brains take in. Language helps us to decode and make sense of the world, and recode the information for imaginatively different purposes and gain. To interpret and reinterpret the assembly of information in order to shape the mind’s new perspectives on what’s real — well, at least the glowing embers of what’s real — in ways that may be shared to benefit humankind on a global, community, and individual level. Synaptic-like, social connections of which we are an integral part.

Fittingly, we see ourselves simultaneously as points connected to others, while also as distinct identities for which language proves essential in tangibly describing how we self-identify. Human nature is such that we have individual and communal stakes. The larger scaffolding is the singularly different cultures where we dwell, find our place, and seek meaning — a dynamically frothing environment, where we both react to and shape culture, with its assortment of both durably lasting and other times shifting norms.

Picture Post #53 Buckled Rails

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Buckled railway line near Glasgow, 25 June 2018.

The thermal expansion of railway lines is governed most simply by the formula

Δ L ≈ α L Δ T

This formula failed near Glasgow on 25 June 2018, when railway lines buckled in the heat. In fact they buckled in heatwaves all across Europe in the 2010s.  Why?  The answer is simple.  This formula, and versions of it, failed to include environmental factors—at least, not those which mattered.

It is not only railway lines which buckle.  Oceans are polluted, glaciers retreat, bees are poisoned, toads go blind, groundwater is poisoned, people suffocate—in fact, thousands if not millions of things go wrong besides—all without their being included in the formulae.

Here is the problem.  We take at face value that physical laws are true of this world.  It is the heresy of Plato.  Ordinary things, held Plato, imitate forms.  We hold up forms to reality, which is formulae: 'This is how it is!'  It is not.  And so the world is continually bedevilled by negative consequences.