Can't blog.... must watch hockey... must watch more hockey in two weeks than I have in two years (ok not true, but it feels true) ... ca-na-duh! can-na-duh! my god, last night I dreamt hockey... ah, CuJo, your star has fallen .... hockey....

posted at 8:12 AM

A couple of days ago (see below... Blogger does not lie) I linked to the fair use copy of a recent Harper's article on "The spurious foundation of genetic engineering" by Barry Commoner. The essence of the article is that there is evidence that supports that biology's "central dogma" is wrong. The dogma is

"genetic information originates in the DNA nucleotide sequence and terminates, unchanged, in the protein amino acid sequence. The pronouncement is crucial to the explanatory power of the theory because it endows the gene with undiluted control over the identity of the protein and the inherited trait that the protein creates. To stress the importance of their genetic taboo, Crick bet the future of the entire enterprise on it, asserting that "the discovery of just one type of present-day cell" in which genetic information passed from protein to nucleic acid or from protein to protein "would shake the whole intellectual basis of molecular biology."

This smoking gun has not been discovered yet, but what has been discovered are "prions" the general term for the nasties that lead to such things like scrapie, and Mad Cow Disease. Prions are freaking weird and downright scary...

"Crick's theory holds that biological replication, which is essential to an organism's ability to infect another organism, cannot occur without nucleic acid. Yet when scrapie, the earliest known such disease, was analyzed biochemically, no nucleic acid - neither DNA nor RNA - could by found in the infectious material that transmitted the disease"

The article is a good read and even non-science minded folks should be able to get the gist of things.

What struck me about this article - and what I really want to write about here in bloggerland - was how the Common's argument against genetic engineering was constructed. Commoner doesn't spend much time critiquing the the actual act of genetic engineering itself. Instead, he sets himself upon the cornerstone on which its foundation is built.

It was the same tract that Linda McQuiag takes in her book The cult of impotence : selling the myth of powerlessness in the global economy. Instead of taking on the issue of "selling the myth of powerlessness", most of her book is focusses on its cornerstone of the cult of high interest rates. It's an important lesson but its hard to get through an entrie book on the matter. Perhaps an article in Harper's Magazine would have served better.

posted at 9:20 AM

That the entire world without exception had dreamed of this event, that nobody could help but dream the destruction of so powerful a hegemon -- this fact is unacceptable to the moral conscience of the West, and yet it is a fact nontheless, a fact that resists the emotional violence of all the rhetoric conspiring to erase it...

...Countless disaster films have borne witness to these fantasies, and the universal appeal of the images shows just how close the fantasies always are to being acted out: the closer the entire system gets to perfection or omnipotence, the stronger the urge to destroy it grows....

...Terrorism is immoral. The occurance at the World Trade Center, this symbolic act of defiance, is immoral, but it was in response to globalization, which is itself immoral. We are therefore immoral ourselves, so if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil. The crucial point lies in precisely the opposite direction from the Enlightenment philosophy of Good and Evil. We naively belive in the progress of God, that its ascendance in all domains (science, technology, democracy, human rights) corresponds to the defeat of Evil. No one seems to understand that Good and Evil increase in power at the same time and in the same way. The triumph of one does not result in the obliteration of the other; to the contrary. We tend to regard Evil, metaphysically, as an accidental smudge, but this axiom is illusionary. Good does not reduce Evil, or vice versa; they are at once irreducible, the one and the other inextricably linked. In the end, Good cannot vanquish Evil except by declining to be Good, since, in monopolizing global power, it entails a backfire of proportional violence....

from: L'Esprit du Terrorism by Jean Baudrillard
Harper's Magazine, February 2002, pp. 13-18
originally appeared in the November 2 issue of Le Monde
The google translation is amusing.

I'm transcribing just a snippet of the only vaguely understandable thing I have read by Baudrillard. I don't have the audacity to reprint entire articles from Harper's in the name of fair use, although, I have no hesitation linking to such articles.. More about this article later.

posted at 12:50 PM