Matt Lalonde on the science behind the Paleo Diet

Wow, Matt Lalonde's story is much like mine: Vegetarian for a decade, discovered CrossFit, wary of Paleo so did Zone Diet instead, and eventually transitioned to Paleo and omnivorousness. What I like most about Lalonde is his claim that it's too simplistic to say "eat like a caveman." There has to be science to back up dietary claims. Also, his discussion of genetic vs. epigenetic factors.

Peter Singer: Let's not send dolphins to war

Bioethicist and animal rights activist Peter Singer says that the US-Navy is putting dolphins in harm's way in the Persian Gulf and that it is a form of speciesist enslavement that needs to stop.

Indeed, it's no secret that the US-Navy has trained dolphins to detect mines. And now, with tensions on the rise in the Middle East, they might be used in the conflict with Iran over its nuclear program. In response to the new sanctions, Iran is threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz--the only sear route out of the Persian Gulf, and what the US Energy Department calls "the world's most important oil choke." It's suspected that Iran may use mines to do it, and if so, prompt the Navy to deploy their mine sniffing dolphins in response.

Best estimates indicate that the US Navy has trained about 80 dolphins to detect mines. It is speculated that the dolphins only locate the mines and drop acoustic transponders nearby so that their human partners can destroy the mines.

But, as Peter Singer fears, it is also possible for the dolphins to set off the mines and die in the resulting explosion. Moreover, by using the dolphins in this way makes them – and any other dolphins in the area – targets for the Iranians to destroy if they can.

Singer writes:

Animals, or at least those who are conscious and capable of suffering or enjoying their lives, are not things for us to use in whatever way we find convenient. To believe that, because they are members of a different species, we can ignore or discount their interests is speciesism, a form of prejudice against beings who are not "us" that is akin to racism and sexism. We should give equal consideration to the interests of any sentient being, where their interests are similar to our own.

Dolphins are social mammals, capable of enjoying their lives. They form close bonds with other members of their group. They respond to images of themselves in a mirror, and use the mirror to examine marks on parts of their body that they cannot otherwise see – a test that is widely taken to be a sign of self-awareness, which human children cannot pass until they are somewhere between 18 months and two years of age.

The United States no longer conscripts its citizens to fight its wars. All its human troops are volunteers. But even conscripts have some basic rights. The dolphins have none.

Dolphins have nothing to do with the dispute over Iran's nuclear plans, argues Singer. "Whatever the rights and wrongs of taking military action against Iran," he writes, "let's leave the dolphins out of it."

Centauri Dreams: Rethinking SETI's Targets

Great write-up and summary of our recent Dysonian SETI paper by Paul Gilster over at Centauri Dreams. Excerpt:

In a recent paper, Robert Bradbury, Milan Ćirković (Astronomical Observatory, Belgrade) and George Dvorsky (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) consider whether intergalactic SETI may be an example of what they call a ‘Dysonian’ approach to SETI, one that is a ‘middle ground’ between the traditional radio-centric view (with contact implications) and the hostile reaction of SETI detractors who see no value in the enterprise whatsoever and think the money better spent elsewhere. The nod to Freeman Dyson is based on the latter’s conjecture that a truly developed society would surmount the limits of planetary living space and energy by building a Dyson shell, capturing most or all of the energy from the star near which it lived.

A Dyson sphere immediately changes the terms of SETI because it is in principle detectable, but unlike nearby radio signals (either from a beacon or as unintentional ‘leakage’ from a civilization’s activities), a Dyson shell might be spotted at great astronomical distances through its infrared signature. Carl Sagan was one of the first to pick up on the idea and ponder its implications. Dyson was much in favor of attacking the question in a disciplined way, using our astronomical tools, as he once wrote, “…to transpose the dreams of a frustrated engineer into a framework of respectable astronomy.” And here again, we have seen attempts, especially by the aforementioned Richard Carrigan, to study infrared data for signs of such Dyson constructs.

The new direction in SETI that the three authors of the new paper champion is one that employs a broader set of tools. Rather than limiting itself to radio dishes or dedicated optical facilities, it broadens our workspace for extraterrestrial civilizations to include astronomical data that can be gathered in tandem with other research projects, scanning a far wider and deeper field. In the authors’ view, Dysonian SETI also takes into account new developments in astrobiology and even extends into computer science and the possibility of post-biological intelligence. They advocate a Dysonian SETI drawing on four basic strategies to supplement older methods:

• The search for technological products, artifacts, and signatures of advanced technological civilizations.
• The study of postbiological and artificially super-intelligent evolutionary trajectories, as well as other relevant fields of future studies.
• The expansion of admissible SETI target spectrum.
• The achievement of tighter interdisciplinary contact with related astrobiological subfields (studies of Galactic habitability, biogenesis, etc.) as well as related magisteria (computer science, artificial life, evolutionary biology, philosophy of mind, etc.)

The expansion of SETI into these areas would not replace ongoing SETI methods but would significantly expand the overall process in line with the great goal of learning whether other intelligent beings share the galaxy and the nearby universe with us. The paper offers more fruitful speculation than I can fit into a single entry, so we’ll be looking at these ideas over the course of the next few days. If there really is a Great Silence, to use David Brin’s phrase, these authors argue it’s one that we can only ponder usefully if we broaden our search toward the potentially observable achievements of cultures far more advanced than our own. That study has only recently begun.

Sentient Developments Podcast: Episode 2012.01.23

Sentient Developments Podcast for the week of January 23, 2012.

In this week's episode I talk about the new mathematical study which reveals that our Galaxy should have been colonized by now, why Canadians are considering a ban on prenatal gender information, the growing gender imbalance, the latest on the lab-mutated avian flu, why whales are people, health tips to avoid cognitive decline, and why the sex-chip may not be such a good idea.


Tracks used in this episode:

• Alcest: "Autre Temps"
• SBTRKT: "Pharoahs"
• Lower Dens: "Nootropics"

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New mathematical study reveals that our Galaxy should have been colonized by now

A recent article in the Economist alerted me to a recent paper by Thomas Hair and Andrew Hedman that profoundly reaffirms the conundrum that is the Fermi Paradox, an observational problem that is sometimes referred to as the Great Silence.

What's fascinating about the Hair and Hedman paper is that they are not cosmologists or astrobiologists, but rather mathematicians—and it is through the lens of number-cruching that they sought an answer to the question of how long it would take a civilization to colonize its local region given a specific set of parameters. And their findings are disturbing: No matter how they reworked the numbers, they came to the same conclusion: the Galaxy should be colonized by now:

To arrive at their conclusion Dr Hair and Mr Hedman assumed that outer space is dotted with solar systems, about five light years apart. They then asked how quickly a single civilisation armed with the requisite technology would spread its tentacles, depending on the degree of colonising zeal, expressed as the probability that intelligent beings decide to hop from one planet to the next in 1,000 years (500 years for the trip, at a modest one-tenth of the speed of light, and another 500 years to prepare for the next hop).

All these numbers are necessarily moot. If the vast majority of planets is not suitable, for instance, the average distance for a successful expedition might be much more than five light years. And advanced beings might not need five Earth centuries to get up to speed before they redeploy. However, Dr Hair and Mr Hedman can tweak their probabilities to reflect a range of possible conditions. Using what they believe to be conservative assumptions (as low as one chance in four of embarking on a colonising mission in 1,000 years), they calculated that any galactic empire would have spread outwards from its home planet at about 0.25% of the speed of light. The result is that after 50m years it would extend over 130,000 light years, with zealous colonisers moving in a relatively uniform cloud and more reticent ones protruding from a central blob. Since the Milky Way is estimated to be 100,000-120,000 light years across, outposts would be sprinkled throughout the galaxy, even if the home planet were, like Earth, located on the periphery.

Crucially, even in slow-expansion scenario, the protrusions eventually coalesce. After 250,000 years, which the model has so far had the time to simulate, the biggest gaps are no larger than 30 light years across. Dr Hair thinks they should grow no bigger as his virtual colonisation progresses. That is easily small enough for man's first sufficiently powerful radio transmissions (in the early 20th century) to have been detected and for a reply to have reached Earth (which has been actively listening out for such messages since the 1960s). And though 50m years may sound a lot, if intelligent life did evolve more than once, it could easily have done so billions of years before this happened on Earth. All this suggests, Dr Hair and Mr Hedman fear, that humans really do have the Milky Way to themselves. Either that or the neighbours are a particularly timid bunch.

So, the next time somebody smugly shrugs off the Fermi Pardox by suggesting that "it takes too long to colonize the Galaxy" or that "there hasn't been enough time," or that "the Galaxy is too big," tell them to shut-up and read this paper.

Note: It doesn't appear that the Hair and Hedman paper is online; I have contacted them and asked for a copy or a link; stay tuned.

Daniel Goure: "Drones don’t kill terrorists, governments do."

In his article, Drones and the changing nature of warfare: Stop the presses!, Daniel Goure makes the case that we should be careful in assessing the impacts of drones and robotics in modern warfare and the claim that they could impact the tendency to go to war.

The availability of unmanned aerial systems in no way makes conflict more likely or more brutal. Quite the opposite, in fact, seems to be the case. The presumption that were it not for the availability of drones, the U.S. would refrain from conducting military operations against terrorists based in Pakistan is highly dubious. We have an example of an alternative military option: Operation Enduring Freedom. As Joshua Goldstein pointed out in a recent article, the use of armed drones in Pakistan may have prevented the use of far bloodier means. “Armed drones now attack targets that in the past would have required an invasion with thousands of heavily armed troops, displacing huge numbers of civilians and destroying valuable property along the way.” According to Robert Woodward’s reporting on President Obama’s decision to deploy additional forces to Afghanistan in 2009, a number of senior advisors proposed a lower-cost, smaller deployment based on increased use of special operations forces and unmanned aerial vehicles.

I might go even farther than Goldstein and argue that Cortright should advocate the greater use of drones, armed and otherwise, precisely due to his interest in reducing the frequency, intensity, and costs of conflicts. Just as dash cameras in police cars and cell phone cameras have led to a decrease in police brutality and the ability to bring those who violate procedures to account, the electro-optical sensors on drones can be used to increase oversight over military forces in the field. In fact, cameras can reduce what Cortright calls “the psychological distance that separates the launching of a strike from its bloody impact.” It can also help reduce the alleged isolation of the American people from the use of force in their name.

Unfortunately in view of its title, the primary focus of Cortright’s article is not on drones and warfare. Rather, it centers on the subset of the role of drones in current counterterrorism operations. A number of the issues he raises are frankly much more relevant to the rather murky legal and operational circumstances surrounding the global campaign against al Qaeda. Cortright is closer to the mark when, as the title of his article suggests, he connects the nature of drones, notably the lack of a person in the cockpit, to the sense that both the George W. Bush and, most particularly, the Obama Administration saw such systems as supporting if not promoting a “license to kill.” Critics of the use of drones against unlawful combatants in Pakistan and elsewhere would be on firmer ground by connecting the disembodied features of “Nintendo warfare” to our seeming tolerance for the weakening of legal safeguards for criminal terrorists.

In conclusion, I would suggest that there is nothing in the current employment of drones or in plans for future unmanned aerial systems that poses the kinds of dangers suggested by Mr. Cortright. They will not make war easier or cheaper. There is no evidence that armed drones have reduced the political inhibitions against the use of deadly force. The use of drones in no way threatens to weaken the moral presumption against the inappropriate or excessive use of force that is at the heart of the just war doctrine—the emphasis is mine, but the qualifiers have always belonged to just war theory. Mr. Cortright’s problem is not with drones but the policies of those who employ them. I almost hate to say it, but we should remember that drones don’t kill terrorists, governments do.

Canadians consider banning prenatal gender information

Now here's a piece of bio-legislation that's a complete non-starter in my opinion: Rajendra Kale, interim editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, has called for a ban on disclosing the sex of a fetus until 30 weeks, at which point it is difficult to obtain an abortion. The idea is to prevent Canadian parents from engaging in gender selection. The fear is that boys will be favoured over girls, causing a gender imbalance.

Aside from this being a gross violation of reproductive rights, this also flies in the face of actual experience. While there's no question that some ethnicities practice sex selection in Canada (namely Canadians of Sikh, Hindu and Chinese descent), far more Canadians would use the procedure for family balancing purposes. Moreover, if anything, the latest word is that Canadian couples are favouring girls over boys.

And as a recent Globe & Mail article noted:

“You may disagree or feel uncomfortable with the practice but people who practise family balancing are not evil or nefarious,” said Tim Caulfield, the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

He stressed that he is not endorsing sex selection, just underscoring that it is a complex issue with many nuances.

Read more.

MoJo: Baby Moses, Human–Jellyfish Hybrids, and Transhumanism: The GOP Candidates Weigh In

Surprising article in Mother Jones about the GOP race and how transhumanism and trangenics recently crept into a public forum:

When it was Newt Gingrich's turn, the moderators grilled him on, among other things, transhumanism and genetic engineering. The topic was a bit out there, as far as presidential forums go, and hardly the kind of thing you'd ever expect to come out of the mouth of, say, Wolf Blitzer. But the question was a valuable one, forcing the former speaker to choose between two of his greatest loves—futuristic technology/cutting-edge research and civilizational crises.

Gingrich went with the latter. "These are at the heart of the next 40 years," he said. "And we've got to understand: Somewhere on this planet there will be a dictatorship that uses science in a way that is truly grotesque. And then you're gonna have, for example, a decision to make, if someone can participate in the Olympics who's been genetically engineered. I mean you're gonna have, there's an array of different countries out there, some of which have values so lacking to any of us that you're gonna have these kinds of things."

Then came the grandiose part: "This may be the first time in some ways since leaving the Garden of Eden where we have to address the question of what it means to be human. And I think it's also a time to be very aware of the fact the greatest of all sins is hubris, putting yourself before God. And that there is a really great danger posed by scientists and those technicians, who believe that they now have God-like powers. Because it defies the very essence of humans."

One of Rick Santorum's first questions was equally out of left-field: He was asked about a recent breakthrough at Cornell, in which researches used transplanted genes from a jellyfish to illuminate a test-tube embryo, the better to understand its development. "As president," it was put to Santorum, "how would you advance scientific knowledge while protecting human dignity and human life?" Well, for one thing, Santorum made clear he'd oppose human–jellyfish hybrids. "Scientists will go wherever they choose to go because they don't feel any moral constraints," he said. "Our obligation as a society is to protect children, and to not allow us to be experimented on for any reason." In a later answer, he passionately defended banning abortion even in cases of rape, noting that the Supreme Court considers the death penalty for rapists cruel and unusual punishment. If we don't kill the rapist, why should we kill the baby?

Reading this article actually caused me physical pain.

Thomas White: "Whales are people, too"

Thomas I. White, the author of In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier, has penned a must-read article in ABC Environment. White argues that there is now ample scientific evidence that capacities once thought to be unique to humans are shared by dolphins and whales. "Like humans," he writes, "whales and dolphins are 'persons'." And by persons he means that they are self-aware beings with individual personalities and a rich inner life; they have the ability to think abstractly, feel deeply and choose their actions. In addition, their lives are characterized by close, long-term relationships with conspecifics in communities characterized by culture. "In short," he says, "whales and dolphins are a who, not a what."

Thankfully, White notes that research on marine mammals is on the wane:

More significantly, a small group of experts who met at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in the spring of 2010 to evaluate the ethical implications of the scientific research on cetaceans concluded that the evidence merited issuing a Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins. This group included such prominent scientists as Lori Marino and Hal Whitehead. Particularly important in this declaration was the recognition that whales and dolphins are persons who are "beyond use". Treating them as 'property' is indefensible.

Despite this, notes White, whales and dolphins are still being used for entertainment purposes at marine parks:

It is, of course, no surprise that the managers, employees and researchers affiliated with enterprises that make money using captive whales and dolphins do a poor job of being sensitive to the ethical implications of the progress of marine mammal science. These people are caught in a classic conflict of interest. On the one hand, they have a duty to protect the welfare of the cetaceans in their care. On the other hand, their jobs and careers depend on keeping the current business model intact for as long as they can.

Predictably, when there's money on the line, people will not only rationalise all sorts of actions, they'll even believe their own rationalisations. As we saw with the 2008 economic meltdown, individuals running banks and financial institutions on Wall Street were so blinded by a desire to maximise profits that they not only ran their own companies into the ground, they put the economy of the entire planet at risk. When we humans are so ready to turn a blind eye to actions that risk hurting ourselves for the sake of profit, it comes as no surprise that we'll readily ignore the possibility of hurting other intelligent species.

All of the organisations that use captive cetaceans say they are strongly committed to the welfare of the whales and dolphins under their care. Given the ethical challenges that have come from the progress of scientific research over the last 30 years, the question is whether these organisations will respond appropriately on their own or whether they will increasingly become the targets of controversy and consumer boycotts.

So, despite the increasing evidence re-affirming our suspicion that whales and dolphins are persons, we are left with an interesting—but troubling—conundrum: "If moving away from using captive whales and dolphins is both the right thing to do and more profitable than current practices," asks White, "why isn't it happening?"

I encourage you to read the entire article. And while you're at it, support the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology's Rights of Non-Human Persons Program.

DIYbio: Making scientific breakthroughs at home

A number of scientific improvisers, or bio-hackers, are part of a growing movement called DIYbio, short for do-it-yourself biology. The movement got its official start in 2008 with DIYBio.org, an online hub for sharing ideas—and the site has grown to more than 2,000 members since its inception. From the website:

DIYbio.org is an organization dedicated to making biology an accessible pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological engineers who value openness and safety. This will require mechanisms for amateurs to increase their knowledge and skills, access to a community of experts, the development of a code of ethics, responsible oversight, and leadership on issues that are unique to doing biology outside of traditional professional settings.

The NYT recently published an article about the movement.