If you go to your physician's office and inquire about your weight status, he or she will measure your height and weight to derive your BMI (weight in kg divided by height in m squared). Then they will compare your BMI to that of established criteria to decide whether you are underweight (<18.5 kg/m2), normal weight (18.5-24.9 kg/m2), overweight (25-29.9 kg/m2), or obese (>30 kg/m2) . Often times, this measure alone determines whether or not you receive lifestyle treatment. But how useful is this measure anyways? What does it tell you about your health? And finally, how helpful is it to measure when assessing the effect of a lifestyle (diet/exercise) intervention?

For quite some time I have been meaning to discuss some of the issues of solely relying on BMI as a measure of obesity and health, and a nice nudge from our friend ERV was just the motivation  I needed to finally get to work.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: A Blog Around the Clock

It is a common argument by those who are opposed to evolution's implication for religious belief to label Darwin as a social Darwinist and a racist. Adrian Desmond and James Moore's book Darwin's Sacred Cause has gone a long way towards dispelling any claims that Darwin sought to justify black inferiority (in fact, as they show, countering such arguments was an important part of Darwin's work). However, the claim that Darwin inspired social Darwinism is a persistent argument and those that proffer it will stoop to any level in order to discredit him. As I pointed out in my series Deconstructing Social Darwinism, the political theory is incredibly inconsistent but the central tenets were formed by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin. Darwin himself largely eschewed politics and economics and felt that Spencer had misconstrued his ideas for his own political ends. However, despite how frequently this fact has been presented the erroneous argument continues to appear over and over again.

Religious fundamentalists such as Jonathan Wells or Harun Yahya (whose book blaming Darwin for Hitler, Stalin, Mao, hemorrhoids, long lines at Starbucks and other terrible evils can be seen in the image above) are well known for this line of thought. However, the latest attempt to label Darwin with this brush is Richard Weikart, an historian at California State University, Stanislaus in his article Was Darwin or Spencer the father of laissez-faire social Darwinism? in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

Weikart's argument is very poorly constructed, as you would expect of someone who works for the Intelligent Design think tank The Discovery Institute and who wrote a book blaming Darwin for Hitler's ideas on eugenics and genocide (a book so powerfully argued that it took a single blog post to refute it). Rather than point out the poor scholarship in his own article I thought it would be more illuminating to look at a case study that offers a novel way of determining whose ideas were interpreted as social Darwinian and whose were viewed as neutral science. I recently discovered such a case study in the form of a PhD dissertation by an historian of Middle Eastern science Marwa Elshakry.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: A Blog Around the Clock

Exposure to news media has long been thought to help create a more informed and politically educated citizenry, but a new University of Georgia study finds that media exposure did little to correct a...

KINGSTON, R.I. -- March 10, 2010 -- A 10-year effort by a University of Rhode Island scientist to develop transgenic rainbow trout with enhanced muscle growth has yielded fish with what have been...

The meat-eating marsupials are threatened by a deadly transmissible cancer – but the discovery of what makes some animals resistant could save them

You may not know it, but your urine is an environmental menace. Although it comprises only about 1 percent of waste water in sewage systems, urine contributes some 80 percent of nitrogen and 45 percent of phosphate. Removing these impurities...

Back in the 1970s my parents had friends who had stacks of hi-fi separates with gold contact wiring and speaker stands on metal spikes. They were only playing Perry Como on vinyl, but that was their idea of fun, so good luck to them. When the CD emerged on to the market with its claims of superior quality and scratch resistance, the hi-fi enthusiasts split into two camps: those who clung to their “warmer” but crackly analogue vinyl and their hissy tapes and those who went digital and got optical wires to hook up their shiny new CD player to those spiky speakers.

Manufacturers propagated the upward spiral for both camps marketing ever more elaborate systems and even selling green pens to colour the edge of a CD to prevent laser leakage. Personally, I grew up with a “stereogram” and a personal radio-cassette and was quite happy with it, whiling away countless hours listening to prog rock, Jean Michel Jarre, Talking Heads, and the occasional Perry Como album.

But, was it all for nothing? Within another generation the notion of digital audio had been compressed using the audio equivalent of the lossy image format jpeg and music fans were listening on pocket devices or watching Youtube clips with embedded music on poor-quality computer speakers and really not caring either way, whether the sound was great or not.

Jerald Hughes of University of Texas Pan American in Edinburg writing in the International Journal Services and Standards has a nice table showing the technical specification of the human ear and comparing it to the various analogue formats:

Audio system	Frequency range/Hz	Decibel range/dB
Human ear	20-22,000	110+
Vinyl LP	30-15,000	50-60
8-track tape	45-8000	45
Cassette tape	50-12,000	45-50
Chrome cassette	50-16,000	60
Reel to reel	30-20,000+	66+

So, the only system that ever came close to the full range of human hearing was reel-to-reel and I don’t recall seeing many of those around even among the most extravagant separates hi-fi aficionados of my parents’ acquaintance.

So, how does the CD fit into this picture?

Audio system	Frequency range/Hz	Decibel range/dB
Human ear	20-22,000	110+
Compact disc	20-22,000	90+
DVD audio	10-95,000	144

Not bad? It really was a golden era, then, apart from that lack of “warmth” and “colour” that the analogue stalwarts claimed. And, with DVD audio quality (and SACD, superaudio CD) far outstripping even CD. These latter formats are well-known to devoted adherents of jazz and classical where dynamic range and complex frequency content tends to be more common than in rock and pop, although there are serious mastering problems with many modern recordings in all genres.

Today, there are almost as many audio “formats” as there are audio files. One can choose a download or rip at almost any rate, a lossy or lossless compression algorithm, and countless other options and codecs to playback a music file on myriad devices. But, consumers in general, have gravitated towards a quality that is much lower than the human ear is capable of discerning and much lower than top-end equipment is capable of reproducing. It’s as if the hi-fi nuts never existed…

Perhaps that’s the point though, my generation was perfectly content to listen to vinyl albums duplicated on cassette tapes (remember: home taping is skill in music killing music, it never did) and today, the kids are quite happy to listen to downloaded 128kbps mp3 files through the cheap earbuds that come with portable music players.

Human senses and sensibilities have limits. It’s not that the human ear cannot receive the finest of musical details, it most certainly can, it’s just that most people perceive satisfaction in listening to a good-quality mp3 and are not worried about the top notes or the quiet moments that might be lost in the compression process that squeezes their collection of thousands of songs on to a sliver of silicon embedded in a case no bigger than a thumbnail.

Audio cassettes were popular because they were convenient – mix tapes, copying albumbs, recording off the radio all infinitely simpler with cassettes than with a reel-to-reel machine. In the post-digital era of music on chips rather than disks consumers are trading-off audio quality for convenience just the same as they ever did. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

Jerald Hughes (2009). Emergent quality standards for digital entertainment experience goods: the case of consumer audio Int. J. Services and Standards, 5 (4), 333-353

I spoke to Hughes who confessed that he too is a prog-rock fan, and admitted that the first album he ever bought with his own money was the YesSongs triple live album. He also told me he is still listening to his Technics direct-drive turntable with hyperelliptical stylus through Bose 501 speakers and said, “it really IS ‘warmer’…”

Whatever happened to the audiophile? is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Robots are coming out of their industrial cages and into our lives, prompting engineers to search out new kinds of safety features

As I wrote Monday's post on the avian poetry anthology Bright Wings, I had just finished reading a cover review in the NYT Book Review of Danielle Trussoni's novel Angelology. I had two kinds of winged creatures in mind: natural and supernatural.

The review observed that books about angels are wildly popular, something I made note of in a Boston Globe column twenty years ago. I suggested then that the 90s promised to be the decade of angels, and polls confirmed that a healthy majority of Americans believed in the literal existence of heavenly spirits. Well, if anything, angels have grown in popularity, Apparently you can now better your life with angelic alliances. The self-help literature includes How to Hear Your Angels, Working With Angels, In the Arms of Angels, and so on.

Now, I'm as fond of fairy tales as the next person. Humanoid celestial creatures have been a part of our culture since Genesis. By Milton's time, the lore of the angelic armies had reached epic proportions. Lord knows I learned enough of it in parochial school. Angels have even danced through these posts on occasion. But literal? Anyone who in 2010 takes angels literally suffers a severe detachment from empirical reality.

Meanwhile, the real wonders get lost in the din of fluttering wings.

If a medieval philosopher were confronted, on the one hand, with the lore of angels, and, on the other, with the idea of the air resonant with a hundred species of unheard music (Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, to say nothing of the Grateful Dead and Norah Jones) made actually audible by a small box called a radio, he would surely call the latter more wondrous. And what of that continuous wind of invisible neutrinos that pours through our bodies from the animating furnace of the Sun? Closer to home, the idea of humanness revealed by molecular biology and neurobiology is a far more stunning conception than the medieval philosopher's "little world made cunningly of elements and an angelic sprite."

There's no point decrying our culture's preoccupation with the mystical and paranormal, at least not until scientists and naturalists are better able to show that a scientific world-view can satisfy the human need for meaning. Scientists and naturalists may feel plugged into something larger and more wonderful than themselves, but so far they have failed to convince the public that science is anything more than a practical tool for wringing material benefits from nature. Until they do, aerodynamically impossible spirits will continue to haunt the bookstores. And Danielle Trussoni's biologically implausible angel-human hybrids have surely already been optioned for the movies.

Meanwhile, I have my own little angels at the hummingbird feeder, stoking their racing metabolism with my wife's own mix of celestial ambrosia.

Female students with a genetically diverse immune system said they had sex with more people than their peers did

The Union of Concerned Scientists says the Obama administration is 'moving too slowly' to remove political interference from science

DNA from a 19,000-year-old emu eggshell has been isolated – the first time such a feat has been pulled off

Molecules that help a jellyfish-like animal sense light suggest how similar compounds in the eyes of mammals could have evolved

Forty years after the Apollo astronauts bounced across the moon, new studies are revealing water inside the samples they returned – and showing how close they may have come to water-coated soil

When you sing along to the radio, is your brain processing the words and music separately or as one?

The producers of the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove teamed up with government agents to investigate a California restaurant rumoured to be selling whale meat

Although NASA's space shuttles remain on schedule to stop flying in September, the drumbeat to continue the program has gotten louder in Congress. Sen. Bill Nelson, of Florida, is calling for one additional flight, and last week Sen. Kay Bailey...

As I wrote those words in yesterday's post I was watching an osprey cruise the shore in front of the house. Fish hawk, they call it here. It dipped and soared, hardly moving its wings, its keen eye fixed on the turquoise water below, waiting for a glint of sunlight from the scales of a silver fish. Flow. Flow. The bird, the air, the sea, the fish. Different at every moment. Always the same.

And somehow my thoughts drifted back more than half-a-century to...

Somewhere about the second or third week of every university calculus course, the student is introduced to the concept of the limiting value of a ratio both terms of which approach zero -- a concept crucial to all that follows. The definition was the most incomprehensible thing I had encountered in my life, a mess of mathematical gobbledegook. It was appended to the statement "These preliminary remarks should now enable us to understand..."

But, of course, I did not understand. I doubt if any first-year calculus student reaches this point in the course with understanding. Still, I was smart enough to know that if I sidestepped this initial hurdle I would never grasp what followed. So I beat my head against it for a week until the light bulb finally went on. I had figured out the concept of a limit.

The rest, as they say, was a piece of cake. The study of calculus became pure bliss, the neatest thing I encountered in college.

I took my final degree in physics, and physicists use calculus to express the laws of nature. But it was a funny sort of nature we studied in physics -- without ospreys, wind, sea, or fish. As the years passed I drifted into writing, and more or less forgot about calculus. But something ineradicable had been planted in my mind. Something about flow. About transformation. About continuous change.

Something about ospreys riding gifts of air.

The poet Marianne Moore wrote: "The power of the visible is the invisible." Calculus is about invisibles -- the infinite and the infinitesimal. That's what the cryptic definition of a limit is all about. A way to talk meaningfully about the unobservable instant. The thing we call a derivative in calculus is the calculable ratio of two numbers that separately vanish into nothingness, leaving behind something spooky but palpably real, like the grin of the Cheshire cat -- a rate of change, a measure of continuous flow. Calculus clicked when I made the connection between the grin and the cat.

Which brings me back to the osprey. As I watched that splendid bird riding gifts of air it occurred to me that I was observing the physical embodiment of those abstract differential equations I studied long ago. Calculus was invented as a language for describing continuous change in nature -- the glide, the dive, the soar, the flow. Watching the osprey I was an eavesdropper, listening in on nature's conversation with itself.

All today's stories on newscientist.com at a glance, including: extermination in paradise, the "midwife molecule" that could have assembled Earth's first life, and why chameleons can eat breakfast

The ice at the planet's north pole may be moving on a bed of salty sludge, which one day could be handy for fuel

When people make a decision, their pupils dilate – a cue that could betray intentions, or even converse with people with locked-in syndrome

At last we have a glimpse of what is going through the mind of the Conservative party, thanks to a report from the industrial designer James Dyson

A report suggests that women who drink moderately are less likely to pile on the pounds – what does the study really mean, asks Jessica Hamzelou

Rats have long wreaked bloody devastation in the wildlife haven of South Georgia – now conservationists are planning brutal retaliation

A new material based on nanotubes matches the efficiency of solar cells – but scavenges power from heat leaking from hot pipes, not sunlight

High-speed video images show the lizards can catch prey with their rubber band-like tongues equally well whether their body temperature is a cool 15 °C or a warmer 35 °C

The magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile moved the city of Concepción by around 3 metres, says Richard Fisher

A previously unrecognised molecule, similar to a type found in meteorites, may have helped the first biomolecules assemble from their building blocks

Photographer Richard Barnes explains the allure of museums for artists and why nothing beats the renovation of an old-fashioned diorama

There's no shortage of designs to convert wave energy to electricity – now they're proving their worth at sea

A new report warns that Britain will be "relegated from the economic premier league" if it cuts government funding of science

Next month, the US president will travel to Florida for a conference on the future of NASA

Europe's Mars Express spacecraft is performing a series of 12 fly-bys of the Martian moon Phobos, making the best ever measurements of its gravity

Best Documentary Feature winner Louie Psihoyos (second from left) and Fisher Stevens (right) for their work in The Cove backstage during the 82nd Annual Academy Awards at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood last night. In the documentary film, dubbed an eco-thriller, a team of divers, activists and special effects experts, infiltrated a secret cove in Japan to expose dolphin killings. Here is a trailer for The Cove.



You can find more Oscar coverage here and a list of winners here.



Photo (top): Richard D. Salyer / ©A.M.P.A.S.

Permalink | Recent Headlines | News Feeds

Europeans import nearly twice as much carbon dioxide per head as US citizens – but the US is still the world's largest emitter

House guests brought me as a gift Billy Collins' spanking new anthology of poems about birds, Bright Wings, splendidly illustrated with paintings by David Allen Sibley, who you may know from his Sibley Guide To Birds. Collins is himself a poet of considerable renown, twice Poet Laureate of the United States. The book is beautifully produced by Columbia University Press, and I have been curled up all morning enjoying the feathered flights of many of my favorite poets: Marianne Moore, Mary Oliver, Amy Clampitt, Elizabeth Bishop, Howard Nemerov, Wallace Stevens, and more.

Who, watching birds, hasn't wished to be a poet? The hummingbird, there! at the slipper-flower blossom, a blur of wings, stealing fuel with his soda-straw beak -- it's not science he evokes but breathless excitement. And the mischievous bananaquit, hopping from branch to branch in the white torch tree, waiting for her turn at the feeder -- one wishes then for a gift of rare words, not some dry and abstract ornithological treatise, but a song of praise, an Ode To Joy, a Hallelujah Chorus.

Oh! how one wishes to rise into their element, to loose the hawsers that anchor us to earth, to dive, to dart, to dance at the tips of twigs in the buttonwood tree, to cruise out there along the shore like the osprey, riding gifts of air. But even poets must rue the way their words stay pasted on the page. Howard Nemerov's Blue Swallows ends:

Swallows, swallows, poems are not
the point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind's eye lit the sun.

Click Anne's image to enlarge, then again if you wish.

I've been reading Stephen Baxter's Ages In Chaos, the story of James Hutton and the discovery of geologic time. As someone who has studied and taught this stuff for half a century, there is not much in the book that I don't already know. It strikes me, however, that the book is not so much an account of the discovery of geologic time as it is the story of how Europeans escaped from the intellectual shackles of the Scriptures.

Leonardo, Bacon, Steno, Burnet, Buffon: All grappled with the problem of how to make the evidence of their senses conform to the ancient stories and myths of prescientific peoples -- stories and myths that had been ordained the inerrant word of God by the Christian church. The intellectual acrobatics necessary to stay on the right side of orthodoxy were sometimes ludicrous, but try they did. It wasn't until the time of Hutton, Lyell and Darwin that the senses finally trumped Scriptures as the arbiter of truth.

Today, within the scientific community at least, it seems obvious that what presents itself to the senses -- the fossils, the folded strata, the faults and unconformities -- tell a more reliable story of the Earth than the utterly typical imaginings of peoples who lived in the Middle East thousands of years ago. Indeed, it seems so obvious that one wonders how the ancient books were ever considered to be divine communications. But of course, not a lot has changed. The majority of peoples in the world continue to put their faith in scriptures -- the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, etc. -- even when it requires rejecting the knowledge so painstakingly wrested from nature by Hutton, Lyell and Darwin.

Why? Is it that we like immutable certainty? Do we prefer the ancient stories because we like to believe that the creator of the universe has me -- yes, me -- constantly in mind? Is it the privilege of belonging to a chosen people -- God's in-crowd? Is it the irresistible attraction of immortality?

Who knows? Perhaps a bit of all. Whatever the reason, those of us who accept with gratitude the liberating efforts of Hutton and company find in the new empirical stories a cosmic vista of unsurpassed grandeur -- even if it means foregoing the notion that we possess the Truth and will live forever.

This video from CreatureCast.org shows a Siphonophore. Technically, it is a colony of Siphonophora. The Jellies Zone says some siphonophores can form chains over 100 feet long. CreatureCast explains that the jellyfish like creature seen below is actually a colony of organisms.

What looks like one long body in this video is actually a free-swimming colony of clones - many genetically identical bodies that are all attached. But each body in the group isn't just like its neighbor. They each do a specific job for the colony. Some individuals will swim, some will catch food, and some will reproduce.

You can see a couple other interesting videos of Siphonophores here and here.

(via Boing Boing)

Permalink | Recent Headlines | News Feeds

Nothing we know about in the universe approaches the complexity of the human brain. What is it? A vast spider web of neurons, cells with a thousand octopuslike arms, called dendrites. The dendrites reach out and make contact at their tips with the dendrites of other cells, at junctions called synapses.

A hundred billion neurons in the human brain, with an average of 1,000 dendrites each. A hundred trillion octopus arms touching like fingertips, and each synapse exquisitely controlled by the cells themselves, strengthening or weakening the contact, building webs of interlinked cells that are knowledge, memory, consciousness -- a soul, a self.

A hundred billion neurons. That's more brain cells than there are grains of salt in 1,000 one-pound boxes of salt. A roomful of salt grains, floor to ceiling. Each in contact with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of others. The contacts flickering with variable strength. Continuously. Unconsciously. Never ceasing. Remembering. Forgetting. Feeling joy. Feeling pain. Thinking. Speaking. Lifting a foot, moving it forward, putting it down again. Flickering. A hundred trillion flickering synapses.

Just thinking about it is exhausting.

In recent years, new scanning technologies enable neuroscientists to watch live human brains at work. Active neural regions flicker on the screens of computer monitors as subjects think, speak, recite poems, do math. Thinking -- displayed on the screen of a scanning monitor -- can look like a grass fire exploding across a prairie.

Perhaps the most exciting research is that of the scientists who study the biochemistry of neurons: How do the cells regulate synaptic connections to build new neural webs? One big surprise is just how much of the "thinking" of neurons is done by the dendrites, those hundreds of spidery arms that connect neurons to one another. DNA in a neuron's nucleus sends messenger RNA down along the dendrites to active synapses, where they are translated into proteins that regulate the strength of synaptic connections. Tiny protein factories in the dendrites are apparently key to learning and memory.

What all this amounts to is awareness of awareness. The biochemical machinery of awareness has been turned upon itself, and we begin to glimpse the astonishing architecture of the human soul.

The latest issue of SpectroscopyNOW is online. This week I cover everything from MRI for testicular cancer to egg-shaped carbon balls by way of energy molecules, copper proteins, secret writing, first up a forensic test for distinguishing saliva deposits from other substances at a crime scene:

Non-destructive spit test – Raman spectroscopy can identify samples of an unknown substance at a crime scene as human saliva during forensic analysis, according to a US study, the technique would preserve DNA evidence. I asked research team leader, Igor Lednev to tell me about his aspirations for the technique.

“The major motivation of this research project, funded by the National Institute of Justice, is to bring our novel method to the forensic lab and a crime scene as soon as possible,” he told me. “The method is at the developmental stage at the moment and several further developments need to be done before moving to the “real” world crime scene.” These include (i) automation of the technique and making it a user-friendly “black-box type” apparatus, (ii) expansion to potential mixtures of body fluids, (iii) protection from possible interference from substrate materials and possible contaminants, and (iv) expansion to possible evidence degradation under various environmental conditions.

To achieve those goals the team is collaborating with “real world” practitioners, CSIs including Barry Duceman, Director of Biological Science, at the NY State Police Forensic Investigation Center and John Hicks, Director of the Northeast Research Forensic Institute. Lednev revealed to me that a first prototype of the device should be in forensic laboratories within two to three years.

Also, in my SpectroscopyNOW column this week:

MRI on the ball – MRI proves to be a good diagnostic tool for testicular cancer and could spare some men unnecessary surgery.

Focus on energy molecule – Organisms use ATP as a universal energy storage molecule, now carbon nanotubes, modified with luciferase, have been used as near-infrared detectors for cellular ATP. The work has potential for studies of ischaemia, Parkinson’s disease, hypoglycaemia and more.

Copper, on the beat with NMR – The first NMR spectroscopy study of the copper site in an important blue metalloprotein, azurin, has been undertaken. Copper mediates many biochemical redox reactions and azurin plays an important role in catalysing electron transfer in cellular reactions.

Sunscreen spies – Sunscreen and boron can work together to make a compound that changes colour when touched under ultraviolet light. The compound changes from blue-green to yellow with the gentlest of rubs and then reverts quickly to blue-green when gently warmed, although the process is reversible at room temperature.

Bucky eggs cracked – Unusual egg-shaped fullerene molecules are rulebreakers because they do what no other fullerenes seem to do – fuse three pentagons of carbon atoms, according to chemists in China. The discovery of these molecules could lead to new insights into fullerene chemistry as well as offering new opportunities for synthesising novel materials.

Forensic saliva test montage by Albany’s Aliaksandra Sikirzhytskaya.

Virkler, K., & Lednev, I. (2010). Forensic body fluid identification: The Raman spectroscopic signature of saliva The Analyst, 135 (3) DOI: 10.1039/b919393f

Forensic saliva test within spitting distance is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

If love's a sweet passion, why does it torment?
If a bitter, oh! tell me, whence comes my content?
Since I suffer with pleasure, why should I complain,
Or grieve at my fate, when I know 'tis in vain?
Yet so pleasing the pain is, so soft the dart,
That at once it both wounds me and tickles my heart.

A song from Henry Purcell's 1892 opera The Fairy Queen, a musical retelling of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The song is part of the "Fairy Mask" with which Titania entertains Bottom, who is wearing the donkey's head. According to the program notes that came with my Purcell Quartet CD, the song "became by far the most popular song in the play, was endlessly reprinted and imitated, and was used to great effect by John Gay in The Beggar's Opera." All of which suggests a certain universal resonance of the theme.

Closer to home I think of Lou Rawls' Love Is A Hurtin' Thing:

For every little kiss there's a little teardrop
For every single thrill there's another heartache

There are some things we don't expect science to explain, and romantic love is surely one of them. A hundred billion neurons in the human brain, with an average of 1,000 dendrites each. A hundred trillion tendrils reaching out and touching like lovers' fingertips, each synapse exquisitely controlled by the cells themselves, strengthening or weakening the electrochemical contact in response to internal and external stimuli -- a touch, a blush, a sigh, a pout -- building webs of interlinked cells that are a sweet passion or a bitter, wounding and tickling. Who can map that intricate circuitry? Who can follow that braided Amazon of pleasure and hurt to its source? Lou Rawls again:

When love brings so much joy why must it bring such pain
Guess it's a mystery that nobody can explain

From NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center comes this stunning composite photograph of Earth, the sharpest "blue-dot" picture yet. Here is the planet that two thousand years ago the boldest of thinkers could imagine only in their mind's eye. Here is the watery sphere that Columbus and Magellan kept fixed in their imagination as they launched their tiny craft into the wet unknown. The blue-white planet, dappled with ocher and green, suspended in the vast -- perhaps infinite -- black of space. Almost perfectly round and smooth. If you wrapped a schoolroom terrestrial globe in kitchen wrap, that thin layer of plastic would be thick enough to encompass oceans and atmosphere, the deepest oceanic trench and the highest mountains. And in that gauzy layer too is all of life, teeming, photosynthesizing, respiring, copulating, thinking, dreaming.

What is the season? Note the slight brightening around the tip of the Baja California Peninsula (click to enlarge). Here the Sun is directly overhead, exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, twenty-three-and-one-half degrees north of the equator -- the summer solstice. Here in Exuma we are also exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, a bit more than two hours east of Baja; it is early afternoon on a cloudless summer day. Europe is in twilight.

Nothing in the photograph obviously reveals the presence of the human species (unless it is that perplexing straight line between the southern tips of Greenland and Hudson Bay, which must be an artifact of the photomosaic process). But lord knows we have the power to change the picture dramatically. A nuclear war could shroud the planet in obscuring smoke and dust. Global warming might change the coastlines and the amount of cloud cover. Already, it seems, we have diminished the amount of summer sea ice at the top of the globe.

As I was growing up, in every one of my parochial school classrooms, high on the wall at the front of the room, was the image of a suffering man nailed to a cross. It was there to remind us that the creator of the universe had come to Earth and died to redeem us from the sin of having been born human in a fallen world. What it more graphically instructed me is how "inhumanely" humans can behave toward each other, even to the point of hammering nails through palms. Better, I think, to have had this image of Earth hanging there at the front of the room, to remind us of the gossamer insubstantiality of life in a universe complex and wonderful beyond our knowing, and of the moral imperative of being the only creatures in the universe (that we know about) who can say "It is beautiful" and resolve to make it more so.

Last fall, I wrote here about Jan Vermeer's The Milkmaid, which at the time was enjoying a bit of limelight as the centerpiece of a show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since then, the painting has been the desktop for one of my laptops. Here is a detail: this stocky, sensible young woman, who has been studiously ignoring me every day as I write. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Who was she? How long was she required to pose, holding the heavy pitcher, the muscles of her arms straining with fatigue. Did Vermeer pay her, this maid of Delft, or did she volunteer her service for the artist? Could she have guessed that 350 years later we would celebrate her beauty through the illuminating power of art?

The painting is very much a homage to materiality: the flesh of the girl's bared forearms, the rough cloth of her dress, the ceramics, wicker, brass and bread, the dribble of milk. It is, in one specific sense, a very Catholic painting, sacramental in its "faith in the power of the image to incorporate a mysterious presence that is both living and indefinable" (I quote the scholar Daniel Arasse). If there is a defining difference between traditional religions and religious naturalism it is in the notion of revelation. In traditional religions, revelation comes as direct communication from an extranatural divinity through holy books or prophets -- that is, through human imagination and the received stock of stories and metaphors. Traditional revelation is generally expressed in anthropomorphic forms and quickly becomes dogma. For the religious naturalist, revelation is encountered anywhere and everywhere, in the isness of what is, as a vague perception of "a mysterious presence that is both living and indefinable."

With The Milkmaid, Jan Vermeer is our prophet. He sees into the isness of this simple domestic scene -- sees it charged with mystery, that sense, so amply confirmed by science, that there is always more to the world than meets the eye, not something supernatural, but metanatural, the rich and extravagant isness of things that overflows our knowing. And here, this thoughtful young woman from the household or neighborhood has become the instrument of revelation, the channel by which something ineluctable leaps out of the isness of matter and transfixes us. How else to explain the power of pigments on canvas to hold our rapt attention across the ages?

As I mentioned before, during February I presided over a creative writing seminar with a dozen island residents, ten adults and two high school students. Some terrific writing but let me quote here a single sentence from Tamika's final essay:

The wind on my face was a sweet relief for the fire I felt on my skin.

I suggested at our last gathering that this is what it's all about. At first glance there is nothing complex or "writerly" about the sentence. No five-dollar words or big ideas. Just words of one syllable, except for "relief," and honest emotion.

But read the sentence aloud. Catch the rhythm. Hear the way "wind" plays off "sweet," and "sweet" eases up to "relief." Hear the five "fs" beat out their neat tattoo. And note the way "wind" and "skin" bracket the sentence.

Behind the apparent simplicity there is a carefully constructed loveliness, a writer at work, perhaps on autopilot, but with an unerring sense of sound and syntax.

Good writing is not pompous or pretentious. It does not preach or prattle. It can be as effortless as breathing, or, rather, it should appear as effortless as breathing.

Go, Tamika. Fill your life with such sentences.

Europe has been hit hard by fierce Winter storms. The storms killed dozens of people. France was particularly hard hit. The Epoch Times says at least 50 were killed in France with the death toll expected to rise. The storms are considered to be the worst in France since 1999. Take a look:



Permalink | Recent Headlines | News Feeds

Anne's Sunday illumination. Click on image to enlarge.

A piece of coral picked up from the beach, which just happened to be standing next to a plant on the terrace. The one manufactured by animals -- coral polyps. The other from a completely different category of life. They have independently evolved an identical shape of thick trunk and branching limbs. Anchored to earth or seafloor, reaching for the sun.

Dendritic patterns can be found throughout the natural world. The rivulets on the beach on a retreating tide. The mighty Mississippi and its many tributaries. The human nervous system reaching out from the central processor to every extremity of the body. The electrical grid of a power company. The distribution system of the New York Times. Convection cells in the body of the Sun bringing fusion energy from the core to the surface.

Gathering and dispersing.

Is there some abiding philosophical truth embodied in the pattern?

The Greeks called it "the One and the Many." Unity and diversity. The general and the particular. Gathering and dispersing.

Our brains, hearts and lungs communicate with the tips of our fingers and toes. Of what use is a brain without sensory data to process, and how do the sensors work without a constant supply of energy? Our bodies are overlapping meshes of dendrites.

My musing here reaches out in a branching pattern to every one of you, and gathers back your wisdom (at least from those who choose to comment). More. I am like the plant or coral reaching for the sun, and my perimeter does not coincide with my skin. My dendrites reach to the distant galaxies, gathering information, bringing it home, fusing it into a self, and then sending it out again -- well, maybe not to the distant galaxies, but at least to the other side of the globe.

Some of us are trunk people; we are -- by and large -- introverts, contemplative, absorbed in the consolidation of self -- the Cistercian in his cell, the scholar in her ivory tower. Others of us are twig people: extroverts, out and about, insatiably curious about what's over the hill or around the bend -- travelers, Twitterers, political activists.

Gathering and dispersing. Like the universe itself, culture needs both.

Do a little exercise for me. Stick out your arm in front of you. Now wiggle your index finger from side to side. Now bend it back and forth. Now wiggle your pinkie.

"Uh," you say, "what was that all about?"

Think for a minute about what just happened.

Photons from the screen of your computer entered your eyes. They formed images of little squiggles on your retinas and signals were sent to the brain. The brain interpreted the signals as instructions, and sent out electrochemical pulses that were routed specifically to your arm and hand. To muscles specified by the squiggles. That reacted in a certain way. All so fast it seemed instantaneous.

I dare say that for most of human history no one gave any of this a thought, because there was nothing to think about. It just happened. It was part of the self, the spooky inhabitant of the body that was like a -- well, like a spooky inhabitant of the body. It just happened.

Even now, when we know so much about the electrochemistry of neurons, we still don't think about it. Wiggling a finger is a "miracle" of an extraordinary magnitude that we take for granted.

In fact, the more you think about wiggling your finger, the more impossible it seems that all that processing and routing and reaction is just an electrochemical buzz that happens essentially instantaneously. Knowing a little bit about what is happening electrochemically doesn't explain away a mystery; it rubs our noses in mystery. What previously did not register on our consciousness now seems a thing of astonishing grandeur. The wiggling of a finger.

But mystery is not miracle.

Think a bit more about what happened. You clicked on a bookmark. Instantly this post appeared on the screen of your computer, no matter where you are in the world. Pulses of electricity flew through an international maze of routers and servers, packets of data flying hither and yon at almost the speed of light, retrieving something stored on a server even I don't know where, to be assembled on the screen of your computer by the circuitry within.

That vast web of interconnected computers that is the internet is astonishing, but there is nothing miraculous about it. What happens in your body when you wiggle your finger is a system of routers and servers of equal -- or greater -- complexity, and there is nothing miraculous about it.

Oh, I could carry on this theme forever. How did the "internet" that is your nervous system come into existence? It was somehow all programmed into your DNA as a four-letter code, which was expressed in interaction with the environment, assembling -- well, you. And that is the "miracle" of development from a fertilized egg -- which is, of course, another story.

And another behind that.

And another...

I have just finished teaching -- gratis -- a creative writing seminar for the island's education center, ten adults and two high-school students, four two-hour sessions. And had a lot of fun. For one assignment, I asked the participants to take an incident from the Old or New Testament, no matter how trivial, and reimagine it in a page or two of rich, descriptive writing. The results were gratifying.

The assignment was suggested by Anita Diamant's wonderful novel The Red Tent, which I have been reading for a second time, a retelling of the biblical story of Jacob and his wives and children from the point of view of Jacob's only daughter, Dinah. The book beautifully evokes the people of 4,000 years ago -- farmers, herdsmen, city builders -- who invented the stories by which we in the Western world -- through the Scriptures and myths -- have pretty much measured our lives ever since. Certainly, on this island, the stories are well known to all.

Allow me to recycle some things I said when I first read the book several years ago?

The gods are everywhere in Diamant's tale. In every tree and stream. In moon, sun, and stars. In menstrual blood and spindle. In the waters that nourish the planted seed and the drought that withers the nanny goat's teats. Dinah learns the stories of the gods in the woman's tent -- the red tent -- as they are told and retold by her mother and aunts.

Jacob and his clan live in constant negotiation with the gods, through prayer and sacrifice. Behind the world of their daily lives is a shadow world of spirits with human faces, or semi-human faces, who act with human willfulness, raising up and striking down, imposing outrageous demands, bestowing blessings.

By Jacob's time the gods were already old. They were born in the minds of our earliest human ancestors, who, finding themselves in an uncertain world, created a measure of order by imagining unseen spirits with human features.

Even today, as a new millennium begins, the ancient gods still haunt our imaginations, investing the world with presumed consciousness and will. This in spite of the fact that science has led us into a very different landscape. What we have discovered in science is not a shadow world of humanlike spirits, but rather an elusive and enigmatic fire that burns in the very stuff of material creation. The fire does not have a human face, but it animates the planet and perhaps the universe.

How do we come to terms with this new knowledge? In Diamant's novel, Jacob decides to return to the land of his ancestors, from which he has lived (and married) in exile. His wives are fearful. Zilpah says to the other women: "All of [our] named gods abide here. This is the place where we are known, where we know how to serve. It will be death to leave. I know it."

And Bilhah answers: "Every place has its holy names, its trees and high places. There will be gods where we go."

We are no less fearful than were Jacob's wives of leaving the familiar. But, as Bilhah says, every place has its sacred meaning, every place is holy. Whatever Mystery we meet in the land of the galaxies and DNA will not greet us with a human face, but, if we are receptive, it cannot fail to drop us to our knees with awe and reverence, fear and trembling, thanksgiving and praise.

Dawn Brancheau, an experienced female trainer at Sea World Orlando, was fatally injured by a 12,000 bull Orca named Tilikum today. Tilikum is also linked to two other deaths.

Richard Ellis, an author, artist and marine conservationist with the American Museum of Natural History, believes the killer whale's actions at SeaWorld Orlando were intentional. He says killer whales are intelligent creatures that don't do things accidentally. He says this was not an "insane, uncontrollable act." He doesn't think Tilikum was trying to eat the trainer but he does think the whale decided to do this. Ellis also thinks the popularity of killer whales in capitvity is going to increase, not decrease, because of this story. Take a look:



Permalink | Recent Headlines | News Feeds

...Thisby knows

so little of the world
as yet: the bit

she can see through the
chink in the wall

has made her heart beat
faster in its cage...

A few lines from a poem of Linda Gregerson. Never mind the context; the image is arresting. Beautiful Thisbe is confined by her parents' to her high-walled house in Babylon, with only a crack in the wall through which to communicate with her forbidden lover. And, of course -- as so many parents discover -- the restriction makes her passion all the more intense.

We look out at the universe through a metaphorical chink in the wall. We are prisoners of our limited sensory apparatus, our finite brains. Slowly we have widened the chink -- just think of the Hubble photographs compared to what Ovid, say, knew of the world. But the wider chink has only made us more aware of the limits of our knowing, heightened our curiosity, excited our passion -- made our hearts beat faster in their cages.

We put our lips to the chink, we whisper prayers, not knowing to whom or what we pray, imagining a lover whose remembered image grows ever more indistinct even as our passion grows.

If it were possible, would we want to have the walls down, to have full access to what the physicist Stephen Hawking whimsically called "the mind of God" -- a full and complete knowledge of everything that is? Not me. Woo prolonged is woo sustained. Remember what happened to Thisbe and Pyramus, and for that matter to Eve and Adam when they ate of the Tree of Knowledge. The ancient myths tell a great truth: the tease is more exciting than the consummation.

I don't write much about the antics of animal rights activists these days, because while some of their activities have a very negative impact on the work of some scientists, they're really just a marginal--albeit highly vocal--bloc that thrives on attention. Still, sometimes they need to be called out, and Janet of Adventures in Ethics and Science is doing just that:

Harassment drove UCLA neurobiologist Dario Ringach out of primate research in 2006. This was not just angry phone calls and email messages. We're talking about people in masks banging on the windows of his house in the night, scaring his kids. Without support on this front from other scientists or from UCLA, Dario abandoned research that he believed to be important so that he could keep his family safe.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

This year's version of the science blogging anthology, The Open Laboratory 2009, is out and available from Lulu publishing. You can order it in paperback format or as an electronic download. Three cheers to editor Scicurious and series editor Bora Zivkovik for their great work in making this happen!

For more, check out Scicurious' announcement and the earlier unveiling of the posts included in this year's anthology. You can see my contribution here.

Read the comments on this post...

Vaclav Havel, the Czech poet, playwright, and statesman, famously said: "Modern science...abolishes as mere fiction the innermost foundations of the natural world: it kills God and takes his place on the vacant throne so henceforth it would be science that would hold the order of being in its hand as its sole legitimate guardian and so be the legitimate arbiter of all relevant truth." He was, of course, chiding what he perceived to be the overweening hubris of scientists.

His remark has been much quoted in an approving way. Mistrust, even fear, of science is rampant. The reason, I think, is clear. Scientific knowledge threatens some of our most cherished notions, in particular the existence of a personal (i.e. humanlike) divinity who minds attentively each and every human life, and, perhaps even more fundamentally, the immortality of self.

The universe revealed by science is not measured on the human scale of space or time. The cozy cosmic egg of our ancestors, with us at the center as the measure of all things has been shown to be a delusion. As D. H. Lawrence sourly opined: "Science has killed the sun, making it a ball of gas with spots."

Add to this the fact that science is complex, difficult and counterintuitive and it's no wonder that it sends a chill up so many spines.

There are two possible responses. The most popular is to simply put science out of mind -- while accepting, of course, the economic, medical and technological benefits science provides -- and go on believing the comfortable myths of our ancestors. The less popular response is to embrace the universe of the DNA and the galaxies, and learn to live with some measure of disillusion. As the biologist Lewis Wolpert has said, "Scientific knowledge and method may be uncomfortable, but [it} is surely better than ignorance."

Science may have toppled God from his throne, but it doesn't take God's place. Science tell us nothing about how to live a good and fulfilling life. For that, we will always need artists and poets, activists and contemplatives, ethicists and saints. But whatever lives we create for ourselves, it would seem advantageous to build them on the foundation of the most reliable knowledge we have of this world, even if that knowledge is tentative and discomfiting. The staggering success of scientific method speaks volumes in its favor where it comes into conflict with the consoling balm of traditional lore.

When I was a toddler, a picture of an angel hung on the wall above my bed, a beautiful winged creature guiding a boy and girl across a rickety footbridge. It was, of course, a Guardian Angel, and (according to my parents) each of us had one. Before I went to sleep at night I always said the traditional prayer that begins "Angel of God, my guardian dear..."

It is a consoling idea, that one of the heavenly choir is assigned to each of us, to guide us safely across the rickety bridges of life and watch over us as we sleep. My own Guardian Angel hovered solicitously at my side until about the time I went off to school by myself, slipped from consciousness at adolescence, and vanished completely as I began the study of science.

Angels and empiricism didn't mix.

Still, various polls show that between 55 and 70 percent of American's believe in angels. How is it possible that in the early 21st century so many well-educated people believe in now-you-see-them-now-you-don't humanoid creatures with wings?

Angels are symptomatic of our culture's split personality. On the one hand, we are scientific. Our technology, our economic well-being, our long lives and generally good health -- and perhaps even our political freedoms -- are based on science, and on a scientific attitude that values skepticism, the evidence of the senses, and the rejection of supernatural agencies.

Another part of our culture is skeptical about science, distrustful of reductionism, nostalgic for a world animated by spirits, and possessive of the notion that each of us has a direct line to whatever force or forces rule the universe.

We accept science for the material benefits it contrives on our behalf, but we distrust the materialist philosophy of scientists, preferring to give our attention to anyone claiming commerce with spirits.

We turn to science to remedy our ills, but we are quick to blame science for our misfortunes. We put confidence in the scientific method, but reject the naturalistic philosophy that explains why the method works. In our schools we teach kids biology, chemistry and physics, and in our homes we promote astrology, creationism, health fads, and parapsychology.

No wonder we stumble so uncertainly across the rickety footbridge that leads to the future. Our philosophical compass swings wildly from north to south, lacking any consistent pole to give us a reliable bearing.

And now, having said all that, I offer you Caravaggio's guardian angel (see here and here). Wouldn't you love to have him as your footbridge companion, following you around with his violin, tousled locks and naughty black wings?

A Sunday illumination from Anne. For those who are new here, Anne is my sister, who lives in a sweet adobe casa on a mesa in New Mexico -- the art yin to my science yang. Call her pics, if you want, Art Musings. Click on the pic to enlarge, and again. The originals are in high definition. I wish we could see them that way here.

I mentioned here several times recently Ursula Goodenough's The Sacred Depths of Nature. I just noticed a line in the book that I underlined when I first read it a dozen years ago: "It's all very complicated."

It's in the chapter on Sexuality, and we all know that sex is complicated. However, the same sentence might have been in any other chapter of the book -- Origins of Life, say, or Awareness, or Emotions and Meaning, or Multicellularity and Death. It's all very complicated, and the more we learn about it all, the more complicated it gets. And anyone who tells you otherwise is whistling up the wind.

Which is why I'm always baffled by those folks who think they have it figured out. Who believe everything they need to know has already been written down in a book -- the Bible, say, or the Koran. Or who just trudge through life without an ounce of curiosity about what's underfoot, or overhead, or inside. "Oh, that's just a ladybug," they'll say. As if a ladybug weren't a little six-legged package of mystery we could ponder for a lifetime without getting to the bottom of it. And, of course, some people do ponder it for a lifetime -- ladybugologists we'll call them.

Which brings me, as usual, to religious naturalism. Which is a kind of agnosticism. A willingness to say "I don't know, it's all very complicated." Where did the universe come from? "I don't know, it's all very complicated." Why are the laws of nature what they are? "I don't know, it's all very complicated." How did life begin? "I don't know, it's all very complicated." What is self-awareness? "I don't know, it's all very complicated." What is the meaning of it all? "I don't know, it's all very complicated."

We are naturalists in that we don't populate the picture with imaginary anthropomorphic spirits who intervene at will in the course of events. We are religious in that we respond to the world with awe, reverence, and gratitude. To whom or what are we grateful? "I don't know, it's all very complicated."

The New York Times Magazine last week had an article on the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM), held each year at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Teams of students from all over the world vie for temporary possession of the grand trophy, a large aluminum Lego. Their entries? Bioengineered life forms -- jiggered bacteria, mostly -- that have had their DNA modified to perform some useful activity -- make drugs, synthesize fuel, generate electricity, clean up pollution, and so on. In the process, iGEM is compiling lending libraries of "BioBricks," snippets of DNA that code for different cellular functions. In the somewhat facetious words of Drew Endy, an iGEM founder, you can make a bookcase by cutting down a tree, turn it into lumber, saw it up, plane it, and nail it together, or you can program the DNA in a tree so that it grows into a bookcase.

DNA as a Lego set! I saw this coming back in the year 2000 when I wrote the following tongue-in-cheek fake news story as my Boston Globe Science Musing (which I reproduced here in 2006). I was pretty much on schedule in my predictions. The regulatory and ethical issues remain unresolved. As the NYT Magazine story makes clear, the field of synthetic biology has all the energy, free-spiritedness and wild frontiers that characterized the early days of the internet.

**********************************************

June 11, 2012. Hasbro-Mattel, the toy division of Monsanto Universal, today announced a product that will likely be found under many a Christmas tree later this year: The Little Creator Bioconstruction Set.

It's not cheap, but this spiffy kit lets kids create microbes that they design themselves -- living organisms, unlike any that exist in nature. "The day of Tinker Toys and Erector sets is past," said a spokesperson for Hasbro-Mattel. "No more static or even motorized constructions. With the Little Creator Bioconstruction Set a kid can build things that metabolize, interact with the environment, move about, reproduce."

For the moment, this means one-celled organisms that must be observed under a microscope, but the company promises multicelled creatures within a few years.

The present kit contains an assortment of 600 genes -- the minimum necessary for life, plus enough extras to add variety. With the included apparatus, children can string these genes together into a genome of their own choosing, then insert the genome into an organism of their choice.

The number of possible arrangements is staggering. Not even the toy's manufacturer can predict what sorts of creatures might emerge from the apparatus.

"One exciting part of play will be naming the organisms a child creates," said the company spokesperson. "That privilege belongs to the child alone."

The Little Creator Bioconstruction Set had its origin in scientific research done at the Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland around the turn of the millennium. Scientists at the institute set out to determine the minimum gene set necessary for life.

They started with the free-living organism that had the smallest known number or genes, the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, a harmless inhabitant of the human genital tract and lungs. The bacterium has just 480 genes, compared to more than 30,000 in a human.

One by one, the scientists inactivated genes along M. genitalium's single chromosome, to find out which genes the tiny organism couldn't do without. They finally zeroed in on about 300 genes that are essential for viability. These are among the 600 genes included in the Little Creator Bioconstruction Set.

Still, a chromosome construction toy was not possible until the technology of gene splicing and manipulation became sufficiently inexpensive. The Hasbro-Mattel technology uses specially-designed silicon chips to facilitate the selection and splicing of DNA strands.

"Kids today are too sophisticated to accept a goldfish or a hamster as a pet," said the Hasbro-Mattel spokesperson. "They want life forms they have designed themselves, and the Little Creator Bioconstruction Set lets them do just that."

Asked if the new toy lets children "play God," the spokesperson said: "I would rather say it lets them play Steve Jobs. What we are talking about here is unrestricted innovation, a chance for kids to exercise their human creative potential without impediment or restraint."

Nonetheless, some government officials and academic ethicists are concerned.

When the possibility of creating artificial life from a minimum gene set was first broached in the winter of 1999, scientists and ethicists called for a full public debate of the morality of exercising this technology.

However, before the debate could get properly underway, it was left behind by the rapidly developing technology. By the year 2008, genetic engineering of original and modified organisms was commonplace. It was inevitable that sooner or later these powerful technologies would become the basis of a children's toy.

"What seems bizarre or even frightening to one generation, becomes old hat to the next," says ethicist Pascal Swagger of Pfizer University (formerly Harvard). "The ethical implications of new technologies will need to be assessed more quickly if regulatory agencies hope to have any say in shaping our future. By the time a technology in embedded in a child's toy, it is too late."

What about the possibility that organisms built with the Little Creator Bioconstruction Set will pose an environmental hazard? The Hasbro-Mattel spokesperson said: "We are confident that any microbe assembled from the current gene set will be harmless, and certainly negligible compared to the countless genetically-modified organisms that have been released into the environment during the past decade."

"And besides," he added, "so many naturally-occurring animals and plants have gone extinct due to human technological activities, the world can use a little novelty."

More novelty is in the works. If all goes as planned, within a few years kids will have the ability to design pets they can play with without a microscope. Pink hamsters. Polka-dotted gold fish. Parakeets that glow in the dark. "The time for debate is over," says Pascal Swagger. "The future is here."

Yesterday I mused on why we get old and die. From the point of view of evolution, we only need to live long enough to pass on our genes. Everything else is gravy.

Consider the brown marsupial mouse of Australia, a shrewlike creature that does it and dies with remarkable alacrity.

At the appropriate time of year, biological clocks tell male marsupial mice that it is time to mate. Hormones gush -- not a now-and-then trickle, as in humans, but a sudden spate. Docile juveniles, less than a year old, are forthwith turned into sex-crazed adolescents. Their appetite for sex displaces all other concerns, including food, drink, grooming, sleep, and the avoidance of predators.

After a few frenzied days of non-stop copulation, the haggard male marsupial mice expire - every one of them! - having essentially gone from youth to old age in a flash. Their work is done. The next generation is assured. The females of the species can now manage quite well without them, thank you.

And that, my friends, is the gist of the story from the point of view of natural selection. Humans are programmed for a similar sort of existence, although on a rather more extended schedule -- just ask any adolescent. At which point culture intervenes. With increasing success we manage to take a licking and keep on kicking long past our peak reproductive years, in the meantime finding time for lots of other fun and games, like art, and science, and religion, and -- and meditating on the short, urgent life of the brown marsupial mouse of Australia.