Greg Krehbiel's Crowhill Weblog - Content
A multi-author blog with a range of opinions on news, culture, politics, beer, art, science, education, religion and life
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Greg Krehbiel on
18 February 2012
By cell count, you’re only 1/10th human. At best.
Humans Carry More Bacterial Cells than Human Ones: You are more bacteria than you are you, according to the latest body census
(Don’t worry too much. By volume you’re mostly human.)
Furthermore, these bacteria may drive evolution.
These studies are part of a growing consensus among evolutionary biologists that one can no longer separate an organism’s genes from those of its symbiotic bacteria. They are all part of a single “hologenome.”
(I find that incredibly amusing for other reasons, but … maybe in another post.)
So the fact that gut bacteria can influence our evolution doesn’t take you to the Star Wars midichlorian stuff, but it sets the stage. And then when you read this sort of weird thing — Learning from Bacteria about Social Networks — You can see where Lucas may have gotten his ideas.
Okay, now let’s get really silly. What if a colony of bacteria could be self-aware?
Being domesticated by humans is a pretty good evolutionary strategy. By sheer numbers, sheep are far better off now than they were before we got our hands on them. Of course that just begs for the kinds of jokes you hear about pets. Who’s really in charge, the pet or the owner?
What if some odd behavior, or disease, was in the best interests of our gut bacteria? There are cases in the insect world where a parasite causes the host to do things for the benefit of the parasite.
So here’s your movie plot — The zombie apocalypse may be caused by socially networked bacteria!
Unfortunately, the heroes would be geeks creating and administering antibiotics, not rednecks in pickup trucks with shotguns.
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2012-02-18 ::
Greg Krehbiel
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Greg Krehbiel on
17 February 2012
That’s what a former colleague used to call people who were intelligent, but not as intelligent as they thought they were.
I thought of that when I read this today.
The difference between the mid-wit and the genuinely intelligent is usually fairly easy to identify. The mid-witted individual tends to compare himself to those below the average and concludes that because he isn’t like them, he must be a genius. The genuinely intelligent individual compares himself to the great minds of the past — with which he is familiar, having experienced many of their works — and concludes that for all his intellectual superiority to the great mass of relative retards presently surrounding him — he is nothing particularly special. (From The tragedy of the mid-witted)
Another reason to read old books, I guess.
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2012-02-17 ::
Greg Krehbiel
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Greg Krehbiel on
17 February 2012
But I think Buchanan is wrong to protest his ouster from MSNBC.
It’s hard to imagine where he could go that wouldn’t be a step up.
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2012-02-17 ::
Greg Krehbiel
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Greg Krehbiel on
16 February 2012
I have often thought of writing a book on the theme “why you should believe in God even if he doesn’t exist.”
I’m convinced there are lots of benefits to religious belief that go beyond better marriages and sex lives, longer life expectancy, and the sorts of things the sociologists measure.
One of them is the tendency to point the finger back at yourself.
For example, I get frustrated with the way pedestrians behave in the city. They don’t follow the traffic rules, and it messes things up for everybody else. So when I see somebody crossing against the light, I’m tempted to utter a malediction.
But as soon as I think that, I immediately ask myself if I’m guiltless on the subject. Do I follow all the rules all the time? Of course I don’t. So all I’m really doing is exchanging my estimate on when you should follow the rules with somebody else’s. I’m not on the moral high ground I would like to think.
There’s nothing inherently religious about developing that kind of mental habit. But it’s the sort of thing religions emphasize and press on you, and I would be willing to bet that religious people have that mental habit to a higher degree than non-religious people.
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2012-02-16 ::
Greg Krehbiel
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Greg Krehbiel on
16 February 2012
Here’s an article that goes with a theme I’ve mentioned here a few times — that religion is inevitable and true secularism can never and will never work.
The Separation of Church and State is Impossible
A simple summary of the point of the article might be that you can’t draw a bright line between religion and politics because the political invariably assumes some religious point of view.
Even secularism itself, Critchley maintains, is a religious myth, based as it is on a belief in progress. “The very idea of progress, that the future will be better than the past — which is the basic premise of American life — is a translation of the Christian idea of providence,” Critchley told me. “Most societies, for most of history, thought that history had a cyclical path, whereas Western society is defined by a linear idea of history, which really begins with Judaism and then finds its rearticulation in Christianity.” It’s a myth Obama drew on when he said that “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” or that it’s possible to be on “the wrong side of history” — and, in doing so, gave American liberals their own shortlived moment of political hope (otherwise known as faith). …
Liberal democracy, Critchley argues, is simply the political form of deism. Natural law and natural rights, so central to the American creed, are fundamentally theological concepts.
I’ve been told that it’s only us moderns who believe in this idea of a political system separate from a religious system. Historically, religion and politics were always entwined. It was just a question of which religion, or collection of religions, or meta-religion, or whatever. There have been nations that tolerated religious diversity, but only under within a larger, essentially religious context.
We’re all being pulled along by the cultural current we live in, and we don’t even feel that current. We have to learn to challenge the assumptions of our own culture (e.g., by reading old books) to notice and question those assumptions.
…religious rhetoric isn’t necessarily something an otherwise secular government indulges in opportunistically or by rote — it’s an essential part of how government actually works.
I don’t agree with everything in the article, but he makes some good points.
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2012-02-16 ::
Greg Krehbiel
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Greg Krehbiel on
14 February 2012
I’ve always liked Lewis’ response to the “we can’t turn the clock back” schtick. When the clock is wrong, that’s precisely what you do.
Along those lines, two “then vs. now” stories caught my eye today. In the first, Economist staffer Zanny Minton Beddoes lets loose on Santorum.
The fact that you say that you think he might win the nomination completely terrifies me. I mean, how many decades back, how many centuries back does he want to take us?
It doesn’t matter if he’s right or wrong. He wants to “go back.” That’s a sin to “progressives.”
See Mainstream Scream: Economist hit on Santorum
In the second story, Walter Williams contrasts Philadelphia schools when he attended vs. now, and pokes fun at the excuses we hear all the time.
How might one explain the greater civility of Philadelphia and other big-city, predominantly black schools during earlier periods compared with today? Would anyone argue that during the ’40s and ’50s … there was less racial discrimination and poverty and there were greater opportunities for blacks and that’s why academic performance was higher and there was greater civility? Or how about “in earlier periods, there was more funding for predominantly black schools”? Or how about “in earlier periods, black students had more black role models in the forms of black principals, teachers and guidance counselors”? If such arguments were to be made, it would be sheer lunacy.
“Sheer lunacy” doesn’t stop many people, I’m afraid. That’s precisely the kind of nonsense I hear all the time.
See Rising Black Social Pathology
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2012-02-14 ::
Greg Krehbiel
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Greg Krehbiel on
14 February 2012
Here’s an interesting post from the Mind Hacks blog.
A culture shock for universal emotion
Many people have assumed that our emotional expressions are cross-cultural. That may not be true.
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2012-02-14 ::
Greg Krehbiel
by
Greg Krehbiel on
14 February 2012
Pentamom posted a link to this on one of those other social sharing talk whatchamacallits.
How the White House’s 98% Contraception Figure for Catholics is Wrong
Is the appropriate subtitle “how to lie with statistics,” or “98.4% of statistics are made up on the spot,” or “politicians will say anything,” or …. There are too many choices.
Anyway, I heard Cardinal Wuerl discuss this on some MSN morning show. (Not by choice. I was in a doctor’s waiting room and it was playing on the set. I think that’s the only way MSN gets any viewers. Captive audiences.)
One of the hosts said “most Catholics use birth control,” to which Cardinal Wuerl said, in just the right tone of voice, “I don’t want to shock any of you, but there are even Catholics in prison.”
I don’t give a fig about contraception, but I hope this story continues to hurt the Obama administration. Their high-handed, arrogant ways are going to come back to haunt them. I hope.
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2012-02-14 ::
Greg Krehbiel
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Greg Krehbiel on
13 February 2012
I’ve often wondered why, if tobacco is as awful and dangerous and horrible as we always hear it is, previous generations ever survived at all.
In the middle decades of the 20th century it seems that lots and lots of people smoked. The mysterious thing is that they weren’t just dropping dead all over the place. That’s what you’d expect from the anti-smoking hysteria we hear most of the time.
Over the past few months I’ve read that sitting at a desk all day and eating lots of sugar are both just as bad as tobacco.
So if people in the 50s were smoking all the time, maybe they made up for it by walking and eating less candy, so, on balance, they weren’t quite as likely to suddenly drop dead.
I’m not advocating smoking, candy or a sedentary life, I’m just trying to figure out why so many people who smoked seemed to get along okay — generally speaking. Maybe it was because health is a multi-faceted thing, and smoking is just one of many bad habits that eat years off your life.
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2012-02-13 ::
Greg Krehbiel
