Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics: Lysenko wins a round? Developing. Turning on the Caps Lock tone.

View 801 Tuesday, December 03, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

 

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

 

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

 

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

 

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article by a Ph.D. candidate named Adrienne Rose Johnson “For the Starving, ‘Eat Local’ Isn’t an Option,’ which points out the day of the local self sufficient community is over, and the way the world feeds itself is through shipping food from vast plantations and feeding ranches all over the world. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303670804579233921148739770

The ‘developed’ world pretty well feeds itself and doesn’t have famines. Local pasturage isn’t particularly green, either: the transportation energy is less than the energy savings from mass production, or so she says and my back of the envelope calculations don’t contradict that. Toward the end of this she says

Hunger is an issue that requires a mature social conscience and political will to look beyond the garden into the global. According to the United Nations World Food Program, 842 million people in the world don’t have enough to eat. Nearly all of these people—827 million—live in developing countries, where 14.3% of the population is undernourished. Some 66 million primary school-age children "attend classes hungry across the developing world, with 23 million in Africa alone," according to the U.N. organization. It calculates that $3.2 billion is needed per year to reach all 66 million of these hungry school-age children.

In this global sense, the often-heard eat-local slogan of "vote with a fork" is well-intentioned but naïve. It doesn’t satisfy our moral obligations as global citizens. If you want to cast a food-related vote, find a candidate talking about global hunger and do it at the ballot box.

What struck me in reading this was the use of the term “developing countries” and “developing world.” I can recall in my graduate political science classes that while the newspapers used terms like “underdeveloped” and “impoverished” and “primitive” and “Unproductive” for such places, it was considered more polite to call them “developing” countries.

I went along with this, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. It may make people in primitive countries feel better to be called ‘developing’ but it doesn’t do much for development. I recall many years ago being interested when the Old Regime of Tubman and his True Whig Party offered a huge chunk of 5°N latitude land to be developed into a space port. His only requirement was that companies that came in to exploit the area build schools for the children of all the workers, and establish some other basic government services and law and order. Liberia at the time was governed by the descendents of freed slaves who had been sent back to Africa to a colony established by the US and was, if slowly, definitely a “developing” country. In 1980 an army sergeant overthrew the government and the country descended into civil war that has only recently ended, and much of the previous development was gone.

At the time – the 1970’s – I studied some of the governments of Africa, most of which were kleptocracies which liked to be called ‘developing’ but all too often the only things developed were overseas bank accounts for the ruling classes. Needless to say it was considered racist to refer to these places as primitive, uncivilized, or even under-developed. ‘Developing’ was the satisfactory word even if there were no visible signs of development.

Development seems largely to consist of transfers of food from productive countries to the ‘developing’ countries. In the old colonial days the theory at least was that tribal societies would become civilized through law and order and education; compulsory education was tried in some places but generally could not be afforded, but there were schools for those who wanted to go to school. As I said earlier, under the True Whig government in Liberia, a condition of foreign investment was that the children of anyone employed in Liberia be given an education and at least nominal – sometimes quite good – medical care. There were often medical technician apprenticeship education facilities as part of the health care program. All that is gone, but the Liberian officials I talked to were well educated and referred to their country as primitive but developing – and they had a definition of developing. They hoped in a few generations to have 75% literacy in the country…

I did manage to interest some investors in a venture to exploit Liberian resources as part of a construction of a space port – there are considerable advantages to a near equatorial launch site, and the region was suitable as a test station for a receiver for space solar power – but all that was wasted when a tribal revolt insisting on one man one vote (which turned out to be once) brought all that to an end, and Liberia went from ‘developing’ to ‘war torn”. At least there hadn’t been a lot of investment yet.

Unlike Ms. Johnson, I am very much in favor of local truck gardens and food production, but that’s really a topic for another time. I had a hydroponics greenhouse in the back yard at Chaos Manor until Hammer made us enough money to afford a swimming pool.

My friend Ron Unz has an odd theory: that raising the minimum wage would allow cutting welfare benefits. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/the-minimum-wage-cure-for-illegal-immigration/ My own view is that minimum wages destroy employment opportunities for the unskilled and inexperienced, and it won’t matter if you raise minimum wages because you’ll never be able to cut entitlements to suit, but Ron is a very intelligent guy and worth listening to. I’ll try to work up an analysis, but I can’t believe Unz will convert me to his view.

caps lock key tone

You said: I was able to go into the accessibility settings and set the tone for CAPS LOCK .

How did you do that, where are the ‘accessibility settings’ ?

thanks

JG

John Galt

Control Panel > Ease of Access Center > Make The Keyboard Easier to Use > Turn on Toggle Keys

It used to be under Accessibility which had a wheelchair icon but that route is gone. Turn on the toggle. Do NOT DO ANYHING ELSE or if you do, write down what you did. The toggle to tone ought to work as soon as applied and needs no reset. When you hit the Caps Lock key a tone sounds. Hit it again and a tone sounds when you turn it off. There are other settings in there, some useful, but beware. There is a way to make the keyboard invisible to the computer after the password is typed in; I don’t know how I did it or how I turned it off, and I am not going to experiment to find out how to do it again.

FYI, obviously not something to post.

You quote Obama as making his transparency statement on January 31, 2009.

I had occasion to quote this today, and I (almost) never quote without attribution. I found the statement explicitly near the end of Obama’s January 21 (twenty-first), 2009 welcoming address to staff. I cannot find it documented as being said on January 31.

Here’s the source:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-welcoming-senior-staff-and-cabinet-secretaries-white-house

Today’s Frank & Ernest cartoon addresses the issue at

http://www.gocomics.com/frankandernest/2013/12/03

Best regards,

Well, I don’t have the location of my source, but there was one, with date, that I considered satisfactory. He has famously said this more than once, and it is not an atypical promise from Mr. Obama. It hasn’t worked out that way. Thanks for the information, but on consideration I do not consider it unfair to leave it up there.

 

Lamarck and Lysenko

experience modifies genes

hi Jerry,

This article about passing an aversion to smell onto offspring shows some of the first evidence that evolution is not completely random.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25156510

Jeff Marshall

This may be the most important genetic data since the discovery of DNA. It is nothing less than evidence for some of the Lamarckian hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The last important advocate of that was Lysenko. If acquired characteristics can be inherited, then the mechanism of evolution changes dramatically.

We know that social characteristics can be “inherited” in villages – my cocktail party theory of the role dogs played in the evolution of human intelligence is an example, and I only call it a cocktail party theory because I haven’t the time to make a formal investigation and defense of the theory – but that only explains why there have been such rapid developments in humans.

We have certainly not heard the last of this discovery.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.