There are many copies. I don't know if they have a plan.

Olivia Judson, a.k.a. Dr Tatiana, made an informative post on cybrids earlier this week. It concerns the technique --- it is fair to describe it as controversial, when human DNA is involved --- of transplanting a small cell of one species into the egg of another, in place of the target cell's own nucleus. The nuclear DNA then ends up being entirely from the transplanted species ...

... but the nucleus is not the only thing with DNA. Some organelles, specifically the mitochondria, have it too, and mitochondria are important. Whether the (say) human/bovine mitochondrial differences, or other differences between human and bovine eggs, are important, I'm not well-placed to judge.

I was struck by the statement that "A mammalian egg may contain as many as 200,000 mitochondria": I had no idea that it could be so many. (Lots of cells have only a handful.) This seems to be another of those areas where even people like me, members of the scientific community in good standing but with only rudimentary biology, know some of the facts but not their relative importance or proportion: where we miss the "feel" of the thing. As I have learned over the years, the interior of a cell can be a very complicated, crowded, non-soup-like place. This is not what I was told at school.

Addiction, oversharing, and the new economy

I felt liberated — finally, a job where I could really be myself! Never again would I have to censor my office-inappropriate sentiments or shop the sale racks at Club Monaco for office-appropriate outfits. But at the same time, I wasn’t quite convinced that the system of apprenticeship and gradual promotion that I’d left behind when I left book publishing was as flawed as establishment-attacking Gawker made it out to be. I’d been lucky enough, in my publishing job, to have the kind of boss who actually cared about my future. At Gawker, I barely had a boss, and my future was always in jeopardy. In my old job, I’d been able to slowly, steadily learn the ropes, but now I was judged solely on what I produced every day. I had a kind of power, sure, but it was only as much power as my last post made it seem like I deserved.

And as with the employment conditions, so (it turned out) with the social conditions. The quote is from a terrifying-yet-oddly-fascinating article to appear in the upcoming weekend magazine section of the NYT, by writer Emily Gould on her period as an editor at Gawker Media, "a network of highly trafficked blogs".

The whole thing is interesting to reflect upon as a topic for intergenerational argument. Does Emily's mother (or perhaps her grandmother) understand the world, the economy, the social circle in which she is moving, and its rules and opportunities and risks? Almost certainly not. Is that world an example of everything her (grand)mother warned her against? Almost certainly, yes.

One year on

This blog is a year old: I wish the occasion were a happier one. By the way of a good-news story, though, let me point you to an effort to remember students and faculty through relief work in poor parts of Virginia.

The following posts have been popular:

All together now! (30-Jul-07)
Blinded by the light (05-Jan-08)
Easter for grownups (27-Mar-08)
The end of the affair (01-Jul-07)
Four reactions to an apology (17-Feb-08)
A German beer trail (22-May-07)
Kermode on Vermes on the Resurrection (23-Mar-08)
The love that dare not speak its name (25-Jun-07)
Midgley on rights and social ethics (14-Sep-07)
Miserere mei, Deus (18-Nov-07)
Of giants and crockery (17-Oct-07)
Perks? (19-Apr-07)
Pheasant Plucking (24-Jun-07)
She is a very bad girl (12-Jul-07)
sushi and sashimi (23-Dec-07)
Talk is cheap (24-Oct-07)
Tambourines and elephants (16-Dec-07)
Tangled up in (quantum) blue (05-Oct-07)

Let me also put in a shameless plug for Silver on the Tree (30-Mar-08) and Europa Rising (08-May-07)

If seeing is believing ...

If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves – because, regardless of what it is – we are likely to uncritically believe it.

It's sentiment I endorse, but I'd be a bit suspicious of it coming from me, or from someone likewise conservative. In fact the author is Errol Morris, writing in his blog at the New York Times. As a documentary film-maker who himself uses dramatic re-enactment as a tool, I'd say he can speak with some authority on this question.

The article is a little long, but well worth reading: on re-enactment generally, and on some fascinating individual cases. And (somewhat off-topic), if you haven't seen Morris' documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, then truly, you must.

Fish, on a fish out of water

In the NYT opinion section there's a post from Stanley Fish that tries to distinguish good and bad reasons for opposing a controversial university appointment: thoughtful as always. For example, here's a striking portrait of the plight of the outsider in certain special kinds of community:

he or she will lack the internalized understanding that renders the features of the enterprise intelligible, and in the absence of that understanding, the wanderer in a strange land will see only anomalies and mistakes that should be corrected. Items in a practice are not known piecemeal; you don’t learn them by listing them. You learn them by being so embedded in the practice that everything that happens within it has a significance you don’t have to strain for because it is perspicuous without any mental effort at all ...

An enquiry concerning the proper use of scientific arguments, wherein our author loses his sense of humour

My mate Eb remarked, re that last post, about flame wars starting when people tried to "fix" something "wrong" on the Web late at night ...

... and he might as well have been talking about me. There was a post last week at nothing new under the sun, which has since been buried under a pile of long comments from yours truly. Byron has occasionally gotten a word in edgeways.

The original post concerns a Jared Diamond article on agriculture; the (ahem) "discussion" concerns the sciences, myths, their nature, and the proper use of scientific arguments in wider disputes. My point, in part, is that there are limits to what counts as a fair argument, even if the cause in question is Really Really Important.

I am sensible of the irony (if not the absurdity) of trying to establish this point using an extended series of posts to someone else's blog.

Four reactions to an apology

I guess even people outside Australia have noticed that on Wednesday the federal parliament passed a motion of apology to the nation's aboriginal people, in particular the so-called Stolen Generations: victims of policies of removal of aboriginal children from their families. Of almost equal symbolic importance was the speech by the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in support of the motion.

There has been a lot of talk on this during the week and in a sense I do not have much to add to it. But by chance it's my duty to offer prayers this morning, on behalf of the 10:00 AM congregation at my church, and so I have to reach some kind of publicly useful position on the week's business. On the one hand, this is dark history that (as the PM says) cries out for recognition and redress. On the other, it is a fearful thing to inject irrelevant polemic into a public prayer, and so I've been trying to understand to what extent this apology really is controversial. As a way of thinking through this, here are a couple of (very different) reactions I think should be rejected; and one, equally critical, that I think should be treated with respect. (Skip to the end if you want to get to the positive bit!!)

(1) Easiest to dismiss is Miranda Devine's statement in the Herald that the PM was fanning the flames of the "culture wars". Coming from a serial arsonist, this really was a bit much ... and if Ms Devine truly thinks (as she says) that Mr Rudd is taking up the approach of former prime minister Paul Keating, then her memory is worse than mine, or her imagination more powerful. I fully admit to having enjoyed Mr Keating's use of aboriginal rights and history as a cudgel to beat his political opponents: at the time, I also thought it was clever politics, a way of bringing the Labor Party in line to support land rights (after the initiative of the High Court) that it might otherwise have held at arms length. In retrospect he was wrong, and so was I. That polemical approach sowed the wind, and we then reaped the whirlwind for eleven-and-a-half long years: reaction that could point to what it reacted against, accuse it of partisan ideology and impracticality ... and be at least partly right.

So there, Ms Devine: I was wrong; so was Paul Keating, at least in this respect. As for the Labor Party, it is currently led by a dentist (figuratively speaking), a bureaucrat, a plain and uninspiring speaker (although his litany-inspired speech yesterday was, for him, unusually good) ... the kind of man who can say without irony that he is excited by establishing evidence-based policies. I take that as a token that the ALP is also willing, in this matter at least, to move on. Perhaps you could try it yourself. I understand that newspapers thrive on controversy, and on "debate" between "opposed" positions, and thus there's a kind of premium on taking a contrary view. But come on: this is important.

(2) Criticism instead from the left, and (as it were) from above, comes from a guest-post by Scott Stephens at Faith and Theology: The apology and the moral significance of guilt, accusing the PM and Parliament of tokenism and empty spectacle and (his words) enlisting aboriginal people "to take part in a kind of emotional pornography for the benefit of thousands of white Australian viewers".

I find this kind of purism --- this apology does not go far enough, so it is worse than useless --- infuriating. One could take issue with the details of the argument: for example, if it's intention that matters, as Mr Stephens Kants, doesn't that count against the approach of Paul Keating? (Mr Stephens faults the PM's language for not being as robust as PK's storied Redfern Speech: "we took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life … we committed the murders … " and so on.) As mentioned, I loved the Redfern Speech and I love PK, but the man can barely open his mouth without at least incidentally swiping at his enemies, Redfern not excepted: surely this is intentional at some level, and thereby compromises the action? Or if one's vice has become so ingrained that it proceeds without any higher-level volition, is it thereby innocent? (Hint: The Christian answer to that question is "no".)

But such arguments are incidental: I just cannot see the merit in trying and convicting the Prime Minister of compromise, of judging the limits of achievable consensus --- of being a politician. This is not news. Nor is it criticism. It is self-indulgence.

And yet ... Mr Stephens is held in regard by at least some other people I respect, and I have learned from experience to be careful of dismissing someone where this is true. There's also something a bit suspicious in a scientist accusing a theologian of contrariety and self-indulgence: because I would say that, wouldn't I? Maybe my reaction against this sort of posturing is part of some Two Cultures problem, however I have, as Mr Darcy would say, not yet learnt to condemn it.

(3) Both Ms Devine and Mr Stephens appeal for support to Noel Pearson, the aboriginal leader whose fierce independence of previous debate has won him enormous authority in the wider Australian community. Read his reflections the night before the apology, and also shortly after the election last year, and you will see why. In fact, one could profitably skip the Devine and Stephens articles and read Pearson alone: the substantial points against the current bien-pensant consensus are all there, but they are set in the midst of an argument that is actually about the problem of dealing with this history, and the present, in political terms, rather than using the apology as a tool in some other dispute.

Mr Pearson is in two minds about the apology, and seems to feel no need to condense his views into a easily-repeated "reaction". I will honour that restraint by simply saying: read what he has to say.


(4) As for me, I have no plan to repeat the apology later this morning: that would be presumptuous and unnecessary. But I do want to use it as a starting point, or (perhaps better) as background: for how can one ignore it this week? And when will we get a topic more fitting for reflection during Lent? "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?", asks the hymn. The answer to the question is "Yes", but it is not a simple yes by any means, and some of the issues are the same.

At Good Friday services at the Lutheran church in Geneva --- it doubles as a kind of chaplaincy to visiting English-speakers, and (a little perversely) as a British Commonwealth get-together --- a striking hymn was sung in the nineties, adapted from a Zulu (and Xhosa?) protest song. It was powerfully used to invite reflection on the crucifixion, and on all human sin, especially sins committed in company: the simple chorus will stay with me all my life.

Senzenina --- What have we done? What have we done? What have we done?

Give the man his due

Olivia Judson (a.k.a. Dr Tatiana) blogs on the NYT side concerning Alfred Russel Wallace, evolution's Other Guy. It was his birthday on January 8th (OK, so I missed it), and in five months it will be a hundred-and-fifty years since his letter to Charles Darwin that, by showing that someone else was onto the idea, prompted him to publish The origin of species by means of natural selection.

Second in time and in profundity to the sainted Charles, Wallace has missed out both on being a scientific pin-up and on being the scapegoat for a million social and conceptual ills. (Heads up, people: "it" is not Charles Darwin's fault. Or Alfred Russel Wallace's. Or the fault of biology. If you want someone to blame for whatever dreadful thing you think has been unleashed, you might more accurately try Herbert Spencer.) Of course, I should not wish the latter fate on anyone's memory. But as for Wallace's scientific standing: this is a man who, whatever his other weaknesses, independently hit upon the idea of evolution by natural selection, one of the great concepts of any age, and the key in the lock of natural history. Let's give him his due.

Talk is cheap

Now here's why I have mixed feelings about blogs: a succinct and measured remark on the recent "outing" of Hogwarts' headmaster, a mere paragraph in length, followed by 61 comments (and counting) of the most tedious nature imaginable.

In an earlier post, I remarked that there are related matters which are more plausible in the films than in JKR's text. Presumably other people have noticed this. So following this latest discussion, we can look forward to the film of Deathly Hallows being dragged into the culture wars.

Great. I'm really looking forward to that.

----------

UPDATE: There is an excellent reflection on this matter in the New York Times. Three cheers for the old-fashioned medium of print (which, of course, I access via the Web).

Wrestling with Student Tragedy

A post on a student's tragic situation, and two responses (1 and 2) on the Rate Your Students blog.

Food for thought here. This site is not only about US professors letting off steam.

Rate Your Students

Featured a few months back by Blogger: Rate Your Students. Its motto: Email us your pain.

I would not want to spend all my days reading American professors venting about their students --- I would not want to spend all my days reading any blog, or anything on the Web for that matter --- but this thing is worth a look. And I guess the www.ratemyprofessors.com site needed some kind of counterweight.

Today's RYS post: A New Correspondent Shares Some of the Normal Disgust Concerning Her "Special," Most Favoritest Student.

The New York Times is free again

Editorial and other opinion columns at the New York Times, and the archive, are once again free online.

I've been a subscriber since this content went secured --- because the NYT is that good --- but on everyone else's behalf at least, I'm glad that it's back out in the open. Do I prefer that people's blogs link to some other unverifiable ranting guy, or to articles in a disciplined and relatively independent paper? Hmm, lets see, difficult choice ... not sure what I think about that ...

I'm still alive ...

... although you wouldn't know it from reading this blog lately. I've variously been on working holiday in the US, recovering from jetlag, and then nursing a virus (which I guess I picked up by not being careful enough while recovering from jetlag).

There are lots of things to post: with luck I'll find time in the next week or so.

I hope everyone else who took August hols had a good time ...

A proxy war

Like a fool, I interjected in a discussion on military chaplaincy on the Faith and Theology blog last Thursday.

I meant to raise my eyebrow at one correspondent's wholesale argument against chaplaincy --- illegitimate as a Christian ministry even if war itself were justifiable, we were told --- which seemed to cry out for contradiction. I told myself that I was thus engaging in a brief police action, in a good cause.

But now I find myself in the middle of a war-by-proxy, with Pacifism and Just War theory sponsoring the two sides. And I have no exit strategy.

There must be a moral in here somewhere.

Let's be honest

I just added "Christianity" to the official subtitle of this blog, as one of its prevailing concerns. Because, let's be honest: who was I kidding by omitting it?

The tendentious nature of much discussion on theo-blogs still dismays me: it sometimes dismays me when I'm engaged in such discussions. I would hope that my own contributions are reasonable, but this is for others to judge ... and it will not do to affect a distance from these discussions which is not supported by the data.

For the record, I have been known to contribute to the following theo-blogs, in roughly this order:

The Blogging Parson (Michael Jensen)

nothing new under the sun (Byron Smith)

hebel (Matt Moffitt)

Faith and Theology (Ben Myers)

My problem is usually with (some of) their interlocutors, rather than these gentlemen themselves.

The love that dare not speak its name

There is a fascinating exchange on homosexuality and Christian (specifically Catholic) doctrine here, in a recent Commonweal magazine.

The correspondents are, if you can believe it, a straight male theology professor (Luke Timothy Johnson) who advocates acceptance of homosexual relationships, and a lesbian freelance journalist (Eve Tushnet), a recent convert to Catholicism, who stands for the traditional position of the church.

Despite what I initially thought, both of them seem to be on the level. And despite what you might think, both of them are worth reading.

Professor Johnson's responsibly liberal position involves a certain amount of --- let us be frank --- special pleading and tendentious argument. (The references to slavery, for example, are depressingly rote and tone-deaf. If that's not already clear to you, I suggest reading The Letter of Paul to Philemon and then trying to square it against Johnson's statement on the apostle's views.) But Johnson is an unlucky man. He indulges in much less special pleading or tendentious argument than you might expect, and he is clearly trying to be straightforward and plain-speaking. His concern for being faithful to Christian revelation, and faithful to the phenomena, is manifest. And he has put all of his cards on the table, including those which count against his own argument: a refreshing thing, that, in these polemical times. In isolation I would have called his contribution to the discussion a good one, for these and other reasons, but he has had the misfortune to be up against someone who completely outclasses him.

Ms Tushnet is altogether extraordinary. She is rigorous. She is open. She is clear on what is secure in her own understanding, and what is provisional. Honest and critical about her own experience, and speaking with what anyone in our culture would recognise as a kind of authority, she finds that she needs to listen to what Christian (and specifically Catholic) tradition has to say. Reading her words, I am reminded --- quite outside my own experience --- of why I take the Scripture seriously. Of why I take Christian doctrine seriously. This does not happen often.

Her position is a classic example of faith seeking understanding, the great model of Christian thought. Prof. Johnson by contrast is trying to achieve a final position --- to get in all the data --- and one feels the strain. In fairness to him, he will probably think the same thing in five years' time. Ms Tushnet may well think something quite different in five months' time, and as a scientist I can't help feeling that that is an indulgence. But I will still listen willingly to whatever she has to say.

-----

Stepping back from the detail of Prof. Johnson's and Ms Tushnet's positions, there is something deeply Catholic about their whole discussion. I mean that in a good way. It respects reason (and reasonableness), tradition, experience, insight, and beauty, in a way that many Protestant discussions do not. It takes difficulty and obscurity for granted. It is recognisably about a world that real people live in.

As an Anglican, I have the privilege admiring the (Roman) Catholic church from a safe distance. This is something worth doing, and something that my fellow evangelical Christians are depressingly reluctant to do. The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, is an honourable exception in this matter, and I note that it is a brave man who would accuse him of being insufficiently Protestant. So what, exactly, is everyone else's problem?

[Acknowledgement: I am indebted to Ben Myers, and his estimable blog Faith and Theology, for a pointer to the Commonweal article.]

The Trouble with Principle

I am currently involved in a discussion on liberalism (in politics) and the role of principle (in ethics), courtesy of The Blogging Parson.

The initial posts by TBP are almost always well-informed and provocative, and lend themselves to further discussion. I guess this makes it a good blog, my semi-frequent grumbles with the content notwithstanding.

A reluctant blog

I never was an early adopter. After 13 years or more on the web, I still write my HTML by hand, and until this moment I haven't had a blog --- until six months ago, I had never even posted to one. In the nineties I was the web responsible for my university department, and since then I've written up popular lectures and film reviews for my home page; and the web is something I use extensively for work. But something in me has resisted its more popular forms.

Maybe it's particle-physicist snobbery: we invented the thing, and now it's completely out of our hands, and often contrary to our values. Or maybe it's that, being an opinionated person, I've been afraid of ending up as one more ranting guy at a keyboard. But in any case, I started posting to some friends' blogs a while back, and the sky did not fall in. So it seems like it's time to give this a try for myself.

As for the title, taking things seriously is what physicists do, and taking things seriously is something I've been doing, to the occasional dismay of my friends, all my life. I hope it doesn't exclude having a sense of humour, but that's for others to judge.