Lifting the stem-cell research “ban”
Google “did bush ban stem cell research?” and you get this gaggle of articles. Some of the titles announce that Obama has ended Bush’s stem cell research ban, while others refer to Bush’s policy as a funding ban.
What a difference a word makes! The second set of articles more closely approximates the truth. But to be even more correct you would have to add “federal government” to “funding ban,” and change the word “ban” to “restriction,” as well as adding “embryonic” to modify “stem cell.” Bush never banned stem cell research nor even government funding for all of it; he did limit government funding to lines that had been developed prior to August 9, 2001, and he never had any problem funding adult stem cell research.
Many people have applauded Obama’s actions. But to agree with Obama’s new policy is it really necessary to distort history? Although it is indeed likely that the Obama directive reversing the Bush position will open up more opportunities for research with stem cells, it’s not as though under Bush things were not progressing, through the use of adult stem cells and other creative solutions (see this and this for two examples). But to acknowledge that would be to acknowledge that Bush wasn’t really against science, just a particular form of science that he considered unethical.
Obama has released a so-called “fact sheet” in tandem with his new executive order on stem cell research funding. In it he writes:
The previous Administration allowed the National Institutes of Health to fund human embryonic stem cell research on cell lines created before an arbitrary date, August 9, 2001, but prohibited research on cell lines created after that date. The Executive Order signed by President Obama today lifts this restriction, which has no basis in science and was not required by any law.
There it is again [emphasis mine]: “prohibited research on cell lines created after that date.” No, it did not; it just withdrew federal funding. And of course the Bush restriction had “no basis in science;” that’s a straw man argument. Bush never alleged it to have such a basis.
It was a decision about the ethics of science, and the way in which ethics and science interface. You may or may not agree with Bush’s decision; Obama clearly does not. But to pretend otherwise is to be disingenuous.
Here is the letter I am sending to POTUS Obama.
Dear President Obama,
I am writing to protest your lifting of the restriction on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. I believe that using embryonic stem cells opens up several ethical problems, the main one being that embryos might be purposely created to be destroyed for only medical purposes. Since an embryo is life in waiting, that creates a big problem for many people who are against optionally destroying potential life. Most Christians take this position and, since you profess to be a Christian, why are you taking this position?
There are over 50% of the American taxpayers who are against embryonic stem cell research for ethical reasons. You have just authorized using their tax dollars to do something they find ethically troubling. Does this not trouble you?
Doing research using embryonic stem cells is not illegal and can be funded with private capital. Although I am opposed to such research, I see no reason why, if embryonic stem cell research is so valuable to medical science, it cannot be adequately funded by private dollars from those who have no ethical problems with the research.
I am deeply toubled by this move on your part!
Sincerely,
Nice email Jimmy J.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The White House statement (in the “fact sheet” link) is gobbledegook which says nothing:
Every. Single. Thing. Mentioned. In that paragraph. Was already being done under Bush’s NIH. What does this gobbledygook mean? Will Obama’s NIH step up funding for ESC research? They should not, b/c ESC research has been vastly less productive than ASC research(in fact, it’s hard to argue that ESC research has produced anything other than knowledge that the human body rejects ESCs as foreign bodies, and creates fast growing tumors). The gobbledygook does not say Obama’s NIH will increase funding directed at ESCs. Such seems, by virtue of the smoke and mirrors surrounding the announcement, to be implied. Yet, with Obama, one must trust nothing and verify everything. There is NOTHING here which meaty enough to confirm anything. The gobbledygook says nothing – just as all of Barack’s favorite statements say nothing.
I believe most of the amazing discoveries/ potential cures have come from the ADULT stem cell line products anyway.
If that is true, wtf are we doing throwing government funding (TAXPAYER MONEY) at embryonic stem cell research which apparently hasn’t yielded much if anything when we can’t afford it? Isn’t the budget already overburdened as it is?
Ethical considerations aside doesn’t anyone in the Obama reign even care that we are going to waste MONEY on stuff that doesn’t work?
Jimmy J. you might have an ethical argument but saying, “for only medical purposes.” Well, what does medical knowledge do? does it save lives? I’m not saying I have the answer, I mean science shows us that embryos in healthy occurrences develop into human beings and they should be protected — but I think also that in some circumstances that’s not always the full story.
It’s just like Global Warming (now morphed into Climate Chaos). It’s not about the science it is about an agenda. I have no idea how many “eminent” (at least in their own minds) doctors I heard talk about how without stem cell research people with spinal cord injuries, etc. would never walk, etc. but huge strides were made using umbilical stem cells and adult stem cells which would have never happened if all the funding had gone to embryonic stem cells. Much of that research had been tried with embryonic stem cells with no positive outcome. Interesting, no?
Unfortunately from things I have been able to find out Obama has left the door wide open for all kinds of cloning and I am sorry but creating viable embryos only to destroy them for the stem cells is WRONG.
But again it is about an agenda – not the science. And like global warming when you take the concept of a higher power out of the equation you get a lot of wrong answers. There are too many researchers in this field who have no ethics. Their attitude is “if you CAN do it – then it is ETHICAL to do it”.
So Jimmy J. there’s your answer as well. It is not about putting the taxpayers’ money where it will get the best results. It is about an AGENDA – pure and simple. Because you are right. If embryonic stem cells were where the breakthroughs were there would be all kind of bioengineering companies all over that – like white on rice.
There is no need for embryonic stem cells any more. Read this
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/01/stem-cells-breakthrough?utm_source=Ode+Newsletters&utm_campaign=fc436a4a7f-daily-rss&utm_medium=email
for further information.
Over the past eight plus years the media has been complicit in obfuscating the language and the issues involved. So that many people I know fulminate about Bush being anti science and against curing human ailments. Unfortunately, the well has been poisoned and only very patient, learned, and disciplined people can suspend their judgment until you can accurately put the language side by side and expose the distortions.
I’m not saying this is an arcane and irrelevant issue. It isn’t. For those of us awake at the switch we comprehend the ethical problems. I applaud JimmyJ’s letter. He understands the heart of the matter – as I understand it and as many Christians also understand it. But don’t expect the President’s office to in any way honestly appreciate it.
Journalism died long ago.
Back in 1995 they claimes Republicans were trying to cut Medicare by 270 Billion.
Yet it was a 7% increase for 7 years (more than 49% compounded)
Journalists in the dominant drive-by legacy media are incredibly lazy, have no common sense, and have no expertise in any subject matter (economics, science, climate, etc)
What to do?
Keep pointing this stuff out to the political newbies….
My coworker continues to think she is well informed after watching the drive-by legacy nightly news. She is slowly becoming aware I think as I forward a story a week she never saw.
I know she read it as she comments on it.
BHO had a hell of a lot of bad news in the last week, so he needed something to rally the troops. Katie Couric was (again) sliding out of her seat describing the historic signing. The little kid in the wheelchair jumped up and started running after he sprinkled his ESS on his breakfast cereal. Look at this as a stimulus package for 45 year old post doc fellows who can’t get real jobs and are too lazy to go into medicine and be doctors. Check that, they probably understand that after Obama is through, no one will want to go into medicine.
You should save my postage, Jimmy J. Your language will not make any sense to the people in the White House. They didn’t even attempt to address the ethical case.
Since we have seen reports of the promising advances in adult stem cells for some time, you have to wonder why the fuss about embryonic stem cells as the only kind worth talking about.
Again, the answer is obvious: it only has resonance because it reflects on the abortion debate. In context, supporting “science” means ignoring ethics and bashing “religion.”
You will see more of this from the White House: “science” is the antithesis of “religion” or “the Religious Right” or “the Fundamentalists,” take your pick according to circumstances. It can also be the antithesis of “corporate greed,” as in the case of AGW. Who could be against science?
And “science” will turn out to be whatever the administration’s scientific allies claim that it is. If they get in a pinch, they will trot out ethicists like Peter Singer at Princeton to provide a fig leaf of academic respectability.
But the solution is not to retreat to religious or even ethical lines of argumentation, but to address the science and force attention on facts and logic. The argument of the Left is that to be religious and Conservative is to be stupid. The best way to disprove that case is by being very clever indeed and by showing that the Left can’t allow the facts to be known.
s/b You should save YOUR postage. sorry
Sorry again, I was wrong, or at least not completely right. The accompanying speech does speak to a moral obligation to reduce pain and disease:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-of-the-President-As-Prepared-for-Delivery-Signing-of-Stem-Cell-Executive-Order-and-Scientific-Integrity-Presidential-Memorandum/
So that’s something. Bu he still doesn’t name or address the ethical claims of people who disagree. The unnamed costs must be small not even to be weighed against the potential for new therapies, which he insists cannot be guaranteed.
I wonder how much research could have been funded with Michelle’s salary for her now unnecessary job.
The reporting and the hype on this whole issue have been horrible. Hopes were awakened that could never be fulfilled in time to help those currently suffering. The public has been misled on how science works–not on a planned timetable. There were serious ethical issues raised by even the scientists who first worked in the field. For the glib, superficial man in the WH, none of this matters. He just needs to look cool and progressive. We don’t even know whether he ever took a biology course, but we should be in awe of his superior judgement.
About a year ago, I read an article about how Bush arrived at his decision to fund stem cell research and to put the limits on the use of embryonal stem cells. He seems to have approached the issue in a serious and thoughtful way. I don’ think he looked at his polling numbers.
Whats it like to embrace a political movement that has lying and distortion as a requirement? I can’t imagine how any democrat looks at himself in the mirror with such dishonesty at the core of his philosophy. And is the lying and distortion for us or just themselves?
All else aside, I found it incredibly galling to read about this in the same paper that’s filled with stories about how bad the economy is. (E.g., lead story in Boston Globe: “Economy fuels rise in crime, police say”.) Amidst all the wreckage, much of his own making, Obama wastes no opportunity to trash his predecessor. Is this really the message he wants to send, that in the midst of a crisis, he publicly nurses his spite?
It’s all Leftist show, ignorant and hollow, but a show. The play’s the thing. They’ve turned a 180 on that crispest of mottos, “Esse quam videri.”
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They have made more progress with later pluripotent cells… the doctor i work with and i have been debating that for a while (one of the few people who can understand what i talk about that i am interested in).
for the most part their conceptual on things is off… we dont fit a blueprint model. the concept of building them maintaining isnt possible in the living system… though how i would prove it and show it other than explain it, i havent figured out yet. which is one of the side projects, how to show what is easy to see from a math point…
a higher being is basically a set of tweaked neutered cellular clones which surround and serve the purpose of the sexual cells.
the cells grow from a single start, in a feed forward branched network. this is different than how they conceptualize it today (and take that default conceptualization for granted).
that is that every cell divides into two cells, and that the cell before, sets up the situation in the cells forward. in essence feeding forward.
in the blue print model, the kind of thing that they discovered recently, which they wrongly call neo-lamarckian, is not possible… but in a feed foward system, it would be impossible to prevent!
in blue print, how you get stem cells is a quandry, in the branching feed forward, its just a cell line that when branching didnt die.
so what becomes clear, is that the right differentiated cell which has more information as to its job, task, and place… is a better fit…
the point of using embryo stem cells was that before what we know today, they seemed to be the easiest. and would be easiest from a blue print model… the idea being that you could somehow direct the cells divisions along the different branches till you got to the starter branch for that organ, and grow it so to speak.
by not using embryo stem cells, we ended up finding all these other types, and learning more about what it does. this game is just the left attempting to justify by other means a way to preserve their eugenics programs against opposition. the fight will no longer be winnable, that the prols can always then be split between the “its always bad crowd” to the “but look at the good” crowd.
the embryo cells are not as good as these later lines. there are a lot of serious reasons why, but i can give you two simple ones.
the embryo is another individual with different dna, and what is being done is a transplant of one individuals stem cells into anothers. even if you use a clone to make the embryo, the clones switches are not set right, the telomeres are not right, etc.
the second reason is that using adult stem cells you are using the cells of the person who has the situation. which is better all around…
so in essence, there is not as much reason for using fetal stem cells as there was before they had used them on anything before or even found the adult ones. and if it werent for bush we probably would have put most money in the fetal ones, and all the work and lack of progress (notice the trend), would be seen as the norm… but by not using what would be easy to start from, but hard to finish… we found a harder start, that was a better finish.
the doc i am working with is fun.. i tell him how it works and he throws papers at me… then asks me to explain other parts… but its slow since a lot of the stuff is hard to transfer… like why we age… and why heterosexual family with younger mating and grandparents is important to our genetics… and lots of other interesting stuff..
as far as aging… they will not find anything that will extend life much… as old age is not the decline of a fixed plan not able to maintain itself… its one long story from the first cell, to the last… and the later cells have less story worked out than the earlier ones..
that death is the dividing lines for how we seek improved qualities, sort them, and then compress them…
the elegance of this is incredible.. and i can see it in my head (i see math, my son doesnt, though he is on a mathematics scholarshp). it shows how we get organs out of nowhere, how things can change pretty fast, even that cancer has a purpose…
but proving it is another story since its a systemic kind of thing… the best so far that i have is to show or find clues where they are stymied, and where this other view is not… then wait till they find out more… its given me some interesting insight in how and why artificial digital forms never worked either… at least not beyond minimal principals… though i think the most interesting part and nifty part is that it also shows that there are informational niches as well. that not only do creatures invade real world locations and then differentiate, but that they can auto differentiate by solving certain ‘problems’ and those problems opening up a whole new vista in solutions and their real world expression.
unless life solves that problem, it cant progress past that point… it cant reach the complexity that it needs to be what can exploit at that new level or area…
but as always.. i digress.. there is so much more… and this area is one of my actual interests… but i get too long…
Restriction on federal funding DOES equal a “ban”…
…if you believe in the Federalization of Everything.
That is, if you think that the Federal Government should monitor the fall of every sparrow and dole out every
citizen’sperson’s fair share of the good things like manna from Heaven, then of course a restriction on federal funding is tantamount to a ban. I mean, where else is money for these things supposed to come from?Very good post, Artfldgr. Do you have links for a few papers on feed forward branched networks? This is an extremely interesting argument.
As in CA, MD has spent state money on embryonic stem cell research when our state’s privately funded institutions had moved on to adult stem cell research since the embryonic research had not showed any progress. Over 77 treatments are the result of adult stem cell research. Ideology trumps logic again, but it is our money that is being wasted by these fools.
Artfldgr,
Your point about Bush’s policy directing attention to adult stem cells was very important. It points to how I, at least partially, define my conservatism: Whenever a new problem or a new opportunity is identified, people will jump up, wave their hands, and say “I can fix it; I can do it.” If they can frame their plans in evening news soundbites or Oprah-friendly inspiration stories, they drown out all the other voices. It is the conservative’s job to say “Wait a minute. Let’s think about this and hear some other voices, including those from the past.”
Obviously, there are emergency situations in which quick responses are needed; however, even these should be weighed and analyzed when the emergency is over. Mostly though we have time to think in advance and at least identify the way in which our actions might have farther reaching impacts, especially on core values and structures of society. It is not our desire to ban the new or put our society in a canning jar to preserve it like a perfect peach. But it is our job to remind people what it took to produce that peach and what pests or diseases can destroy it.
This is why I read your blog – you approach issues from a ‘lets be reasonable’ position rather than a dogmatic one. I think that you’re right — research was progressing under Bush. As quickly as I’d like? No. But moving? Yes.
It’s analogous to the furor when the National Endowment for the Arts wouldn’t fund certain artists, who then complained that their artistic liberties were being unfairly constrained. They weren’t. There’s a difference between being constrained and not being supported. Granted, if you need support to do it at all, it feels like the same, but it’s not.
Good piece.
Under the statist Obama, we’d have every reason to expect that anything the federal government didn’t fund – would be prohibited. As such, Obama’s executive order reference to Bush’s prohibition, is just another example of liberal projection.
Excellent comment Artfldgr. I too have come to believe that the left’s attachment to embryonic stem cell research was more about an attempt to validate their pro-choice position.
Artfldgr,
I enjoyed reading your post – well thought out and pretty succinct. The insidious reasoning behind the liberal stance became patently obvious through the inimitable words of (then VP candidate) John Edwards in 2004…..
John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
Like global warming it is a prestidigitative (I know that’s not a word but it works well I think) tool – an act of legerdemain meant to direct the blame for misfortune upon the opposition.
Now I can get a fetal stem cell phone….
Ba dum bump. Rim shot…. 🙂
Artfldgr,
Would like to add my thanks for your comment. Your grasp of the science is impressive.
I only know that I come down on the side of the argument that creating embryos for experimetnal uses is, as Highlander states, all about confirming their pro all abortion, all the time position. I am anti-abortion, therefore I find embryo destruction to be an unethical practice.
Your statement about not being able to find the answers to life extension is interesting. In looking around, I think it is pretty obvious that everything on this Big Blue Marble has a pre-programmed life span. It is a continuous process of life creation, followed by slow decay and eventual death. And then the whole thing repeats. It’s almost as if someone had planned the whole process. Heh!
Neo wrote “But to pretend otherwise is to be disingenuous.”
You may want to hold onto that line as a repeater for the next few years.
Oblio,
Very good post, Artfldgr. Do you have links for a few papers on feed forward branched networks? This is an extremely interesting argument.
Not really as there are no real examples of this in the bio papers… not that I am an expert that has surveyed them all (an impossibility).
Most of my work is in applied mathematics in software. And most of the literature on feed forward is more related to control systems, like in factories, and in software things.
There is a lot of ‘wrong’ views that are out there… and this is besides the political games or in some ways abstractly because of them. Like the nature nurture argument. It’s a completely false useless point…. to think that the data given to a spreadsheet is what defnies the spread sheet, is ridiculous. but when you talk of people, then what they take in and store and act on, like data in a spread sheet. Takes on meaning that has no meaning.
However among the not so bright, it’s seems like an easy way to make a contribution and be rewarded… we took 200k and ran some studies, and we found that protocagnatasis aureous is 63% nature, and 37% nurture… and then go on to show how you got that, and delve into process, and ignore meaningful conclusion. In other way it’s a high faluting way to get people who could be smart, but are crippled, to waste resources doing busy work. because they believe ni the labor concept of value…the more busy work you do, the more valuable what it is you must be doing.
In order to start delving into my work, since it isn’t published and the doctor I am working with is a socialist who thinks he is being taken care of (but anyone who gives up on their own interests in favor of their keepers will eventually someday find out that they weren’t kept, they were used. And their failure to act accordingly in the deal, sentenced them to the future they have, not what could have been. The ‘winners’ will have more children, will have more familial success, and your line will become anemic. Darwins survival concepts basically say that a creature who doesn’t know its own interests, and works for others interests putting their own on hold, is really a bad contribution to the future.
First start with networks. Not the real kind but the types. and don’t worry as to how information moves within them. that way you can start to see that different networks have different structures and those structures lead to imposing preferential rules and things over others. (try to remain neutral in that you don’t care what the rules are, but the fact that the structure imposes them, and not all structures are the same).
To an IE (information engineer), each of these things have properties to them. to a biologist, unless they reinvent the insight of the information people, when looking at biological information systems… everything will have to wait till they get these structures and say… oh.. X imposes Y and forbids Z and Z’
The other thing is to try to get away from the blue print model.. its wrong. period. there is little in it to save it at all.. and it will be decades before they realize it (I have no illusions that I will make a dent in things. probably not, and later people will look and say, look at that… wow.. which is more the case than not).
Feed forward networks, and related things like random number generators, use the current step to create some input for the next step.
Here is how basic it is… yet the biologists were tauight something else (but not directly… I don’t think they actually teach it, its just the terms everyone uses to be understood, and after a while they were taken too seriously, and so are hard to change. this is different than injecting false information… )
We (humans) grow from one cell (fusion of two), to an end result of some 60 trillion cells. Once glance at twins matching finger prints will tell you that EVERY cell has a position to take up.
And so to understand that, we took a model we understood that can create end results in which every part has a defined place. it was natural to do so.
But for me, I wanted to grow solutions. And so kept hitting walls… a big one being that how do you integrate changes into a blue print model that does not overturn the whole thing like central planning making arbitrary changes?
Anyone who has ever seen the wonderful movie (cant remember the title) where a couple buy a house, and they try to move to the country, and it becomes this white elephant as seeming innocuous things, force the complete restructuring of the whole place. the best classical scene of this is when the architect tries to figure out why it was 10k for moving some flag stones. What happened was the constructuion workers did the job right, and the request is easy to make witout knowing what it entails (hint hint to obama). That is I want a flagstone here, a drain and a nice table to work on my plants… ended up rerouting the plumbing, the electrical, the drain… support joists, and so on… there was no need to question the person paying, is there? service with a smile..
In fact the blueprint model is what opens up the argument that god had to make things whole (while the whole argyumetn is a waste. God could have also made natural selection. The argument presupposes that god isnt any smarter than the person making the assertion!!!)
It also doesn’t explain how it expands. And so forth… the problem is huge, and so large no one is paying attention to it yet. they will, because as time goes by, the model will fail.
[edited for length by neo-neocon]
dane,
I enjoyed reading your post – well thought out and pretty succinct.
thank you… and thanks to all the others that said something nice..
i am trying to be succint… but i am passionate, love people, want to share, and dont realize others have hard times with it… (well dont relize at what point that starts really).
i was so worried that i railed on… without feedback that is truthful… its hard to know where your standing… after all, if i choose to listen to lee and mitsu, i am nuts… i if i choose to listen to a hanger on, i am great… and each side can make you feel that way too…
succint… that was the nicest compliment i have received in a while.. especially when worried as to diong justice to neo’s permissiveness in her home. 🙂
http://www.redstate.com/mark_i/2009/03/11/the-la-times-answers-stem-cells-faqs-with-frequently-stated-misconceptions/
I read about this in the NYTimes a while back. The reporting is truly despicable and confusing to someone who isn’t drinking the Kool-Aid. I immediately showed it to my roommate, a liberal, and he lamented the decline of journalism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/us/politics/07stem.html?_r=1&scp=9&sq=Stem%20Cell%20Research%20Ban%20Obama&st=cse
“To separate science and politics” huh? Any fool can see that federal funding of specific scientific research is clearly connecting politics with science! It’s no wonder that the NYTimes is going under when either they are idiots or they treat their readership like idiots!
Actually, not using federal funds on stem-cell research is effectively separating politics and science.
There’s no clear indication that federal financing is necessary for scientific experiments. There are plenty of charities and private benefactors/companies that would love to discover stem-cell therapies and would fund scientific research into that field.
Ironically, Obama’s comments apply to his predecessor’s policies but not his own.
For the record, I am not opposed to stem-cell research. I would actually welcome it because my mother has type I diabetes. But considering the ethical considerations, I would prefer it to be privately funded.
Artfldgr, I’m with you: it is all extremely powerful and elegant.
I’m no scientist, but I remember a book that is well executed for the popular audience: Genome: Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999), by Matt Ridley (former Science Editor of the Economist who ended us as non-executive chairman at Norther Rock!).
http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-Chapters-P-S/dp/0060894083/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236827970&sr=1-1
I’m sure that some of it is out-of-date or disproved by now, but I remember his explanations of telomeres, the nature of cancer, evolutionary battles between the X and Y chromosomes that determine gender, and the idea that RNA is the ancestor of DNA and uses DNA to reproduce itself. That’s not what I remember from high school biology. Very cool stuff.
“Although it is indeed likely that the Obama directive reversing the Bush position will open up more opportunities for research with stem cells”
Probably only if Congress lifts it’s late 90s ban on embryo destroying research…
amr Says:
” Ideology trumps logic again, but it is our money that is being wasted by these fools.”
Its almost like Obama is playing politics with science!
Oblio,
This just out today…
Random network connectivity can be delayed, but with explosive results, new study finds
http://www.physorg.com/print156087603.html
and this will give you an idea of how i abstract and see what you can do with things. its a talent, as i have not found that others find the behavior boring or common when they see it.
In the classic model of random networks, after a certain number of connections are made, overall connectivity begins to rise in a steep curve (ER). A new model that delays this transition results in overall connectivity occurring almost instantaneously at a critical moment, shown in this graph by the upward turn of the flat red line (PR). Credit: Raissa D’Souza/UC Davis
In the classic model of random network formation, known as the Erdé¶s-Rényi model, connections are added from among a large collection of points one at a time by randomly selecting a pair of points to connect. Two points are considered to be in the same group if it is possible to go from one to another along a continuous line of connections. A group remains very small until the number of connections reaches at least half the number of points. After that, the growth of the largest group follows a steep upward curve.
D’Souza, along with co-investigators Dimitris Achlioptas at UC Santa Cruz and Joel Spencer at New York University, wanted to explore how a network would change if there were an element of choice injected into its formation. In their mathematical model, they considered two random connections in each step, and selected only one. To make their choice, they multiplied the number of points in the group linked to one end of a connection by the number of points linked to its other end. And in each case, they chose the connection that yielded the lower product.
As they expected, this process delayed the onset of super-connectivity. But the team’s analysis provided strong evidence for a new phenomenon: when a system is suppressed like this, it builds up a kind of pressure. “This algorithm yields a very violent transition,” Achlioptas said, “reaching a critical moment at which the probability that two points are connected jumps from essentially zero to more than 50 percent instantaneously.”
and here is a comment i sent to a friend in which i talk with… (but he has little time to discuss, so a lot of the cool stuff just fritters away back into the ether like a super wave on the ocean that appears at a convergence of waves, then as they pass through each other disappears from whence it came appearing to have no origin).
This has a lot of bearing on the math I have been trying to get across.
Cells are a network, and this network has a dividing plane, but it also has a linking plane. The dividing plane creates the structure for building larger, and then there is a linking plane that insures that even if things develop in another lineage that they can converge.
Basically all they are discovering here is that if you keep the entities that are going to link up from linking up, holding them back, they will link up suddenly as a state change. rather than slowly form ice, they stay liquid and a slight stimulus causes instant freezing from supercriticality.
Well, they just described the mechanisms that make a political change or coupe happen.
Rather than a slow evolution as everyone of like mind can get together
They set the groups in opposition, even though their base ideology is the same. At some point they reach a critical mass where they all converge and suddenly there is this huge network of people of like mind that are willing to do nasty things as they are all in charge through their commonality that just seemed to appear. [think of how many people would like to see a death penalty for madoff… and then think in their haste what that would lead to…]
This also has a VERY close correlation with the mathematical work that was done on why rich get way ahead of other people, and in that work they found that there is a smooth growth that is linear, and then at some point the growth curve switches becomes much steeper… as if a pump needs enough juice to be primed and then it runs.
(that would mean all this disincentive to work is a means of keeping as few as possible from reaching a point where their pumps are primed. Rather than they not know that its not zero sum, they know that it IS not zero sum, and so there is no defense through acquisition or collection, only defense by preventing others from climbing the hills. The whole planet COULD share in wealth and good living, just as everyone in the US does. it doesn’t come at the expense of others, which is the secret, for if we believe it does, we will work to prevent anyone new from climbing the hill that is so unfair, rather than everyone get together and climb the hill and share the view with those who would stand alone).
This is some really cool stuff… but we will see whether it actually gets applied to the things that it relates to.
The information scientists are not immune to the same problems that the biologists have, they just express it differently.
This was why so many of our esteemed creating people were like me (not that I am like them in success), in that they did not learn one high vertical truth. they didn’t seek one view.
Unlike our current culture that strives to have one answer and one view, and one perspective and oh how that sounds nice
But that is nothing but the stagnation of a rock… it’s a hell that sounds nice when presented but horrible once experienced
[ask the women failing and miserable “trying to have it all”, ignoring their biology ripping their hair out and more (just as one example of many)]
But if you learn all these different disciplines you then rise above them. you are no longer in the glass house afraid to throw stones, you are outside the glass house and have a place to throw them, and a place to enter and contemplate one way, and ability to leave that perspective and go to another and see it from that way.
With more roads and destinations you are no longer fooled that there is only one reality, only one glass house, only one “truth”… there are many views, and they all converge on one truth called reality…
Rashomon resonates because that is a deep nature to how reality is…
Thanks for the link, Artfldgr. Very interesting. This must have important implications for understanding evolutionary biology. There are also implications for punctuated equilibrium in social sciences.