Up From Facebook

  From a PBS post on Facebook yesterday: “ On May 5, 1925, Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution.   “It all began when the state of Tennessee passed a law making it a crime to teach evolution in public schools. The newly-organized American Civil Liberties Union responded immediately, placing an ad inviting a teacher to help test the law in the courts.   “A group of local businessmen selected Scopes to provoke the indictment, both to challenge the law and to draw publicity to Dayton during an economic slump.   “But once the trial got under way, a pair of big-name lawyers—Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution—overshadowed Scopes' role.” I took Biology II as a senior in a public high school in Tennessee, 1972-73. When we reached a section on evolution, the teacher asked if there were any concerns. Nobody voiced any, so we moved on.

As I told a guy today up at Slater Park, I plan to live to 100 because very few people die after that age. I didn’t tell him that I plagiarized that George Burns line. I could also have quoted Woody Allen: I plan to achieve immortality by not dying. There are certainly things one can do to prolong life. The most reliable, in every animal in which it has been tested is caloric restriction. That means  reducing average daily calorie intake by typically 20–40% below normal requirements while maintaining proper nutrition. Is that living? We report, you decide. As for the “Blue Zone lifestyle”: The secret to Blue Zone lifestyle longevity is poor record-keeping. Be careful what you wish for. A long life with Alzheimers is a curse, not a gift. https://science.anu.edu.au/news-events/news/dr-saul-newman-has-uncovered-secret-living-110  

I’ve read over 200 history books and biographies. The two great drivers of history are war and money. For a dose of military history, I recently read “The Dark Path” by Williamson Murray. A big take-home of that book was how often victory depended on superior finances. For economic history, I’ve read “ Money: The true story of a made-up thing” by Jacob Goldstein, “ The world for sale” by  Jack Farchy and Javier Blas   and “Our dollar, your problem” by Kenneth Rogoff. But to understand the history of international finance, I turned to “Money Beyond Borders:  Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto ” by Barry Eichengreen.   This book begins with deep dives into the minting of Greek silver tetradrachms and Roman silver denarius, and the consequences of debasement by rulers like Nero. Both nations reached well beyond their borders with their coins, both through trade and by paying their far-flung militaries in coin.. Eichengreen argues that the fall of th...

  It was clear by the late ‘60s that America was doing far more harm than good in Vietnam and should just sue for peace and get out. Eventually, the US left and the Vietcong took over. Eventually, Vietnam became a reliable US trade partner. America is doing far more harm than good in Iran. Trump should just negotiate the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and get out. Eventually, the religious dictatorship in Iran will give way to a government better able to work with its neighbors and with the US.

Venter died a couple days ago at the age of 79.     As a grad student, I wondered whether it would be possible to sequence the human genome. As a postdoc, I did both Maxam and Gilbert sequencing and Sanger sequencing (first with E coli Klenow fragment, then reverse transcriptase) a couple hundred nucleotides per reaction, each reaction taking up to a week. For the first decade that I had my own lab, we did our own sequencing, but eventually it became cheaper and faster to send the template out to be sequenced by a company.   Venter drove the progress of DNA sequencing with his own company, then allied with the NIH to complete the first draft of the human genome. Genomic sequencing has transformed medicine, as well as evolutionary biology and taxonomy.   In the last five years that I had my own lab, genome sequencing was so cheap that I had a local company sequence the entire genome of a mutant fly line I'd created in order to define the sequence at one gene. And arou...

I’m not enough of a scholar of international affairs to possess a highly differentiated opinion on Taiwan. Superficially, a PRC invasion of Taiwan seems analogous to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: the PRC brands Taiwan as a renegade state, just as Putin brands Ukraine as “little Russia.” The historical antecedents are very different, and the historical case for amalgamating Taiwan with the PRC is certainly stronger. That said, Taiwan currently wants independence and Xi plans for an eventual takeover. Most of what I read these days discusses a military takeover of Taiwan. That made little sense to me. How could the PRC justify the billions required to defeat Taiwan and the billions more to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure when they could simply build it on the mainland and outcompete Taiwan?   Eyck Freyman writing in Foreign Affairs envisions a crisis, not a war, as the path to takeover. “It begins not with missiles but with cutter ships. One morning, dozens of Chinese coast g...