CapitalistImperialistPig

 There is a homeobox gene called dll, which, if damaged, let Sean B. Carroll tell the story. A few years ago, we were studying the Distal-less gene (Dll for short), so named because when it is mutated, the distal (outer) parts of fly limbs are lost. We were curious whether this limb-building gene played a role in other species. We were pleased to find that Dll was deployed in the distal parts of developing butterfly limbs, and in the limbs of crustaceans, Carroll, Sean B.. Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo (p. 69). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.  It happens that lobsters and fruit flies are not the only ones where it is active.  All sorts of distal limb portions are under its control, including those appendages of mammals and the siphon of the sea squirt.  Such homeobox genes appear to have a truly ancient heritage.  The eyespots of primitive worms, the compound eyes of a fruit fly, and the camera eyes of mice and other mamma...

Texas is a warm place, and Texas does not like government regulation.  Texas utilities took advantage of these facts to separate their power grid from the rest of the country to avoid regulation and not bother to winterize power generation systems.  Despite the climatology, it got very cold in Texas over the past week and water supplies to fossil fuel and nuclear plants froze up and so did the States unwinterized wind turbines.  Result: millions lost power and water on some of the coldest days in State record.  Many died.  Others were forced to shelter together in close proximity during the pandemic. Because the Texas power grid isolated itself, it couldn't even import power. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/opinion/texas-blackout-energy-abbott.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

 I am arguing with Connolley again.  The occasion is his review ( http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-tyranny-of-merit.html ) of a book called the Tyranny of Merit. It's not likely to be a book I would read, because I'm a lot more concerned about the tyranny of folly.  Dr. Connolley, and perhaps the author, manage to wander into the thorny philosophical territory of the meaning of  value, justice, and merit.  Can we say anything about these except that opinions differ? Connolley: " The assertion (p 136) that Hayek doesn't understand that things other than market value, have value, is drivel. So what we get is a fatal problem for his theory: market value isn't moral worth. His answer (again, p 136) is to take market value as a proxy for social contribution, which is lying worthy of Plato. In his version, free-market liberalism differs from meritocracy. In mine, it doesn't." Dr. C tends to get a bit vituperative, which tends to have a bad effect on me, ...

 All predictions of Orwell seem to come true eventually so it shouldn't surprise us that consigning various historical persons to the unperson bin has happened.  What is a bit disappointing is that educational institutions seem to be taking the lead.  Robert Millikan was Caltech's first Nobel Prize winner and the person most responsible for turning it into one of the world's most prestigious universities.  The tallest building on campus used to be called the Millikan Library, but Millikan has had his name deleted from all the major campus features.  It seems that he had subscribed to and promoted some popular eugenic ideas back in the day.  Not sure if his picture and grotto in the Athenaeum (faculty club) have been deleted, or if his works have been scrubbed from the library that used to bear his name. Meanwhile, San Francisco has changed the names of schools named after notorious racists like Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington.  More locally, the hig...

 After a long sojourn in sunnier intellectual climes, and most of them are, I returned to Popper and his analysis of the flaws of Marx.  It is a subject that has trouble holding my interest, since I have always considered the flaws manifested in the implementation of his ideas manifest.  Moreover, I don't think much of the historical prediction stuff that seems to be at its heart.   Still, there is some point, I suppose, in looking at the milieu he studied, and its rather catastrophic consequences.  Frankly, I was less inspired by the persecution and execution of Marx than the drive by damage done to classical liberalism.  given my abiding distaste for Hayek, Friedman, and their ilk, I found that encouraging. What is the greater danger to human freedom and welfare?  That is the question that animates the dispute between interventionists like Popper and Libertarians like Hayek.  For Popper (and Marx, so far as I can tell), it is capitalism and...

How did the distinctive traits that make us human evolve?   So what are those traits, anyway?   Here are a few: binocular vision, fingers with nails and soft pads instead of claws, fingers adapted to grasping rather than running, upright posture freeing those hands to grasp and manipulate. Roland Ennos, in his fascinating new book, The Age of Wood, notes that all those traits were already present in the bush baby, a tiny primate that looks a bit like a furry human. Though they are similar to us in so many ways, bush babies are only distant relatives. Fossil evidence and DNA analysis show that their lineage split from ours around 50 million years ago. Yet they share with us many key derived characteristics: binocular vision, with the eyes both pointing forward; an upright body posture; differentiation of the limbs between hind legs and feet for locomotion, and arms and hands for gripping; and soft pads and nails on the tips of their digits, instead of claws. We usually thin...

Thomas Malthus was one of the first to write on economics, but he is also almost invisible in conventional economic discussions.  I am inclined to think that this is because his idea is both simple and uncongenial to both Marxist and most Capitalist theories of the economy.  Reduced to its essence, his idea is that humans can reproduce faster than our means of sustenance can increase.  Darwin took this idea and made it the core of his theory of evolution. Neglect of Malthus cannot be explained by lack of confirmatory data.  The Chinese adoption of the "one child" law was draconian, but it is probably the most successful economic policy in human history.  It took decades, but China went from being a high fertility and desperately poor country to an economic superpower.  Many advanced countries achieved the same things by less drastic measures, but the data clearly shows that high fertility destroys economic progress and low fertility promotes it. Low fertili...