A science fiction story (for the cognoscenti) — answer to the puzzle and a bit more

Comrade Chen we have a serious problem.

Don’t tell me one of our bugs escaped confinement.

Worse.  One of theirs did.  And it’s affecting the PLA (People’s Liberation Army).  Some are turning into pacifists.

It doesn’t kill them?

No. But for our purposes it might as well.

It’s a typical adenoassociated virus (AAV) like we use.

Well, what does the genome look like?

We’ve sequenced it and among other things, it codes for a protein which enters the brain and alters behavior.

What?

Well, the enemy has some excellent biologists, one of whom works on Wolbachia.

What’s that?

It’s a rickettsial organism which changes the sex life of some insects.

I don’t believe that.

Do you have a cat?

Yes.

Well many cats contain another organism (toxoplasma gondi).

So what.

Rats infected by the organism become less afraid of cats.

Another example please.

A fungus infecting carpenter ants causes the ant to leave its colony, climb a tree, chomp down on the underside of a leaf and die, freeing fungal spores to fall on the ground where they can reinfect new ants.

Well what is the genome of the virus?

It has some very unusual sequences, and one which proves that the Wolbachia biologist on the other side has a very large ego.

How so.

Well in addition to the brain infecting protein, there is a very unusual triplet of peptides all in a row.

Methionine Alanine Aspartic Acid Glutamic acid, then a stop codon, then Isoleucine Asparagine, than a stop codon, then Threonine Alanine Isoleucine Tryptophan Alanine Asparagine.  We think that the first two in some way cause readthrough of the stop codons so the protein following the short peptides is made.

Where does the big ego come in?

Sir, proteins can have hundreds and hundreds of amino acids.  People got tired of writing their full names out, so each of the 20 amino acids was given a single letter to stand for it.

M – Methionine

A – Alanine

D – Aspartic acid

What does D have to do with Aspartic acid?

Nothing sir, look on the letters as Chinese characters.

E -Glutamic Acid

I – isoleucine

What about the stop codon between Glutamic acid and Isoleucine

Just regard it as a space.

N – Asparagine

Nooo! ! ! I I’m beginning to get the picture.

Yes sir, it stands for MADE IN TAIWAN

—-

A few years later

Well the Taiwanese biologist outsmarted himself (or herself).   The Taiwanese soldiers wouldn’t fight either as the virus spread.  Most conflicts between nation states pretty much ended (Russia/Ukraine, North Korea/South Korea) etc. etc.  The Taiwanese biologist was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and did receive it in absentia, as every military type in the world was looking for him (or  her), so he (or she) went into hiding, and is believed to be living in an Ashram near Boulder, Colorado.

Unfortunately, the idea of using viruses to change human behavior spread past nation states, and private groups with their own agendas began using it.

The ‘new soviet man’ of the previous century looked rather benign compared to what subsequently happened.

The next story for the scientific cognoscenti will describe the events leading up to the impeachment trial of President Jon Tester in 2028.

 

“A Troublesome Inheritance” – II – Four Anthropological disasters of the past 100 years

Page 5 of Wade’s book contains two recent pronouncements from the American Anthropological Association stating that “Race is about culture not biology”. It’s time to look at anthropology’s record of the past 100 years. It isn’t pretty.

Start with the influential Franz Boas (1858 – 1942) who taught at Columbia for decades. His most famous student was Margaret Mead.

He, along with his students, felt that the environment was everything for human culture and that heredity had minimal influence. Here’s what Boas did over 100 years ago.

[ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 99 pp. 14622 – 14623, 14436 – 14439 ’02 ] Retzius invented the the cephalic index in the 1890s. It is just the widest breadth of the skull divided by the front to back length. One can be mesocephalic, dolichocephalic or brachycephalic. From this index one could differentiate Europeans by location. Anthropologists continue to take such measurements. Franz Boas in 1910 – 1913 said that the USA born offspring of immigrants showed a ‘significant’ difference from their immigrant parents in their cephalic index. This was used to reinforce the idea that environment was everything.

Boas made some 13,000 measurements. This is a reanalysis of his data showing that he seriously misinterpreted it. The genetic component of the variability was far stronger than the environmental. Some 8500 of his 13,000 cases were reanalyzed. In a later paper Boas stated that he never claimed that there were NO genetic components to head shape, but his students and colleagues took the ball and ran with it, and Boas never (publicly) corrected them. The heritability was high in the family data and between ethnic groups, which remains in the American environment.

One of Boas’ students wrote that “Heredity cannot be allowed to have acted any part in history.” The chain of events shaping a people “involves the absolute conditioning of historical events by other historical events.” Hardly scientific statements.

On to his most famous student Margaret Mead (1901 -1978) who later became the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1960). In 1928 she published “Coming of Age in Samoa” about the sexual freedom of Samoan adolescents. It had a big play, and I was very interested in such matters as a pimply adolescent. It fit into the idea that ” “We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.”. This certainly fit nicely with the idea that mankind could be reshaped by changing the system — see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man one of the many fantasies of the left promoted by academia.

Subsequently, an anthropologist (Freeman) went back to Samoa and concluded that Mead had been hoaxed. He found that Samoans may beat or kill their daughters if they are not virgins on their wedding night. A young man who cannot woo a virgin may rape one to extort her into eloping. The family of a cuckolded husband may attack and kill the adulterer. For more details see Pinker “The Blank Slate” pp. 56 –>

The older among you may remember reading about “the gentle Tasaday” of the Philippines, a Stone age people who had no word for war. It was featured in the NY times in the 70s. They were the noble savages of Rousseau in the 20th century. The 1970 ”discovery” of the Tasaday as a ”Stone Age” tribe was widely heralded in newspapers, shown on national television in a National Geographic Society program and an NBC special documentary, and further publicized in ”The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age People in the American journalist, John Nance.

In all, Manuel Elizalde Jr., the son of a rich Filipino family, was depicted as the savior of the Tasaday through his creation of Panamin (from presidential assistant for national minorities), a cabinet-level office to protect the Tasaday and other ”minorities” from corrosive modern influences and from environmentally destructive logging companies.It appears that Manuel Elizalde hoodwinked almost everybody by paying neighboring T’boli people to take off their clothes and pose as a ”Stone Age” tribe living in a cave. Mr. Elizalde then used the avalanche of international interest and concern for his Tasaday creation to create the Panimin organization for control over ”tribal minority” lands and resources and ultimately deals with logging and mining companies.

Last but not least is “The Mismeasure of Man” (1981) in which Steven Gould tore apart the work of Samuel Morton, a 19th century Anthropologist who measured skulls. He accused Morton of (consciously or unconsciously) manipulating the data to come up with the conclusions he desired.

Well, guess what. Someone went back and looked at Morton’s figures, and remeasured some of his skulls (which are still at Penn) and found that the manipulation was all Gould’s not Morton’s. I posted about this when it came out 3 years ago — here’s the link https://luysii.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/hoisting-steven-j-gould-by-his-own-petard/.

Here is the relevant part of that post — An anthropologist [ PLoS Biol. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071;2011 ] went back to Penn (where the skulls in question reside), and remeasured some 300 of them, blinding themselves to their ethnic origins as they did. Morton’s measurements were correct. They also had the temerity to actually look at Morton’s papers. They found that, contrary to Gould, Morton did report average cranial capacities for subgroups of both populations, sometimes on the same page or on pages near to figures that Gould quotes, and therefore must have seen. Even worse (see Nature vol. 474 p. 419 ’11 ) they claim that “Gould misidentified the Native American samples, falsely inflating the average he calculated for that population”. Gould had claimed that Morton’s averages were incorrect.

Perhaps anthropology has gotten its act together now, but given this history, any pronouncements they make should be taken with a lot of salt. In fairness to the field, it should be noted that the debunkers of Boas, Mead and Gould were all anthropologists. They have a heavy load to carry.