Genetics Versus Choice in Politics

Charles Gibson, from ABC News, interviewing Sarah Palin asked her about homosexuality, giving her the choice between genetic or learned.  Palin dodged the question, but I got to wondering about the implication of that question.  I assume Gibson was using it as a touchstone question for gauging just how conservative Palin might be.  Conservatives want to believe everything in life is a choice and that we’re morally judged by our behavior.  Liberals consider some behavior genetic and believe that changes how society should be run.

What if some behavior was absolutely proven to be genetic?  How would that affect politics?  Scientists often say they have found a genetic link to various diseases and conditions, but I don’t think all people accept science at this level as being true.  To many people it’s as vague as understanding the theory of evolution.  What would it take for science to convince the majority of people that genetics is a fact of life?  Most people accept the science of aerodynamics even though they don’t understand it because they buy airline tickets.

If the science of genetics evolved to the point with near 100% accuracy to predict future behavior from pre-natal testing would that be convincing?  If all pregnant women got a blood test and one of the factors given was a 75% chance of having a homosexual kid, and studies later showed that 75% of those kids did indeed turn out to be homosexual, would conservatives accept the science of genetics and its implications?

We know that conservatives can radically alter their positions – Sarah Palin is proof of that because accepting her as suitable for commander in chief asserts an acceptance of radical feminist ideals from forty years ago.  If homosexuality is proven to be part of nature, will conservatives accept that and love their gay and lesbian kids?  Or will their loathing of homosexuality change their position on abortion?

What if the science of genetics goes further.  What if genetic testing could predict that children will become atheists, criminals, terrorists or even Democrats or Republicans?  Will fundamentalists be willing to abort Democrats as fetuses, or a family of Yellow Dog Democrats want to abort a young Republican?

Am I an atheist because of genetics or choice?  Growing up I thought at age 12 I was making a decision on my own to abandon primitive superstition, but as I’ve grown older I’ve sometimes wondered if atheism isn’t just my nature.  I went to the same schools as my peers, and went to church with them too, so why do 90% of boomers think about God, and us other 10% don’t?  Maybe there’s a constant 10% of skeptics in every generation, no matter what the educational system is like.  Would pro-life fundamentalists accept abortion if they thought they could stomp out atheism in a few generations?

Or would conservatives feel less threatened if they knew that homosexuals and atheists were just weird breeds in the population like Calico cats.  I’m not the kind of atheist that wants to convert religious people.  I believe that genetics makes some people religious and it does no good to try and make them scientific.  To me, atheists who try to convert for their cause are like religious people who try to shanghai people into their belief systems.  I’d like to believe if people read and study enough on a subject they will come to their own conclusions, but I don’t know if that’s a scientific truth.

What I would like is a political system that allows everyone to pursue their on beliefs as long as they don’t interfere or harm other people and their beliefs.  And I think that was what the American founders intended for our American way of life.  The problem we face today is some people think their personal beliefs, maybe genetic in origin, should be how 100% of people should believe and those beliefs should be codified into law.  Some of the extremes of this thinking would like to get rid of homosexuals, atheists, liberals and environmentalists.

To these thinkers, that’s the path to a successful government and a happy population.  But think about this.  If GM and Ford, and the auto unions had supported conservation and environmental recommendations from back in the 70s and 80s instead of seeking to politically change laws to meet their own self interests they wouldn’t be heading down that steep economic decline towards bankruptcy.

I know this illustration might sound like it’s coming out of left field, but hear me out.  What I’m saying is government laws that were meant to protect all people would have been much more beneficial to the special interests of the auto industry if they had not interfered.  The American auto industry inflicted it’s own near mortal wounds by getting laws customized for their way of thinking.  If they had had to compete with world auto makers under the laws that were meant to help everyone, they would still be prosperous today.

Whether our behavior is learned or programmed by genes, it should not matter to our laws.  We need laws designed for the common good that ignore special interests.  We need to accept diversity and account for it in our legal system.  Gays getting married should not affect fundamentalists who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, if we have a system that allow for both.  To me the solution is simple.  Have two kinds of marriages, the first, a basic legal marriage that meets state and federal laws, good for all people, and a second marriage within churches that meet the laws of their gods, for those people that have extra special interests.

My mother-in-law never believe my wife and I were properly married because we weren’t married within the Catholic Church, but the laws of the nation believe we are married.  If I believed like my mother-in-law, I would have converted and gotten married in the Catholic Church.  The law of the land would have no affect on that.

By the special interest beliefs of Catholics, anyone not married in the Catholic Church is not married.  Should that be the law of the land?  See my point.  This world will never know which religion is right so we have to create laws that work for all religions.  We need generalized rules for laws, and let people pick their own specialized beliefs that they keep to themselves.

I don’t know if our behaviors are programmed or created by our free will, but should that affect the political system?  We need a system that works either way, or any combination of the two.  As long as I can be an atheist I don’t care if other people are Christian, Jew, Muslin, Pagan or Hindu.  Governor Palin should have said to Charlie Gibson, “It doesn’t matter if homosexuality is learned or genetic, the American way should protect them to the fullest extent of the law.”  Our only enemies that we should abort are those that threaten us physically or interfere with our ability to pursue happiness through American ideals.  Those are the true terrorists, whether from outside of the country that want to attack our way of life, or criminals that want destroy our system from within.

Jim

Has Reading With My Ears Ruined My Desire To Read With My Eyes?

I have hundreds of unread books sitting on my shelves wagging their tales anxious to be read, but of the 28 books I “read” so far this year, only one was read with my eyes.  And that one, Marsbound by Joe Haldeman, was read as a magazine serial.  Had it been available on audio at the time, like it is now, I wouldn’t have read any printed books this year.  Of the 39 books I read last year, only two were printed.  Before I discovered audio books on digital players through Audible.com in 2002, I read on average 6-12 books a year.  After digital audio, I’m reading 35-55 books each year.

I read more audio books now because, one, I can multitask reading with walking, driving, doing the dishes, eating alone, and other quiet mindless activities.  Second, I listen to more books than I read because I’m enjoying them more.  When I was kid I was a real bookworm, often reading a book a day for weeks at a time.  I discovered a lot of fun books back then, but I have since reread some of those books on audio and discovered I missed a lot from reading too fast and poorly.  Third, audio books got me out of my science fiction rut and into a wider range of literature because listening gives me the patience to read books with my ears that I would never take the time to read with my eyes.  Fourth, and this is the most important, I think I experience books better through audio because I’ve discovered I’m not a very good reader, and the quality of audio book narrators have constantly improved in recent years and I flat out prefer listening to a great reader than doing a botched up job myself.

Now, the the question is:  Has reading with my ears destroyed my desire to read with my eyes?  When the seventh Harry Potter book came out last year I raced through it like everyone else, so I know I can still enjoy eyeball reading, but the whole time I wished I had waited for the audio edition to arrive from Amazon. 

To force myself to read a book with my eyes, I bought Incandescence, a new novel by Greg Egan.  I was in the mood for some cutting edge science fiction and it wasn’t available on audio.  And, I am enjoying reading it.  I read slower than I used to – that’s something listening has taught me.  But as I go through the sentences I can’t help but think this book would sparkle far greater if I was hearing it read by a fine reader.

So, have audio books become a crutch?  Or have I just discovered a better way of experiencing books and have become addicted?  If EMP killed off all the iPods in the world I think I’d want to try and recreate audio books in the old fashion way.  I’d want someone to read to me, or I’d want to learn how to read aloud and try to dramatically present stories like the narrators I love so much to hear.

Yet, if this return-to-the-19th-century catastrophe happened I might end up reading more books because all the computers and televisions would be out of commission too.  I started reading like crazy in junior high school when I outgrew Gilligan’s Island and I wanted to break away from my family unit.  I had lots of time and even though I had plenty to do, I preferred the laziness of reading.

In our society, literacy is a virtue, but being a kid gorging himself on science fiction does not confer a lot of social status.  It was plain old escapism.  If iPods and Audible had been invented in 1965 I would have grown up listening to books, and I would have listened to better books than I had been reading.

I’m currently listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.  That’s one book I would never read with my eyes, but if I had read it and The Age of Innocence at 13, I would have had a much better understanding of those scary junior high girls.  I think I’m a much better person at 56 for reading Wharton.  That wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for audio books, and I was an English major during my college years.  I had a hard time reading classic novels – I kept hoping they’d assign fun modern novels, but they didn’t.  If I had gotten to hear the classics back then I would have been a much better literature student.  I know this is true because when I took three Shakespeare classes I listened to the plays on LPs and aced my exams, plus I admired the writing so much more.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not suggesting you should give up reading with your eyes.  I think many people are better than I am at reading.  I just discovered late in life, at around 50, that I was a lousy-ass reader.  When I do read now, I do try harder try to hear what I’m seeing.  That requires reading slower and thinking about the dramatic quality of the sentences in front of me.  I wish I could read like Jeff Woodman or Jim Dale, but I don’t.

Last night I pulled down several novels that I’ve been meaning to read and read a few pages from each.  I admired the writing but I realized I would never read them.  Middlemarch, Vanity Fair and Call It Sleep are just too dense for me to read with my eyes.  I brought them to work today and put them on our book give-away table.  They disappeared in a few minutes and I hope they have found good homes.

Audio books have greatly enriched my life.  I truly don’t think they have ruined my urge to read with my eyes, because that urge was already fading.  Without audio books I’d probably continue reading 6-12 books a year for the rest of my life.  Before I turned fifty I was thinking I might only read another 200 books before I died, and wondered why I owned 1,200 and was buying more all the time.  I’ve already listened to more than that planned 200, so audio books have already expanded my reading lifetime. 

My desire to “read” books is greater than any other time in my life, but strangely I’m going to stop buying books, ones printed on paper, that is, because they will sit on my shelves, unread, and I’m feeling way too guilty to add any more lonely unread pages.

Jim

True Blood

You’d think the public would have put a stake through the heart of vampire stories long ago but as long as creative new repackaging like the Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer and HBO’s new series True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries come along, the undead will continue to haunt us.  I have to admit that I have a life-long prejudice against vampire stories.  Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula was a cliché when I was a kid, and the concept seemed tired even back in the 1950s.  I was arm-twisted into give the living dead another chance with Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which I truly admired, and that taught me to be more open about vampire stories.

The world of literature is full of recycled plots, characters and concepts.  Who would have ever thought that millions of books could have been written around the concept of the private detective?  True Blood blends murder mystery with the occult.  I guess some ideas are primal and go back as far as the origins of consciousness.  Being killed by a bite to the throat may even be an ancestral memory from when we were animals.  And isn’t it interesting that Christian symbols are weapons against these evil creatures of the night?  Especially since both myths use blood as the conduit of resurrection.

I did not intend to get into another HBO series, but I just happened to be in front of the TV when the premier episode started and within seconds I was hooked.  Right from the beginning I was thinking, “Geez, this is great storytelling.”  We’re not talking Shakespeare here, but A-1 quality Weird Tales.  Just high octane lurid pulp fiction, told with humor and a sense of style. 

Vampires have come out of the crypt and are demanding their civil rights, and humans are all over them seeking kinky sex, historical knowledge and even their blood.  Vampire blood is rumored to have some of the same kind of properties that Chinese herbalists claim for rare animals on the endangered species list and its worth thousands on the black market.

True Blood is about the first vampire moving into the little Louisiana town of Bom Temps.  You can follow the news of these events at Bloodcopy.com, an interesting viral marketing tool for HBO.  Anna Paquin plays Sookie Stackhouse, a young telepathic waitress that is boy crazy for vampires and solves mysteries for The Southern Vampire Mystery book series.  I’m amused that Charlaine Harris shares my last name and birthday, we were even born in the same year, and she lives in this part of the country.  I don’t believe in astrology, but my reading taste seems to be in the same house as her writing.

The first episode of True Blood got me hooked, so I’m anxiously awaiting next Sunday night to see if I’ll keep wanting to watch it.  I had come this close, picture me holding two fingers in a near pinch, to giving up TV this summer.  I’m a TV addict.  Shows as entertaining as True Blood, Pushing Daisies, Big Bang Theory and Mad Men keep me coming back.  I constantly wonder why fiction is so addictive.  I know it’s all make-believe.  I know it’s all pixels on a screen.  I know television is created by the elite of the world to get rich off us couch potatoes.  But I’m mesmerized by good story telling.

I’ve got to admit the vampires are a silly concept.  I could be spending time reading about quantum physics or learning to program rich Internet applications, but instead I flop on the couch and watch Anna Paquin pretend to be telepathic and Stephen Moyer pretend to be a vampire.  Why is that so interesting?  If I knew maybe I could churn out my own vampire stories and become one of those elite people that look down on television watchers but get rich writing stories that get slobs like me addicted.

Jim

Electoral College

An old friend of mine called me today sassing me with jokes about my piece on Sarah Palin.  He’s afraid that too many men are going to use their below the belt brains to make their voting decision.  I carefully informed him that although I found Sarah very attractive physically, I wasn’t going to vote Republican.  He then told me my vote wasn’t going to count anyway.  He said because of the way the Electoral College works, my vote, along with all the other democratic votes, won’t be used because it’s winner take all in each state, and currently Tennessee is running almost 2-to-1 for McCain.  That won’t keep me from voting, but it sure is a downer bit of knowledge.

His state, Florida, is slightly for McCain, but can still go either way.  I wonder if I should move to Florida and register there quickly?  Or would it be better to move to Colorado where the democrats have a slight edge and help them solidify the lead.  (I have no idea what the voter registration rules are, though.)

To play with these fun numbers, I found www.electoral-vote.com for quick statistics on state by state polling.  I wish I knew more about these people to know if their statistics are accurate and if the creators of this web page are biased for either party.  Politics really creates some fantastic web activity, and it’s extremely hard to know what’s real and not real.  Snopes.com is a great place to check rumors of any kind, but during the election it has become a great political lie-detecting tool.

I can understand the theory behind the Electoral College, but I wonder why we can’t have direct voting, instead of using this ancient indirect method.  The Wikipedia article I linked to above is quite fascinating, and gives many pro and con points to the concept.  I can understand some of the pro Electoral College points in the abstract, but I just feel the one person one vote concept is more fair.  I doubt things will ever change, so keeping an eye on www.electoral-vote.com is probably the best way to take the political pulse each day.  If the Electoral College is the whole game, then stats following it are the ones to watch.

Jim

Why Can’t I Play Video Games?

Excitement is turning up all over for the new video game Spore and I’m thinking about buying it.  The trouble is I can’t play video games – at least not modern games.  I could play Space Invaders, PacMan and Galaga back in the arcade days, but for decades now whenever I try to play a popular video game I come to a screeching halt.  It’s like I have a mental block – I literarily have no idea what to do. I guess if I had grown up with video games I’d have a repertoire of gaming skills and it would be intuitive how to start each new game.

Spore seems like just the right kind of game for me since I love evolution and science fiction.  I downloaded and installed with minor difficulty the Spore Creature Creator Trial Edition.  My first stumbling block came when I couldn’t figure out how to launch the program.  It took me awhile to even discover I had a Games area on my Start Menu where the installer put it.  When I finally got the program running I knew enough to know I’m suppose to create a creature, but there are no guidelines as to why and what for.  Do I just add features randomly on a whim?

The same thing happened to me when I bought Civilization, Ages of Empire, Myst, and other trendy games.  They sound wonderful, but when I start them up, I wonder what do I shoot, and how do I avoid being hit.  That’s about all I know.  The last video game I was addicted to was Arkanoid.  Susan, my wife, age 55, plays video games for hours at a time and earns endless satisfaction from them, but then she’s always been adept at games and puzzles.

I can play cards to be social, and I know how to play chess, but my mind just clouds up with boredom when I do.  I find reading about chess far more entertaining than playing it.  Someone once suggested I lacked the gaming gene, and that may be true.  But I want to play.  Video games are the emerging art form of our times and it seems like a shame to miss out on them.  Unlike jazz or impressionistic paintings, the cost of experiencing the art of video games is hours of work and I’m just too lazy or impatient to pay the price.  I feel guilty about that.

I’m afraid if I don’t catch up to the video game world now, it will evolve past what I’ll ever be able to learn, if they haven’t already, and I’ll be shut out from this art form for the rest of my life.  Playing video games might be compared with playing the piano or the guitar, something I can’t do either.  However, guitar players can record their performances and I can enjoy them.  Wouldn’t it be neat if great video game performances could be recorded for people like me to experience?  I imagine watching video games would be a combination of watching a movie and a spectator sport.

Getting old means learning to live with limitations and it’s annoying to discover that I can’t do something nearly all first graders do with ease.  It’s already galling enough to know that my old body can’t handle the physical games I played in school.  I now understand why golf is so popular amongst oldsters.  Not being able to play video games, which require little physical effort, is more telling, since it suggests my mind is going, but it’s more damning than that, it means I’ve lost the will to play.  Now that does make me feel old.

The makers of Spore and other video games should offer free editions with training wheels for us late blooming boomers.  I can picture these games with lots of tutorials and practice sessions.  They need to start with 1 minute practice games, and then move up to 2 and 3 minute games.  Get us hooked and we’ll buy the full package.

Another thing video game makers could do is create video gaming teaching programs.  Analyze the most common features of video game play and create lessons on them.  Or build online gyms for video game training where novices can go and do circuit training to build up their skills.

And I need to build up my tolerance and patience levels.  I need to stop being so wussy and caving in after 45 seconds of frustration.  It’s why I didn’t stick with playing the guitar or any other activity that didn’t feel natural from the first moment.  I wonder if I adapted to playing video games if I could apply the same mental techniques to learning how to play the guitar and other pursuits I gave up on in the past?

Update 9/8/8: I guess I won’t be buying Spore after all. The fury over it’s DRM has convinced me to not bother. I’ll have to find an older game to start my video gaming training.

Jim