One More Big Piece of News

The Trustees voted last night, and now I have tenure. So now I'm "The" Biochemist at SPU, they're stuck with me for a while!

Book Review: 2 Corinthians

Ok, it's not like I'm padding my book review list by counting books of the Bible as books now, but I did just finish the NT Wright Paul for Everyone commentary on 2 Corinthians, so I thought I'd make a blog post to record my finishing it, and to put down a few impressions. It's strange how 2 Corinthians seems patchwork in tone, up one second, down the next, reconciling one second, and berating the next, but the commentary pointed out some important clues I had never seen before: Titus visits Paul at about halfway through the letter, and the tone shifts, then shifts again as Paul's visit becomes imminent. The letter was not written all at once, although it was probably read all at once. This finally makes sense to me. One other big observation is how the entire thrust of the letter is that the Christian life isn't supposed to be perfect -- it's supposed to be a sacrifice.* Paul is arguing against a strain of triumphalist, proto-prosperity gospel that hasn't gone away. One particular challenge to me is how "rough" Paul is. As someone who likes the flourishes of rhetoric and a well-turned argument, it seems he's turning to me and pointing the finger when he reminds us, the power of the gospel is that it needs none of that. This theme comes up in both 1 and 2 Corinthians. I guess I'm a Corinthian at heart. Well, at least it means Paul would've loved me ... even when I exasperated him.

* Yes, that is a reference to the recent happenings on Lost, at least as much as they relate back to the original Christian story ...

Book Review: Nothing to be Frightened Of

Basic parameters: 250-page stream of meditations on death, God, memory, the fear of death, family, philosophy, writing, and death again.

Great first line: "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him."

Times I laughed out loud: 5 (a high mark).

Most prominent quoted writer I knew nothing about previously: Renard, a French journal-writer from the early 20th century.

Scientific anecdotes: Too many to count on one hand.

Scientific worldview of the author: Skeptical of the church, but just about as skeptical of the militant atheists. Therefore, claims to be agnostic but constantly writes from a standpoint of "brave practical atheism," as in, "We all know it's meaningless ..."

Ability of the author to question the validity of the scientific anecdotes forming the basis of his musings: Minimal.

Times the author came right up to Jesus and then said "Well, we all know that's not true" or "Obviously the Gospels were written as fiction": Too many to count on one hand.

Time it took to read the book: 3 days (zoom, I must be making up for lost time).

Most poignant passage: Where the author tries to envision just how much meaning it would give to art if he would just be able to believe some part of the religious meaning behind it. I'm rooting, "You can do it! Read N.T. Wright! Read John Haught! Your countrymen! They speak your language!!" But no, it's just wistful conjecture that all too soon segues into another topic.

Blogging about U2

Here's a very nice collection of bloggers writing about U2:
http://thehurstreview.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/with-a-shout-celebrating-u2/

My U2 fandom is more focused on Achtung Baby, when the band went "dark" but also gained Technicolor sound. I was most excited in U2 3D when for the encore the unique guitar chords of "The Fly" started up and the video screens erupted in a thousand colors. You may gather from this that I'm one of those people who actually really like Pop, warts and all. Even Zooropa has its moments for me. So "Medieval U2" is my U2 of choice ... but I'm still excited about a new record coming out, believe me.

Favorite underappreciated U2 song: the B-side "Slow Dancing."

Favorite underappreciated U2 song on an actual album: "For the First Time." (This depends on whether you consider Zooropa an "actual album" or not.)

Favorite band that out-U2's U2: The Violet Burning, specifically on Demonstrates Plastic and Elastic. This is a classic album that shamelessly rips off and mixes up the sound and feel of both Rattle and Hum and Achtung Baby, making it simultaneously familar and new. I think they're better than U2 -- for those who wish U2 had kept in the Achtung Baby phase (anyone? anyone?), this should satisfy.

Plant Intelligence

Consider how the sunflower turns to the sun. It detects light and adjusts its structure to maximise how much energy it catches. This is an example of plant intelligence. Ok, it should still be an insult to call someone as dumb as a stump. But that stump has (or, more precisely, the living tree before had) some hidden, slow intelligence that, though it may not be obvious, is intelligence nonetheless.

The question that reveals the sense in which plants can be considered intelligent is pretty simple: How do plants choose where they grow? They don't just blindly put down roots and hope for the best. Different plants do this in different ways, but there are clearly some computations going on when a plant decides which way to send roots, stems, leaves, so that resource acquisition is maximized. In doing so the plant computes pros and cons and "decides" which way to go, and it's right in its calculations in surprisingly sophisticated ways. Plants know how to find light, water, and the kind of soil they need.

This is the gist of one of the essays in the recently reviewed book The Deep Structure of Biology. And I'm not sure about the term "intelligence" really. "Computation," sure. But intelligence seems a higher standard. Yet, which gardener among us hasn't felt outsmarted by weeds?

At the very least, talking about plant intelligence should help us define what intelligence is not. If plants have a rudimentary intelligence, it is built around resources (light, water, soil) and not around communication. So don't talk to your plant. Unless it makes you feel better. But do water it.

Without really taking a stand on the prospects for a full-blown "plant intelligence," I'd like to jump to conclusions and draw a heedless parallel or two. I'm reminded of 2 Kings, when Elisha and his servant are in a city under siege by the Samarian Army. The servant is understandbly worried. Elisha tells him to look up, and the servant suddenly sees an army of angels all around, filling the hillside. You can take this story in two wrong ways: you can run with it to try and figure out how angelic armies work, or you can allegorize it and try to explain what it means, even though you believe the angels weren't really there, they just symbolized something. Both of those strategies undermine the passage, but I'm interested in what it says. It says there are unseen intelligences hidden around us. The intelligence of plants is one way (and ONLY one way) in which intelligence might be hidden around us. Clearly, plants are not angels, and if we start eliding the two we're gonna drift into animism. But both are represented as creations, with different levels of intelligence, put here by a creator. I'll have to think a while to unpack what that means. It implies a rich and responsive creation, I'll tell you that.

Maybe an image of what it means would be better than a proposition. Think of the end of Prince Caspian, when the trees come alive and march onto the battlefield. Or the March of the Ents in The Lord of the Rings. I think the writings of Lewis and Tolkien about nature may actually accord somehow with research into plant intelligence. IF and only if it turns out to hold water scientifically. I am no judge of that, having never taken a botany course.

There's nothing conclusive here. It could be that plants are unintelligent, that an apple tree is no more intelligent than an Apple II computer. If so, we're left with the wonder of watching a sunflower turn its face toward the sun, how at the very least that's a wonderful and beautiful process. I'm OK with that too -- the world is rich and responsive as we understand it now. If there's something to be gained from scratching the surface of plants and peering into their inner workings, let's take a look and see.

Book Review: The Deep Structure of Biology

This is an anthology of essays, edited by Simon Conway Morris, evolutionary paleontologist and (dare I put it this way) natural theologian. Its first half/two-thirds is mostly review articles of biology studies that, put together, may argue that there are significant constraints on how evolution can proceed, that it's not quite as mindless of purposeless as others make it out to be. The last third is more philosophical and theological, talking about the compatibility of Darwin's theories with purpose in the universe. There is a significant biological slant overall, and some interesting findings that, not being a biologist, I'm not in much of a position to critique intelligently. There's essays about evolving flasks of bacteria in a lab, the shapes of trees (both big real trees and the evolutionary tree-of-life constructs), plant intelligence, ant intelligence, crow intelligence, and whale intelligence. The idea that the world is alive with intelligence and, well, not quite consciousness but complicated networks of self/non-self discrimination ... I want to hear more about it and so I'll keep an eye out for these subjects. And don't worry, I'll blog more about plant intelligence soon, so you don't think I've completely gone off the deep end. Yet.

Overall, it's a bit uneven but I think it's to be expected with the diversity of authors and subjects. When I started on the essay by Michael Ruse it was like stepping into the sunlight from the dank stodginess of the previous essay. There's definitely better essays than others. I recommend those by Conway Morris, Ruse, and Haught (quickly becoming a John Haught fan the more I read of his stuff). In fact, I'm going to have three follow-up posts full of ideas suggested by this book over future days.

Another overall observation is that some of the scientists seem to be dragged into writing essays against a part of their will. After a very interesting essay on ant intelligence, one scientist felt compelled to tack on a one-page disclaimer about how any seeming intelligence was only an illusion. Well, that's the question, isn't it? Such dogmatic assertions don't really fit in the context of this book. Haught and others implicitly deal with these struggles in the final chapters, so I can give the book a thumbs-up for overall organization, and in fact, I would have liked to see more cross-pollination of ideas from author to author. I just want a greater rate of diffusion for the ideas, so the good ones survive and the bad ones go extinct!

Having a baby definitely means I took longer than usual to read this book, but don't take that as a critique. It's really a step in the right direction. I'll be looking for more to see if there's anything to this crow intelligence stuff (so that time that one crow kept attacking me as I walked near Green Lake was personal???).

More to come on specific subjects.

Microsoft + Music = ?

Microsoft is working on Songsmith, a program that will take the tune you sing and make music to fit it.

The following demonstration of the technology needs no explanation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwiaVXVlUQ4

The videos where people have fed classic tunes into Songsmith and recorded the results are just as "good." I like "Roxanne" and "Hotel California" myself.

In the words of Darth Vader, "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed."

...

(You know, I actually could imagine using this for a kind of musical notetaking ... but not for making an ad ...)