Funny old thing, life.

I ran into Steven A Christie, MD, JD online. He wrote a pro-forced-birth book called Speaking for the Unborn, which purports to provide 30 second pro-life rebuttals to pro-choice arguments. I think 30 seconds actually refers to the amount of tiime he spent thinking about them. It's a truly bad book. But he sent me a copy.

And to give it credit, I don't think any other book has made my job drop to the floor from the very first sentence.

Whether or not something’s alive is a purely scientific question that science has fully settled
As I wrote to him, there aren't enough LOLs in the entire universe to cover that one. Just google the phrase Are viruses alive?. Not a bad idea anyway... you can come up with some interesting, informative discussions. I like this one. Funny, the Microbiology Society hosting a discussion about a fully-settled question!

Science in general is not a safe space for binary minds, and biology is the most unsafe space of all. You can make reasonably good arguments a virus like SARS-CoV2 is not alive. But then you find out about the giant viruses, some of which have bigger genomes than some bacteria. And you realize there are mycoplasmas, and Rickettsiae, a continuum all the way up to free-living bacteria.

It's alive! Alive, I tell you!

And on the other end of the size scale, there are entities like the trinucleotide CAG repeat that causes Huntingdon's disease. Is it alive? Well, it reprduces along with the rest of the host genome, the tracts of CAG actually getting longer with successive generations, which is something of a mercy, because it eventually kills the host so quickly they don't pass on the mutant gene. Horrible disease; it killed one of my professors in graduate school. It would be a real stretch to call this thing of molecular mass 1800 g/mol alive. But if you're going to write a nice tight definition of life, better make sure it's excluded. Why you would waste your time on such a quixotic enterprise as trying to define life is a better question.

The point is, it doesn't matter. It has no practiccal significance. Scientists long ago abandoned Plationic questions such as whether something is alive. Christie would have been on firmer ground saying this is not a question scientists debate much any more. Well, we do, but not in conference sessions, we argue about it in the bar at the end of the day's session. It's applying a bright line to a continuum. Always good fun; such problems usually are. But nobody ever told my colleague Jim Van Etten he couldn't, as a biologist, study giant viruses, because they're not alive.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Benny Johnson and Turning Point USA at UNL: stealing people's stuff to own the libs

Image
The newly 'recognized' Turning Point USA UNL chapter have immediately put paid to speculation they might be any different than the other chapters of the alt-right campus freak show, by recruiting the unsavory Benny Johnson as their first speaker. Benjamin Arthur Johnson graduated from the University of Iowa in 2009. Although it's been variously reported he also has a degree in Organic Chemistry, U. Iowa seems to think he only graduated in Psychology . Since he was an honors student, I hoped to find the thesis he is supposed to have written; running that through a plagiarism checker might be a laugh riot. Unfortunately, it seems not to be in their digital repository. Johnson commenced his career with a listicle-laced gala performance of promiscuous plagiarism at Buzzfeed, which led to his firing. He stole from no fewer than 41 articles. Then, after a brief break to let the scandal die down, he got a job at IJR Review . The man has no shame; a hate click, he claims,...
Read more

Dan Whitney, aka Larry the Cable Guy, a short biography

Image
I have known of Dan Whitney, Larry the Cable Guy , longer than most people have. In the car on the way into work at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, we used to listen to one of the usual mostly-talk rock radio shows. Larry would quite regularly call in. His accent fascinated me. Probably because I’ve lived in so many places, I like to try to place accents. Larry the Cable Git's accent was vaguely southern, or was meant to be southern, but I couldn’t place it anywhere in particular in the South. In any case, he’d distorted it so much you could make out only half of what he was saying.  What he was saying was mumbled, consciously transgressive hate.  Later on, I discovered he was was born and grew up in Pawnee City Nebraska, until his preacher daddy hauled him down to Florida. It’s a long story… (1) Daddy issues Daniel Lawrence Whitney, better known by his stage name and character Larry the Cable Guy, was born on February 17, 1963 in Pawnee City, Nebraska, to the Reverend ...
Read more

The Fortenberry slaves: a prelude

Image
Toiling in the mid-morning sun, in a hot, muddy cotton field in Copiah County, in the south of Mississippi, three young African American men, brothers, aged 18, 20 and 22, hoed the rows. It was late June, 1860, and so the men were slaves. The ground was wet from yesterday’s rain, the air heavy, and the men were anxious to finish their work before the clouds gathering on the western horizon flooded the fields with another summer cloudburst. Inside the plantation house, unbeknownst to them, they were being enumerated . James R Fortenberry, the slave-holder, a man of about 35, was listing their important personal details to Elijah Peyton, Assistant Marshall. These details were three; age, gender, and race. The race was officially ‘mulatto’; at that time, and in that place, mulattos were usually the sons or daughters of a black woman raped by a white slave-holder. They had no names, as far as the United States Government was concerned. Instead they would be listed, in Peyton’s elegant,...
Read more