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Monday, December 08, 2003
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 Stuart Kauffman writes: For the better part of a year and a half, I've been keeping a notebook about what I call autonomous agents. An autonomous agent is something that can act on its own behalf in an environment. Indeed, all free-living organisms are autonomous agents. Normally, when we think about a bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient we say that the bacterium is going to get food. That is to say, we talk about the bacterium teleologically, as if it were acting on its own behalf in an environment. It is stunning that the universe has brought about things that can act in this way. How in the world has that happened? As I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just a physical system; it's just a bunch of molecules that hang together and do things to one another. So, I wondered, what characteristics are necessary for a physical system to be an autonomous agent? After thinking about this for a number of months I came up with a tentative definition. My definition is that an autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time. Definitions are neither true nor false; they're useful or useless. We can only find out if a definition is useful by trying to apply it to organisms, conceptual issues, and experimental issues. Hopefully, it turns out to be interesting. ... The life cycle of a cell is simply amazing. It does work to construct constraints on the release of energy, which does work to construct more constraints on the release of energy, which does work to construct even more constraints on the release of energy, and other kinds of work as well. It builds structure. Cells don't just carry information. They actually build things until something astonishing happens: a cell completes a closed nexus of work tasks, and builds a copy of itself. Although he didn't know about cells, Kant spoke about this 230 years ago when he said that an organized being possesses a self-organizing propagating whole that is able to make more of itself. But although cells can do this, that fact is nowhere in our physics. It's not in our notion of matter, it's not in our notion of energy, it's not in our notion of information, and it's not in our notion of entropy. It's something else. It has to do with organization, propagation of organization, work, and constraint construction. All of this has to be incorporated into some new theory of organization. (12/08/03)
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 Craig Russell writes: While freedom may well be man’s natural state, modern man no longer lives naturally. If we accept the constant blandishments of our current culture – if we continue to participate in the comforts of its rampant and mindless materialism while rejecting perforce honest hard work of the spirit – we must also accept the physical, mental, and spiritual restrictions that culture places upon us. ... Freedom requires responsibility. And yet how many of us are truly willing to take responsibility for our own freedom, for our own lives? How many of us, for example, take true and total responsibility for something as basic and fundamental as our own food, for that essential connection to the earth that sustains our very lives? The vast majority of us depend totally upon Power and its Economic System to provide that for us. We eschew any caring for, or connection to, the land. We’re unwilling to make the effort it would take to produce our own food. We literally refuse to get our hands dirty. We, by and large, much prefer immersing ourselves in the infinite greed of the marketplace and the ease and comforts of “civilized” life it provides – for our cars and our oil furnaces, our roads and our televisions, for our fresh strawberries and pomegranates delivered fresh in the dead of winter. Most of us have lived this way for so long that, like teenagers living off their parents, we simply take for granted the effort, the networks and organizations, that bring those things to us. Just as they don’t really understand what it takes to keep the lights on and put food on the table, we have little if any idea about where food or electricity comes from or how they got here – little if any idea about what, exactly, it took to achieve and maintain this state of being, this level of ease and comfort. And then, wanting the comforts but lacking both true knowledge of (and any responsibility for) them, we complain like spoiled teenagers about the necessary restrictions the System requires of our minds and our lives. We are as dependent on this System, and upon Power, as these teenagers are upon their parents. How then can we rightfully, forcefully, or justifiably claim we have had freedom taken from us when we refuse responsibility even for our own sustenance? Do we want life given to us, or do we want to work to create it for ourselves and take responsibility for it – good or bad, successful or not? We have to pick and choose. We have to decide between our comfortable, easy, oil-based technological lifestyle on one hand and freedom of thought and action on the other. Wealth or simplicity? We cannot have both. We can regain those freedoms we claim to hold so precious only by reclaiming that responsibility, and all responsibility, for our own lives. We don’t have to fight for freedom; we just have to work for it. (12/08/03)
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 New Scientist -- Modified sugar beet is far more environmentally friendly than conventional beet. So concludes a controversial new analysis that is the first to measure the wider impact of such crops, including their contribution to global warming, damage to the ozone layer and toxicity to aquatic life. "Overall, herbicide-resistant GM beet was 15 to 50 per cent better for the environment, depending on what impact was being measured," says Richard Phipps of the School of Agriculture at the University of Reading in Berkshire, UK. Phipps and colleague Richard Bennett say the benefits arise mainly because farmers spray much less weedkiller and pesticide onto GM beet, less often. Thus saving a lot of tractor fuel and reducing the impact on global warming, for example. The findings contradict the recently completed "farm-scale evaluations" in the UK, the largest trials done to compare the effects of GM and conventional crop systems on farmland wildlife. In these, GM beet and oilseed rape turned out to be worse than non-GM counterparts. Maize with GM resistance to a particular weedkiller did better than non-GM maize, but the result may become a moot point as the EU is soon to ban the use of that weedkiller on conventional maize. (12/08/03)
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 BBC Environmental Science -- Scientists in South Korea have found a local fish that could help control the spread of malaria. The fish, called the muddy loach, eats mosquito larvae and can completely remove them from rice fields. The research was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in the US city of Philadelphia. At the same meeting, scientists revealed how they believe farming helped spread malaria. The concept of the muddy loach is simple; find fish which eat mosquito larvae, and put them in lakes and fields where larvae live and breed. Researchers experimented with the fish in several locations in South Korea, in rice-fields farmed both organically and conventionally. They found that by putting enough fish in a field, all the mosquito larvae would be eaten within a day. Muddy loaches are omnivorous and hardy, which the researchers say make them ideally suited to the job. The idea of using fish in this way dates back a century or so, but in recent decades it has fallen out of favour as more modern techniques for combating malaria, such as chemical insecticides, drugs and bednets have taken precedence. But the researchers say muddy loaches could make a significant impact on malaria in East Asia. It could also help in other parts of the world, where there are other fish which could do a similar job, whether in rice fields or in lakes and ponds. And at the end of the malaria season, farmers get to eat the fish as well, fat with all the larvae they have been consuming. (12/08/03)
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 BBC Enviromental Politics -- Countries refusing to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases should face trade sanctions, according to a British independent think-tank. The United States has not signed the Kyoto agreement on climate change and Russia has indicated it may follow. The New Economics Foundation wants the EU to tax imports from these countries because they enjoy a competitive disadvantage as energy costs increase. Signed-up countries are currently meeting in Italy to discuss the treaty. New Economics Foundation spokesman Andrew Simms told BBC Radio 4's Today programme EU countries would be within their rights to "work out the cost of the free ride America is getting" and raise that amount. "There are very few signals the United States understands - they do understand economic signals," Mr Simms added. "There is only a certain amount of time people can go around behaving like teenagers who don't have to care about anybody else," he told Today. "We are about half a century away from being ecologically and economically bankrupt because of global warming." The British diplomat who proposed environmental sanctions 20 years ago, Sir Crispin Tickell, told the programme the United States' refusal to sign the United Nations Climate Change Convention was the "height of irresponsibility". (12/08/03)
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9:07:15 AM 
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2004
Timothy Wilken.
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