Imagine you have a glass of water with a vertical line of three holes in it, and you have absorbent sleeves of varying diameters. If a sleeve is within a certain diameter range, it will cover all three holes, and there are no leaks. If it is too large, it will slide too far up the glass, and one or more holes at the bottom will be uncovered; the glass will leak. If it is too small, it will not slide far enough up the glass, and one or more holes at the top will be left uncovered; again, the glass will leak.

If we pretend the glass is human behavior, the leak is undesirable behavior, and the sleeves are genetic markers, a scientist might excitedly run up with a sleeve of an inappropriate diameter to prevent all the leaks… and exclaim that he’s found a sleeve that causes leaks.

But there is no sleeve that causes leaks. What causes leaks is that the glass has holes in. I’ve never been satisfied that genetic researchers have even attempted to consider alternate hypotheses; the notion that “genes cause things” has been around since the fifties, long before we had any real evidence, and it’s just never really been challenged.

I’ll leave you with this, we see, speak, and hear, through a symbolic lens of illusion… or is it delusion?

(Also, I have no idea why my livejournal friend page is hitting your trackback. There are 9 other readers on that feed. I removed it from technorati to see if that would help, but apologize for the comment spam.)

This is one of my favorite recent science poem finds:

_
Poem Written By an Evolutionist Who Believes in the Soul
They say there are more people living now
on this earth than have ever lived before
which means, in terms of reincarnation,
that some of the people we pass on streets
_
must have been snails or badgers once,
since there are only so many human spirits
to go around—or maybe they were clouds
of atoms drifting through the wet vapor.
_
Perhaps the disgruntled toll booth operator
is the compilation of nine coconut trees and
the cranium of a pterodactyl, plus two lilies
and a salt shaker burnt up in a kitchen fire.
_
And I myself carry the essence of penguins
amid the faint consciousness of a tennis ball,
sharing space with those who were giraffes
and hippos, swatting flies with their fat tails.
_
If so, surely this means too that population
is not just the product of low infant mortality
plus a great deal of unprotected sex, but rather
the graduation of lesser species on their way
_
towards an age when life will float the cosmos
as joyful flutters of immeasurable raw energy,
without memory, light as light but twice as fast,
presiding over the cold stone of dead planets.
_
Michael Meyerhofer

[...] 2008 at 6:53 AM raph_kosterhttp://www.raphkoster.com/2008/07/20/the-sunday-poem-modus-ponens/http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=1841This week’s poem is a meditation on good and evil and faith and logic via Principia [...]

The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens

The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens

The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens