Why should religion get a free ride?

Chris Dillow notes that Gordon Brown is privileging religion:

What is a conscience? This is the question Brown opened when he said that “exercising your conscience will mean for Labour Party members a free vote” on parts of the embryology bill.

But, as Janine asks, why should conscience only permit a free vote here? To take just one example, many Labour MPs consciences might - or should - stop them wanting to put people in jail for 42 days without charge. But there’s little hope of a free vote on the Counter Terrorism bill.

What Brown means by “conscience”, then, is “religious belief.” Which raises the question: why should religious beliefs have a special status in politics that allows MPs free votes when they don’t get them on other grounds?

Why should religion be privileged above other belief systems? Dillow says it shouldn’t be. I go further than that: religious beliefs should be accorded less respect, less status, than for example secular liberal beliefs.

There are about 6 billion people in the world, and about 100 million of them die every year. Most of these people die of diseases, many (or all) of which could be curable over time with medical research. So medical research saves lives, and being against medical research — which opponents of the embryology bill are — kills people. Hitler only killed 50 million or so; these people want 100 million potentially preventable deaths to happen every year.

Most of the religious people who oppose the embryology bill are I suppose in their private lives good and decent people; certainly the vast majority don’t personally go round killing people. Which leads me to the conclusion that although good people do good things, and bad people do bad things, it takes religion to make good people do bad things.

Free will versus science

Quaequam blog has as thoughtful post up about how modern science is dissolving commonly-held notions about free will:

I’m becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that science and our notions about free will are increasingly coming into conflict. On one level that tension does not, and never will be particularly meaningful. Science is unlikely to ever become so adept at understanding our genes, brains, bodies and environment to such an extent that it can predict exactly what anyone is likely to do at any given moment. But on another level, it is likely to throw up all sorts of inconvenient truths such as levels of intelligence and modes of behaviour which have fundamentally chemical bases and can thus be altered in a similar way. We’ve created distinctions between “disorders” and personality traits which are looking increasingly unsustainable. Surely there needs to be some kind of distinction between a negative thing that we should seek to cure or otherwise discourage, and a neutral thing that we should tolerate in a pluralistic society? But that line seems to be becoming increasingly blurred and just as we are having to seriously consider reclassifying some things from the former to the latter, so we may have to consider others going the other way. Or is it to be anything goes?

One point is that the “we” who are going to have to decide how to deal with these issues doesn’t jusdt include the West, it includes societies like China, which might be described as paternalistically authoritarian and will probably have less reluctance to change human brain chemistry if they thing society will benefit from it.

How it will eventually turn out probably depends on what is the most efficient, so that if one society alters human brain chemistry in a way that makes them vastly more efficient than their competitors (e.g. by making people cleverer and harder-working, or less likely to commit crimes) then other societies will have to match them or they will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

All three of my parents were genetic scientists

You know you’re living in the 21st century when someone can say “All three of my parents were genetic scientists“.

Open source and utopia

Is open source software a utopia? If so, what kind:

“Open Source Software: There are days when I can’t figure out whether I’m living in a Socialist utopia or a Libertarian one.” — Alex Future Bokov

Bug Labs

Bug labs seems (potentially, at least) to be very interesting and useful. Think of it as lego for electronic gadgets. Their software is all open source (not sure about their hardware — but I’ve emailed them a query).

They have a store open.

Connect this with fabricators (such as RepRap or Fab Lab) and you have the engine of growth for the 21st century.

Storm: the future of malware

Storm is a program that surreptitiously installs itself on your computer, and when installed, attempts to install copies of itself on other computers on the Internet. it’s a worm, in other words. Unfortunately, Storm is also a very well-designed program. Bruce Schneier explains:

The Storm worm first appeared at the beginning of the year, hiding in e-mail attachments with the subject line: “230 dead as storm batters Europe.” Those who opened the attachment became infected, their computers joining an ever-growing botnet.

Although it’s most commonly called a worm, Storm is really more: a worm, a Trojan horse and a bot all rolled into one. It’s also the most successful example we have of a new breed of worm, and I’ve seen estimates that between 1 million and 50 million computers have been infected worldwide.

Old style worms — Sasser, Slammer, Nimda — were written by hackers looking for fame. They spread as quickly as possible (Slammer infected 75,000 computers in 10 minutes) and garnered a lot of notice in the process. The onslaught made it easier for security experts to detect the attack, but required a quick response by antivirus companies, sysadmins and users hoping to contain it. Think of this type of worm as an infectious disease that shows immediate symptoms.

Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they’re different. These worms spread more subtly, without making noise. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.

One major worry with Storm is that there doesn’t appear to be a good counter to it:

Not that we really have any idea how to mess with Storm. Storm has been around for almost a year, and the antivirus companies are pretty much powerless to do anything about it. Inoculating infected machines individually is simply not going to work, and I can’t imagine forcing ISPs to quarantine infected hosts.

Redesigning the Microsoft Windows operating system would work, but that’s ridiculous to even suggest. We simply don’t know how to stop Storm, except to find the people controlling it and arrest them. Unfortunately we have no idea who controls Storm, although there’s some speculation that they’re Russian. The programmers are obviously very skilled, and they’re continuing to work on their creation.

Oddly enough, Storm isn’t doing much, so far, except gathering strength.

Personally, I’m worried about what Storm’s creators are planning for Phase II.

Me too. Personally I’m worried about the military possibilities of this. If an adversary could infect the majority of computers in another country, and then take them down all at once, it could do enormous damage to that countries economy and social structure. And as computers get more ubiquitous, the problem will only get worse. Countries should be preparing now to defend themselves against malware warfare.

As computers get more powerful and software more complicated, it becomes easier to hide a worm. And as software becomes more autonomous, the danger that malware can do becomes bigger. So I can see malware becoming a major force limiting the growth of computer systems; maybe this will even be big enough to prevent a singularity from happening.

Ouch, the honesty

Eliezer Yudkowsky writes:

At the Singularity Summit yesterday, several speakers alleged that we should “reach out” to artists and poets to encourage their participation in the Singularity dialogue. So at the end of one such session, a woman went up to the audience microphone and said:

“I am an artist. I want to participate. What should I do?”

And there was a brief, frozen silence.

I wanted to leap up and say:

No, no, I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. We’re just calling for greater participation by artists. We can get plenty of credit for being enlightened just by issuing the call. If we really cared what artists thought, we would find some artists and ask them questions, not call for artists to participate. We don’t actually want to hear from artists. We think your opinions are stupid.

Artificial organism can make proteins

A number of groups of scientists are trying to build artificial organisms.

One team is led by Dr Giovanni Murtas, at the Enrico Fermi research centre at Roma Tre University. They are using the “bottom-up” approach of putting together lots of simpler molecules to make a cell. Recently they have got their proto-cell to make proteins:

To the untrained eye, the tiny, misshapen, fatty blobs on Giovanni Murtas’s microscope slide would not look very impressive. But when the Italian scientist saw their telltale green fluorescent glint he knew he had achieved something remarkable - and taken a vital step towards building a living organism from scratch.

The green glow was proof that his fragile creations were capable of making their own proteins, a crucial ability of all living things and vital for carrying out all other aspects of life.

The achievement is a major advance for the new field of “synthetic biology”. Its proponents hope to construct simple bespoke organisms with carefully chosen components.

Dr Murtas, at the Enrico Fermi research centre at Roma Tre University in Italy, and Pier Luigi Luisi aim to build a living thing from the bottom up. “The bottom-up approach has the possibility of creating living systems from entirely non-living materials,” said Tom Knight, an expert in synthetic biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Italian team’s advance is to make simple cells which are essentially bags made up of a fatty membrane containing just 36 enzymes and purified ribosomes - microscopic components common to all cells which translate the genetic code into protein. The primitive cells are capable of manufacturing protein from one gene.

The team chose a fluorescent green protein found in jellyfish because it was easy to see, using a microscope, when the protein is being made. “We are trying to minimise any system we put in place for the cell,” said Dr Murtas. “We can prove at this point that we can have protein synthesis with a minimum set of enzymes - 36 at the moment.” He hopes the project will teach him about the earliest stirrings of life in Earth’s primeval slime some 3.5bn years ago.

(link from Slashdot)

More people work in services than agriculture

From Slashdot:

For the first time since the invention of agriculture, farming is not the biggest sector of the global economy — services is. (Aggregate employment numbers often divide the economy into agriculture, industry, and services.) Workers are now moving directly from agriculture to services, bypassing the traditional route of manufacturing.”

On a related note, I read a few years ago that for the first time, most people are living in cities.

You know you’re living in the 21st century when…

… people predict artificial life may be possible within ten years:

Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer. Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of “wet artificial life.”

“It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it,” said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. “We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.”

(Link from Slashdot)