Weekly Reader

A pair of interesting articles today I am reposting because they made me think in a different way about some issues that are important, but over-discussed. Basically I thought there was nothing new under the sun when it came to editorials on ObamaCare and evolution….perhaps not.

If You Think ObamaCare’s Bad Now, Wait Until You Have to Live With It.

The first is on the hot debate of the week, ObamaCare. Aside from the mind blowing corruption that has officially worn America’s patience for big, bloated, and unresponsive government, the big news is that it’s probably going to pass.

And forgetting about all the details, costs, regulations, and shadiness of it, it is often said that just like Social Security or Medicare, people will eventually be for it, even though they’re bankrupt. So is ObamaCare the same? I always argued that I’m not for those programs either, at least not when 33 trillion of it is unfunded and it’s about to crash.

But the article “Why ObamaCare would Fail” (aside from showing life under ObamaCare won’t be too great) says that, in fact, it’s nothing like Social Security. And I have to say I hadn’t identified this gigantic difference…

While it’s true that Social Security and Medicare have remained popular even as the programs threaten to bankrupt the country, they are different from Obamacare because at least conceptually, everybody pays into them and everybody receives benefits.

Yet Obamacare would be a welfare program in which one segment of the country receives benefits, while others have their coverage disrupted, and are punished with higher taxes, longer wait times, and poorer quality of care. - Full article

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Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Evolution is Wrong

This article just kept me enthralled. One of the few things that discusses evolution in the same ways I think about it.

It claims that evolutionary thinking is going through a revolution. Completely changing everything we think we understand.

Not a day goes by where they haven’t identified a gene or the evolutionary reason for every action and feeling we have. The end result, is really we don’t have free will….a pretty major bummer, but it’s the only take you’ll find, even though something inside you knows it makes no sense. Even if you believe in evolution.

Here’s some great excerpts.

For much of the late Noughties, a week never seemed to pass without one new book or news story attributing some facet of modern-day life to the evolutionary past: men were more prone to sexual jealousy than women because a woman who conceives becomes unavailable for imminent future acts of reproduction; men preferred women with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7 because of natural selection.

It explained music and art and why we reward senior executives with top-floor corner offices (because we evolved to want a clear view of our enemies approaching across the savannah).

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Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.

The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze. They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment.

The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature’s traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn’t news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what’s news is that those changes can be inherited. And this doesn’t, of course, apply only to chickens: some of the most striking findings come from research involving humans.

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A single period of extreme overeating in the midst of the usual short supply, researchers found, could cause a man’s grandsons to die an average of 32 years earlier than if his childhood food intake had been steadier. Your own eating patterns, this implies, may affect your grandchildren’s lifespans, years before your grandchildren – or even your children.

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Darwin, writing before the discovery of DNA, knew very well that his work heralded the beginning of a journey to understand the origins and development of life. All we may be discovering now is that we remain closer to the beginning of that journey than we’ve come to think.

Read the complete (and lengthy) article over at The UK’s The Guardian