UNR Students for Liberty » Science

Patents on Human Genes

Barry Belmont — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:59:01 +0000

Today the ACLU, PUBPAT, and the U.S. Solicitor General made their arguments appealing a decision made a few years back to allow companies the right to patent human genetics.

The ACLU and PUBPAT brought a lawsuit in May 2009 against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation, which hold the patents on two human genes related to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2. The lawsuit charges that the patents restrict both scientific research and patients’ access to medical care, and that patents on human genes are illegal because genes are “products of nature.” The groups brought the case on behalf of breast cancer and women’s health groups, individual women, geneticists and scientific associations representing approximately 150,000 researchers, pathologists and laboratory professionals.

Their arguments can be heard below

The obvious answer to this whole situation is that genes are merely information, and possessors of information should not be given a government writ to punish those who know as much as they do.

‘Capitalist Science’

Barry Belmont — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 22:37:46 +0000

The two key lifestyle choices in my life — science and ‘libertarianism’ — often coexist in a peaceful harmony with one another. Their mutual emphasis on free expression, evidence, and procuring accurate pictures of the human condition lead to a synergy in so many aspects that I’m rarely at a loss for how to approach any particular topic. Unfortunately they come smashing into one another over the issue of scientific funding: the question “How will the scientific enterprise be funded?” is one that leaves me uncomfortable and ceding the issue to less biased minds.

Recently, however, a researcher by the name of Bruce Knuteson has called for a moving away from the current “socialistic” science that we currently enjoy today toward a “capitalistic” one. His arguments can be seen in the paper linked below. As I still consider myself too biased (in both directions) to properly consider the issue, I thought I would pose the issue here to see if the bright minds of the burgeoning libertarian movement have an answer to the question “In what ways can science be funded that will benefit the human condition?”

xkcd: Pseudoscience and Economics

Barry Belmont — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 22:10:54 +0000

If you haven’t seen this yet, you should:

The Tragedy of the Commons

Barry Belmont — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:21:35 +0000

So for those of you interested in theory behind the experiment to be conducted today at 12:15, consider this blurb from Garrett Hardin:

The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlet(6) in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd(1794-1852). We may well call it “the tragedy of the commons,”using the word “tragedy” as the philosopher Whitehead used it(7): “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. Itresides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.”He then goes on to say, “This inevitableness of destiny can onlybe illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in factinvolve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futilityof escape can be made evident in the drama.”

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman willtry to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such anarrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries becausetribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both manand beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally,however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when thelong-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At thispoint, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generatestragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks,“What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds fromthe sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly+1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effectsof overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utilityfor any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fractionof 1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him topursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; andanother. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each andevery rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy.Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increasehis herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is thedestination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own bestinterest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

The (Seventy-)Seven Percent Solution

Barry Belmont — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 18:57:09 +0000

Recently published research out of North Carolina State University has identified a “tipping point” for national debts. That is, at a certain point in which the national debt actually begins to have an adverse effect on economic growth. The results?

If a country’s public debt reaches 77 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), bad things start to happen

At least according to the researchers of the study. The US currently stands (from 1980-2008) at 61 percent and can go one of two ways depending on who you ask:

In other words, the next few years are probably going to be fun to watch. That is, if you manage to avoid being swallowed by your country’s collapsing economy.

UN to Appoint Earth Contact for Aliens

Barry Belmont — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:56:52 +0000

Taken from news.com.au.

THE United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earths first contact for any aliens that may come visiting.

Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN’s little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire.

She is scheduled to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before – and that means the UN must be ready to coordinate humanity’s response to any “first contact”.

During a talk Othman gave recently to fellow scientists, she said: “The continued search for extraterrestrial communication, by several entities, sustains the hope that some day humankind will receive signals from extraterrestrials.

When we do, we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination.”

Professor Richard Crowther, an expert in space law and governance at the UK Space Agency and who leads British delegations to the UN on such matters, said: “Othman is absolutely the nearest thing we have to a ‘take me to your leader’ person.”

However, he thinks humanity’s first encounter with any intelligent aliens is more likely to be via radio or light signals from a distant planet than by beings arriving on Earth. And, he suggests, even if we do encounter aliens in the flesh, they are more likely to be microbes than anything intelligent.

Vaccinations: Part 1 of Several

Barry Belmont — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 22:47:59 +0000

So, being an avid follower of the Skeptic’s movement for a good portion of my life, I have been bombarded with refutations of “anti-vaxers” for the past several years. For some reason, I have tried to pay it little mind, usually placating myself with “Well, it’s just a parent’s decision to raise their child” much as I would for most anything else, such as education or moral upbringing.

Well, this report out of Africa about measles taking the lives of 70 children because their parents refused to have their children vaccinated was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I can no longer placate the voice in my head that has constantly hummed that “this is wrong, this is wrong.”

So consider this the prelude to case I’ll harp on for the coming weeks: Vaccinations should be mandatory. I know this is a bold claim to make in the face of us live-and-let-live libertarians, but consider, just briefly, that we all must first “live” to be libertarians. And we can’t very well do that, or we shouldn’t very well have to do that as children, without vaccines.

The Effects of Authority: The Milgrim Experiment

Barry Belmont — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 20:31:00 +0000

If you want to feel sad, angry, and hopeless over the nature of the human condition, watch these three segments (about 15 minutes total) from a BBC documentary about aggression. In it the film makers replicate the infamous Milgrim Experiment wherein a subject is persuaded to inflict extraordinary harm on another human being by the mere presence of an authority figure.

Thus it is sadly not inconceivable that people (normal, fine, decent people) when placed in certain situations are all too capable of actions that would cause the sun to grow cold with horror.

Moral Objectivism, Stated Eloquently

Barry Belmont — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:31:36 +0000

There are such things as objective moral truths. For anyone who disagrees:

Physicists Study How Moral Behaviour Evolved

Barry Belmont — Sun, 09 May 2010 16:54:07 +0000

This article originally appeared on the physicsworld.com news section [hence, the British-ism in the title]. It is written by Edwin Cartlidge, a science writer based in Rome. For those of you with a particular interest in the ‘game theory’ approach to the development of social cohesion.

Physicists Study How Moral Behaviour Evolved

A statistical-physics-based model may shed light on the age-old question “how can morality take root in a world where everyone is out for themselves?” Computer simulations by an international team of scientists suggest that the answer lies in how people interact with their closest neighbours rather than with the population as a whole.

Led by Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the study also suggests that under certain conditions, dishonest behaviour of some individuals can actually improve the social fabric.

Public goods such as environmental resources or social benefits are often depleted because self-interested individuals ignore the common good. Co-operative behaviour can be enforced via punishment but ultimately co-operators who punish will lose out to co-operators who don’t punish because punishing requires time and effort. These non-punishing co-operators then lose out to the non co-operators, or free riders. With free riders dominant the resource is depleted, to the detriment of everyone – a scenario known as “tragedy of the commons”.

How, then, does co-operation arise? Some researchers have proposed that co-operators who punish could survive through “indirect reciprocity”, the idea that working for the common good will enhance a person’s reputation and ensure that they benefit in the future. Helbing’s group, however, has shown that this is not needed for co-operation to flourish.

Emergent phenomena

They came to this conclusion by focusing on how individuals behave with their nearest neighbours, rather than a wider group that is representative of the entire population. Like nearest-neighbour models of magnetism – which are often more realistic than mean-field approximations – they say that this approach captures “emergent” phenomena that would otherwise be lost.

Their game-theory-based model comprises a square lattice of tens of thousands of points, each representing an individual. Each individual could adopt one of four strategies – co-operate without punishing free riders; co-operate and punish (“moralist”); free ride; or free ride but also punish other free riders (“immoralist”). Initially, the four strategies are distributed randomly among individuals and the system evolves to find out which behaviour wins in the long run.

This evolution is influenced by three variables – the fines that penalize free riders; the cost of administering punishment; and the “synergy factor”, which stipulates how much the sum of individual contributions is enhanced by collective action.

The computer program picks an individual at random and calculates how much it stands to gain relative to its four nearest neighbours, given the strategies employed by each neighbour. The exercise is then repeated for the neighbours themselves. The strategy employed by each individual was then modified in light of the success of their neighbours, so that individuals could imitate those who performed better than themselves.

Intriguing results

Running the simulation for up to 10 million iterations yielded some intriguing results. As expected, if the punishment fine to cost ratio and synergy factor were low then everyone would eventually become a free rider, just as moralists would prevail if the fine was set high enough. However, they also found that moralists could win out over non-punishing co-operators even if the cost of administering punishment was relatively high. This was because imitation of better-performing neighbours soon led to small clusters of both co-operators and moralists in a sea of free-riders. With moralists better than co-operators at dealing with free riders they came to dominate, even though they would lose out if placed in direct competition with the non-punishers.

An “unholy collaboration” between moralists and immoralists was also seen whereby individuals adopting these strategies could coexist at the expense of both co-operators and free riders. This, the researchers found, would occur if the cost of punishment was low, the synergy not particularly high, and the fines moderately high. As they point out, this scenario is supported by the real-life existence of immoralists.

New type of collective behaviour

Helbing’s colleague, Attila Szolnoki of the Institute for Technical Physics and Materials Science in Budapest sums up the work, “The contribution of statistical physics to this research field could be to realize that large numbers of players can result in a new type of collective behaviour that cannot be derived from two-player analyses. Computer models can therefore be considered as pre-experiments that help to design more sophisticated lab experiments.”

The team is currently building a laboratory capable of carrying out game-theory experiments with up to 36 people, which should allow them to test the predictions of their model.

Herbert Gintis, an economist and game-theory expert at the Santa Fe Institute and Central European University in Budapest, believes that Helbing and colleagues are right to incorporate small-scale interactions into their model. But he says that they should also factor in genetic relations between people because individuals’ behaviours depend on whether or not they are dealing with a close relative.