For my last thread, I want to ask about something trivial but dear to my heart. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, I took over the cooking responsibilities. I kept cooking because I like it. It’s completely different from what I do at work, and I find it useful to have a hobby at which I sometimes succeed and often fail spectacularly; it’s very effective at keeping the ego in check. Come to think of it, it’s not that different from blogging. I know many of you are passionate about food. What was the best meal you’ve ever had? Or, if you prefer, what is your favorite recipe?

Fetal stem cells come from a fertilized human egg, and therefore are morally problematic to many people. But stem cells (of any kind) may lead to an second, even more difficult moral problem. One of the possible uses for stem cells is to custom grow organs for transplant. On the surface this seems like an unambiguously good thing; not only would it provide replacement organs for anyone who needed one, but those organs would presumably be in perfect shape, and if grown using an adult stem cell from the patient’s own body would be a perfect genetic match and would therefore not be susceptible to rejection. But there’s a deep problem lurking here, because it is possible that the technology would allow an aging person to replace his or her organs as they grew old, prolonging life far longer that was previously possible. Given the rapidly increasing expense of medical care, this kind of procedure would almost certainly be extremely costly.

There are several other medical technologies on the horizon with a similar promise. For example, a dietary treatment called calorie restriction has extended both average and maximal lifespan in every species in which is has been tried. Calorie restriction entails a diet which is completely nutritionally adequate but has around 30% fewer calories than normal. The fact that it extends maximal lifespan is quite remarkable, because it implies that calorie restriction does more than just improve health. Modern medicine has dramatically increased average lifespan, from 40 a few hundred years ago to near 80 today. But a few hundred years ago the very oldest people lived to be around 110-120, and improved medicine has not increased that. Increasing maximal lifespan implies that the aging process has actually been slowed down. The oldest known calorie restricted rhesus monkey, for example, lived to be 40 years old; this would be roughly equivalent to a 150 year old human. Furthermore, calorie restriction reduces age related diseases. As a consequence, not only do these animals live longer than normal but they remain healthier. They aren’t invalids; they maintain younger characteristics for longer than their control counterparts.

This is important because we don’t really understand why people age. Well, of course they age because time passes. But we don’t know the biological cause of aging, why at some point after adulthood cells lose their youthful vigor. Is it due to accumulated cell damage caused by free radicals? Is it due to telomeres (parts of your DNA that in part prevent uncontrolled cell growth) getting shorter? Is it due to apoptosis? Or some other reason, or all of the above? Nobody really knows.

No one expects humans to voluntarily restrict their diets, of course. However, the fact that biologists now know of a treatment that slows aging gives them a foot in the door — a way to design experiments that allow them to figure out what causes aging. The hope is that once the mechanism is understood, drugs could be designed that mimic the effects of calorie restriction without requiring the dietary changes. Again, this is likely to be very expensive.

So the questions I want to ask are these. First, what are the social implications of creating a very long lived class of people? How do we choose where to expend our resources, and do we owe it to people to help them live as long as medical science allows, even if that entails great expense? Even if you assume that we do away with public or insurance-based financing of these treatments, there would still be a problem in that we would be allowing the creation of enormous class disparities, only this time it would be in health and lifespan in addition to wealth. These are problems we’re already starting to have; seniors have much higher medical expenses than average, and we haven’t really figured out how to deal with that. We have to deal with this basic question whether any of these technologies pan out or not, and if any of them do the problem will get much much worse. In fact, it sounds like a bad science fiction dystopia.

Second, are there any theological problems here? Is it a problem if peoples’ average lifespan is 150? 200? 300? It’s very unlikely, but it’s at least conceivable that someday aging could be prevented entirely, which would mean that people would die only due to disease or accident. A very careful, very lucky person could be nearly immortal. What would that mean for the plan of salvation?

One of the most common criticism of space exploration is that it’s much too expensive. “Why are we sending all of that money into space when we have so many problems here on earth?” the argument goes. An identical argument can be made against a lot of basic research. Although much spending on scientific research can be justified by the economic or practical benefits that result from it, some simply can’t. It’s very unlikely that anyone will benefit from knowing what dark matter is.

A similar argument can also be made on spiritual grounds; in fact, it’s already come up on The Thread That Would Not Die. God wants us to be charitable to each other. We are to help the poor and visit the sick. We are to preach the Gospel, perfect the Saints, and redeem the dead. Why are we wasting time trying to understand quarks and taking pictures of other planets? Or, for that matter, theorizing about economics or history or art? Sure, we have all of those quotes in the Teachings of the Prophets manuals about gaining knowledge and becoming educated, but most of those either refer to spiritual knowledge or justify education for its practical benefits. For the most part the prophets are silent about the idea that secular or scientific (or artistic or literary or historical) knowledge is innately valuable. So is it? Or is it just a distraction from the real spiritual work of mortal life?

I think God wants and expects us to seek knowledge (all kinds), to make scientific inquiry, and to explore the universe. Here’s why.

• Because gaining knowledge is an attempt to understand God.
• Because it’s childlike. If you are a parent, then you probably have noticed this — children are constantly experimenting, making hypotheses and testing them out. That’s how they manage to figure out the rules the world works by so quickly. Children are the prototypical scientists, and many scientists describe what they do as just a continuation of childhood. I think that when Christ taught that we should be like little children he was referring to having the faith of a child — but maybe there’s room in there for having the wonder of a child as well. Without a little wonder we get jaded. I don’t know about you, but it’s really easy for me to ignore a mushroom growing in my yard, until I start looking at its structure, and realize it’s actually made up of billions of cooperating cells, and that its relatives has been on earth for millions of years, and produce one of the widest range of pharmacological substances of any living thing. We weren’t meant to be jaded.
• Because God is an artist. I alluded to this in a previous post: the universe is unbelievably beautiful. I don’t believe He created it all just for us to appreciate, especially since there’s so much of it that neither we nor anyone else will ever see. But I also don’t think He made it so beautiful without expecting it to be appreciated.
• Because God created us in a way that allows us to understand the universe. Have you ever thought about how surprising it is that a man-made construct, mathematics, can describe the laws by which the world operates? We’re completely used to the idea, but it’s actually so amazing that it took thousands of years to figure out. Until Galileo, in fact. I don’t think God gave us this remarkable ability for no reason. You can make similar arguments for our artistic and musical abilities.

I really want to be eloquent here. I feel like I should be able to. But I can’t, this is the best I can come up with. I’m having a “describe the taste of salt” moment. So here’s my best reason:

On a night when there’s no moon, turn out all the lights and go outside. If you live in a city, drive to somewhere away from the city lights. Let your eyes adjust to the darkness for about 30 minutes. Then look up.

That’s why.

Many of you have chosen to devote your careers to producing beauty or truth. How do you justify yourselves?

What is it about different religions and cultures that allow them to laugh at themselves (or not)? Are we as a people becoming more comfortable with our religion and ourselves? Or is my observation just an unwarranted stereotype?

Until recently, an engineer who wanted to design something would sit down in front of a drafting table, a lab notebook, or a napkin and start drawing. Each part of the object being built would be carefully designed to do its job. And I suspect that’s how most people still think of engineers working. That’s been changing, though. The invention of small, powerful computers has fundamentally changed the way things are designed, in a way that has direct bearing on the debate between evolution and creationism.

As an example consider the microprocessor. The Intel 4004, the first microprocessor and the chip that started the computer revolution, had a few thousand microscopic circuits that were designed and laid out by hand. But microprocessors have become dramatically more complex; the Pentium 5 that most of the computers being used to read this are based on has around 100 million components. There’s no way a human eningeering team could correctly design a chip with that many components; it would take hundreds of years. Instead, the engineers specify certain design parameters about the chip — how fast it will be, how much memory it will have, what operations it will perform, and so on — and then feed those specifications into a piece of software that automatically lays out the components so they meet the specification (of course that’s a dramatic simplification of the design process, but it’s basically accurate). At no time does a human ever lay out individual components. The design emerges naturally out of the design specification and the layout algorithm. The reasons for the new technique are multiple, but the most important are that implicit design takes less time and results in higher performance. In many cases, implicit design allows engineers to solve problems that just weren’t tractable using explicit design techniques.

For lack of a better term I’ll call the older design paradigm “explicit design”, and the newer automatic one “implicit design”. Implicit design isn’t restricted to microchips; it turns up in every kind of engineering. Bridge designers often design girders by mathematically specifying how the girder material reacts to loads and then using a mathematical optimization technique to find the best girder design. Again, the design emerges naturally from the specification and the optimization algorithm. Related techniques are used to design everything from factories to airplanes to robots.

Recently, implicit design has been taken a further step. Before, the engineer would specify a machine’s design parameters at a fairly low level — that bridge girder would be implicitly designed, but it was still designed in isolation, and putting all of the girders together was still the job of the engineer. But a new set of techniques, known as evolutionary algorithms, allows a designer to implicitly design the entire bridge as a unit. All the engineer does is to tell the computer how to tell when a bridge is good, and the computer does the rest. The way this works is that the computer starts with a set of inferior bridge designs, and it evaluates each of them according to the equations given to it by the engineer. It takes the best of those designs and, by combining their features, generates a new generation of bridges. Repeat this a few hundred thousand times and you often end up with a bridge that is significantly better than any known human design. The name “evolutionary algorithms” isn’t a coincidence, of course; the design technique draws its inspiration from biological evolution, and it’s set to revolutionize engineering. Some experts even think that evolutionary algorithms will make computer programmers obsolete, claiming that in the not-so-far future all software will be evolved instead of written.

I don’t know the mind of God, but I do know that He is a better engineer than I am. It seems to me that in the debate between evolution and creation, the burden of proof was often on religious advocates of evolution to demonstrate why God would choose to use such an strange way of creating humans. But now that evolution is being proven to be such a powerful, flexible design technique, the burden of proof is shifting, and maybe it’s now incumbent on detractors to explain why He wouldn’t.

Santa Claus: An Engineer’s Perspective

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau).

At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

Different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical), this works out to 967.7 visits per second.

This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.

This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest manmade vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them. Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.

The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, even if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.

Merry Christmas.

Here’s the story. Matt told me he had a friend who had mentioned the Church’s official stand on stem cell research:

“While the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles have not taken a position at this time on the newly emerging field of stem cell research, it merits cautious scrutiny. The proclaimed potential to provide cures or treatments for many serious diseases needs careful and continuing study by conscientious, qualified investigators. As with any emerging new technology, there are concerns that must be addressed. Scientific and religious viewpoints both demand that strict moral and ethical guidelines be followed.”

In other words, the Church is basically neutral. The friend noted that stem cell research is potentially one of the most difficult and important moral issues of our time. If the prophet can’t give us more certain guidance on an issue like this, then what exactly is his calling?

I couldn’t come up with a good answer to that question then, and I still can’t. As I recall my best shot was that perhaps God expected us, as part of “being anxiously engaged in a good cause”, to partially define our own moral code. But that doesn’t really answer the question. Does anyone have a better answer? Note that the question is not whether stem cell research is good or bad; it’s what the purpose of the prophet is regarding a difficult moral issue.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, here’s a quick primer on stem cells. A stem cell is an undifferentiated cell; in other words, it is the most basic kind of cell and has the theoretical ability to turn into any type of cell in the body — a nerve cell, a heart muscle cell, bone, and so on. In theory, a doctor could use stem cells to grow a custom kidney for transplant. Stem cells may be able to cure diabetes, spinal cord injuries, and any number of degenerative diseases including muscular dystrophy and Parkinsons. So far so good. The moral issue is that the best source for stem cells is a fertilized egg. The egg is allowed to divide briefly and then its cells, which at this point are stem cells, are harvested. As a consequence gathering embryonic stem cells is uncomfortably close to — some would say identical to — abortion. There are other sources of stem cells which don’t have the same moral difficulties, but it is not clear that stem cells from those sources are as versatile. The issue is further muddied by the fact that, at least initially, researchers want to take stem cells primarily from “extra” fertilized eggs that are generated as a result of assisted fertilization. Usually during an assisted fertilization, several eggs are fertilized but not all of them are implanted. The rest are frozen, and are usually never used, and over time degenerate. Supporters of stem cell research argue that using these cells for a beneficial purpose is better than just allowing them to die. Detractors say that there’s a big difference between keeping an egg frozen and intentionally destroying it.

Angela pointed out that nature is governed by simple, elegant laws. Look, for instance, at Newton’s Law of Gravitation, which reads (warning! Math!)

F = G*m1*m2/r^2

where F is the gravitational force exerted between two bodies, m1 and m2 are the masses of those bodies, r is the distance between them, and G is the universal gravitational constant. This equation (with some caveats) describes the motion of all matter in the universe. It’s consequences include explanations for why things fall when dropped, how solar systems are formed, and what holds galaxies together. It’s surprisingly simple. But its results are seldom neat. Our galaxy has billions of stars and probably trillions of planets, each pulling on the others, and all orbiting along different paths. Even though each of them affects the others according to the simple equation above, it turns out to be impossible to come up with an equation that exactly describes how the motion of any body in the galaxy changes over time, and if you plot the motions of the stars they appear to be more or less random — nothing neat about them. It’s not until you take a big step backwards that you can see that galaxies have a breathtakingly beautiful structure. There is order at the very lowest level and the very highest level, and nowhere in between.

I’m not that up on biology but I’m told that similar principles hold. The basic laws of chemistry are are pretty simple, but their repercussions lead to enormous, unpredictable complexity. All trees have the same basic structure — roots, a trunk, branches and leaves — but the exact placement of the branches and leaves is basically random. The structure of the neurons in your brain defies description. But take a big step out and you get order again — you get bodies with identifiable organs and systems, ecosystems with interlocking, supporting species, and intelligent creatures with language, symbolic thought, and spiritual lives. You also get breathtaking beauty again.

I’m often reluctant to draw spiritual principles from scientific truths, but I think she has a good point. In this case maybe looking at the creation tells us something about the Creator. God implements simple laws from which He creates what appears to be disorder. And perhaps at one level that’s what D&C 88:119 is getting at: a house of order implies a life governed by God’s laws. But that doesn’t mean that life will be neat or even understandable while it’s being lived. Maybe the order only becomes apparent after the fact.