Rationalisten

The article in this Wednesday’s JC was Ageing and death in an organism that reproduces by morphologically symmetric division. by Stewart EJ, Madden R, Paul G and Taddei F. (PLoS Biol. 2005 Feb;3(2):e45. Epub 2005 Feb 01.), which deals with ageing in E. coli.

Single-celled organisms that reproduce by symmetric division have been held as functionally immortal. If the division is fully symmetrical, there is no way to distinguish between the mother cell and the daughter cell; in fact the distinction becomes meaningless since they are inseparable. In this case each cell division produces two infant cells, which leads to the conclusion that there is no ageing in single-celled organisms that reproduce by symmetric division.

The authors of the article propose that even morphologically symmetric division is not fully symmetric, e.g. not all of the cellular components are able to diffuse rapidly enough from the poles. The effect of this is that the concentration of these components will be different at the poles and in the center of the cell. Since the division occurs down the middle of the cell, this means that each of the new cells has one of these old poles and one new pole that is generated in the division. When either of these daughter cells divide, one of the granddaughter cells will have the two-generations old pole from the grandmother cell and one new pole, while the other will have the one-generation old pole from the mother cell and a new pole. This means that one of the granddaughter cells will be “older” than the other, even though they were “born” at the same time. In the article the authors report that they found that the cells that inherit the old pole “exhibit diminished growth rate, decreased offspring production and an increased incidence of death”. These results indicate that there is in fact functional ageing even in this kind of organism.

Why is this interesting? The question to ask about ageing can be posed as: “Why is there ageing?” or: “Why does ageing remain in the population when an individual who did not suffer from ageing, and could thus reproduce for a much longer period, would have an obvious evolutionary advantage?”. It would seem that not being subject to ageing would be a very successful strategy for an individual and also that even one single individual who gained a significantly longer reproductive period would skew the population quickly.

The results of the article suggest that there are no organisms that don’t age and the question why ageing has not been eliminated remains. One possible answer lies in a cost/benefit trade-off. Ageing sets in because the repair systems fail to keep up with the constant damage and degradation that our cells are subjected to. Repairs come with an energy cost that must be balanced against other costs such as those for reproduction and growth. This means that immortality, which would require a perfect repair-system, would come at a very high cost. Such a system would leave less energy to be expended in reproduction and growth, meaning that the individual would be less reproductive.

If we make the assumption that a perfect repair-system is possible and disregard any external threats, it seems that, given the enormous evolutionary advantage an immortal individual would have, a perfect repair-system would come at such a high cost that no energy would be left for growth and reproduction. IRL, however, every individual runs the risk of having their reproductive period (or life) foreshortened by violence or an accident. This makes it more costly to have low reproductivity, since it lessens the chance of successfully reproducing, and lowers the threshold at which the cost of a perfect repair-system is outweighed by the evolutionary advantage.

In conclusion: all organisms suffer from ageing, even those that reproduce by morphologically symmetric division. This means that it is likely that either it is not possible to have a perfect repair-system or that the cost of such a system would be large enough to outweigh the evolutionary benefit of immortality.

Today is the Buy Nothing Day in Sweden so my advise is to make a stand and do some serious shopping today.

The EU is about to implement legislation that would compel phone networks and ISPs to preserve certain parts of their logs for no less than 12 months.
This was proposed jointly by Sweden, France, Ireland and the UK in April this year. I have only been able to find the proposition in Swedish; the task of finding such documents on the EU-site is daunting.
Going from the present legislation, where information of the kind considered here must be destroyed once there is no further use for it, to the new legislation where the information must instead be preserved is a huge step, a total turnaround even.

The proposition defines the information that must be preserved as:

• information needed to track and identify the origin of the communication including information about the user and the users connection,
• information needed to identify the route and destination of the communication,
• information needed to identify the date, time and duration of the communication,
• information needed to identify the communication (i.e. size and format of an email),
• information needed to identify the tools used for the communication,
• information needed to identify the geographical location from the start of and during the entire communication

The proposition stresses that no information about the contents of the communication should be preserved.

Reviewing this list is in itself a chilling exercise since the proposition presents a major invasion of privacy and decrease of anonymity in communications. A more in-depth analysis aggravates the problems even further. Considering the nature of much of the communication on the Internet, the condition that the contents of the communication must not be revealed is moot since it is often impossible to separate the contents from the package. I.e. Web addresses contain much information about the contents of the communication but are also necessary to provide the information required by the proposal.

Some problems:

• It would seriously hamper the anonymity of the Internet which is one of the major boons,
• it raises concerns about whether the information could be used in the wrong way, for instance for mapping political views or sexual preferences since it would not always be possible to avoid logging contents and since the information contained in knowing what web pages a person views is enormous,
• lastly there is always the fear that future incarnations of this legislation will put no limit on the information that can be gathered (yes I know this is a slippery slope argument).

In the light of revelations such as this one it is perhaps not very surprising that France would be in on something like this but it is frightening that Sweden is. However, it now seems that someone has caught on to the dangers of this proposal. The Swedish Committee on Justice wants to review the proposal to ensure that it’s impact on the privacy of the users is not to grave. I would want them to repeal the proposal altogether but since that isn’t going to happen I’ll settle for an exclusion of Internet traffic.

Johan Norberg has more on the Mexican situation. He shows that although there are many inhibitions to the free market in Mexico, the situation has still improved vastly since the introduction of NAFTA.
I’m still a little surprised that the USA is allowed to subsidize the corn farmers under the treaty but the facts show that in reality free trade has been a boon to the Mexicans.

In the article I referenced in my previous post, the US is critized for:

1. Dumping subsidized maize on the mexican market, making it economically unfeasable for Mexican farmers to grow their own maize since it’s cheaper to buy it in the stores. This is described as a neo-liberal shift but of course it isn’t since no neo-liberal/libertarian would endorse subsidizing agricultural overproduction.
2. Selling genetically modified maize to the Mexicans against their will. Some Mexican farmers have been planting this maize (which was originally intended to be eaten) and there is widespread fear that this will be detrimental to the local varieties of maize, some of which are traditional and have been used for a very long time. The fear is mainly that the transgenes will somehow “take over” the local varieties and that the spread of transgenes will have a major impact on the biodiversity of maize. Read this article to balance this view; it’s conclusion is that due to the properties of maize there is very little risk that a few transgenes will affect the genetic (and therefore the bio-) diversity of maize. There is no mention of the effects of putative evolutionary pressure but it is still nice to read something non-hysterical about a GMO.

While you’re into science, check out this interesting article at Reason. I haven’t had time to view all the references yet but at least it is a change from all the doomsday prophecies that are so prevalent these days and from the look of it, it has a scientific foundation.

Well, it looks like there’ll be four more years of Bush. Even though I disagree with many of the stands the republicans take, most of these concern issues that won’t affect me as a non-US citizen. Subtracting everything that doesn’t affect me I reach the conclusion that this result was for the best. No canceling of free trade agreements and no penalties for companies moving production outside the US are good things.

The one remaining problematic issue is the “War on terror” including the war in Iraq. I hope that GWB will listen more to international opinion on these issues during this term. I believe that the US needs to rebuild some standing and credibility. This is not to say that the US should always follow the “general international opinion” or even what the UN says, only that it should listen more. We need to be able to work together to solve these problems and we need to be able to use many different tools to that end. There are other methods than war and appeasement.