Without natural selection

I've blogged about this before, but I think I have a new way of explaining this, so at the risk of repeating myself, here goes:

I remember hearing this example from a Genetics class in college. In every generation of wild rabbits, different rabbits have different lengths of hair, some long, some short, and some medium. The rabbits with shorter length hair get too cold at night, leaving them susceptible to disease, so they tend to be selected against. The rabbits with longer length hair tend to overheat and can't run as fast when being chased by predators, so they tend to be selected against. By the time of the next breeding season, you tend to have a predominence of medium haired rabbits. However, the genes for hair length in rabbits are particularly susceptible to mutation, so that by the next generation, you still have roughly the same proportions of long/medium/short haired rabbits.

Evolution has selected for rabbits with a high mutation rate in the hair length gene because the weather often changes from year to year, and can go in cycles such as the ice ages. This high mutation rate results in a loss of reproductive efficiency each year, but it helps them adapt to changing conditions from year to year. Say, for example, that the weather begins to get colder from year to year. Each year, instead of the medium haired rabbits being selected for, it's the longer haired rabbits that get that survive best. Their offspring will again show a variability in hair length, but now median hair length will center around the hair length of the longer haired rabbits.

Now, what would happen if the rabbits suddenly developed high technology? They would have central heating, so the shorter haired rabbits wouldn't get too cold at night, and they'd have guns to protect them against predators, so the longer haired rabbits wouldn't get eaten. By the next breeding season, all of the rabbits would be able to reproduce. They'd probably have birth control, so we wouldn't have to worry about over population, but the shorter haired rabbits would produce who's hair length varied around the hair length of the shorter haired rabbits, and the same with the longer haired rabbits. With each subsequent generation, the extremes in hair length would get shorter and shorter, and longer and longer, on each end of the scale. As their technology got better, they would be able to support even greater extremes of hair length. After several generations, you'd have nearly naked rabbits running around with big old shaggy rabbits.

Now, let's apply the same principle to humans, who really do have technology. The concept of highly mutable regions of DNA is a common strategy, so we surely have some as well. In a primitive culture, where natural selection is still at play, the extremes of any particular feature are selected against, so, although they appear in each generation, the majority of each generation is centers closely around the median. But in a highly technological society, the extremes survive to produce offspring, so each generation becomes more and more extreme, and the extremes make up a larger proportion of society.

One obvious charactertic that we have a large variety of in our current society is weight. We see a lot of variation in individual weight in our society, and I think we see more variation in more modern societies than in primitive societies, but it's hard to say if this is because of the principle I'm describing, or if it's because of other factors, e.g. more availability of food on the one hand, and a culture that prefers skinny people on the other.

Another candidate for this principle is mental stability, and intelligence. I don't really know if there is an increase in variability in these traits in our society, but because our species has see a lot of change in this area fairly recently in our evolution, it wouldn't surprise me if genes affecting the brain are highly mutable. After all, we're obviously descended from individuals who had mutations that affected the brain.

The usefulness of corruption

Listening to a story about William Jefferson on the news today made me think of something. I think it's a no-brainer that there is, and always has been, a bit of a power struggle between the Office of the President and Congress. In that type of environment, and knowing the nature of men, it's also obvious that there will be a temptation for the President to use the means at his disposal, most prominently the FBI, to gather information about various congressmen with the intent of using that information to influence them. It wouldn't surprise me if the President were aware of a lot more of the corruption going on, but just held on to that information until it became useful. In the case of Jefferson, I think the recent allegations against several republicans, namely Tom Delay and Duke Cunningham made him made him think that the democrats needed a little scandal of their own to help balance the tables before the upcoming election.

It also makes me think of other times in which this knowledge might have been used to influence members of Congress. I remember back when Bush was first pushing for a war in Iraq. The republicans supported him in this, but the majority of democrats didn't. Then there was a vote on whether to give the President the power to declare war without Congresses approval. There was some poorly defined clause in there saying that the President had to exhaust all diplomatic means first, but the President had already been arguing that we'd done that, so it was obvious what would happen. The President waited a little while so that it would appear that he was trying some kind of diplomatic solution first, then he went to war.

Congressmen aren't stupid. They knew that if this law passed, Bush would go to war. The phrasing of the law to make it look like they wanted to exhaust diplomatic means first simply allowed them to appear as if they didn't support the war.

I've always felt like this sudden, nearly unanimous, change in direction for the Democrats was a result of either bribes or threats, and the Jefferson situation kind of piece of evidence toward this. Of course, you could just believe everything at face value and believe that Jefferson is one of the few corrupt Congressmen, and that the FBI just happened to catch him at it, and that the democrats really felt that Bush would prudently exhaust all diplomatic means and only go to war reluctantly as a last resort, but that would be a bit like believing that if you only see one cockroach on your kitchen floor, that that's the only one.

New "Lost" theory

Okay, the 4-toed foot statue could mean aliens.

Images of Mohammad

Okay, I guess I'm in a blogging mood tonight. The issues of the images of Mohammad in the cartoons (was it in Sweden, I forget) is a little bit old, but I was too busy with work to comment on it, so I'm commenting now.

I read someplace that Mohammad didn't want any images of himself made because he was afraid people would worship the images instead of what was really important, the truth that he was trying to teach them. He was afraid wars would be fought because someone desecrated an image of him, and he didn't think that was a good reason for people to die.

So now, instead of worshipping images of Mohammad, Muslims are worshipping a lack of images, and they're willing to fight a jihad over it (some of them are anyway). Somehow, I don't think that's what Mohammad had in mind.

"Lost" Theory

No, this is not about a theory that I had that I can no longer find (although there are plenty of those), it's a theory about the "Lost" TV show.

I don't watch a whole lot of television, but every Wednesday night, my whole family sits in front of the TV to watch "Lost". My wife recently picked up some kind of magazine that had an article on "Lost", and in it they describe some of the theories people have on what's happening in this show. They said that "... the most popular is that the passengers of Oceanic flight 815 are stuck in purgatory." They supposedly did a survey of people's blogs or something and came up with that. My question is: "most popular" among who, morons?

Okay, maybe I'm being a bit harsh, but how does that explain the birds that died when Walt got angry while he was reading a book on birds? (This happened during one of the early episodes during one of the Michael/Walt flashbacks) Or the fact that Walt's mom suddenly got sick and died when Walt got angry at her? Or, how does it explain the what the supposed palm reader said about Claire's baby, and how he arranged to get her on the flight?

I have two theories, and I think the truth is actually somewhere in between, but it's still easier to explain it as two different theories.

The first is that the Dharma experiment was an experiment in psychic power. Alvar Hanso collected a bunch of people who exhibited some weak psychic power and took them to the island to test them. The island had some kind of power that enhanced psychic ability, and Alvar wanted to use that to improve his results. (The concept that some areas of the planet can have strange effects on people was introduced in the Rose flashback where her husband tried to take her to a place in Australia to heal her cancer. The guy there examined Rose and told her that, while that place did have the ability to heal some cancers, it couldn't heal hers.)

Anyway, the island made the psychics too powerful, and they revolted against the Hanso corporation, and began to implement their own plans. I think they're trying to take over the world. Their strategy is to subtely influence events in the world to cause other people with latent psychic power to come to the island, and then to assimilate them into their group. The main man in the "Others" group, probably had the most psychic power, and he controls the rest of the people in the group. They can leave the island, but when they do, they lose the islands enhancement to their psychic power, so their main base of operations has to be the island.

Their psychic powers, even with the island's enhancement, is relatively weak. It gives them an edge, but they can't just go out there and mind-control people into doing what they want. They have certain things they have learned how to do, and they are limited to using these tools to acheive their goals. They are not all-powerful.

It's been 13 years since the French Woman's boat came to the island. Maybe it was brought there by the psychics, or maybe it was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, it's pretty obvious that the Dharma Initiative was circa 1950's or 1960's or so, so it's taken the Others quite a while to arrange for the plane crash. What were they doing in the meantime? Experimenting and learning how to control and use their powers. I think the smoke monster and the polar bears are a result of this experimentation.

My second theory is a good vs. evil thing. The island is evil and it's somehow trying to get people to do its bidding. It first seduced John Locke by giving him his legs back and turning him into a virile hunter. When it threatened to take those gifts away again, it frightened John into doing its bidding. John, who first helped Charlie get over his heroine addiction, later turned against him when Charlie had a dream that Claire should get the baby baptised. That's because the island wanted to prevent the baptism. John tried to discredit Charlie's opinion in the group by highlighting the fact that Charlie had been a drug addict, and when Charlie was on the verge of being able to destroy the rest of the heroine, John took it and hid it, preventing Charlie from destroying it, and giving John the power to use it to influence Charlie in the future. (Somehow the drugs ended up in Sawyer's stash, and I'm not sure how that happened.) Charlie, who appears kind of weak and lacking in confidence, is no match for studly John, and this kind of sets up a David and Goliath kind of battle.

The palm ready who got Claire to go on the plane saw a little of this struggle. He know Claire's baby had the potential for two possible futures, one as a good person, and the other as a terribly bad person. That's why he was so scared when he read Claire's palm. He first wanted Claire to keep the baby, saying that it must be raised by her, but she insisted that she wanted to give him up. Then, when Claire came to tell him she had decided to keep the baby, he insisted that she fly to California to give the baby to a couple there that could raise him. At first, the audience is led to believe that this new couple could also raise the baby in the right way for him to become a good person (at least, that's what I believed), but by the end of the episode, Charlie suggests that he knew about the crash all along, and that Claire and her baby would survive, and that this was all part of his plan to have Claire raise the baby. However, another possibility is that the island somehow got control of the palm reader, and either made him believe that getting Claire on the flight was good for her, or somehow threatened him to get her to get on the plane.

Echo is another interesting character. Actually, I think it might have been him who suggested that Claire's baby should be baptised, based on an interpretation of one of Charlie's dreams. As a boy in one of the flashbacks, he saved his brother from a life of killing and drug running by offering up himself to be kidnapped instead of his brother. When Echo went with the kidnappers, he gave his small cross that he wore around his neck to his brother. It was obvious from this that Echo had been a very religious kid, and after receiving this cross, Echo's brother went on to become a priest in the church. Echo, after being kidnapped, went on to lead a life of killing and drug running until his brother ended up getting on a small plane, leaving Echo behind. At this point, Echo pretended that he was his brother, and assumed his brother's role in the church. When he came to the island, Echo found the plane that his brother had been on, and his brother's decayed body, and took back the cross. He then told people that he was a priest, or at least, he said 'yes' when Charlie asked him if he was a priest.

In a way, the cross represents the person that Echo was supposed to be. When Echo was kidnapped, his brother received the cross and became that person. When Echo got the cross back, he got his original destiny back.

At first, it seemed that Echo was in the "good" camp. He interpreted Charlie's dream as a message that Claire should have her baby baptized, and he kind of backed Charlie up, albeit behind the scenes as far as everyone else was concerned, when John turned against him. But lately he's been acting kind of rude to Charlie, and then in the last episode he gave up on building the church and moved into the shelter.

John, on the other hand, has seemed to have escaped the evil influence of the island, although I can't quite put my finger on why I think that. I read in this article that Terry O'Quinn, the actor who plays John, told the producers that he missed the old John Locke. It may be that the producers decided to make John swing back to the good side, and have Echo become the evil person, or maybe now it's Michael. I think the producers have some basic plan as to what's going to happen, but I also think their letting the story kind of evolve to fill that plan, letting the characters develop in a natural way and so forth.

As to how to merge these two theories, the fact that Echo thought that the baby should be baptized, and John's attempts to downplay the importance of that (he couldn't come out strongly against the baptism, because that would've given him away), makes me think that this is a battle between good and evil in the Christian belief system. Echo's being a priest, and the Mary dolls holding the heroine could just be coincidences, Christians live in this world, so we could expect some Christian icons in the movie without this necessarily happening in a Christian universe, but that John was opposed to the baptism means that the island was opposed to the baptism, and this means that the island's plans could've been thwarted by the baptism, so the baptism must somehow protect the baby from the island, and that could only happen if the island was somehow related to the Christain devil, and the good was somehow on the side of the Christain God.

The question is, how to fit this in with the psychic experiment theory. The only thing I can think of is that the devil is the one who provides the island with it's psychic-power-enhacing power, or maybe that he's simply using the island's power for his own purposes. Maybe he subtely influenced the Hanso Corporation to begin the experiments there, knowing that the kind of power the island gave would corrupt most people and give him influence over them. Or maybe the main "Others" guy is the devil, but then, what would be the whole purpose of the psychic power that Walt obviously had?

I'm not really happy with this merging of the two theories. That's why I presented it as two theories instead of one.

One other theory, one that I thought was probably obvious to anyone who's been watching the show, but after reading the article I'm not so sure. Although the last episode showed the Others as living in pretty primitive conditions, we all know that's not true. We saw the episode where Claire began remembering what had happened to her when she was kidnapped, and we saw the fake beard that Kate found in the locker in the area where Claire had been taken to, and anyone who saw the last episode saw Walt tell his father that things weren't what they seemed, and that they were just pretending. Also, the guy who kidnapped Claire, I forget his name, was very clean cut. He obviously got some nice clothes from somewhere. I think it's pretty obvious that the Others have a pretty sophisticated setup.

Another question: do all of the survivors of the flight have latent psychic ability, or do just some of them have it? Walt and Claire's baby obviously have it, and I would say John Locke probably has it as well. Also, although I like the idea of Jack not having it, and maybe just having good leadership abilities, I think he probably has it. I think he used it when he helped restore the use of her legs to that woman who later became his wife during one of the flashbacks. His psychic power is probably what made him a good doctor and have a reputation for never losing a patient. Echo might have it. He's kind of in the same ballpark as John. Maybe they have it, or maybe you don't need it to be influenced by the island. Personally, I kind of think everyone who's alive now has it. I'm not sure if the people who survived the plane crash had it, and were either died because the island can't plan things perfectly, didn't have it and the island killed them off because it didn't need them, or did have it, but were going to go to the good side, and the island killed them off for that reason.

Finally, in the final battle between good and evil, who is on which side? Jack and Kate are certainly on the good side, at least so far. Like John and Echo, people can change sides at the will of the producers. I think the producers think everyone will think Sawyer will be evil, so they'll have him be their "surprise" good person. I think Charlie, Claire, and Claire's baby are pretty solidly in the good camp. The baby may appear to be close to going to the bad side, but good always triumphs, and Claire's baby is definitely key, so I don't see how they can make him end up on the bad side.

The real surprise, I think, will be Rose. She seems like such a good, spiritual, Christain woman, but she stopped her husband from making the big SOS sign because she knew the island had healed her cancer, and she was afraid that if she left the island, she would get the cancer again. Like John, the island has a hold on her. Will she beat it and come back to the good side? That would make a good feel-good story, but it would be kind of polly-anna-ish if everybody stayed with the good side. I think the producers need to sacrifice someone for the sake of the plot-line, and I think that someone is Rose.