Why Human Genetic Engineering is inevitable

In some circles these days there is a vivid debate on whether we should allow human genetic engineering or not. I think this debate misses the point - the real question is not whether we should prevent altering the DNA of unborn humans, but whether we can prevent it. I think the answer to that question is "No", and here is why:

• First, a country (probably somewhere in Asia) that is less concerned with religious beliefs about the sanctity of the human body (USA) or less distrustful of genetic engineering in general (Germany and much of the rest of the European Union) will permit human genetic engineering to remove hereditary diseases. This will provoke an outcry from some parts of what is generally called the "Western World", but since this procedure will have lots of proponents even there and it is hard not to sympathize with the plight of those so afflicted, calls for embargoes against the offending country will go nowhere.


• The procedure will to spread to several other small countries, but not to Europe or the USA. Lots of rich parents from the latter regions will travel to these countries to "fix" their children. Legal attempts to prevent them from doing so fails - probably because these people can afford good lawyers.


• Finally, most Western nations relent and allow this procedure, since outlawing it doesn't stop that many people and the ban only disadvantages the law-abiding and those who can't travel elsewhere to do it. Many European nations will probably even allow this procedure under their national health plans, if it becomes inexpensive enough.


• A few biotech havens start offering "upgrades" for unborn children that will make them smarter, healthier, or longer-lived. Again, rich people will go there to get the best genes money can buy for their children. "Designer Babies" become a reality. Most Western countries will try to stop this for a time, with little success. Others see where the wind is blowing, and legalize it under close government supervision so that they can rake in the profits.


• The cycle repeats itself numerous times, with ever-more radical changes from the human norm. Many countries will outlaw the more drastic changes, but the genie is out of the bottle - anyone who wants a certain modification for his or her children and has the money can get it in the right country.

When in the past has a technology that has a possible benefit for many people and a ready market ever been successfully suppressed? The closest example I can think of are nuclear weapon, which require large, national installations to produce... and we still have massive stockpiles of those, as well as lots of small countries trying to build them on their own (some successfully so). Human genetic engineering, on the other hand, probably doesn't need much more than the equivalent of a well-stocked clinic - a couple of millions of dollars as starting capital, once the basic procedures have been proven to work. How will it be possible to suppress that?

No, I think the entire debate on whether we should "permit" human genetic engineering is pointless. It is not within our power to prevent it. Instead, we should concentrate on trying to work out the consequences of it - such as that the "inherent abilities" of children might depend a lot on how much their parents are able to spend on their DNA - and figure out a way of dealing with them so that they cause the least disruption of our societies.

My Problem with Libertarianism

Ever since I have heard of the political philosophy of Libertarianism I had my doubts on whether it could work in real life - same as with Communism, in fact. Sure, some aspects of it may sound appealing (again, just like with Communism), but I just don't buy that it could function in a large-scale society (again like Communism, which so far has been shown that it can also only work in small communities).

Sure, it would be nice if transfers of money or other property involving your own could only happen with your consent - but the big problem is that "property" is largely a legal fiction created by the consent of society as a whole. There is no "natural", scientific definition of property, and property as a concept exists only because there are a sufficient number of people willing to enforce it (with force, if necessary). And like all legal fictions it runs into problems when you examine it closer and consider its implications.

For example, let's assume someone owns a small forest on the top of a hill. One day, the owner of this property decides that he wants to chop down all the trees and sell the lumber. It's his right - after all, the forest is his property.

Yet the forest also stored a lot of ground water between the roots of the trees - and a farm located downhill which was owned by someone else depended on that water. Now the ground will be far drier, the harvests smaller, and the farmland worth less. Thus, the owner of the forest - by doing what he wants with his own property - has directly harmed the property of the second. Does the farmer deserve compensation from the owner of the hilltop property, or not?

And the example can be extended to a far larger scale. Take the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies irrigation water for most of the Great Plains region of the United States. Consumption of the aquifer water far out-paces its regeneration, and it is likely that it will run dry within the next few decades, effectively putting an end to irrigation in much of the area. Could you really get every farmer in this region to voluntarily limit their water consumption to a sustainable level? I think not - if this decision is left to freely-entered agreements between citizens, then the inevitable outcome will be that the aquifer will run dry, rendering vast stretches of farmland nearly worthless. If there is going to be any solution at all, it will have to involve a government which must be willing to enforce its decisions with force. Hopefully most farmers working these lands will support the government concept and have voted for it - but if a significant minority refuses to honor any agreement because they feel that they can do what they want with their land, then everyone will suffer.

And beyond natural resources there is infrastructure to consider. Almost everyone is dependent on the roads that lead from their homes to their places of work, places to shop, and anywhere else they want to go. If these roads are owned privately, and the owners of even part of the route decide to charge more for their use or even prevent others from using them entirely, then everyone who is dependent on these roads suffers and the properties these roads connect to will drastically drop in value - and their owners are harmed, simply because someone else is doing with their property what they want.

Of course, building an effective road and transportation system is likely to involve forcing others to relinquish their property, as there are constraints on the shape and paths of transportation networks. Without the power of eminent domain, your paths will be a lot more inefficient and circuitous, to the economic detriment of all who need to use them. This is especially important in densely-populated places like Europe where properties have been subdivided over many, many centuries. Other regions, like the Americas, may have more room for settlements to expand without government intervention - but that's only because the governments in question invoked eminent domain against all the prior inhabitants of the land.

Thus, some amount of coercion is necessary for any large-scale society to function at all - and the best one can hope for is a government that only uses this force as little as possible, and is responsive to the needs of its citizens.

Just to make it clear, though - I do not advocate for the government to take over all matters of commerce. Far from it! The markets have brought us vast wealth and standards of living our ancestors could only dream of. However, I do not believe that the free market is the answer to each and every problem we are facing - some problems are best solved by the markets, while others are best tackled by the government, while others still will fare better when both cooperate. As always, real life requires compromise - and compromise is something that doesn't seem to fare well in Libertarianism.

#Aufschrei

Aufschrei (noun):

1. A cry of pain.
2. A cry of rage or indignation.

 This double meaning fits the #aufschrei hashtag very well which has been trending in the German language parts of Twitter for the last few days as women recount their experiences with sexism. How did it come to this?

Obviously, the sexism has always been present and despite this allegedly more modern age it has not gone away or even been reduced as much as some might want to believe. But the ultimate trigger for the current discussion were several recent news stories:

• A Catholic hospital in Cologne refused an examination to a rape victim because they didn't want to be "in the position of having to advise on possible unwanted pregnancies resulting from [...] attacks".
• Rainer Brüderle, one of the great unreconstructed Old White Men of the German Liberal Democratic Party who has been scheming for years to return to the party leadership has been accused by a female journalist of making a sexist joke at her expense.
• Another female journalist has reported on her experiences with the rampant sexism within the fairly young Pirate Party.

However, the discussion has grown beyond these individual stories. The same people as usual are trying to downplay the problems - but for the time being at least the women's stories are heard. Time will tell if this changes anything in the long run, but if you can read German now would be a good time to pay attention to the stories.

On Privilege in Germany

Much has been written about Privilege in the sense of aspects like White Privilege, Male Privilege, or First World Privilege. In particular, I've participated in many discussions about Privilege in the United States. It is therefore only fair that I discuss how Privilege shapes German society. These are my own personal views only, and very likely incomplete or possibly even wrong in places - so if you have alternative views, please share them.

First, let us look at Privilege based on the social class of one's parents (disregarding ethnicity for the moment, as I will talk about that later). While of course wealthier parents have more opportunities to send their children to private lessons and private schools, these have less of an impact as social class selectors than in other countries. The problems are more subtle:

• After elementary school (which goes up to 4th grade), children are generally sorted into different school types based on their aptitudes, grades - and the evaluations of their teachers. Only one of these school types - the Gymnasium - directly leads to university (though graduates from other schools can get there as well with lots of extra work). And there are plenty of studies that show that children of parents with academic degree will get a recommendation for the Gymnasium far more often than children from poorer or non-academic backgrounds - even if their school performance is identical!
• On most days, school ends at 1 pm - which means that at least one parent needs to be home from work at noon, and that presents difficulties for families where both parents - or a single parent - need to work to make ends meet. While there has been a push to provide afternoon supervision and activities at school, that's still far from universal, with perhaps only 50% of schools offering this service (the actual percentage varies widely by state). Furthermore there is an expectation that parents supervise and assist with the homework of their children - which not all parents are able to (especially if the subjects weren't covered in their former schools) and again provides an advantage to children of parents with an academic degree.

Once you have actually finished school and entered university, your social background doesn't matter all that much any more - there are no tuition fees for public universities in all but two states (and even those will likely abolish them this year), though cost of living can still be a problem if you don't study in your hometown.

Next we come to Male Privilege. I'd say that in Germany if you are a woman you can reach pretty much any position, including that of Chancellor of Germany... as long as you don't have any children. While there has been a push recently for a greater availability of whole day schools and daycare centers, many people still expect one of the parents to stay home in the afternoons and watch over the children... and in most cases, that means the mother. Many will still call mothers who refuse that role "Rabenmütter" ("raven moms"), alleging that they are "abandoning" their children. This attitude is reflected in a recent law pushed through by the Christian Social Union - a junior coalition partner in the current federal government - which gave €150 per months to parents who didn't use their right to daycare and instead kept their children home.

Thus, mothers who stay at home during the afternoons will have to take poorly paid half-day jobs to have any source of income at all - and and demand for jobs accommodating this schedule far outstrips supply. Meanwhile fathers who watch the children for the afternoons will find it almost impossible to find any suitable jobs at all, since men are expected to work for the whole day and not take any breaks from work for their children - which confirms the saying that "The Patriarchy hurts men, too!"

Next we come to Privilege based on ethnicity. The kind of racist prejudice based on idiotic ideas about "racial superiority" found among the Nazis and their kind still exist, but fortunately these represent minority views. There are two "historic" ethnic/religious communities in Germany which have suffered and still suffer prejudice:

• The History of the Jews in Germany is well known, including the horrors perpetrated against them in the Third Reich. Today there are about 300,000 Jews living in Germany (200,000 of them recent immigrants from the territories of the former Soviet Union). In professional and everyday life there is little active prejudice against them - primarily because they are indistinguishable from the rest of the German population - but there are still racist... fuckwits is probably the most accurate term who sometimes vandalize their graveyards and houses of worship.
• The Sorbs are an ethnic group living in parts of Eastern Germany with their own language whose culture has often been suppressed and parts of their territories confiscated - and even today some old wrongs still haven't been addressed, such as continued use of their territory for the open pit mining of coal.

Earlier waves of immigrants - such as the Hugenots, French religious refugees or 19th century Polish immigrant workers - have been absorbed and assimilated into German society and culture and can only be recognized by their family names. They are Germans for all intents and purposes and do not suffer from any prejudice. With more recent waves of immigrants - that is, any that came after WWII - prejudices persist, and they largely parallel the experiences of immigrants to most other wealthy nations. Prejudice and discrimination largely parallel the prosperity the immigrant comes from, with immigrants from wealthier nations being better of. Personally, I'd rank the acceptance of various immigrant groups in the following way, ranging from best regarded to worst regarded:

• Western/Northern Europe, North America
• Southern Europe/Eastern Europe
• East Asia/Latin America
• South Asia, Turkey, Middle East, Africa

This is largely a matter of cultural snobbery than explicitly based on race - for instance, many black Americans noted a marked improvement in the attitudes of the Germans they encountered when they realized that they were from the USA instead of sub-Saharan Africa. Another aspect which can make a huge difference in the treatment of foreigners and immigrants are their academic credentials, as people with graduate degrees are given tremendous amounts of respect in social situations in Germany. Any visitor or immigrant with a PhD should take care to mention this to any German officials they encounter, as this will make them much more helpful and accommodating!

As for discrimination in everyday matters, German laws outlaw discrimination based on ethnicity, but they also don't track ethnicity - there are no government forms or census data on ethnicity, and no explicit affirmative action practices based on it. There are also no steps to prevent discrimination during job applications - it is still customary to include a picture in your job application, and as studies show it still matters if you "look German" or not.

I think this should cover the basics. If you have further questions, don't hesitate to ask!

Some Thoughts on Guns and Gun Control

First, I'd like to explain my own experiences with guns: Like many German men I was drafted into the German military, and I ended up among the Jäger - light infantry. I was trained with pistols, assault rifles, and machine guns (as well as with a panzerfaust, once). So I am familiar with guns and their operations.

Yet I have absolutely no desire to own a gun in my private life, have never felt a need for them for self-defense, and I wouldn't want a relaxation of Germany's gun laws, either (for the record, Germany has about 5.5 million privately owned guns and 1.4 million gun owners, out of a population of 80 million people).

But still, I think the German media are making things too easy for themselves in condemning the American culture of gun ownership. Yes, the American homicide rate is six times higher than the German one. Yes, some aspects of American gun culture can come across as truly bizarre for a German audience (and thus make oh-so-delightful video segments for German news and documentaries). But let us consider for a moment that their circumstances differ from our own, and judge them accordingly.

While I don't believe that a heavily armed populace is a guarantee against tyranny, as it is often claimed (especially since in Weimar Germany heavily-armed militias were one of major reasons for the downfall of democracy and gun control laws were relaxed as democracy declined), I do think the self-defense argument has some merit.

Under what circumstance might it be a good idea to have a gun nearby for self-defense? To my mind, when you are far away from any law enforcement authorities - when the nearest police station that could help you is far away and there is nobody living close enough to be even aware of any attacks so that nobody else will be able to call for help.

Not coincidentally, that describes most of the USA throughout their history - and even today large swathes of U.S. territory fit this description.

In densely populated areas, especially urban ones, this is more problematic - and not coincidentally, this describes most of Europe. While cities were a very useful development in human history and necessary for economic prosperity and increased ecological efficiency, they are also a deeply stressful environment for humans, as we are constantly surrounded by strangers and have few ways of judging their motivations or predicting their actions. As population densities have increased, they have always been accompanied with an increase in the number of written and unwritten rules that the members of a society are expected to adhere to as a way of dealing with those stresses. In low-population areas, it is easy to demarcate one's territory and for others respect it, but in cities our personal spaces and territories are infringed on all the time - thus the instinct to defend one's territory with force becomes deeply problematic, as the accumulated stress makes it more likely that people will make bad choices in such situations.

And of course, the transition from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban society is one of the main forces driving U.S. politics of this generation, which is why this issue is so heavily fought. German media (and European media in general) view this battle purely from the perspective of the densely populated urban culture, which shows in their heavily moralistic tone when reporting on this.

Nevertheless, I believe that the large number of gun-related homicides in the USA are merely a symptom, and are not directly caused by the culture of gun ownership - rather, I feel that the USA increasingly have problems with dealing with their social stresses, and those stresses express themselves in a high homicide rate. Increasing inequality, massive private debts, widespread poverty, the pernicious results of the War on Drugs, lack of trust in the authorities and many other problems add up until parts of the population see no other way but to resort to violence to "solve" their problems - and deaths are the result. But if the USA were better able to deal with their social problems, then I have no doubt that their homicide rate would be much lower in turn.

This is your Brain on Transhumanism

I've had a fascination with Transhumanism ever since I've heard of the concept - the notions that humans can and should use technology to transcend natural human limitations, of both the human body and the human mind.

I do not really consider myself a full-fledged Transhumanist - while having a longer life span would be nice (as would be other generic "health improvement" technologies), all in all I am fairly happy with how my mind and body currently function. Still, I try to keep an eye on Transhumanist technological developments - after all, you never know if something useful might come from it.

And one such field of technology that not only deserves plenty of attention but is also a matter of current concern rather than a far-future fancy - alterations of how the human brain works.

Such tools are admittedly still crude, but they do exist. Almost everyone has taken stimulants at some point in their lives, if only in the form of caffeine. Then there are recreational drugs like alcohol, cigarettes, or cannabis which also have significant effects on the brain (if they hadn't, nobody would bother with them). Then there is the increasing number of "performance-enhancing" drugs, anti-depressants, and others like Ritalin which have varying levels of efficiency and side effects.

And these are just the deliberate attempts to alter our cognitive functions. Take parasites, for instance - do you really love your cats, or is this just your toxoplasma speaking? And is there are a meaningful difference between the answers?

Then there is the matter of learning - every time you come across new information, your brain will rewire itself to accommodate this information. While this is usually a good thing, it can have some rather nasty side effects - for example, if you are constantly inundated with stories that a particular group is violent or otherwise not to be trusted, then your subconscious will make note of that and influence your decisions and behavior even though what is commonly referred to as the "consciousness" believes itself to be free of prejudice and bias (on that topic I strongly recommend Cordelia Fine's A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives).

So the way our brains, our minds operate is constantly changed and altered - sometimes by our choosing, but often not. But the future will likely offer plenty of new technological approaches for changing the way our minds work - and that is one of the core promises of Transhumanism.

So, if you had the opportunity to change your brain, would you trust yourself to make such decisions wisely? And if you do, what kinds of changes would you ask for without fearing for the loss of your Self - of what makes you "you"?

On claims that Global Warming does not occur

The vast majority of scientists working in the field of climatology agree that the Earth's atmosphere is heating up and human activity is at least partially to claim. However, outside of the science of climatology this is still seen as controversial by many. The objections tend to take one of these forms:

• Type A: There is no evidence of global warming.
• Type B: If there is evidence of global warming, then it is not due to human activity.
• Type C: If global warming is occurring and it is due to human activity, then it is not going to be damaging.
• Type D: If global warming is occurring and it is due to human activity, and it is going to be damaging, then the costs of avoiding it are too high, so we should do nothing.

Today I'd like to talk about Type A - that global warming is not occurring, or that it has stopped. There have been numerous variations on the claim - the one that's currently making the round is that the British Met Office has allegedly conceded that global warming stopped 16 years ago, even though the Met Office has said no such thing. I've looked at a number of such claims, and one common trend I've noticed is a certain... willingness to play fast and loose with statistics.

The most blatant example I've come across was an article by one Christopher Monckton, who is fairly famous for his efforts in this field. The original article is no longer available, but fortunately a copy still exists at Archive.org. In this article, he used the following graph to prove that not only global warming had stopped, but that there is actually a cooling trend!

 

I was intrigued when I stumbled across this back in April 2008 and decided to replicate the graph. It turns out that he had used the HadCrut3 data set of global temperature data, and based on that data set I was able to come up with the following graph (made with GnuPlot):

 

First of all, while the used data did show a cooling trend, my linear fit (again, done with GNUPlot) produced a cooling of

-0.00156427 °C/month.

Extrapolated for an entire decade, like the author has done, this would translate into:

-0.00156427*12*10 °C/decade = -0.1877124 °C/decade

This is not even half as much as the 0.4 °C/decade the author claimed. But wait, it gets better!


It seems that the author of the article, has deliberately started using the 2001-2008 HadCRUT3 data set with one of the hottest months in this period - which happens to be January 2002 (so he didn't use any 2001 data after all, despite the caption of the graph) - and then ended using the data with the very coldest month in this period, which was the abnormally cold January 2008:



With such a self-selected data set to confirm his bias, is it any wonder that found got a significant cooling trend?

And why did he use only using only six years and one month to extrapolate a "cooling per decade" value - especially when the same data set goes back for far more than a decade and a real value could be easily calculated?

The... kindest explanation I can come up with is that he has no working knowledge of statistics.

Of course, that was in 2008. So what is the current state of Earth's atmosphere? The recent graph by NASA might be illuminating:

 

There are plenty of graphs other than Monckton's in circulation that claim that global warming has stopped or is reversing itself  - but as you can see here, the best that can be said is that the atmospheric temperatures are maintained at a very high plateau.

Introduction

Hello!

I'm a 37 year old German physicist with a PhD in Computational Materials Engineering who currently works as a project manager for the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology in Kassel, Germany. I've been a frequent poster on Google+, and as the number of my followers kept increasing I've contemplated starting a separate blog - and my recent arrival at the 20,000 followers mark seems a good opportunity as any.

Why call this blog "A German Eye"? Well, my audience is and always has been international in scope, but I will attempt to bring a uniquely German perspective to my posts which I hope others will appreciate. Time will tell if I succeed in that goal.

I see this blog as an extension of my Google+ stream rather than a replacement. Thus, the posts here won't have a specific focus. However, you can expect certain main themes to be prominent:

• Politics: Like with many Germans, observing and commenting on politics is a major past time, and thus you will hear my opinions on political issues - whether related to Germany, the USA, or the rest of the world - fairly frequently.
• The Environment: I am a member of the German Green party, and thus is a concern dear to my heart. In particular, I pay attention to news and politics revolving around climate change.
• Renewable Energy and related topics - including energy management, which is the focus of my work group. However, any views posted here are purely my own and not those of my employer.

But my interests range far and wide, so you might find posts about almost any conceivable subject matter here.

See you soon!