The blogosphere has been reporting a story via the Associated Press about an experiment performed on a recent space shuttle flight involving Salmonella bacteria. It turns out that during the 12 day flight the bacteria grown in the shuttle mutated to become significantly more virulent than the same strain grown under controlled conditions on earth.

Salmonella grown on board the space shuttle was many times deadlier than its terrestrial counterparts.
Researchers led by Cheryl Nickerson, associate professor at the Arizona State University Biodesign Institute, found that Salmonella grown during space-shuttle mission STS-115 in 2006 underwent major changes in the expression of 167 genes. When administered to mice back on Earth, the bacteria proved many times more deadly than an equivalent strain grown on the ground.
Technology Review

Here’s what happened. The bacteria spent 12 days in space during which time they replicated in an environment radically different[1] to that on earth. An associated effect of the lack of gravity is a reduction in pressure of the fluid passing over the bacteria cells. It is believed that this changed the gene expression[2] of 167 genes(73 proteins) producing a more virulent strain of the bacteria.

yellow and red

The response from the internext has been predictably ludicrous with titles like Spaceflight makes germs deadlier, stronger and Germs In Spaaace! Bugs Deadlier In Study. While they might report the facts correctly I’m ticked off that they misrepresent the implication of this experiment.

Some of the blame for this has to go to the lead researcher, Dr. Cheryl Nickerson[3] quoted as saying ‘These bugs can sense where they are by changes in their environment. The minute they sense a different environment, they change their genetic machinery so they can survive’. Bullshit.
It’s very likely that Dr. Nickerson was simply speaking colloquially, but this statement is totally incorrect. ‘These bugs’ don’t sense shit about changes in their environment and the sure as fuck don’t ‘change their genetic machinery’. What happened here is that the change in the environment meant that, as the bacteria replicated(had kids) and, in the process mutated, child cells that responded well to the low gravity environment were naturally selected as more successful. This was a simple, ordinary example of the process of natural selection causing the phenomenon of evolution. To say that the bacteria looked around and used their temporary environment to make themselves more poisonous is naivefuct.

What is amazing is that the mutation occurred so rapidly. From what I could find it seems that the generation time[4] of salmonella seems to be about 40 minutes under normal conditions. This means that 36 generations were produced per day, 432 generations in total. That’s very few generations in which to produce such a radical change. As always the secret to the speed at which the mutation spread is due to the large number of individuals per generation. Let’s assume the experiment started out with 105 cells[5]. I’m not going to risk the calculation of how many cells they would have ended up with by the end of the 12 days[6] but we’re talking here about a gabazillion cells per generation. And with the radical change in environment it means that those cells with a beneficial mutation(improving their survival rate) would’ve kicked ass and dominated their colonies, thereby setting their offspring up to be even more likely to succeed.
Each new report like this illustrates the incredible rate at which natural selection – the simplest of processes – can produce a solution to an environmental challenge that is wonderfully elegant. No cosmic watchmaker could do this in 12 days[7].

The second thing that the internext is completely misrepresenting about this story is the effect of space on bacteria. Sending bacteria into space does not ‘make it more dangerous’, as if zero gravity equips the little cells with sharper teeth the better to bite us with. The fact that in this particular case the bacteria mutated into a more virulent form says nothing at all about the effect of space on poisonous organisms. All that it says is that in this particular case, in this colony the offspring became progressively more virulent. Of course there is a good likelihood that if they were to send up another batch they would become more virulent again, simply because the environment is so radically different that it would likely favour the same type of mutation.
But this does not mean that all bacteria become more dangerous in space. There is an equally good likelihood that the bacteria would have become less virulent or even completely harmless. Somehow I don’t think that if this were the case it would have made much news. I can see the headlines now ‘Bacteria in space stay exactly the same!’.

Natural selection is a fantastic, elegant and powerful process. It’s effects continually astound us, its solutions to environmental problems are consistently ingenious. There is no need to jazz up its entirely purposeless workings by imagining some form of intent or will to change on the part of its subjects.

[1] near-zero gravity
[2] the process by which inheritable genetic information is turned into a physical product such as a protein.
[3] who appears to have first published research on microgravity’s effect on bacteria way back in November 2002
[4] The time required for a bacterial cell to divide
[5] From what I’ve found this seems to be the ballpark number of cells per mm2 in your average, healthy salmonella colony.
[6] Given the attrition rate, space constraints etc.
[7] And let’s not talk about what’s possible in 6 days of intelligent design.

Flood Wall

Wit Kinders

Stenciled Again

Atlantas First

Sporty U

G Boys

DLU

Park Teens

Gringo Star

New Shoe Arrivals

I am not a scientist – I design and write software. Anyone who works in the field that this post deals with will be able to take it apart in no time, but I stand by my qualitative comments on the significance of Alex for our concept of intelligence.

As the entire world knows by now, Alex the Parrot died a few days ago. He was 31.
Alex was made famous for his considerable communication skills. He was the leading subject of an experiment running over three decades by Dr. Irene Pepperberg – a US academic (comparative psychologist).

Alex

I saw a documentary on Alex and his cohorts a few years ago and there is no denying that their skills and innocent charm were/are magical. Do yourself a favour, read an example of a conversation with Alex here. I grew up with an African Grey parrot[1] and while he/she[2] had an extensive vocabulary of calls and words/phrases I have no doubt that they were learned by rote. Lonka(the parrot) did learn to use phrases correctly, such as calling out to my dad as he left for work in the mornings, but those were limited to very simple, routine situations.
Alex’s abilities were in an entirely different league. Able to combine several attributes of one or more items (color, material, count, size) to answer questions that require comparisons, algebra etc he was reported by some to have had an intelligence comparable to a 5-year-old human.

Another fascinating aspect to Alex’s life is the training technique Dr. Pepperberg used to teach Alex. She would train[3] Alex together with a human colleague. These sessions would basically involve Alex competing against the human for rewards. Alex would observe what the human trainer did to receive the reward (e.g. identify the colour of a wooden block) and then learn to do the same. This would result in a natural competition[4] in which Alex’s learning is speeded up by competing with the human for that delicious treat.

What I’m interested in is the ongoing debate about animal intelligence. Alex was used as a case in point by both sides of the argument. Supporters of the idea that Alex showed a very simple form of human-type intelligence point to his ability to combine various attributes of several items into relatively complex comparisons[2] as an indicator of a flexible form of intelligence that goes beyond simple recognition and repetition. Detractors claim that his behaviour, while complex, is rote – simple repetition and recognition.
Another supporter point is that Alex was able to independently express his desires[6]. However, all animals express desire, the dog whining at the door means ‘I wanna pee’.

What I’m interested in is the detractors’ description of their objections, Dr. Herbert Terrace, arguing against classifying Alex’s intelligence as human-like, describes it as ‘a complex discriminative performance’. Ouch.
But wait! He describes it as ‘a complex discriminative performance’ – complex. Not to want to make trivialising assumptions about Dr. Terrace’s wider argument or his work I am excited about this statement. Sure, he does characterise Alex’s behaviour as a performance (i.e. trained for repetition), but he does concede ‘complex’.
One of my favourite books of all time is Steven Pinker‘s How the Mind Works. It describes, amongst other things, the Computational Theory of Mind which holds that the brain is a computational device(a machine) which produces intelligent behaviour and cognition through a highly, highly parallalised, ridiculously complex form of information processing.
In short, that human intelligence is a simple product of the brain’s ability to process thousands of events in parallel using its roughly 100 billion neurons and their roughly 3 quadrillion interconnection points(synapses). The secret to this ability lies not in some mystic breath of life, but simply on the brain’s complexity. One of the intelligent behaviours that the brain produces is language and something that is important to note is that Dr. Pepperberg does not characterise Alex’s sentences as language, they are responses – either to questions or to his own desires. I agree with this; a voice assisted satellite navigation system does not use language, it produces responses in the form of human words. But this is not a fundamental difference in the mechanism that produces the intelligence – complex information processing.
If you really understand computer programming it should be clear that a very similar mechanism produces computer intelligence[7]. A computer’s information processing capability is a direct result of the stacking on top of one another of thousands of layers of trivial logical operations. A computer can, after all perform only boolean logic[8] – but stacking those on top of one another in layer upon layer of interconnected pieces produces a spell checker[9].
I believe that the same applies to the brain. There is no magic point at which the brain all of a sudden becomes ‘intelligent’, going from being able to perform basic functions like breathing and recognising poisonous foods through to ‘!bang! I see it all now! I understand’. Fuck that. Intelligence is simply a function of the complexity of the device(machine/organ) that processes the information(reported by our senses) received by the system(the body). And in that sense I feel strongly that Alex was intelligent, not ‘intelligent’ or ‘exhibiting signs of intelligence’; intelligent in the same way that a human is intelligent, the same way that a forest of trees is intelligent and that an evolutionary microchip is intelligent.
And no, I’m not into that whole Gaia, we are all one and interconnected bullshit. Yes, we are all interconnected, yes there is information processing that occurs between individual organisms. But without having to resort to some flaky notion of an overmind, individual organisms/devices like that microchip, Alex and I are intelligent in exactly the same way – the mechanism is the same.

Alex’s intelligence was massively less complex than a human’s, as it was massively more complex than the microchip’s, but it’s the same. Yes, there are still mysteries that complex information processing begin to answer today(such as consciousness – neither Alex nor the microchip was/is conscious as far as we know) – but intelligence isn’t one of them.
It is arrogant and ignorant of the biological reality of the human brain to claim that our intelligence is somehow special or different from that of any other animal or neural life form.

And so, to Alex – I hope you had fun, you were cool. I’m sure that as the last electrical pulses jumped chemically from neuron to neuron in your brain you saw those delicious moments in your life, those wonderful cork nuts that you ate as you spoke.

Cork Nut

[1] By all accounts still alive, but having flown the coop about 5 years ago. Some months later my parents were walking around their town when they heard Lonka’s distinctive calls coming from a nearby house.
[2] Determining the sex of parrots is a notoriously difficult and error prone business
[3] Here we have one of the crucial points of this post, was she training Alex or teaching him, and is there a difference?
[4] The absolute fundamental environment[i] in which all animal(including human) development takes place – competition.
[i] not to be confused with the process that produces that development; being natural selection
[5] She asks ‘How many?’, he says ‘Two’, she asks ‘What’s different?’, he says ‘Color’.
[6] He says ‘Wanna go back’
[7] No, I’m not going to call it ‘intelligence’, it is intelligence.
[8] is it less? is is more? is it equal? That’s all you need.
[9] And here we can speculate about whether the internet(the most complex machine ever built) has already or is still waiting to become measurably intelligent itself.

One of the more bizarre[1] things from my last trip to the US was a TV ad offering a complete room for $999. It turns out that the complete room is a hot topic in suburban America. What it is(this complete room concept) is, well, a complete room. You can, from one company, from a catalog select all the decor for a room in your house – all the decor. They will supply the furniture, the accessories, the wall coverings, the carpets, the picture prints – even the delicate fucking fragrance of a soft summer afternoon. Actually, I need to qualify this; the $999 room doesn’t include all of the above, in fact[2] it only includes the core furnishings for a room[3]. But for some hundreds of dollars more they will put together the entire thing for you.
I’ve not been able to find the exact advertisement on the web, but it seems that one of the market leaders is Thomasville. They offer a variety of collections to suit your lifestyle and personality[3]. Here’s a taste at the shit that they have lined up to fill that hole in your waking life.

The Kent Park Collection

Inspired by the glittering English Georgian period, the collection is exquisitely detailed and luxuriously crafted to suit the consumer who recognizes the difference between transcendent style and more fleeting “here today, gone tomorrow” fashion.

The Costa Blanca Collection

A glittering sea reflects the Mediterranean’s multi-hued past as a crossroads of trade and meeting place of culture, ideas – and style. From Gibrahar to the Italian Riviera, an imaginative mélange of color and pattern defines a look that says “relaxed living.” European-inspired Costa Blanca™ furnishings for bedroom, dining room, and living room are both fashionable and inviting. Expert Thomasville® craftsmanship blends natural materials with oak veneers wrapped in a mellow, sun-washed finish. Just add your own light-infused vista, gentle breeze and cooling, zesty drink.

The Wanderlust Collection

A little bit rustic. A little bit daring. And an adventurous spirit that doesn’t get lost in translation. That’s Wanderlust – Asian and Arts & Crafts minimalism spiced with exotic Moroccan patterns, tactile materials, and rich, eclectic finishes. At once coordinated and a mélange of experience. Add organizational features that make the most of your space, plus a few captivating details, for the flavor of a memorable vacation – without leaving home. Need a category for this well-traveled look? How about Post Modern Global Craftsman? Sounds cool. Looks smashing.

And my personal favourite

The Ernest Hemingway Collection

Inspired by its namesake, The Ernest Hemingway® Collection from Thomasville® marries romantic notions, simple forms, and exotic details in an expansive home furnishings collection that honors the many faces of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s legendary life. Bold.

Even Cindy Crawford is getting in on the action.

I’m not fussed by the astounding ugliness or nouveau fakiness of the rooms on sale. Nor am I concerned about the way that American consumer culture seems to be geared almost exclusively to instant gratification. But how could anyone be willing to pick an entire room(even their entire house) from a catalog?!? Ooh! The Hemingway just really gets me, y’know – it encapsulates what I want from life. Adventure, heritage, living life to the fullest. Why not pick yourself from a catalog? Your room assembles from a single kit with easy to follow instructions!.
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky.
Now all you need is a complete house in which to put your complete room!

[1] And each trip reveals a whole new world of bizarre things about the US
[2] Read: the small print
[3] In that order