The Silurian Hypothesis

When I was eleven, we lived in an English Tudor on Bluff Road in Glencoe, Illinois. One day, three strange men (two young, one old) knocked on the door. Their last name was Frank. They said they’d lived in this house before us, not for weeks but decades. For twenty years, this had been their house. They’d grown up here. Though I knew the house was old, it never occurred to me until then that someone else had lived in these rooms, that even my own room was not entirely my own. The youngest of the men, whose room would become mine, showed me the place on a brick wall hidden by ivy where he’d carved his name. “Bobby Frank, 1972.” It had been there all along. And I never even knew it.

That is the condition of the human race: we have woken to life with no idea how we got here, where that is or what happened before. Nor do we think much about it. Not because we are incurious, but because we do not know how much we don’t know.

What is a conspiracy?

It’s a truth that’s been kept from us. It can be a secret but it can also be the answer to a question we’ve not yet asked.

Modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years, but life has existed on this planet for 3.5 billion. That leaves 3,495,888,000 pre-human years unaccounted for—more than enough time for the rise and fall of not one but several pre-human industrial civilizations. Same screen, different show. 

Same field, different team. An alien race with alien technology, alien vehicles, alien folklore, and alien fears, beneath the familiar sky. There’d be no evidence of such bygone civilizations, built objects and industry lasting no more than a few hundred thousand years. After a few million, with plate tectonics at work, what is on the surface, including the earth itself, will be at the bottom of the sea and the bottom will have become the mountain peaks. The oldest place on the earth’s surface—a stretch of Israel’s Negev Desert—is just over a million years old, nothing on a geological clock.

The result of this is one of my favorite conspiracy theories, though it’s not a conspiracy in the conventional sense, a conspiracy usually being a secret kept by a nefarious elite. In this case, the secret, which belongs to the earth itself, has been kept from all of humanity, which believes it has done the only real thinking and the only real building on this planet, as it once believed the earth was at the center of the universe.

Called the Silurian Hypothesis, the theory was written in 2018 by Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute, and Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. Schmidt had been studying distant planets for hints of climate change, “hyperthermals,” the sort of quick temperature rises that might indicate the moment a civilization industrialized. 

It would suggest the presence of a species advanced enough to turn on the lights. Such a jump, perhaps resulting from a release of carbon, might be the only evidence that any race, including our own, will leave behind. Not the pyramids, not the skyscrapers, not Styrofoam, not Shakespeare—in the end, we will be known only by a change in the rock that marked the start of the Anthropocene.

It was logical for Schmidt and Frank to turn their attention from the upper to the under, from the cosmos to our own earth. Why look for alien life there when we might find it here, removed not by miles but years. There was indeed a mysterious jump in surface heat; 55 million years ago, global temperatures rose from 9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Called the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, it left the same sort of geological evidence that will be left by our current carbon binge. 

There may have been other jumps, but we wouldn’t know it, as the geologic record only goes back so far. (We live in a compactor, where all things are crushed, recycled, and returned as new.) A meteor could’ve caused the Thermal Maximum, or it could’ve been the eruption of a monster volcano, the sort that presently smolders beneath the Atlantic. Or it could have been caused by the awakening of an ancient civilization, which rose like we rose, then fell as we will. That could be the fate of all advanced species, a rise and fall that flows as naturally as the change of seasons. Such a universe is ironic, continually creating characters whose technology brings on the very end they’re trying to avoid.

When Schmidt and Frank searched, they found a single forerunner to their idea of deep time. It came not from science, but from science fiction. At this level of conjecture, there’s little difference. It was an episode of Dr. Who, in which the time traveler visits an ancient species of advanced, long-extinct lizard people who’d achieved technological mastery 450 million years before modern man. The lizards were called Silurians, hence the Silurian Hypotheses.

It’s not really a new idea. Ancient mystical texts hint at earlier creation, the life that preceded the Garden, prequels to Genesis. These incarnations are not reported in the Bible because they are none of your goddamn business, but the evidence is everywhere. Some students of conspiracy believe there was a time when lizard people shared the earth with modern men, the older race dying as the younger emerged from the forest. T

he last of the lizards were worshipped as gods; these were the deities of ancient India and Greece. The technology—weapons and machines—created miracles. You can see the lizard kings in carvings from Mesopotamia, the oldest historical records, where humans bow before reptile men. You find them again in the Torah, where they appear as Nephilim, the so-called watchers—“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them,” according to Genesis, “they were the heroes of old, men of renown”—which no priest, minister, or rabbi can properly explain. Just ask a clergyman and see for yourself. (I asked my rabbi.) There is some weird shit in the Bible.

According to a kabbalah-besotted friend, this world is God’s seventh creation, which explains dinosaur bones and other fossils. “The evidence is everywhere,” he told me one night. “They can say a meteor wiped out the past, but what is a meteor? God.” Some believe there are still Silurians walking the earth, holdovers who share their technology with a hidden elite—possibly Freemasons, possibly Jews. Some pseudoscientists speak of an atomic blast that took place in India 10,000 years ago. It might’ve been a natural phenomenon, or might’ve been the war that wiped out the Silurians or drove them off the earth. A website called Vedic Knowledge reported evidence “of an atomic blast dating back thousands of years. It destroyed most of the buildings and probably a half-million people in Rajasthan, India. One researcher estimates that the bomb used was about the size of the ones dropped on Japan in 1945.”

This ancient catastrophe, which some take as evidence of an ancient nuclear war, shows up in the Mahabharata, a Sanskrit epic, with the appearance of “a single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe … An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000 suns, rose in all its splendor … it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes an entire race.”

It’s heartbreaking—the fact that, as we face the nightmare of climate change, some of us have read our own perilous present back into the geological past and have come to see even our apocalypse as unremarkable, something that’s been experienced before and was inevitable from the start. It’s thrilling, too, the idea of a pre-human industrial civilization. It means we don’t know anything: who we are, or where, or even the history of our own home.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Humans’ body temperatures are mysteriously getting colder, study finds

Bodies now typically cooler than textbook 37C first established 150 years ago, experts say

The average human body temperature has dropped over the past 150 years, according to a new study, though it remains unclear what is behind this decrease.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have established that people’s bodies are now typically cooler than the textbook figure of 37C, first established by German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich in 1868.

The study shows that modern-day men have a body temperature 0.58C lower than their 19th century counterparts, while women’s are 0.32C lower.

This decrease has been attributed to “changes in our environment over the past 200 years, which have in turn driven physiological changes”. However, the study acknowledges that establishing cause and effect remains “inherently unprovable”.

Senior author Julie Parsonnet, a professor of medicine and of health research and policy at Stanford University, says: “Our temperature is not what people think it is.

“What everybody grew up learning, that our normal temperature is 98.6°F [37°C], is wrong.”

The study offers a number of explanations for the drop in temperature, including a reduction in the human metabolic rate.

Advances in medical treatments, better hygiene, greater availability of food and improved standards of living, which provide humans with a constant ambient temperature, could all have contributed to this drop-off, the authors say.

They also suggest the cooling may be due to a population-wide decline in inflammation, with our bodies subjected to fewer infections and diseases as a result of improvements in modern medicine.

“Inflammation produces all sorts of proteins and cytokines that rev up your metabolism and raise your temperature,” says Dr Parsonnet.

“We’ve changed in height, weight – and we’re colder. I don’t really know what [the new measurements] mean in terms of health, but they’re telling us something. They’re telling us that we are changing and that what we’ve done in the last 150 years has made us change in ways we haven’t before.

“Physiologically, we’re just different from what we were in the past.

“The environment that we’re living in has changed, including the temperature in our homes, our contact with microorganisms and the food we have access to. 

“All these things mean that although we think of human beings as if we’re monomorphic and have been the same for all of human evolution, we’re not the same. We’re actually changing physiologically.”

Researchers analysed temperatures from three datasets covering distinct historical periods. 

The earliest set, compiled from military service records, medical records and pension records from Union Army veterans of the American Civil War, captures data between 1862 and 1930 and includes people born in the early 1800s.

The second set contained data from 1971 to 1975, while the third covered 2007 to 2017.

As part of the study, the authors investigated the possibility that the decrease could reflect improvements in thermometer technology. 

Researchers checked for body temperature trends within the three datasets and, based on the assumption that measurements would have been taken with similar thermometers for each historical group, found their observations were consistent with the broader picture. Each group saw a similar decrease every decade.

The full findings were published in the journal eLife.  

(Source: Independent)

The hidden origins of mankind

There is a movie that came out decades ago. I saw it in a theater in Paris as part of a Robert Mitchum festival, which, as luck had it, was playing in a small theater across the street from my small hotel at the end of a small street during a small, lonely season of my life. Instead of going to museums, I passed the days in the dark watching Cape Fear, The Night of the Hunter, Out of the Past, and Pursued, an obscure movie directed by Raoul Walsh. Martin Scorsese once described it to me as the only Freudian Western. It deals with repressed memory, signs and symbols, dreams and fantasies of uncovering the hidden origins of your existence. It’s about a cowboy. He lives in New Mexico with his mother, whom he loves; with his sister, whom he loves in a different way; and with his brother, whom he hates, though he doesn’t understand why. At night, he is haunted by a strange dream—in it, he sees dancing boots and spurs, and there is always laughter. In the last act, we learn the meaning of the boots and the laughter, a secret that explains the cowboy’s fear and distrust. The dream is more than a dream. It’s a memory of the day the man who’d been posing as Mitchum’s uncle killed Mitchum’s father, then danced over the body in spurred boots laughing as the woman Mitchum would accept as his mother scooped up the terrified child to be raised as her own.

That movie has haunted me ever since. Its dancing spurs have become my dancing spurs, its story less a plot than a parable. It’s mankind reduced to symbols. It’s a secret encoded. It’s telling us that the truth about our past—as a species—has been hidden. It’s about the effort to keep it hidden, which constitutes a conspiracy. It’s a secret that remains just out of reach, though the existence of the secret is hinted at in all the ancient books. It’s in the Bible (Old Testament) and in its sequel (New Testament). It’s in Exodus when Moses climbs the trail to the peak of Sinai, the holy mountain, the Lord’s abode in the upside-down. God gives Moses the Ten Commandments, then something else, a secret teaching, whispered in the left ear. Moses shared it with his nephews, who either passed it on or were not listening. Some of it may have been recorded in Jubilees, a noncanonical book of the Bible. It’s in the Gospels, too, most clearly in Mark, when Jesus, explaining why much of his teaching is given in the form of parables (in ancient Israel, a parable was like a riddle) says he does it to obscure as much as to reveal:

You are permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but others are not. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge. But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have will be taken away from them. That is why I use these parables, for they look, but they don’t really see. They hear, but they don’t really listen or understand.

For Jews, this method—teaching via seemingly pointless stories—will be familiar. All our old-timers prefer anecdotes to instructions, questions to answers. Think of the Bob Dylan lyric: “I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain.” Or think of my pop who, when asked why he answered every question with another question, responded, “Why do you ask?”


So in Mark, you again have the existence of the secret but not the secret itself, which is reserved for a handful of disciples who will pass it on to a chosen few, protecting the masses from a truth that would only confuse them.

You find mention of the secret all through art and literature—once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. It’s in every book that’s really knocked me out. Start with Walker Percy, whose novels I came across by accident—of course, there are no accidents—freshman year in college, when I was hungry for the secret. The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming—these books gripped me and disappointed me. Gripped me because the protagonist was always on the verge of discovering the secret; disappointed me because he never did. I always closed the book hungry, yet not knowing why. This not knowing drives Percy’s protagonists toward suicide. Better not to know you don’t know than to know you don’t know and never will. It’s a realization his characters experience as a fall from Eden, a move from blissful ignorance to tortured knowledge. Once again, and just like that, the bleak nature of their predicament comes back to them.

This can happen anywhere, even on a golf course:

Another time, he sliced out-of-bounds, something he seldom did. As he searched for the ball deep in the woods, another odd thing happened to him. He heard something and the sound reminded him of an event that happened a long time ago. It was the most important event in his life, yet he had managed until that moment to forget it.

Shortly afterward, he became even more depressed. People seemed more farcical than ever. More than once he shook his head, and smiling ironically, said to himself: This is not for me.

Then it was that it occurred to him that he might shoot himself.
First, it was only a thought that popped into his head.
Next, it was an idea which he entertained ironically.
Finally, it was a course of action which he took seriously and decided to carry out.

The books satisfy but not fully: you want the answer Percy himself seeks but never finds. You are left with the same questions you had at the beginning: Is there a secret? Who keeps it and how? And, most importantly, what is it?

That’s where secret societies, and the hatred of secret societies, comes in. Because these groups, real or imagined—Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Jews, always Jews—are thought to be in possession of the secret, which they use to manipulate the multitudes. If not, then why the codes, the symbols, the strange languages and signs? Why the two-headed eagle, the pentagram, and the all seeing eye? What are these things if not a wink to the hidden elite, those who know but are not telling. And what about the secret books—the Book of Enoch and the Gospel of Judas, or the occult writings of Theosophist Madame Blavatsky? And what about the rituals? The goat loaded with sin and driven into the wilderness, the horned helmet worn only in the inner sanctum, the staff and the flowing robes?

*

A fixation on such questions can drive people mad; they stand before the world like a person standing before a 3-D poster, hunting for the pattern. The answer is so close they can almost touch it. It shimmers like a heat mirage up the highway, forever receding. If they knew this, maybe they’d know everything. A man in my town told me that he gets goose bumps whenever he walks past the synagogue, wondering what’s being said in there. I can assure you, I told him (it’s my synagogue), nothing is being said. Or, if we are talking, it’s not about you. We know nothing you don’t know, which is why I have trouble connecting with the services. I am searching for the same thing as you, I tell him. In fact, the core of Judaism, as far as I’m concerned, is not knowing. We had the secret, then lost it. That’s the worldview. That’s the humor. That’s the food. That’s the sad old men. That’s the klezmer. That’s why people pray to a wall in the desert. Because the wall used to support a temple, in which there was a room where the secret was spoken once a year, but the room and the building have been destroyed.

People join secret societies for the business contacts, the companionship, to pass time and, of course, for the answers. But are these answers, if they do exist, anything other than ludicrous? The Nation of Islam believes the white race was made in a lab by a black scientist named Yakub. Scientologists believe human history was warped by an intergalactic overlord named Xenu who, in an effort to deal with overpopulation, killed millions of beings, stashed their frozen souls—“thetans”—beside volcanoes on earth—Hey, I’m doing the best I can here!—which he then nuked, scattering alien souls that adhere to modern humans in the way of burrs picked up in the forest. You pay, they are removed, and you become “clear.”

Every religion has a creation story, and the story, whether told in school or church, is always basically the same. The lyrics change, but the melody is the melody. It is always order arising from chaos: a big bang, an explosion of life, the creation of man and the fall from the paradise of not knowing. In the Bible, Cain kills Abel and is cast out. In Darwin, Homo sapiens plunge the Neanderthals into nonexistence. In both stories, the bad brother survives. In the Bible, the snake tempts Eve in the Garden, she eats from the tree of knowledge, and brings suffering into the world. To Gnostics, God is really a demigod who means to imprison us, to keep us from learning the secret: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat; But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, though shall not eat of it; for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” In this reading, the spirit we have accepted as almighty is more like a prison warden, hiding the truth, which the snake, who enters the Garden as if entering our dream, tires to reveal. Having eaten from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve must be cast out before they eat from the tree of life, at which point they will become the equal of their jailer. “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:  Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”

And who is this “us,” anyway?

And what about the modern sects, dozens of them, who’ve picked up and reassembled the pieces of the puzzle into ever wilder patterns. Take, for example, members of the Raëlian Movement, who believe mankind was created by ancient aliens—a genetically engineered hybrid designed to mine the gold needed to save the alien atmosphere. It’s a story they say can be read in the tablets found in the ruins of ancient Sumer, the world’s first civilization, which show reptile men, spaceships, thrones, little people worshipping giant lizards—the snake that crept into the Garden? These were the old-world gods, the immortals of Mesopotamia and Egypt, Greece and Rome. People with the right kind of eyes can find these intergalactic overlords even in our canonical texts. There they are, above the wine-dark seas of Homer. There they are, in the first pages of Genesis, where they are called the Nephilim. “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.” It’s a secret known to the Masons and Illuminati, though it has been kept from the people, who, to this day, are ruled by the descendants of half alien/half human hybrids. (This is what conspiracy theorists like David Icke believe; it’s what people mean when they speak of the reptilians.) Some think we are not even free-range hybrids, but live in a vast zoo, where we are gawked at by schools of field-tripping aliens. Some think we are on a reality TV show—that we’re famous on a distant planet. Some think this is all a computer simulation, that this world is not the real world but a reflection or echo of the real world, that we are living in a mainframe, our lives the playthings of adolescent boys who really should be doing their homework.

So what does it all mean?

It means that no book, no teacher, no religion, no philosophy, no scientific discovery will ever satisfy. You are looking for something you will never find, which they used to call God.

(Source: The Paris Review)

First human-monkey chimera raises concern among scientists

Researchers reprogrammed human cells before injecting them in the monkey embryo

Efforts to create human-animal chimeras have rebooted an ethical debate after reports emerged that scientists have produced monkey embryos containing human cells.

A chimera is an organism whose cells come from two or more “individuals”, with recent work looking at combinations from different species. The word comes from a beast from Greek mythology which was said to be part lion, part goat and part snake.

The latest report, published in the Spanish newspaper El País, claims a team of researchers led by Prof Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte from the Salk Institute in the US have produced monkey-human chimeras. The research was conducted in China “to avoid legal issues”, according to the report.

Chimeras are seen as a potential way to address the lack of organs for transplantation, as well as problems of organ rejection. Scientists believe organs genetically matched to a particular human recipient could one day be grown inside animals. The approach is based on taking cells from an adult human and reprogramming them to become stem cells, which can give rise to any type of cell in the body. They are then introduced into the embryo of another species.

Izpisúa Belmonte and other scientists have previously managed to produce both pig embryos and sheep embryos which contain human cells, although the proportions are tiny: in the latter case, researchers estimate that only one cell in 10,000 was human. Pig-human and sheep-human chimeras are attractive in part because pigs and sheep have organs about the right size for transplantation into humans.

 The human-monkey chimeras have reportedly only been allowed to develop for a few weeks. Photograph: Xinhua/Barcroft Images

Details of the work reported this week are scarce: Izpisúa Belmonte and colleagues did not respond to requests for comment.

However Alejandro De Los Angeles, from the department of psychiatry at Yale University, said it was likely monkey-human chimeras were being developed to explore how to improve the proportion of human cells in such organisms. “Making human-monkey chimeras could teach us how to make human-pig chimeras with the hope of making organs for transplantation,” he said. “It could teach us which types of stem cells we should be using, or other ways of enhancing what’s called ‘human chimerism levels’ inside pigs.”

De Los Angeles pointed out that, as with previous work in pigs and sheep, the human-monkey chimeras have reportedly only been allowed to develop for a few weeks – ie before organs actually form.

Prof Robin Lovell-Badge, a developmental biologist from London’s Francis Crick Institute, agreed. “I don’t think it is particularly concerning in terms of the ethics, because you are not taking them far enough to have a nervous system or develop in any way – it’s just really a ball of cells,” he said.

But Lovell-Badge added that if chimeras were allowed to develop further, it could raise concerns. “How do you restrict the contribution of the human cells just to the organ that you want to make?” he said. “If that is a pancreas or a heart or something, or kidney, then that is fine if you manage to do that. [But] if you allow these animals to go all the way through and be born, if you have a big contribution to the central nervous system from the human cells, then that obviously becomes a concern.”

The news of the monkey-human chimeras comes shortly after it was reported Japanese researchers such as Prof Hiromitsu Nakauchi received government support to create mouse-human chimeras.

In March Japan lifted a ban on allowing such embryos to develop beyond 14 days and being implanted in a uterus, meaning these chimeras can, if permission for an experiment is granted, be brought to term. Nakauchi has said he does not plan to bring the human-mouse chimeras to term yet.

Lovell-Badge said it is very unlikely the animals, if brought to term, would take on human-like behaviour, but said the animals might not behave like “normal” rodents.

“So there are some animal welfare issues as well as the ‘yuck-factor’ ethical issues from making something more human,” he said. “Clearly if any animal born had aspects of human appearance, their faces, their hands, their skin, then I suspect, while scientifically very interesting, people might get a little upset with that.”

De Los Angeles and colleagues have suggested monkey-human chimeras could, in theory, provide new ways to study neurological and psychiatric diseases in humans.

“In theory, for diseases where primate models are not good enough, making human-monkey chimeras could provide a better model of brain diseases,” he told the Guardian, adding that in the case of Alzheimer’s more than 150 trials have failed in 20 years, possibly because of a lack of a good disease model.

One possible approach for brain research is that a monkey embryo could be genetically altered and then injected with human stem cells so that part of the brain, for example the hippocampus, is composed only of human cells. A similar approach has previously been used by Izpisúa Belmonte and colleagues to grow a rat pancreas inside a mouse.

“If you just swap the hippocampus, it doesn’t mean you are now going to have a human-functioning brain,” said Lovell-Badge. “It might have perhaps slightly better memories or slightly different memories … but they are not going to have a human cortex, which is what actually makes us human.”

But such proposals walk straight into the ethical arena others have been at pains to dodge: the possibility of human cells ending up in monkey brains, a development some fear could result in the creatures being human-like. Researchers have previously said they are able to prevent human cells ending up in chimeras’ brains or sex organs.

De Los Angeles said there is still a long way to go before human-monkey chimeras are brought to term.

“The evolutionary distance between humans and monkeys spans 30-40 million years, so it is unclear if this is even possible,” he said. “This difference is greater than 10 million years between mice and rats, and even the efficiency of making mouse-rat chimeras is already quite low.”

While making monkey brains more human is a red line for some, in some ways it has already been crossed. In April scientists in China published a study in which they claimed to have introduced a human brain gene into monkeys, with the animals showing features including better short-term memory and shorter reaction times. These animals are not chimeras, but it is clear that new boundaries are being pushed.

Lovell-Badge said he thought it possible that the development of human-monkey chimeras to study a part of the central nervous system could gain approval, but that it would take a while.

“In the UK, any proposal to make human-monkey chimeras would have to be very well justified, and it would have to get through a very tough review process,” he said. “I am sure that any proposal to go straight to live born chimeras would not get approval in the UK and probably not also in Japan.”

(Source: The Guardian)

Before you can be with others, first learn to be alone

In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe described the ‘mad energy’ of an ageing man who roved the streets of London from dusk till dawn. His excruciating despair could be temporarily relieved only by immersing himself in a tumultuous throng of city-dwellers. ‘He refuses to be alone,’ Poe wrote. He ‘is the type and the genius of deep crime … He is the man of the crowd.’

Like many poets and philosophers through the ages, Poe stressed the significance of solitude. It was ‘such a great misfortune’, he thought, to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get caught up in the crowd, to surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing conformity. Two decades later, the idea of solitude captured Ralph Waldo Emerson’s imagination in a slightly different way: quoting Pythagoras, he wrote: ‘In the morning, – solitude; … that nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company.’ Emerson encouraged the wisest teachers to press upon their pupils the importance of ‘periods and habits of solitude’, habits that made ‘serious and abstracted thought’ possible.

In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.

In 1961, The New Yorker commissioned Arendt to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust. How could anyone, she wanted to know, perpetrate such evil? Surely only a wicked sociopath could participate in the Shoah. But Arendt was surprised by Eichmann’s lack of imagination, his consummate conventionality. She argued that while Eichmann’s actions were evil, Eichmann himself – the person – ‘was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions.’ She attributed his immorality – his capacity, even his eagerness, to commit crimes – to his ‘thoughtlessness’. It was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder.

Just as Poe suspected that something sinister lurked deep within the man of the crowd, Arendt recognised that: ‘A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.’ Eichmann had shunned Socratic self-reflection. He had failed to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the vita contemplativa, and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil.

Clamdigger 1935 by Edward Hopper. Courtesy Sharon Mollerus/Flickr

‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,’ Arendt wrote, ‘because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.’ It is not that unthinking men are monsters, that the sad sleepwalkers of the world would sooner commit murder than face themselves in solitude. What Eichmann showed Arendt was that society could function freely and democratically only if it were made up of individuals engaged in the thinking activity – an activity that required solitude. Arendt believed that ‘living together with others begins with living together with oneself’.

But what if, we might ask, we become lonely in our solitude? Isn’t there some danger that we will become isolated individuals, cut off from the pleasures of friendship? Philosophers have long made a careful, and important, distinction between solitude and loneliness. In The Republic (c380 BCE), Plato proffered a parable in which Socrates celebrates the solitary philosopher. In the allegory of the cave, the philosopher escapes from the darkness of an underground den – and from the company of other humans – into the sunlight of contemplative thought. Alone but not lonely, the philosopher becomes attuned to her inner self and the world. In solitude, the soundless dialogue ‘which the soul holds with herself’ finally becomes audible.

Echoing Plato, Arendt observed: ‘Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company’ but desire it and cannot find it. In solitude, Arendt never longed for companionship or craved camaraderie because she was never truly alone. Her inner self was a friend with whom she could carry on a conversation, that silent voice who posed the vital Socratic question: ‘What do you mean when you say …?’ The self, Arendt declared, ‘is the only one from whom you can never get away – except by ceasing to think.’

Arendt’s warning is well worth remembering in our own time. In our hyper-connected world, a world in which we can communicate constantly and instantly over the internet, we rarely remember to carve out spaces for solitary contemplation. We check our email hundreds of times per day; we shoot off thousands of text messages per month; we obsessively thumb through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, aching to connect at all hours with close and casual acquaintances alike. We search for friends of friends, ex-lovers, people we barely know, people we have no business knowing. We crave constant companionship.

But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she put it, ‘by what everybody else does and believes in’ – no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish ‘right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’. Solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness – and conscience – but also a practice that prepares one for participation in social and political life. Before we can keep company with others, we must learn to keep company with ourselves.

(Source: Aeon)

Scientists create embryos that are both animal and human

A handful of scientists around the United States are trying to do something that some people find disturbing: make embryos that are part human, part animal.

The researchers hope these embryos, known as chimeras, could eventually help save the lives of people with a wide range of diseases.

One way would be to use chimera embryos to create better animal models to study how human diseases happen and how they progress.

Perhaps the boldest hope is to create farm animals that have human organs that could be transplanted into terminally ill patients.

But some scientists and bioethicists worry the creation of these interspecies embryos crosses the line. "You're getting into unsettling ground that I think is damaging to our sense of humanity," says Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology and anatomy at the New York Medical College.
The experiments are so sensitive that the National Institutes of Health has imposed a moratorium on funding them while officials explore the ethical issues they raise.

Human-Animal Embrios Created In The Lab
Nevertheless, a small number of researchers are pursuing the work with alternative funding. They hope the results will persuade the NIH to lift the moratorium.

"We're not trying to make a chimera just because we want to see some kind of monstrous creature," says Pablo Ross, a reproductive biologist at the University of California, Davis. "We're doing this for a biomedical purpose."

The NIH is expected to announce soon how it plans to handle requests for funding.

Recently, Ross agreed to let me visit his lab for an unusual look at his research. During the visit, Ross demonstrated how he is trying to create a pancreas that theoretically could be transplanted into a patient with diabetes.

The first step involves using new gene-editing techniques to remove the gene that pig embryos need to make a pancreas.

Working under an elaborate microscope, Ross makes a small hole in the embryo's outer membrane with a laser. Next, he injects a molecule synthesized in the laboratory to home in on and delete the pancreas gene inside. (In separate experiments, he has done this to sheep embryos, too.)

After the embryos have had their DNA edited this way, Ross creates another hole in the membrane so he can inject human induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS for short, into the pig embryos.

Like human embryonic stem cells, iPS cells can turn into any kind of cell or tissue in the body. The researchers' hope is that the human stem cells will take advantage of the void in the embryo to start forming a human pancreas.

Because iPS cells can be made from any adult's skin cells, any organs they form would match the patient who needs the transplant, vastly reducing the risk that the body would reject the new organ.

But for the embryo to develop and produce an organ, Ross has to put the chimera embryos into the wombs of adult pigs. That involves a surgical procedure, which is performed in a large operating room across the street from Ross's lab.

The day Ross opened his lab to me, a surgical team was anesthetizing an adult female pig so surgeons could make an incision to get access to its uterus.

Creepy Cimera Embyros
Ross then rushed over with a special syringe filled with chimera embryos. He injected 25 embryos into each side of the animal's uterus. The procedure took about an hour. He repeated the process on a second pig.

Every time Ross does this, he then waits a few weeks to allow the embryos to develop to their 28th day — a time when primitive structures such as organs start to form.

Ross then retrieves the chimeric embryos to dissect them so he can see what the human stem cells are doing inside. He examines whether the human stem cells have started to form a pancreas, and whether they have begun making any other types of tissues.

The uncertainty is part of what makes the work so controversial. Ross and other scientists conducting these experiments can't know exactly where the human stem cells will go. Ross hopes they'll only grow a human pancreas. But they could go elsewhere, such as to the brain.

"If you have pigs with partly human brains you would have animals that might actually have consciousness like a human," Newman says. "It might have human-type needs. We don't really know."

That possibility raises new questions about the morality of using the animals for experimentation. Another concern is that the stem cells could form human sperm and human eggs in the chimeras.

"If a male chimeric pig mated with a female chimeric pig, the result could be a human fetus developing in the uterus of that female chimera," Newman says. Another possibility is the animals could give birth to some kind of part-human, part-pig creature.

"One of the concerns that a lot of people have is that there's something sacrosanct about what it means to be human expressed in our DNA," says Jason Robert, a bioethicist at Arizona State University. "And that by inserting that into other animals and giving those other animals potentially some of the capacities of humans that this could be a kind of violation — a kind of, maybe, even a playing God."

Ross defends what his work. "I don't consider that we're playing God or even close to that," Ross says. "We're just trying to use the technologies that we have developed to improve peoples' life."

Still, Ross acknowledges the concerns. So he's moving very carefully, he says. For example, he's only letting the chimera embryos develop for 28 days. At that point, he removes the embryos and dissects them.

If he discovers the stem cells are going to the wrong places in the embryos, he says he can take steps to stop that from happening. In addition, he'd make sure adult chimeras are never allowed to mate, he says.

"We're very aware and sensitive to the ethical concerns," he says. "One of the reasons we're doing this research the way we're doing it is because we want to provide scientific information to inform those concerns."

Ross is working with Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte from the Salk Intitute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., and Hiromitsu Nakauchi at Stanford University. Daniel Garry of the University of Minnesota and colleagues are conducting similar work. The research is funded in part by the Defense Department and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

(Source: The Daily Trends)