Women & World Peace

Foreign Policy has an article that claims that the best predictor of a state's stability is how it treats its women.

What's more, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are as insecure and unstable as nondemocracies. 

Our findings, detailed in our new book out this month, Sex and World Peace, echo those of other scholars, who have found that the larger the gender gap between the treatment of men and women in a society, the more likely a country is to be involved in intra- and interstate conflict, to be the first to resort to force in such conflicts, and to resort to higher levels of violence....  

It's ironic that authors such as Steven Pinker who claim that the world is becoming much more peaceful have not recognized that violence against women in many countries is, if anything, becoming more prevalent, not less so, and dwarfs the violence produced through war and armed conflict. To say a country is at peace when its women are subject to femicide -- or to ignore violence against women while claiming, as Pinker does, that the world is now more secure -- is simply oxymoronic.

Well, Pinker's argument is one I don't think much of myself (we discussed it here); nevertheless, I'm not sure what to make of this argument.

Stability as such isn't much of a goal, if what is being stabilized is injustice.  Thus, to some degree, you would think it would be a good thing to see that states that are fundamentally unjust were also unstable:  that's just what we might think we would want to see.

On the other hand, growing instability doesn't seem to improve the situation for women much:  in fact, it seems to worsen it.

It seems probable that they have their causality exactly backwards.  Good treatment for women does not cause political stability; it seems to result from it.  It is in a stable atmosphere that women have often done best in human history, because it is in such an atmosphere that the traditional male advantages are minimized:  size, strength, and a mental structure that evolution has shaped for war.  In a stable environment, it is development of long-term relationships rather than combat that tends to shape society:  and these are traditional female strengths.  It's the periods of long-term prosperity and stability in which women have advanced their political and legal position.

This suggests that if you want to see women's treatment improve, you should work to stabilize society; but you will almost certainly be stabilizing an oppressive environment for the women when you do it.  The goods that come for women will come from their own work and their own natural strength, over time, not because of external efforts.

Nevertheless, there are some counterexamples to the theory that occur to me.  It would have been true during the height of the instability of the industrial age, for example, that women had greatest equality (if not best treatment) in the places rendered most unstable by the revolution; and likewise, in WWII, it was the instability that created the opportunity for large-scale female migration into factory work.

This set of data suggest that creating instability is a great thing to do insofar as it gives women a greater hand in the means of production, which may only be possible in industrialized or post-industrial societies.  It was certainly true that many Marxist revolutions promised women this very good if they would join the revolution and help overthrow the government, which is why many third-world Marxist leaders were women.  However, after the revolution the promised goods rarely materialized.

If this is the truth, though, then there's no general rule about correlation or causation to be made here.  The fact that stable states are correlated with female rights is true only just now; it was not true before, and might not be true later.

The authors would like it to be true that the correlation (and even the causation) ran in their direction, because it could allow us to avoid making a value judgment between stability and freedom for women.  In fact, I suspect we will often have to make such judgments:  and I am as ready to strike a blow for freedom today as I ever was, though experience has made me less hopeful about how much we can actually achieve in our own historical moment.

"Counsel, do you have any other arguments?"

These are not words a lawyer wants to hear from the bench, especially if his only honest answer is, "Your Honor, I got nuthin'."

Arguments before the Supreme Court this week on the Arizona immigration law went far worse than I ever imagined they would, in part because I haven't been playing close attention to the exact position of the federal government.  I did not realize, for instance, that federal law already permits local police to check the immigration status of a person they suspect of being an illegal alien.  Arizona's law merely makes such a check mandatory.  The purpose of the change apparently was to permit the state authorities to override local preferences for annulling the federal immigration laws; in other words, this law works out a conflict between state and municipal authorities, not between state and federal authorities.

I also did not realize that the government stipulated at the outset that it was offering no arguments about the danger of profiling.  The law itself is race-neutral, so any such argument from the DOJ would have to await the implementation of the state law and the application of the usual statistical tests.  There may come a day when we have to endure "disparate impact" arguments on this subject, but today is not that day.

Remarks from the Justices amply demonstrated how badly the federal government's arguments were faring, but some of the worst came from moderate Justice Kennedy, from new, presumptively liberal Justice Sotomayor, and even from obviously liberal Justice Breyer.  Breyer asked how a provision that would require policemen call to check immigration status can be said to conflict with a federal rule that allows policemen to call to check immigration status.  Sotomayor got the DOJ to admit that the state would merely alert the feds that they'd discovered an illegal alien; nothing Arizona is doing (or could do) would require the feds to take the aliens into custody, if they didn't feel that doing so was a high priority or worth the expense.  (I'd just expect the feds to set up an automated message system that no one ever checks.  "Press one if you're wasting our time with more reports of illegal aliens, you red-state poster-children for hate crimes.")  Justice Kennedy's question was even more devastating: "So you're saying the government has a legitimate interest in not enforcing its laws?"  And as has been so widely reported, Justice Roberts stated, "It seems to me that the Federal Government just doesn't want to know who is here illegally or not."  But none of the Justices was impressed by the argument that federal pre-emption means the states are prohibited from giving the feds information they'd prefer not to know.

I don't know of any precedent for this situation, where the feds want to keep a law on the books, then claim pre-emption over the issue whether it will be enforced as written.  As Justice Scalia pointed out:

Anyway, what's wrong about the states enforcing Federal law? There is a Federal law against robbing Federal banks. Can it be made a state crime to rob those banks? I think it is. But does the Attorney General come in and say, you know, we might really only want to go after the professional bank robbers? If it's just an amateur bank robber, you know, we're going to let it go. And the state's interfering with our whole scheme here because it's prosecuting all these bank robbers.

Religion & Science, Together

Chemistry World discusses a new technique for recovering the original beauty of Medieval illuminations.  (Hat tip:  Medieval News.)  This is, of course, what the relationship between science and faith ought to look like:  a beautiful partnership, each seeking truth according to its discipline.

Tom Sawyer's Friend:

...the Washington, D.C. bureaucrat.

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land. 

Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

That means "no milking the cows," as well as "no picking the corn," and "no carrying bales of corn that I picked," and "no going to the farmers' market on Sunday, in the hope that your smiling face might charm someone into buying our tomatoes."  

It also means "No more 4-H" and "No more Future Farmers of America."

You can probably still whitewash the fence... at least until the next set of rules comes along.

Fixing Boys

Let's leave aside the question of whether there is a "war on boys" or a "war on women," or whether the system is stacked against one or the other.  It's clear that, regardless of how "the system" is "stacked," boys have significant problems with school as currently structured.

A better question, then, might be:  how can we structure school so that boys tend to excel?

Here are a few thoughts on structuring a program for boys, with a very small amount toward the end on how it would interact with a program for girls.

1)  It would involve longer school days, but with more and longer breaks for physical activity.  Boys at the elementary school level should be getting up for a good forty-five minutes' play at least three times during the school day.  At elementary levels one of these play periods can be formalized, into sports or (especially) martial arts; the others should be free.  At higher levels, first two and then periods should be formalized:  as boys grow into teenagers they need more structure to keep them out of trouble.

2)  It should assume that boys mature more slowly, and thus focus on topics earlier in their education that require less emotional maturity.  Math and science are good subjects at early ages; history and emotionally-difficult literature should be pushed back.  Stories that can be read to boys, or that have shown a long history of being interesting to boys, are good at this age -- adventure tales, Robin Hood, or books without emotional content like stories about airplanes and trains.  Stories that require them to confront or examine complex emotional truths are for later.  The technical skills of reading and basic composition do not involve much emotional weight, but advanced composition -- because it requires a mastery of content, which comes from emotionally laden things like history and literature -- should be pushed back as well.

3)  This implies that boys and girls should usually be educated separately, although the implication is not rigid; and in addition, there are substantial benefits to having boys and girls working alongside each other from early life.  It would be good to break school days into class periods for each subject, and the classes taught differently, so that individual accommodations can be made.  A boy who matures unusually quickly may benefit from being introduced to more emotionally complex materials, so that he might go to a class mostly filled with girls for the literary period; a girl might not develop as quickly, and go to a class filled mostly with boys.  Because boys will focus more on math and science early, those classes will probably advance faster; some girls who show especial aptitude may spend part of their days in boy-heavy classes.

These are just some initial thoughts; any or all of these thoughts may be wrong.  The point is to think about the problem from the perspective of trying to construct a solution that will work for the boys.  What do you suggest?

Once More with Feeling:

Philosophy is being made obsolete by science, claims a theorist cited by The Atlantic:

In January, Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and Director of the Origins Institute at Arizona State University, published A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, a book that, as its title suggests, purports to explain how something---and not just any something, but the entire universe---could have emerged from nothing, the kind of nothing implicated by quantum field theory.

Well, yes, "the kind of nothing."  This is just how we got started, though:  this "kind of nothing" isn't nothing at all.  It's the potential for something.

It turns out that the New York Times ran a piece that we somehow missed containing a rebuttal on just the same terms as we have been making.  The author was not me, though, but a better authority: a philosopher named David Albert, who also holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics.  I am gratified to learn that he raises substantially the same point.

"The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields... they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story."

The Atlantic decided to interview only Krauss, so you can read the rebuttal-to-the-rebuttal.  However, having done so, I can't say that I find it enlightening or even interesting.  He claims that philosophy doesn't advance while science does; the reviewer points out that the basis of computer science and artificial intelligence is based on recent work in philosophy of language.  'Well, I was just being provocative,' but the important areas of philosophy are being subsumed by other fields.  What about the ones that continue to produce insight?  'Those will be subsumed.'  Bertrand Russell?  'He was a mathematician.'  (Also a philosopher!  As Albert is both a philosopher and a physicist.)  It would be better to read St. Augustine on physics than the people reviewing his book, who are 'morons' (with, in Albert's case, a pair of advanced degrees in quite difficult subjects).

There is a point he's trying to make here, though, and if we are patient with him we can almost see it.  He clearly misses the philosopher's point, but that's because he wasn't listening.  Let's not make the same mistake.  Just what is he trying to say beneath all that sneering?

A modest proposal

My notion for a simultaneous attack on three problems:  (1) uninsured free riders on the American healthcare system, (2) the unconstitutional individual mandate under ObamaCare, and (3) the problem of illegal immigration:  limit the individual mandate to illegal immigrants, the penalty for non-compliance being immediate deportation.  Check insured status automatically during all traffic stops, the same way we check auto insurance.  Then abolish EMTALA for illegal immigrants.

I realize this doesn't address the problem of uninsured free riders under EMTALA who are American citizens, but at least the poorest of them are eligible for Medicaid, and they're not pouring over the borders.  This proposal also assumes it's constitutional to deport illegal aliens who can't prove they have medical insurance, but since they're legally subject to deportation anyway, I don't foresee the Supreme Court objecting.

A Culture of Arms

I personally believe that it is proper to carry arms openly whenever possible; the benefits of this are something we spoke of years ago, and I haven't changed my mind.

Nevertheless, for many people concealed carry is the only possible carry.  The usual solution is to carry some sort of holster, but another option is to wear clothing designed for the purpose of carrying concealed weapons.  The specialty industry built around this second option includes fine craftsmen like those at Coronado Leather, as well as larger-scale manufacturers like 5.11 Tactical.

Apparently, though, Woolrich has begun a line aimed at those who wish to carry a firearm in a fashionable way.    Under Armor, which pitched a military-approved version of their undershirts to help soldiers and Marines stay cool in Iraq, is apparently also in this market.

Woolrich is the most interesting, though, because it's such an ordinary part of American culture.  It was there nearly two hundred years ago when we were pushing West and needed warm things against frontier weather; these days, Woolrich products are available for sale in every Cracker Barrel by every interstate in the country.

It's encouraging.

Shāh Māt

Shāh Māt, meaning king-kill in ancient Persian, or as we say today:  checkmate. It seems the game of chess may have originated in India around the sixth century A.D., before spreading to Persia and thence to Europe via the Muslim expansion. Early on, it was called chaturaṅga, which translates as "four divisions (of the military)":  infantry, cavalry, elephantry, and chariotry.  (No hawks?  -- and by the way, isn't it a shame that elephantry no longer figures heavily in our military traditions.)  It's not too surprising that infantry and cavalry would become pawns and knights, but I wouldn't have guessed that bishops started out as elephants or rooks as chariots.  The position now called a rook has been filled not only by chariots over the intervening centuries but also by boats, carts, and towers.  The original pieces next to kings were viziers, but transmuted into queens by a thoroughly obscure process.  Early queens, like early bishops, had much more limited moves.

The Cloisters in New York City are now featuring a traveling exposition of early chess pieces carved from walrus ivory, probably in eleventh-century Norway, which were discovered in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis off the western coast of Scotland.  In this set, the rook takes a human form:

Among the warders (rooks) in the exhibition, who are represented as foot soldiers, one bites the top of his shield, barely containing his frenzied eagerness for battle. Scholars have identified such figures as berserkers (the soldiers of Odin from Norse mythology), known from the Heimskringla — the Chronicle of the Kings of Norway — of the poet Snorri Sturluson (ca. 1179–1241).

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Immigration confusion

PollingReport.com consolidates polling from a number of sources over time.  The link takes you to a summary of public attitudes to immigration, though other issues are addressed elsewhere in the site.  One of the strongest messages is that voters favor Arizona's immigration bill and think the Obama administration should butt out.  On most other immigration issues, public opinion is far less clear.  Americans' support for amnesty, for instance, swings over all the place depending on how the question is worded.  If you throw in enough words about ensuring that a new law will take account of work history, tax payments, and ties to the community, it will be popular.  Other formulations of the question, however, can elicit a lukewarm response even if they refer generally to those same considerations.  Similarly, if a question sticks closely to whether immigration is the primary responsibility of the federal or the state government, opinion will be mixed.  But throw in the question of whether the state should be allowed to step up if the federal government fails, and Arizona wins hands-down.

For the most part, you can find the expected divergence of opinion between Republicans and Democrats, with Independents splitting the difference.  Nevertheless, I was surprised to find that both Republicans and Democrats respond well to the statement "Do you favor or oppose allowing local boards [emphasis supplied] to determine whether illegal immigrants can stay in the United States based on factors such as how long the immigrants have lived here, if they have a family, a job and are paying taxes, and have other ties to the community?" while Independents do not.

Questions about whether immigrants contribute to or detract from American prosperity yield mixed results until you throw in the concept of balancing an immigrant's contribution against his drain on public freebies.

By far the clearest division of opinion appears when the answers are separated between Latino and non-Latino.  This division dwarfs the disagreements among the parties generally.

The new slavery

We all love lawyers, don't we?  -- when they make up those clever, mind-expanding arguments by way of increasing social justice.  The International Union of Operating Engineers has sued Indiana’s governor, attorney general, and labor commissioner, asserting novel theories under which the state's right-to-work laws are slavery prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment. First, the union is required to negotiate on behalf of all workers, regardless of what percentage of them have elected not to join the union. Okay, I at least understand why that one gets up their noses, even if I can't quite buy calling it slavery. But the second argument is that the law requires union workers to labor alongside non-union workers. If that's slavery, too, we've got a whole lot of restructuring to do.

What should we call it when taxpayers are forced to work to support other people? If we start calling it slavery whenever someone imposes a free-rider element on the system, let alone whenever we're forced to endure the company of people we disapprove of in public places, we're going to need a new word for real slavery.  By this theory, the Jim Crow laws were an admirable anti-slavery measure.

*Updated to substitute a better link for the broken one above (thanks, Valerie!).

New horizons in tech world

Not all you younguns will remember these things, so come sit by Gramma's rocker while she reminisces about 1979 with the help of these old AT+T videos.   One is a recruiting spot for the Bell Labs, showing earnest young tech geeks and their bad hair talking about good places to work and good communities for their families. These cutting-edge careers involved things like computer-to-computer communications that were about to revolutionize data transport.  The young technicians are cheerfully brisk about their career opportunities, without imagining that they're the center of the world.

The other video shows the happenin' new designer telephones, the kind you used to plug into a wall -- some even had a dial.  The featured homes all look more like something out of Dallas or A Clockwork Orange than what I remember of homes back then, when I was a new college graduate.  The phones are fun to look at, but it's the clothing that cracks me up.

A prisoner breaks out of the dilemma

This clip made my day.

H/t Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Word sleuthing

Here's something that's been bothering me lately.  (I don't have enough real trouble.)  What is the root of the past participle "fraught," as in "fraught with menace"?  On the analogy of "thought" and "taught," I get frink or freach, which lacked a certain something.  On the analogy of "wrought," whose root I imagined to be either work or wreak, I get fork or freak.  Freak seems to hold real promise:  when you're freaking out, you're fraught.  Somehow the word "free" seems to be involved, as well, which is how you get the contrast between "barrier-free" and "barrier-fraught" architecture, but as far as I can tell no one thinks there's a true etymological link between free and fraught.

Today I finally tried to look it up.  Most sources claim the root is the same as the participle, "fraught," but they admit that nobody says "to fraught" and that, if they did, its archaic meaning would be close to what we now suggest with the word "freight."  I can accept freight.  A situation is metaphorically freighted with some quality just as it can be fraught with that quality.  So I'm glad we cleared that up.

The experts claim, by the way, that the proper past participle of wreak is "wreaked," while "wrought" goes only with "work."  Well, I don't know.  I always thought you wrought havoc.

Efficient laundry

High-falutin' detergents add expensive enzymes, which break up stains.  They really work, but when the wash cycle is over the enzymes go down the drain along with the cheap soap and dirty water.  But wait a minute -- didn't they tell us in chemistry class that the whole point of enzymes is that they facilitate reactions without being used up?

Two bright fellows, C.S. Pundir and Nidhi Chauhan, reported to the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research that they had bound the four most common laundry enzymes to plastic surfaces (a bucket and scrub brush used in pre-washing) in a way that made the enzymes available for at least 200 re-uses over a three-month period.  It's a cheaper approach, and a lot less junk in the wastewater, too.  It's not commercially available yet, unfortunately.

Just-in-Time Structures

Conventional structures are sized for maximum loads, but maximum loads don't happen very often.  Wouldn't it be great if we could save material by strengthening structures only during emergencies, so to speak?  At the University of Stuttgart, they're experimenting with hydraulic drives that respond to unusual loads, which permits a structure to be made much thinner and lighter than usual.  In this prototype, a curved wooden shell touches down at four points, three of which end at moveable hydraulic cylinders.  A control system reads the load status at multiple points in the structure and moves the three free-floating points to counteract variable loads resulting from wind or snow.  As a result, the shell can be much thinner than what you'd expect for its huge span:  only four centimeters thick for 100 square meters of structure.

Imagine a bridge built with this system.  You really wouldn't want to lose power to the control system while traffic was on the bridge.

Back to Part I

My apologies for dropping out of this discussion here - it deserved more time than I could give it 'til now, and Grim gave me a not-at-all easy reference to look over - which I quite failed to grasp. (I've read Part II and am joining in that one separately.) I want to return to a part of Part I. Grim was reexplaining Kant's problem in terms of a believer, like Chesterton, who claimed to have pieced together evidence from throughout his life that brought him to believe in God.

Let's say that someone has encountered a number of phenomena that they believe demonstrate the existence of God. One counterargument to their reasoned belief in God would be to point out that they have misconstrued the causes of the phenomena...Yet he has come by his knowledge in the same way we come by knowledge of anything that is outside of ourselves in the world.

Absolutely, boss. But the quality of that evidence is the thing I always want to examine. (Chesterton makes it impossible because, after a book of build-up, he won't even say what that evidence is. But that is another story.) Putting it that way blurs the distinction between evidence of different quality (per Chesterton again, between the kind of man who doubts the existence of God and the kind who doubts the existence of cows).

So your objection, and Tom's after a fashion, is that you want to say that 'well, we can't have perfect knowledge of things outside of us, but we can have approximate knowledge' -- knowledge on a scale, as Tom put it. The problem is that doesn't get off the ground. Everything you think you know about the outside world is phenomenal (Kant is arguing). Every experience, every sensation, every fact you think you know is actually just a fact about your own internal thoughts...

Not so. The perceptions I get are evidence about the external world. "Direct" in the legal sense; "indirect" the way you say Kant's using it. The things I experience are consistent in such a way that they back each other up, and are evidence for each other. I see what looks like a fire; I feel the heat from it; I touch it and get burned by it; I hear and read about it. This is all evidence that such a thing as fire exists. It would be different if I lived in a world where I saw things that looked solid, but my hand passed through them when I tried to touch them; or things that looked just like fire sometimes burned and sometimes didn't for no apparent reason; or I felt my skin was crawling with bugs but everyone else said I was suffering from delusional parasitosis. Those situations would be evidence that my senses were not reliable and that the knowledge I got from them was not so useful.

I'm not in a world like that. The evidence I get runs the other way - within limits.[1] Yes it is possible that this is all a great self-consistent illusion of the brain-in-vat variety. But, I have to say, so what? What difference does this make to anything I have to do? Why paralyze myself by claiming, "This evidence isn't perfect; it could be all wrong without my knowing, so I'll declare all my knowledge completely nonexistent, without value, not knowledge at all?" It's the only evidence I've got and I'll take it as far as it seems to get me. Any map that I carry is not the same thing as the land it represents. It's only an indirect representation, and by its nature imperfect. Do I throw it away? Declare it's no map at all?

Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant - the protagonist of a few trilogies he wrote - was in a similar situation. He kept being transported to a fantasy world, which included a villain named Lord Foul, and (at least in the first two I, which I read) never seemed certain whether he was really visiting another world or dreaming the whole thing. But, he figured, whichever way it was - he was going to fight Lord Foul. I don't understand any other approach.

[1] I'm partly color-blind and accept there are things you can see that I can't; I can be fooled by optical illusions and know that what I think I'm seeing isn't always quite right.

Weren't We Just Talking About This?

A biologist writes about culture in terms that will seem quite familiar:

RICH AND SEEMINGLY BOUNDLESS as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality external to our bodies, is pitifully small.

He gives a litany of examples, to which we might add:  and all that's without the problems of apperception.

More on Bullies, From President Obama

Well, then-aspiring-author Obama, rather.  Dr. Althouse is reading more around the dog-eating tract that has gotten so much attention.

The man pulled the blade across the bird’s neck in a single smooth motion. Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. The man stood up, holding the bird far away from his body, and suddenly tossed it high into the air. It landed with a thud, then struggled to its feet, its head lolling grotesquely against its side, its legs pumping wildly in a wide, wobbly circle. I watched as the circle grew smaller, the blood trickling down to a gurgle, until finally the bird collapsed, lifeless....  Later, lying alone beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune.

Why does the boy — as remembered by the man — connect the killing of the bird to his own good fortune? Is it some elemental realization that simply to be alive is amazing, the bird being dead? Or is he excited to be in this new place with lots of thrilling new activities like beheading a bird and shortly thereafter eating it? Or is it the connection to the father figure, who's so eager to show the boy what life is really about and so easily overcomes the reticence of the mother? The next thing that happens in the book is that Lolo teaches him how to deal with bullies: Don't cry over the lump where he hit you with a rock; learn boxing. Lolo buys boxing gloves for him and teaches him to "keep moving, but always stay low—don’t give them a target." Good advice!  And it's on the very next page that Lolo teaches him to eat dog (and snake) meat.... The point is:  Life was a big adventure. And meat was part of the adventure — meat from real animals that lived and died.

Doubtless the President would agree with our advice, then:  the way to deal with bullies is to teach them to fear your own strength, not to whine, and to learn to fight smarter and better than they do.

Also, never to believe in clean hands.

Not your grandfather's DNA

If some science fiction writer doesn't pick up on this idea for a story about really alien forms of life, he's missing a good bet.

All life we know of on Earth depends on RNA or DNA, the long, ladder-like molecules that hold the sequences of three-letter words (each spelled with the four-base alphabet A-G-C-T) that serve as code for the 20 amino-acid building blocks of our proteins.  No one knows how such a code developed in the first place, or why all earthly life uses essentially the same code.  No one knows why all life strings the code along a ladder built of the sugar called ribose (the R in RNA) or its slightly altered cousin, deoxyribose (the D in DNA).  Was it just the structure that fell into place first, like the QWERTY keyboard, and everyone kept using it from then on?  There's no obvious reason why the ladder couldn't be built of other sugars.  For that matter, there's no obvious reason why the alphabet employed by our genetic code for protein synthesis couldn't choose other letters from the unknown number of potential nucleotide bases of which our familiar A, G, C, and T comprise only four (five, if you count the U that substitutes for T in RNA).  Further, there's no obvious reason why the code should limit itself to three-letter words and resulting vocabulary of 4 to the third power, or 64 words.

Obviously a 64-word vocabulary is sufficient to spell out some amazing complexity.  There's no limit in principle to the sentences you can form with 64 words.  You don't even need four letters to spell a lot of words, as binary computers attest.  The point is, the code our DNA uses is not the only way to skin a cat.  For instance, the amino acids that line up like pearls on a string to form our long-chain protein molecules number 22 in total, but of those only 20 are assigned a three-letter "code word" in our DNA.  (The other two get added in by separate enzymes at a later stage in the protein synthesis process not directly controlled by a DNA transcription.)  What's more, a number of other amino acids have specialized uses other than as beads in the protein string, such as for neurotransmitters or steps in metabolic pathways, but they are not assigned a three-letter DNA code word.  So our genetic code has more words than it needs for the amino acids we use, but it uses up the redundancy in synonyms for some of them, while having no word for others.

So, back to the article I linked to above.  The guys who fool around with this stuff are beginning to synthesize genetic molecules they call "XNA." These are still identifiable as nucleic acids, using a sugar and a phosphate for the ladder backbone and the familiar bases A, G, C, and T for the rungs, but they use different sugars from the usual ribose or D-ribose.  Some of the alternative sugars turn out to be more structurally sound, standing up unusually well, for instance, under the stress of voracious enzymes and extreme pH levels.

Intrepid experimenters are even adding a couple of new bases to the usual A-G-C-T quartet, thus vastly expanding the code's vocabulary.  I'll be very interested to learn how (and if) the surrounding cell mechanism learns to "read" the new words.  I've never quite been able to understand even how the old words are read.  Some sources I've read suggest that the shapes of the A-G-C-T code words are in some way physical cookie-cutter templates for the corresponding amino acids, but my impression is that that part is not well understood, and in any event I certainly don't understand it.  It's one of my favorite mysteries.

All this work still sticks pretty close to Earth-style genetic molecules, of course, using a sugar-phosphate ladder backbone with bases for rungs.  And yet sugars surely aren't the only way to construct a ladder, nor ladders the only possible structure on which to string a series of letters, nor a linear string of letters the only way to express and preserve a code.  What works here needn't be what works best under different conditions.  So I'm really curious to see how experiments in synthetic genetics come out.  Because of my abiding interest in the origins of life, I'd love to find out more about how ordinary molecules could possibly have developed into active metabolism from dead-end equilibrium, and from there into replicating systems that take resources from the outside world and use energy to restructure them according to their own pattern.  If nothing else, I'd like to see a better understanding develop of what kind of proto-molecules could possibly have developed into RNA, which, as primitive as it may be, is still an extremely complex structure and very, very far removed from the kind of chemical gunk you can generate from experiments designed to mimic primordial conditions.

I often hear casual statements to the effect that conditions on such-and-such a planet are "too extreme" to support life.  I don't find a statement like that meaningful.  Even on Earth in recent decades, we've found microbes thriving in extremely hot, cold, or poisonous conditions we'd confidently have called impossible until they were discovered.  The assumption in the 1950s that life originated in shallow seas is giving way to the notion that it may have started in deep-sea thermal vents or in venues sporting other extremes of heat and pressure.  We'd have to know considerably more about how life originated here before we could make any sensible statements about what it needs to get started universally, or about what sorts of forms life might take besides the ones we're used to.