Increíbles robots de la empresa Festo en Alemania

Nadan, vuelan... son dignos de cuentos de ciencia ficción, pero están aquí y ahora. Y apenas es 2009.

¿Qué es lo "normal" en el siglo XXI?

Sarah Gronert

Ronald Inglehart ha medido desde hace 40 años el cambio social en el mundo a través de realizar en decenas de países la misma encuesta: la encuesta mundial de valore. Y ha constatado algo: la humanidad en general está pasando de tener valores tradicionales y materiales a valores postmateriales, postmodernos. Esto ocurre a la vez que la humanidad está pasando cada vez más a vivir en ciudades, donde la sociedad es mucho más plural y diversa que en las zonas rurales. Si a lo anterior le sumamos el avance en ciencia y tecnología llegamos al punto en que aparezcan "anomalías" en la narrativa social, pero que quizá son solo los primeros signos físicos del cambio social, facilitado por los nuevos avances materiales. Y esos mutantes, esos pioneros narrativos que empiezan primero a aparecer en el mundo del espectáculo, y de los deportes. Del mundo del espectáculo la revista Time enfocó la semana pasada el caso de Madonna, como ejemplo de la mujer madura que usa todo el poder de la ciencia y la tecnología para ser más joven que Britney Spears. Del segundo caso habla hoy Andrew Sullivan en su blog, y mucha de la prensa del mundo. Se trata del caso de Sarah Gronert, tenista alemana de 22 años. Copio del blog de Sullivan:

Sports and Gender

"It's one of those areas where blank slaters have so far been unable to insist on denying natural differences between men and women. No co-ed professional rugby, for example; and men and women are still separated in almost all team sports and track and field. The issue, of course, is testosterone. But what if someone is born intersex, gets an operation to become legally female but still seems to have enough masculine power to serve many other women off the tennis court? Meet rising tennis star Sarah Gronert, 22."

Así es, Gronert nació como se dice medicamente como una persona intersexual, es decir, nació con los genitales de ambos sexos, pero hace tres años decidó realizar un cambio quirúrgico, y hoy es medica y legalmente una mujer. Juega tennis, y lo juega bien, por eso creo muchos la critican. Pero dandoles un poco razón, tampoco podría ella jugar en un equipo de hombres, porque no lo es. Hace poco Oscar Pistorius, un corredor sudafricano, también sufrió de discriminación por correr más rápido que muchos, pero es que él usa piernas articiales, y por eso es mejor decían muchos, y no merece correr con los "normales". El siglo XXI nos llevará a esa pregunta: ¿quién es normal? O... ¿qué es lo "normal"? El promedio afirmarían muchos, pero... ¿la diversidad social del siglo XXI se puede realmente promediar?

Ya se puede hablar por teléfono celular con Dios, perdón, Google...

Ya me urge un iPhone. Ah , y por qué cree que Google es Dios...

Honda presenta prototipo de sistema que ayuda a personas con problemas para caminar

Se llama Walking Assist Device y fue presentado el prototipo por Honda el pasado 7 de noviembre de 2008. Ayudar a personas que tienen problemas para soportar su peso, y por ende para caminar. Por lo general son personas con daños en la espina dorsal o aquellas que trabajan mucho de pie o que tienen ya cierta avanzada edad. Ojalá salga pronto al mercado. Me recuerda al exoesqueleto que usa Sigourney Weaver en Alien El Regreso. Poco a poco la tecnología se una más a lo biológico, difuminando los límites, y creo que no es ni bueno ni malo. Es solo la continuación de nuestr a voluntad de controlar el fuego hace miles de años atrás.

Robots de enjambre o swarmbots

Los robots de enjambre o swarmbots apenas inician su evolución, pero si hay especies de hormigas que hacen puentes para que otras pasen sobre riachuelos, estos también pueden tener potencial de diseñar propias soluciones. Aquí se aplica la premisa de que el todo es más que la suma de sus partes. Podríamos enviarlos a explorar Marte por ejemplo. Su futuro es amplio, aunque también imagino escenarios de pesadilla... Más sobre swarmbots aquí.

¿Y si los atletas tuvieran el derecho de automodificarse para ganar?

Michael Phelps, ayer en el Cubo de Agua de Beijing 2008, trás ganar su segunda medalla de oro.

Ya lo hacen con ejercicio, dietas, claro está. Pero por qué no dejarlos usar nuevas drogas pregunta John Tierny en el New York Times de hoy. De hecho argumenta el régimen actual de supervisión no funciona, ya que muchos examenes no son en sí científicos. Yo soy ambivalente sobre el tema: ¿pureza deportiva o juegos mutantes? Ambas posibilidades me atraen. Copio un fragmento:

August 12, 2008

Findings

Let the Games Be Doped

By JOHN TIERNEY

Once upon a time, the lords of the Olympic Games believed that the only true champion was an amateur, a gentleman hobbyist untainted by commerce. Today they enforce a different ideal. The winners of the gold medals are supposed to be natural athletes, untainted by technology. After enough “scandals,” the amateur myth eventually died of its own absurdity. The natural myth is still alive in Beijing, but it’s becoming so far-fetched — and potentially dangerous — that some scientists and ethicists would like to abandon it, too.

What if we let athletes do whatever they wanted to excel?

Before you dismiss this notion, consider what we’re stuck with today. The system is ostensibly designed to create a level playing field, protect athletes’ health and set an example for children, but it fails on all counts.

The journal Nature, in an editorial in the current issue, complains that “antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear” by relying on unscientifically calibrated tests, like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory. Even if the authorities manage to correct their tests, they can’t possibly keep up with the accelerating advances in biology. Some athletes are already considering new drugs like Aicar and GW1516, which made news recently when researchers at the Salk Institute used them to quickly turn couch-potato mice into treadmill champions with new, strong muscles.

“There’s a possibility that athletes in this Olympics will be using these drugs,” said Ronald Evans, the leader of the team at Salk, who has been fending off inquiries from athletes about these drugs. He has advised the antidoping authorities on how to detect these drugs, but whether they’ll be able do it competently this Olympics is far from clear.

The authorities will have even less of a chance of catching athletes who move beyond drugs and hormones to “gene doping” — inserting genes in their DNA that could increase strength and endurance without leaving telltale chemicals in the bloodstream.

There’s no proof that this would work, but that won’t stop competitors. As Science News reported, a track coach in Germany was caught looking for Repoxygen, an experimental virus used to insert a gene into DNA.

Bioética: ¿por la "dignidad humana" o la "autonomía de la persona"? ¿Y quién lo decide?

Uno de mis pensadores favoritos es Steven Pinker, linguista y psicólogo de la Universidad de Harvard, experto en temas de cognición. Ahora disecta en The New Republic el problema de la "dignidad humana" en el discurso de la bioética de derecha, que había sustituído el concepto filosófico de "autonomía de la persona", donde se presume la libertad de elección, por el más pantanoso de "dignidad de la persona humana", un concepto copiado del discurso católico tradicional. Pinker titula muy provocadoramente su ensayo como La estupidez de la dignidad. Lo copio integro por su gran pertinencia en estos momentos, a semanas de la Conferencia Mundial de SIDA y a meses de la posible visita de Benedicto XVI a la Ciudad de México:

The Stupidity of Dignity
Conservative bioethics' latest, most dangerous ploy.

Steven Pinker, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Credit: Felix Sockwell

This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics. The Council, created in 2001 by George W. Bush, is a panel of scholars charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation, including drugs that would enhance cognition, genetic manipulation of animals or humans, therapies that could extend the lifespan, and embryonic stem cells and so-called "therapeutic cloning" that could furnish replacements for diseased tissue and organs. Advances like these, if translated into freely undertaken treatments, could make millions of people better off and no one worse off. So what's not to like? The advances do not raise the traditional concerns of bioethics, which focuses on potential harm and coercion of patients or research subjects. What, then, are the ethical concerns that call for a presidential council?

Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.

Whatever that is. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, "Dignity Is a Useless Concept." Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy--the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place, such as Mengele's sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, "dignity" adds nothing.

Goaded by Macklin's essay, the Council acknowledged the need to put dignity on a firmer conceptual foundation. This volume of 28 essays and commentaries by Council members and invited contributors is their deliverable, addressed directly to President Bush. The report does not, the editors admit, settle the question of what dignity is or how it should guide our policies. It does, however, reveal a great deal about the approach to bioethics represented by the Council. And what it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare. For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing.

To understand the source of this topsy-turvy value system, one has to look more deeply at the currents that underlie the Council. Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.

The report's oddness begins with its list of contributors. Two (Adam Schulman and Daniel Davis) are Council staffers, and wrote superb introductory pieces. Of the remaining 21, four (Leon R. Kass, David Gelernter, Robert George, and Robert Kraynak) are vociferous advocates of a central role for religion in morality and public life, and another eleven work for Christian institutions (all but two of the institutions Catholic). Of course, institutional affiliation does not entail partiality, but, with three-quarters of the invited contributors having religious entanglements, one gets a sense that the fix is in. A deeper look confirms it.

Conspicuous by their absence are several fields of expertise that one might have thought would have something to offer any discussion of dignity and biomedicine. None of the contributors is a life scientist--or a psychologist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, or a historian. According to one of the introductory chapters, the Council takes a "critical view of contemporary academic bioethics and of the way bioethical questions are debated in the public square"--so critical, it seems, that Macklin (the villain of almost every piece) was not invited to expand on her argument, nor were mainstream bioethicists (who tend to be sympathetic to Macklin's viewpoint) given an opportunity to defend it.

Despite these exclusions, the volume finds room for seven essays that align their arguments with Judeo-Christian doctrine. We read passages that assume the divine authorship of the Bible, that accept the literal truth of the miracles narrated in Genesis (such as the notion that the biblical patriarchs lived up to 900 years), that claim that divine revelation is a source of truth, that argue for the existence of an immaterial soul separate from the physiology of the brain, and that assert that the Old Testament is the only grounds for morality (for example, the article by Kass claims that respect for human life is rooted in Genesis 9:6, in which God instructs the survivors of his Flood in the code of vendetta: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God was man made").

The Judeo-Christian--in some cases, explicitly biblical--arguments found in essay after essay in this volume are quite extraordinary. Yet, aside from two paragraphs in a commentary by Daniel Dennett, the volume contains no critical examination of any of its religious claims.

How did the United States, the world's scientific powerhouse, reach a point at which it grapples with the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century biomedicine using Bible stories, Catholic doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegory? Part of the answer lies with the outsize influence of Kass, the Council's founding director (and an occasional contributor to TNR), who came to prominence in the 1970s with his moralistic condemnation of in vitro fertilization, then popularly known as "test-tube babies." As soon as the procedure became feasible, the country swiftly left Kass behind, and, for most people today, it is an ethical no-brainer. That did not stop Kass from subsequently assailing a broad swath of other medical practices as ethically troubling, including organ transplants, autopsies, contraception, antidepressants, even the dissection of cadavers.

Kass frequently makes his case using appeals to "human dignity" (and related expressions like "fundamental aspects of human existence" and "the central core of our humanity"). In an essay with the revealing title "L'Chaim and Its Limits, " Kass voiced his frustration that the rabbis he spoke with just couldn't see what was so terrible about technologies that would extend life, health, and fertility. "The desire to prolong youthfulness," he wrote in reply, is "an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity." The years that would be added to other people's lives, he judged, were not worth living: "Would professional tennis players really enjoy playing 25 percent more games of tennis?" And, as empirical evidence that "mortality makes life matter," he notes that the Greek gods lived "shallow and frivolous lives"--an example of his disconcerting habit of treating fiction as fact. (Kass cites Brave New World five times in his Dignity essay.)

Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a "mortal danger," he writes, in the notion "that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it." He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

And, in 2001, this man, whose pro-death, anti-freedom views put him well outside the American mainstream, became the President's adviser on bioethics--a position from which he convinced the president to outlaw federally funded research that used new stem-cell lines. In his speech announcing the stem-cell policy, Bush invited Kass to form the Council. Kass packed it with conservative scholars and pundits, advocates of religious (particularly Catholic) principles in the public sphere, and writers with a paper trail of skittishness toward biomedical advances, together with a smattering of scientists (mostly with a reputation for being religious or politically conservative). After several members opposed Kass on embryonic stem-cell research, on therapeutic cloning (which Kass was in favor of criminalizing), and on the distortions of science that kept finding their way into Council reports, Kass fired two of them (biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and philosopher William May) and replaced them with Christian-affiliated scholars.

Though Kass has jawboned his version of bioethics into governmental deliberation and policy, it is not just a personal obsession of his but part of a larger movement, one that is increasingly associated with Catholic institutions. (In 2005, Kass relinquished the Council chairmanship to Edmund Pellegrino, an 85-year-old medical ethicist and former president of the Catholic University of America.) Everyone knows about the Bush administration's alliance with evangelical Protestantism. But the pervasive Catholic flavoring of the Council, particularly its Dignity report, is at first glance puzzling. In fact, it is part of a powerful but little-known development in American politics, recently documented by Damon Linker in his book The Theocons.

For two decades, a group of intellectual activists, many of whom had jumped from the radical left to the radical right, has urged that we rethink the Enlightenment roots of the American social order. The recognition of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure these rights are too tepid, they argue, for a morally worthy society. This impoverished vision has only led to anomie, hedonism, and rampant immoral behavior such as illegitimacy, pornography, and abortion. Society should aim higher than this bare-bones individualism and promote conformity to more rigorous moral standards, ones that could be applied to our behavior by an authority larger than ourselves.

Since episodes of divine revelation seem to have decreased in recent millennia, the problem becomes who will formulate and interpret these standards. Most of today's denominations are not up to the task: Evangelical Protestantism is too anti-intellectual, and mainstream Protestantism and Judaism too humanistic. The Catholic Church, with its long tradition of scholarship and its rock-solid moral precepts, became the natural home for this movement, and the journal First Things, under the leadership of Father Richard John Neuhaus, its mouthpiece. Catholicism now provides the intellectual muscle behind a movement that embraces socially conservative Jewish and Protestant intellectuals as well. When Neuhaus met with Bush in 1998 as he was planning his run for the presidency, they immediately hit it off.

Three of the original Council members (including Kass) are board members of First Things, and Neuhaus himself contributed an essay to the Dignity volume. In addition, five other members have contributed articles to First Things over the years. The concept of dignity is natural ground on which to build an obstructionist bioethics. An alleged breach of dignity provides a way for third parties to pass judgment on actions that are knowingly and willingly chosen by the affected individuals. It thus offers a moralistic justification for expanded government regulation of science, medicine, and private life. And the Church's franchise to guide people in the most profound events of their lives--birth, death, and reproduction--is in danger of being undermined when biomedicine scrambles the rules. It's not surprising, then, that "dignity" is a recurring theme in Catholic doctrine: The word appears more than 100 times in the 1997 edition of the Catechism and is a leitmotif in the Vatican's recent pronouncements on biomedicine.

To be fair, most of the chapters in the Dignity volume don't appeal directly to Catholic doctrine, and of course the validity of an argument cannot be judged from the motives or affiliations of its champions. Judged solely on the merits of their arguments, how well do the essayists clarify the concept of dignity?

By their own admission, not very well. Almost every essayist concedes that the concept remains slippery and ambiguous. In fact, it spawns outright contradictions at every turn. We read that slavery and degradation are morally wrong because they take someone's dignity away. But we also read that nothing you can do to a person, including enslaving or degrading him, can take his dignity away. We read that dignity reflects excellence, striving, and conscience, so that only some people achieve it by dint of effort and character. We also read that everyone, no matter how lazy, evil, or mentally impaired, has dignity in full measure. Several essayists play the genocide card and claim that the horrors of the twentieth century are what you get when you fail to hold dignity sacrosanct. But one hardly needs the notion of "dignity" to say why it's wrong to gas six million Jews or to send Russian dissidents to the gulag.

So, despite the best efforts of the contributors, the concept of dignity remains a mess. The reason, I think, is that dignity has three features that undermine any possibility of using it as a foundation for bioethics.

First, dignity is relative. One doesn't have to be a scientific or moral relativist to notice that ascriptions of dignity vary radically with the time, place, and beholder. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. We chuckle at the photographs of Victorians in starched collars and wool suits hiking in the woods on a sweltering day, or at the Brahmins and patriarchs of countless societies who consider it beneath their dignity to pick up a dish or play with a child. Thorstein Veblen wrote of a French king who considered it beneath his dignity to move his throne back from the fireplace, and one night roasted to death when his attendant failed to show up. Kass finds other people licking an ice-cream cone to be shamefully undignified; I have no problem with it.

Second, dignity is fungible. The Council and Vatican treat dignity as a sacred value, never to be compromised. In fact, every one of us voluntarily and repeatedly relinquishes dignity for other goods in life. Getting out of a small car is undignified. Having sex is undignified. Doffing your belt and spread- eagling to allow a security guard to slide a wand up your crotch is undignified. Most pointedly, modern medicine is a gantlet of indignities. Most readers of this article have undergone a pelvic or rectal examination, and many have had the pleasure of a colonoscopy as well. We repeatedly vote with our feet (and other body parts) that dignity is a trivial value, well worth trading off for life, health, and safety.

Third, dignity can be harmful. In her comments on the Dignity volume, Jean Bethke Elshtain rhetorically asked, "Has anything good ever come from denying or constricting human dignity?" The answer is an emphatic "yes." Every sashed and be-medaled despot reviewing his troops from a lofty platform seeks to command respect through ostentatious displays of dignity. Political and religious repressions are often rationalized as a defense of the dignity of a state, leader, or creed: Just think of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, the Danish cartoon riots, or the British schoolteacher in Sudan who faced flogging and a lynch mob because her class named a teddy bear Mohammed. Indeed, totalitarianism is often the imposition of a leader's conception of dignity on a population, such as the identical uniforms in Maoist China or the burqas of the Taliban.

A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens. Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at their leaders, institutions, and social mores. And they abjure any mandate to define "some vision of 'the good life'" or the "dignity of using [freedom] well" (two quotes from the Council's volume). The price of freedom is tolerating behavior by others that may be undignified by our own lights. I would be happy if Britney Spears and "American Idol" would go away, but I put up with them in return for not having to worry about being arrested by the ice-cream police. This trade-off is very much in America's DNA and is one of its great contributions to civilization: my country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.

So is dignity a useless concept? Almost. The word does have an identifiable sense, which gives it a claim, though a limited one, on our moral consideration.

Dignity is a phenomenon of human perception. Certain signals from the world trigger an attribution in the mind of a perceiver. Just as converging lines in a drawing are a cue for the perception of depth, and differences in loudness between the two ears cue us to the position of a sound, certain features in another human being trigger ascriptions of worth. These features include signs of composure, cleanliness, maturity, attractiveness, and control of the body. The perception of dignity in turn elicits a response in the perceiver. Just as the smell of baking bread triggers a desire to eat it, and the sight of a baby's face triggers a desire to protect it, the appearance of dignity triggers a desire to esteem and respect the dignified person.

This explains why dignity is morally significant: We should not ignore a phenomenon that causes one person to respect the rights and interests of another. But it also explains why dignity is relative, fungible, and often harmful. Dignity is skin-deep: it's the sizzle, not the steak; the cover, not the book. What ultimately matters is respect for the person, not the perceptual signals that typically trigger it. Indeed, the gap between perception and reality makes us vulnerable to dignity illusions. We may be impressed by signs of dignity without underlying merit, as in the tin-pot dictator, and fail to recognize merit in a person who has been stripped of the signs of dignity, such as a pauper or refugee.

Exactly what aspects of dignity should we respect? For one thing, people generally want to be seen as dignified. Dignity is thus one of the interests of a person, alongside bodily integrity and personal property, that other people are obligated to respect. We don't want anyone to stomp on our toes; we don't want anyone to steal our hubcaps; and we don't want anyone to open the bathroom door when we're sitting on the john. A value on dignity in this precise sense does have an application to biomedicine, namely greater attention to the dignity of patients when it does not compromise their medical treatment. The volume contains fine discussions by Pellegrino and by Rebecca Dresser on the avoidable humiliations that today's patients are often forced to endure (like those hideous hospital smocks that are open at the back). No one could object to valuing dignity in this sense, and that's the point. When the concept of dignity is precisely specified, it becomes a mundane matter of thoughtfulness pushing against callousness and bureaucratic inertia, not a contentious moral conundrum. And, because it amounts to treating people in the way that they wish to be treated, ultimately it's just another application of the principle of autonomy.

There is a second reason to give dignity a measure of cautious respect. Reductions in dignity may harden the perceiver's heart and loosen his inhibitions against mistreating the person. When people are degraded and humiliated, such as Jews in Nazi Germany being forced to wear yellow armbands or dissidents in the Cultural Revolution being forced to wear grotesque haircuts and costumes, onlookers find it easier to despise them. Similarly, when refugees, prisoners, and other pariahs are forced to live in squalor, it can set off a spiral of dehumanization and mistreatment. This was demonstrated in the famous Stanford prison experiment, in which volunteers assigned to be "prisoners" had to wear smocks and leg irons and were referred to by serial numbers instead of names. The volunteers assigned to be "guards" spontaneously began to brutalize them. Note, though, that all these cases involve coercion, so once again they are ruled out by autonomy and respect for persons. So, even when breaches of dignity lead to an identifiable harm, it's ultimately autonomy and respect for persons that gives us the grounds for condemning it.

Could there be cases in which a voluntary relinquishing of dignity leads to callousness in onlookers and harm to third parties--what economists call negative externalities? In theory, yes. Perhaps if people allowed their corpses to be publicly desecrated, it would encourage violence against the bodies of the living. Perhaps the sport of dwarf-tossing encourages people to mistreat all dwarves. Perhaps violent pornography encourages violence against women. But, for such hypotheses to justify restrictive laws, they need empirical support. In one's imagination, anything can lead to anything else: Allowing people to skip church can lead to indolence; letting women drive can lead to sexual licentiousness. In a free society, one cannot empower the government to outlaw any behavior that offends someone just because the offendee can pull a hypothetical future injury out of the air. No doubt Mao, Savonarola, and Cotton Mather could provide plenty of reasons why letting people do what they wanted would lead to the breakdown of society.

The sickness in theocon bioethics goes beyond imposing a Catholic agenda on a secular democracy and using "dignity" to condemn anything that gives someone the creeps. Ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago, the panic sown by conservative bioethicists, amplified by a sensationalist press, has turned the public discussion of bioethics into a miasma of scientific illiteracy. Brave New World, a work of fiction, is treated as inerrant prophesy. Cloning is confused with resurrecting the dead or mass-producing babies. Longevity becomes "immortality," improvement becomes "perfection," the screening for disease genes becomes "designer babies" or even "reshaping the species." The reality is that biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex, entropy-beset human body. It is not, and probably never will be, a runaway train.

A major sin of theocon bioethics is exactly the one that it sees in biomedical research: overweening hubris. In every age, prophets foresee dystopias that never materialize, while failing to anticipate the real revolutions. Had there been a President's Council on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Internet, since it would inexorably lead to 1984, or to computers "taking over" like HAL in 2001. Conservative bioethicists presume to soothsay the outcome of the quintessentially unpredictable endeavor called scientific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free society, only emerge as hundreds of millions of people weigh the costs and benefits of new developments for themselves, adjusting their mores and dealing with specific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fertilization and the Internet.

Worst of all, theocon bioethics flaunts a callousness toward the billions of non-geriatric people, born and unborn, whose lives or health could be saved by biomedical advances. Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die. And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Stuff of Thought.

Permiten a Pistorius competir en Olimpiadas de Beiging

Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters

La historia se hace todos los días: una decisión de la Corte de Arbitraje del Deporte revirtió una decisión de la Federación Internacional de Asociaciones de Atletismo y permitirá a Oscar Pistorius, un joven doblemente amputado, competir por un lugar para los Juegos. El fallo de la Corte dice que las piernas de fibra de carbono del atleta no le dan mayor ventaja sobre otros. Copio del NYT:


The court, an international panel that is the final arbiter on legal disputes in sports, came to a decision after hearing expert testimony from Pistorius’s camp and the I.A.A.F., track and field’s governing body, on April 29 and 30 in Lausanne, Switzerland. It published its opinion in a statement at 9 a.m., Eastern time.The I.A.A.F. had declared Pistorius ineligible for able-bodied competition in January despite originally clearing him to compete last spring, pending further investigation. Pistorius will be allowed to resume his efforts immediately.


Wow, vaya semana de noticias que rompen tabúes...

Stephen Hawking explora grandes preguntas

Lleva décadas atrapado en su cuerpo, pero su mente es más libre que nunca (gracias a haberse convertido en un cyborg) y explora algunas de las preguntas que la ciencia visita ahora y seguramente contestará en un futuro cercano. 10 minutos de una conferencia del astrofísico británico en la reunión de TED en Monterey, California.

Un restaurante automatizado en Alemania

Lo malo: es el fin de los meseros, es decir, menos empleos para los menos capacitados.
Lo bueno: es el fin de las propinas.

El terrible futuro de la guerra

Este robot se llama "Big Dog" y es desarrollado por los ingenieros de Boston Dynamics con financiamiento de la Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), dependiente del Pentágono. Su versatilidad es impresionante - camina hasta en nieve y en suelos patinosos sin caerse, resiste embestidas y hasta salta - y sólo es un protótipo. Dénle cinco años para correr a una gran velocidad, armado con una cámara estereoscopica y con una arma. Según el Journal of New England Technology se encargó a los ingenieros hacer un robot con la agilidad, fuerza y mobilidad de una animal, y parece lo han logrado. Y este es un proyecto ahora público, imaginen los secretos.

Es asombroso, y terrorifico. Terminator llegará, y más pronto de lo que creemos estas cosas podrán vigilar las calles de las grandes ciudades e ir a campos de batalla.

Creced y Multiplicaos

No sé aún bien si esto me da alegría, o miedo...

Con una armada de estos muchos empleos son obsoletos, desde cajeros de banco hasta el desk service de los hoteles. ¿Eso sería bueno? Hoy por hoy el Asimo solo es usado como guía de turistas en Japón.

Si "Dios" nos hizo de barro a su imagen y semejanza, ¿estamos haciendo lo mismo con acero y electrónicos?

Oscar Pistorius en acción

Es la continuación del anuncio anterior de Nike con el eslogan: this is my weapon, this is how I fight (este es mi cuerpo, así es como lucho)...

Mi cuerpo: esta es mi arma, así es como lucho

Quizá de los mejores anuncios de Nike. Se trasmitió en Sudáfrica, de donde es Oscar Pistorius, el joven que corren con piernas artificiales y a quien se le negó la oportunidade competir en los juegos Olímpicos de Beiging 2008 por ser supuestamente tecnicamente superior a los humanos "naturales".

Niegan a Blade Runner correr en Beiging

Ya había hablado de él antes, de Oscar Pretorius pero ahora es oficial: no se le dejará competir en las Olimpiadas de Beiging 2008 porque supuestamente sus piernas artificiales le dan ventaja contra los humanos "naturales". ¿Discriminación contra un cyborg? El simbolismo/sincronicidad de llamarlo en la prensa Blade Runner lo hace aún más interesante...

¿La llegada de fascismo genético?

Hace poco escribí como el Partido Nacionalista Británico está cobrando fuerza en el Reino Unido, ante el temor (y rencor) que causan los inmigrantes y la falta de empleos para los británicos con pocas calificaciones. Y advertía de que la nación cayera a manos del fascismo, poco más de 60 años de terminada la 2a Guerra Mundial. Ahora aparece otra noticia que nos da idea de la extraña dirección hacia la que parece dirigirse Inglaterra y los otros tres territorios que forman el Reino Unido. Ahora se planea realizar un censo de la población, pero tomandoles muestras de su ADN, y como ustedes saben la información es poder, y quien controle nuestra información más personal, más intima, nos controla. Un escenario posible en 10-15 años es una cruza de lo que plantea entre películas como Gattaca e Hijos del Hombre... Copio de The Guardian:

Civil rights fears over DNA 'census'

Amelia Hill, social affairs correspondent
Sunday December 30, 2007
The Observer


More than 100,000 people, including children as young as 10, will be asked to provide saliva tests and DNA samples in a new annual survey of the lives, behaviour and beliefs of people in the United Kingdom.

The UK Household Longitudinal Study will replace the long-running British Household Panel Survey. It will be the most expensive and ambitious survey of its kind in the world, costing an initial £15m and covering 40,000 households.

The UK is undergoing considerable socio-economic change,' said Professor Nick Buck from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University, which is developing the study. 'We have an ageing population, increasing diversity of ethnic background and rising levels of instability in both working careers and family life. This survey will enable researchers to obtain unprecedented understanding of diverse experiences of the population over time, linking evidence about parents and children, following individuals through time and observing their experiences.'

But the plan has been denounced by civil rights campaigners. 'I would not let my DNA details be taken in this way,' said Richard Clayton, the barrister representing the rights group Liberty in its fight to prevent police from keeping DNA samples of suspects later cleared of wrongdoing.

'My principal concern would be how clearly people are informed that their involvement in this study is voluntary and that, even if people do agree to take part, they are absolutely clear about the extraordinary amount of personal information that can be gleaned from such samples.'

The study will incorporate the existing survey, which has been running since 1991, but will ask those taking part to allow interviewers working for the National Centre for Social Research to take a saliva sample and allow a range of physical examinations. 'The sample could be sent to a medical laboratory to look at indicators of health, such as sugar and cholesterol levels, and for genetic tests that use the DNA contained in saliva,' said Buck.

The sample will not be tested for diseases such as HIV but interviewers may ask those taking part for permission to store a small amount that can be used as medical tests become more advanced. 'If a certain gene is found in the future to be associated with a certain illness, then being able to go back to previously gathered samples and testing to see how common that gene is will help to plan healthcare,' said Buck.

¿Puede ser una parte del cuerpo humano una obra de arte?

El New York Times reporta un nuevo debate en Francia sobre la definición del arte, pero ahora mucho más postmoderno: ¿puede ser una cabeza humana maorí una obra de arte?

Rouen Town Hall, via Associated Press

El ayuntamiento de Rousen - que la tenía en un museo - la quiere devolver a Nueva Zelanda para lavar toda culpa colonial, el ministerio de cultura francés dice que no puede hacerse porqué eso haría un indebido precedente y pondría en peligro las colecciones de muchos museos franceses, afirmando que esa cabeza no solo una cabeza, sino una pieza de arte. Yo estoy en la posición del gobierno francés. Nueva Zelanda no necesita todas las cabezas maorís que están en todo el mundo, además conviene a la comunidad científica que algunas de ellas estén fuera de la isla y nación. No todo el arte de un país debe estar en ese país.

Pero esto, aunque esté en un cuerpo humano, no es una obra de arte según yo, pero sí basura de arte contempóraneo postmoderno...

El mejor comercial de 2007

El guión, la música, la dirección de arte, la filosofía... sin duda es el mejor anuncio que he visto este año. Johnny Walker hace honor al espíritu de su eslogan: Keep Walking.

Sobre cómo se hizo este gran comercial puede ir aquí.
Y el website de la campaña es: www.theandroid.com

Los nuevos tatuajes

La nueva moda de tatuajes anatómicos crece con la cultura científica. La ciencia se está convirtiendo en la nueva religión. Una galería de más imagenes.

Paquistán contra la ciudadanía cyborg

Modificar el propio cuerpo, como hacen transexuales, es un delito en Paquistán, un país cuasi gobernado de forma teocrática por el islam. Copio de La Jornada:

• Se casaron el año pasado; un equipo médico descubrió que él es transexual

Shumail Raj abraza a su esposa Shezina Tariq, luego de que el Alto Tribunal de la ciudad de Lahore, Pakistán, los condenó a tres años de prisión y una multa

FOTO Ap

Irá a prisión una pareja paquistaní por mentir sobre el sexo del marido

REUTERS

Un tribunal paquistaní condenó el lunes a tres años de cárcel a una pareja por mentir sobre el sexo del marido, que es transexual.
La pareja se casó el año pasado después de que el esposo se sometió a una operación de cambio de sexo, pero un equipo médico designado por un Alto Tribunal de la ciudad de Lahore descubrió que Shumail Raj, de 31 años, es mujer.

¿No entienda nada sobre la transexualidad?
- GenderPAC es una asociación que defiende los derechos de personas transexuales en Estados Unidos.
- Transexual Legal presenta qué sucede sobre el tema jurídicamente en México.
- Disforia de género, ONG de defensa de transexuales en México.