The latest episode of the Sentient Developments Podcast is now available. Alternative audio formats are also available.An overview of my recent talk at the Center for Inquiry Discussing Twitter and Google Apps Part 3 of my Fermi Paradox talk: Possible solutions and next steps Why the male birth-control pill is so important for men; sorry, ladies—this pill isn't about you
There's been considerable media attention surrounding a recent breakthrough in the development of a male birth-control pill (MBCP). Fact of the matter is that it's still about 5 to 10 years away. It's taking forever for a men's pill to come to market.
What's taking so long?
Well, the issue is not as simple as it might first appear. Sure, there are still some technical hurdles to overcome, but the delay in developing a MBCP has definite political, economic and even discriminatory aspects to it.
Barriers to entry do in fact exist for the male pill—disempowering barriers that men should most certainly be aware of—including those set up by sexist women who belittle male reproductive accountability, unfair gender biases, self-serving feminists who refuse to relinquish reproductive power, and a risk averse Big Pharma.
And men themselves are also to blame. Far too many guys have gotten comfortable over the idea that birth-control pills are exclusive to women. Most men have not yet realized the implications of having access to a pill of their own.
Consequently (and quite disturbingly), conversations about the male pill have migrated outside the sphere of male interests. Women tend to frame the issue as it pertains to their concerns and their needs, while politicians and pharmaceutical companies neglect the issue, unsure as to what it means to them.
Ultimately, however, this is about men. It's about men gaining fair and equal access to a powerful contraceptive that will finally allow them to have the same control over their reproductive processes as women—an outcome that will greatly benefit male interests.
How the male pill works
An international consortium of physicians recently revealed a formula for "safe, effective and reversible" hormonal contraception for males.
The breakthrough involves progestin, which is found in women's birth-control pills and the male sex hormone testosterone. Progestin helps suppress ovulation when used in an oral contraceptive and it appears to function in the same way for men, suppressing the rate and extent of sperm production. The developers claim that this contraceptive will be as effective as a vasectomy.
Men will have to take the pill for about 2 to 3 months to deplete their sperm. It will take a similar amount of time to restore normal levels of fertility once off the pill.
Bring it
For the most part, both men and women appear to be in favor of the MBCP.
Trouble is, most men and women don't truly understand why it's so important. Particularly women.
Now, I don't mean to begrudge women their reasons for welcoming the male pill. It's all good.
I think it's great that couples will finally be able to share the burden of birth control.
And it will undoubtedly be a welcome alternative for those women who cannot take the pill or other contraceptives (of which there are many).
There's also the issue of accessibility. A 2004 report from the Reproductive Health Technologies Project calls contraceptive availability an "unfinished revolution." Indeed, we need more contraception and more options.
But this is fundamentally an issue of male reproductive control
This is a male issue about male reproduction.
And all that it entails.
The pill will resolve a number problems that men typically face.
It will be dramatically less invasive and severe than a vasectomy—a procedure that can be reversed, but one that's quite involved and not always possible.
The male pill will also prove to be much more reliable than condoms or withdrawal which can have worst-case failure rates of 15 and 27 percent respectively (!!!).
Also, the male pill will have a profound sociological impact similar to what happened after the advent of the female birth-control pill. This will prove to be a seminal event as far as the men's movement is concerned.
In fact, a strong case can be made that the delay in the male pill has been caused by an underdeveloped male social movement. The sense of urgency to develop a MBCP has been quelled by the dissenters and the disconnected. Men need to be aware of those forces that work to prevent the advent of not just the male pill, but a cohesive and powerful men's rights movement itself.
The possibility of a male pill has caused a number of women to pause and reflect on the implications.
Should a woman believe a guy who says, "Trust me, baby, I'm on the pill."?
Most women would likely say no. It's doubtful that women would put faith in men to stick to a strict schedule of birth-control pill popping. Men are supposed to be untrustworthy and irresponsible, right? After all, they're not the ones who would have to deal with a pregnancy.
Aside from what this says about negative male stereotyping, this complaint neglects three fundamental issues.
First, people must take control over their own reproductive processes and not rely on the other person. This goes for both men and women. The MBCP will finally help men know for certain that they have virtually no chance of impregnating a partner.
Which immediately brings to mind the problem of trust that many men are confronted with today. Should men trust women when they make the same claim? How many times has a man been duped into fatherhood by an opportunistic woman?
Well, according to a Cornell University study, over a million American births each year result from pregnancies which men did not intend. What does this say about female reproductive accountability?
The male pill, will at the very least, help men avoid this risk.
Second, the MBCP strictly deals with contraception. It will do nothing to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The advent of a male pill will not eliminate the need to wear a condom as far as STDs are concerned.
And third, most men do in fact deal with a pregnancy and the introduction of an unexpected child -- be it parental or fiscal responsibilities. There are more accountable single dads who have joint custody of their children than ever before in history.
An unwelcome power shift
As Glenn Sacks has said, "Power is the reward which comes with responsibility."
Indeed, because women have had to bear the burden of contraception, they have gained control over an integral component of human life, namely reproduction. The MBCP threatens to wrest that control from women to men.
Quite understandably, some feminists are concerned about this possibility.
And, I'm sorry to say, that's too bad.
Men are currently at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the choice of reproduction -- but this is now set to change.
As an example, according to the 2004 National Scruples and Lies Survey (which polled 5,000 women in the United Kingdom), 42% of women claimed they would lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, regardless of the wishes of their partners.
Wow.
Other evidence suggests that over 10% of children turn out not to be the offspring of the expected father when DNA tests are done, suggesting that many men obliviously help in the raising of children who are not actually theirs.
This is no laughing matter. Child support rates are increasing, with some fathers giving their ex's as much as 15 to 25% of their take home pay per child. And it's widely known that fathers are second class citizens in the courts. For example, in some U.S. states a father cannot present DNA evidence to disprove paternity.
For those men who truly don't want to have children—something that is completely within their rights—the MBCP will help them achieve that level of control.
And again, female claims that this will allow men to forever shirk their paternal responsibilities and live in perpetual adolescence are not just gross generalizations, but sexist statements of the highest order.
The Man is holding men down
Quite surprisingly, Big Pharma has dragged their feet in developing the MBCP. Despite over 20 years of research, they claim that there's little money to be made.
In fact, that's one of the main reasons that the pharmaceutical firms Bayer and Organon abandoned their male pill programs last year.
This is because men are not demanding it
Men are clearly not showing Big Pharma that they want a male pill.
Research shows that most males are not ready for personal birth control. A recent MSN-Zogby poll revealed that only 14% of Americans would definitely take it or insist that their partner take it. And tellingly, the study indicated that women are slightly more excited about the prospect than men.
While at the same time other studies show that men do in fact want alternative contraception options.
What's going on here, guys?
Perhaps confusion has something to do with it. There's a very underdeveloped sense of a male collective consciousness. It appears that men, for the most part, don't yet realize the importance of reproductive control—something women have, for obvious reasons, been very aware of for quite some time now.
Some men, for example, dismiss the male pill on account of their fear that it would transgress their masculinity.
This is exactly the mentality that has to be abandoned and replaced by some more forward thinking ideas that will work help equalize not just reproductive options, but other gender issues that set men at a disadvantage or limit biological potential.
Times they are a changin'
Perhaps I'm understating the fact that 14% of men are ready to use the pill. That's a significant number unto itself. Maybe it's a positive sign that attitudes are changing and that broader acceptance is on its way.
In all likelihood, demand will probably increase once the pill is finally made available. It will become real for men once it becomes a real option.
And hopefully it will wake men up to the possibilities. Issues of gender, sexuality and reproduction are not just women's issues. They're a vital element of the collective human condition.
Transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom desperately hopes that we never find signs of extraterrestrial life -- advanced or otherwise....the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier...The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.We are hoping that the filter resides in our past, that we have already overcome highly improbable odds.
Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come.
Throughout history, great civilizations on Earth have imploded--the Roman Empire, the Mayan civilization that once flourished in Central America, and many others. However, the kind of societal collapse that merely delays the eventual emergence of a space-colonizing civilization by a few hundred or a few thousand years would not explain why no such civilization has visited us from another planet. A thousand years may seem a long time to an individual, but in this context it's a sneeze. There are probably planets that are billions of years older than Earth. Any intelligent species on those planets would have had ample time to recover from repeated social or ecological collapses. Even if they failed a thousand times before they succeeded, they still could have arrived here hundreds of millions of years ago.Bostrom, who is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, concludes his article by making a case for increased foresight and vigorous inquiry into potential risks.
The Great Filter, then, would have to be something more dramatic than run-of-the mill societal collapse: it would have to be a terminal global cataclysm, an existential catastrophe. An existential risk is one that threatens to annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential for future development. In our own case, we can identify a number of potential existential risks: a nuclear war fought with arms stockpiles much larger than today's (perhaps resulting from future arms races); a genetically engineered superbug; environmental disaster; an asteroid impact; wars or terrorist acts committed with powerful future weapons; superintelligent general artificial intelligence with destructive goals; or high-energy physics experiments. These are just some of the existential risks that have been discussed in the literature, and considering that many of these have been proposed only in recent decades, it is plausible to assume that there are further existential risks we have not yet thought of.
Look out professional athletes, here come the cyborgs -- and they're aiming for the Olympics.
This issue is a snap-shot into the future of sports. Governing bodies will have much more to contend with than just performance enhancing drugs. Technological endowments, particularly those that are cybernetic in nature, are poised to upset the apple cart that is professional sports.
The science of tissue engineering and the development of in vitro meat may one day, hopefully, result in the end of livestock.Meat essentially consists of animal muscle. There are loosely two approaches for production of in vitro meat; loose muscle cells and structured muscle, the latter one being vastly more challenging than the former. Muscles consist of muscle fibers, long cells with multiple nuclei. They don't proliferate by themselves, but arise when precursor cells fuse. Precursor cells can be embryonic stem cells or satellite cells, specialized stem cells in muscle tissue. Theoretically, they can relatively simple be cultured in a bioreactor and then later made to fuse. For the growth of real muscle however, the cells should grow "on the spot", which requires a perfusion system akin to a blood supply to deliver nutrients and oxygen close to the growing cells, as well as remove the waste products. In addition other cell types need to be grown like adipocytes, and chemical messengers should provide clues to the growing tissue about the structure. Lastly, muscle tissue needs to be trained to properly develop.In vitro meat, referred to by some as laboratory-grown meat, is animal flesh that has never been part of a complete, living animal.
With my feet upon the ground I lose myself6. What is the most interesting thing you are working on/reading about/writing about these days?
between the sounds and open wide to suck it in.
I feel it move across my skin.
I'm reaching up and reaching out.
I'm reaching for the random or what ever will bewilder me.
And following our will and wind we may just go where no one's been.
We'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one's been.
Spiral out. Keep going...
One of my prized possessions: A 6th edition copy of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species from 1872.
How come quantum? How come existence?
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?
If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.
In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.
No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.
Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.
To hate is to study, to study is to understand, to understand is to appreciate, to appreciate is to love. So maybe I'll end up loving your theory.
We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
If you eat canned food or drink from a can or hard plastic bottles, chances are good that you've ingested Bisphenol A. A controversy is now raging over the safety of the chemical, which acts like a synthetic female sex hormone. Bisphenol A may be responsible for a number of health risks.It seems obvious that a high dose of a poison would be more dangerous than a lower one, but bisphenol A is creating a stir because it doesn't follow this seemingly common-sense rule. Researchers say this oddity results from the fact that bisphenol A isn't a conventional harmful agent, such as cigarette smoke, but behaves in the unconventional way typical of hormones, where even vanishingly small exposures can be harmful.Look for this issue to gain increasing public attention over the coming months and years.
This is why some environmentalists and scientists contend that bisphenol A, which leaches in trace amounts from food and beverage packaging, is among the scariest manufactured substances in use, an eerie modern version of the vaunted lead water pipes by which ancient Romans were unknowingly poisoned.
Extrapolating from the results of animal experiments, they suspect bisphenol A has its fingerprints all over the unexplained human health trends emerging in recent decades hinting at something going haywire with sex hormones, including the early onset of puberty, declining sperm counts, and the huge increase in breast and prostate cancer, among other ailments.
Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. This is shown in a study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. "Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings." (Nature Neuroscience, April 13th 2008)
I will be giving a talk about transhumanism and life extension at the Centre for Inquiry this coming Friday April 18. I will be speaking from 7:30 to 9:30 pm at the CFI facility, 216 Beverley St, downtown Toronto.The latest episode of the Sentient Developments Podcast is now available. Alternative audio formats are also available.Eight tips to dramatically improve your chances of living forever Exploring George's existential angst
1. ExistenceLet me explain.
2. The presence of suffering
3. Human isolation in the cosmos
4. The high probability of human extinction relatively soon
Edward Miller on open source meat. Ronald Bailey wonders if it's wrong to make animals into happy slaves. Jeremy Hsu on merging man and machine to reach the stars. SETI eat your heart out: Europe-wide radio net to be used in search for ET
There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to Man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident. And even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation. -- J.R.R. Tolkien
Death, as a proposition, doesn't have much going for it. Given the opportunity, many of us would rather opt out of the whole aging and dying thing and live a life of perpetual health and vitality.
1. Eat the right foodsIn addition to antioxidants, you need to ensure that you’re getting enough phytonutrients which can be found in fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts and teas. Not only do they serve as a source of antioxidants, they can enhance immune response and cell-to-cell communication, alter estrogen metabolism, convert to vitamin A, cause cancer cells to die, and repair DNA damage cause by toxins.Walnuts Pomegranates Sunflower seeds Blackberries Cranberries Blueberries Dried apricots Ginger Raspberries Prunes
2. Avoid the wrong foodsIf you're going to eat these foods, just make sure that you wash them extremely carefully.Apples Bell peppers Peaches Spinach Strawberries
3. Adopt a calorically restricted diet
4. Supplement your diet with vitamins and mineralsAmong other things, a proper vitamin and mineral regimen will help you reduce your chances of cancer, irregular neurotransmission and cardiovascular disease.13 essential vitamins: Vitamins A, C, D, E, K, and the B vitamins (thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, biotin, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, and folate) 17 essential minerals: including calcium, magnesium, potassium, selenium, chromium and zinc 2 essential fatty acids: Omega 3 and 6
5. Exercise and be activeFrequent and regular physical exercise boosts the immune system, increases bone density, and helps prevent diseases like heart disease, cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesity. It also improves mental health and helps prevent depression.Flexibility exercises (such as stretching) will help you improve the range of motion of muscles and joints. Aerobic exercises such as cycling, walking, running, hiking, and playing tennis will increase your cardiovascular endurance. Anaerobic exercises such as weight training, functional training or sprinting will increase your short-term muscle strength.
6. Avoid dangerous activities and unhealthy habits1. Motor vehicle (MVA): 44.3%I'm not advocating that you live a life of extreme risk aversion. Just exercise common sense and care. Eastern philosophies, for example, advocate a mindful existence in which you are encouraged to be fully aware of yourself and your environment at any given moment. A mindful approach to living is not only mentally healthy, it may also prevent careless accidents.
2. Falls: 17.8%
3. Poison (liquid and solid): 13.0%
4. Drowning: 3.9%
5. Fires, burns, and smoke: 3.4%
6. Medical/surgical complication: 3.1%
7. Other land transport: 1.5%
8. Firearms: 0.8%
9. Other (nontransport): 17.8%
7. Support life extension causes and be socially active
8. Sign up for cryonics just to be safe
