More "Atypical Subversive Strategy" goodness

Thank you for the congratulatory e-mail, Darwin. And if you haven’t heard, Lamarck, I’m finally Section Two! I’m now privy to the specific details of the great plan. I’m going to post both stage 2 (not to be confused with section 2, of which I’m now a part) and 3. Section 2 is entirely dull, so I’ve gone to great pains in order to summarize it. Most of it is economic gibberish – I’m sure they’re paying a lot of monkeys to crunch these numbers. I think you’ll be much more interested in stage 3. To be completely honest, Stage 3 (though it’s only in the preliminary stages – it all depends on the success of the first two stages) is giving me second thoughts about this whole thing. Not that it matters – we’re all in way too deep at this point.

Stage 2: Popularization (3-10 years)

The goal of Stage 2 is to make genetic fingerprinting more accessible, while maintaining its social value. It will begin with a vast reduction in cost and the end of ISCP’s patent rights to the genetic fingerprinting technology. Continued identity theft, along with the ever-increasing medical benefits will catapult genetic fingerprinting into mainstream culture.

[Enter a whole host of tables regarding mean salaries and strategic tax refunds]

If this stage is not deemed successful within 3 years, we will green-light the in-house development of a genetic epidemic. This disease will be highly localized, yet sensationalized by our chief advisors.

At the end of Stage 2 the technology will be publicized and, following a raise in federal taxation, will become free to all citizens (it will not be mandatory). This will usher Stage 3.

Stage 3: Lottery (50-70 years)

Stage 3 will begin with the creation of several hundred gated communities. These homes will be modeled after those affordable by the top 20^th percentile.

These communities will include official government jobs for all residents, along with the amenities of a normal town. The government will retain ownership of each house indefinitely; the death of the official tenant of a house will result in the expulsion of their family.

Each town will be equipped with an underground shelter; these will allow the residents of the town to survive underground for one century in the case of a nuclear attack or other crisis.

The official justification for these communities will be that we require an adequately robust and varied genetic pool to continue our existence in the event of a catastrophe. In effect, we will have set up a lottery in which the price of admission is to be genetically fingerprinted. If we can maintain the allure of these communities, we believe that genetic fingerprinting will have reached levels of at least 98.42%.

Funny Movie

This is a video showing a chimp hacking a voting machine. HILARIOUS!

http://www.bbvdocs.org/videos/baxterVPR.mov

The Selfish Gene, Part I

The human body contains approximately 100 trillion cells, most of which are less than a tenth of a millimeter across. Inside each cell there is a black blob called a nucleus. Inside the nucleus are two complete sets of the human genome (with the exception of the sperm and egg cells, which have only one copy, and red blood cells, which have none).

The human genome is organized into twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. Of these, twenty-two are ordered by approximate size, from the largest (one) to the smallest (twenty-two.) The remaining pair consists of the sex chromosomes, two large X chromosomes in women, one X and one small Y in men.

Each chromosome contains several thousand instructions (genes), which can be broken up into paragraphs (exons), which are interrupted by interference (introns). Each paragraph can be further broken down into words (codons) written with letters (bases). There are one billion words in a gene, making it longer than 800 Bibles.

In between the paragraphs of useful information (exons) lie long stretches of random nonsense and repetitive strings or irrelevant code (introns). Hidden in this immense code is the dirty secret of the genome – each gene is far more complex than it needs to be. The reason for this confusion is that the genome has been adding, deleting, and amending in the process of self assembly for over four billion years.

What makes this nonsense code in the genome so fascinating is that because it is self-replicating, it is prey to parasitism. In fact, the gene is riddled with the equivalent of computer viruses… selfish, parasitic stretches of letters that only exist because they are adept at getting themselves duplicated. The Human Genome Project found that about 35% of our DNA is so-called “junk code.”

Just as the code of the genome is the survival mechanism for these meaningless bits of DNA, which exist only to exist and reproduce, the more we learn about genetics, the more it seems like the human body is merely the survival mechanism for our genes to exist and reproduce.