Is An Alien Message Embedded In Our Genetic Code?

Apr 1, 2013 11:27 / by Ray Villard

The answer to whether or not we are alone in the universe could be right under our nose, or, more literally, inside every cell in our body.
Could our genes have an intelligently designed “manufacturer’s stamp” inside them, written eons ago elsewhere in our galaxy? Such a “designer label” would be an indelible stamp of a master extraterrestrial civilization that preceded us by many millions or billions of years. As their ultimate legacy, they recast the Milky Way in their own biological image.
Vladimir I. shCherbak of al-Farabi Kazakh National University of Kazakhstan, and Maxim A. Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, hypothesize that an intelligent signal embedded in our genetic code would be a mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by Darwinian evolution. They call it “biological SETI.” What’s more, they argue that the scheme has much greater longevity and chance of detecting E.T. than a transient extraterrestrial radio transmission.
PHOTOS: Top 10 Places To Find Alien Life
Writing in the journal Icarus, they assert: “Once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales; in fact, it is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature. Once the genome is appropriately rewritten the new code with a signature will stay frozen in the cell and its progeny, which might then be delivered through space and time.”
To pass the designer label test, any patterns in the genetic code must be highly statistically significant and possess intelligent-like features that are inconsistent with any natural know process, say the authors.

They go on to argue that their detailed analysis that the human genome (map here) displays a thorough precision-type orderliness in the mapping between DNA’s nucleotides and amino acids. “Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language.” They say this includes the use of decimal notation, logical transformations, and the use of the abstract symbol of zero. “Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing,” they assert.
ANALYSIS: Are We Living in a Hologram?
This interpretation leads them to a farfetched conclusion: that the genetic code, “appears that it was invented outside the solar system already several billions years ago.” This statement endorses the idea of panspermia, the hypothesis that Earth was seeded with interstellar life. It’s certainly a novel and bold approach to galaxy conquest if we imagine this was a deliberate Johnny Appleseed endeavor by super-beings.
However, there are other possibilities too. I’ve previously written about the far-out notion that the universe we observe was built just for us and exists inside a computer program (with apologies to The Matrix film trilogy). Therefore the idea that some programmer somewhere wrote the genetic code for life in their model universe is consistent with the authors’ suggestions.
Biological SETI inevitably smacks head-on into an idea that is completely antithetical to science: the concept of intelligent design (ID). The proposition of ID is that our biology is so complex it must have been engineered by a higher power.
ANALYSIS: Space Algae Invasion? Probably Not
To date, ID has been nothing more than biblical creationism in sheep’s clothing. Christian fundamentalists use it to push the teaching of creationism in schools as an alternative to “secular” evolution. (Which, by the way, is now being battled in school systems in four states.)
Can the claim of an alien signature in our genetic code be any more believable, or provable than biblical ID?
We know so little about the origin of life on Earth it seems presumptive to identify genetic structure that supposedly defies a natural explanation. Even the discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system would not provide an independent test of this idea. Panspermia could have naturally occurred among the planets and moons.
And, even if the genetic code is ultimately considered the handprint of an extraterrestrial grand designer, then who designed the designer?
Image credit: NASA, DOE ///http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/could-an-alien-message-be-embedded-in-our-genetic-code-130401.htm

ARE WE REALLY FROM HERE? OR SOMEWHERE ELSE?

November 29, 2013 By Joseph P. Farrell 

There’s an interesting book out apparently that while I have not read, bears mentioning since it seems to challenge some of the convenient assumptions of human origins made by mainstream science. Many of you sent this to me, and I think the subject matter is intriguing enough to pass along here, especially  as, if one reads the article carefully between the lines, is using the standard idea of “evolution as environmental response” to argue against the idea that humans evolved entirely on their own, on Earth, and entirely naturally:
Humans do NOT come from Earth – and sunburn, bad backs and pain during labour prove it, expert claims
Now, frankly, I find the idea that my occasional bad back problems are an argument for anything else other than a poor mattress or particularly bad dreams is not very convincing. Other arguments – such as our inability to withstand prolonged exposure to sunlight without significant health problems - might be an argument of a human evolutionary response to a different environment than the earth. And similarly with the large size of human babies’ heads, and so on. Most interestingly: our bodies’ clocks or “circadian rhythms” are adjusted to a longer daily clock than the actual terrestrial day, which, of all the arguments surveyed in the article, I find the most appealing and compelling. (Interestingly enough, the Martian day – depending one whether one measures the sidereal day or the solar day – is between 24 hours and 37 minutes long, and 24 hours and 39 minutes long. In other words, the Martian day is more in line with the human body’s natural clock and circadian rhythm than is the terrestrial day.  When these last three things are taken together, it begins to argue somewhat more persuasively. At least, it should make one sit up, take notice, and entertain the possibility.
But there’s another bit of science news arguing the same thing, and I referred to this in my most recent book, Covert Wars and the Clash of Civilizations, and it is this article from the prestigious science journal Icarus:
Is an Alien message embedded in our genetic code?
The Icarus article wastes no words:

They go on to argue that their detailed analysis that the human genome (map here) displays a thorough precision-type orderliness in the mapping between DNA’s nucleotides and amino acids. “Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language.” They say this includes the use of decimal notation, logical transformations, and the use of the abstract symbol of zero. “Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing,” they assert.
ANALYSIS: Are We Living in a Hologram?
This interpretation leads them to a farfetched conclusion: that the genetic code, “appears that it was invented outside the solar system already several billions years ago.” This statement endorses the idea of panspermia, the hypothesis that Earth was seeded with interstellar life. It’s certainly a novel and bold approach to galaxy conquest if we imagine this was a deliberate Johnny Appleseed endeavor by super-beings.
However, there are other possibilities too. I’ve previously written about the far-out notion that the universe we observe was built just for us and exists inside a computer program (with apologies to The Matrix film trilogy). Therefore the idea that some programmer somewhere wrote the genetic code for life in their model universe is consistent with the authors’ suggestions.

Well, yes. The genetic code, and indeed the whole process of evolution,  has to my mind more the appearance of design than not (sorry Mr. Dawkins), but the questions posed by the Icarus article  in terms of Mr. Ellis’ book are rather contradictory: if the “code” was intelligently designed, then why design such a bad code for human life here, inclusive of large babies’ heads, back aches, inability to live so close to the sun, and body clocks off by an hour from the terrestrial day? Or, on the other view, why design such a code for an intelligent and conscious organism such as homo sapiens sapiens to live elsewhere, and then bring it here and strand it on Earth without tweaking the code a bit to allow a more harmonious existence? After all, if you can design it, you can tweak it.
The bottom line is this: the outlines of that deepest mystery – human origins - are being clarified by science. But in clarifying the outlines, the mystery isn’t rendered less mysterious, it is merely made into a sharper mystery.

Read more: ARE WE REALLY FROM HERE? OR SOMEWHERE ELSE?

Why performance enhancing drugs belong in sport

From a purely scientific perspective, bans on performance-enhancing drugs are arbitrary and illogical.

Greg Stevens

Science Correspondent //http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/7144/performance-enhancing-drugs-will-never-go-away-and-they-shouldnt/

Notorious drug cheat Lance Armstrong in the documentary The Armstrong Lie

Wednesday, 27 November 2013

Caffeine was fine for athletes to use until 1962. Then it was banned by the International Olympic Committee, and it suddenly became an illegal, shameful and disgusting way to gain an unnatural advantage. Then, in 1972, the ban was lifted, and caffeine was suddenly just something you got with your coffee or soda. Then, it was re-banned in 1984.

In 1988, Alex Watson was dismissed from competing in the Olympics. In his words: “As far as they were concerned… I’d tried to cheat, I’d failed a drug test, I was a disgrace.”
Then in 2004, the ban was lifted again. But, in 2010, a high-profile Australian Rules football player ended up in the hospital after having an adverse reaction to caffeine and sleeping pills, so the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA) recommended adding caffeine back on the banned list again.
John Fahey, chairman of the WADA, said: “Having been taken back off the banned list, it can be put back on… It will be looked at again in light of what’s occurring at the moment” (emphasis added).
This mercurial “we will change the rules based on what’s in the news today” attitude is fueled, in part, by the way that the media reports on these issues. Shame. Betrayal. Disgust. The language is always damning and extreme.
From Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez to Lance Armstrong, from the 2007 Mitchell Report to the current ongoing investigation of the Biogenesis of America clinic, the stories are always presented as tales of sleaze and moral decrepitude that inevitably lead to remorse and shattered dreams.
How could they not? When people think “steroids”, the image that comes to mind is those infamous East German female athletes, back when Soviet-controlled East Germany started giving their athletes testosterone, resulting in liver cancer, organ damage, infertility and… well, a very distinctive look.

Kornelia Ender, 1976. Photo Credit: Allsport UK/Allsport

But medicine and technology have come a long way since the 1970s. People know more about dosages and how to counteract the negative side-effects of substances like testosterone. Nonetheless, injecting your body with things that bodies naturally produce, such as human growth hormone (HGH), testosterone and blood, is still banned.

Taking synthetic antibiotics or pain killers, on the other hand, is not banned – despite the fact that both antibiotics and painkillers are performance-enhancing. They allow athletes to overcome the pain and damage caused by physical stress, and therefore improve performance. Moreover, they both can have harmful physical side effects if they are taken to the extreme or administered in an unsafe way.
Testosterone and HGH can both be prescribed as medical treatment for people whose bodies do not produce enough of these substances naturally. To account for this, the International Olympic Committee created Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUE), which can be granted to an athlete if the three following criteria are met: 1) the athlete would have a significant impairment to health if the drug were withdrawn, 2) the drug will only increase the athlete’s performance to normal levels, and 3) the athlete could not use any permitted alternative.
Since neither “significant” nor “normal” are well-defined, these criteria essentially are reduced to a game of instinct and personal judgment on the part of the TUE commission. TUEs for testosterone use were approved in two prospective Olympic athletes in the 1990s because the applicants were men who did not have testicles (one because of a congenital defect, the other because of surgery).

Sticking to the spirit

On the other hand, an older Olympic athlete had been prescribed testosterone for the medical condition of low testosterone, but his application for a TUE was rejected because there was no “organic reason” to justify its use. Here “organic” presumably means “lack of testicles”.
Vague guidelines and arbitrary enforcement have always been the name of the game for drug enforcement in sports, however. The WADA defines three criteria for banning a substance for Olympic athletes, one of which is whether use of the drug is “against the spirit of the sport”.
You see, the reasons for banning performance enhancing drugs from athletic competitions have never really been about health or science. From a purely scientific perspective, the bans are arbitrary and illogical.

XKCD addresses the steroid scandal.

Serious athletes monitor, regulate and experiment with every aspect of their physical being. This includes their food and water intake, their sleep habits, and of course their exercise routines. They have rituals that they go through during training and leading up to competitions.

The rituals are different for different sports, of course, but they can include anything from manipulating their sleep cycles to radically modifying their salt intake in the days before they compete. For athletes, their bodies are finely-tuned machines. They are constantly testing the engine, seeing how it reacts and fine-tuning the parameters.
So what happens when an irresponsible overly enthusiastic young athlete voids himself of too much salt, and due to a medical condition ends up in the hospital? Will salt testing suddenly become mandatory, and salt a regulated substance: anyone with levels too low will not be allowed to compete?
Will new committees be formed to ensure that no athletes eat too many carbohydrates in a day, with the intent of “conferring an unfair advantage”? Will they regulate how much or how little sleep an athlete is allowed to get?

Vague guidelines and arbitrary enforcement have always been the name of the game for drug enforcement in sports.

When emotional levels are high, as they tend to be both in matters of sports and in matter of health, people easily slip into extreme and irrational arguments. This is how we end up with bans on caffeine, a substance that is almost difficult to avoid in today’s world.
This is how we end up with scare stories like the New York Times piece, “Muscular body image lures boys into gym, and obsession”, intended to terrify parents over the fear that their children might feel pressure to take performance enhancing drugs if they get involved in sports.
“90 percent of the 1,307 boys in the survey… said they exercised at least occasionally to add muscle,” the article ominously explains. “More than 40 percent of boys in middle school and high school said they regularly exercised with the goal of increasing muscle mass.”
Behold the horror of teenagers exercising! Obviously, parents should be very frightened.
The witch hunts and drum-beating surrounding steroid use – both for professional athletes and for teenagers – have been ramping up dramatically over the past 10 years. Everybody is told that they should be afraid of this terrible epidemic. Massive “outings” of athletes, like the ones currently in the news surrounding the Miami clinic Biogenesis of America, are lapped up by audiences with the same horror and fascination as car chases and airplane crashes.
Yet despite the best efforts of the fear-mongers, professional athletes are still doping. There is absolutely no evidence that all of the fear and bans and shaming have actually lead to any decrease in the use of performance enhancing substances.
How could it possibly be a deterrent, when the notion of “performance enhancing substances” isn’t even well-defined? How could an athlete possibly take the idea seriously, when he views his body as a complex and highly tuned machine for which all food is essentially a drug: a drug in the good sense, and one that allows the machine to function properly.

Inconsistent and arbitrary rules

There are times, although they seem rare, when the “anti-doping” crowd is pressed to admit their own inconsistent and arbitrary rules. This happened recently when HARDtalk’s Stephen Sackur interviewed Julian Savulescu, professor of Practical Ethics at University of Oxford and editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Over and over again, Savulescu explains that the ban of performance enhancing drugs is arbitrary and illogical. Finally, Sackur was reduced to stating explicitly the real underlying argument against performance enhancing drugs: moralistic prejudice.

“You miss a human element,” Sackur blusters. “If you persist with this, you turn sport into a contest between scientists, rather than a contest between physical athletes.”

This kind of argument has been echoed by others, such as Eric Cohen, the editor of The New Atlantis. Cohen says, “steroids may help athletes break records, but that such feats cannot be considered valid athletic accomplishments because they are not, in themselves, solely human.”

With all due respect to journalists and philosophers, this is the type of observation that could only be made by a person who has never been a serious athlete.

There is nothing more human than being an athlete who is in tuned with his body. There is nothing more physically human than paying such close attention to your body that you know how every aspect of your diet and exercise routine impacts you, how your performance will change, and how you can improve that extra fraction that could ensure victory in the next competition. There is nothing more human than testing the limits of your physical self.

When you are an elite athlete, everything in life is chemistry. Your sleep, your diet, your activity, and even the amount and timing of the water you drink affect your body chemistry. Everything is a drug. And your one and only focus is finding out how to push your body to perform better.

There exists no drug that will simply place you on the scoreboard for any sport. All performance enhancing drugs interact with an athlete’s genetics, training, diet, and skill. Even if performance enhancing drugs were made universally legal, in a free-for-all with no restrictions – which is not something I’m advocating, by the way – it would still not be a “competition between scientists”.

At the end of the day, no matter how many drugs are involved, The Game will always be sweat and blood and skill and training. This is something that every athlete knows, and this is why the “problem” of athletes manipulating their own bodies, by any means necessary, will never go away.