WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY

Good grief!  I go to D.C. for a few days to see my sister and the comments section of this blog explodes.  I do not intend to get in the middle of what looks like a vigorous debate.  I shall continue reading The Rainbow and the Worm and report on it.  Yesterday I went to a fund-raising party here in Chapel Hill for a progressive member of the North Carolina House, and judging from the conversation, things do not look good for reversing the reactionary turn of this promisingly purple state.  It takes a strong stomach and great patience to try to make even tiny improvements in this benighted country.

Let me say, by the way, that if the vote in the Congress goes against the President and he then launches an attack on Syria anyway, there would be a good constitutional argument for impeachment.

WHAT ELSE HAVE I BEEN READING?

On the way up to D.C. on Friday I read a shoot-em-up, and then at the airport yesterday I bought the latest John Grisham, The Racketeer.  I just finished it.  It is a hoot.  I recommend it.

WHAT I AM READING

I have just started reading The Rainbow and the Worm, by Mae-Wan Ho, one of the books recommended by my sister.  I would like all of you to read the following two page selection taken from the introductory first chapter, "What is it to be alive?"  The passage describes what happens when a muscle contracts.  I find this passage simply astonishing.  Think, as you read it, of how many thousands of research scientists had to carry through carefully conceived experimental programs in order for her to write this brief summary for the non-specialist.  This is the sort of thing I wish Thomas Nagel had spent his time writing about in his book, Mind and Cosmos.  By the way, Ho indicates that later in the book [I have only read chapter one], she will talk about quantum entanglement and a host of other topics from theoretical Physics in their relation to Biology.

"Another instructive example is muscle contraction.  About 40% of our body is made up of skeletal muscle, i.e., muscle attached to bones, like those in our arms and legs and trunk.  Another 5 or 10% is smooth muscle such as those of our gut and body wall, and cardiac muscle in the heart.  Skeletal muscle consists of long thin muscle fibres, which may be discerned under a magnifying glass.  these fibres are several centimetres in length, each of which is actually a giant cell formed by the fusion of many separate cells.  A single muscle fibre, magnified a hundred times or more under the light microscope, can be seen to be made up of a bundle of 20 to 50 much smaller fibres, or myofibrils, each 1 to 2 μm (micrometre, one-millionth of a metre] in diameter.  A myofibril has regular, 2.5μm repeating units called sarcomeres, along its length.  Adjacent myofibrils are aligned so that their sarcomeres are in register.  Under the much higher magnifications from the electronmicroscope -- thousands to tens of thousands of times -- one will see extremely regular arrays of the periodic structures.  One will also see that each sarcomere consists of alternating thin and thick filaments, made up respectively of the two main muscle proteins, actin and  myosin.  In three dimensions, there are actually six thin actin filaments surrounding each thick myosin filament, and the six actin-filaments are attached to an end-plate, the Z-disc.  Contraction occurs as the actin filaments surrounding the myosin filaments slide past each other by cyclical molecular tread milling between myosin 'head' groups and serial binding sites on the actin filament, forming and breaking cross-bridges between the filaments, in all three dimensions in the entire array.

The actin and myosin molecules are packed and arranged very precisely, approaching the regularity of crystals, and the study of the detailed structure of resting as well as contracting muscle is done by means of x-ray crystallography.  There are 624 myosin head groups on each myosin filament, and when the entire muscle contracts, each sarcomere in it shortens proportionately.  Thus, when a myofibrile containing a chain of 20,000 sarcomeres contracts from 5 to 4 cm., the length of each sarcomere shortens correspondingly from 2.5 to 2 μm.  The energy for contraction comes from the hydrolysis of a special molecule that acts as the universal energy transacting intermediate in the body.  In its 'charged up' form, it is ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, with three phosphate groups joined one to another in series and then to the chemical group adenosine.  ATP 'discharges' its energy by splitting off a phosphate group at the end, to give the partially 'discharged' form, ADP or adenosine diphosphate.

Muscle contraction is triggered by an action potential at the site where a nerve impinges on the muscle-cell membrane.  An action potential is a quick electrical discharge followed by recovery of the pre-existing baseline electrical potential.  This releases calcium ions, Ca²⁺, from intracellular calcium ion stores to initiate contraction simultaneously in the entire cell within a millisecond.  Contraction involves numerous autonomously occurring cycles of attachment and detachment of all the individual myosin heads to and from the binding sites on the actin filaments at the rate of 50 cycles or more per second -- each of which molecular event requiring the transfer of energy contained in one molecule of ATP -- precisely coordinated over the whole cell.

In a typical muscle contraction, all the cells in the muscle -- billions of them at the very least -- are executing the same molecular treadmilling in concert.  Simply waving our arms about is a veritable feat requiring a series of actions coordinated instantaneously over a scale of distances spanning nine orders of magnitude from 10^-9 metre [nanometre, one billionth of a metre] for intermolecular spacing between the actin and myosin heads, to about one metre for the length of our arm;  each action, furthermore, involving the coordinated splitting of 10¹⁹ individual molecules of ATP.  Now, think, imagine what has to happen when a top athlete runs a mile in under four minutes;  the same instantaneous coordination over macroscopic distances involving astronomical numbers of molecules, only more so, and sustained for a long period without break."

OFF TO THE NATION'S CAPITOL

I am flying up to Washington at the crack of dawn tomorrow to visit my big sister, Barbara [whose reading suggestions I have shared with you], so I shan't be blogging for the next several days.  Before I leave, I should like to comment once more on the Syria business, and particularly on the debate now taking place on the President's request for Congressional authorization for a "limited strike" against Syria.

I have already indicated that I think the strike is a really bad idea, leaning heavily for my judgment on William Polk's invaluable analysis posted here.  But the fact of the debate, and they way  it is playing out, is really very interesting.  It constitutes, I believe, a tiny step away from the unfettered Imperial Presidency with which we have all been living for the past sixty years and more.  If, mirabile dictu, the vote goes against Obama, he will have a really difficult choice to make:  whether to abide by the vote, thus acknowledging limits on the power of the presidency, or to order the strike anyway, thereby telling everyone in American public life that his request for authorization was a charade.

I am old enough to have lived through the enormous expansion of presidential power during World War II and the years immediately thereafter.  Since I am no sort of American historian, I shall not attempt a capsule description of that fateful expansion, but perhaps I can offer a purely personal reminiscence of the early stages of the transformation of America's president into Emperor or King.  The next few paragraphs come from my Memoir, A Life in the Academy, Volume One, Chapter Five:

"I spent that last summer finishing my manuscript and preparing to leave Cambridge.  In late August, I wrapped up the book and decided to take a little vacation.  Since I had never visited Washington D. C., and now knew several people in the new Kennedy Administration, I took the train down to spend a week there.  I checked into a hotel near the train station and went round to various office buildings to visit my friends.  They were tremendously excited by their new jobs, but as I spent time with them, I grew more and more uneasy.  It was all a bit like the court at Versailles under the ancien régime.  There was a great deal of gossip, and a constant anxiety about the thoughts, the feelings, the preferences, the moods of one person, the President.

When I went over to the Capitol to take a look at Congress, my view of the government changed entirely.  I spent several days in the visitors' gallery of the Senate, watching debates and votes.  The fact that it was the one cool place I had found in a steamy town may have had something to do with my reaction.  I watched with great amusement as Everett Dirksen protested his love of duck hunting and hunters, imitating to great effect a duck settling onto a pond at sunset.   Apparently the government had imposed a tax on duck hunting in order to raise money for wetlands preservation, and then had used the money to drain swamps for development.  The duck hunters of America wanted a five million dollar appropriation to make things right, and Dirksen, who was opposing all spending that week on grounds of fiscal responsibility, was trying to convince the duck hunters of Illinois that he felt their pain.  I watched the great maverick, Wayne Morse, bellow to an empty chamber that he was not going to kowtow to the Catholic Church, with regard to what I can no longer recall.  And I watched as all but two of the senators came to the floor to vote on the renewal of the Civil Rights Commission.

What attracted me so greatly was the fact that each of these men and women was an independent person, beholden only to his or her constituents, and not subservient to the President, regardless of how charismatic and powerful he might be.  These were men and women with honor, not servile courtiers hoping to be given pride of place on a balcony or in a presidential jet.  Exactly the same sentiments welled up in me as I watch octogenarian Robert Byrd deliver speech after speech calling George W. Bush to account for the damage he did to the U. S. Constitution.

It was fun visiting Marc Raskin in the Executive Office Building, and listening to the rumors about Kennedy and Marc's secretary, Diane DeVegh.  It was interesting hearing Dick Barnet talk about the inside story at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.  But it was ennobling to watch the debates on the floor of the Senate.  I think it was that week in a hot Washington summer, rather than any of the books I had read, that once for all time soured me on the Imperial Presidency."

In the fifty-two years since that summer, things have only gotten worse and worse.  It is now impossible in public discourse even to call into question the Imperial Presidency without being considered a fringe nut from the right or the left.  I suspect that in some corner of his mind Obama understands some of this, although he has neither the political courage nor the will to act on that glimmer of understanding.  But if this vote does something, anything, to place limits on presidential power, it will be worth the tedium of listening to John Kerry.

 

SHAMELESS COMMERCE DIVISION OF THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE

Since the attention attracted by William Polk's fine letter on Syria has brought many new visitors to this blog, I should like to take the opportunity to welcome them, and to hawk the four volumes of my published and unpublished papers, which are now available on Amazon.com for $9.99 a pop.  You will find there a rich assortment of lengthy philosophical essays, pointed reviews, unpublished lectures and exploratory papers, and a complete assortment of the many tutorials that I wrote and posted on this blog over several years.  All the money from the sales goes to the Society for Philosophy and Culture at McMaster University whose director, Michael Hemmingsen, facilitated the publication of the volumes.

On Amazon you will find some of my best known books, including Kant's Theory  of Mental Activity, Understanding Marx, Understanding Rawls, and -- my favorite -- Moneybags Must Be So Lucky.  In addition, you can acquire your very own copy of my Autobiography, chock full of delicious gossip about Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, and the University of Massachusetts.

READING SUGGESTIONS

My comments on Nagel prompted a request from Larry K. for some of my sister's reading recommendations.  She gave me four titles:

Sean B. Carroll -- The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution

 

Sean B. Carroll -- Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo

Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb -- Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life

 

Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart -- The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma

 

In addition, there are the following outstanding books by Nick Lane which she led me to some time ago:

 

Oxygen:  The Molecule That Made The World

 

Power, Sex, Suicide:  Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life

 

Life Ascending:  The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

 

Any one of these, I think, would be a revelation to those who are unaware of the astonishing work now being done in Biology.

LAST LINES

My light-hearted post about catchphrases prompted a considerable outpouring of suggestions from the readers of this blog, encouraging me to try another game:  Last Lines.  The classic last line, of course, comes from the same Casablanca that gave us "We'll always have Paris."  I refer to Bogart's last words to Claude Rains:  "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."  Wikipedia tells me that the line was actually written a month after shooting ended, and Bogart had to be brought back to dub it.

But my all time favorite is a throwaway line delivered by Linda Fiorentino at the very end of Men in Black.   She, Will Smith, and Tommy Lee Jones are leaving the scene of their epic engagement with the giant intergalactic cockroach [played with over the top brilliance by Vincent d'Onofrio].  Jones suggests that they consult with Dennis Rodman about some new crisis.  "Is he an alien?" Fiorentino ask.  Yes, she is told.  As she gets in the car, she says ruminatively, "Not much of a disguise."