A Desert of Dust

I'm still alive! I managed to survive my first year of academia and I feel like the next year will be so much better. I've finally narrowed down my research topics and I'm getting a firmer grasp of my subject. It's nice to be back on familiar ground, so to speak. So, my long career or scholarship begins with a firm foundation and a happy send-off.

So, obviously, this gets me thinking about the lives we create for ourselves. You know, the empires we build together, the knowledge we create, and the lives that we touch. I ran across two quotes while in this frame of mind. Well, technically, I ran across one quote and then I opened up an old book to find the second quote. The two quotes are related and I thought of the second one immediately after reading the first. I saw the first quote while reading A Continent Of Islands by Mark Kurlansky. The book is about Caribbean history; how the people of the islands have struggled against near insurmountable odds to craft nations out of slavery, poverty, genocide, and their colonial pasts. The quote is somewhat out of place, padding the end of the introduction and starting the first chapter, but there's a universal appeal about the quote; something about it speaks to so many things.

I was thinking about was what my life will mean one day, what it means to build a nation, and what role can I play in the grand scheme of things. Here is where I found the quote:

"And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of the colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Those words still ring through my ears, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" I imagine myself in the Imperial Sand Dunes of southeast California. The dunes are huge and expansive. You can't help but feel small compared to them. Not just small, but vulnerable. You check your gas gauge, twice. The heavy sands and the heat they trap could kill you if you don't keep moving.

And here, in the middle of this wasteland, you encounter a pedestal. One stone artifact in a mountainous terrain of sand, heat, and desolation. The stone object is a warning to the mighty, to you who believe that you can create something timeless. "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" The warning is clear: nothing remains.

This reminded me of a second quote by one of my favorite authors, H.G. Wells. In this passage, the protagonist travels into the future where the remaining people had become like animals, simple and unintelligent. He explores the area and encounters an abandoned building here. It's old, but it is obviously some sort of museum or university. The flags that line the large room catch his eyes. That's when he sees the shelves:

"The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness or rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought cheifly of the Philosphical Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics."

Again, the warning is clear. So little remains from our massive efforts. Our great nations are sand and all the we know is dust. Our monuments break and our books crumble. Really, in the end, all we have are our individual life journies. My roommate once jokingly told me that he's after prestige in the scientific world. At first, that seems like a noble goal. In the end, however, that goal, like Ozymandias' great kingdom, will be like every other goal; a desert of dust. Suddenly, I'm glad that my journey is one I do out of love. We have so little time and so many steps to take in our lives. I can only pray that each of my steps takes me towards happiness and the things that truly are timeless in life.

What I study may not last forever, but it brings me true inner joy. On top of that, I think I may be able to touch a life or two in the process. Isn't that all that matters in the end?

2000-2010: A Growing Distinction

I've been thinking about the first decade of the American 21st century. If you were to characterize it, what would you say were its most salient features? As we progress into a century to which we shall never see the conclusion, one can only wonder how historians will look back and summarize our lives. What is our context? While nobody can completely answer this question, I thought I'd take a shot:

I see a decade of growing separation.

This separation is unlike the socio-economic stratification that characterized the Victorian eras and industrializing England. We will no longer have Eloi and Morlocks coming from the same first-world nations. Poverty exists, we cannot deny that. However, the working underclass of industrialization and the service class of America are very different.

Instead, the American social divergence has more to do with perspectives than anything else. Let me explain. I have been reading a book on gender expression and the liberties afforded to modern Americans as opposed to Americans of the early 20th century. We have so many more ways to express ourselves now than we did then. Forget Foucault; we have freedoms! In fact, these freedoms have caused a huge shift in the fabric of our society. The post-modernist turn has caused us to question everything we know about classifications and absloute Truth. We have begun to ask questions like, "what do you mean by feminine," "what exactly is the difference between man and woman," and "are our traditional values even worth upholding?" An athiest, nonconformist, gender-fluid person of color can stand in front of a white, anglo-saxon housewife and the two can survey each other, akin to viewing through onself the looking-glass darkly. We can ask "who am I" by seeing those who are not like us. We have unrivaled access to people who are fundamentally like, and yet unlike, ourselves.

Where class barriers separated the working class worker from the aristocratic industrialist, we have astoundingly fewer barriers. Let's be honest. Further, now that we see the "other self," many odd things taking shape in that mirror. We have begun to question who we are even more as we gain more looking-glasses. It seems like we're going around in post-modern circles, coming back to the same annoying questions every time. Can we even say what our differences are, even though they are finally standing right in front of us?

This is the divide I see going into the 21st century. One person can be incredibly sexually and socially liberated. This person can live next door to (or at least interact with) the most conservative and repressed person in America. We don't even have our traditional ways of pretending the separation doesn't exist! Those barriers are slowly crumbling. We constantly face these problems head on. How do we create a vision of relationships that works as well for the queer couple as for the conservative WASP couple? Is such a middle ground even possible?

This separation continues into other walks of life, too. It's not just sexuality, but a whole range of ideologies and information. How do we deal with the education divide? What about traditional politics and a post-rationalist world? Money, social power, even the ability to distinguish "junk news" from "real information?" What about access to the internet? We live in an information and opinion society that will define the whole century the way the great wars defined the 20th. Here is where our divide distingiushes us.

Dire Post-Modernists

As many of you may have guessed, I'm somewhat nerdy. Sure, what person doesn't love reading esoteric philosophy books? But it gets worse. If social standing ran on "cool points," I've already traded mine in for Victorian clothing, role playing game books, and graduate school. Let's be honest. My pockets are empty. My cool points are spent.

You need to comprehend the full extent of my nerdiness if you're going to understand how I felt when I came across Dresden Codak, a web comic. If you've never seen a role playing game, then this will make no sense to you. If you've never read Auguste Comte, this probably won't make much sense either. If you understand any of it... woe to you. You're just as nery as I am. Don't worry, I won't tell anybody.

Yes, the character is an 8th level positivist

Dresden Codak has two comic strips that depict philosophical role playing characters. Her companions are a 6th level Spinozan and a 5th level Epicurean. However, my favorite class is positivist, by far. In case you didn't know, positivists believe that the only authentic knowledge is that which can be seen, felt, touched, or otherwise gotten from our senses. Not surprisingly, scientists and engineers tend to be positivists.

Of course, not all people appreciate the positivist disregard for all other forms of knowledge. Also, positivists tend to have a love of strict logic and complicated machinery. Oh, and they look at their shoes a lot when speaking to others. While I'm not exactly a positivist, I feel a certain kinship with them... especially considering that I'm running in more humanitarian and activist groups nowadays.


Yes, I tend to be a little less playful when it comes to social constructivism and narrative. But, hey, I can mine bacteria for antibiotics, create vaccines, and write in a dense, unreadable fashion. All at the same time. I get the feeling that many gender scholars and social activists don't quite share my type of logic. Many plans and ideals sound great, but many of them sill simply not work.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't try... just don't be surprised when it nothing changes. Many of the people I hang around with don't agree with this viewpoint.


Anyway, I got to thinking what I would be and it came to me. I stayed up all night talking with someone about this before I decided on my character. I'd be a Half-Tao Empirimancer. Yes, I really am that nerdy. I know what philosophical role-playing character I would be.

Oh, and don't ask why I'd be that particular character... believe me.

Current Controversies and a Response to Ian Hacking

I know I haven't posted in a while, but I thought of my gentle readers while replying to an academic blog today. The renowned Ian Hacking spoke at our university the last two days and we'll be having breakfast with him tomorrow morning. To prepare for this breakfast, Hacking posted a short blog entry for us to engage:

This entry can be found at the "OnTheHuman.org" website.

“What will commercial genome-reading – from cheap 23andMe to costly but complete Knome – do to middle-class conceptions of personal identity?”

Say the name Knome out loud, not in one syllable but as two:– “know-me.” The corporation unabashedly offers “Know thyself” at the masthead of its Home Page.

I accept the implied invitation to connect modern technology with the Delphic injunction. “It is a matter of placing the imperative to ‘know oneself” … back in a much broader context of questioning that is either implicit or explicit. What should one do with oneself? What work should be carried out on the self?” That is Michel Foucault, talking about the “techniques or procedures … that are suggested or prescribed to individuals in order to determine their identity, maintain it, transform it.”

Are the direct-to-consumer online genome services forging a new technology of the self? There are quite a few good companies that go beyond specific ancestry tracing or specific risk evaluation (say for breast cancer). The very name of the global-Icelandic deCODEme invites “decode me so that I can know me”, but I shall focus only on the two American firms mentioned. Note that in these names it’s “me-me-me” at the end: personal identity is only a stone’s throw away.

Knome differs from 23andMe in many ways, starting with the fact that it offers your complete genome, while 23andMe is partial, looking at particular sites. More important: 23andMe encourages sharing your genetic data, while Knome emphasizes privacy. Hence they bear on your identity, as a person, in different ways.

23andMe does health and ancestry, but creates, as a byproduct, new biosocial groups. That is a phrase I adapted from Paul Rabinow, and explained in my “Genetics, biosocial groups & the future of identity.” Families are biosocial groups in which the proportion of biology ranges from zero to 100% (from an always-single person with adopted children, to an idealized nuclear family). So are races. In both cases the biosocial group can be integral to the identity of members of the group. Start saying who you are and you will soon be referring to biosocial groups. To create new ones is to generate new possibilities for new biosocial identity.

A few weeks after you have paid your $400 and sent in your spit, 23andMe writes back with a link to your genetic profile. It does not say “Welcome” but welcome to you. It is “You”, that’s Me, all the way. The implication is clear, you are about to learn about the real you.

Next, we are urged to “explore, share and discuss” our DNA. It is like Facebook. I get to join groups of fellow subscribers with whom I share some DNA commonalities, be they connected with health or haplotype. For some, these will be support groups of those said to share a significant risk of something awful. For others it will be a new way to forge genealogical links. New groups are formed, almost a parody of the idea of biosocial identity that I envisaged in the piece at the link above.

At first glance this looks like a pretty thin type of identity, not deserving of a connection with the grander philosophical ideas of the self. Yet the ways in which people come to think of themselves in terms of their support groups or their extended families cannot be exaggerated. Don’t underestimate the Facebook mode. It should be recognized as a contemporary public forum in the same business as the confessional, a device, which, from the Church to the analytic couch, has played an integral role in forming the Western idea of the self. The story, it may be suggested, continues with the “sharing” of identities on online within the framework of the likes of 23andMe. Of course, the traditional confessional was a private, two-way street, so let us turn to the private.

Knome incarnates a far stronger impulse to self-knowledge than 23andMe. It is the first company to offer a complete sequencing of your genome for cash (now down to $99,500). One sales pitch is an unabashed appeal to narcissism. Four human genomes have been sequenced with public funds (Ventner, Watson, unknown Han, and an unknown Yoruba.) Now you can join with a few more individuals whom Knome is sequencing. For a short time only, this elite group will be less numerous than astronauts who have stood on the moon. That is temporary fluff. Costs will drop radically. Complete sequencing will become a middle class luxury option. What’ll it be, honey, that week in Paris or our genomes?

The week in Paris seldom leaves much of a trace, but the genome surely will. The picture is, that you have learned your essential you. That is why the small investment will be “suggested or prescribed to individuals in order to determine their identity, maintain it, and transform it.” To determine, in the sense of find out their identity, to maintain (first in the sense of prevention of disease), and finally to transform themselves, in manifold senses.

Today a vice-president of Knome will take you through the hoops, but in a few years, competitors will outsource phone consultations that will not much differ from the useful chat you had with the tech person last time your computer broke down. Incidentally, Knome already outsources its sequencing to Shenzen, where the Beijing Genomics Institute has outstanding facilities. Even it seems to have an eye on the “me” market. In February it had a training workshop whose theme, in awkward translation, was “BGI&Me—Innovation Development Guided by Scientific Concept of Development.”

I am a conservative reactionary. I know that although my genetic inheritance constrains my possibilities of action and choice, I do not believe it is my essence or constitutes my identity. My question could be put: how long will it take before this attitude becomes extinct? We know that the genomic revolution will radically change the material conditions of life for soon-to-be-born generations. My question is: what will be the conception of self for those people soon to come?

-Ian Hacking

Here is my reply to the above article, which was submitted after many other (more worthy) academics replied...

Would this make me the lone liberal anti-reactionary?

We can all agree that identity probably can not be reduced to a digital code, even if this code comes from every (nucleated) cell in our bodies. Yes, most of us have seen GATTACA and we don’t think a digital sequence is the end-all of self identity. Because of this, I’m going to avoid the “genomic reductivism” trap. However, as a historian, I cannot help but think that the genome testing doesn’t really do anything truly revolutionary. Instead of offering a novel concept of self, genome sequencing offers “updated” arrangements of old identity categories. The newer arrangements certainly create some interesting questions, but people have identified themselves through scientific and biological categories long before the “discovery” of genetics.

I’ll give one quick example. Just to shake it up, I’ll use an example where people found empowerment and validation through biological identity (for better or for worse). In the late Victorian period, sexologists formulated an evolutionary description of “homosexuality” and “sexual inversion.” These scientific and medical descriptions of “the homosexual,” complete with case studies, reached the masses through various books. Not long after, individuals replied to the sexologists (the most notable being Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, and Hirschfeld) via letters. These readers, in essence, were writing to tell the evolutionary scientists that they read the medical book and joyously decided to adopt the new identity as defined by the sexologist. For the first time, these people found a commonality (and a shared evolutionary identity) with others even though they did not know these other homosexuals in person.

When genetics overtook older evolutionary-biological categories, the biological homosexual identity didn’t disappear. Instead, this category eventually transferred into the hotly-contested Xq28 allele, also known as the gay gene. Before one jumps to say “of course the identities shifted,” I should point out that not all evolutionary identities survived the molecular genetic shift. For instance, poverty and class were almost completely abandoned as biological categories. However, the genetic category of homosexual (and, therefore, heterosexual) remains a bio-political group identity. Again, many individuals choose to identify with this newly-genetic identity, much like they did when it was an evolutionary identity around 1880.

I’m going to make a bit of a leap because I don’t want to make this post too long, so please bear with me. The adoption of genetic identities shows a dual aspect the image of the self. On one hand (one that is emphasized in white American culture), we have an internal source of the self. Identity is found within us somewhere, whether this is in our cells or within our psyches. On the other hand, we have the self that is external. Here, identity is found through social labels given to us by others. This happens in two ways: not only do we seek commonality with others, but others label us with or without our consent.

There is no way to avoid the Janus-faces of self. However, the two versions of self do not constitute an identity. Instead, identity is formed from the navigation between the external self and the internal self. Furthermore, genomic identity potentially changes both types of self. You are AT LEAST categorized by others when your sequence becomes public information. However, most of us would identify as Tay Sachs carriers if we were told that we were by a geneticist, so there is a great chance that genomic identity influences internal self as well.

Can this genetic information tell us everything about us? No. However, it does influence our identity in PROFOUND ways (the final “P” to genetic identity, to paraphrase an American GINA congressional hearing). Not only does the information tells us about ourselves, it also tells others about our children and our ancestors in a different way than evolutionary identities did in 1880. Like any type of identity, sometimes this can lead to discrimination. Other times, this can lead to empowerment and new ways of relating to others.

Perhaps we should talk about who establishes these identities (for instance, why is there only one gay gene? Could there not be multiple types of homosexuality?), scientific authority, genetic information confidentiality, and how we use these new identities to establish our conception of the state (or the citizen). Whether we like it or not, genetic identities are here to stay so long as we accept the genetic “central dogma.” Our genomes (and our bodies) give us a new form of self, one that’s, in some way, beyond the self we can create in our own psyches; our genotypes don’t change the same way our desires and fantasies do. I believe that genomic identity is more than a happ-ME-ness fad. Genomic identities are just one chapter in a historical and deeply-rooted human phenomenon.

We'll see if this rouses any interest. Oh, yes, and I was recognized by The National Academies for my work in science education recently. yay.

Feminized Society and "Bych" Propaganda

My research into biology, gender, and genetics turns up some very interesting popular literature. Most recently, I read a post by an author that claims to not be racist or woman-hating. The post, entitled Bad Men Give Women AIDS, focuses on an article written by an AP Medical Writer, Maria Cheng. Before you read this article, I'd like to give a small litmus test on this author's perspective.

1. The blog is entitled "The Rantings of a Young Man in a Feminized Society."

2. After claiming that the only voice of reason is a male (vs. female) scientist, he ends the entry with "In case you're wondering, the author is named Maria Cheng. It all makes sense to now."

3. The young man's article has numerous biological inconsistencies, such as equating the medical terms HIV and AIDS and assuming they are interchangeable in his argument.

Now, I study "gendered science," or how certain scientific ideas gain an artificial gender component, as part of my project. I have to admit that I dislike a lot of feminist counter-history (and gay counter-history) and I think gender encroaches far too much in our current biological thinking. Still, I'm beginning to wonder if all gender-central thinking, especially anti-feminist, is highly destructive. I understand that feminist counter-history, or the purposeful inclusion of women into historical accounts, is good for the history discipline. Now that I've actually seen blatant anti-feminist writing, I'm quite disgusted by the whole gender-centered endeavor.

I stumbled across this blog by looking up popular references to "feminized" biological traits, specifically the way homosexual males are often depicted as being biologically feminine in some way. A good, if not extreme, example of this is David France's work on feminized traits, such as the counter-clockwise hair whorl. After some close analysis, I can't help but think that this science, much like the gender-focused anti-feminist entry I mentioned above, is simply junk... and I'm definitely not a fan of junk science (nor junk hate-speech, but what can you do?)

I've been pouring over the genetic statistics of gay behavior and I'm starting to question the basic assumptions of gay gene testing. After my entry and research on the history of biological homosexuality, I'm starting to wonder why scientists are looking for one gay gene. If, historically, there has been more than one type of homosexuality, would it not make sense that this particular trait would be genetically polymorphic? It's possible that many people are genetically predisposed to homosexuality, while some might choose to mimic same-sex behavior? It's likely that there is more than one gay gene, and even more likely that there is more than one morph, or form, of homosexuality.

Some statistical studies support this, including twin studies. If more than half of identical twins have the same sexuality as their sibling, then it strongly correlates homosexuality to a genetic marker. However, if not all siblings share the same orientation as their sibling, then there may be types of homosexuality (or complex factors for these other twins) that are not genetic.

Either way, I don't think "feminization" is a good, let alone universal, explanation for sexuality. The whole gender-centered science and language seems so ignorant to me, not to mention a little ethnocentric. Which culture's gender types should we use, anyway? They're all have a different set of assumptions of what makes someone a woman vs. a man; no gender-specific idea can be taken out of a cultural or ethnic context. Oh well.

Anyway, keep your eyes peeled for more crazy, "feminized" biological ideas. Post me if you have any good leads.

Self Efficacy and Thesis Writing

I was wandering around the departmental building looking for a book on American history the other day. Professors and other grad students often discard books that they do not use anymore and leave the scraps for us enterprising and starving first-years. Under a panic over being a historian and not knowing anything about American history, I dug through every book in the pile. While I didn't find anything to help me with my upcoming Americanist history seminar, I did find a book called Writing and Publishing Your Thesis, Dissertation, and Research: A guide for students in the helping professions.

The Americanist seminar panic hasn't yet subsided, but my nascent fear of not-being-able-to-finish-a-thesis, or thesis-phobia, has already started to subside. I've realized that the project, while very large, can be broken down into smaller pieces. On top of that, I've been giving undergraduates advice on how to write more effectively for a whole quarter now and I feel like it's increased my confidece in my own ability to formulate a logical and persuasive idea. One of my now-graduated, doctoral friends came up to me right before he moved and thanked me, "I would have never built an effective time management system for writing my thesis if you hadn't introduced me to your egg-timer trick."

In fact, I have so many of the needed skills to tackle this whole thesis thing... well, except the knowledge required to actually write novel research and analysis. Still, I can work on that in the next couple years. I love what I study and I think it's incredibly important. I've got time, yo.

My growing feeling of self-efficacy is such a good thing. During my research on science students of color, someone pointed out that self-efficacy, or the firm knowledge that you are capable of completing a task, is what keeps endangered students from dropping out. I completely agree.

I just want to write this down for historical reasons. Perhaps, when I am close to crying because I'm not making progress on my thesis, I will see my youthful optimism and it will remind me to reduce my obstacles, cut the project into smaller pieces, and keep doing what you love... because you're capable. A person that I respect quite a bit told me to never turn something in that I wasn't proud of. What I research is definitely something worth doing and worth doing well.

On the Inside

I'm totally traumatized right now; I feel like the worst person in the whole world. This is one of those instances that is only significant to you, even though it's small compared to other people. Looking at my last post, it seems quite insignificant. This doesn't change the fact that I want to crawl under a rock and shy away from the sun today.

I graded undergraduate papers for the first time.

It's emotionally hard for me to judge the efforts of other people. Many of these people have decent ideas, but they lack the ability to express them clearly. I can tell some people tried very hard to construct a good paper and failed in the process. I'm imagining people crying in their dorm rooms because they put in so much effort into their paper and feel helpless against my tyrannical grading style.

Of course, I tried to err on the side of generosity. Some fellow TAs grade harshly to an extreme. Also, my professor set a 'B' as a solid paper. If I had the option, I'd give everybody an 'A,' like we can do in graduate school. Despite all this, there's something unsettling about wielding my new-found academic privilege and having to give people harsh grades in the process. I'm on the inside of this process now and I don't like looking out.

I hold writing workshops throughout the quarter. One can only hope that people take advantage of the opportunity.