Help me find a sale on tinfoil hats!!

New Year’s Eve 2020

You need to follow the bouncing ball (links) closely on this one. To conclude that COVID-19 vaccination is the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories we need only agree that some things are not new. Below are some controversies which are resolved in the eyes of some, partially resolved in the eyes of others, but all as close as we ever get to real science.

Darwin’s theory of evolution, Natural Selection, tells us that only the strong survive. Many have tried (and failed) to explain the opposite: altruism. Explanations, however superficially sound, always lead back to the same conclusion. A famous equation offered fifty years ago “proved” (the word is in quotes because I am fussy about that word) mathematically that altruism does not occur and cannot survive in nature.

Another issue in evolution is whether a species will overpopulate, deplete its food source and thus self-destruct, sort of fishing yourself to extinction. The technical term for this is Evolution of Predatory Restraint. And I haven’t even explored the term “…thinning the herd…”

The Darwin Awards are so named for a reason.

[stay with me here, it all comes together later]

Your government wants you to know how the COVID vaccine is different from those which came before. So do I. Read about it. I would be doing you a disservice by summarizing it for you here. Those of us who have not been able to buy a decent tomato in years are rightfully suspicious of genetic modification. So, is it a stretch to suggest that those vaccinated may thereafter become red and inviting on the outside and white and tasteless on the inside? Remember the vaccine is brought to you by the same government who brought you Ruby Ridge, $600 ashtrays and stunning victories in The War on Drugs, The War on Poverty and many others.

We know that the human sex ratio is very close to 1:1. Whether that is a good thing is not much in doubt from a biological survival standpoint, sociologically not so much. We have some troubling examples of the consequences of tinkering with nature in this area.

Humankind is made up of tinkerers. The temptation to alter nature appears in many forms. One is politicians passing laws that seek to reverse Laws of Nature. There is so much literature on the folly of this activity one struggles to find the best citation so I will just send you to the guy who won a Nobel Prize for it.

But that was the Nobel for Economics. In the end that was just about money. Genetics are slightly more serious. Not long ago “desktop DNA editing” became a reality. This may be the ultimate DIY. But the hard part is the delivery system if you want results in a hurry. For large mammals, at least one researcher thinks it takes about a million years for an evolutionary change to permanently establish itself if delivered naturally.

Suppose you don’t want to wait? What do you do?

There is a widely known statistical mistake known as Simpson’s Paradox. It makes possible titles in the medical literature like “Good for Women, Good for Men, Bad for People.” The essence of Simpson is that it is possible to arrive at one conclusion from a dataset that is divided into parts and the opposite conclusion using the entire dataset. For this reason, all sentences which begin “Studies show…” should be suspect.

About ten years ago some biology researchers published a paper that gave the recipe for creating Simpson’s Paradox in their genetics lab. The name they gave their two groups were “Producers” and “Nonproducers.”

[about now you should be getting the drift…]

With that as background, a few questions come to mind:

1. Can George Soros engineer the vaccine so that anyone who doesn’t think like he does has a life expectancy less than his?

2. Suppose you think the world should be run by women. Not a bad idea as it is hard to imagine them making more of a mess of it than men have. While you are vaccinating 7 billion people, just tweak the recipe to tip the balance in the genetic voting machine toward women. Currently we have about 101 men for each 100 women. A small nudge in the opposite direction would not hurt much. What could possibly go wrong?

3. Would those in favor of only “good” people want a snippet of code which insures the survival and prosperity of an altruism gene? Or would they see it as an encroachment on their source of income?

4. Why not just include a small modification that eliminates violent behavior? Who would object to that? This should fund the defund the police movement.

5. It is hard to predict how the transgender element will react. I suppose either way half of them will be happy.

6. How about adding code that predisposes an organism to being predisposed to being vaccinated? But will there be an antidote for this?

7. Personally, I would like genetic modification that makes human beings eager to read long narratives like this.

8. Let’s have an allergy to taxes that grows with each generation. We would need a genetic sidecar that recognizes inflation as a tax.

9. Can the genome be modified to require those who prefer men’s laws over Nature’s Laws to first read George Orwell, Friedrich Hayek (another Nobel Laureate) or Ayn Rand continuously until they get it?

10. Then again, perhaps the most pressing need is to finally resolve who is the funniest, Mel Brooks or Woody Allen. For a perfect World, any genetic modification should start there.

This New Year I am in the business of asking questions for which I have no answers. I leave it to those much smarter than I am to fill in the blanks.