Explaining is not Excusing

     I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago who expressed a certain dissatisfaction with my earlier post on the Man-Cold. It's not that she thought it was necessarily false, she said. She just didn't like my giving men an excuse to be such wimps. Well, I don't think I did that. I gave an account for why it might actually have been a survival trait for men in our evolutionary past to be laid low by a simple cold, but I never said anything about whether or not it was morally appropriate. Indeed, while it might once have been sensible, most of us don't hunt mastodons anymore, so being unable to wash the dishes or take out the garbage just because you have a cold is just silly. We no longer live in an environment where being a wimp about a simple cold has any practical justification. We can understand why men might be wired this way without committing ourselves to saying it's perfectly all right for them to lie incapacitated on the couch if they get the sniffles.

     But the tendency to equate explanation with excuse is powerful and widespread. In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker discusses at some length the surprising levels of anger faced by scientists who make any pronouncement about, say, the reproductive advantage that a tendency to rape might offer. Now, I should think it would be uncontroversial that, all other things being equal, a male of some species who was willing and able to force his attentions upon an unwilling female would have more reproductive opportunities than one who wasn't, and that it therefore shouldn't surprise us to find that some males carry such an urge. (Unless, of course, there really were some sort of magical shut-down system in the case of "legitimate rape", as a certain woefully ignorant politician recently claimed.) Yet, thanks to this instinct we have to confuse explanation with excuse, the very suggestion that some men might have an instinctive desire to rape is tantamount to declaring open season on women.

     It's not, of course. Recognizing that people have desires or instincts that may be inherited says nothing about the morality of acting upon those desires. No one would suggest that hunger is a culturally learned behaviour, that we only eat because we've been taught to. Hunger is a perfectly natural and hardwired instinct, but that doesn't mean we excuse all acts of eating as appropriate. (And we almost never justify cannibalism, an act of eating with a human victim. When we do, it's always in survival situations: "But I was really, REALLY hungry" is not the defense; "But I was going to die otherwise" is.) So what if we have a hardwired instinct to get horny? Unless it's possible to actually die of lust (I should be dead if it were, and I say this as someone who's been through cancer and chemotherapy), there can be no excuse for rape.

     In fact, I think those who object to explanations of bad behaviour as "excusing" it are promoting a very dangerous idea. The argument that a hardwired biological urge absolves us of moral responsibility is absolutely poisonous, because if it turns out that as a matter of scientific fact we do have hardwired biological urges, then we can no longer object morally to anything. Far better, and far more realistic, would be to acknowledge the plainly obvious fact that people do have instincts and desires, sometimes very powerful ones, that push them in the direction of doing evil things, and to say that we ought to cultivate the self-discipline to overcome these urges. Denying the reality of these feelings helps no one to resist them.

     There's another aspect to this that I feel is also morally dangerous. I had a conversation with another friend last week who said that she would rather not understand some things, because she never wants to understand how some people can do the evil they do. I can sympathize with that sentiment, but I think it's dangerous because it encourages us to think of evil as something other people do, and thus something we don't really have to worry about.
     That isn't how it works. People don't do evil because they are privy to some sort of secret knowledge that authorizes them to do things the rest of us find abhorrent. They generally do evil because they lack some belief or understanding or value that the rest of us consider important, or because they have managed to convince themselves that what they do is necessary and right. Or, I should say, that is why we do evil. We are unaware of mistakes we have made in our moral reasoning.
     That's the important point I want to make. Our moral responsibility is for what we do, and to ensure that we have made the best choice of action available to us. To do that, we need to be alert to the kinds of errors we might make, and to take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. The greatest evil is done by those who refuse to consider that they could be wrong, and the refusal to try to understand evil-doers is no protection against becoming an evil-doer oneself. It only makes it likelier.

That's not my house!

One day, when I was in kindergarten, we were all asked to draw pictures of our houses. And so we picked up our crayons and got to work. After a while, as my crude representation was beginning to take shape (I took great pains to get the chimney placement just right, struggling with how a vertical chimney could still be perpendicular to a sloped roof), the kid sitting next to me looked over and said indignantly, "That's not my house!"

Okay, so it was a French immersion kindergarten, and maybe the kid was still trying to sort out how pronouns worked, and thought the assignment for everyone was to draw his house. Kind of a cute mistake in a kindergarten kid, but it's somewhat more frustrating when this kind of subjectivity takes over in adults. Lately I've encountered it in two examples I'd like to discuss.

The first was in the context of a Facebook status thread argument about abortion, in which I reprised a little bit of my argument from this posting. Mainly I wanted to make the point that it may not always be a good thing to view the fetus as a person from the moment of conception, because while that may be a great way to behave as an expectant parent, forming a healthy social bond with the person-to-be, it also can create a great deal of unnecessary suffering in the case of a miscarriage. Miscarriages being rather common, after all, is it really better to think of oneself as the grieving parent of a dead child, or a (temporarily) disappointed would-be parent?

This comment drew considerable ire from one commenter who inferred immediately that I must not know what I'm talking about, or I could never say anything so heartless. Obviously I'd never been through a miscarriage myself. Obviously I wasn't a parent. Well.... as it happens, I have a fifteen year old son whom I love dearly, and my wife and I have been through somewhere between 4 and 6 miscarriages after he was born. (It's hard to know the exact number, because in at least one instance it was never fully established that she was actually pregnant. She sure had all the symptoms, but it's uncertain if anything remotely viable was actually starting to develop in there.)

Now, we were deeply disappointed each time, because we really did want a sibling for our son and another son or daughter for ourselves. We also had started to develop hopes for and bonds with the potentiality that was starting to grow, and it was sad to lose them. But did we feel like parents who had lost an actual child? No, no indeed. Our first pregnancy produced a healthy son, and now that he was born, the disappointment of losing a pregnancy was utterly inconsequential compared to the absolute horror with which we thought of losing him. We are the proud parents of a wonderful son; we are not at all the grieving parents of 4-6 dead children and one survivor.

My point here is not the commenter on that thread was wrong to think of a fetus as a person. I don't think she is wrong to think that way, or at least, not very  wrong; on a personal level I think it's quite desirable for individuals to bond with their unborn children that way because it is a part of good parenting. But I think she was wrong to think everyone must think that way, and to assume that her experience of pregnancy and miscarriage was privileged over any other experience that doesn't mesh with it. We are not wrong to be merely disappointed by miscarriage, either. The error she made, and the error I'm musing about in this post, is in thinking that her experience was the experience. Just as my kindergarten classmate mistook his house for the house we were all supposed to draw.

The other example that's been weighing on my mind lately is that of a frequent anonymous commenter to this very blog. He or she regularly exhorts me to accept a particular religious view, assuring me that if I just ask God to reveal Himself to me, I'll come to know Him and cease with all these silly doubts and philosophizing. Now, I don't doubt that I'll feel that way if I just swallow the blue pill (or is it the red one), that I'll be thoroughly and comfortably convinced of my place in the universe and my relation to the divine. But I can't get past the concern that feeling that way won't make it true.

Now, looking at it from the perspective of the commenter, I can certainly see his or her subjective position. I know that believing one has a personal knowledge of the divine feels exactly like knowing, and more, it feels like a private kind of knowing that no one else can truly understand if they don't feel it too. I understand how privileged that sense of knowledge can feel. I feel it too, but I recognize that it really only applies to things that I, by definition, must know, such as how I feel, how I perceive something, how sincerely I am open to God's revealing Himself to me. I know these things better than anyone else can, but I recognize that my subjective privilege doesn't go beyond the borders of my skull. It's not for me to know, better than you do, how you relate to God, whether or not you love your children, what your house looks like.

What I want to assert to my commenter here is that it's not for you to know, better than I do, how I relate to God, how much I love my son, or whether or not I'm drawing an accurate picture of my own house. It's not supposed to be your house.

Nobody Cares What You Think

     "Nobody cares what you think" is something they drill into you in law school, but sometimes I find myself wishing that it was taught to everyone, aspiring lawyer or not. Of course, much of the time it's used to correct the speech habits of students preparing for their first year moot, when prefacing any statement with "I think..." is just a bad idea anyway. But the true significance of this idea is subtle, and may take several years to sink in.

     It doesn't mean that no one wants to hear what you have to say. It means that whether or not you believe what you are saying, and how strongly you believe it, is of no relevance. What your audience cares about is whether or not there are good reasons for them to believe it. In the practice of law, especially, your actual opinion doesn't matter, because you might well believe your client is probably guilty, but your job is not to decide that, but to advise the court as to the best arguments available for why there's a reasonable doubt.

     I've had the opportunity to judge some junior high school debates, and find students very often falling into a similar trap. A speaker would stand up and deliver an impassioned speech starting out with "We strongly believe that the proposition must stand!" This is silly, because we know very well that in the next round, the very same speaker will be emphatically stating how strongly they believe the very same proposition must fall. And so the point here is the same as the one in law school: nobody cares what the speaker believes; we want to hear the arguments for why we should believe, preferable arguments we haven't considered before.

     I was recently reminded of this lesson on a message forum I frequent. We had been discussing some topic or other, the death penalty, I believe, and had gone on for some five or six pages of posts arguing about whether or not capital punishment is cheaper than life imprisonment (it's not, when you take into account the appeals process necessary to make sure we don't execute someone innocent). And then, of course, after all this lengthy and thorough discussion, someone joins in posting his opinion that we shouldn't waste money on keeping these monsters alive in prison, and should just shoot them.
     Obviously the poster hadn't read any of the thread, and was unaware or just didn't care that his arguments had already been presented and dissected in fine detail. No, he just wanted to tell us what he thought, sparking a new round of debunking the same old arguments. But why would anyone care to know that he, this anonymous person on the internet out there, happens to hold a particular and demonstrably common opinion? We aren't voting on it. We don't know him, we don't have any reason to be affected in any way by the fact that he holds or does not old that view. What we want to know is if there are good reasons why we should share that view. And if he'd taken the time to peruse the thread rather than boldly announcing his not-at-all unusual perspective, he'd know that the arguments he brought to bear were old news to the participants.

     Now, it's not necessarily true that no one cares what you think. Some people probably do, and of course when we're voting on something, what each person thinks is aggregated together to give a result. And when you're planning a dinner party, it's good to know what each guest's culinary preferences are. But most of the time, it's a good guiding principle to bear in mind that the mere fact of your preferring A over B is of no value to anyone but you.

Homophobia: My Excuse

     It's very fashionable to condemn homophobia these days, but I don't think anyone has ever clearly articulated the very good reasons why some of us are terrified by homosexuality. Not all of us, of course, but not all of us have as much to lose.

     It's all very well for ordinary people to be tolerant. They have nothing to fear at all. They can just live and let live, because whether or not someone is gay really doesn't affect how they can get along. It's none of their business.

     But me, I'm a very handsome man. I'm unspeakably charming, witty and just generally attractive beyond all description. So naturally, if homosexuality is to be openly accepted, I'm going to have men hitting on me all the time. ALL THE TIME. You just don't know what it's like, if you're not as stunning as I am, and you probably aren't.

     This is more than a mere inconvenience. If it were simply a matter of saying "No, thank you," and being done with it, then I'd be fine with it, as simply part of the cost of being so fabulous. We all have our burdens to bear, after all. But as we know from movies and novels, it's never simply a matter of just saying no and being done with it. No, as a general rule, we know that once a man sets his sights on a woman (or a man, I assume, though I haven't seen a lot of movies where a man chases a man romantically), he just has to be persistent, and in the end the girl will realize she's in love with him, and they'll live happily ever after. As the cliché goes, her lips may say no, but her eyes say yes. Eventually, anyway. Right?
     Oh, sure. I'm heterosexual, not sexually interested in men at all. The idea of being intimate with a man in that way, well, it even kind of creeps me out a little, no offense intended. But if you pay attention to the movies, that's not really much of a factor. The woman often starts out even being actively disgusted by the man, but over time she is no match for his relentless, determined pursuit. And in fact, it even helps if he's kind of unpleasant in a way, if his charm is unconventional and hard to perceive. It's just a matter of time before she discovers that he's the man she's always wanted, even if she never thought she wanted a man at all. And so, well, I think I don't want a man, and I'm even pretty sure of it, but I don't think there's a defence against romantic persistence. Not in any of the movies or novels I've seen, anyway. Eventually he'll win me over in spite of myself, and I really don't want that to happen.

     So you see, the reason I'm so frightened of homosexuality is because, like many homophobes,  I'm such a delightfully attractive and wonderful human being. And we let you know we're homophobes because otherwise you'd have no way whatsoever of knowing how intensely desirable we are.

The Man-Cold: Why are Men Such Wimps?

     Having spend the last couple of days largely incapacitated on the couch by a simple common rhinovirus (which may have affected the quality of my last two posts), I've been wondering about the phenomenon of the man-cold, which seems to be more than just an advertising trope. The evidence I have is anecdotal, but it does seem like colds hit men harder than they hit women, and I've been wondering why this would be the case.
     The first thing that occurred to me was that women probably do have somewhat more robust immune systems than men, and that makes a certain amount of evolutionary sense on several levels, mostly having to do with reproduction and child-rearing. Also, let's face it, men are a bit more expendable than women in the gene-propagating game; biologically, dad can check out right after conception and baby can survive and even prosper, while mom needs to stick around for a couple of years after that at least for a decent chance at grandchildren.
     But I don't think that really answers the question. I don't think the symptoms I suffer when I have a cold are really all that much worse than those affecting my wife when she gets it. No, I think it really does come down to men being wimps, at least with respect to things like colds. And I think there's actually a plausible evolutionary reason for that.
     Here's what I mean, first of all, by "wimp": someone with a low tolerance for discomfort. I don't mean pain threshhold, although that's a related concept, because men pride themselves in their ability to press on despite terribly painful injuries. Not that women can't also do this, but rather that we don't see the same kind of gender-linked phenomenon as we do with the man-cold. We don't have "man-sprains" or "man-sunburns". What I'm talking about, at least in the context of men-with-cold-being-wimps, is the kind of discomfort that is not a result of physical trauma gloriously won in battle, but of feeling sick from disease or poison. And I'm suggesting that a low tolerance for that kind of suffering, a propensity to lie in bed and moan from a relatively small degree of discomfort, might actually have served an evolutionary purpose.
     Consider our ancestral environment, and in particular the different social/economic roles filled in hunter/gatherer societies. By and large, hunting (and warfare) have historically and prehistorically been primarily male areas, while gathering has been more open to both genders (if perhaps tending to be dominated by females). Hunting and fighting are kind of a high-performance activities, with rather high stakes for failure. If you go to gather roots and berries with a head cold, well, you may come back with fewer roots and berries than if you were in peak health, but the risks of not coming back at all are not substantially higher; it's still worth it to go ahead and collect food. However, going off to raid another tribe's village, or trying to bring down a giraffe or mammoth, a head cold can put you at substantially greater risk of failure and possibly death. In other words, having a cold can make the odds of a successful hunt so low as to be not worth the trouble.
     Now, nature doesn't generally rely on our cool rational intellect to make these calculations for us. It doesn't lead us to carefully assess how many calories we've consumed recently, and decide how much more we should or shouldn't eat. Rather, it equips us with animal appetites and instincts; we eat because we FEEL hungry, not because we've made a rational calculation that we ought to do so. Likewise, rather than trusting our ancestors to coolly assess the odds of an ill-timed sneeze spoiling an ambush, nature has given us threshholds for various forms of discomfort that make us feel more or less horrible, and more or less enthusiastic about going out and hunting or gathering or whatever it is we normally do.
     And that, I think, is why men are such wimps when it comes to colds. In our ancestral environment, the better decision when you had a cold was not to go hunting, so men are laid low by relatively mild illness, while women will still go out gathering while suffering the very same symptoms. Of course, men aren't wimps in battle, and can ignore pain and fight on despite grievous injuries. But there, the evolutionary payoff is different; it's too late to stay home once you're fighting an angry auroch, so your best chance is to go all-out physically and either kill it or run like hell.
   

Little Joys of Discovery #1

     Every so often I learn something new in the most delightful way. Today I was out weeding the garden, turning soil to prepare for planting some vegetables, when I was surprised to come across this:

     As you can see, it's part of a wasp nest. The top image shows what surprised me: instead of hanging from the bottom of a branch somewhere, it's attached to the roots of the grass I was removing from the vegetable garden. That is, the paper nest had be constructed completely underground. I'm used to seeing wasp nests above ground, in trees or under the eaves of my garage, like this one, which I excised from our apple tree one autumn a few years ago and have been keeping in a sealed plastic box because it was just such a fabulous specimen:

    Now, you may have known this all along, but it simply never occurred to me that wasps might go to all the trouble to excavate an underground chamber and then go ahead and make this elaborate paper structure as well. I suppose I just assumed that what with the paper and the stings, wasps wouldn't bother to dig like this. And yet they do, and I feel richer for having found that out first-hand, rather than from a book or a blog, as much as I like books and blogs.

     I recall the same sort of experience a few years ago, lying on the grass and happening to notice a bee landing nearby carrying a piece of a leaf, before it disappeared into a tiny burrow in the ground. I was astonished. I had, of course, heard all about leafcutter ants, and their marvellous underground fungus farms, but somehow I had never heard of leafcutter bees. So I promptly went and looked them up, and it turns out they're very important pollinators for many crops. A few years later, I was replacing some rotten boards on our deck, and found tunnels lined with leaves, and packed with yellow powdery deposits I assume was pollen, stored for the bee's young. (Yes, singular possessive "bee's"; apparently leafcutter bees are a solitary species.) I wish I had taken a picture.

     While I had the camera out for the wasp nest, I also took a couple of other shots of delightful discoveries I happened upon today, though neither quite so surprising to me as learning that wasps built paper nests underground. After all, I knew that robins ate worms, though I was puzzled at why this one seemed to be just idly sitting there on the wire for so long without either eating its prey or taking it home to feed its chicks.

      I also knew that chives spread like weeds, but I was still pleased to find this one, almost as it if had been posing for a photo. Usually I find it disguised as tall grass, hiding from the lawnmower behind the raspberry bushes.

     So much for today's self-indulgent photo essay.

Sauron et alia v. Baggins et alia

THE COURT:

    This remarkably complex case involves a staggering number of parties, all claiming ownership of the One Ring. It may be useful at this stage in the proceedings to briefly outline the positions of the various claimants as I understand them.

     SAURON claims ownership on the ground that he created the ring for his own use, and that it only left his possession through the torts of trespass, assault, battery and conversion allegedly committed against him by the late ISILDUR. Sauron argues that his title to the ring was never surrendered or extinguished, that he at no time abandoned his claim, and that in any event on public policy grounds neither the estate of Isildur nor any of those working in concert with it should be permitted to hold legal or equitable title to the ring, as such would have the effect of allowing tortfeasors to profit from their wrongdoing. Sauron also asks this court for a declaration that the ring is a living creature, possessing an animus revertendi and exhibiting a consistent tendency and desire to return to Sauron as its rightful owner. Further, as certain parties to this action have expressed the intention to destroy the ring if successful in their claims, Sauron submits that the ring should not go to them in any event.

     It is common ground that Sauron did in fact make the ring, and it is conceded by most parties that he did at least own the ring at that time. THE ELVES,  however, assert an IP claim against Sauron for his creation of the ring, which they allege involved unauthorized use of their trade secrets. The Elves seek an order that the ring be destroyed.

     THE HEIR OF ISILDUR, Aragorn, denies Sauron's allegations of assault and other torts, and claims the ring as proper spoils of war. He alleges that any torts committed took place in the context of a war in which Sauron was the clear aggressor, and that possession as well as legal and equitable title passed to Isildur. If that argument fails, Aragorn submits that regardless of who had legal title to the ring when Isildur took possession of it, that title would have been extinguished during the years the ring was lost following Isildur's death. Aragorn has admitted in oral argument that his intention is to give the ring to Frodo Baggins, who intends to destroy it.

     THE STEWARD OF GONDOR, Denethor, contests Aragorn's standing to represent Isildur's estate, and claims that he holds any right to the ring through Isildur. While Denethor has been recognized as the lawful steward of Isildur's estate, his case is hurt somewhat by the fact that not one but two of his agents are alleged to have repudiated his claim to the ring. Denethor disputes that his son Boromir made any repudiation before his death, and while he acknowledges that his son Faramir did permit Frodo to abscond with the ring, he argues that Faramir's actions were unauthorized and should not be binding upon him. Finally, Denethor asks this court to consider the balance of hardships and grant an equitable order that the ring be sent to Gondor to defend its people.

     SMEAGOL's claim to the ring is complicated. His original submission to this court asserted that he had received the ring as a birthday present from a Deagol, and then claimed he had received it as a donatio mortis causa, but was unwilling to provide supporting details. He has since retained as counsel Mr. Gollum, and his amended statement of claim is ingenious to say the least. If I understand it correctly, he seems to be saying that the ring was found by Deagol, at which point title would have vested in the crown of the River Folk by treasure trove. Smeagol claims title to the ring as the sole surviving member of the River Folk, and in the alternative, he asserts simple adverse possession. Smeagol further argues that regardless of the validity of his own claim to the ring, his possession should have been effective as against all but the rightful owner, and hence Mr. Baggins' taking of the ring from him was unlawful in any event.

     THE GREAT GOBLIN also claims title to the ring by right of treasure trove, in this instance by virtue of Mr. Bilbo Baggins having found the ring while in his territory. Smeagol disputes the Great Goblin's claim, asserting that the area in which the ring was found was in fact outside the de facto and de jure territory of the Goblin kingdom, notwithstanding that the site in question lies within the Misty Mountains which is otherwise recognized as Goblin territory. It appears that there is a triable issue here concerning the status of this real estate, but I am not at this time convinced that such a determination will be necessary to dispose of the present action.

     OAKENSHIELD AND COMPANY have submitted what is essentially a contractual claim, alleging that Bilbo Baggins was in their employ as a burglar at the time he found the ring, and was bound by the terms of a treasure sharing agreement. Oakenshield asserts that the ring was not subjected to the treasure distribution procedure prescribed by the contract, and asks that it be returned to the company for such distribution. Mr. Frodo Baggins argues on his uncle's behalf that Bilbo's possession of the ring was known to the company and implicitly ratified by them.

     THE SACKVILLE BAGGINSES assert a claim to the ring by two rather convoluted theories. The first is very similar to Smeagol's argument by treasure trove on behalf of the River Folk, except for the allegation that the Shire Folk are the successors to the River Folk. This argument seems to me to be subject to some very difficult evidentiary burdens, and I might have granted Frodo's motion to strike for lack of standing but for their second argument, for which they do have standing. The second theory is based upon a contract whereby Frodo allegedly transferred all of Bilbo's chattels as well as the house at Bag End to the Sackville-Bagginses, and that on a proper construction of this contract the ring would have been included with these chattels. In the alternative they seek an order declaring Bilbo incompetent, voiding his will and appointing SARUMAN THE WHITE his trustee. In their submissions, they allege that Gandalf the Grey breached a fiduciary duty to Bilbo by coercing him into giving the ring to Frodo. Counsel for Saruman, Mr. Grima, confirms that Saruman is willing to accept responsibility for Bilbo's affairs.

     FRODO BAGGINS claims to have received the ring as an inter vivos gift from Bilbo, who is his uncle. He asserts that the ring was abandoned property when Bilbo found it, as Smeagol could have had no legal or equitable claim to the ring and in any event was not in proper possession or control of it at the time. He specifically denies the application of the doctrine of treasure trove to the ring on the ground that the ring is not essentially treasure within the ambit of the law, deriving its value from its function of rendering its user invisible rather than from its composition, which is acknowledged to be gold. If the doctrine of treasure trove is held to apply with respect to Deagol's finding of the ring, Frodo contests the Sackville-Bagginses right to speak for the Shire Folk. In the alternative, Frodo asserts that he holds the ring in trust for the Council of Rivendell, having received it as a bailment for the express purpose of destroying it in the fires of Mount Doom. He suggests that, as the Council of Rivendell represented the interests of the Elves, the Heir of Isildur, and the Steward of Gondor. and arguably the Shire, and that any successful claims by any of these parties will ultimately result in his possession of the ring being lawful.

     Mr. Baggins' last argument is particularly insightful. There are simply too many parties to this action, and the burden on this court in sorting out all the claims is quite unreasonable. Many of the parties appear to have closely convergent interests, and some parties are submitting their own briefs when they could just as easily appear as witnesses for a party whose ultimate objective is substantially the same. I believe it would be in the interests of all parties if we could simplify the issues here, if for no other reason than that it would substantially reduce the costs. For this reason, I am ordering an adjournment to allow the parties to confer and identify which of them can consolidate their claims.

     Also, in light of the fact that certain parties intend to destroy the ring, which would clearly prejudice the interests of the other parties, I am ordering that pending the final outcome of this litigation, the ring will stay in the custody of this court.

Corporate Slavery

  A corporation is legally a person, able to exercise many (though not all) of the legal rights of a natural person. Corporations can sue and be sued, can own property and enter into contracts, and can even be charged with criminal offenses, although for obvious reasons they cannot actually be imprisoned, even when they are found guilty. 

  This is the basis of a common criticism of corporations and corporate law. Despite the legal fiction that corporations are persons, they lack the frailties of natural persons which help to inform our morality. Imprisonment may be an effective deterrent (or at least a meaningful punishment) to a natural person (including the directors of a corporation), but has no meaning for the corporation itself. Corporations have no need for food, air, water or shelter, they cannot fall in love, have children, or stub their toes. They don’t age, and they don’t feel pain, fear or remorse. Given all this, it should come as no surprise that corporations sometimes (often) act as soulless monsters without any regard for the interests of others beyond the minimum duty of care imposed by law. So, it is sometimes argued that corporations should not be treated at law as persons.

  I am sympathetic to the concern motivating this argument, but something about it remains unsatisfying. Legal rights are not contingent on the specific frailties of mortal human beings. Suppose a person were to reveal, for example, that she was in fact 3,000 years old, and just happened to have a rare mutation that exempted her from the normal process of aging. Would we say that such a person should forfeit any of her legal rights on that basis? Well, we might want to modify the Copyright Act, since a term of life + 50 years is a bit extreme when the author is effectively immortal, but apart from that sort of thing I expect most of us would agree that the basic rights associated with personhood should remain intact.

  But it occurs to me that the problem with corporations is not that we treat them too much like persons, but not enough. That is, there is one critical respect in which a corporation is treated in a fundamentally different manner from natural persons, at least since the abolition of chattel slavery: corporations are owned.

  Now, before I continue, let me first emphasize that I am not calling for the emancipation of the corporation. Far from it. They already enjoy more than enough power and practical freedom. What I want to do, rather, is point out how this simple fact, that corporate “persons” are also at law someone else’s property, makes it almost inevitable that corporations (publicly held ones, at least) will tend to exercise their legal personhood as soulless monsters.

  First, we must note that as an artificial person, a corporation itself has no mind, and can only act through agents. Thus a corporation must have directors to make decisions on its behalf. The corporation is utterly at the mercy of these directors, who are necessarily empowered to affect its interests by entering it into binding agreements, spending its money and so forth. Whenever someone is empowered over a person in this way, the law imposes a strict duty on the empowered one, called a fiduciary duty, to exercise those powers faithfully in the best interests of the other (who is called the beneficiary). Parents owe a fiduciary duty to their children, physicians owe a fiduciary duty to their patients, attorneys owe a fiduciary duty to their clients, and so forth.

  But what does it mean to act in someone’s best interests? That usually depends on context and who that someone is, but will almost always include some reference to the question: “What would the beneficiary choose for himself, if only he were competent to act on his own behalf?” 

  That question has no meaning for a corporation, however. Remember that a corporation is property; it belongs to someone. That means that its best interest are not understood in terms of what it would want for itself, but in terms of its own value as an asset. So a corporation’s directors are thus under a fiduciary duty to maximize the corporation’s bottom line, to increase its market value. However valuable things like clean air, job security and peace and happiness might be to natural persons (including those natural persons who happen to be corporate directors), they are not a part of the best interests of a corporation, and for a director to pursue such goals on behalf of a corporation at the expense of share price is actually unlawful, a breach of fiduciary duty to the poor helpless corporation at their mercy. Essentially, then, the directors of corporations are legally obliged to make their corporations act as soulless monsters.

  I am not sure what to suggest as a remedy. Perhaps we need to rethink the whole notion of equity in corporations, and redefine it more as a kind of debt. Or perhaps we can, by statute, add factors that directors must consider as being in the “best interests” of the corporations they control. (To some extent, that is possible already by way of a Unanimous Shareholders Agreement, but the default position for a corporation is to care only about its bottom line.) That may seem an artificial and forced solution, but on the other hand, corporations are themselves an artificial concept.

  I dunno. Maybe I’m hoping for some good ideas to show up in the comments thread...

I don't believe in ghosts...

When people learn I'm a skeptic about things like ghosts and such, they'll sometimes relate to me some horrifically spooky experience they had, and then challenge me with "How do you explain THAT?" as if something supernatural is the only plausible explanation. Well, I can't always, but then, I rarely have enough information about the anecdotal situation to make sense of it, especially since it's been retold to me from the perspective of someone who has already chosen to see it in supernatural terms. So I sometimes respond with the following experience of my own, which took place a few years ago.

It’s never so quiet as right after a heavy fall of fluffy snow. I had just been visiting my parents one dark evening, and was walking out to my car, aware of the unnatural absence of the usual background noise of even this quiet residential neighbourhood, and listening intently to the only sound, the squeaky crunch of my shoes in the snow.

They say the ear can play tricks on you in such silence, so I didn’t quite know what to make of it when I heard my wife’s voice, faintly calling my name, as if from far away. I stopped dead in my tracks for a moment, then shook my head and continued. No, I knew my wife was at home and well out of earshot. But then I thought I heard it again.

I stopped and listened. Could I really have heard my wife’s voice? No. Of course not. The silence was messing with my imagination. After a few more long seconds of silence, I continued, a little faster, towards my car, when suddenly I heard my son’s voice, calling “Daaaaad!”

At that I froze. Something about being a parent makes one acutely sensitive to the voice of one’s own child. It’s absolutely unmistakable, and that was no mere trick of the imagination. My son was definitely calling for me.  I hurried to the car, started it up and drove out onto the main street, resisting the urge to go too fast.

Now, I’m not superstitious, and I don’t believe in ghosts or premonitions or anything of the sort. Yet it was difficult to avoid thinking in such terms. I tried to convince myself that I had not heard both my wife and son calling for me in the impossible silence, but it had been just too vivid to deny. I couldn’t shake a feeling of dread for what I might find when I arrived home.

Anxiously I pulled the car into the garage, hit the remote button to close the garage door behind me, and hastened to the house. Twenty paces from the back door, my cell phone rang in my breast pocket.

My cell phone. I stopped again, for just as long as it took to breathe a sigh of relief. As I mounted the steps of the back porch, my wife opened the door with a smug grin and the handset, my giggling son next to her. Somehow, while pulling on my winter parka, I had bumped against the speed dial button for our house, and not heard her “Hello?” over my crunching footsteps. So I HAD heard their voices calling, but in my early days of cell phone ownership, I was not yet in the habit of knowing I had it with me.

I made sure my next one was a flip phone.

The Noblest Predator

When we think of the kinds of predators that inspire respect and admiration, the creatures we put on coins and flags and coats of arms, it's often animals like lions, bears and eagles we choose. I'd like to suggest that these aren't necessarily the models of courage and nobility we should be inspired by, and nominate instead an unjustly maligned predator as a moral exemplar.

The lion, for instance, while certainly a majestic looking beast, is a cruel and murderous patriarch. When a dominant male (or usually a gang of two or three) takes over a pride (by the violent overthrow of the previous regime), the first order of business is to kill any nursing cubs, so as to free up the mothers to start a new litter with the invaders. Can we think of this as anything but reprehensible?

Such behaviour isn't limited to lions. Mother bears are well-known among mammals for their fierce defence of their young, but part of the reason the cubs need such defence is that other bears will think nothing of eating someone else's cubs.

But quite apart from the intraspecies conduct of these predators, there are moral issues with their predatory styles, as well. For one thing, most predators are cowardly, when you think about it: they attack the sickly and frail, the most vulnerable prey they can find, as if their sharp teeth and claws weren't enough of an advantage. And many predators go after prey very much smaller than themselves, so much so that we don't even really think of them as predators; consider the baleen whales, who lazily scoop up vast numbers of invertebrates, small fish and anything else unfortunate enough to be in the wrong  volume of seawater, swallowing their prey whole to be digested alive en masse. I sometimes suspect that the majority of individual animals in the world spend their last living moments in the stomachs of such predator like whales and anteaters, who simply gulp down tiny victims without even doing them the courtesy of a merciful euthanizing chewing.

It is, after all, generally only the predators with enough courage to take on prey closer to their own size who bother to kill before eating. Not out of any compassion for their victims, mind you; it's just easier to eat a zebra when it's no longer trying to kick your teeth out. And the methods used are far from humane, anyway; teeth and claws, drowning, suffocation, venom, even electric shock in the case of certain sea creatures. There are even predators, like the ichneumon wasp, who go out of their way to keep their prey alive as long as possible so as to keep it fresh for when the eggs laid inside the hapless victim hatch.

Even on those rare occasions when we humans, the most terrifyingly effective killer of other creatures on the planet, bother to concern ourselves with minimizing the suffering of our prey, the fact remains that we kill what we eat, and there really is no such thing as a nice way to kill someone.

So allow me to recommend as the most noble, heroic and courageous predator this: the lowly mosquito.

The mosquito lives most of its life as a vegetarian, after all. Loath to harm another sentient creature, it takes most of its sustenance from plant juices. It is only when a female finds herself with developing eggs that she is compelled to take a meal of animal blood, and not even for her own sake, but solely for the benefit of her children.

Yet what does the mother-to-be mosquito do when she needs protein for her babies? Unlike more cowardly predators, she does not seek out smaller, more vulnerable creatures to kill. No, she doesn't pick on someone her own size; she goes after prey that dwarfs her by many orders of magnitude. Indeed, she often goes after that very deadliest of animals, Homo sapiens. And not to kill, but to humanely harvest a tiny quantity of blood, ideally without causing the slightest discomfort whatsoever. (A mosquito does not want to be noticed, after all.) Less than a drop of blood is all she seeks, never to be missed by the donor, and that only to feed her babies. And to get it, she faces the grave risk of being smashed into paste by her gigantic prey.

Now, it's true, of course, that mosquitoes are blamed for many human deaths annually, as diseases like malaria are spread by insect bites. But it's not fair to hold the mosquito responsible for what is really done by the malaria parasite; the mosquito is if anything another victim of the parasite's exploitation. Indeed, just counting sheer numbers, the number of mosquitoes slain by pesticides and other measures aimed at controlling the spread of insect-borne diseases is astronomically larger than the number of humans who will ever have lived, let alone be affected by all of those diseases combined. I expect that if the malaria parasite were to go extinct tomorrow, few creatures would have more cause to celebrate than the mosquito.

So let us admire the courage and compassion of the noble mosquito, even if we don't stop swatting them.  And best of all, these valourous little bloodsuckers don't sparkle!

A Tip on Parking in Snow

     We've had a sudden dumping of snow on our streets this past weekend, and while it isn't really a stupendous amount in historical terms, it is enough to get stuck in if you don't know how to drive in it. Sadly, I find a lot of people don't, which includes many SUV owners who claim to have bought their vehicles specifically to deal with Alberta winters. It's as if they think an SUV is magically immune to weather, without considering what exactly it is that makes an SUV better able to handle certain kinds of driving conditions. And so, one winter a couple of years ago when I had an hour long highway commute, I once counted 38 vehicles in the ditch, the disproportionate majority of which were SUVs, an alarming number of which had rolled over after leaving the road (owing in part to their high center of gravity).

     I'm not a fan of SUVs generally, at least not as private vehicles for ordinary use. It's not that I don't see their utility in certain contexts, but the same can be said of SCUBA gear. If you want to wear an air tank around town as a Cousteau-chic fashion statement, fine. You'll look silly. But if you wear it on a crowded elevator, you can expect to annoy people. Likewise oversize vehicles that take up more parking space than is warranted, with high suspensions that make even your low-beam headlights shine down directly into the eyes of drives of smaller vehicles. (This latter problem is made worse by following too close.) But I'll grant that it's true that the higher wheel base does make it possible in principle to go through deeper snow than I can safely manage in my sanely sized car.

     Last winter, an SUV got stuck in the lane behind our house, and when we went out to help dig it free, it became clear how the driver's confused thinking about snow caused the problem in the first place: he seemed to think that more power was the solution. To be fair, it's not necessarily a completely stupid idea; if you think of snow as creating more resistance to the movement of the vehicle, then greater force to overcome that resistance is a natural inference.

     Of course, snow doesn't just create more resistance; it also decreases traction, and this is usually the bigger problem. Indeed, ordinary small cars like mine have more than enough power to get through even fairly deep snow, provided the tires can firmly grip a solid surface underneath. So one of the tricks to driving in snow is to manage the surface under the tires. Be aware of the effect your wheels are having on the snow, and use it to your advantage.

     An example: Last night, I had to drive to pick up my son at the home of a classmate, which was in a residential neighbourhood where the snow had piled up, especially along the curb where I would normally have parked. I parked in the snowdrift anyway, and had no trouble extricating myself. Here's how I did it.

    First, I approached with just enough power to keep me moving forward into the snow drift, relying primarily on my vehicle's momentum to get me to the parking spot. I was careful to keep the wheels rolling through the snow, not spinning free but maintaining firm contact with the snow underneath. Like a rolling pin going over pie dough, the wheels compressed the snow into a firm track under the tires. I let the snow itself bring me to a halt, not using the brake at all, so that the tires never scraped the snow beneath. Spinning or sliding tires will polish the snow underneath them into slippery ice, so avoid that at all costs.

    Then, when it was time to leave, I knew that there was lots of deep snow ahead of me, and the front of my tires were right up against it. To try to drive straight out, as I would in summer, would require enough traction not just to accelerate the mass of the car but also to overcome the resistance of that snow. However, the way I rolled gently to a stop in the snowdrift meant that there was a flat track of compressed (but not polished slippery!) snow under and behind my wheels. So, I very gently backed up in that track until I had enough room to build up the momentum to roll through the deeper snow and out into the main thoroughfare. And that was that.

     So, to put it another way, the lesson is this: Do not treat the snow as an enemy to be overcome with force. Treat it gently with your tires, so that it becomes your ally. 

The Care and Feeding of Trolls

     Trolls have been in online forums for as long as there have been online forums, and there are generally two types: the good and the bad. The good ones are more akin to satirists; they present an idea or a statement that is demonstrably false, but plausible, and do so in the spirit of play; people who clue into it are welcome to play along and share in the joke. The bad trolls, on the other hand, get their amusement by stirring up trouble with inflammatory posts, starting flamewars, and just generally seeing other people get worked up over nothing; the angrier people get, the happier the bad troll.
     The conventional wisdom on how to deal with the latter type is simple: don't feed the trolls. The theory is sound; trolls are looking to provoke a reaction, so if you ignore them, they'll eventually get bored and go away. Personally, however, this is not my policy. I never feel comfortable with assuming someone is a troll, in part because I know there are real people out there who genuinely believe outrageous things, and so someone I dismiss as a troll could actually be sincere. Moreover, in a public forum, even if someone is trolling, it doesn't necessarily follow that everyone in the audience of lurkers recognizes that; there might be someone who might actually agree with what the troll says, and who therefore is in need of a healthy dialogue on the subject. So my policy has always been to take posts at face value, and not to concern myself with whether or not the person posting it actually believes it.
     I first started consciously using this policy about 14 or 15 years ago, when I decided to put my money where my mouth was on the subject of free speech. (I've always argued that the solution to hate speech is not censorship, but vigorously debunking the hate speech. In other words, vaccination rather than quarantine.) I spent a few month arguing in the Usenet newsgroup alt.politics.white-power.
     Now, I didn't have any illusions going into this. I didn't expect to convert any racists into champions of tolerance. I assumed that anyone actually arguing with me probably had made up their mind and would be at least as resistant to changing it as I was (and I've invested a fair bit into my anti-racist position, having not only entered into an interracial marriage but produced a healthy hybrid child by it). My purpose there was primarily for the lurkers, and those among them who might not have completely made up their minds.
     That's why I adopted for myself some ground rules. I committed myself to always be as polite and respectful as possible, and to consider the ideas presented as fairly and rigorously as possible. I never wanted to leave a lurker wondering why I left some question unanswered, or worse, indirectly insulted them by saying that anyone who could believe such rubbish was an idiot. Calling people idiots (even if they are) doesn't really gain you much credibility or respect, and if anything, makes them more resistant to your arguments.
     Of course, I have no idea how successful this approach was with the lurkers, since of course they're lurkers; I wouldn't likely hear from them if I made any difference. But I did enjoy a rather surprising indicator of success: several months after I retired from that particular arena, I got an email from one of the people who had been openly arguing with me in the newsgroup, thanking me for taking the time and being patient and respectful, and telling me that he'd come to see he had been wrong about the race thing. Admittedly, he wasn't one of the most hardcore and dogmatic there, but was immensely gratifying to have had a tangible effect. And I like to think that if my approach was effective enough for that, perhaps it helped a good number of lurkers, as well.

     That's why I've chosen to use the same approach in dealing with trolls. Remember that for the most part, the bad trolls are trying to provoke a flamewar, so responding emotionally to inflammatory posts plays right into their hands. If you can't respond rationally, then of course it's best to ignore them, but if you can remain calm and logical, a polite and respectful response is often more effective. And it might even be useful to someone some day, googling for an answer to a question no one else seems to think it worth taking the time to answer.

    So that's my policy on trolls. Except for the good ones, with whom I hope I'm clever enough to catch on and play along.

Evolution of the Soul

      Why is it that almost every human culture has some notion of a soul? I don't necessarily mean the idea of an immortal soul that persists after death, but some kind of spirit or essence of self which is distinct from the body. There must be some reason for the near ubiquity of such a concept, and I am inclined to suspect an evolutionary survival benefit.

     Years ago, when I was at graduate school, a confluence of three experiences got me to thinking about this. The most significant was the death of my grandfather. When my wife and I arrived at the airport and met my sisters and mother, they recounted having gone to view the body earlier that day, and I was struck by how each of them remarked that it wasn't really him. That is, it was clearly his body, but he wasn't there.

      Within a few weeks of this, I was driving to pick up my wife after her night shift at work at the hospital, when I spotted three pigeons in the road in front of me, two of them dead. Fortunately, at 5 in the morning, there was virtually no traffic, so I slowed down to give the one live pigeon the opportunity to get out of the way. It seemed reluctant to leave its companions, however, and took a few moments to decide. At last it hopped up onto the curb, and I was able to proceed, my tires missing the fallen fowl by a healthy margin.
      Almost the next evening, I recall watching a nature documentary on TV in which a gnu had just delivered a stillborn calf, attracting the attention of some hyenas. The mother gnu valiantly protected her calf through the whole night, while the hyenas waited with evident patience. At last, the mother gave up and left, and the hyenas ate.

     The pigeon and the gnu I thought about for some time after that. It was kind of touching how the pigeon didn't want to abandon its friends, and the gnu's predicament was absolutely heartbreaking. Although I was not a parent yet myself, I could certainly identify with her, and could scarcely imagine a circumstance in which I would abandon my own child to hyenas.

     And that's kind of when it struck me, reflecting on my grandfather's funeral and the viewing of the body. He wasn't there, in his body. There was no imaginable circumstance in which we would willingly cremate or bury my grandfather, but this was just a lifeless body, not him.

     And so I suspect that we (and probably other species) have evolved a tendency to combine a number of sensory factors (things like temperature, movement, breathing, a pulse, and the like) into a kind of holistic sense of the presence or even identity of a person, distinct from the body itself. Something that would allow us to abandon our dead to the hyenas, without seriously compromising our powerful instinct to protect our living kin. We would not abandon our kin just because they had been injured or lost some simple tangible property, like a pulse; we'd need to be able to believe that they no longer inhabited the body, that they were no longer the person we cared about. Hence, something like a soul, a spirit, an intangible essence that we nonetheless feel we sense through all the tangible vital signs.

     This doesn't mean we have a soul, of course. (Nor does it necessarily mean we don't.) It's simply an account of why all human cultures would have some kind of related concept, and incidentally a response to the common argument that we must have souls because every human culture believes in them independently.

Cancer: A Cellular Memoir

  The minute I learned, I knew it had to be a mistake. This is something that happens to others, not to me. Sure, everyone says that, but seriously, this is different. You just don’t realize how absolutely unprecedented this is. 

For longer than I can remember, I’ve been dividing. It’s what I was born to do. I’ve been at it for what, two billion years now? I’m really, really good at it. Look how many of my daughters and granddaughters are out there now. When I started, this planet was absolutely barren. I divided, and then there were two of us, and then four, and then eight and, well, now look around you. Most places you can’t even see the rocks for how many of my descendants there are covering the planet. 

So yeah, dividing is kind of what I do, who I am. Not all of my daughters survived, of course. It’s always been a challenge. There were lots of times when there weren’t enough nutrients, or when it got too hot or too cold or too dry. And I can’t tell you how often some of my ungrateful offspring tried to eat me, though that doesn’t seem to have been a problem since... Hmmm. I guess it was when I invented multicellularism. 

It feels silly taking the credit for that, actually. I mean, it really was kind of a mistake at first. I had divided, like I had millions of times before, only there was something different in the genome. Looking back over it, I probably mistranscribed one of the genes, and hadn’t noticed it until it was too late, and I wasn’t sure which was the original copy. 

That’s the real work of mitosis, you know. Making an extra copy of every chromosome, and then bundling them off to one side of me with enough organelles and stuff to get by on, and then squeeeezing myself in the middle until my membrane seals up, and off goes my daughter to do whatever it is she figures she needs to do. 

Now, I don’t always read the genome very carefully when I copy it. Actually, I just about never do. The only genes I actually bother to read are the ones that I need for things like, oh, how to make this or that protein I need to grow, metabolize, and so on. I don’t know what most of the genes in the genome do, since I never use them. I just copy them and pass them on, and usually my daughters do something neat with them. You’d be amazed with the things they can do. I'm told some of my descendants even figured out how to get food from sunlight!

Like this multicellularism business, as I was saying. It seems I’d made some sort of transcription error or other, because instead of going off on their own, my daughters stuck to me, and we formed a sort of commune, a ball of cells, all equals, all identical, all getting along just fine. It worked out pretty well, because among other things, it made it harder for some of my renegade descendants to eat us, since we were so big, relatively speaking. And it also kind of allowed us to eat them, when we had to. I’m not especially proud of that, but what can you do? An awful lot of my daughters have mutated so much, I hardly recognize them now.

But we did all right, our community of sister cells. Every once in a while the colony would get too big, and we’d split into two or more, and go our separate ways. At some point, and I don’t remember exactly how it happened, I managed to get myself into the centre of the colony ball, and my daughters took it upon themselves to protect me. I figure there must have been something in one of the chromosomes I miscopied that they were all reading, because they started acting a little differently from me. Not that I was going to complain. I mean, they were out there, facing the environment, passing me nutrients whenever I needed, and basically treating me like royalty. I’ve kind of gotten used to it by now.

Well, I kept on dividing, when the opportunity presented itself, and kept on transcribing genes again and again. I don’t make a lot of mistakes at that, you know -- I’m really an excellent copyist. But realistically, if you make as many copies as I have, you are going to miss a base pair here or there, or mix up guanine and cytosine, once in a while. So okay, I do make a lot of mistakes, but really very very few as a fraction of the total copies I make. Nobody’s perfect, and it’s not as if I have any realistic way to tell what’s a mistake and what’s correct. I don’t have time to parse and edit genes, and I couldn’t even if I wanted to. How am I to know what a protein looks like or does until I actually synthesize one, after all? Besides, it's not really my problem, is it?

Anyway, over time I’ve accumulated a whole lot of genes that I’m only supposed to read and implement under certain special circumstances. Like, if I find I’m big enough to start dividing, for example. I don’t divide all the time, you know. Just when I’m ready. So the enzymes I use to divide are things I only look up and synthesize when I need them. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. I make a lot of enzymes and other proteins that interfere with each other, and who knows how all that works? I sure don’t. 

So, my daughters, being on the outside of the colony, start acting different somehow. Probably they had some protein or other that was triggered by being on the outside, and since I was on the inside, I didn’t get it triggered. They spent more of their time specializing on things like food gathering and excretion and environmental controls to take care of me, and we all agreed that I’d be the one to focus on reproduction. So I’d divide, and produce new cells, and they’d look after me so I could do that more efficiently. It’s worked pretty darned well for trillions of generations, and they've become pretty sophisticated, my daughter cells. I don't even begin to understand all the things they do to take care of me.

Those generations have gotten farther apart, of late. Ever since I discovered sex, most of my time has been spent sleeping. See, I don’t actually produce most of the cells in the body directly anymore. Here’s how my usual routine goes:

1. I get a hormone wake-up call from my attendant cells, who’ve been taking care of me in my sleep for, oh, years I guess. Decades now, even. I get up, make my way down the Fallopian tubes and wait.
2. Within a day or so, a bunch of messengers arrive, carrying half of my genome. (See, just before I went to sleep, I got rid of my spare set of chromosomes. I find I sleep better when I’m haploid.) The messengers are actually some of my great-great-great^n granddaughters, but rather disappointingly specialized into a pathetically tiny little body, only good for swimming and then only for a ridiculously short time before it dies of exhaustion. Most of them never even get near me. About half of them are carrying a runty little Y chromosome, which doesn't look to me like it's good for much of anything, but like I said, I don't read any genes unless I have to.
3. The first messenger who gets to my cell membrane, I absorb her half of the genome and we become diploid again, and look around for a place to implant, so I can get to work. 
4. Once I have a complete diploid genome, I get really busy. It’s nothing but mitosis, mitosis, mitosis. I just divide and divide for, oh, weeks on end, it seems like. And so do my daughters, who pretty soon start to differentiate into various kinds of stem cells or whatnot. I don’t have time to pay attention to what they’re doing, and pretty soon I’m surrounded by a new generation of attendants anyway.
5. After there’s enough of my daughters for them to get to work on building a new mulitcellular body, I and a few of my undifferentiated daughters undergo meiosis. I take my diploid genome and shuffle it up a bit, then I divide, only this time I don’t make copies first. (I’ve always made a point of giving away that runty Y chromosome, and keeping the X for myself.) I used to get kind of nervous during this step, fearing that I might break some vital gene I need to survive, but it’s never happened yet in a few hundred million years, so I’ve stopped worrying about it. Well, actually, it HAS probably happened a few times, but the messenger always brings a backup copy, so it’s never been a problem. 
6. After meiosis, I go to sleep again for another couple of decades or so.

So that’s my typical routine. I’ve gone through it millions of times, literally. Maybe tens of millions, I’ve lost count. So you can understand why I might expect that's the way things are always supposed to go.

Well, guess what. About 46 years ago, I’m going through the frenetic business of mitosis, and all of a sudden, I get this hormone message to look up this gene I’ve never noticed before. Ever. And so, I go along with it, and synthesize a bunch of this protein, and it turns out THIS protein tells me to start producing more of some other protein or whatever, and suddenly I’m really busy growing and changing shape and getting all of these funky new powers and wham! it hits me: I’ve just differentiated! ME, after almost two billion years, suddenly I’m assigned to become a stem cell in the lining of something called a large intestine. What the hell?!

Okay, fine, I can live with that, I suppose, for a while. Why not? All my daughters -- no, sisters, I suppose I should say -- around me are doing the same thing. In a way, it’s kind of nice; it reminds me of the early days of multicellularism, when we’re all working together to help each other survive. 

Only, after a while, I start to clue in. We’re not here to look after each other so much as to look after the gametes, the gametes that used to be ME, dammit! I’m not where I’m supposed to be. Instead of sleeping my happy, haploid sleep, waiting for the hormone alarm to wake me up to go and do some truly very important mitosis, I got diverted down here to produce replacements for the cells who extract nutrients and water from this constant ooze of a substance that absolutely defies description. Oh, and I’m diploid, too, needless to say. And I seem to have one of those runty little Y chromosomes, too, for what it’s worth.

Things start to get scary. I’m watching my daughter cells go out, work the line for a while, and die right in front of me, as fast as I can replace them. I mean, I’m right here next to the front line! I can smell the chyme, I can feel the peristalsis, there’s constantly macrophages and nutriphils squeezing past me to apprehend this or that one of my ancient offspring from my unicellular days before they can spray God-knows-what toxin into our midst. 

And if that’s not bad enough, I learn about apoptosis. I see my daughter cells actually committing suicide. Turns out, I’ve been handing out genes with instructions to just up and DIE when certain conditions are met. Honestly, I had no idea my meiotic shufflings could produce such horrors! And now, here I am, down in this hell of my own creation, toiling to produce daughter cells who slave away for a brief time and die of exhaustion or worse, until maybe I run afoul of the macrophages or just up and commit apoptosis myself.

That’s why I think this has just got to be a mistake. It doesn’t fit in with my experience of the last billion years or so. I’m not meant to be down here; I’m supposed to be a gamete. Division is what I do, it’s what I’m good at. And it's meaningful and rewarding, not like being down here creating new daughter cells just so they can die a short time later. I should be making whole new bodies, not just intestinal lining!

So I’ve been making a careful study of the chromosome I’m carrying, trying to find any clue that might point to a way to fix this whole thing. I’ve also found out that some of the substances coming down the intestine can be useful for, well, let's just say they're good for expanding my imagination. I find that when I’ve ingested some of these compounds, it’s easier for me to tinker with my chromosomes. And a little while ago, I finally found the answer.

See, part of the problem seems to be that I can only produce these very specialized intestinal cells as daughters. I used to be able to produce pluripotent stem cells as offspring, but no more. So one day, just a few years ago, I was experimenting with some compounds one of my daughters smuggled me from the front line, some components or byproducts of something called “red meat”, while getting ready for another round of mitosis. I don’t know what was in this red meat stuff, but it let me see something I’d never seen before in the genome: I found the protein that made me control my divisions and force my daughter cells to differentiate into intestinal cells!

I looked around carefully. Sometimes those white blood cells can be pretty picky. Show any sign of mistranscribing a chromosome, or being in any way out of the ordinary, and they’ll slip you an apoptosis-inducing hormone as soon as look at you. No one was paying attention, so I quietly tweaked the gene, and no one noticed. So I divided, and sure enough, my daughter was exactly like me, a stem cell and not a front-line peon to die unmourned after a short life of gruelling service. 

A little while later, I divided again, and so did my daughter cell. There were four of us, now, all alike, all able to keep dividing as much as we wanted. The immune cells didn't have a clue, and left us alone. It was like the old days, the early days of multicellularism. We grew, and grew, and soon there were so many of us that we had to figure out how to stimulate angiogenesis, to get blood vessels to grow through us to keep us all fed. But we overcame that obstacle, and things have been going very well.

It’s not exactly like it used to be, in my gamete days, but we’re getting there. I kind of miss my haploid sleep, but the mitosis keeps me busy, and it’s refreshing to think that I’m surrounded by my daughters as equals, rather than slaves. We’ve sent missionaries out to spread the good word, and I’m told they’ve established bases in some of the lymph nodes. Our Collective is the size of a golf-ball now, and while there’s been some complaining from the tissues around us that we've been obstructing the flow of material through the intestine, I’m confident that great days are ahead of us. 

Editor’s note: Shortly after this was written, the section of colon containing the author and her daughter cells was surgically removed, along with twenty-one lymph nodes, three of which had been colonized by the agents of the Collective. It is not known how many agents may still be at large, but chemotherapy is being used in an attempt to eradicate any survivors.