Isegoria

Built to survive the apocalypse, the Georgia Guidestones are not merely instructions for the future — the massive granite slabs also function as a clock, calendar, and compass:

1. The monument sits at the highest point in Elbert County and is oriented to track the sun’s east-west migration year-round.
2. On an equinox or solstice, visitors who stand at the west side of the “mail slot” are positioned to see the sun rise on the horizon.
3. An eye-level hole drilled into the center support stone allows stargazers on the south side to locate Polaris, the North Star.
4. A 7/8-inch hole drilled through the capstone focuses a sunbeam on the center column and at noon pinpoints the day of the year.

There’s more:

The main feature of the monument, though, would be the 10 dictates carved into both faces of the outer stones, in eight languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili. A mission statement of sorts (LET THESE BE GUIDESTONES TO AN AGE OF REASON) was also to be engraved on the sides of the capstone in Egyptian hieroglyphics, classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Babylonian cuneiform. The United Nations provided some of the translations (including those for the dead languages), which were stenciled onto the stones and etched with a sandblaster.
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But many who read what was written on the stones were unsettled. Guide number one was, of course, the real stopper: MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000 IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE. There were already 4.5 billion people on the planet, meaning eight out of nine had to go (today it would be closer to 12 out of 13). This instruction was echoed and expanded by tenet number two: GUIDE REPRODUCTION WISELY—IMPROVING FITNESS AND DIVERSITY. It didn’t take a great deal of imagination to draw an analogy to the practices of, among others, the Nazis. Guide number three instructed readers to unite humanity with a living new language. This sent a shiver up the spine of local ministers who knew that the Book of Revelations warned of a common tongue and a one-world government as the accomplishments of the Antichrist. Guide number four—RULE PASSION—FAITH—TRADITION—AND ALL THINGS WITH TEMPERED REASON—was similarly threatening to Christians committed to the primacy of faith over all. The last six guides were homiletic by comparison. PROTECT PEOPLE AND NATIONS WITH FAIR LAWS AND JUST COURTS. LET ALL NATIONS RULE INTERNALLY RESOLVING EXTERNAL DISPUTES IN A WORLD COURT. AVOID PETTY LAWS AND USELESS OFFICIALS. BALANCE PERSONAL RIGHTS WITH SOCIAL DUTIES. PRIZE TRUTH—BEAUTY—LOVE—SEEKING HARMONY WITH THE INFINITE. BE NOT A CANCER ON THE EARTH—LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE—LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE.

The whole project was paid for by one “R.C. Christian” and “a small group of loyal Americans”:

Jay Weidner, a former Seattle radio commentator turned erudite conspiracy hunter, has heavily invested time and energy into one of the most popular hypotheses. He argues that Christian and his associates were Rosicrucians, followers of the Order of the Rosy Cross, a secret society of mystics that originated in late medieval Germany and claim understanding of esoteric truths about nature, the universe, and the spiritual realm that have been concealed from ordinary people. Weidner considers the name R. C. Christian an homage to the legendary 14th-century founder of the Rosicrucians, a man first identified as Frater C.R.C. and later as Christian Rosenkreuz. Secrecy, Weidner notes, has been a hallmark of the Rosicrucians, a group that announced itself to the world in the early 17th century with a pair of anonymous manifestos that created a huge stir across Europe, despite the fact that no one was ever able to identify a single member. While the guides on the Georgia stones fly in the face of orthodox Christian eschatology, they conform quite well to the tenets of Rosicrucianism, which stress reason and endorse a harmonic relationship with nature.

Weidner also has a theory about the purpose of the Guidestones. An authority on the hermetic and alchemical traditions that spawned the Rosicrucians, he believes that for generations the group has been passing down knowledge of a solar cycle that climaxes every 13,000 years. During this culmination, outsize coronal mass ejections are supposed to devastate Earth. Meanwhile, the shadowy organization behind the Guidestones is now orchestrating a “planetary chaos,” Weidner believes, that began with the recent collapse of the US financial system and will result eventually in major disruptions of oil and food supplies, mass riots, and ethnic wars worldwide, all leading up to the Big Event on December 21, 2012. “They want to get the population down,” Weidner says, “and this is what they think will do it. The Guidestones are there to instruct the survivors.”

Once upon a time, Brandon Keim notes, researchers knew that DNA contained four nucleotides. Then they found a fifth. And now they’ve found a sixth:

Called 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, it’s a form of the fifth nucleotide, technically known as 5-methylcytosine. Like its forerunner, it helps turn genes on and off, but in ways that researchers didn’t expect.
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Epigenetics, or the study of gene activation, has blossomed since the Human Genome Project’s completion in 2004. Controlled by a secondary layer of biochemical information — “epi” means “outside” — genes are turned on and off at different times and places in the body. That helps explain why, despite considerable genetic overlap, species take such different forms. (Humans and chimpanzees famously share 96 percent of their DNA.)

One powerful epigenetic mechanism is methylation, in which 5-methylcytosine replaces cytosine — the letter C — in a gene, telling the cellular machinery that turns genetic code into proteins to leave it unread. Heintz made his findings almost accidentally while developing new methods for studying methylation in mouse neurons.

According to Heintz, methylation performed by 5-hydroxymethylcytosine doesn’t behave in the same way as that produced by old-fashioned 5-methylcytosine. And just to make the situation trickier, standard methods of methylation detection can’t distinguish between the two forms.

“People are perfectly willing to admit that some people are taller or some people are shorter,” Gregory Cochran said. “But no one wants to say This group is smarter“:

The biological basis for intelligence can be a thankless arena of inquiry. The authors of “The Bell Curve” were vilified 15 years ago for suggesting genes played a role in IQ differences among racial groups.

But Cochran, 55, and Harpending, 65, say there’s no question that as a whole, Ashkenazi Jews — those of European descent — have an abundance of brain power. (Neither man is Jewish.)

Psychologists and educational researchers have pegged their average IQ at 107.5 to 115. That’s only modestly higher than the overall European average of 100, but the gap is large enough to produce a huge difference in the proportion of geniuses. When a group’s average IQ is 100, the percentage of people above 140 is 0.4%; when the average is 110, the genius rate is 2.3%.

Though Jews make up less than 3% of the U.S. population, they have won more than 25% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to American scientists since 1950, account for 20% of this country’s chief executives and make up 22% of Ivy League students, the pair write.

Cochran’s an interesting fellow, a Ph.D. physicist who started in aerospace before becoming interested in biology:

He worked for a while with evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald on theories that germs cause common disorders like heart disease and Alzheimer’s. The pair courted controversy by postulating that some unidentified pathogen prompts a hormonal imbalance that makes babies more likely to become gay.

Cochran read more than 15 genetics textbooks and became intrigued by the deadly diseases that disproportionately afflict Ashkenazi Jews: Tay-Sachs, a neurological disorder that debilitates children before killing them, usually by age 4. Canavan disease, which turns the brain into spongy tissue and typically claims its victims before they can start kindergarten. Niemann-Pick disease Type A, in which babies accumulate dangerous amounts of fats in various organs and suffer profound brain damage and death before their second birthday.

He was struck by the fact that so many of the diseases involved problems with processing sphingolipids, the fat molecules that transmit nerve signals.

This seemed an unlikely coincidence. Genetically isolated groups often have higher rates of certain diseases. But of the more than 20,000 human genes, only 108 are known to be involved in sphingolipid metabolism. The odds of Ashkenazi Jews having four sphingolipid storage disorders by random chance are less than 1 in 100,000, he calculated.

He talked it over with Harpending, an expert in human population genetics. They came to believe this was an example of heterozygote advantage — where having two copies of a mutated gene can mean disaster but one copy is helpful.

Slime molds show a surprising degree of intelligence:

In their experiment, biophysicist Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University and colleagues manipulated the environment of Physarum slime-mold amoebas (near right). As the cells crawled across an agar plate, the researchers subjected them to cold, dry conditions for the first 10 minutes of every hour. During these cool spells, the cells slowed down their motion. After three cold snaps the scientists stopped changing the temperature and humidity and watched to see whether the amoebas had learned the pattern. Sure enough, many of the cells throttled back right on the hour in anticipation of another bout of cold weather. When conditions stayed stable for a while, the slime-mold amoebas gave up on their hourly braking, but when another single jolt of cold was applied, they resumed the behavior and correctly recalled the 60-minute interval. The amoebas were also able to respond to other intervals, ranging from 30 to 90 minutes.