Eric Yu
2007-10-16 01:53:48 UTC
From Unqualified Reservations:
Richard Dawkins recently wrote a book called The God Delusion. You've
probably heard of it.
Professor Dawkins is a great scientist and one of my favorite writers. And
I have no quarrel at all with his argument. I was raised as a scientific
atheist, and I've never seen the slightest reason to think otherwise.
These days I prefer the word "nontheist" - for reasons which will shortly
be clear - but there's no substantive difference at all. Except in the
context of role-playing games, I have no interest whatsoever in gods,
goddesses, angels, devils, dryads, water elementals, or any such presumed
metaphysical being.
Nonetheless, it's my sad duty to inform the world that Professor Dawkins
has been pwned. Perhaps you're over 30 and you're unfamiliar with this
curious new word. As La Wik puts it:
The word "pwn" remains in use as Internet social-culture slang
meaning: to take unauthorized control of someone else or something
belonging to someone else by exploiting a vulnerability.
How could such a learned and wise mind exhibit an exploitable
vulnerability? And who - or what - has taken unauthorized control over
Professor Dawkins? The aliens? The CIA? The Jews? The mind boggles. As
well it should. Patience, dear reader. All will become clear.
Professor Dawkins' explanation of religion, with which I agree completely,
is that religion is a memeplex built around a central delusion, the God
meme - an entirely unsubstantiated proposition. Religion exists because
this memeplex is adaptive. This explanation is both necessary and
sufficient. It is also parsimonious, a la Occam's razor. It may not be
simple, but it's a heck of a lot simpler than "God."
(I dislike the word "meme" and the complex of terminology that's grown up
around it, mainly because (a) the word has a dorky sound, and (b) it means
the same thing as "idea." However, in deference to Professor Dawkins and
his numerous acolytes, I'll use it for this discussion.)
In Darwinian terms, Professor Dawkins' main point is that the adaptive
interests of religion - or of any other memeplex - are not the same as the
adaptive interests of its host. As a celibate priest, for example, you are
helping Christianity to be fruitful and multiply. It's performing no such
service for you.
Biologists have a word for this: parasitism. Probably because he wants to
be nice, Professor Dawkins tries not to use the p-word. But he's clearly
thinking it.
The God delusion is a parasitic meme because, being alien to reason, it
does not serve the interests of the host. Furthermore, some of the
memeplexes which include it - or "religions" - include far more pernicious
memes, such as suicide bombing, which are lethal both to the host and
anyone within its blast radius. The case would seem to be closed.
But immunology is tricky. After all, if Professor Dawkins is right, anyone
who believes in God is most certainly pwned - that is, infected by a
parasitic religious memeplex. This category includes some of the smartest
people in the world today. Intelligence is certainly no barrier to memetic
infection. Worse, there have clearly been periods of civilized history in
which everyone was infected by this parasite. The things are dangerous,
there is no doubt.
Therefore, without disputing Professor Dawkins' Darwinian conclusion, I
think it's prudent to step back a little, and attack the problem with a
slightly broader and more careful approach.
The God Delusion is what immunologists might call a specific immune
response. Professor Dawkins notes that religion is alien to the reasoning
mind. He notes that it reproduces and evolves. He sees that similar
phenomena have caused many problems in the past and continue to do so in
the present. He identifies a common feature of these problems, the God
meme, and churns out antibodies to it.
This process is not infallible. Suppose, for example, you note that a
patient is ill and can't eat. You take a biopsy of his guts and find that
they're full of - bacteria! Bacteria are clearly not human. They're a
well-known cause of disease. So the obvious problem is that the patient
has a bacterial infection, and you prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics.
Meanwhile, the poor fellow is dying of colon cancer, and you're trying to
eradicate his intestinal flora.
Biological immune systems make all kinds of mistakes. Presumably the same
is true of memetic immunology. After all, what was the Inquisition
thinking? They thought of heresy exactly the same way Professor Dawkins
thinks of religion: as a sort of mental virus, whose eradication, while
unavoidably painful, would bring peace and sanity.
In memetic immunology, it's often very difficult to distinguish parasite
from counterparasite. When we see two populations of memes in conflict, we
know both cannot be healthy, because a healthy meme is true by definition
and the truth cannot conflict with itself. However, we might very well be
watching two parasites competing with each other. They will certainly both
claim to represent truth, justice and the American way.
So I think it might be worthwhile to attack the question from another
angle, using the analogy of a generalized immune response. Rather than
asking ourselves whether specific traditions, such as Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, etc, are parasitic, we can focus on the problem of
parasitic memeplexes as a whole.
If Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc, turn up on this screen, perhaps
we'll want to point some T-cells at them. But a generalized approach will
also detect any other parasitic memeplexes we may be infected with. After
all, the God delusion isn't the only delusion in the world.
One way to approach generalized memetic immunology is to design a generic
parasitic memeplex. Avoiding specific details which may confuse us, and
focusing on the combination of adaptive success and parasitic morbidity,
we can construct design rules for an optimal memetic parasite. We can
evaluate potential threats by looking at how well they fit this template,
which should be as nasty as possible.
When dealing with actual biological agents, of course, we can work in
biosafety labs. The most dangerous viruses, such as smallpox, Ebola, and
the 1918 flu, cannot be safely handled without elaborate, multiply
redundant containment systems. Some would argue that they cannot be safely
handled at all.
With memes and memeplexes, there's none of this. By designing the
memeplex, we effectively release it into the wild. Fortunately, UR has a
small and discreet audience, which strikes me as very wise and
conscientious. I'm sure none of you will be tempted to abuse this
dangerous memetic technology, which in the hands of less scrupulous
thinkers could easily become a formula for total world domination.
Remember, this is only a test.
So our generic parasitic memeplex will be as virulent as possible. It will
be highly contagious, highly morbid, and highly persistent. A really ugly
bug. Let's focus on these design aspects separately: contagion, morbidity,
and persistence.
A contagious memeplex is one that spreads easily. The template may not
have to infect everyone in the world - although that's certainly one
option. However, for any really significant morbidity, we'll want massive,
lemminglike misdirected collective action. This requires mass infection.
There are three general ways to transmit a memetic parasite: parental
transmission, educational transmission, and social transmission. Needless
to say, our template should be a champ at all of them.
If your parasite can't be transmitted parentally, it's really not much of
a parasite. Children learn the basic principles of reality and morality
before they are six, and - as the Jesuit proverb goes - anything that can
slip in at this age is likely to stick. "Give me the child and I will give
you the man." Fortunately, any simple idea, even if it is nonsense, can be
transmitted at this age. Unless the template is fundamentally dependent on
some meme which children are unlikely to grasp, such as partial
differential equations, parental transmission is no problem.
But educational transmission - infection of children and young adults by
institutions whose ostensible purpose is to instill universal knowledge
and ethics - is the mainstay of any successful memetic parasite. Since
these same institutions educate future educators, replication can continue
indefinitely.
Over multiple generations, educational transmission outcompetes parental
transmission. Changes of religion by executive fiat, for example, are
common in European history. In the more recent past, the Allied victors
eradicated militarist traditions in Germany and Japan through their
control of the educational system. Furthermore, by treating the press as
an educational institution, we can create a system of continuing, lifelong
reinfection in which parasitic memes are omnipresent. (Of course, it's
important to remember that exactly the same techniques can also cure a
memetic infection.)
But neither parental nor educational transmission can bootstrap itself
from a small initial infection. While most parasitic memes probably
originate as mutations of preexisting memes, they can certainly be
invented from scratch (unlike genes). And even a mutation has to spread
somehow.
Therefore, no memetic parasite is complete without a system for social
transmission: informal transmission among adults, following existing sThe
second step in designing for social transmission is to look at the status
structure of social networks, and construct memes that will flow naturally
along the usual network direction: from high status to low status.
That is, our parasite should be intellectually fashionable. All the cool
people in town should want to get infected. And infection will make them
even cooler. They will be the hosts with the most. For example, one common
trope in various religious traditions is asceticism: the voluntary
renunciation of material comforts. Since this tends to be much easier for
those who start out wealthy and comfortable, it's an effective status
marker. Any memes that can associate themselves with asceticism gain a
clear adaptive advantage.
Our parasite is now optimized for contagion. But is it bad? Is it truly
evil and destructive? The most contagious parasitic meme in the world, if
all it brings to its hosts and those around them is happiness and
prosperity, isn't worth worrying about.
So we need to move
Finally, our parasite will employ a strategy of politicization, insisting
that everyone in a society be involved in the contest for political power.
Since our memetic parasite is already bound to one or more political
factions, politicization leaves no one with the option to ignore it, and
simply live their lives. Neutrality is not acceptable. All those who are
not actively infected, and who do not openly endorse the parasite, are by
definition its enemies. And they will be crushed. The safest thing is to
play along, and raise your children in the faith - even if you don't
really believe, they will.
High contagion and adaptive morbidity will allow our parasite to spread
widely and rise to power, where it can continuously propagate itself
through educational institutions. But there is still another problem:
persistence. If our parasite does not resist competitors, or succumbs
easily to healthy counterparasites, it won't last long and it won't be
much of a threat. It should be as hard as possible for hosts toTherefore,
diversionary hysteria is another essential tactic in our parasite's bag of
tricks. Hosts who would otherwise be tempted to notice the morbidities of
infection, and attribute them to the parasite itself, must be diverted.
Either their defensive energies will be directed either toward other
symptoms which are in fact not serious, or they will attribute the real
problems to other causes which are not in fact significant.
We can kill two birds with one stone by directing our hysteria toward
those who reject the parasite, and identifying their efforts to cure it as
the cause of the morbidity. This strategy of counterimmunity, in which the
infected treat disinfection as if it were contagious - which, of course,
it is - has been a staple of memetic parasites throughout the ages.
The goal of a counterimmune strategy - such as the Inquisition - is to
eradicate heresy. But this is actually only the simplest approach to
counterimmunity. We can get much fancier.
Suppose, for example, our parasite does not I think at this point we have
a pretty good design for a successful memetic parasite. Don't you agree?
If not, how do you think the parasite could be improved? (Of course, this
sort of "intelligent design" by no means implies that any such beastie was
designed by some purposive plan. We are just trying to reverse-engineer
the effects of Darwinian selection.)
Now let's compare Professor Dawkins' target, the God delusion, to this
ideal parasite.
Forgetting other religions for a moment, Christianity clearly fits the
profile. Every one of the strategies observed above has been employed by
some Christian sect, some set of believers in the "God delusion," at some
point in time.
However, if I may project a little, Professor Dawkins' readers are not
concerned about the Anabaptists, the Arians, the Monophysites, the
Nestorians, or any such obsolete sect. They are concerned with
vintage-2007 American Christian "fundamentalism." If your goal is to solve
a problem, the problem must exist in the present tense.
FundamNor is social transmission of any help, because salvationism is
incredibly unfashionable. Quick - how many salvationist celebrities can
you name? At the average chic dinner party in Manhattan, how many of the
guests are likely to be salvationists? How many salvationists are employed
by Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Random House, Viking or Knopf? And so on.
So, one might argue, the salvationist meme is a threat, it is just a small
threat. It needs to be kept in its place, that's all. Sure, the influence
of the God delusion has been steadily decreasing for the last four hundred
years. But if we take our eye off it, it might come back! I'm certainly
not prepared to dismiss this as absolutely inconceivable.
However, there's another candidate we have to consider.
In the first chapter of The God Delusion, Professor Dawkins describes
himself as "a deeply religious non-believer." He calls his belief system
"Einsteinian religion," and waxes poetical as follows:
Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein
himself: "To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a
something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity
reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is
religiousness. In this sense I am religious."
It's easy to see that this statement is not exactly the theory of general
relativity. In fact, it appears to have no factual content at all. Hm.
What, exactly, is this "Einsteinian religion?" Did Professor Dawkins
invent it? Did Einstein? What else do Einsteinians believe in, besides
"beauty and sublimity"? Are there other Einsteinians, or need only
distinguished scientists apply? If an Einsteinian were to stoop to
anything so mundane as voting, who would he or she vote for?
And how does "Einsteinian religion" stack up against our parasite test?
We'll consider these fascinating issues in part 2 of this essay, which
will appear next Thursday.
[Please note that I'm on the road and will be more than usually tardy in
responding to feedback. However, I will get to it all, hopefully this
weekend. I'm especially curious to hear if anyone has any ideas for
improving the parasite design.]
--
***@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
Richard Dawkins recently wrote a book called The God Delusion. You've
probably heard of it.
Professor Dawkins is a great scientist and one of my favorite writers. And
I have no quarrel at all with his argument. I was raised as a scientific
atheist, and I've never seen the slightest reason to think otherwise.
These days I prefer the word "nontheist" - for reasons which will shortly
be clear - but there's no substantive difference at all. Except in the
context of role-playing games, I have no interest whatsoever in gods,
goddesses, angels, devils, dryads, water elementals, or any such presumed
metaphysical being.
Nonetheless, it's my sad duty to inform the world that Professor Dawkins
has been pwned. Perhaps you're over 30 and you're unfamiliar with this
curious new word. As La Wik puts it:
The word "pwn" remains in use as Internet social-culture slang
meaning: to take unauthorized control of someone else or something
belonging to someone else by exploiting a vulnerability.
How could such a learned and wise mind exhibit an exploitable
vulnerability? And who - or what - has taken unauthorized control over
Professor Dawkins? The aliens? The CIA? The Jews? The mind boggles. As
well it should. Patience, dear reader. All will become clear.
Professor Dawkins' explanation of religion, with which I agree completely,
is that religion is a memeplex built around a central delusion, the God
meme - an entirely unsubstantiated proposition. Religion exists because
this memeplex is adaptive. This explanation is both necessary and
sufficient. It is also parsimonious, a la Occam's razor. It may not be
simple, but it's a heck of a lot simpler than "God."
(I dislike the word "meme" and the complex of terminology that's grown up
around it, mainly because (a) the word has a dorky sound, and (b) it means
the same thing as "idea." However, in deference to Professor Dawkins and
his numerous acolytes, I'll use it for this discussion.)
In Darwinian terms, Professor Dawkins' main point is that the adaptive
interests of religion - or of any other memeplex - are not the same as the
adaptive interests of its host. As a celibate priest, for example, you are
helping Christianity to be fruitful and multiply. It's performing no such
service for you.
Biologists have a word for this: parasitism. Probably because he wants to
be nice, Professor Dawkins tries not to use the p-word. But he's clearly
thinking it.
The God delusion is a parasitic meme because, being alien to reason, it
does not serve the interests of the host. Furthermore, some of the
memeplexes which include it - or "religions" - include far more pernicious
memes, such as suicide bombing, which are lethal both to the host and
anyone within its blast radius. The case would seem to be closed.
But immunology is tricky. After all, if Professor Dawkins is right, anyone
who believes in God is most certainly pwned - that is, infected by a
parasitic religious memeplex. This category includes some of the smartest
people in the world today. Intelligence is certainly no barrier to memetic
infection. Worse, there have clearly been periods of civilized history in
which everyone was infected by this parasite. The things are dangerous,
there is no doubt.
Therefore, without disputing Professor Dawkins' Darwinian conclusion, I
think it's prudent to step back a little, and attack the problem with a
slightly broader and more careful approach.
The God Delusion is what immunologists might call a specific immune
response. Professor Dawkins notes that religion is alien to the reasoning
mind. He notes that it reproduces and evolves. He sees that similar
phenomena have caused many problems in the past and continue to do so in
the present. He identifies a common feature of these problems, the God
meme, and churns out antibodies to it.
This process is not infallible. Suppose, for example, you note that a
patient is ill and can't eat. You take a biopsy of his guts and find that
they're full of - bacteria! Bacteria are clearly not human. They're a
well-known cause of disease. So the obvious problem is that the patient
has a bacterial infection, and you prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics.
Meanwhile, the poor fellow is dying of colon cancer, and you're trying to
eradicate his intestinal flora.
Biological immune systems make all kinds of mistakes. Presumably the same
is true of memetic immunology. After all, what was the Inquisition
thinking? They thought of heresy exactly the same way Professor Dawkins
thinks of religion: as a sort of mental virus, whose eradication, while
unavoidably painful, would bring peace and sanity.
In memetic immunology, it's often very difficult to distinguish parasite
from counterparasite. When we see two populations of memes in conflict, we
know both cannot be healthy, because a healthy meme is true by definition
and the truth cannot conflict with itself. However, we might very well be
watching two parasites competing with each other. They will certainly both
claim to represent truth, justice and the American way.
So I think it might be worthwhile to attack the question from another
angle, using the analogy of a generalized immune response. Rather than
asking ourselves whether specific traditions, such as Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, etc, are parasitic, we can focus on the problem of
parasitic memeplexes as a whole.
If Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc, turn up on this screen, perhaps
we'll want to point some T-cells at them. But a generalized approach will
also detect any other parasitic memeplexes we may be infected with. After
all, the God delusion isn't the only delusion in the world.
One way to approach generalized memetic immunology is to design a generic
parasitic memeplex. Avoiding specific details which may confuse us, and
focusing on the combination of adaptive success and parasitic morbidity,
we can construct design rules for an optimal memetic parasite. We can
evaluate potential threats by looking at how well they fit this template,
which should be as nasty as possible.
When dealing with actual biological agents, of course, we can work in
biosafety labs. The most dangerous viruses, such as smallpox, Ebola, and
the 1918 flu, cannot be safely handled without elaborate, multiply
redundant containment systems. Some would argue that they cannot be safely
handled at all.
With memes and memeplexes, there's none of this. By designing the
memeplex, we effectively release it into the wild. Fortunately, UR has a
small and discreet audience, which strikes me as very wise and
conscientious. I'm sure none of you will be tempted to abuse this
dangerous memetic technology, which in the hands of less scrupulous
thinkers could easily become a formula for total world domination.
Remember, this is only a test.
So our generic parasitic memeplex will be as virulent as possible. It will
be highly contagious, highly morbid, and highly persistent. A really ugly
bug. Let's focus on these design aspects separately: contagion, morbidity,
and persistence.
A contagious memeplex is one that spreads easily. The template may not
have to infect everyone in the world - although that's certainly one
option. However, for any really significant morbidity, we'll want massive,
lemminglike misdirected collective action. This requires mass infection.
There are three general ways to transmit a memetic parasite: parental
transmission, educational transmission, and social transmission. Needless
to say, our template should be a champ at all of them.
If your parasite can't be transmitted parentally, it's really not much of
a parasite. Children learn the basic principles of reality and morality
before they are six, and - as the Jesuit proverb goes - anything that can
slip in at this age is likely to stick. "Give me the child and I will give
you the man." Fortunately, any simple idea, even if it is nonsense, can be
transmitted at this age. Unless the template is fundamentally dependent on
some meme which children are unlikely to grasp, such as partial
differential equations, parental transmission is no problem.
But educational transmission - infection of children and young adults by
institutions whose ostensible purpose is to instill universal knowledge
and ethics - is the mainstay of any successful memetic parasite. Since
these same institutions educate future educators, replication can continue
indefinitely.
Over multiple generations, educational transmission outcompetes parental
transmission. Changes of religion by executive fiat, for example, are
common in European history. In the more recent past, the Allied victors
eradicated militarist traditions in Germany and Japan through their
control of the educational system. Furthermore, by treating the press as
an educational institution, we can create a system of continuing, lifelong
reinfection in which parasitic memes are omnipresent. (Of course, it's
important to remember that exactly the same techniques can also cure a
memetic infection.)
But neither parental nor educational transmission can bootstrap itself
from a small initial infection. While most parasitic memes probably
originate as mutations of preexisting memes, they can certainly be
invented from scratch (unlike genes). And even a mutation has to spread
somehow.
Therefore, no memetic parasite is complete without a system for social
transmission: informal transmission among adults, following existing sThe
second step in designing for social transmission is to look at the status
structure of social networks, and construct memes that will flow naturally
along the usual network direction: from high status to low status.
That is, our parasite should be intellectually fashionable. All the cool
people in town should want to get infected. And infection will make them
even cooler. They will be the hosts with the most. For example, one common
trope in various religious traditions is asceticism: the voluntary
renunciation of material comforts. Since this tends to be much easier for
those who start out wealthy and comfortable, it's an effective status
marker. Any memes that can associate themselves with asceticism gain a
clear adaptive advantage.
Our parasite is now optimized for contagion. But is it bad? Is it truly
evil and destructive? The most contagious parasitic meme in the world, if
all it brings to its hosts and those around them is happiness and
prosperity, isn't worth worrying about.
So we need to move
Finally, our parasite will employ a strategy of politicization, insisting
that everyone in a society be involved in the contest for political power.
Since our memetic parasite is already bound to one or more political
factions, politicization leaves no one with the option to ignore it, and
simply live their lives. Neutrality is not acceptable. All those who are
not actively infected, and who do not openly endorse the parasite, are by
definition its enemies. And they will be crushed. The safest thing is to
play along, and raise your children in the faith - even if you don't
really believe, they will.
High contagion and adaptive morbidity will allow our parasite to spread
widely and rise to power, where it can continuously propagate itself
through educational institutions. But there is still another problem:
persistence. If our parasite does not resist competitors, or succumbs
easily to healthy counterparasites, it won't last long and it won't be
much of a threat. It should be as hard as possible for hosts toTherefore,
diversionary hysteria is another essential tactic in our parasite's bag of
tricks. Hosts who would otherwise be tempted to notice the morbidities of
infection, and attribute them to the parasite itself, must be diverted.
Either their defensive energies will be directed either toward other
symptoms which are in fact not serious, or they will attribute the real
problems to other causes which are not in fact significant.
We can kill two birds with one stone by directing our hysteria toward
those who reject the parasite, and identifying their efforts to cure it as
the cause of the morbidity. This strategy of counterimmunity, in which the
infected treat disinfection as if it were contagious - which, of course,
it is - has been a staple of memetic parasites throughout the ages.
The goal of a counterimmune strategy - such as the Inquisition - is to
eradicate heresy. But this is actually only the simplest approach to
counterimmunity. We can get much fancier.
Suppose, for example, our parasite does not I think at this point we have
a pretty good design for a successful memetic parasite. Don't you agree?
If not, how do you think the parasite could be improved? (Of course, this
sort of "intelligent design" by no means implies that any such beastie was
designed by some purposive plan. We are just trying to reverse-engineer
the effects of Darwinian selection.)
Now let's compare Professor Dawkins' target, the God delusion, to this
ideal parasite.
Forgetting other religions for a moment, Christianity clearly fits the
profile. Every one of the strategies observed above has been employed by
some Christian sect, some set of believers in the "God delusion," at some
point in time.
However, if I may project a little, Professor Dawkins' readers are not
concerned about the Anabaptists, the Arians, the Monophysites, the
Nestorians, or any such obsolete sect. They are concerned with
vintage-2007 American Christian "fundamentalism." If your goal is to solve
a problem, the problem must exist in the present tense.
FundamNor is social transmission of any help, because salvationism is
incredibly unfashionable. Quick - how many salvationist celebrities can
you name? At the average chic dinner party in Manhattan, how many of the
guests are likely to be salvationists? How many salvationists are employed
by Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Random House, Viking or Knopf? And so on.
So, one might argue, the salvationist meme is a threat, it is just a small
threat. It needs to be kept in its place, that's all. Sure, the influence
of the God delusion has been steadily decreasing for the last four hundred
years. But if we take our eye off it, it might come back! I'm certainly
not prepared to dismiss this as absolutely inconceivable.
However, there's another candidate we have to consider.
In the first chapter of The God Delusion, Professor Dawkins describes
himself as "a deeply religious non-believer." He calls his belief system
"Einsteinian religion," and waxes poetical as follows:
Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein
himself: "To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a
something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity
reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is
religiousness. In this sense I am religious."
It's easy to see that this statement is not exactly the theory of general
relativity. In fact, it appears to have no factual content at all. Hm.
What, exactly, is this "Einsteinian religion?" Did Professor Dawkins
invent it? Did Einstein? What else do Einsteinians believe in, besides
"beauty and sublimity"? Are there other Einsteinians, or need only
distinguished scientists apply? If an Einsteinian were to stoop to
anything so mundane as voting, who would he or she vote for?
And how does "Einsteinian religion" stack up against our parasite test?
We'll consider these fascinating issues in part 2 of this essay, which
will appear next Thursday.
[Please note that I'm on the road and will be more than usually tardy in
responding to feedback. However, I will get to it all, hopefully this
weekend. I'm especially curious to hear if anyone has any ideas for
improving the parasite design.]
--
***@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org