Scientists have been testing an very clever idea for ridding the world of Malaria.

The theory is that by inserting into a mosquito genes that are inimical top theMalaria parasite, resistance to the disease could be bred through the population, in time eliminating the disease from the planet. Only one problem, abject failure.

According to this report in Nature the new genes turn the flitting mozzie into a droopy stumblebum who misses out on the vast majority of breeding opportunities. They discovered that within 4 generations, or about a summer, the new genes in the test sample had been entirely driven out of the population by the fitter, faster, standard mozzie.

Could this have anything to do with challenging the mosquito? Maybe harbouring the parasite confers some kind of advantage. It reminds me of the rare Egyptian vulture which eats dung. There is no nutritional value in the dung, but it does turn the animal's face yellow. The more dung it eats, the more its system is challenged. If it gets sick it can't breed, if it doesn't get sick, its face turns yellow, brighter and brighter with every dung meal.

The upshot is that vultures looking for tough mates look for bright yellow faces. The vultures could be bred to not eat dung, but no-one would breed with them. Maybe the mosquito equivalent happens with malaria in the system, without it, the mozzie is just a whimp.

The vital point is that the absence of malaria does nothing for the mosquitos. If we want to muck about with genes, we have to start thinking about how those changes confer benefits and penalties, not on us, the intended recipients, but on the organisms we are using as carriers. Consider the transfer of Roundup resistance to weed plants from corn and other "desirable;e" plants. Why would that work and not malaria? Because the absence of malaria applies a penalty to the mosquito in terms that we have no way of comprehending, while the roundup or Bt gene transfer to weed plants because it confers significant benefits.

Incidentally, there is an interesting, although tangential discussion of this in Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's Genes, Peoples and Languages. he points to the fact that the heterozygotes for thalassemia confer protection from malaria. In populations where both diseases are endemic but fluctuate, the human population carries a mix of the genes necessary to sustain it in the long term, regardless of the effect on individuals.

Matt Mower has come up with the term for the bursting of the damn, the Purple Cow. What he's looking for is not just something that is good enough, to be the tipping point in any field, it has to be remarkable.

The question is, how does something become a Purple Cow? The radically new and totally innovative is not the answer, the first mover advantage is rarely true.

I suspect that what happens is a lot of experimentation around an idea which helps to condition the thinking and set up a demand. Right now there's a growing set of people who are using an expanding set of overlapping tools. I use LiveJournal for my blog because of the desktop interface, I use Blogroll, especially ITS browser based desktop centric Bookmarklet to harvest and organise other Blogs, I use Awasu Newsreader because it is clean and adds feeds really easily but none of them is the whole deal.

What I want is a tool that lets me add a blog to the roll, automatically add it to my feeds then post to my own blog quotes and links from the sources I read, save the good stuff to a personal feed and share the feed with a group, gain the benefits of their shared feeds and use the whole thing as a shared reputation system for the content. Plus some other stuff.

All of that stuff lurks in different chunks of software but hasn't yet collapsed into an integrated application. When it does, the first or second one off the blocks will be the winner because the demand will have been built, the tools will be familiar and the applications for the idea hanging out for it.

I just came across Newsmonster which I'm about to try because it has several of these functions built in. Some of this stuff is getting very close to the Purple Cow

Hal Macomber has some interesting stuff on his blog. This piece about the place of stories in organising and managing projects and feeding into his P-Log tool development is interesting. I love stories and I think we need to be better at telling them, but we also need to have a better idea of what they do and how they do it.

The Power of Stories is more than simply to organise facts and fill in the gaps, or even to imagine the outcome so we know where we think we want to go.

Stories are an emergent structure/ process, they arose because that is, in some way, how we store and retrieve information with our brains. What's more stories enable us to embed ourselves, because of their familiarity, in the narrative, we can use them to "see" where WE are in the process, even when someone else is telling the story.

They recruit us into the process and enable us both to understand it, and take independent actions towards fulfilling the outcome, without constantly having to ask for orders and decisions from the rest of the group. This is a great tool but it has one limitation, when we find ourselves in unfamiliar surroundings to which the stories don't apply.

For more on this stuff read Julian Janes "The Origin
of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". When we are confronted with situations not encompassed by our internalised stories we have to improvise. Those who can do so effectively, survive, those who can't are swept away by history. Knowing when the story is no longer telling the truth is also an important skill, one that the Dotcoms never figured out. The End