Atomic Nerds

Now that we’ve covered what food consists of from the body’s point of view and what it does with it once you’ve swallowed it- gaining, storing, and mobilizing energy- we move on to how the body actually uses it.

The word “metabolism” technically means the process of biologically transforming one kind of molecule into another kind of molecule; catabolic metabolism refers to breaking something up, usually for the purpose of gaining energy, whereas anabolism refers to building something from more basic components. In the context of the human body, we usually refer to the concept “metabolism” to describe as a whole our body’s systems for storing and burning energy as though it were a single variable; a “slow metabolism” is one biased to storage, where a “fast metabolism” would be one more biased to burning energy. “Basal metabolism” is usually used to describe a general “set point” for an individual’s metabolism when not actively busy exercising or otherwise stressing the body’s need for energy. We tend to think of “burning energy” as something we exclusively do when exercising, but basal metabolism actually accounts for the primary bulk of our energy requirements; as mammals, simply regulating our body temperatures to stay at a constant, warm set point is where most of our consumed calories go. Activity* and repairs account for the remainder of the body’s calorie needs; the reason that the bulk of the burning of fat stores a person will go through in a day occurs during deep sleep is that this is when the body is busy repairing and rebuilding from whatever insults it suffered during the day- and, if the day included significant exercise, building it back a little better as a training adaptation.

Basal metabolism will vary a great deal across individuals just as a matter of genetics; some people are built with “thrifty” metabolisms that diligently store energy and don’t let it go readily, others are high-burning, store little, and experience the excess as “nervous energy” if they don’t put it to some use. While everyone seems to have a natural set point, other variables will still influence them powerfully in various directions; age, activity level, hormonal fluctuations whether natural or medically induced, illness or injury, or an experience with starvation**. Any significant push on any of the variables that change the body’s energy needs will reflect in basal metabolism; although we usually don’t think of temperature as a factor because most of us sensibly inhabit temperate climes that don’t significantly push us, extreme cold will create pressure on the metabolism that translates into a significant chunk of the massive calorie needs for arctic explorers and others forced to spend a great deal of time coping with it. Body composition also has a significant effect on basal metabolism; fat is energy-cheap to maintain and a few pounds more or less of it don’t alter the budget much, but muscle is very expensive and more or less muscle mass has a much more dramatic effect per pound on the metabolic rate needed to maintain it, let alone put it to serious work.

Perhaps an ideal “case in point” example of the degree to which one person’s basal metabolism can differ from another’s is swimmer Michael Phelps, who famously subsists on a 12,000 calorie a day diet. (In contrast to the 1500-3000 daily needs of an “average” nonathlete, depending on age, sex, and size.) Phelps probably has a fairly high basal metabolism by genetics, and being a young man gives him another bump up, but the entirety of the rest of those calories are going toward maintaining the gargantuan energy output allowing him to spend five hours a day on intense exercise, and then repair his body from the damage done and turn it into training adaptation. None of those calories, regardless of source, are sticking around as fat- all of them are used to maintain his muscle mass and put it through daily strenuous effort. The fats and carbohydrates are turned into massive stores of glycogen, and then burned during training, rather than being stored in adipose tissue. All of this is normal for an Olympic-level athlete during training-and the high basal metabolism itself, the muscle mass, and the upper limit of glycogen storage in skeletal muscle are all trained responses rather than what the metabolism of an average sedentary adult would do under the same conditions.

Having discussed the gestalt effect of energy demands and output we refer to as metabolism, let’s have a look at how that’s actually accomplished. For the purpose of generating energy, the human body relies on three major systems. For the first two, everything begins with glycolysis, the conversion of a molecule of glucose into pyruvic acid. What then happens to the pyruvic acid depends on whether oxygen is present or not.

Aerobic respiration is our body’s main glucose-burning, energy generation system. (High school flashback trigger: the Krebs cycle!) This is where we get the bulk of our energy, and it is by far the most efficient way to use glucose to produce ATP. When you’re doing anything that doesn’t rapidly require you to slow down or stop and catch your breath- within about two minutes or so- you’re relying mainly or totally on this primary pathway. During aerobic metabolism, one molecule of glucose yields 30-38 ATP. This is why oxygen is so popular with life on Earth. Most people are familiar with exercise as defined by “aerobic” or “anaerobic”, but there are actually two “anaerobic” pathways.

The lactic acid system is what happens to the pyruvic acid in the absence of enough oxygen for aerobic respiration. The pyruvate becomes lactic acid, which becomes lactate and free hydrogen. The lactate circulates to the liver to be reassembled into glucose, the buildup of free hydrogen ions then begins interfering with respiration. This interference is what puts the hard upper limit on lactic acid metabolism and creates the sensation of pain and fatigue. You can run for about a minute and a half this way. The net yield is two molecules of ATP per original molecule of glucose- vastly less efficient than aerobic metabolism, but not dependent on your ability to rapidly supply vast amounts of oxygen to your tissues.

The phosphogenic system is the shortest of the short term for energy generation. Adenosine triphosphate becomes adenosine diphosphate when one of its phosphates is ripped off (producing the energy), and is resynthesized back into adenosine triphosphate by ripping the phosphate off a molecule of creatine phosphate, which can last for as long as the supply of the latter lasts. This is the only energy system that is truly local to a muscle cell, as the supplies of ATP and CP live within the cell itself rather than being delivered by the bloodstream. This system is for short-term, maximum-effort energy bursts: the available supply of ATP and CP in combination lasts no longer than a maximum of about eight to ten seconds. When the ATP runs out, energy drops, the other systems replenish ATP, and the cycle can continue, though it will be always running at a deficit relative to that first big burst.

Any and all exercise can be roughly broken down by the degree to which it leans on these pathways; sprinters and weightlifters rely on a combination of the lactic acid and phosphogenic systems, while a distance runner (or any endurance athelete) is working as aerobically as he or she can. Aerobic exercise can be maintained for far longer, but anaerobic exercise burns the glucose much less efficiently and thus tends to go through a great deal of it in those smaller chunks of time. In either event, after the activity is at an end and the body’s owner peacefully asleep, training adaptations occur in response to how the body was challenged; in terms of activities that were limited by oxygen, building more and further extending capillaries enhances the body’s ability to deliver oxygen to tissues, as well as strengthening the heart and lungs. Activities that were limited by maximum muscle fiber recruitment, lactate threshold, size and capacity of muscle fibers, and neurological efficiency will produce improvements in these areas***.

If you’ve ever heard the term “VO2 Max”, it measures an individual’s capacity to utilize oxygen; it measures the maximum amount of oxygen in milliliters that the individual can use in one minute per kilogram of body weight. Effectively speaking it’s a measurement of an individual’s capacity for maintaining aerobic metabolism; running at a pace of 5 mph is easily sustainable aerobic activity for one person and more anaerobic for another who will be out of breath in a few minutes because the first person has a higher VO2 max than the other. A large number of variables- metabolic ability to rapidly and efficiently handle lactic acid buildup, cardiovascular strength, capillary network, volume of blood plasma and density of red blood cells, and more- go into what raises VO2 max, but the principle “if you want to improve it, train it”- in this case by repeatedly doing things that bring you to running out of oxygen for aerobic respiration- always apply. The explicit purpose of Tabata intervals, for example, is to spend as much time as possible using the anaerobic pathways, using only enough rest to get enough oxygen back to restore them as possibilities before returning to the work****.

Fatigue is what ultimately limits exertion. Most of us are familiar with fatigue due to exceeding our lactate threshold- which boils down to the working muscle cells, and the metabolic processes they use, becoming acidotic, which interferes with muscle contraction and the smooth operation of the ATP factory. This is not, however, the only process that produces a sensation or effect of fatigue; the nervous system will also experience a burnout effect when repeated, intense muscle contractions are demanded, as the supplies needed for motor neurons to deliver constant “CONTRACT HARD NOW” messages to the muscle fibers can exceed the body’s ability to quickly recycle them*****, especially when there are a lot of hydrogen ions already floating around from a lot of anaerobic glucose-burning. These are what will stop a sprinter or a power-lifter; what stops an athlete working at endurance activities that let him get the majority of his energy from aerobic metabolism will ultimately be his supplies of fuel and his body’s ability to use it efficiently.

To illustrate this, let’s go back to our marathon runner. We’re going to assume that this runner is extremely fit and also intelligent about what his limiting factors will really be in a race; he’s spent the previous five days or so going very light on his running and chowing down on tons of carbohydrates in order to top off his supplies of muscle glycogen, and more of the same the morning of his race to make sure his liver is nice and stuffed with yet more glycogen. He’s excited and moving about, and the hormonal response from his adrenals is blunting what otherwise might be a big insulin spike. As he begins running, he has plenty of glycogen for his body to readily convert to glucose, and he’s maintaining a pace that allows aerobic respiration to dominate. As this goes on, cortisol becomes the hormone dominating his metabolism; as far as his body is concerned, it must be experiencing a stressor that for some reason causes running miles and miles to be a good idea. Aside from continuing to burn up his existing stores of glycogen, his body starts burning his fat stores; since there are double the number of metabolic steps that need to be taken to turn fat into glucose than there are to glycogen into glucose, this is necessarily a much slower and less efficient process; fat is like coal compared to glycogen’s refined gasoline as a fuel, and what will limit the runner won’t be the extent of his fat stores but rather his body’s ability to rapidly convert the fat into something useful while still relying on the glycogen as what will allow him to take his next stride; the fat is more a supplement that will stretch the life of his glycogen than itself a primary supply of energy. All of it still boils down to glucose, but his body simply can’t turn fat (or protein, for that matter, which the cortisol is also stripping for glucose generation) into glucose fast enough to make it primary distance running fuel, though it’s good enough for walking.

If our runner hadn’t been so careful to make sure he had as much glycogen as possible stored in his muscles, at some point as the miles stacked up he might run out; in this case he would experience “hitting the wall” as still feeling relatively alert and energetic but his legs simply refusing to continue working. Since he has plenty of muscle glycogen to burn, his limiting factor then becomes liver glycogen, which is what his brain the energy pig is drinking from. If he runs out of liver glycogen, he will experience his wall as an overwhelming loss of motivation or sense of fatigue, loss of alertness, or even hallucination or other clear manifestations of cognitive dysfunction. His muscles have the fuel and the energy efficiency to keep going, but his central nervous system needs its fast, rich glucose supply to keep running them. Aside from breakfast, one thing he can do to stave this off is to make sure his supplies of fluid also represent a supply of very simple sugars- sports drinks rather than simply water******. He needs cool fluids in any case, since overheating or dehydrating will put so much stress on his cardiovascular system that fatigue and forced cessation of activity will arrive rapidly. In theory, as long as he can keep getting glucose to stave off the collapse of his stored energy and fluids to keep his body temperature regulated and his blood pressure up, he can keep going like this until his tissues actively start to break down from the overuse without the chance for a good long sleep and repair cycle- which is exactly what ultramarathoners do. (Our marathoner will be content with 26 miles, a nice pasta dinner, and a really long nap.) All of this, however, requires the runner to have trained well enough to have a very high VO2max to limit the amount of time he spends in anaerobic energy pathways, an efficient metabolism, and muscles and bones conditioned to the long work. A completely untrained individual probably won’t be able to walk 26 miles no matter how much glucose you throw at him, let alone run it.

A sprinter or a weightlifter, in contrast, spends his workouts in a very different metabolic environment. He certainly has enough glycogen to sustain his workout; it’s going to be his body’s ability to tolerate and clear hydrogen ion buildup, the size of his muscle fibers and his nervous system’s conditioning to recruit many muscle fibers per contraction and keep up contraction, and efficiently pump out glucose in a low-oxygen environment that’s going to dictate how much power his body can put over a short period before fatigue stops him in his tracks. High intensity and short time period (it has to be if the work is really high intensity) will also change the hormonal picture for him to favor more growth hormone and less cortisol- which is one reason among many that marathon runners tend to end up looking like this and sprinters like this even though both are training exclusively for running performance rather than any aesthetic purpose.

I promised in the last post that I would at least attempt to translate all of this information into a short guide to how various popular dieting protocols actually work, and that I shall. Fundamentally speaking, all diets intended to alter body composition either focus on calorie content or on controlling hormones.

Low-fat diets are the flagship diets of calorie restriction; when one macronutrient source is worth 9 calories per gram and the others 4, lowering the fat content of any given food item is usually an easy way to lower its calorie content. Low-fat diets *do not* work when overall caloric load is not carefully tracked- if you simply replace the satisfactions of fat with lots of sugar or starch, no matter how little dietary fat you’re eating you can still maintain or gain body fat. Not all calorie-restriction diets are necessarily low-fat- see also Weight Watchers- but you certainly won’t find any fans of NOT carefully watching fat content here.

Low-carb diets are diets of insulin control. There are several variants in this family- Atkins, South Beach, primal/paleo- with different philosophies and different amounts of “allowed” carbs and what kinds of carbs are allowed, but all of them rely on either dramatically lowering the amount of produced insulin (remember, storage hormone) or blunting and smoothing out insulin responses. South Beach, for example, puts its dieters through a period of sharp insulin restriction- a ban on carbohydrates for the first two weeks- and then moves to focusing more on staying low on the glycemic index. Protein and fat both induce a higher satiety response- a feeling of fullness and satisfaction- in normal individuals than carbohydrates do, so calorie restriction tends to happen as a natural consequence. Some of these diets go all the way into advocating staying in a state of ketogenesis- shifting the bulk of the body’s energy needs to burning fat and requiring the brain to run on ketone bodies rather than glucose. (Yes, this can be done. It’s how we survived starvation Back In The Day.) Some people tolerate ketogenic diets much better than others; there seems to be a lot of natural variation in how well or poorly people do with extreme carbohydrate restriction. Perhaps needless to say, 100% of endurance athletes do poorly on ketogenic diets, though some bodybuilders combine ketogenesis with runner-style muscle glycogen loading in a cyclical fashion.

Any diet that produces the desired result for its user- less body fat while keeping a reasonable proportion of muscle mass, sustainability, and energy levels adequate to support activity level- will result in fewer consumed calories and reduced peaks and valleys in blood glucose. Any diet that actually does this is a good one, whatever metabolic lever it relies on, and any that doesn’t is either straight bunkum or really, really incompatible with the needs of the user.

*Believe it or not this includes mental activity. The brain sucks down quite a lot of glucose doing something difficult for it; if you’re struggling through a challenging math test you may as well be running when it comes to how fast you’re going through glucose. Big brains are expensive, which is one major evolutionary reason so relatively few animals bother with them. Given that the glucose needs go down as tasks are learned and mastered, however, you’re much better off with running than math when it comes to planned calorie-burning.

**Extreme calorie restriction counts as a starvation experience regardless of whether it happened because you were stranded in the desert or because you wanted to be in swimsuit shape. This is why crash diets are such a pernicious cycle; each experience trains the metabolism more firmly to store every scrap of energy and only let it go if absolutely forced. Not only does the weight come back, it comes back much faster than it went on.

***Believe it or not strength training is every bit as much about your motor nerves as it is your muscles; you will be stronger performing motions that your nervous system has learned thoroughly. This is also why varying movements- and making sure movements are complex and involve multiple joints- helps in making sure strength transfers from the gym to daily life, and why there is often seemingly poor carryover in strength between two different motions that work the same muscle or muscles.

****The good news about Tabata intervals: an effective workout in only fourteen minutes! The bad news: they will be the most profoundly miserable fourteen minutes in your day unless you manage to run across that lion I kept talking about in the last post. If you’re NOT miserable, you’re probably slacking.

*****I could explain this in more detail, yes, but it would require a really long side digression I think we will all be much happier without.

******Sports drinks will hit your bloodstream even faster than a can of soda, given that doing so is their reason for existence. Sports drinks are not diet drinks.

A word, up front, about what this is not intended to be: it is not intended to be a guide to weight loss or exercise. There are approximately ninety billion of those, many of them bogus, and a surprising number of which nonetheless work each about as well as the other. What this is meant to be is a 101 on how the body handles fueling itself and making more of itself; some schools of thought may well emerge as objectively more or less sensible than others with such knowledge, but it’s not meant to be a series of arrows pointing to any approach whatsoever. If the machine is an understandable machine with more-or-less comprehensible moving parts and processes rather than a mysterious and temperamental black box, evaluating approaches is vastly easier. I would also like to note that however much I wind up making snarky asides about nutrition as a scientific field and how profoundly political and murky it is, I have a great deal of sympathy for nutritionists. They are working in a byzantinely multivariable field in which it is nearly to completely impossible to properly isolate and control for almost all of those variables; they’re not so much stuck looking for needles in a haystack as they are stuck with evaluating to which degree each and every straw in the haystack is a load-bearing straw. Not easy, and it’s no surprise we get so many frustrating cases of completely honest and dedicated researchers coming to opposite conclusions based on the same data sets- because those multiple variables can turn the data sets into Rorschach blots. Yes, the politics are disgusting, but it’s no surprise.

So caveated, on with it.

Fuel- the raw materials

When considering any given food, the units of relevance are the three macronutrients: fat, protein, and carbohydrates. There any many other things in food, including vitamins, minerals, electrolytes, and fiber, but the substances that are broken down to either provide energy to run the body and the raw materials to repair it and produce more of it- food’s reason for existence and what defines it as food- are the fat, protein, and carbohydrates.

Fats are made of long, stable hydrocarbon chains. They vary in how many double bonds and little kinks in the chain there are, and this affects how stable in heat, light, and oxygen the fat is. “Saturated” fats have a hydrogen for every two available bonds a carbon atom has that’s not being taken up by the carbons upstream and downstream of it; “unsaturated” fats have fewer hydrogens and more double bonds between carbons. “Polyunsaturated” defines fats with lots of these double bonds. Since having a hydrogen attached to every free bond is a more stable configuration, saturated fats are those most stable in heat and light; this is why you can fry something in lard, a saturated fat, but flaxseed oil, a polyunsaturated fat, must be used raw or else it breaks down and turns rancid. This is also why you can put lard in the pantry while flaxseed oil must be kept refrigerated in an opaque bottle*. You’ll often see the word “lipid” used when discussing fats; all fats are lipids, but not all lipids are fats. Lipids are a broad class of compounds that may be briefly described as hydrophobic hydrocarbon chains; they include fats, waxes, sterols, and the various fat-soluble vitamins. Fats themselves are part of a more distinct subgroup of lipids called triglycerides. All of this biochemical terminology makes reading nutrition textbooks, and your blood chemistry results, very exciting.

Contrary to the overall public health message actually digested by the public (“fat is bad for you”), fats are highly necessary to maintaining good health; cell walls are made of lipids, and thus getting adequate fat in the diet is fairly crucial in order to be able to maintain and repair yourself. Without enough of it, hair will be dull and thin, nails will be brittle, skin will be dry and flaky, and wounds will heal slowly. All that said, unless you’re a vegan or on a food-sensitivity diet with a lengthy list of don’t's, getting enough fat in the diet to maintain health is generally trivial. (You need at least 5% of your calories from fat to survive. At least 25% to thrive.) While fat is largely something the human body can produce itself (and the most frequent Western woe is that it does so with all too much enthusiasm), there’s a small subgroup of fats it requires, cannot manufacture, and must ingest: the essential fatty acids. These are used for a broad variety of cell-maintenance tasks rather than simply being broken down and used for fuel, and while how much of them is required for solid health is still very unclear; that they ARE necessary is undisputed. Omega-6 fatty acids are found in the modern developed-world diet in abundance; omega-3 are rather rarer and problematically tend to come in unstable forms. Omega-3 is why anyone would bother supplementing with fish or flax oil**.

Biologically speaking, fats are the energy storage medium of choice for animals and to a lesser degree for plants. Hydrocarbon chains can store a great deal of potential energy densely. As such, each gram of fat is worth about nine calories to a human.

Proteins are chains of amino acids folded into globules. While fat and carbohydrates are mostly two different ways of arranging carbon and hydrogen atoms into varyingly fast and potent forms of directly burned fuel, protein is the macronutrient that goes most directly into building more body rather than being burned for fuel. The amount of it you need depends on whether you’re growing, trying to recover from injury, have a rigorous normal activity level that involves having to make far more repairs than you would if you were sedentary (this process is broadly known as “becoming fit”), or even aging and getting less efficient in how the body uses its resources. “Protein” as a term represents a much more diverse class of molecules than “fat” does, but as all of them are put to roughly similar purpose by the body- being chopped into constituent amino acids to produce the proteins that comprise the body’s native toolkit- treating all proteins as roughly equivalent when it comes to nutrition works out anyway.

The body can manufacture most amino acids on its own, but there are eight that are essential and must be ingested. Fortunately, the essential amino acids are rather more common than omega-3 fatty acids; it’s generally trivial to get a full complement of amino acids, again unless you are a vegan, and even then you need to be a rather picky vegan in order to be missing out on one or more of the essentials. Many of the most common traditional food combinations- rice and beans or rice and tofu, for example- represent combining two sources of plant protein lacking one or more essentials into a single, complete protein sources. Most animal proteins are complete, so any carnivore and most vegetarians can generally cease to worry about essential amino acids no matter what supplement companies are trying to tell you.

Proteins break down to about four calories per gram.

Carbohydrates, as the name suggests, compounds that consist of nothing but carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. For the purposes of the subject, carbohydrates come in two forms: saccharides, which are relatively small and simple carbon-and-hydrogen structures, and polysaccharides, which are rather larger and more complex carbon-and-hydrogen structures. Polysaccharides do include glycogen, a substance we will discuss later, but for the purposes of figuring out what’s in food carbohydrates are either saccharides- sugars- or polysaccharides- starches.

No matter what any supplement company tells you, there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Unlike fats and proteins, ingested carbohydrates exist from the body’s point of view as a pure energy-and-carbon-storage medium, with no esoteric side purpose. The body can produce the carbohydrate compounds it specifically needs from any carbohydrate or fat, provided it has the tools to take the molecule apart***. From a biological point of view, starches are the preferred long-term energy storage medium of plants; a potato, domesticated to produce and store vastly more starch than its wild cousins, is the vegetable equivalent of old-style massively fat domestic pigs.

Carbohydrates, like proteins, break down to about four calories per gram.

Speaking of calories, they are purely the shorthand for how much energy is contained in food; they aren’t a discrete item of their own, merely a mathematical shorthand for energetic potential that is being stored, or energy directly used. The “calorie” used in food is not equivalent to the “calorie” you may remember from your chemistry or physics laboratory days- a food calorie is actually a kilocalorie. Making this even more fun to keep track of is that the laboratory calorie as a unit of energy is now archaic, replaced by the joule****.

Fuel- the refined version

The body has its own energy currencies and storage mediums, which are far less varied than their sources. The most basic unit of cellular energy currency, the one that is actually burned to directly cause any cellular event to happen, is adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. The body is only toting around about three ounces of ATP at any given time, however; the vast, vast majority of its fuel is stored in either a short-term sugar storage form (glucose), a medium-term polysaccharide form (glycogen), or a long-term fat form (fat). The vast majority of metabolism is about transforming food into glucose and then storing the excess in one form or another.

Glucose is the most direct energy form for the body, the one that it splits and burns in order to fuel the creation of ATP. Any given metabolic process to create energy involves glucose, and everything else is about breaking down some more complex carbon and hydrogen structure into glucose to then be used in this fashion. It is pure fuel, ready for immediate use. It’s also slightly toxic; a healthy metabolism keeps the supply of circulating glucose limited and stores as much as it can in order to mitigate this effect. The damage caused by unregulated glucose can be seen in the long-term damage to nerves, vision, and blood vessels seen in people who have had diabetes for decades, particularly if it wasn’t well controlled.

Glycogen is glucose packaged for easy-access storage, which lives in the muscles and in a larger store in the liver. Glycogen is what the body expects to be using during non-resting times, and represents the reservoir of ready energy available for athletics, and almost all such exercise is fueled by burning off the current stores of glycogen. If we were to use a combustion engine analogy, glucose is the fuel moving through the engine, and glycogen is the fuel in the tank. When a marathon runner “hits the wall”, this is the moment when his body has run itself entirely out of glycogen. (Marathon runners, thanks to the extremity of their energy requirements, are actually an interesting example of the consequences of metabolic pathways I’ll get into more later.)

Fat is long-term storage, the Federal Oil Reserve of the body. Energy the body doesn’t expect to need any time soon goes here to help the body ride out times when a steady supply of food just isn’t coming in, or to cope with very high extra energy demands such as pregnancy, extreme cold- or running out of glycogen. If the glycogen is the fuel in the tank, fat is the fuel in the gas can you hope you don’t wind up needing at all. Fatty/adipose tissue also stores a few other things besides energy, like the fat-soluble vitamins (which can cause serious trouble in the case of chronic overdose)- and some storage and manufacture of the steroid hormones, which is as of yet not terribly well understood. Suffice to say the tendency of some chronically overweight mean to grow “man-breasts” is due to more than just fat- extra adipose tissue seems to make for extra estrogen which, nastily, tends to itself encourage extra adipose tissue.

Fuel- refining the raw materials

The intuitive thing for humans is to think of fats as what winds up as fatty tissue, sugars and starches as what wind up as blood sugar and glycogen, and the proteins and enzymes***** as things that are immediately pressed into service more or less in their original capacity. Digestion, however, is a relentless process of breakdown; our digestive enzymes exist to turn everything into basic units that the body then uses in the assembly of other compounds depending on its immediate needs. Fats become glucose or glycogen and carbohydrates become fat as metabolic priorities dictate; to the body, it’s all just a question of how best to store or use the carbons and in what configuration.

Insulin is the major determinant in what happens to the food once digestion has finished unpacking it and transforming it into amino acids and glucose. When blood glucose rises, insulin production steps up to move the excess glucose into cells for storage to prevent blood glucose from rising to damaging levels, as well as simply to prevent waste******.

The key thing to remember about insulin is that it’s not simply about moving glucose from the bloodstream into cells, it’s essentially the master control storage hormone. It moves amino acids into cells as well as glucose for assembly into various needed proteins, and it also stimulates adipose- body fat- cells to turn glucose into into triglycerides- the long-term storage fat format. Insulin also inhibits the metabolism of triglycerides back into glycerol and fatty acids for use as energy, which is what we generally mean when referring to “burning fat”- if insulin is present in significant amounts, fat will not be used for energy at all. If insulin is there and energy is needed, it will come preferentially from turning sugars into glucose and burning that.

Without insulin, glucose is not taken up by most of the body’s cells at all. The cells in the liver and the brain can take in glucose without insulin, but the rest of the body requires its signal. For an untreated diabetic, glucose levels continually rise while body cells, faced with an energy drought, turn to fat and the protein in the muscles. The byproducts, ketone bodies, eventually build up along with the glucose to the point of making blood acidotic. Insulin normally controls ketones as well, which is why type 1 diabetes can cause ketoacidosis but simple fasting or a very low carbohydrate diet can’t.

Since insulin production responds linearly to glucose released into the bloodstream as digestion finishes, the rate at which this happens and energy is produced depends largely on what is going on with digestion. Very simple sugars hit the bloodstream as glucose almost instantly; technically speaking, for glucose and sucrose, you don’t even need your stomach or intestines- they will begin entering your bloodstream starting at the mucous membranes in your mouth, which is why glucose gels may be used to revive someone in a hypoglycemic crisis without them being conscious and able to swallow. The enzymes that break down the simplest sugars are present in your saliva, and of course glucose needs no processing at all. More complex starches that require a more advanced digestive toolkit take longer to unpack and hit the bloodstream, and the addition of fiber and other macronutrients such as fat and protein also stretch out the period of digestion and the size, speed, and spread of the blood glucose rise. A spoonful of sugar goes straight to the bloodstream; a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal with butter (but no added sweetener) stirred in takes so long to sort out between the fat, soluble and insoluble fibers, and various complex starches that the release of glucose to the bloodstream will be slow but also last for hours. If you’ve heard of the term glycemic index, it’s a figure obtained by feeding something with exactly fifty grams of available carbohydrates to ten test subjects and measuring their blood glucose response over a two-hour period; high glycemic index describes a carbohydrate source with a sudden, steep rise in blood sugar and low describes a much slower and more modest response.

The blood sugar = insulin = storage effect also causes the steep energy peaks and valleys associated with too many simple carbohydrates; insulin will store everything. Therefore, if you eat a meal that was sizeable but also predominantly simple carbohydrates, the high insulin response will diligently pack everything away- leaving relatively little left hanging around to provide readily available energy. This is the metabolic equivalent of going on a large grocery shopping trip, making one sandwich out of the haul to eat now, and then throwing the rest of the food into the freezer. Hunger returns quickly because, when the body goes looking for ready sources of energy, not much is there.

Glucagon is insulin’s partner; its release signals the liver to liberate the glycogen stores and turn them into free blood glucose. It also stimulates a certain amount of insulin release, since most tissues other than the brain and the liver itself will need the insulin in order to make the glucose available to the cells. It also encourages the production of glucose from non-glycogen stores- fat stored as triglycerides into glycerol, then into glucose, and the same from proteins. After the marathoner hits the wall, glucagon is what directs his body to start cannibalizing itself- fat stores where they can be found, and muscle mass- for more glucose to keep going.

Cortisol is widely known as a “stress hormone” because, while it maintains a constant low-level presence in normal individuals, physical and psychological stressors inspire the secretion of a lot more of it. Together with glucagon and adrenaline, a cortisol dump into your system (JESUS CHRIST IT’S A LION, GET IN THE CAR) will have the opposite effect of insulin and will induce the body to break open the stores, stop the transport of resources into fat cells, and liberate as much energy as glucose as it can. The system is actually fairly sophisticated- the marathoner we keep mentioning is soaking in cortisol, and while the entire signal chain is not understood, his body is peeling off protein to turn into glucose from his nonexercising muscle mass, blocking energy uptake by the nonexercising mass just as it is with the fat cells, and feeding the result to his legs. Part of the way cortisol makes energy less available to tissues that aren’t very busy attempting to save their owner from lion attack is by down-regulating the sensitivity of their insulin receptors, which can eventually cause major problems for someone living with chronic stress and will exacerbate any form of diabetes as a result. People who need massive doses of cortisol in order to keep other diseases in check not only suffer from a muscle wasting effect, they also may wind up with type II diabetes purely as a consequence of the hormone, referred to as “steroid diabetes”. Cortisol does a large number of other things as well, including encouraging leaching of calcium from bone for use by the nervous system, but its antagonistic relationship with insulin is the main relevant subject of concern.

Human growth hormone, if insulin is the storage hormone, is the “building” hormone. Growth hormone encourages the building of muscle mass, mineralization of bone, increased protein synthesis, liberation of fat stores for the energy to fuel these various activities, tickling the immune system encouragingly, and telling the liver to make glucose rather than storing it. If it sounds like a lovely hormone*******, athletes agree and this is why it’s up there next to the androgens in terms of substances banned by various sporting agencies. Aside from its obvious high presence during times when children are actively growing, human growth hormone is stimulated by intense exercise, deep sleep, and low blood sugar/fasting. As it is a resource that could cause profligate use of resources, HGH is tightly regulated by the body; it goes away once blood sugar rises, and cortisol will also chase it away, among other things. (Those other things mostly being a great deal of biochemistry not really relevant to the topic at hand.)

If I continued to list hormones that affect food in some way, I’d keep going for quite awhile; suffice to say that these are the major players that affect how food is sorted, stored, and used. Since we’re already seven footnotes and close to four thousand words in, I’ll close out here. In the second half to this monster I plan to cover in much more detail exactly how energy is used, as well as how the various popular forms of dieting actually work on a metabolic level.

*Speaking of snarky asides on nutritional science and public health, the focus on saturated and unsaturated fats as direct proxies for the “healthiness” of a fat has had some interesting consequences, especially as people try to make their food healthier by cooking with unsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. The products of a fat breaking down and oxidizing under heat too extreme for it can have some unfortunate interactions with the food being fried, such as acrylamide creation from frying starch with an oxidizing fat. Make your french fries in lard, tallow, or peanut oil, not soybean, olive, or canola oil. Poor McDonald’s can’t seem to win on this one no matter which way they jump.

**No, seriously, never cook with these.

***Lactose would be an example of a sugar that some but not others have the capacity to make use of. While enzymes to pick apart varying kinds of complex carbohydrate are something of a hot evolutionary commodity among bacteria, mammals that wish to exploit an unusual food source usually borrow a bacteria to keep in the gut for the purpose. Carbohydrates not digestible by humans are usually referred to as “fiber”.

****Chemistry is dense and frustrating at times. We should probably be glad of this, as the temperament required to learn it well is nearly incompatible with the temperament required for do-it-yourself political violence.

*****Again no matter what anyone selling or advocating anything tells you, for the most part active enzymes that we consume don’t wind up doing a thing except being chopped into amino acids like other proteins. There is no such thing as an enzyme deficiency unless your only possible food source is milk and the genetic lottery didn’t give you lactase persistence into adulthood.

******Actually, I’m oversimplifying by quite a bit here. Insulin does respond to blood glucose levels, but also to the ingestion of carbohydrates and proteins, and it rises in an anticipatory fashion at normal mealtimes and in response to sweet flavors, even artificial sweeteners. However, subsequent blood sugar responds very differently to an insulin spike induced purely by protein than it does to carbohydrates or carbohydrates plus protein, and we are now screaming into “here there be dragons” territory in terms of what is currently well understood, so it’s just as useful in practical terms to think of insulin as the reaction to glucose and back away slowly.

*******If you want to know why you don’t want to just take a bath in this stuff, do a Google image search for “acromegaly”. Then, for fun, always take a close look at athletes in sports in which anabolism-enhancing drugs are a powerful temptation.

If you are a foodie or simply very interested in what’s in your food and how it tastes, you probably already know of the concept “umami”, the fifth basic taste along with salty, bitter, sour, and sweet. In Western countries the concept is usually expressed as “savoriness”. What fewer know is that umami has a single and very direct source; as sweetness as a sensation is triggered by simple sugars and their molecular imitators, umami is triggered by glutamates. Glutamic acid, a nonessential amino acid, is the natural source, and monosodium glutamate is the manufactured one. Glutamic acid is usually bound up in a protein in its natural form, but only free glutamates provoke the strong savory taste; foods with naturally high amounts of free glutamates are the ones that provoke the strongest sensation of savoriness. Many meats have a fair amount of free glutamates, as do tomatoes, mushrooms, breads and other yeast products, and especially many varieties of cheese- thus explaining the perennial popularity of a slice of pizza*.

Since humans seem to be strongly drawn to savoriness- soy sauce is another potent source of free glutamate, and it is one of the world’s most ubiqutous condiments, with tomato sauces being just as popular in other quarters of the globe- making sure a meal has sufficient glutamic acid content is one way to guarantee that otherwise boring ingredients will be delicious. Bearing that in mind, a markedly successful recipe we tried recently that doesn’t look like it would be all that tasty unless you know this particular fun fact:

Cheesy Eggplant Bake

1 medium eggplant, peeled
2 teaspoons salt
3/4 cup dry bread crumbs
1 tablespoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 egg + 2 egg whites
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 large green pepper, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced
2 (14.5 ounce) cans stewed tomatoes
6 ounces part skim mozzarella cheese, shredded

1) Slice eggplant crosswise into 1/4-inch rounds. Arrange rounds in a colander in your sink and sprinkle salt all over them. Walk away for half an hour. When finished, “rinse under cold water and pat dry with paper towels.”

2) While eggplant is sitting, combine bread crumbs, garlic salt, and pepper in a shallow bowl or on a plate. In a separate shallow bowl, whisk eggs. When eggplant is done, douse each slice in the egg mixture. Then dip in the bread crumb mixture to coat. Shake off any excess and/or drippy-ness.

3) In a large skillet, heat 1/2 tablespoon oil over medium-high heat. Cook a few rounds until browned, about 2 minutes per side. When finished, arrange in 13×9-inch baking dish. Repeat for second batch.

4) Preheat oven to 350°F.

5) Heat last 1 tablespoon oil in same skillet over medium-high heat. Add green pepper, onion, and mushrooms. Cook until onion is softening and pepper is crisp/tender, about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Top eggplant with mixture. Add tomatoes on top of that, spreading evenly.

6) Cover with tin foil and bake 25 minutes. Remove from oven and take off tin foil. Sprinkle cheese on top and bake another 25 or 30 minutes, until cheese is melted and a little brown. Serve to applause.

We substituted zucchini for the peppers since I don’t care overmuch for peppers but I do like squash quite a lot.

High-scoring sources of glutamates in this dish: Mushrooms, tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, eggs, bread crumbs. Medium-scoring: eggplants and peppers, both nightshades and relatives of tomatoes, and zucchini as well if you use that. Delicious content: high to match. Meat necessary to create sufficient umami for deliciousness: none whatsoever. Much to our surprise, given that neither of us had ever had eggplant or an eggplant-containing dish before and were moved to rate it higher than “meh”, but there you go.

*If you think you are sensitive to MSG and a meal at a Chinese restaurant bothers you but pizza doesn’t… the MSG is not your problem.

Dr. Venkman, we believe that the purpose of science is to serve mankind. You, however, seem to regard science as some kind of “dodge” or “hustle.” Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy and your conclusions are highly questionable. You are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman, and you have no place in this department or in this University.

Here at the Nerd Ranch, if you want to start a serious no-shit look-for-your-teeth brawl, a statement akin to the above is your best bet to getting there. That said, if you replace the name “Dr. Venkman” with “Dr. Erich Ritter” you will have a 100% accurate statement.

Erich Ritter is a behavioral ecologist with his PhD from the Bangladesh Post Office Zurich University*, and according to his biography is “is the only professional applied shark-human interaction specialist.” He is a poor scientist.

One of Dr. Ritter’s main tenets is that most shark bites are not attacks, but accidents. The shark was not out for human blood, but was curious, stepped on, had PMS, or was actually reflected light from Venus in a pocket of swamp gas. To a point, I agree with this. White shark attacks on surfers have frequently been chalked up as a case of mistaken identity, as the profile of a surfer paddling out strongly resembles the shark’s preferred seal prey. Further, he has in the past postulated that he can control interactions with sharks simply by modifying his heart rate.

In 2002, while filming for Discovery Channel’s annual “Shark Week,” Dr. Ritter achieved applied shark-human interaction with a bull shark and his leg.

In an attempt to demonstrate his theory about heart rates and the complete safety of being around sharks, Dr. Ritter employed the methodology of wading out into waist-deep water populated with a high concentration of bull sharks, and chumming the water. Yes, the same bull sharks responsible for more applied shark-human interactions than any other species. The same bull sharks with more testosterone at ambient levels in their blood streams than Mark McGuire in a batting cage. To call this experiment poorly designed is an understatement.

At any rate, the predictable outcome occurred and Dr. Ritter was dragged to shore sans most of his leg. After his recovery, since blood sells, Discovery gave him another show, “Anatomy of a Shark Bite.” In this bit of popular tripe, Dr. Ritter uses “state-of-the-art robotics” and computer animation to recreate the event and, supposedly, analyze the mechanics of how shark bites physically work, presenting the work in the context that this is somehow very poorly understood, despite a myriad of studies, papers, and research that did not originate with a video clip that should have appeared on MTV’s “Jackass” instead of any show claiming to be serious and remotely scholarly. It’s been many years (thankfully) since I saw the show in question, but some of the more egregious design flaws included using steel for the shark’s teeth in the robot, ignoring the mechanical force multiplier of a lever and considering air-line PSI to be the same as applied PSI in the pneumatic shark-jaw, using fixed jaws (ignoring the rather significant motion and mechanic from the fact that real shark jaws extend and rotate through different angles during the biting process, rather than just the “Hungry-Hungry Hippos” model used in the “state of the art robotics”), and reproducing the vigorous nuanced shaking motion sharks normally create via their entire bodies by having Biff and Slab push the robot back and forth. The computer modeling was essentially “Here’s a CGI shark! Ain’t it pretty?” On the plus side, they did put a fair degree of effort into getting the shape of the teeth right between the various shark species they were “recreating” the bites of.

When the show originally aired, I was so astounded at the lack of effort to bring anything to the table other than flash and shock images from the original attack, that I wrote to Dr. Ritter. As this was several computers ago, I no longer have either my original letter or his reply, but I detailed the above flaws with the bite-model he used along with some others that I’m sure I’d recall if I re-watched the show, asked about some obvious mathematical errors presented in the show, and in general asked what the fucking fuck he called that piss poor excuse for modeling, and could you maybe own up on a few things that are just flat wrong, though amazingly I did so politely. His response was essentially “Piss off, I have a PhD and you don’t.”

Now as I said, in broad principle I agree with Dr. Ritter. I don’t believe many shark attacks on humans occur out of malice or predation, and that sharks overall have very clear body language. Fins stiff and down, swimming slowly? Good sign not to keep doing what you’re doing. I’ve waded in a school of leopard sharks and emerged without any damage, though I don’t believe for an instant that it had anything to do with properly controlling my heart rate. Not chumming the water might have been a factor, but I digress. Given this position, and that I sincerely do believe that the overall message that we should not fear sharks and should protect them, I chalked Dr. Ritter up as a pompous blow-hard who on the balance probably does more good for sharks than harm (at the very least, he’s directly contributed to the nutritional needs of one bull shark, which is more than I’ve done) and let it go.

Those in the audience of the TV watching persuasion have probably noticed that once again it’s time for Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week. I can’t really say that this has been the event to look forward to that it was in the past, and ever since the laughable spectacle of a show described above, I haven’t paid much attention to it. This does not preclude catching bits and pieces during dinner, or while channel surfing in the evening, however, which brings us to another point of why Dr. Ritter is a poor scientist. Flipping on the boob-tube the other evening, LabRat and I came in on the Thrilling Dramatic Conclusion to a show I missed the title of revolving again around shark bites. The Thrilling Dramatic Conclusion in question? Dr. Ritter will reproduce the experiment that led to his tragic accident!

Except there were only nurse sharks (a species noted for being extremely docile, especially compared to bull sharks, the odd lemon shark (inquisitive but also not noted for high aggression levels), and maybe a blacktip reef shark out at the edge of the bay.

And there was only Dr. Ritter in the water instead of him and the camera crew and a couple other guys.

And he was moving much more slowly and cautiously.

And there was a spotter watching the sharks from safety calling out positions.

Oh, and there was no chum in the water. That might be a little factor.

One of the central features of real science is repeatable experiments. If you say you managed to start up cold fusion, but can’t ever duplicate it, then that pretty much goes in the column headed “Bullshit.” If experiment A is dropping a baseball from a height of ten meters and measuring the amount of time before it hits the ground in order to determine acceleration due to gravity, and experiment B is pushing a baseball across a table with a spring, these experiments are not equivalent. They do not contain the same variables, they do not measure the same things, and the — do I even need to keep hammering this point? They’re not the same experiment, and the outcomes are not outcomes that can be measured against each other.

Look, Dr. Ritter’s original stunt was to have Steve Urkel march into a group of Hell’s Angels with a baggie of meth around his neck knocking over their beers and calling them all sweet-cakes. The “recreated” experiment was telling Nigella Lawson that unfortunately the butter for her toast was not pre-softened, we’re terribly sorry ma’am, so breakfast is on the house.

Sure, there are disclaimers all over the shows about how you shouldn’t jump in the middle of shark lagoons yourself, and those really are pretty good warnings for once. These didn’t-make-the-cut clips from “Jackass” are dangerous, whether you know what you’re doing or not. Dr. Ritter trying to prove his theory via this methodology is disingenuous at best, and at worst… well, take a look at his leg. There are much better ways to go about analyzing and observing shark body language and stimulus response. There’s something to be said for stepping away from the cage, since they do obviously provoke a curiosity response from the shark, but the flailing ape with bubbles coming out of its head is sort of a fin-scratcher to our toothy friends too. Honestly this guy’s body of work is like a “how-to” for anti-science. Really, I’d like to suggest that if he’s going to keep at his body of work in this manner, he step things up a bit, get a wet suit, and go prove his theory with the great whites. Someone else even helpfully made a template for how a show like that should look. I bet the endings are almost identical, too. This one will just be wetter.

*In all fairness, ZU may actually be a very good institution. Its alumnus and his holier-than-thou attitude and camera-seeking behavior, however, does not present a stellar image of the institution.

I was listlessly kicking around a post that requires some extra research that on a warm breezy afternoon I was feeling frankly uninclined to do at that moment, then a friend of mine dropped rant material in my lap. So off to the races we go to savage an old favorite target, an “evolutionary psychologist” (actually JUST a psychologist, if he knows much about primate or human evolution it’s not evident from his writing) hawking his new book about how humans are really exactly like chimpanzees and human culture is a sinister plot.

Let’s fisk!

Seismic cultural shifts about 10,000 years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries, it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists and covered up by moralizing therapists.

You have to give him credit for not weaseling around; his thesis really is that ten thousand years ago humans suddenly began behaving unnaturally across the world and that this is the result of an ongoing cultural plot. Or rather- bear in mind I’ve not read the book as I’ve gotten no indication it would be worth my time except as exercise for my spleen- the Western world. His knowledge of how those strange primitives in places untouched by Abrahamic religion, modern medicine, and psychologists and their cultural practices seems not to extend beyond Margaret Mead being pranked by the Samoans.

In recent decades, the debate over human sexual evolution has entertained only two options: Humans evolved to be either monogamists or polygamists.

Only if you have exclusively been following the debate in pop psychology. Actual evolutionary biologists and anthropologists aren’t this binary, nor do they always approach it as a rigid dichotomy.

Couples who turn to a therapist for guidance through the inevitable minefields of marriage are likely to receive the confusing message that long-term pair bonding comes naturally to our species, but marriage is still a lot of work.

Well, yes. That’s because sharing your life with another adult human with their own thoughts, wishes, desires, and goals is, in fact, inherently a lot of work. If you do polyamorous relationships right they’re also a lot of work, if not actually MORE, because it gets more complicated with each individual added to the relationship. Just because something is natural to the human species does not make it EASY; it’s indisputable that we evolved as a savannah-based omnivorous hunter and gatherer, but I challenge you right now to go to Africa, walk out into the Serengeti, and make an easy, comfortable, and fulfilling living at it. I suspect it also takes a lot of work.

Few mainstream therapists would contemplate trying to persuade a gay man or lesbian to “grow up, get real, and stop being gay.”

….Dude. How old is this guy? Does history really start at the last fifteen years for him?

But most insist that long-term sexual monogamy is “normal,” while the curiosity and novelty-seeking inherent in human sexuality are signs of pathology.

Well, it does seem to be “normal” in the sense that heterosexuality is “normal”, i.e. what the bulk of the species has done most of the time through most of recorded history. And that humans are normally curious and novelty-seeking is an idea acknowledged as far back in the Bible in the sense of creating an origin story specifically centered around the trait and bothering to make a long list of proscriptions that are only necessary if it frequently occurs to people to do them. I’ve honestly heard of a lot more therapists telling people to stop being gay than I have of therapists telling people that wanting to fuck different people is pathological.

Thus, couples are led to believe that waning sexual passion in enduring marriages or sexual interest in anyone but their partner portend a failed relationship, when in reality these things often signify nothing more than that we are Homo sapiens.

Well, yes, they do in fact portend a failed relationship if acting on these desires is unacceptable to your partner, brainwashed by culture as he or she may be or not. There’s a massive difference between telling a therapy client their desires are unnatural and telling them that they are destructive. While it is in fact difficult to find a therapist that will view opening a relationship as one of a list of potential options that will end in a good result for the couple, I think the psychological conspiracy to deny that human nature can include a wandering eye exists only in Mr. Ryan’s head. And in the therapists’ defense, fucking around on your partner will in fact be very destructive unless both of you have agreed, have excellent self-knowledge, and excellent communications skills; it’s very far from something that will make people magically happier because they’re being “natural’.

This is a problem because there is no reason to believe monogamy comes naturally to human beings.

Only if you are extremely selective and sometimes ignorant or deceptive about those reasons. More on that later, but also “Aside from the fact that it mysteriously seems to be built into a ton of human cultures. AGH CONSPIRACY.”.

Our ancestors evolved in small-scale, highly egalitarian foraging groups that shared almost everything. Anthropologists have demonstrated time and again that immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are nearly universal in their so-called “fierce egalitarianism.” Sharing is not just encouraged; it’s mandatory.

Question: At any point, did you ask these anthropologists whether the sharing of everything included mates? In the polygamous cultures, is it considered culturally acceptable to have sex outside of those bonds? I kind of doubt it, because the conception of total egalitarianism in modern-hunter-gatherer societies is itself more pop-culture mythmaking than reflection of cultural anthropological reality. Go here if you want to know more.

Although our social world revolves around private property and individual responsibility, theirs spins toward interrelation and mutual dependence.

This is an unscientific comment, but I seem to recall some notions of interrelation and mutual dependence including free love had some really exciting effects in various quickly failed hippie communes of the sixties.

Little thought is given to who owns the land, or the fish in the river, the clouds in the sky, or the kids underfoot. An individual male’s “parental investment,” in other words, tends to be diffuse in societies like those in which we evolved, not directed toward one particular woman — or harem of women — and her children, as conventional views of our sexual evolution insist.

This is just… patently making shit up at this point. I have no idea where he got this notion other than somewhere out of his own idea of what an awesome primal society would be like. For one thing, visit the hunter-gatherer wiki hosted by the Ohio State University anthropology department as a way of counteracting the sort of mythmaking I mentioned, go to nearly any page having to do with the structure of individual hunter-gatherer societies, and note how very, very often the words wife, husband, and marriage are used, almost as though it were taken as the norm. For another thing, it’s in complete contradiction of logic to think that hunter-gatherer society would have a totally laissez-faire attitude toward sex and whose children were whose: hunter-gatherers live in SUBSISTENCE SOCIETIES. The number of births a group has per year isn’t a matter of extra baby showers, it’s a question of whether there’s going to be enough food to go around. There’s no birth control and no abortion- it’s something any such society has to be very concerned about.

But when people began living in settled agricultural communities, social reality shifted deeply and irrevocably. It became crucially important to know where your property ended and your neighbor’s began. Remember the 10th Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that [is] thy neighbor’s.”

Actually, possessions appear pretty much immediately in any hunter-gatherer society that has found an area rich enough to settle for awhile. It’s not an Agricultural Conspiracy, people appear to naturally want things of their own as soon as they don’t have to pack it out every few weeks.

With agriculture, the human female went from occupying a central, respected role to being just another possession for men to accumulate and defend, along with his house, slaves and asses.

Not so much. Women are possessions in quite a few hunter-gatherer societies, some of which are screamingly and violently misogynist. Astoundingly, hunter-gatherer cultures don’t shake out into a unitary Garden of Eden state, there’s a massive amount of variation between them. It’s almost like humans are naturally an intensely cultural species.

Students are taught that our “selfish genes” lead us to organize our sexual lives around assuring paternity, but it wasn’t until the shift to agriculture that land, livestock and other forms of wealth could be kept in the family. For the first time in the history of our species, biological paternity became a concern.

So this dude, who is pontificating on human evolution… that’s evolution, the game in which the most successful are the ones who produce the most children and grandchildren who go on to become reproductively successful themselves… in a species in which the investment in child care necessary to produce offspring that become reproductively successful is the most intense of any on the planet… is asserting that humans had no reason to ever care who had fathered a child until the ancient equivalent of X-boxes and McMansions became involved.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA *gasp* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!

*sniff* *wipes face* Moving on.

Research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy and psychology points to the same conclusion: A nonpossessive, gregarious sexuality was the human norm until the rise of agriculture and private property just 10,000 years ago, about 5 percent of anatomically modern humans’ existence on Earth.

The term for this would be “blatant and egregious lie”, unless his most recent source was Desmond Morris, who was himself highly problematic for a host of reasons. Though it’s a funny lie, in that anatomically modern humans have not existed for long enough for ten thousand years to represent 5% of our period of tenure on earth.

The two primate species closest to us lend strong — if blush-inducing — support to this vision. Ovulating female chimps have intercourse dozens of times per day, with most or all of the willing males, and bonobos famously enjoy frequent group sex that leaves everyone relaxed and conflict-free.

This is also a blatant and egregious lie. Even ovulating female chimps don’t take all comers; while it is possible for an aggressive male to pressure and bully a female chimp into sex if he has enough male buddies to help him out, this generally only happens to low-status females. For the majority of female chimps lucky enough not to be Sally Low-Status, they may mate with more than one male, but she chooses which ones carefully. As for the bonobos, while they are indeed famous for being unique among primates for frequent non-reproductive sex, it’s not “group sex” where “everyone” lies around afterward having worked all conflicts out; it’s mostly sexual contact between females, who as the dispersing and non-related-within-a-group sex are the ones with the most potential for conflict. The males do engage in some mutual diddling from time to time, but it’s not an Ape Orgy and who has REPRODUCTIVE sex with whom is still important.

The human body tells the same story. Men’s testicles are far larger than those of any monogamous or polygynous primate, hanging vulnerably outside the body where cooler temperatures help preserve standby sperm cells for multiple ejaculations.

Also a blatant lie, or at the least very misleading. Next to our two closest relatives he’s been extolling as our wild equivalents, our testicles are incredibly puny, our sperm count low, and our sperm sluggish. I am linking to an upload because I honestly can’t figure out whether a skinned testicle is a SFW image or not, but here is a chimp’s testicle and a chimp’s brain, in human hands for size comparison’s sake: Balls vs. Brains. Speaking of testicle size relative to body size.. this image is definitely not safe for work.

Men sport the longest, thickest primate penis

True, but penis size isn’t actually relevant to how many times a male can ejaculate and produce useful sperm. The cat family relies on induced ovulation- that is, the female doesn’t ovulate at all until she’s mated several times- and has several representatives, especially lions, who specialize in Endurance Sex. Their penises are only as large relative to their bodies as is needed to penetrate. Which suggests that big dicks on male humans may have a lot more to do with bipedality and the angle of penetration having gotten trickier relative to when we were still using our knuckles for locomotion. Which also suggests that Mr. Ryan is mixing a fair amount of his own identification with masculinity and what makes it into his “scientific” analysis.

as well as an embarrassing tendency to reach orgasm when the woman is just getting warmed up

I say it up there, it comes out here. You’re doing it wrong, sport.

These are all strong indications of so-called sperm competition in our species’ past.

Women’s pendulous breasts, impossible-to-ignore cries of sexual delight, or “female copulatory vocalization” to the clipboard-carrying crowd, and capacity for multiple orgasms also validate this story of prehistoric promiscuity.

Uhhhhhhh. For one, breast size or the fact that we even HAVE breasts when we’re not lactating has nothing whatsoever to do with promiscuity, and the fact that the thinks this is self-evident tells me WAY more about his fantasies than I ever wanted to know and I have to scrub my brain now. Ditto vocalizations during sex. As for capacity for multiple orgasms… well, there’s less real reason for why they SHOULDN’T exist if not for prehistoric gang-bangs than why they should. If you’re not losing a dose of protein and DNA for every orgasm, why should the sensory response be limited?

“But we’re not apes!” some might insist. But we are, in fact. Homo sapiens is one of four African great apes, along with chimps, bonobos and gorillas.

I’m actually going to quote someone else on this, because she said it well enough that her metaphor is now a term in my head for bullshit “we are just like this species we’re related to” evo psych. Blog is NSFW, but take it away, Holly:

I agree that human behavior is evolved, but I believe that we evolved into humans. If we still had the hierarchies and behaviors of apes on the savannah, we’d be apes on the savannah. (Also, even apes are often more complex than Kanazawa assumes.) It’s like saying “dolphins are descended from land creatures with legs, therefore dolphins have legs.” And the idea that men are harem-keeping sperm machines and women are antler-contest-judging baby machines is some serious dolphin legs. Morality, creativity, abstraction, empathy–these are our flippers.

Now that I’ve about run out of post to fisk- the rest is basically a condescending “oh, you can CHOOSE to be monogamous, but it’s silly and unnatural and good luck with that”- further commentary.

I really love how his fantasy primatology and fantasy anthropology are in direct conflict with each other. The term “sperm competition”- which is not so-called at all as it’s a recognized concept in those sections of evolutionary theory addressing sex- is competition. The chimps waiting for a turn- or just as likely just waiting because the lady in question isn’t interested- aren’t high-fiving each other and getting turned on by the gang-bang, they are in competition with each other. They’re not all buddies while the sperm does the heavy lifting. Chimps, along with all other primates with boisterous ovulation, have great big canine teeth: they’re not for being fierce hunters, they’re for tearing up other males. Male bonobos have much smaller canines than male chimps, but they’re still bigger than female bonobo canines. Hominids, in interesting contrast, had drastically diminishing canines as well as diminishing sexual dimorphism (the degree to which male and female bodies in a species are different) in canines as early as Ardipithecus- four million years ago. Primate “free love” isn’t peaceful and it isn’t all that free either, but it looks like we stopped needing those physical weapons for it quite a long time ago.

More than that, as I’ve ranted multiple times here in the past so I’ll try to keep this time brief, Ryan completely and totally ignores our biggest, completely non-hypothetical difference from chimps and bonobos: we have concealed ovulation and sexual receptivity completely uncoupled from fertility. No one can tell when a woman is fertile, including the woman. This dramatically lowers the fitness payoff for males using a promiscuous mating strategy; the odds are always highest that whatever female he’s successfully mated with wasn’t even fertile at all, which hugely lowers the value of the time and effort put into each mating. It also hugely raises the value of any strategy that involves investing much more into many fewer women- odds are she’s bound to be fertile at some point, and if you put your time and energy into either guarding her from other males or winning enough of her friendship that she really likes mating with you over others you not only pump up the odds you’ll have a kid, it also puts the kid into reach to help make sure that he or she makes it to reproductive age.

This doesn’t mean humans are definitely naturally monogamous. I don’t think cultures in which polygyny IS the norm are warped cultural conspiracies either. But, as I have gone into much more detail in previous posts if you want to trawl around in the archives, it DOES mean that monogamy is one of several that make a sound reproductive strategy for human males.

In the meantime, if you want to read a book about human sexual evolution and primate sexual strategies, don’t go to a pop psychologist with fantasy visions of evolution and anthropology, go to a real evolutionary biologist that’s extensively studied primates: Why Is Sex Fun, by Jared Diamond. Now with 600% more science than the nearest competitor! I would argue it needed to be a much longer book, but it’s still much more worth your time than Ryan’s.

This post is a collaboration- I did the bulk of the typing, but the ideas and sourcing were the product of a long and rather frantic e-mail exchange with Steve Bodio, who has pictures, additional comments, and some explication of politics affecting the falconry issues here: Big Black Nemesis

In the last post in this kind-of-a-series, I talked about species concept and how biologists go about attempting to define what a species actually is so that they can organize phylogenetic trees and generally go about the process of fitting things into discrete categories that seems to be so central to human understanding. I tried to explicitly point out the major weaknesses of each, but only hinted at the major flaw in biological species concept, because that flaw was rather unexpected, still not conventional wisdom with regards to species and speciation, but undeniably there and leading to Interesting Problems.

As I said, an implicit assumption contained within biological species concept is that it assumes that different species are very genetically distinct from one another and that their cladistic history and points of branching may be accurately measured by the degree to which they are genetically distinct. The idea in general was established well before it was possible to map entire genomes and compare them to one another, but there seemed to be nothing wrong whatsoever with the principle.

Where the problem came in was that once this sort of systematic mapping and comparing began to happen, a disturbing number of groups containing members that were very clearly different species in the morphological and ecological models, even ones that were presumed to be completely reproductively isolated from one another… were not all that genetically distinct at all, or were not genetically distinct in ways that matched their known patterns of distribution or history as a species. It seemed the morphological and ecological species-concept people had a very sound point all along- it turns out that what makes an organism special as a distinct entity in and of itself, in ways relevant to categorizing, cannot be read directly from its genes. This was a troubling thought-especially since it slaps a big question mark on the accuracy of phylogenies derived from tracking the degree of divergence of “stable” single point genes or mitochondrial DNA, which although much more stable than those portions of the genome more subject to direct selective pressure apparently may vary much more in speed of mutation than assumed- but it wasn’t really a devastating blow to species concept as defined by reproductive isolation, just one of the things assumed to be a direct consequence.

What IS a troubling idea for biological species concept is the idea that reproductive isolation between species that are very definitely different species may not necessarily be nearly as firm as thought unless the isolation imposed was of a firm geographical or mechanical nature.

Speaking of wolves as I was last week, let’s talk about them. We know that wolves and dogs are interfertile like most if not all Canids, and that hybrids betwixt the two are generally only ever either the product of deliberate human creation or a fringe area of habitat for wolves in which a wolf and a dog might each be desperate enough for company and mates to deal with dogs on terms other than the completely adversarial one that is normal operation for them. There may be some humans confused on the point, but wolves and dogs know they are different species; they treat one another either as competing predators or, in the case of smaller dogs, the wolf is the predator and the dog is the prey. This is not a very disturbing idea for human taxonomists because it is broadly assumed that the dog is immediately derived from some strain or another of Eurasian-born gray wolf, C. lupus, and therefore if sometimes lines gets crossed, well, speciation takes a long time to fully complete and sex is a strong drive.

Where the case of wolves really gets interesting is that, speaking of species in which a DNA sample won’t tell you what it is, in terms of a bottle of wild New World canid blood you’ll have more reliable results asking the sampler who drew it whether it came from a wolf or a coyote (C. latrans) than you will running the sample, as Raymond Coppinger has famously ranted. Why this is so interesting is the respective evolutionary histories of lupus and latrans: grey wolves evolved, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, in Eurasia. They are an Old World predator who migrated into North America across the Bering Land Bridge during its periods of existence, possibly in successive waves. Coyotes, in contrast, are a New World canine that survived the Ice Age collapse that devastated so many North American species to howl in a new epoch and a new ecology. Their most recent common ancestor dates back to the Miocene.

Things get worse when the red wolf, C. rufus, is added into the picture: since the advent of genome analysis, it’s coming into serious question whether or not the red wolves are a distinct species from wolves and coyotes, impossibly “polluted” with coyote genes, or are simply now a very large hybrid zone between wolves and coyotes. What is known for sure is that what genes they have that they don’t share with coyotes, they do share with wolves, and what genes they don’t share with wolves, they do share with coyotes. Hybridization with coyotes was always a concern for red wolf conservation*, when it was feared the population would simply become coyotes- now the question is whether the existing “red wolf” population was created in the last century out of the remnants of the original red wolves plus coyote blood as they collapsed under habitat pressure, whether they were an older hybrid population created from a similar collapse under habitat pressure from eastern Native Americans, or whether “C. rufus” has always simply been a very large hybrid zone between grey wolves and coyotes.

The red wolf, whatever it may truly be, is not alone in its status as a potential hybrid zone “species”; it appears that the northeastern coyote- big, heavy coyotes- and the eastern Canadian wolf are both of rather mingled blood**. Go far enough north and east from the US, and the coyotes get awfully wolflike in both appearance, behavior, and DNA- and go far enough south and east from Alaska, and the wolves get smaller and more coyotelike in appearance, behavior, and DNA. When it comes to answering the question “what is it”, you might as well follow a morphological or ecological concept, because the genes aren’t going to tell you much useful and the reproductive isolation is questionable at best, although coyotes and wolves are dedicated enemies in other areas their habitats overlap- one of the first things the reintroduced Yellowstone wolves did was start killing coyotes as often as they could catch them.

We will return to our New World canines, but for now let’s digress to Old World falcons. The hierofalco group is a monophyletic (all related to each other and with no descendants outside the group) clade of big, level-flying falcons who all inhabit Asia, but between them also cover Europe, Africa, and North America. Their largest and most famous representative is the Gyrfalcon, a big, burly creature by falcon standards that is most at home in tundra, taiga, and rocky cliff areas. It inhabits a belt of territory around the top of the globe. The Saker falcon is a somewhat smaller bird (though still a damn big falcon) that inhabits a band south of the Gyrfalcon’s territory in Europe and Asia, and has a broad northern range of overlap with the southern edge of the Gyrfalcon’s range. Sakers prefer open grassland and lighter forest, though they share a fondness for cliffside residency with their more macho Gyrfalcon cousins. The Lanner and Lugger falcons are the other two members of hierofalco, but are far less germane to the topic of this post, so beyond acknowledging their existence as the two southern representatives we will go no further with them.

Gyrfalcons and Saker falcons are, like wolves and coyotes, completely interfertile- the results of a mating between the two (which need not involve artificial insemination, Gyrs and Sakers will happily form a natural pair) is completely fertile itself and suffers none of the identity crises that make some other avian hybrids significantly less adapted than their parents. And as the reader might expect who has been following me so far, all broad genetic analysis of Gyrfalcons and Saker falcons shows the evidence of a high degree of hybridization between the two populations, even when it is taken into account that their own isolation was much more recent than the canids’.

This is the point at which things get a bit political. There is a region Steve Bodio refers to as the “Four Corners” in Central Asia, overlapping Kazakhstan, Siberia, and Mongolia, in the northern end of Saker territory and the southern edge of Gyrfalcon territory, in which the Sakers get awfully Gyrlike. Falconers in Central Asia call them Altai falcons and consider them desirable for their greater hardiness over the Gyrfalcon*** and greater size and power over the Saker. What makes it more problematic is that Arabic falconers agree, and have built up quite a classification system of Altai “types”, some of which they are willing to pay quite highly for, which naturally disturbs some conservationists, who have had distinctly negative experiences with rich men willing to pay highly for wild animals, whole or piece by piece. In terms of size and color morphs, the described Altai varieties are indistinguishable from deliberately produced Gyr/Saker hybrids.

Although there is broad acknowledgment that the genetic studies of Gyrfalcons and Sakers shows a high degree of hybridization both past and ongoing, there is a fair amount of argument about what this means. Right now one proposed theory is that the hybridization mostly comes from deliberate Gyr/Saker hybrids created by falconers and then escaped back into the wild, with possibly some natural habitat pressures coming from humans also driving the sort of natural hybridization caused by dwindling populations desperate for mates.****

This is the point at which I stop describing things that everybody agrees on- widespread genetic evidence indicating hybridization, with its almost certainly being entirely natural hybridization in one of my two examples- and put on my pith helmet and butterfly net in pursuit of the Wild Speculation. Tally-ho!

Earlier we discussed parthenogenesis, where it shows up, and how it originates, and joined in some speculation as to how it may be an evolutionary strategy for species colonizing new and inhospitable habitats to fix a highly adapted line and allow for rapid radiation. In that post hybridization, associated as the instigating event of most vertebrate parthenogenetic lines, played a role as a way to experiment with several radical new combinations of genes not present in the parent species, with any that were markedly more successful being the winners to move into the new habitat.

One of the things the Four Corners region of Central Asia and North America in general share in common is that they are both extremely diverse regions that have experienced repeated and often violent environmental change. In North America, glaciers have swept in and out and carved mountains, valleys and rivers, instigated massive floods, and left new open plains in their wake. In Central Asia, the retreat of the ice caused a band of taiga forest to spring up where there had been tundra- now prime Saker habitat- but in the Four Corners region, the separation was incomplete; it has everything from cliffy mountains to tundra to taiga to grassy valleys to bog, sometimes only miles from each other.

North America was also affected much more dramatically by another potent agent of change: humanity. The first Americans wandered over the Bering bridge along with the wolves, caribou/elk, and brown bears, and they tended to leave nothing they touched unchanged. They chased some species out of existence, encouraged others, and created a great deal of grassland where there had been forest, including the regions representing modern red wolf territory, which were greatly affected by slash-and-burn agriculture*****. Of more recent effects of humans, I need say relatively little- extirpation of predators was regarded as a universal benefit in America until quite recently, and forest, grassland, swampland, and desert have wandered rapidly in some places.

Evolution is the process of change over time, and in the case of repeated and dramatic environmental change and disturbance, time is short and the creature that can change quickly has advantage. Humans are a particularly polarizing force of change for North American canids, because an outbreak of humans in a given area is something that is always a very bad thing for grey wolves but often a net benefit to coyotes. Humans will chase and try to eradicate both, but while the pack-dependent wolves almost always buckle to the pressure and are driven back, the coyotes simply splinter their groups into pairs and dramatically increase their breeding rate. Wolves cannot urbanize; coyotes are adept urbanizers. A coyote’s real problem in the wild is other predators, including wolves- mountain lions and wolves are much better at killing coyotes than humans are, but humans are much better at killing those other predators than they are at killing coyotes in a way that sticks.

Canines are unusually plastic in their genetics; relative to other mammalian groups, a canid can adjust its size and proportions quite quickly in response to new conditions. It was already widely observed of the coyotes that had radiated east, particularly the northeastern ones, that they were much bigger than most western coyotes. That they were wolflike in their genetics was a surprise, but that they were wolflike in their hunting seemed simple ecological sense; with the eradication of nearly all large predators from the east, deer grew so numerous multiple states have been forced to treat them like vermin. “Normal” coyotes are already known to be able to pack up and take deer, but with deer representing a rich and untapped food source, immediate pressure would favor bigger, stronger coyotes better adapted to taking deer for the bulk of their meals rather than rabbits and rodents. Coyotes that were, in fact, more wolflike.

We know from the reports of colonists that there were wolves in Eastern Canada and New England when they got there, and we know from similar sources that there were red wolves in the southeastern US when they got there, but a colonist is forced to rely on morphological species concept: if it is physically, ecologically, and behaviorally wolf-shaped, then it’s a wolf, and will be reported as such. We can analyze the DNA from old skins in natural history museums, and this has been done with the red wolf (no difference from the modern, “hybridized” red wolf), but no such specimens exist that predate the effects of European colonization in North America.

The current generally accepted picture of hybridized and “polluted” red wolves and northeastern coywolves and coyote-hybrid eastern Canadian wolves is that they all represent an unnatural condition born of coyotes radiating into old grey and red wolf territory and the desperate survivors hybridizing with the newcomers. What I am suggesting is that this is may actually be a very old strategy for the New World canines, born of constant and rapid change: the red wolves may have always been thus, and likewise the Eastern wolves. We know that the coywolves are very well adapted, rather than being some sort of damaged hybrid “compromise” between the parent species- their numbers grow despite their pressures and the fact that they are not protected.

Where coyote and wolf populations and niches are healthy and well-defined, they are competing predators, enemies, and behave as such… but perhaps when local conditions make it so that one niche and population is being dramatically cut back, hybridization- in a sense, the genetic line changing teams- becomes appealing. This is already a version of what’s already believed for how hybridization between the species became so common, the only new thing I’m suggesting is that this may have been a winning strategy for both species in the face of pressure and change for much longer than modern human populations have been here. When things change and get bad for one species, or opportunity is simply knocking- the most rapidly adaptive route may be to flow into the other.

For the falcons, the story is a bit more stable. The Altai falcons may represent a similar case of adaptive hybridization, or they may represent a case of incomplete speciation in which the middle zone of their shared territory offers so many different kinds of niches that there is simply no force driving them to completely split- or rather, too many forces acting at once in different directions. It is also possible that the sheer variety of the region in which hybridization seems to occur- and maybe very often and completely naturally, falconers certainly need exert no effort to get Gyrfalcons and Saker falcons to treat one another as appealing mates- means that there are several micro-niches that varying combinations of Gyrfalcon and Saker falcon morphology and behavior would be ideal to exploit, which would create not only positive pressure to hybridize, but also suggest an evolutionary reason for why different but consistent-over-time varieties of “Altai Falcon” persist.

The classic picture of speciation that most of us learn is that groups of animals become separate species when things change enough in some way that distinct but stable evolutionary strategies emerge, and whether because of geographic separation or other kinds of isolation, over time the groups split into two different species based around the two distinct strategies. Natural hybridization violates this model, because in theory the result would be something imperfectly adapted to either niche and, if the parent species had the poor taste to mate in the first place, the result would have no significant impact on the evolutionary history of either species.

But when the environment refuses to stop changing, strategies in consequence cannot remain stable, and children that are much different from you stand an even chance of being better off… perhaps it pays to hold your neighbors close.

*Conservation has always been a tremendous pressure force in sorting animal populations into clear species, because you need a species definition to qualify for protection. The controversy in red wolf conservation is that, in the lights of the conservationists, whether they are red wolves or “just” hybrids of species with healthy populations of their own means the difference in protection versus no protection.

**If you read the article, you’ll see that the wolf researcher studying these overlapping gene pools proposes that coyotes are only about 300,000 years old and spawned from a northern wolf ancestor in Canada, and if you’re following your chain of implications suggests that the red wolf is ancestral to both the Eurasian grey wolf line and coyotes. This clears up the disturbing natural hybridization implications, but also disagrees quite dramatically with the paleontologists, who hold that the coyote is the oldest of the surviving distinct species of canid in North America. To be fair to everyone, canid taxonomy is a messy and incestous business, as we are seeing.

***For all their toughness versus ice and snow, Gyrfalcons tend to have lousy immune systems and get sick at the drop of a hat in captivity. Warmer regions tend to breed more and more virulent bugs than Arctic ones.

****Bear in mind that the Four Corners region, while providing many appealing residences for large falcons, is highly inhospitable to humans. It is very sparsely populated and most Western scientists aren’t in a massive rush to get out there and start counting heads, so a picture of the actual falcon population of all species and varieties in between is very foggy.

*****They left this part out of Pocahontas. The European memory of vast, intimidating forest primeval being the condition of the American seaboard is not so much the state it was in when they arrived as it was the state it was in after imported European pathogens killed off most of the tribes that had been there, their farms with them. Forests can be quite quick to retake that territory once it is again unoccupied- New England’s reforesting post the Industrial Revolution is a case in point. The topic of whether the extent of the South American rainforest represents an always-was condition or a condition acquired after the South American disease-induced native die-off is one that causes much bristling of beards as well.

The thing about science education, as with all education, is that the totality of the subject is large enough that in order to distill the concepts well enough that they can be communicated to schoolchildren, you must to some degree fudge the truth. This is why we teach fifth-graders that America had a civil war because suddenly one half of the country realized slavery was bad and the other half refused to give it up, rather than going into the complexities of the question of state sovereignty, Constitutional compromises, industrialized economies versus agricultural economies, and the sorts of racist institutions nearly everyone agreed on that didn’t involve actual ownership of people. For the most part, as people grow and further their education, they accept the necessity of this process and expand their understanding of something approximating the truer picture of the complex subjects involved, although some are still really put out about it*.

One of those truths realized when expanding one’s knowledge of biology is that species, while a hugely important concept that a great deal of one’s understanding hinges upon, is also… rather loosely defined, and in fact is the subject of sometimes acrimonious debate among working biologists, leading to taxonomy being rather more exciting a field than it sounds just for the battles among its practicioners. The question of what criteria to define species by and which is the most valid is an active and somewhat open one, and each has its flaws.

Biological species concept is perhaps the most widely agreed upon for validity, as it has a definition perhaps most intuitive and easiest to apply rigorous testing to: a group of animals is a species if it forms a distinct cluster of individuals that are reproductively isolated. This used to mean (and many think it still means) that two groups of similar animals are separate species only if they cannot produce fertile offspring together, but there are some genera, like Canis, in which obviously different species are completely interfertile even though they are radically different in form and home locale. To round out this concept, the differing dogs would qualify as separate species because they are still reproductively isolated by their behavior- a wolf and a cocker spaniel may be able to produce entirely viable, fertile offspring, but they are still completely reproductively isolated in that the wolf would much rather eat the spaniel than mate with it, so they are therefore separate species.

Other forms of reproductive isolation include ecological isolation- lions and tigers are interfertile (kinda), but lions live in grasslands and tigers live in forests, so they don’t meet so therefore they don’t mate- temporal isolation, in which breeding cycles are out of sync, and mechanical isolation, in which something about the process of mating or the process of sperm and egg meeting is precluded by some feature of one of the organisms**. Biological species concept is especially appealing because it gives a very easy and intuitive framework to hang species concept before proceeding to discuss speciation, as you can frame it in terms of how reproductive isolation develops and proceed from there. Implicit in the notion of biological species concept is the idea that species are inevitably clearly genetically distinct from one another, something that would go on to cause some great fun once genome sequencing became a widespread and accessible technique.

Before biological species concept, there was the morphological species concept, which is something akin to species defined as obscenity once was- “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” In morphological species concept, fundamentally speaking, a tiger is a tiger and a lion is a lion because the one is a stripey thing that lives in forests and one is a maney thing that lives on savannahs. In less glib terms, this is the traditional method for taxonomy: examine the species’ frames and makeup, and group them as they are most similar, most obviously derived in shape, and have the most obvious geographical relations. Wolves are wolves and dogs are dogs not because the one doesn’t want to mate with the other, but in terms of consistent distinct patterns of their skull proportions. Morphological species concept is yet another in which widespread genome sequencing would go on to cause headaches for its most ardent devotees. It is also just about the only way you can go about taxonomy if you are a paleontologist and all the examples of your species are represented by fossils. Phenetics represents an extremely organized and mathy extreme of morphological species concept, and also produces some of the most vigorous and entertaining journal letters-column catfights. The morphological concept’s most obvious weakness is convergent evolution- sometimes things are shaped very similarly because they share the same pressures and specializations, not because they are closely related.

Ecological species concept is a newer kid on the block, and under it, groups of animals are species or not species depending on the niche they occupy in ecology. A wolf is a wolf because it lives in groups with other wolves and takes large game, and a dog is a dog because it lives in groups with humans and takes kibble. Again, this is glib, and it obviously is intended to be somewhat married to morphological species concept in that no one is attempting to argue that lions and hyenas are the same species despite occupying the same territory and hunting largely the same game, but it is the essence of the idea. Where someone using biological species concept would go on to explain speciation in terms of the development of reproductive isolation, someone using ecological species concept would go on to explain it in terms of clusters of similar-looking but different groups of organisms shaped by niche availability. The major weakness as a species concept is that “niche” can be as squishy a concept as species, and generalist species often occupy more than one niche; try, for example, defining humans as a species within this framework.

I could go on as there are more, but most of the rest represent either an extreme form of one of these (recognition species concept, phenetic species concept), or are less a way to look at an organism to define what sort of it-ness makes it its own species than they are a way to organize phylogenetic trees cleanly (cladistic species concept). Everyone agrees on the idea of species, but as organisms are a product of biological processes and therefore more inclined to represent points along continuums rather than easily organized categories, trying to define them and sort them all out in ways that can be nicely represented on posterboard and PDF files are a problem that is likely to remain eternal.

Coming sometime hopefully soonish after the weekend: In which I explain hopefully all the ways I have just lied to you in the process of attempting to simplify the issue of species.

*Yes, I am aware both Zinn and Wells- especially Wells- do a lot of deliberate deception themselves and that they are in a position to know better. Their audiences, however, consist largely of people annoyed to find that the education they got as children was simplified and that are more interested in nursing this resentment than in furthering their education. It’s very easy to lie to someone by telling them truthfully that they were lied to before, then continuing…

**Students tempted to point out that Great Danes and Chihuahuas are therefore separate species due to mechanical isolation are advised not to be so cheeky, lest they make Ernst Mayr give them the disappointed look.

Having gone into a thumbnail of the history of evolutionary theories of the advantage of sexual reproduction, the question as it stands nowadays is not “why sex”, but rather “why NOT” sex, for species that have entirely given it up* and gone to all-female lines of parthenogetically reproducing individuals.

When I initially set out with the idea of this post, I expected it to be very simple, and I turned out to be dramatically wrong. I will start out with the simple bit.

Both parthenogenesis in sexual species and especially completely parthenogenetic lines do share a common pattern, which is that they excel in a specialized niche as colonizers. Colonizing species are what you get first in an environment that has either recently had its previous ecosystem wiped out or has yet to be exploited; these species excel at rapidly moving in and filling what niches are available, but tend to eventually be out-competed by other species as the ecosystem matures. In some cases they may never be booted out due to poor habitat or general inaccessibility- for this reason islands don’t normally tend to have terribly complex ecosystems and harbor a number of species that would be outcompeted by mainland species- and often are, either over a very long period or a much shorter one if humans move in toting their mainland species with them.

Parthenogenesis offers an obvious advantage to a colonizer; there doesn’t need to be more than one of the animal in question to begin colonizing, the genotype that is successful enough to move into a harsh environment in the short term is probably a good bet to replicate rather than recombine and radiate rapidly into the entirety of the available niche, and their clean-slate situation is generally a perfect one for the short-term-strategy, high-payoff investor I mentioned in the previous post. Aside from colonizing islands, like the completely parthenogenetic Mourning Gecko of Hawaii (now declining as they are apparently outcompeted by a mainland species, the house gecko) and the parthenogenesis-capable Komodo dragons** of the Indonesian archipelago, this applies to any habitat that has been recently disturbed or is prone to recurring disturbance.

Most of the all-female lines of whiptail lizards (and there are several) seem to predominate in riparian areas of the southwestern US, which are prone to frequent destruction by flash flood. Aside from just washes, the southwest has a fairly long and recent history of disruption; human habitation, even by native Americans, was a little more than some of the environment could handle, and the Anasazi in particular turned a lot of forest into arid grassland. Combine this with the fire-dependent ecosystem of Ponderosa forest, and you have a rapidly changing environment in which a species that happens to be suited to the environment the changes create could spread very rapidly, more rapidly without sex than with it- we are in the middle of Ponderosa forest, surrounded by many canyons, and all of our little yellow striped yard lizards are of the local all-female race of whiptails.

This was where I expected the post to conclude originally: in a genus of lizards with many sexual species and many independently evolved lines of all-female parthenogenetic lizards, the parthenogenetic lizards win where the environment has either been recently disturbed or is constantly disturbed, and their sexual cousins win in more stable habitats where the advantages of sex have the chance to win the long game.

What I did NOT expect was to discover was that, in vertebrates, parthenogenesis is heavily associated with hybridization events to the point where the paper I eventually tracked down trying to figure out what on earth was going on asserted that all known vertebrate cases of parthenogenesis are associated with hybridization events, while a few more cases since then have emerged and don’t appear to have any link to any hybridization***.

Kearny makes the case that the hybridization is not incidental, but rather a hand-in-hand strategy with the parthenogenesis itself for species moving into a disturbed habit. He ties everything around glaciation events (which is, I suppose, why our local whiptails weren’t included), but glaciation is itself a very specific type of disturbance whose patterns can be geologically tracked and which tends to open up broad swathes of newly available, but inhospitable, habitat. He demonstrates that hybridization and gene flow from sometimes even multiple members of the same genus is associated with successful colonizing and radiating in disturbed/harsh territory even with sexual species.

This is where parthenogenetic lines- and both the geckos and the whiptails I’ve been talking about are known to have originated from multiple independent hybridization events- tie back into the portfolio-balancing theory of the advantage of sex. (He specifically cites Roughgarden coming to his conclusion, in fact.) Hybridization does not necessarily produce an intermediate result; it can be a tremendous dice-throw when it comes to the result, and there can be consequences like dwarfism or gigantism****, extreme color morphs, and other results dramatically different from both parent species; if sex produces a wide range of genes that work well in combination with each other within a species’s gene pool, hybridization means all bets are off with how well or poorly said genes will work in combinations that haven’t been fine-tuned by selection for the last million years.

For related species on the ragged edge of new potential territory, or coming back from a major environmental shakeup, they can be in the same relatively disadvantageous position: possibly a small population with a reduced gene pool and not particularly adapted for the new world order. Hybridization with the strange neighbors would result mostly in offspring that were even more poorly adapted- but for the few equally wild-card results that WERE, a parthenogenetic line would “fix” the new type not present in either population in a position of advantage as a colonizer. With low or no gene flow from the parent species (sometimes parthenogenetic species will occasionally be sexual outside the species), its advantage could persist without immediate dilution from either original, markedly less-well-adapted species.

Shuffle the cards, shuffle the cards… then run with the first really good hand you get.

*Given up sexual reproduction, that is. They still have sex. They are demonstrably more fecund when sharing a burrow or laboratory habitat with a mate, with whom they trade off taking the “male part”. They are unusual among reptiles and even within their own genus for this chumminess. No evidence of ice cream or “The L Word” has been found, however.

**Interestingly, the dragons are also unusual among reptiles and lizards in general in that they seem to form some kind of pair bond with their mates. I have no idea what this means but it’s worth noting.

***The Komodo dragons again, also some shark species, and also snakes. The snakes actually were discovered prior to the paper’s publication, though. I have no idea if its author simply hadn’t heard or discounted it because it did not result in a unisexual line. As a purely taxonomic footnote, the Varanid monitor lizards to which Komodos belong are arguably more closely related to snakes than to the geckos and whiptails, and they and the snakes share the same ZW sex-determination system, which is why Komodos couldn’t go fully parthenogenetic even if it were to their advantage to do so- all the offspring are male. Reptilia is one fucked up clade.

****Back to the dragons, so far as I could determine no hybridization event is known for them, and their likeliest ancestors include lizards as large or even larger than them… but they do stand out as quite odd among island colonizers for their sheer size. The predominating theory is that they began smaller and grew larger to exploit stegodonts and deer as a food source. Pure and rampant speculation, but food for thought.

I’ve been waiting for the ideal time to sit down and let this magically put itself together and it appears as though it is determined to remain a ball of constantly escaping and breeding snakes, so I will have to split this into multiple parts.

Awhile back I mentioned that I was working on a post about parthenogenesis in vertebrates and why asexual reproduction appears at all in nature against a background of relentless sexual reproduction, and got immediately and violently sidetracked by the fact that it was a much, much more complex subject than I expected and my chosen example genus particularly so. Then I found out while attempting to chase down answers that most of the leads I was looking for didn’t go much of anywhere because no one had yet gotten around to writing papers meant to address them. Hence the ball-of-snakes nature of the subject.

The “problem of sex” has been a perennial topic in evolutionary biology, because the seemingly intuitive argument is that it should be a significant fitness loss for an organism that has a genome good enough to get it to successful reproduction to them randomly shuffle not only its own genes, but then combine them with some equally randomized genes from some other organism. Yet, we know this genetic shuffling must actually be tremendously advantageous, because almost all species reproduce sexually, and even in groups like bacteria that normally reproduce by replicating themselves directly, a tremendous amount of horizontal gene transfer (as opposed to vertical, the fissioning and accumulating mutations thought “normal” for bacteria) has gone on- so much so that the earliest roots of the phylogenetic “tree” of life become impossible to disentangle because it’s impossible to tell what was orderly and clockable mutation and how much was useful genes disseminating by horizontal transfer.

The first solution to the problem of sex was Muller’s Ratchet, which proposes that sexual reproduction exists because otherwise asexual lines would slowly be crushed under an accumulation of deleterious mutations that line had no means to get rid of. The Ratchet does turn out to be a useful idea in some areas, especially with regard to accumulating mutations on regions of chromosomes that don’t undergo recombination in otherwise sexual species, but the discovery of widespread horizontal transfer between organisms previously thought to be completely clonally reproducing organisms renders it somewhat obsolete in terms of explaining the advantage of sex itself; why most species are sexual in the more traditional sense still remains a question to be begged, and before this discovery the existence of successfully asexual lines apparently many millions of years old would have been. Regardless, the entire concept when proposed as an explanation for sex itself also runs into the problem that sexual reproduction involves trading or rearranging genes- not actually eliminating them. If looked at purely from the perspective of deleterious mutations, an organism with a theoretical choice between cloning its successful self and recombining its genes runs just as much risk of picking up new bad traits from its partners as it does of having the new combination absent its deleterious genes.

The second dominant theory of sexual reproduction is the Red Queen Hypothesis. This idea boils down to the idea that the advantage of sex is that it allows organisms to rapidly evolve and compete with its predators, direct competitors, and parasites; everybody must have sex because everybody must evolve quickly or otherwise you will be left in the dust by those whose gain would be your loss. Parasites are the favorite example because they have much shorter generational timespans than their hosts and can evolve much more quickly; in this scenario, sex preserves genes that might not be an advantage now but might be in the next generation because the parasites had changed quickly. The logic of Red Queen has its utility, but it also has the exact same problem that Muller’s Ratchet had, which is that if the competition is that intense, an organism would have every bit as much to lose from the possibility of producing less-adapted offspring as more-adapted, and if the competition were really that intense sexual reproduction could make an awful lot of organisms instant losers, especially K strategists- species that put a tremendous amount of effort and resources into a few offspring rather than just a tremendous amount of offspring. To put it in human terms- and we are very specialized K strategists- it does your family’s fitness no good whatsoever if you survive a tuberculosis epidemic and none of your children do because their father wasn’t as well adapted and they took more after him.

A theory gaining currency (in part because at least one of its premises is mathematically sound, which is something that neither the Ratchet or Red Queen ever quite achieved to my knowledge, though I could be wrong) that Joan Roughgarden termed the “portfolio rebalancing” idea. In this version, the advantage of sexual reproduction isn’t in maximizing the fitness of deleterious versus advantageous genes so much as it is achieving a diversity of genes that work well in many different combinations and under different conditions. In investment terms, the difference between an asexual species and a sexual one would be akin to an investor who invests everything he has in things that are currently paying off highly now, and an investor who seeks to balance his portfolio among a multitude of different options, some currently very successful and others less so, though none unsuccessful- at least at the time of investment. The high-stakes investor, or the asexual organism, experience much more short-term success in that intuitive way that suggests asexual reproduction as the more fit model to us- but it is not a stable strategy. The moment something sufficiently important changes, the strategy may collapse, and the fellow with the balanced portfolio having all the sex may be in a much better position to recover and may even be in a position of new advantage. In some ways this is a more robust version of Red Queen as it identifies changing environments to the key to long-term evolutionary success, but positing varying genomes as mostly pretty good as opposed to a stark advantage-disadvantage view inherent in the deadly-treadmill model.

I’ll break off here as I smell dinner is nearly ready and I’ll have little time to write later on. More, specifically the conditions under which parthenogenesis become advantageous and why this same rebalancing theory has a surprising role in driving even asexual strategies, later.

So there’s a discussion over at Querencia about breed standards and their utility or lack thereof, that has me thinking again along the lines of what a “breed” actually is and how breeding should be approached. If you’ll recall I denounced the logic of closed registries some time ago as an inevitable population-genetics suicide pill, and there was some discussion then of how we should define dogs as a breed, if not by their parents and increasingly narrowing gene pools.

The most obvious reply to “closed registries are bad” was and is “if you just define any dog as a breed as one that kinda looks and acts like one, you’ll quickly lose all consistency and probably functionality as well”. This is true. As I pointed out in that post, inbred genetic disease problems and consistency of form and working ability are achieved by precisely the same mechanism: deliberately narrowing the gene pool. The upshot of the post after all the genetic discussion is that you can’t create a group of small-to-medium fast-moving dogs with consistently high aptitude for moving sheep around (or insert other breed form and function) without also accepting a higher rate of genetic disease than you would find in a population of randomly breeding dogs; it’s just that closing registries also closes a lot of the options breeders have to mitigate and do some repair work on those small, tailored gene pools they’ve created.

The line of logic this leads to, at least in regards to how dog breeding is accomplished in the majority of the Western world, is to rely more heavily on breed standards in making our definition of what a breed is. As John Burchard and Steve point out, standards have a great number of problems inherent in them as well, some of which are systemic in that human nature tends to err consistently in the same directions over time. Immediately in comments, the same family of counter-argument as the one above is presented: if we don’t have standards, then we immediately lose consistency, and the entire point of having breeds at all is consistency.

Well, yes. Even the most ardent working-dog devotees, the commenter points out, have a sort of overall shape and form of dog in mind when judging the worth of a dog and its potential contributions to a breeding program. But none of that detracts from Dr. Burchard’s point, which is that breeding to a written standard of questionable interpretation is what has lead to Bulldogs that can’t give birth or mate naturally and can’t survive heat for long, German Shepherds that look like recognizably normal canines from the shoulders forward and victims of severe scoliosis from the shoulders back, and Pekingese that can barely breathe because physiologically speaking, most of their snouts are in their throats. That standards have led to severe deformities being enshrined as “breed type” and actively bred for is inarguable: the evidence is struggling around the show rings every year. Not even the favored savior most frequently put forth, working ability, is any guarantor- the German-bred GSDs must pass a working test to be shown and bred, but as the photos show, have become every bit as deformed as their American counterparts. They merely dumbed down the tests to accommodate for dogs whose grotesque structures had finally compromised their ability to move enough to start failing, as Dr. Burchard notes.

What are these people thinking? Most surely it is not “I think it would be the best thing for the breed to cripple it”. Not, likely, of money- dogs that look like this don’t make such great candidates for milling out and selling to the public. Status? I’m certain it’s a motivation, but again, most people in breeding and showing are there out of love for the breed- ribbons are a nice thing to chase, but there are much cheaper and easier ways to go about status. I suspect, however, that the thought process begins with “an English bull dog is a dog with a skull that should be very large, and in circumference, in front of the ears, should measure at least the height of the dog at the shoulders. Viewed from the front, it should appear very high from the corner of the lower jaw to the apex of the skull, and also very broad and square. Viewed at the side, the head should appear very high, and very short from the point of the nose to occiput. The forehead should be flat (not rounded or domed), neither too prominent nor overhanging the face.” To borrow from one mangled breed’s current standard. Reading it does not directly suggest this- but it is what has resulted over multiple generations of breeders breeding for exactly what was prescribed.

And if they defend their results as what the breed is? Are these dogs descended from those in the original studbook? Yes. Do they fit the standard, are they not exemplifying the standard as directly as they can? Yes, they’re doing that too. The problem is, the standard is constructed around traits that described this animal as distinguished from all other dogs quite accurately… and over generations of a contest that compared bulldog to bulldog depending on how they distinguished in these traits from other bulldogs produced this animal. They have done nothing but create a bulldog that is most purely and essentially a bulldog as they understand the state of bulldogness to be- and love of bulldogs was the primary driver.

Work is not necessarily the cure, either. Work will be more consistent in weeding out dogs that are outright deformed, but a bird dog who cannot be sane unless he runs for miles and miles each day and wrecks his own frame through constant hard use (and yes, maybe because the frame was not that sound to begin with) is as much a dog who is suffering from what his breeding as wrought as one who cannot run for more than a few minutes because he can’t breathe very well to begin with. Likewise dogs that run their paw pads off because they are so stimulated by the prospect of doing whatever it is they fire so hard on that they don’t notice pain until major damage has already been done.

Likewise, such a dog can only exist in an environment in which the work is there for him to do- and the spaces for this kind of work are narrower and narrower with each century. Surely they and their work is worth preserving, but wanting a dog that makes a reasonable companion is by far the commonest modern motive in evaluating dogs, and far from an ignoble one. If work were the standard cure, what to do with vast swathes of breeds that WERE created specifically to be pleasant pets? It certainly wouldn’t move the desire for dog ownership exclusively to people whose particular monomanias make a field-bred hard worker a good choice. In terms of total pet owning homes, even if we could somehow exclude all idiots and irresponsible people, far more would be better off with a carefully bred Bichon Frise from a mindful show-and-nothing-but-show kennel than a terrier from working lines or a field-bred setter. They have no less reason to prefer a purebred to a mutt than a family that wants a dog for a specific job; they may want the dog to be consistently stable, consistently friendly, of a consistent easily managed size, and with a consistent coat that is nice to pet and maybe doesn’t shed so much dander. These are far from selfish or stupid desires or reasons to have a breed.

If you think I’m leading up to a better solution than standards, I’m not. Just because you point out deep and systemic problems in a given system doesn’t mean you have a much better solution. The best I can do is emphasize that when breeding any animal to create a consistent type, the first priority should not be endlessly chasing essentialism, but what makes this breed and what you want it to do- now, in the future, ten generations from now. We cannot eliminate the human qualities of politics and short-sighted terminology from standard-writing, but we can push within the culture to keep these concerns first and foremost. The degree to which individual kennel clubs and overall communities for breeds has done this has made a great deal of difference in how various breeds have fared over the century.

1. Get inquiring comment on earlier post. Make a happy note to yourself that that sounds like a lovely subject for a short, trouble-free little science post as a textbook example of the role of sex in evolution and why, outside of dated/limited Red Queen hypothesis, it is common and asexual reproduction is rare, why the exceptions happen. Cake.

2. Go to look up further detail on the lizard genus in question. Hybridization? Polyploidy? Wait, what does that have to do with it?

3. Look up another relevant lizard. Wait, what, their parthenogenetic offspring are always male? The whiptails are always female. Because the dragons are on a ZW system? Wouldn’t that mean different lizard groups are somehow on a different chromosomal sex-determination system?

4. Wow.

5. Okay, that’s cool, but not really that relevant, so let’s try polyploidy, hybridization, and parthenogenesis.

6. Awesome, exactly what I was after.

7. *note price tag* *frustration*

8. *beg friend with current logins to the Sekrit Science Club* *thank friend profusely*

9. *read* Gosh. *read* Really? *read* How the hell do I interpret that fig- oh. *read*

10. *note time and number of essential things still remaining to do that day* *frustration*

12. *compile process* *post*

In a lengthy comment on my Chromosomal Radio post, commenter Geodykt pointed out that I am explicitly suggesting some fairly deep differences in communication style between the sexes, when previously I’ve been pretty unforgiving of articles designed around Decoding Woman Language or Man Language. I answered there- the bottom line reason I’m so down on the article I fisked is because it not only treats women as some sort of other species, but explicitly rests on the premise that the only form of meaningful interaction for a man with a girlfriend is sex, he’s entitled to sex, and the rest is just her screwing around to get stuff, but it deserves a longer treatment.

Yes, I do think there are meaningful and deep differences between men and women, some of which are no doubt rooted in biology, some of which are rooted in culture, and some of which are rooted in other aspects of socialization, like the way we effectively sort into two different camps of interaction from early childhood to puberty and then gingerly re-integrate. (I suspect this period combined with culture of birth is what creates single-gender “radio”- a long period of learned nonverbal signals and unspoken social mores that may not overlap at all.) The reason I’m so quick to question any and all products, books, articles, and the like that explicitly rest on the premise of “men and women are different, time to explain the differences so we can finally get something done” is that while it’s trivial to recognize that there ARE differences, the human urge to set things into neat categories leads to a tremendous amount of gender essentialism. It’s one thing to recognize that your wife/husband whoever is different from you in ways you may not understand, it’s another thing altogether to forget that you are close friends and you both speak English; the closer and more intimate the relationship, the more the right answer to a question or point of friction is not to figure out how the other person’s Man/Woman Nature is causing it, it’s to talk to them. Yes, communication can be difficult, especially when one or more of the people involved never really learned some advanced communication skills that a lot of people don’t because no one explicitly sets out to teach them, but making assumptions that turn out to be wrong is condescending at best and can be disastrous at worst.

This doesn’t just apply to relationships; a disturbing amount of the time, once you oh-so-bravely bring up the question of “are the sexes fundamentally different, perhaps in ways we don’t remotely understand”, the answer seems to be “yes and it’s biological and happens to line up really well with the gender paradigms of the 1950s”. To give an example, Larry Summers (late of the Obama administration) managed to get deposed as president of Harvard for remarking that the reason women are not found as often in higher levels of academics in math and science may be that women simply don’t tend to be as biologically equipped for math and science as men. He was pilloried for it.

From where I’m sitting, he deserved to be- but not because it was sexist in and of itself to suggest that men and women may be biologically different and even have (very) broadly different aptitudes across varying cognitive domains. It was for being a pure-and-simple sloppy thinker. YES, genetics and biology influence us across both temperament and personality; we should know this simply by the fact that we’ve managed to create different dog breeds that vary dramatically in behavior as much as they do in shape and form. However, humans are also the most profoundly cultural species on the planet; we literally require massive doses of cultural interaction to grow to adulthood and be sane and functional. To assume off the bat that a difference between human groups is genetic without seriously considering culture is just plain lazy as well as highly likely to lead anyone wrong.

No, he wasn’t wrong for the making the suggestion because it was sexist on its face- but to make such a suggestion without sitting down and pondering what exactly a person needs to do to achieve a high level of success in math and science was. For one, academic science requires a person to devote basically the entirety of their young adulthood to work, to the exclusion of much in the way of a family life- unless you can secure a partner willing to shoulder most of the load for you on the home front and be understanding about your relative absence. Does Larry Summers, or anyone else, think that there are no gender differences whatsoever in the pressure a man or a woman experiences to be the primary homemaker? Or, for that matter, in socialization to value career over family or vice versa? Or in remaining single to a certain age versus settling down at a certain age?

For that matter, he’s also off his nut if he genuinely thinks the only measure of your ability to succeed in academic math and science is your talent for math and science, even once you admit it’s also measured by your willingness to lock yourself in a laboratory until you’re at least thirty. I would invite anyone under this impression to walk up to someone on a university campus currently involved in trying to get tenure, or just retain their jobs with any prospect of career advancement, and tell them that success in academic science- tenure and the peer review system- is all about merit and that politics have nothing to do with it. I would also caution this person to pick a day when their subject is in good humor and more inclined to laugh in their face than to try and choke them with their shirt.

DO men and women differ broadly in their respective talents for math and science on a genetic basis? I have no idea. I do know that women rapidly achieved something much closer to parity of representation in another environment where you have to be scientifically inclined but the system is much less political and has much more defined endpoints for the “become a totally career-focused cavedweller” phase- medicine. You could continue to argue the point on the basis that medicine is less “mathy” and therefore not the same, and you might even be right, but the fact that Larry Summers apparently considered absolutely none of this before making a politically loaded statement means he deserves every bit as much contempt as any of his detractors who did nothing but shriek “SEXIST!!!” at any suggestion of biological differences between the sexes other than the obvious.

IQ testing and supposed cognitive differences between men and women, or for that matter among racial groups, suffer from a lot of similar problems, and other problems that have to do with the fact that while you can always be pretty sure that you’ve got your hands on discrete genetic differences between men and women, the same assumption is much less safe between racial groups. It’s well and good to presume that cognitive abilities and differing cognitive abilities among individuals, and perhaps among distinct genetic groups, exist. Good so far. It’s also fine to assume that there ARE some distinct genetic groupings even in a species as global and as inclined to intermix as humans. Also good so far. It’s an entirely other assumption that you can measure groups whose identification both in self and from outside is deeply culturally defined as though they represented genetically distinct groupings. “Black”, to pick an obvious example, describes the entire indigenous populations of the continents of Africa (which contains more genetic diversity within it than the rest of the world put together), Australia, which was genetically separate from the rest of the world for thousands of years, any and all mixtures thereof with any other population group on the planet that seems sufficiently melanistic, plus a completely unknown percentage of blends with other population groups that resulted from spending a couple hundred years as property with sex being one of the perks of ownership for a man. Latinos are even worse as a sample group, as the racial category exists specifically to describe an unknown blend of the entire indigenous gene pool of the Americas plus anything else, mostly European but not all.

It’s one thing to, say, measure the cognitive abilities of dog breeds, but when one of your “breeds” is “all shelter dogs of unknown history with black coats”, and another is “all other shelter dogs of unknown history with curly tails and erect ears”, and another might even be Border Collies with a twelve-generation pedigree, measuring them against one another as though they represented equally known and distinct genetic groupings will get you nowhere useful.

Compounding this difficulty is the nature of IQ testing itself, which tends to be spoken of as though it were a very known and consistent quantity but isn’t remotely. The traditional IQ test model, such as the Stanford-Binet, was designed with a very specific purpose in mind, which was *not* to give the tester a true assessment of the test-taker’s overall native intelligence- but rather to identify students that were deficient enough not to succeed academically with their peers. Not to scale all takers across all cognitive domains- to pick out children who, for whatever reason, could not succeed in school at their age level. Other tests were designed later for other reasons, but all of them until quite recently have focused on identifying *lack* of cognitive ability commensurate with whatever level of society/activity they would theoretically be participating in. Modern intelligence testing has produced a much broader variety of tests, some more and less “culture-neutral”, but they run into the problem that they are all massively inconsistent with each other. I’ve taken quite a few myself just to amuse myself, and apparently my own IQ varies as much as sixty points depending on which test you give me and what the author thought was a good measure of overall cognitive ability. Due to the variety of tests and historical practices, scores from children, adults, and many different tests are all too often treated as equivalent in the data from broad surveys of IQ results across the world…

If you present to me the idea that there may be genetically based differences in cognitive capacity, I’d say you were stating the obvious. If you then expound there may be measurable differences in cognitive capacity among distinct human genetic groups, I’d say go on. If you THEN tell me that the evidence for a specific theory of measurable difference between groups lies in results gained from studies in which the groups may not be perceptibly genetically distinct, the testing of differing methodology and not necessarily designed for the purpose used, and the results extremely variable not only across tests but from one test to another in the same subject, I’d tell you to go back to the fucking drawing board- and maybe make some equally devoted efforts to develop some hypotheses related to the common variable we CAN see and understand to be very powerful- culture.

In the end I’m in fundamental agreement with Eric Raymond even if we have rather radically different outlooks on The Bell Curve; it is extremely likely to be the case that there are differences in various kinds of capacities among different genetic groups and among men and women, and it will gain us nothing to slink around this idea in fear of what we might find out those differences might be, and perhaps much to find out what really is truth.

However, I think I’ve got pretty ample reason to put any such claims under the microscope, because as obvious is the truth that biology affects temperament and cognition and these things are heritable is the temptation out of bigotry, laziness, or honest good intention to lay a template of expectation over the whole investigation that obscures and renders worthless the results more often than not. For all that, the power and prevalence of socialization, deliberate and not, is every bit as obvious- and should always be investigated with equal rigor.

*If the author thought it was abstract reasoning and reading comprehension, I’m a genius. If the author thought it was math, I’m average. If the author thought it was spatial reasoning, I’m retarded- or, sorry, deficient. For reasons of language and cultural barrier, most “culture-neutral” IQ tests tend to be built on spatial reasoning. Perhaps we can expect equal degrees of variance among varying cultures and racial groups for spatial reasoning ability and perhaps not, but I’m pretty fucking leery of equating it with general intelligence. Maybe I just don’t want to be stupid?

Since long pieces where I don’t know entirely what I’m going to put in and what I’m going to leave out don’t get along well with raid nights where the bulk of my evening is going to be devoted to geeky social things, a brief little Random Science Lesson regarding a pet peeve that got woken up and growling again today.

It’s a fairly common thing to say that all fetuses are “female by default” until they’re masculinized into boy babies by uterine exposure to testosterone. I’ve even used this phrasing myself before (though not again now that the peeve has reached full maturity) when attempting to explain how male genitals and female genitals are structures derived from the same tissues that only differentiate after that uterine hormonal exposure, which is one reason sex-change surgery has been refined so successfully for male-to-female transsexuals, at least in terms of retaining sexual pleasure. It’s also a lie-to-children- an oversimplification of the actual biology that’s useful because it’s easily graspable. It also has a point where it stops being useful, as illustrated today when I had an epic facepalm seeing this used as an assertion that femaleness is an example of neoteny.

Fetuses aren’t female until they’re masculinized, they’re neuters until they’re masculinized or feminized. It’s just that we associate maleness so completely with external sexual traits that we tend to read an apparent lack of external traits as feminine rather than as neutral. The external genitalia of a fetus that has not yet undergone sexual differentiation are neither labia and clitoris nor penis; they’re just the substrate. The tubes that will become the urinary output system, sperm delivery system, fallopian tubes, and other internal and external plumbing are still just Wolffian and Mullerian ducts and haven’t had their destiny delivered yet.

The fetus in this state isn’t female- being female requires all sorts of additional development, just stuff that isn’t visible on an ultrasound. What it actually is in biological terms is much closer to being primitive- the basic reproductive structure upon which placental mammals build in a very complex fashion but many other vertebrates barely elaborate on at all. If you’re a bird, fish, or reptile, which gender you aren’t isn’t so much a complicated anatomical statement as it is minor variation on whether the same basic tube setup delivers large gametes or small gametes. This is why it’s possible for so many fish species to be more than one sex over the course of their lives; when the only changes that need to be made are which hormones do what and whether the gametes are large or small, changing sexes as advantages change is an entirely sensible evolutionary approach. The biological definition of “male” and “female” itself, as when applied to plants and fungus and every other life form on earth that comes in two sexes, lies solely on the question of gamete size. Everything else is elaboration.

Fetuses are not “female by default”. They’re tetrapods by default.

An interesting Livescience article on a series of studies about Oxytocin. I’d be more tempted to rip harder on the usual sophomoric shoving of the research into polarizing frames that make for a better narrative, but the researchers themselves come across quite well.

The framing of the article is that oxytocin, which is often referred to as the “love” hormone because it’s associated with things like warm parent-child interactions and equally warm interactions between sexual partners, isn’t as fuzzy and peaceful and happy as it looks due its also being associated with increased defensive aggression on behalf of perceived groupmates.

Now, my reaction and the reaction of many of those who think similarly to me is “No duh, love isn’t just about warm fuzzy feelings, it’s about protecting your loved ones”. The article refers to this other effect of oxytocin as the hormone’s “dark side”, and of course I wouldn’t- it doesn’t seem to me there’s anything “dark” about being willing to defend your friends and loved ones. That is, of course, the framing. However, I get the impression the researchers made the series of experiments specifically to address this rather common public perception of oxytocin; it’s unfortuantely too common to think of it as a warm fuzzy “love” thing that we’d all be better off if we had more of, and demonstrating that it’s really more accurately a “bonding” hormone and that bonds have other implications can only be a good thing.

What REALLY interests me, however, is that the subjects of the defensive-aggression study were exclusively male- a measure that I agree with, inasmuch that if the hormone does have different effects on different sexes, their data could have been thoroughly muddied. One thing that a certain breed of feminist and/or liberal likes to bring up is that women produce much more oxytocin than men do, and follow that up with an implication that men would therefore be better off if they had more of it. Women have more “love” hormone, therefore women are gentler and more peaceful.

DOES it have a different effect in females? I really want to see a follow up. On the one hand it might seem intuitive that only men have the “group defensive aggression” response… but on the other hand, I can’t help but think of the way we use the phrase “mother bear”.

One of the more interesting threads of discussion to evolve out of the previous two posts touching on religion is a discussion of faith, specifically the definition in Hebrews 11:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

This is, I rush to point out, going to be incredibly out of context with the rest of the passage, which has an entirely different intended point than the one I’m about to expound on, but it did lead to a commenter pointing out that everybody operates on implicit assumptions based on things they do not see and cannot be directly experienced. I attempted to use an analogy involving math and, as Roberta pointed out gently, managed to be quite spectacularly wrong in every respect of my example while still managing to come near a reasonable point. (Neat trick that, I’ll have to remember it.) As a caution, I am about to proceed to one of those pieces where I’m not entirely sure I make sense to me, but ultimately I decided trying and confusing a lot of people (again including me) was better than not trying.

I’ve made the point at great length before that what we perceive with our senses isn’t so much a direct reflection of reality as it is a representation of reality tailored by our brains to bring the useful and relevant aspects of reality to our attention. Much of reality-as-we-live in it is experienced by us only through inference; instruments we make built on principles we’ve inferred through careful experiment perceive things like, say, ultraviolet light for us, and the entire process of science- the study of natural law- is a process of seeing “the shape of things unseen”, i.e. the consistent principles of natural law that dictate the shapes that everything takes.

A river flowing down a mountain is, on several levels, a map of things unseen: on one level, it’s a map of the surface of the mountain, whose shape dictates which paths the water flows down. On another level, it’s a force diagram with a little fluid dynamics as well; the shape of the mountain’s surface dictates which paths the water takes, but gravity dictates that the path must always be in a certain direction (towards the lowest surface of Earth it can reach), and the force of the water also over time will dictate the shape of the mountain as it wears its paths deeper. The laws of motion are not seen in that F = m*a is not represented anywhere, but can be inferred from the fact that the flowing water, and everything else with mass, moves in predictable ways. The water will only move through spaces that are not ruled out by natural law; it can move in any direction permitted and will move in many directions down any surface, but will never flow up unless another force is introduced and also will not flow straight outward. There are many paths down, but down is the only option due to gravity. When the landscape limits the space of possible paths for the water by eliminating most of the possible forces on the water, it forms a puddle and stays that way.

Evolution works in much the same way, in that life will diversify but will only do so in ways and shapes dictated by the possibilities available given the constraints of natural law. You will find a very large variety of body shapes in an ocean, but depending on what the ocean animal itself does, they will have certain tendencies to converge- toward, for example, a torpedo-eseque shape with control surfaces for a free-swimming animal. What you will not see despite the range of diversity is any animal shaped like a horse, because that shape is optimized for frequent fast, long motion on a flat surface with no support for its body weight other than its skeleton.

Ocean life may “flow” evolutionarily in any direction, just so long as its path includes an ability to manipulate its position in water, an ability to gain carbon and energy from the resources in water, and an ability to carry out its reproduction in water. Each time in fossil history that a lineage has transitioned from marine life to land life or back again, the shapes the resulting animals take tell us something about the nature of water and land respectively, just as the flowing water tells us something about the nature of the landscape. When conditions sharply narrow the range of possibilities for life, diversity narrows accordingly; rainforests feature libraries of diversity so vast it may never be fully categorized.

The resulting picture in water terms may look something like this:

A deep-sea thermal vent may only feature a few species of archaebacteria that can handle and profit off the heat and extreme chemical conditions. In terms of water flow, more like this:

Likewise, the way that human cultures and societies “flow” across the shape of history also take on shapes that are defined by forces shaping the forms of the possible. Humans adopt profound diversities of music and art, but the shapes that currency takes tend to be highly defined, because it has strict conditions for being able to function in that role. Cultures vary hugely and diversely in their taboos and expressions of “manners”, but they all tend to include a relatively short subset list of items within the “don’ts”- murder, theft, assault. There may be specific social contexts in which killing someone is considered acceptable, but there is no such thing as a society in which casually killing someone because they annoyed you is not forbidden. It is not possible to have a stable society of humans which does not include certain rules, though there may be and likely will be many, many other rules- it’s just that some have much greater ranges of possible variation than others. The nature of the directly acting forces have sources both concrete- the biology of our brains and bodies- and abstract, such as the consequences of abstract intelligence and the forms that it itself creates and manipulates.

Atheists and believers both believe in the substance of things unseen. With respect, I would not define that as “faith”, so much as an acceptance that our knowledge of the nature of our reality is inherently limited. The distinction is that the believers believe that both the forces shaping humanity and its behavior- including morality- and the forces writeable in natural law have a single source and a single, intelligent author and intent. That, and the belief that that force is even partially knowable in the same way natural law is partially knowable, is what I would identify as faith.

Since I seem to have occupied most of my day with dog forum discussion, specifically as to closed registries in purebred dogs, I might as well adapt what I’ve spent my day actually writing given as I have no other ideas. Suffice to say this began as an argument over whether or not closed registries in kennel clubs are a good idea for purebred dogs. In almost all kennel clubs with a few exceptions, after a collection of dogs recognized by the breed club as being that breed is deemed sufficiently large, the registry is then closed and no dog not descended from those individuals will be recognized as being of that breed and acceptable to register or breed from with the club’s blessing. Roll that up with a question I was asked but never got around to answering because the answer was too long and complicated for IRC, and we get postfodder.

We’ve gone through some unfortunate periods in human history where someone thought it would be a bright idea to breed humans as selectively as some of us breed animals, in order to “improve” the human race overall. Those same periods of history tend to be marked by people pointing out this is a profoundly inhumane and unethical idea, occasionally with festive periods where the question goes to a shooting war, but it’s not often pointed out that it’s not only inhumane and unethical, but also a factually wrong idea that would not, even if eugenicists were given total control over human breeding, actually result in a better grade of human.

The first and most obvious reason is one I bring up every time I tear apart yet another bad sexual selection study, which is that the assumption any animal represents the “best” mate choice for the fitness of a potential mate, and animals choose among grades of partners for the best they can find to have them is inherently flawed. Fitness is survival and reproduction of children and grandchildren, and the definition of the most fit genes and gene combinations changes depending on future circumstances. The physically largest and most powerful bodies are great for intense intrasexual competition or defense, but terrible for famine conditions. A metabolism that hangs on to every calorie is fabulous for famine conditions, sometimes detrimental in times of plenty. “Best” is highly contextual and the future cannot be predicted, therefore natural populations usually feature a large variety of stable polymorphisms, or ways in which genes can vary; if “best” didn’t change often, natural populations would lose variety quickly as any sort of consistent direct selective pressure or advantage tends to have quite dramatic results.

The second reason lies in both the ways genes work and our ability to accurately identify what genes are doing what, and what traits are associated with genes and how. We can’t breed animals or people like we can build cars to do specific things, because we invented cars and build them from the ground up with a complete understanding of what each part does and how it works with other parts to have effects beyond that part’s direct function. We wouldn’t look at a car and point to the engine or wheels and identify it as the “speed part” because we know better and understand that a car’s potential for speed is an emergent property of the way its parts work as a system, but many people speak of, say, intelligence, as though it were as singular and granular as eye color. Intelligence is an observable and highly relevant trait to us, as speed is to a car, but we know very little as to where it actually comes from and what bits do what, let alone how to reliably breed for it as a trait. When we breed a dog for “working ability”, we’re actually throwing massive suites of genes together in hopes that the result will be as functional or moreso as the two original individuals, even though we have no idea how the “working ability” parts fit together or how they inherit and in what kinds of discrete units they inherit.

Further complicating things is the human tendency to think of DNA in general and genomes in particular as being like blueprints, because that’s an easy analogy that fits well with how we design and create complex things. It’s not really like that at all, however; no matter how much of individual gene sequences we come to understand, we will probably never be able to “read” someone’s DNA and be able to get a reliable picture of the corresponding individual. This is because genes interact with each other and with cues from the external environment constantly; they come with laundry lists of if-then conditionals. A gene is not like a part in a machine, but rather more like a worker in a factory, whose behavior changes based on the people around him, the conditions he’s working under, and a number of other factors.

To extend the analogy, possibly to torturous degree, let’s take a hypothetical factory worker and call him Gene. Under most conditions, Gene’s job doesn’t change much and he does his job in the same way, but if his co-worker Mary who is a better machinist than he is is there, he lets Mary do some jobs that he had been doing and maybe shifts his own focus to supporting Mary. If Bob is there Gene can slack off, because Bob makes Gene’s job completely redundant. If neither Bob, Mary, nor a long list of other co-workers are there and Gene is alone with his supervisor and his wife left him that week, Gene shoots the supervisor. Unfortunately, no one outside of the Analogy Factory can communicate with anyone within it, and the windows are only open on the second Sunday of years ending in “4″, so the odds are excellent that no one outside will ever know that Gene shot the supervisor or why the supervisor wasn’t being shot before, and in fact are only aware of the situation at all because of the chaos it causes.

This is how most genetic diseases work: they only express in the disease way under certain conditions relating to the rest of the genome they’re in, and even then often environmental pressures are also involved. Genetic diseases that work as simply as gene for blue eyes = blue eyes are selected out within a few generations, because direct selective pressure can apply to them. (The exceptions, like Huntington’s chorea, usually manage to survive because they don’t strike until after an individual’s breeding career is mostly over.) Most of the time, whatever deleterious way they can express doesn’t happen because they’re in a genetic environment that inhibits or doesn’t provoke it.

When you breed from a closed gene pool so that no variety beyond that which is initially present in a low number of selected individuals, every time you eliminate an individual from the gene pool, you eliminate a few of the environments and conditions under which a gene that has deleterious effects under conditions you can’t possibly guess can find itself. If a very fine working dog that exemplifies what people are breeding for is bred very widely and he contains a gene that does something horrible under certain circumstances, that seeds that particular gene around very widely along with whatever genes make him wonderful. As genetic diversity slowly narrows- and it always does in a closed system, it’s just a matter of how fast or slow- that gene gets more and more opportunities to express its Mr. Hyde side as the number of different conditions it can find itself in narrows. And if you ever *do* get the chance to find out which gene is doing it and under what conditions, your chance to either eliminate the gene or increase the number of genes in the population that can render it safe is long since past.

This is, incidentally, exactly the same reason why breeding for particular traits like canine working ability DOES work; you take genes that do specific things you want under certain conditions and raise the odds of them expressing in a way you’re aiming for by narrowing the range of conditions they can find themselves in. You get more disease and more instability by the exact same mechanism by which you get more capacity to work with a human shepherd or a better tracker- by artificially lowering genetic diversity. Further complicating the picture is the issue that genes can and usually do do more than one thing, and sometimes they can have a very useful Dr. Jekyll side to match their Mr. Hyde side; the same variation of the same gene, to choose an ironic example, may both predispose you to Alzheimer’s and enhance your memory before the disease sets in, which it may not anyway. (It also may not give you a great memory.) If you’re selecting for traits, you inevitably include some Jekyll/Hyde genes, and your ability to identify them usually comes only in hindsight.

You can’t produce supermen because there is no “best” that doesn’t change with circumstance, and you can’t even produce them by an artificially imposed definition because the flaws in your supermen will magnify by exactly the same mechanism as their enhanced strengths. You can only produce a more polarized gene pool, not a “better” one.

Sorry for the lack of substantive content this week; between chores and various hobby-related things (Kang resuming her show career and some game stuff) taking up more time than they usually do, there hasn’t been a whole hell of a lot of time to muse and post in.

So from a question Phlegmmy asked me in IRC, here’s a bit of my Bill Nye routine. The question being, do animals get STDs, and if not why not?

They do. Part of the reason we don’t hear much about it is that “sexually transmitted disease” is something we think of as a very discrete category, but it’s not really that way in nature; we think of them as a defined class of ailments because we’re deeply concerned with the kinds of trouble we can get in screwing around, but most STDs are essentially fluid-borne diseases that may or may not have sexual contact as their primary transmission route. AIDS, for example, began as functionally a blood-borne disease that could be transmitted sexually- though a few decades is more than enough time for a virus to mutate and take greater advantage of a very successful way to propagate.

The other part of the reason is we really have little reason to notice or investigate STDs outside our own species unless it’s having some kind of economic impact on us, or is having enough of an impact on a species that it threatens their survival AS a species. We tend to think of science as a nearly limitless sprawling body of knowledge, but the truth is there are a huge number of areas in which we know almost nothing because those areas just aren’t really very relevant to humans. The science of scent and smell is one such area- our body of knowledge on the science behind how this sense works is incredibly primitive compared to our knowledge of light and sound, because smell just isn’t terribly relevant to a primate. We only noticed how ignorant we were when smell became relevant as a way of detecting illegal drugs and explosives- and people seeking to create artificial noses as good as, say, a dog’s found there was no way to even begin because they had no idea how scent could be modeled or how it was being processed in the first place. Animal parasites and diseases are another such thing- unless it’s a disease of something domesticated and economically and emotionally important to us, or a species we’re trying to save, we simply have no reason to go looking.

For this reason, if you want to know about animal STDs, you should go talk to the folks for whom it IS economically relevant- like horse breeders, cattle breeders, and dog and cat breeders. Knowledgeable breeders concerned about the health of their stock and the animals in general usually demand a clean veterinary bill of health to make sure they’re not putting their stud or queen at risk; the only disease that has much publicity outside the stockmen themselves is brucellosis, a bacterial-caused ailment that causes abortion and infertility in some mammals, since that one is contractable by humans.

The ecological vulnerability of native Australian species in general means that they’ve been the main public face of wild STDs, as koalas are under significant existential threat from chlamydia and that species’ version of AIDS. A particularly strange and tragic case is the Tasmanian devil, who are also under serious threat from a strange cancer that is actually transmissible from devil to devil- without any underlying viral cause at all. In addition to being a unique case of a contagious cancer, it’s also effectively a sexually transmitted disease- the cancer mostly occurs on the devils’ faces, and biting at the face is part of devil courting practices. (Tasmanian devil sex is every bit as violent and strange as their reputation would suggest.)

From time to time I’ve seen reference by the sort of religious individual inclined to see God’s punitive hand in nature to the supposed uniqueness of STDs to humans to be punishment for our promiscuity. It’s not: sex is an efficient way for a bug to propagate, so like all the other efficient ways, it is widespread in nature. We’re just so much more interested in our own genitals and sniffles that we don’t notice unless we have compelling reason to.

*Not the same virus or bacteria that affects humans, but genus Chlamydia is a group of bacteria that became professionally parasitic ages back in their evolution and it has many members. Immunodeficiency viruses are also more common than we’d like.

Courtesy of FarmDad via Gunblogger Conspiracy, I ran into one of the coolest websites I’ve seen in quite a long while. It isn’t the usual “bacon, guns, beer, boobs” model that normally piques my cool-o-meter, so if you’re looking for the low-bar I usually set around here, keep moving.

Instead, the site is a travelogue of a Russian biker-chick’s travels through Chernobyl. For fun. No, really. The English is a little broken, but perfectly readable, but unfortunately the site exists as one of those “This is here for me ’cause I think it’s cool” things, as disclaimed on the first page, and is prone to not loading quite as reliably as the for-profit parts of the web. The descriptions of the environment, the places still standing, and the few brave or stupid inhabitants still in the area are compelling. And the exquisitely refreshing part where the author realizes that a) not all radiation is created equal, and b) what kinds and levels of doses will do what to you instead of just ZOMG TEH READIATIONS! doesn’t hurt either. The pictures, interesting in and of themselves simply because of the magnitude of what took place, capture an amazing open-air time capsule to 1986, when Communism was not hyperbole thrown around every other sentence, and Thought Police really did exist, willing and capable to murder someone for having the wrong opinions with the full blessing of the state.

There’s some light explanation on what went down in the days surrounding the disaster, and though nothing one couldn’t pick up from a history book, the boots-on-the-ground point of view brings a lot to the party. Naturally, going sight-seeing through one of the worst nuclear disasters in history isn’t the safest of hobbies, but the author knows her stuff, knows how to stay safe, and to my mind has a very healthy attitude to the whole endeavor. I may not ever find myself in Russia, but the notion of taking a trip like that, to a place so utterly and completely empty, and yet so potentially dangerous, is fascinating.

The full link, in the event that the site is inaccessible for a while, is http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-land-of-the-wolves/author.html . If it’s down, save that link for later, it’s well worth catching when it’s up.

From Boing Boing, a rather hilarious graphic that I’m pretty sure I can rack up a full Bingo in within six comments of exchange with its target:

Click for big.

To be clear, in case anyone is confused, I have absolutely no problem with the basic concept of evolutionary psychology. I fully agree that the bit where we’re rational beings is a hell of a lot more recent than the bit where are social primates, and I absolutely think that that evolutionary background shaped how we think and feel, up to and including biologically based differences in sex, gender, and sexuality. What I have a massive problem with is how revoltingly often that the end “evolutionary psychology” is put to is in constructing ad-hoc just-so stories that justify their creators’ preconceptions and preferences, usually with extremely little true understanding of how the mechanics of evolution actually work, and even less attempt to address cultural forces and check their hypotheses against and across human history and different cultures. The distinct odor of bullshit wafting from such things usually comes with some common telltales:

- Definition of fitness as the degree to which something is sexually satisfying to males. Fitness is defined as number of matings, not number of children reaching reproductive age. The influence of the sexual preferences of females will be often be assumed to be insignificant, if they don’t actually suffer fitness loss from mating.

- The social structure of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers is assumed to have been functionally identical to the social structure of the author or authors’ own society immediately prior to the perceived advent of “political correctness”. Extra bonus: an assumption of a nuclear family with a single breadwinner, which is extremely modern by the standards of known history and still not the worldwide norm.

- Assumption of “mate quality” along a linear scale of best to worst, with minimal acknowledgment that wild gene pools are full of stable genetic diversity for the very reason that the definition of “best” is highly contextual, an effect only compounded by the scale of time.

- Assumptions about Paleolithic hunter-gatherers with minimal to nonexistent supporting examination of modern hunter-gatherers.

- Assumption that widespread cultural variations reflect ways in which human behavior has become “unnatural” rather than representing a warning sign to check the assumption that the behaviors in question are particularly hardwired.

It is true that science is not politically correct. It does not follow that science therefore supports “un-PC” conclusions instead. Science more often offers minimal real conclusions for our cultural wars and bugaboos, or a completely nonintuitive conclusion, as science exists in the first place to counter the heavy sway narrative logic and confirmation bias have on human thought.

Well ZOMG and color me shocked. They fired up the LHC something fierce just the other day, and faith and begorrah we’re still here. So let’s just recap all this, hmm? First the world was going to be destroyed by black holes and dragons when they turned it on. Nothing happened, aside from a rather expensive lesson in “make sure you connected it properly.” Then it was supposed to really be killed by black holes when they turned on the second beam. Still ticking along, amazingly enough. Finally, in the only part where I could even remotely buy there being some danger, we were all supposed to be instantly (or in 14 years, depends on which flawed math you look at) sucked into a doomvortex of super-death when they crossed the streams.

Seeing as every molecule in my body did not simultaneously explode at the speed of light, I’m going to ask again: Where’s my $500?