Atomic Nerds

In a post about the affability of manatees, Peter asks:

. Fascinating creatures . . . I’d love to know how they evolved, and what particular ecological niche they came to occupy.

OK!

Manatees and dugongs are Sirenians, an old order of placental mammals that has its first roots in Paenungulata, one of the earliest groups of placental mammals to diversify away. It’s a quirky clade in that there are only three groups alive today that descend from this group- the Sirenians, the Proboscideans (elephants), and the Hyracoideans, or hyraxes. The Sirenians and the Proboscideans are the more closely related of the living groups, and are grouped together along with another extinct group in the Tethytheria, which evolved along the shores of the Tethys ocean that existed between the Gondwana and Laurasian supercontinents, around where the Indian ocean and India itself are now.

What would became Sirenia started wandering into the water at around the same time some other famous aquatic mammals did, during the early Eocene, the period about ten million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs that can also be described as “1001 Nifty Things You Can Do With A Mammal”, evolutionarily speaking.

The Eocene was a period somewhat warmer than now, but more crucially, also featured a much more moderate temperature gradient from pole to pole- it might not have been dramatically warmer overall, but there was far less truly cold water, almost no ice, and there were far more shallow seas between the continents, which had not yet drifted all that far apart. The Sirenians were, effectively speaking, simply grazing animals that found good fodder in rivers and these shallow seas; like the cetaceans, they started off as robust four-legged animals that spent most of their time in the water (much like modern hippos, ecologically if not genetically speaking) and slowly lost their ability to function on land, as well as hind limbs, over time. Between their choice of habitat and their dense, heavy skeletons, the Sirenian fossil record is one of the smoother examples of major anatomical transition out there.

Global cooling was not kind to order Sirenia, and with the exception of Steller’s sea cow (which seems to have become extinct in short order after its official discovery, because mariners treated it exactly as the name implies) the extant Sirenians were reduced to a small slice of their original diversity, eating seagrasses in tropical oceans and river grasses in rivers and estuaries.

So, there you have it: they’re grazing animals that evolved out of a process of following the fodder, during a period when “into the water” seemed like a really good idea to more than one mammal group, and the niche they fill is, essentially, that of legless, amiable hippos. Were it not for the invention of the extended ocean journey for hominids, and subsequently the powerboat, it would be a pretty idyllic life.

Although it was inspired by the much ado about nothing, or should have been, that was Rick Perry mandating the Human Papillomavirus vaccine for girls.

Now, I shouldn’t have to say that much about HPV. It’s a ridiculously common disease in the American population, it is not sexually transmitted only, and the reason it’s mandated for girls but not boys (though it’s now approved for boys) is that it tends to cause mild to no symptoms for men and symptoms ranging all the way up to fatal cancers for women. The political motivations against mandating it do include the libertarian argument that government shouldn’t be able to mandate vaccines (a wookie hair too far for me), but tend to have a lot more to do with the idea that giving girls* HPV vaccine somehow sends them a “message” that premarital sex or casual sex is inevitable or OK and parents shouldn’t be mandated to do that.

This is not just about HPV vaccine, though the fact that it can cause fatal cancer, is not curable with a round of antibiotics, and is ridiculously common should be but somehow isn’t argument enough for why vaccinating people while they’re young with it should be relatively uncontroversial. This is also about abstinence-only sex education, and the cultural acceptability in general of any sort of talk of sex whatsoever when kids who are sexually mature but still kids comes up.

This is about the fact that unless she actually dies or joins a convent, one prospect any parent would do anything they could to prevent and one of which is very rare, every single daughter goes on to become a sexually active adult woman. It won’t matter if she goes on to become a “slut” or a woman who marries and stays with her first partner, sex is going to be a part of her future and she’s going to need to know something about it. Family planning? Critical part of her life, married or unmarried, and not everyone is lucky enough to have both the relationship and financial strength to leave it up to fate. STDs? Unless she’s a virgin marrying a virgin and both of them were fortunate enough to avoid other ways of contracting the disease in question (and any pathogen that can be transmitted by sex can be transmitted by blood and sometimes other fluids), and the odds of that are low, low, low, STDs are her problem as well as the problem of “sluts” and junkies and all those bad, irresponsible people who deserve what they get.

Even avoiding the worst potential consequences of both, sex and sex within the context of relationships are not things that come as natural, innate knowledge once you have formed a bond, sanctified or otherwise. Like many other complex mammals, humans have to learn sex, and vastly more than that they have to learn relationships and how sex fits within them, which goes way, WAY beyond “not unless you’re married”. It includes what your partners (including spouses) do and do not have the right or the within-the-bounds-of-reason to expect of you. It includes what’s within the bounds of reason to expect of them, and of sex itself. It includes how everything works beyond “insert tab A into slot B” (and if you think it really is strictly that simple, either you’re a virgin or I pity your partner). It includes what’s normal and what isn’t, and what can and should be done to look at and potentially alter the isn’t.

Here’s another home truth: your kid is going to find out the big secret, that sex is a lot of fun, because they’d have to be raised at the center of the earth with a nerve-blocking agent not to, and they’re going to find out probably long before they actually have any. They’re also going to find out something else no matter what you do: that adults lie, and that adults especially lie, all the time and often in comically grotesque ways, about sex. If you want to send your kids messages about what’s okay and what isn’t, then send them- and if those messages are dishonest, what your kid is ALSO going to find out, much sooner than you hope, is that YOU lie. With that discovery, every single other message you have ever given your child, explicitly or implicitly, is going to be questioned with that very thing you assumed was far too inadequate to handle the details of sex and their inevitable future with it: their judgment. If adults and authority figures can’t be trusted, who can? The people who’ve never been taught anything but what they’ve learned by trial and error? Bullshit facts, logic, and inferences are far easier to believe when you have absolutely nothing to check against.

Here are some other things that teenagers can learn about sex aside from “it feels great” (culture and experience with parts of their own bodies told them that), “it could have life-changing consequences” (culture, and you, taught them that whether you chose to share the details or not- culture won’t), and “it’s legitimized by love and relationships”.

- Sex can be disappointing and generally anticlimactic, even if you get off.
- Men won’t always every single time want to have sex. Women won’t always every single time only want to to please a man.
- Sometimes sex doesn’t come naturally, and it doesn’t mean you’re a freak or a failure as a human being if you have premature ejaculation, don’t get hard or wet even if you want sex, or have vaginismus.
- Good sex doesn’t mean a relationship is good and you’ve found The One. Conversely, even sex with someone who is arguably The One won’t always be good.
- Sometimes things go bad even after there was sex and that doesn’t mean you’re a catastrophic failure of a human being either for choosing that person or for having had sex with them, or that you have to save the relationship no matter what if there was sex.
- The opposite sex isn’t psychic and doesn’t have any more of a script or a scoresheet than you do. If an individual member of the opposite sex acts like they do they’re full of shit.
- Sex does not get less messy no matter how “right” it is.
- You can do everything right and something could still go wrong. That’s just the way life is. Try to do it right anyway, your good intentions won’t protect you if you do something wrong out of sheer ignorance.
- Sometimes someone can make you feel great and still be terrible for you. “Wants to have sex with you” is not a tell for this condition.

No matter how strict your morals are, there is NOTHING about ignorance that will make adult life any easier for anyone who holds them, nor is there any person or process that will impart knowledge with adulthood. Education may be difficult, embarrassing, inadequate, and sometimes contradictory, but so is every single other complicated or controversial thing about adult life- if you are worried about other people telling lies, get in there and tell the truth first. Lying to yourself about what will happen to your kids- they WILL have sex, and it WILL be with imperfect people or a even, “best case”, an imperfect person- will only defeat your goals before you even begin.

*The reason why the CDC would first move to give girls but not boys the vaccine first, and then expand it to both, is that girls and women suffer the most from HPV and thus were given priority in studies to determine efficacy- there was a sound research reason to separate the sexes to figure out if the vaccine really worked or not.

Now unpack the political/cultural logic to objecting to girls, but not boys, receiving both sex education and vaccination against sexually transmitted diseases.

a)Men are sexual animals, boys will discover their penises early no matter what we do and need more detailed guidance, and it is the job of girls who will later become women to resist them, and women are the gatekeepers of sex.

b)Boys and later men are therefore the holders or gatekeepers of sexual knowledge who will, by default, later instruct their girlfriends and wives when the sex they owe the men comes around to its proper time at last.

I can see no way this could end badly.

Severe osteomyelitis. Essentially he has an infected face, with about three big pockets of infection.

Which… is not good news, but is better news than the alternative from the first x-ray we got, which was osteosarcoma. This sucks for him and will require a lot of shuttling back and forth from the vet for strong antibiotic injections, and may at some point involved draining one of the pockets, but it is treatable and not a terminal diagnosis as the bone cancer would have been.

Never been happier to hear “severe bone infection” in my life.

Cat still sick, though no worse. Dog either very pregnant and entering final stretch pre-whelping or doing a bravura performance of a false pregnancy, which was planned and would be much more welcome right this second without all the other stuff. Stingray out of town, building war machine, friend coming into town, meeting dogs for potential puppysitting and keeping me from going out of my mind. Chickens with their heads cut off may be more philosophical.

Content if and when I am able and ready.

Let it burn. They’ve worked hard to earn every last cinder. Whatever doesn’t burn earned staying.

Today has been both very busy and kind of terrible. On the upside we successfully got one vehicle’s A/C repaired, on the very down Zydeco is significantly sicker, now on yet another stronger antibiotic, and sounding like an extra from a zombie movie. Whatever idiot was on the phone at the vet’s office yesterday that turned me away with “sorry, booked, not unless it’s a dire emergency” is likely going to catch it in the neck later though, judging by how the docs reacted to him and how far they seem to be trying to go out of their way to make this, and him, right.

No time. No focus. I’m going to go away and have several adult beverages now.

Update for the influx of VFTP sympathy (thanks, Tam. We appreciate it. )
We’re not quite at looking at having to say goodbye just yet, he just went into a downhill dive after what should have been a much more routine procedure.

He went through a dental to remove a rotten canine, and what it looks like happened is the bacteria, which we thought were more knocked down than they were and turned out to be resistant to the antibiotic he was originally sent home with, bunkered up in the pocket where the tooth was and made a hard pushback. We got another antibiotic- in large chewable tabs his gums hurt too much to chew and therefore we had to pill him- and that was supposed to set him back right.

We got the second antibiotic, and gave it a chance to work, right as he had the opportunity to get Emphatically Not Better over the weekend. He went from congested to gurgling breathing and sneezing gore and the side of his nose started bulging alarmingly. Then we get to Monday and I guess I should have been a lot more aggressive with miss not-an-emergency.

So, on Tuesday I was rather frayed to hear that the reason I had stopped being able to pill him was not his cleverness in holding the pill on the back of his tongue, but that his nose and throat are so swollen now he couldn’t swallow it, so basically I was trying to choke my cat to death in the name of helping him.

So now he has a liquid antibiotic the vet swears up down and sideways is excellent on dental/facial infections, is not usually prescribed to animals, and which we had to fetch from a human pharmacy, and the clinic is calling every day for updates and to remind me I can bring him in anytime.

He seems maybe a bit better today? I dunno. But that’s the Story Thus Far.

Evolution is a process of change, mostly as a process of adaptation. Any amount of direct selective pressure will, over the course of generations, act on small differences or genes occurring at low rates with quite a lot of power. Most evolutionary changes are about adaptation, and for a long time evolutionary theorists thought that almost all of them save for freaky population events or things tightly bound by developmental constraints were adaptive changes.

Motoo Kimura advanced the concept that at the molecular level, most mutations are neither adaptive nor maladaptive, but neutral in overall effect, and over time this both became accepted (neutral selection theory) and folded into the larger body of evolutionary theory; you’ll still run into the occasional creationist claiming that Kimura overthrew Darwinism, but modern theorists simply see it as giving a much stronger role to drift- and a much larger pool of genetic “parts” that evolution can work with without dire consequence to the organism- than previously thought. Adaptation still drives the bulk of evolutionary changes we can see, but other forces are more active in creating and maintaining (or eliminating) diversity than previously thought.

Still, attempting to make sense of features of organisms by assuming a positive adaptive value is still the automatic first place people tend to start. Some features are obvious consequences of other processes- like vestigial remnants of limbs on now-legless animals, or the difficult and painful births that human mothers must suffer through. Most usually don’t deign to transparently explain themselves in a way intuitive to a great ape no matter how advanced.

The problem of the monthlies that human women must go through is one that has puzzled theorists for quite awhile, and for which all manner of adaptation explanations have been proposed and knocked down through testing.

Menstruation itself is actually common in mammal species that are reasonably big and complex; the process doesn’t refer to the shedding of blood and tissue through the vagina, but the cycle of building a thick pad of endometrial tissue inside the uterus and then discarding it cyclically*. Most animals that menstruate do “covert” menstruation, which is reabsorbing the tissues rather than shedding them; what humans and a few of their nearest relatives do with the vaginal bleeding is “overt” menstruation. (Even overt menstruation is not even close to complete loss, though- humans are the heaviest bleeders and we still reabsorb about 2/3ds of the endometrium.)

On the face of it, overt menstruation is bizarre. It’s energy and resources down the drain, as it were**, it’s messy, it’s uncomfortable, and at least intuitively it attracts predators. (Maybe. This has been tested much less extensively than you might think.) Adaptive explanations that have either been proposed without testing and received dubiously (menstruation as a “conspicuous cost” indicating a sexual partner robust enough to afford it***), or proposed and tested only to fail testing (the idea that menstruation lowers sexually transmitted pathogens, or promotes vaginal health in general), have not done particularly well at solving the puzzle of how it could possibly be adaptive to leak forty milliliters of blood and tissue every 28 days.

The best answer anyone has come up with so far, and certainly the likeliest after actual testing, is that it’s not an adaptation at all, it’s a consequence- specifically, of being big complex primates that give birth to big complex babies. As it turns out, humans and chimps, the bloody champions of overt menstruation, have bigger uteruses relative to their body size and grow thicker and more vascular endometrial linings; they bleed not because it benefits them, but because fully reabsorbing all the blood and tissue is mechanically impossible for them, and the growth-and-shed cycle is still less energetically expensive than simply maintaining the endometrium at all times.

The monthly curse: yet another price women pay for giving birth to some of the biggest, hungriest, least developed babies on the planet- all for the sake of brains.

*Sort of. Depending on which zoologist you talk to only what primates and a small handful of other groups do is “real” menstruation and other mammals that build and reabsorb the uterine lining through their estrous cycles is something different. This is, however, a point of argument that is largely only interesting to zoologists.

**Though not as much as once thought. Turns out the reason women are more susceptible to anemia than men seems to have much more to do with a protective effect from testosterone than a detrimental one from menstruation.

***Take conspicuous-cost theories with a dose of critical thinking at all times. They’ve been a favorite for proposing without testing, and once tested often fail- either the feature doesn’t turn out to cost all that much, or the opposite sex isn’t even that interested in the feature. Both have been the case for the male peacock’s tail, to use one famous recent example.

…But I really do got flat nuthin and not a single excuse for it. Zydeco got worse than before his surgery, now is starting to improve again on a much stronger antibiotic. The weather sucks and it’s fixing to suck until the end of the year if not beyond. Still busting my ass and making the occasional attempt to break it in the name of self-improvement. Brewing at a brisk pace, got many good results lately.

And that’s really about it. Hopefully Monday will bring more enlightenment.

So in the comments on posts about the entire American-Atheists-sue-over-WTC-memorial furball, one common theme I’ve seen is questioning of why, with the whole broad variety of religions to harass, atheists with a mind to litigate always seem to pick Christians. Sometimes this goes with questioning of, or actual assumption of, sympathies or common cause with the not-picked-on religions like Islam or Buddhism or Judaism.

The short answer is “no, not at all”. Or at least not that I’ve ever seen in ten years of hanging out either within or watching from afar the activities of the atheist/skeptic/”freethinker” community. The sort of atheist that’s inclined to make this a major group identification and to engage in activism generally thinks all religions are equally silly and dangerous, and if they’re afraid of violent terrorist retaliation I’ve certainly never seen such expressed. They’re usually very eager to jump on things like Boobquake or Draw Mohammed Day.

The reason litigious atheists almost always go after a Christian target is so simple it’s apparently no longer obvious: because Christianity is the majority religion in the United States. That doesn’t mean they necessarily dislike it more because it’s the majority, but because BEING the majority makes it most likely the people managing to piss off the atheists are Christians for a number of reasons.

Reason number one is pure math. If we assume that members of all faiths and lack thereofs are roughly equally composed of really good people, major assholes, and the decent-to-apathetic, just by that sheer factor of majority it makes it most likely that the number of asshole-to-asshole contacts are made by two Christians and is not newsworthy beyond the local, or else between a Christian and some sort of nonChristian. It really only takes one asshole in the contact to make a kerfuffle, but either way most of them are going to be Christians because most Americans are Christians, and for the thing to really blow up to national-news proportions it really helps if both parties involved are.

Reason number two is that in scenarios involving non-assholes who are just making thoughtless assumptions, it’s the majority that is *infinitely* more likely to be making a thoughtless assumption- they assume everybody thinks like them because most people actually do, and thus their assumptions can go quite late in life without challenge. A Muslim, Jew, or Hindu assuming that everyone would be cool with an entire group that is not a church group being led through a Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu prayer would have their assumption last about thirty seconds beyond its birth unless they were in some highly specific sub-communities within the US; Christians making the same assumption would be the entire reason we ever had a culture war about school prayer. A small minority objecting versus almost everyone makes the distinction between issues we see as “just some small group of loud crybabies picking nits” versus “it’s obvious this is the wrong thing to do, everyone is upset!” Likewise we don’t see municipal displays of minority faiths because municipalities where they *aren’t* minorities are rare to nonexistent and it doesn’t occur to them that “everyone” would enjoy it and therefore it’s a great idea.

Related to this point is that minorities, again by virtue of being minorities, simply don’t have the *power* to step on as many other toes as majorities, especially in a democratic system. They can manage a certain amount through activism and legal gadflying, but as a rule the most they can manage is volume rather than real pervasive changes that affect others in ways beyond having to listen to them or having to “play fair” with them, such as allowing seasonal displays of other faiths/nonfaiths next to theirs.

Make no mistake, I believe all faiths and nonfaiths are equally composed of 100% human beings and that they are therefore all carrying an equal load of the entitled, the stupid, the thoughtless, and the out-and-out malicious. What I’m trying to point out isn’t “the majority is full of assholes who do asshole things”, but that being a majority gives more leeway to step on tender toes- whether the fault is with the one doing the treading or not, and that when viewed from the outside, this gives the appearance of a united front of minorities against the majority. The only actual unity is that the minorities are all more likely to have been affected directly by something the majority did than something one of the other minorities did; as soon as someone else becomes the majority, or as soon as one of those rarer cases happen, any apparent ties of unity evaporate.

Other groups may do worse things to minorities elsewhere than Christians do to specific minorities here, but people in general are most concerned with what’s happening in their own back yard, as it happens to be where they live. That, and familiarity breeds contempt- particularly when the familiar also happens to be different from your own identified tribe.

Stingray’s Take:
Could’ve been a pretty cool movie, if they’d only used more than one axis of motion.

Also, Vandal Savage called. He wants his fortress, army, jets, guns, climactic scene, and plan back.

LabRat’s Ramble:

A fun summer popcorn movie that delivers absolutely nothing unexpected but doesn’t really exist for that purpose in the first place, so that’s all right. There are probably spoilers of some sort in here, but it’s the sort of movie where if anything that happens that’s truly surprising, you’re probably completely new to American fiction, period.

Much has been made of the movie’s supposed lack of Nazis, with the Red Skull being a member of a breakaway group called Hydra rather than part of the Nazi establishment, but I don’t really see that. There’s no shortage of mentions of Nazis and that the war is on because Hitler invaded Europe, with the Skull’s break from the Reich being a new surprise element they’re using a new surprise unit to counterattack. There is a decided lack of swastikas, but given that using swastikas to represent the Nazi party is illegal in Germany and the films’ producers no doubt want international distribution, this doesn’t strike me as a PC motive so much as a capitalistic one. There are enough deaths’ heads and double lightning bolts on the uniforms, as well as Heil-Hitlers, to leave little doubt exactly who America is in a war with.

The actor they got to play Steve Rogers is well-suited to the part, all-American and stalwart and a good guy; he’s not terribly interesting, but the Captain America character has never exactly been a live wire. (Though he’s certainly quite diverting to look at.) The choice to make Bucky an adult and a friend rather than Cap’s vaguely disturbing underage sidekick was, I thought, a good one- that particular trend was a lot more suitable when comics really were just for kids and young boys as sidekicks was something for the reader to project himself into rather than something for an adult viewer to question.

The best part of the movie is the ham and cheese sandwich that is Tommy Lee Jones as the hardass Army colonel, Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull, and Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s the main character and the reason for the movie’s existence I would have been perfectly happy with just these three and dispensing with Steve Rogers altogether.

Haley Atwell as Peggy Carter, who may as well be cast as “Cap’s love interest” because that’s her entire function in the plot, does pretty well at the whole hero’s-girl gig, certainly VASTLY less annoying than I usually find the role. (Marvel studios does pretty well at this, as I like Gwenyth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts as well.) She gets some good scenes prior to fulfilling her plot function, and while I’ve seen a lot of people clucking their tongues at the unrealism of her punching a grown man hard enough to drop him, it’s fairly clear these people do not watch the same videos I do. (Seriously, folks, the heroic character with something to prove training themselves physically to levels that are objectively ridiculous is a comics staple.)

There was exactly one use of 3D that worked really well and justified its existence. The moment is a fraction of a second long. Otherwise the 3D is exactly what it’s always been: a distracting gimmick.

It’s two hours of underdog makes good, Americans kicking some goose-stepping ass, laser guns and action sequences, and a setup for The Avengers. If this sounds like a good time (it was for me, moreso than Stingray), go see it- but skip the 3D.