Bite Sized
Irradiated by LabRat
The next gen consoles (dilemma solved by noting that the entertainment budget currently has plenty of stretch) have landed. We spent the majority of the weekend exploring the remarkable range of possibilities the Wii offers for a couple to compete with one another in entirely petty ways. (Damn his superior large-motor coordination, by the way.) Stingray is spending today in a heroic effort to get said time-wasting device to recognize the house wireless network so that we may waste time in more varied and sociable ways, which seems to be a process of moving the error messages obtained in a direction of constant and productive change. This process is somewhat impeded by the constant need to remove the cat from various nooks in the network closet, and I can gauge overall progress and his frustration levels by whether one, both, or neither dog is taking refuge under my desk. Having two large, heavy-coated dogs panting and radiating body heat directly next to me is not making for an overall quality of life improvement for me, either.
So, short form. Again. Getting to the doc to investigate various alternate ways of dealing with Pollen Brain Fog is on the to-do agenda for the week, so hopefully things will improve on that score soon.
I never bothered to mention the recent neandertal bombshell that the latest deep genetic investigation has revealed, which is that it turns out that modern humans and neandertals had enough inter-species hanky panky that it’s left significant changes on the human genome, largely because I keep thinking I’ll have something more interesting to say about it than “sounds about right”. What makes me giggle every time I think about it, however, is that said neandertal DNA is only present in populations that departed from Africa at the correct time- which makes aboriginal African genetic groups the only purebred sapiens populations on the planet. “Racial purity” acquires an entirely new meaning.
Again belatedly-because-I-thought-I-might-have-more-to-say, if you want a dose of thoughtful natural science that may bend your brain and your perception of “natural” a bit, go check out Steve Bodio’s piece on passenger pigeons, their natural history, and their place in the North American landscape as a creation and ongoing experiment in constant, dramatic environmental change. The short version is that the passenger pigeon as massive, environment-altering mega-flocks may have been just as much our creation as its extinction was, the long version is worth reading to find out. On my list of “things I mean to write but never even know where to begin” is a thing about our concept of “natural” and our curious and entirely erroneous vision of the concept as both a static thing and something we somehow exist entirely outside of. I can’t say it’s anywhere close to coming together but if- big if- it ever does, I may use this as a starting point.
A comment from Phlegmmy on the last post touches on another of those white-whale posts that I want to write someday but can’t yet because it doesn’t have enough internal skeleton to hang the material off of. Specifically, I want to talk about our cultural concepts of femininity and feminine ideal and how those concepts are bound up with class and status issues. I’ve written and deleted about five sentences after this and this should tell you about how far along I’ve come to being able to actually do so, but the gist of it is that a great many of our historical ideas of ultimate femininity are bound up with being the ultimate status symbol of wealth. The Chinese practice of foot-binding is the most direct example I can think of- no poor farmgirl could aspire to the ultimately feminine lotus-blossom foot, because she needed her feet to work; the entire purpose of foot-binding, or for that matter of very long fingernails, is to send the message that their bearer does not work and is above it. Men may adopt similar status symbols, but it tends not to be baked into gender identity the way it so often has been for women.
How does that at all relate to that post or Phlegmmy’s comment? A poor girl may not be able to afford clothes and makeup and hairstyling to show off the flower of her beauty, but she can be sweet and demure. Ever notice that most of the older cultural tropes we have of openly assertive or aggressive women are intrinsically lower-class ones? Think fishwife. Or, as Stingray just noted, the Wife of Bath.
September 20th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
One thing in the Bodio piece stood out to me:
“the eastern North American form of Peregrine Falcon—now extinct as a “pure” race and replaced by a captive-bred mix of subspecies—was finished off by DDT, but its first and larger decline has been attributed by such scientists as Cornell’s Tom Cade to the loss of the Passenger Pigeon as a food source.”
Are we still blaming DDT? Srsly?
http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.html
When I see things like that tossed off as fact it makes me question everything else in the article.
September 20th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
My take on DDT,as with passenger pigeons, owes no loyalty to either “side”. I DO think chlorinated hydrocarbons concentrate in the food chain and pose problems for apex predators. BUT- a big but- I think this only happens when you do things like broadcast spray them on wetlands- which in any case rapidly selects for pests that are resistant.
DDT should not have been banned. It should have- and should still be!- used on walls of houses and on nets, (especially against malaria, which incidentally once came close to killing me in Africa, so my interest is not merely academic). But indiscriminate use of pesticides breeds resistance in insects almost as quickly as that of antibiotics does in bacteria- it is elementary evo- bio. They all reproduce quickly and in great numbers.
Google, or look up on Amazon, the many excellent books of (pro- DDT) epidemiologist Robert Desowitz. You can have your upper level avian predators AND fight malaria (of course, you are also relying on the likes of the present Zimbawean government to do things right).
Choices need not be binary. On “global warming” I am neither a Gorean nor a “denier”; I am a Lomborgian.
September 20th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
WPA2+PSK is the ticket for Wii connectivity.
September 20th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
I spent decades studying and working with chemicals in the environment and I agree with Steve on the binary choice issue.
DDT isn’t good and it isn’t evil. It just is. And part of what it is is enormously useful in controlling potentially lethal disease vectors. While widespread use of DDT, as was common when I was a child, certainly posed significant problems to the environment - there is ample data that mindful, targeted use does not.
Billions of dollars are wasted every year cleaning up contaminants that would break down naturally before causing significant problems in the environment. Dollars that could be spent to clean up pollutants released in areas where they pose a real threat to human life and vital ecosystems. But because environmental regulations are (at least for the most part) enforced within a strictly binary system, we are not usually allowed to make the value judgments needed to allocate resources in an efficient manner. And the world is a poorer and more widely contaminated place than it needs to be because of this.
Banning DDT is a classic example of this kind of binary error. The recent banning of all deep well drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is another. The fact that BP was allowed to run a slipshod operation that went horrifically wrong is not a valid reason to stop all drilling in the Gulf. But as is often the case, it provided a convenient justification for ideologues to enact regulatory controls that would otherwise be unsupportable.
September 20th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
Are you planning on immunotherapy, LabRat? I’ve been meaning to ask why you haven’t tried it yet.
September 21st, 2010 at 2:01 am
“…the latest deep genetic investigation has revealed, which is that it turns out that modern humans and neandertals had enough inter-species hanky panky that it’s left significant changes on the human genome, largely because I keep thinking I’ll have something more interesting to say about it than ‘sounds about right’.”
Which is precisely the phrase that came to my wife’s and mine lips, upon hearing this on a National Geographic special, the other night.
September 21st, 2010 at 7:59 am
FWIW I second the immunotherapy- had great results for Libby, form an Albuquerque doc. We’ll give you the info.
September 21st, 2010 at 11:00 am
As a side note I’d like to point out that while Junk Science.org has its virtues from time to time, it’s also as hopelessly biased as any project of Al Gore or Michael Moore- and its list of studies just as cherrypicked.
Immunotherapy- considered, yes, but the answer is as completely and utterly lame as “I actually really hate going to the doctor”.
September 21st, 2010 at 4:40 pm
I want to talk about our cultural concepts of femininity and feminine ideal and how those concepts are bound up with class and status issues.
I’ve been amused that even near western history valued women who were pale (didn’t work outside). And during much of our history, heavier, and therefore well-fed, women were more valuable.
Now, at least in the states, a tan is desired, because so many of us spend most of our days inside. Since we don’t get much exercise and calorie-rich foods are cheap, those who can afford the exercise time and more expensive diets show off our wealth through a thin or athletic build.
I’ve noticed a current preference for lightness of skin among hispanics and east asians. I’ve observered much more common of parasols by women of those groups, than other cultures in the states.
September 21st, 2010 at 8:17 pm
From the abstract of the Neandertal bombshell: By comparing this composite Neandertal genome with the complete genomes of five living humans from different parts of the world, the researchers found that both Europeans and Asians share 1% to 4% of their nuclear DNA with Neandertals. But Africans do not.
I had the impression that individual variation in the human genome was enormously greater than racial variation; e.g. in a set of randomly selected individuals, 85% of the variation was individual, 15% racial. If that’s true, a five person sample is meaningless, especially the Africa/Europe/Asia part. Perhaps that 85/15 statistic was just made up for antiracism purposes.
Because of those antiracism purposes, I’m very uncomfortable with the idea that Eurasians have Neandertal hybridization and Africans don’t, because admission of a real difference tends to be grounds for claiming one is better; no reason Cro-Magnon purity should be superior to Neandertal hybridization. The discovery wouldn’t provide a second’s pause to one of Grosse Deutchland’s anthropologists. The possibility of Neadertal admixture has been speculated on for decades, and I always thought it was a pretty cool possiblity that we have Neandertal blood. They were pretty cool humans. The uncomfortable idea is that someone else lacks it.
However, it may be true whether I like it or not. That’s one of the things about truth.
September 21st, 2010 at 8:39 pm
I had the impression that individual variation in the human genome was enormously greater than racial variation; e.g. in a set of randomly selected individuals, 85% of the variation was individual, 15% racial. If that’s true, a five person sample is meaningless, especially the Africa/Europe/Asia part. Perhaps that 85/15 statistic was just made up for antiracism purposes.
It’s less that it was made up for antiracism purposes than that it’s a broad generalization involving all DNA rather than any regions of DNA that are specifically identified with population groups, which is made much stickier in that population groups as can be studied via specific conserved and similar regions and alignment with race are often very different things. In this case, the comparison was the degree of similarity to which a sample’s DNA had high similarity to specifically neandertal sequences rather than the degree to which genomes differed from one another overall. There is more individual variation than population-group variation, but across population groups very certain variations will be somewhat consistent within themselves. Skin color being an obvious example.
Mostly it’s funny to me specifically because I’d so often and so tiresomely, including in the old literature when open racism was scientifically acceptable, heard the comparisons between “blacks” and Neandertal physiology, with this being proof they were the more “primitive” race. In reality Neandertals weren’t so much primitive as a different but very closely related species, but this particular distinction tends to be lost on people who misunderstand genetics badly enough to think races can be ranked on scales of superority, or that races are truly genetically distinct rather than representing upticks in particular features of variation in specific traits. To tie back into the original “Africans have no neanderthal blood” assertion, testing a black American or West Indies resident may well give you neanderthal results even if it’s really true that no African populations ever mingled with neanderthals, because of the significant amount of gene flow in from European and American groups that didn’t happen to give them white skin.
Anyway, if you are really interested read Hawks. He’s actually a very good source regarding population biogeography, what DNA studies do and don’t tell us, and of course especially neanderthals.
September 22nd, 2010 at 10:42 am
I’m just waiting for the racists ( on both sides ) to start claiming that Neanderthal genes were why white folks are into genocide.
Embrace yer inner cave man … and beat some idiot to death with a stone hand ax.
September 22nd, 2010 at 10:58 am
I also noted the researchers were baffled by evidence of Neanderthal DNA in Papua New Guinea populations … not very bright of them.
How did they think PNG and Asia got settled? Settlement out of Africa expanding along the coasts … and right through Neanderthal populations in the mideast. Coastal expansion was probably the fastest, as seacoasts tend to have non-deadly climates and lots of food resources.