INTERESTING TIMES

 

“The state of flow, like the path that bears its name, is volatile, unpredictable, and all-consuming.  Flow feels like the meaning of life for good reason.  The neurochemicals that underpin the state are among the most addictive drugs on earth.  Equally powerful is the psychological draw.  scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers—the three things that motivate us most.  All three are deeply woven through the fabric of flow.  Thus toying with flow involves tinkering with primal biology: addictive neurochemistry, potent psychology, and hardwired evolutionary behaviors.  Seriously, what could go wrong?”
 

—Steven Kotler in The Rise of Superman; Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, p158, in Ch10 entitled The Dark Side of Flow.

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspetive on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today.  Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature.  Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving th emost plant and animmal species to their extinctions.  We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.
--Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2015, p74.

Among regular people there seems to be precious little understanding of what exactly the method is, and what it does and does not accomplish.  This ignorance about the process of science contributes to claims that scientists are just greedy a-holes exploiting the government for profit.  This attitude rises from a complete lack of exposure to real scientists and their way of being.  It is not fair to scientists.  Scientists, for the most part, are trying to figure out how the world works so that we can use that information to make our lives and our world better.  They are not politicians, they are curious people who sought education enough to know what questions to ask and how to test them.  They care passionately about making the world a better place.

The first step of DOING science is to ask a question about the world.  The question doesn't have to be complicated, it just has to reach into the unknown.  Once you have your question, it is a good idea to snoop around and see if anyone else has already answered it, or tried.  Learn everything you can about the variables that might influence the answer.  Once you've studied up on it, you're qualified to make a guess---a "theory" in science terms---as to what the answer might be, and why.  A true scientist knows that a theory is just a theory--it has to be tested repeatedly by people who agree and by people who disagree.  A true scientist is not heartbroken when the data shows that his theory was bunk.  That is useful information.  Time to come up with a new theory.

This testing is the experiment.  There can be many different ways to test any one theory.  The most useful experiments are often the simplest, changing only one variable between two groups of test subjects.  Scientist use many different methods to approach the same question, and this diversity adds richness to the picture painted by the results.  We might know that B follows A three quarters of the time, but until we know WHY they are correlated, and what other variables contribute to the correlation, we do not understand.  A--->B at a rate of 75% is enough to know that there is a connection, but it is not enough to say that A causes B.  We don't know that.  Something else could be causing it.  We take our results from that experiment, share them with the other scientific thinkers in the world, and update our theory if possible.  Usually an experiment brings up new questions, which indicate new possible experiments that need to be done to understand.

So science does NOT discover causality.  It discovers correlations.  Correlations can have multiple contributing variables so more experiments are needed.  Sometimes someone repeats the same experiment and gets the opposite result.  This is evidence that there was something operating in the system that was not being measured.  This is a sign that the original theory was based in deeper ignorance than perhaps we thought at first.  This is hard to admit, even for scientists.

Just because an experiment gets peer reviewed and published in an journal does not make it the truth.  There are many false conclusions that have been published.  Egostists who call themselves scientists publish more books than all the real scientists put together.  Real scientists tent to be intraverts who'd rather stay out of the limelight and just keep digging into these interesting questions.  Every experient needs to be repeated from a variety of angles before a result is accepted as Truth.

So there is a basic primer on the scientific method.  My area is mostly medicine, though I am fascinated by all science.  Medical science is more than double blind placebo controlled studies.  It includes the careful evaluation of population outcomes and biochemical mechanisms and every other factor that could influence the answer.  Science is a process of asking questions and trying to figure out if our theories about the answers are right or not.  A theory is just a theory.

Evolution, by the way, has been proven in so many ways by so many different experiments, that it is not a theory anymore.

This hypothesis may not be as well supported as evolution but there has been a lot of research since the 1970's that supports it.

DONOHUE-LEVITT HYPOTHESIS = The theory that legal abortion reduces crime by reducing the number of unwanted births, neglected and abused youth. As the theory goes, those troubled children grow up to be the next generation of criminals. Research shows that children of women denied an abortion require more public assistance including psychiatric services and foster homes, and engage in more criminal and antisocial behavior than their wanted counterparts.

Most crimes are committed by males aged 18-24. Roe versus Wade (legalizing abortion) was passed by SCOTUS in 1973, and 18 years later the country experienced a significant decrease in crime. One of the justices had offered the rationale that a family unready to support a child should not be required to have one. States that had already legalized abortion had earlier reductions in crime, and higher abortion rates correlated with greater reductions in crime. Australian and Canadian studies have detected a correlation between legalized abortion and reduced crime overall. Of course all of these interpretations have been challenged, and more research is needed. Among other possible contributors to decreasing crime is the removal of lead from gasoline in the same year as Roe vs Wade. Lead ingestion lowers intelligence and increases impulsivity and aggressive behavior.

Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.
--Lily Tomlin

We went to the Mission last night to hear about Viruses from Hell, and it turns out the speaker was a PhD professor who is into viruses that come from acidic hotsprings. He looks a lot like my friend Gordon who is also a brilliant academic--something about that jutting forehead must allow for extra brains. Ken Stedman is a professor at Portland State University who has made a career of viruses. His research has mostly involved examining the genomes of extremophile viruses and comparing them. It was faintly interesting to me--genetics is interesting, and yet I am so homocentric. I really want to know about bacteriophage therapy for healing horrible infections. I want to hear about the evolution of the flu. But his research wasn't about this and his talk was about the questions that will ensure that he gets grants and funding in the future. I couldn't help but to think of the right wing perspective that academics are parasites on society and perform no useful function other than keeping themselves in priuses. There is truth it that, though it is also true that there is nothing more important for our future than to keep investigating our world and what is in it. Scientists have specialized training that makes it possible for them to think of things that I don't have words or concepts for. There is so much more of the world to know about. I am learning this narrow fraction that is medicine, and it is more than I can ever take in. Within that sea I must pick a drop.

Circling back to VIRUSES, I did bring home a few interesting factoids. I call things factoids until they've been demonstrated beyond the shade of MY doubt. He defines viruses in several ways but my favorite was "a capsid encoding organism", also known as a phage. He told us that the major reservoir of viruses on the planet is in seawater, though they infect everything else that lives. Some 5% of the oxygen in our atmosphere is produced by bacteria that are infected with viruses. The viruses increase the oxygen-production of these microbes. I learned that 10% of the human genome is viral---and this is just the ones that have been demonstrated beyond a shade of HIS doubt. Professor Stedman said that up to 43% of the human genome could be viral, and that many of the genes we got from viruses are important ones, without which we would not be here. Apparently all placental mammals share one particular viral gene so it got in there a long time ago.

One of the main points that Professor Stedman made was how much of the world is made up of viruses, and how small they are. He said that if you put all the Earth's viruses end to end the lineup would reach to the Andromeda Galaxy. And they'd weigh more than some huge number of whales, and so on.

One nice thing about going to science pubs is being around people for whom evolution just is, instead of having to debate about it. It makes me realize how much energy I put into defending a basic scientific mindset. Too many groovy spiritual people and homeopaths in my life. They stress me out.

For today my mantra is "it is OK to do nothing" and I have been enjoying it. I need to take breaks more often. And journal. Just for me.

Pretty cool:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/science/toe-fossil-provides-complete-neanderthal-genome.html?_r=2&

Report on the genome from the toe in Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12886.html
Abstract
We present a high-quality genome sequence of a Neanderthal woman from Siberia. We show that her parents were related at the level of half-siblings and that mating among close relatives was common among her recent ancestors. We also sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal from the Caucasus to low coverage. An analysis of the relationships and population history of available archaic genomes and 25 present-day human genomes shows that several gene flow events occurred among Neanderthals, Denisovans and early modern humans, possibly including gene flow into Denisovans from an unknown archaic group. Thus, interbreeding, albeit of low magnitude, occurred among many hominin groups in the Late Pleistocene. In addition, the high-quality Neanderthal genome allows us to establish a definitive list of substitutions that became fixed in modern humans after their separation from the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol. In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to "pure" fluid was alcohol. Whatever health risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol's antibacterial properties. Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties. Many genetically minded historians believe that the confluence of urban living and the discovery of alcohol created a massive selection pressure on the genes of all humans who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Alcohol, after all, is a deadly poison and notoriously addictive. To digest large quantities of it, you need to be able to boost production of enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases, a trait regulated by a set of genes on chromosome four in human DNA. Many early agrarians lacked that trait, and thus were genetically incapable of "holding their liquor." Consequently, many of them died childless at an early age, either from alcohol abuse or from waterborne diseases. Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol. (The same is true of lactose tolerance, which went from a rare genetic trait to the mainstream among descendants of the herders, thanks to domestication of livestock.) The descendants of hunter gatherers--like many Native Americans or Australian Aborigines--were never forced through this genetic bottleneck, and so today they show disproportionate rates of alcoholism. The chronic drinking problem in Native American populations has been blamed on everything from the weak "Indian constitution" to the humiliating abuses of the U.S. reservation system. But their alcohol intolerance most likely has another explanation: their ancestors didn't live in towns."
--Steven Johnson, in The Ghost Map, pages 103-4.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
nor the most intelligent,
but the one that is most responsive to change.
-—Charles Darwin