The brain’s just neat. And really, we don’t all the way give it credit for how neat it is, and how much it does for us. Sure, it gives us cool things like our deep thoughts and our ability to do crossword puzzles, but it does so much more for us, and much of the things it does we’ve attributed to other body parts. We don’t think of our brain as being a part of a rousing game of football, but every catch, every step, and every shoulder-check we throw into some big fat bastard’s stomach while blitzing the quarterback, that’s all our brain interpreting who knows how much information every moment, controlling our physical form, keeping us safe and clear-headed, and spotting those holes in the defensive line we need before we even know we’re aware of them.
In fact, there’s been some interesting research that Jerry Coyne has been discussing on his blog of late about the idea that our brains are so bloody awesome they may have ruled out free will . I don’t understand the science behind it, but according to recent tests, it appears that we make decisions at a brain chemistry level as much as seven seconds before we realize that we’ve made a decision. I’m no Johnny Von Brainsurgeon, so I honestly can’t weigh in on the topic except to say that if my conscious free will is an illusion, it’s an awfully powerful one.
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I’ve always believed that the notion of race was irrelevant. I was raised by liberal Christians who felt that everybody should be equal, and to this day I take a same-but-different stance. My opinion, honestly, is that there are a lot of adjectives to describe a person. Race is one of them. Gender another. I am apathetic to the sum total of those adjectives. If I was hiring a person for a job, I would base my opinion on those adjectives, looking for the combination that best suited the job in question. Race very rarely comes into this equation, unless the job was something that actually related directly to qualities possessed by a particular race. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of one. without really stretching, like pretending I had to hire someone to perform experiments on for a study on sickle cell anemia, a disease that is statistically more common in people who’s ancestors lived in malaria-ridden tropical and sub-tropical climates. But that’s a weak example at best, as race wouldn’t be the issue, presence of sickle cell anemia would be.
But I digress. Clearly, the world is full of people who actually care very deeply about the shade of their flesh, the shape of their face, and all the other myriad traits associated with a given race. And so long as you aren’t a dick about it, I call it no harm no foul. But I do find it strange that people worry about this. Perhaps that’s because I’m a honky, and was raised in a honky part of a honky city.
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Back when I was a lad, I had a thing for horror novels. In fact, I imagined that one day I would write horror novels as a career. It wasn’t until years later that I published two short stories in a horror magazine and then read the other entries in the magazine that I changed this opinion. Horror, it dawned on me, was lame. However, in those formative years I read a tremendous amount of horror fiction from a variety of sources. One of my favorite sets of books was The Exorcist, and later Legion, by William Peter Blatty.
I’m pretty sure that it was Legion that tackled evolution, but I could be wrong. At any rate, I remember really enjoying the philosophical debates about evolution that are documented in the book. As a young Christian lad, they resounded with me, and the fact that the feeling the reader is left with includes a loving hand of God made that young Christian in me awful pleased. The one argument that stayed with me, and that I later came to recognize as fallacious, was the idea of the egg.
I’m going somewhere with this, trust me.
I’m stretching the ole’ gray matter back a long ways, but if I’m right in my remembrances, Kinderman talks about the incredible requirements of an egg. It would have to have a food source. It would have to have a bladder. It would have to be tough enough to protect but not so tough that the embryo could not escape. The embryo would need an egg tooth. And on and on and on, he listed the many things that an egg would need in order to succeed, and if any one of those features was not present, the embryo would die. Later in life I would learn that this is the argument from irreducible complexity.
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I just thought I’d share a link I found quite interesting from ScienceDaily. The article is called Baby Brain Growth Mirrors Changes from Apes to Humans. It details some research that was being performed on the long-term affects of pre-term birth on brain development, and they found a rather surprising correlation to evolution. Enjoy!
Jim
Each and every one of us is a transitional creature. That’s one of those thoughts that changes how you think about evolution. As a kid I understood as most do that we had evolved from apes, but I didn’t, as I think most don’t, understand that the process wasn’t finished. Its easy to look at the wonder of human society and believe that we are the end product of everything; evolution, culture, understanding, you name it, we do it best. Or at least we do from our perspective. But as with all things, we can always do it better.
I used to teach a class in Systems Analysis to students who were studying computers, and one of the important tenets of systems analysis is that any system can always be iteratively refined and made different. The hope, of course, is that the system is made better, but anyone who has ever worked in the field knows that this is not always the case. Evolution is the systems analysis of life, with refinements happening in perpetuity on a tiny scale, but lacking an analyst who directs the changes.
The goal of evolution isn’t to get somewhere, achieve some perfect creature. Far from it, evolution is a process, not a path. Random minuscule mutations happen, and if they help then they may get passed down to future generations. That’s all there is.
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I have always had a thing about bees and wasps. It never made sense to me. They’re entities less than the size of my thumb who couldn’t possibly hurt me more than the discomfort I put up with for a tattoo, and yet when they come flying by I get antsy. I’ve chalked it up to the notion that I have personal space issues. If people are too huggy, I’m just as likely to swat them as I am an ant or spider who carelessly wandered onto my leg. And I don’t feel at all bad about that. Billions of years of evolution and bugs still can’t tell if I’m a plant or not? Sorry, folks, but I am all for natural selection.
However, I’ve always been fascinated by the dark side of bugs. If they were made by God, as I had once upon a time thought, then how could the crawlies of the world be so darned nasty? At first it was things like trapdoor spiders that caught my attention. What would they have done back in the days of the Garden of Eden, when man and animals were all super happy and sang songs together and nobody ate anybody else? Did they just figure out one day after Eve bit the apple that hiding behind a trap door and launching at your prey is a good hunting strategy? Is this behavior learned or instinctive?
Then there was my first encounter in a book with ichneumons, that branch of wasp that embodies yucky better than any other animal I’ve ever heard of. I forget now where I had read about the tarantula wasp, but the image of their behavior definitely gave me the willies. For those who don’t know, what they do is paralyze a tarantula and then lay their eggs on top of it. The tarantula has to sit and wait until the larvae hatch, and then they devour it. This is a shit state of affairs for the tarantula, who is alive but unable to do things like play dodgeball or eat food, waiting for the inevitable mouths of his devourers to awaken.
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I just read the most interesting thing over at the Myrmecos web site about how the red pea aphids got their color. It turns out that research has found that the color is actually a lateral transfer of genetic material that took place who knows how long ago from fungi. In other words, some of the aphids are red/pink and some are not because some of them have a naturally occurring mutation that allows them to produce carotenoids. In a given population of pea aphids they will have both pink/red and green members. That’s an entirely uncommon situation, as usually selection will result in the mutation either succeeding and propagating throughout the population or failing and disappearing.
The chances of an organism becoming infected with a fungus and then incorporating some of the genes into it’s own are very minimal, and as Alex Wild (the author of the Myrmecos blog entry) points out, this is typically something we associate with viruses.
If you’ve never read Myrmecos before, it’s a gorgeous science blog that features some incredibly beautiful pictures of tiny creepy-crawlies, and this particular entry does not skimp out on the imagery. Enjoy!
Jim
Before I get too far into this, let me assure you that what I’m posting about is the first study to find this link, and that does not mean that anything is for really really certain. As with all studies, further evaluation and consensus is required, but it’s interesting stuff.
National Geographic has an article today entitled Near Death Experiences Explained? in which they discuss a recent study in the journal Critical Care that seems to draw a correlation between near death experiences in heart attack patients and the level of Carbon Dioxide in their blood at the time.
I’ve often heard people describe NDEs as being an electrical firestorm in the brain, and while I can’t say that ever sat well with me, it made at least some sense. It would explain why only some patients experience these effects, and why as an intermittent condition it would be so hard to better understand. This new data does not change the equation much, and as was noted in the article, all cardiac arrests show high CO2 with only 10 per cent experiencing an NDE. However, it possibly points us in the right direction for further study.
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Finally, a pleasant intersection between two of the things I understand least in life, health idiots and quantum mechanics. I was just reading an article on Science Daily called Can We Detect Quantum Behavior In Viruses? and while the concept is interesting, I have a horrible, Deepak Chopra flavored dread of their findings.
The idea is that they are now “looking for ways to detect quantum properties in more complex and larger entities, possibly even living organisms.” A little bit further down, we learn that the researchers are “using the principles of an iconic quantum mechanics thought experiment — Schrödinger’s superpositioned cat — to test for quantum properties in objects composed of as many as one billion atoms, possibly including the flu virus”. Dagnabbit! The last thing we need is to find a legitimate intersection between these two topics. Assuming anything comes of this, I can imagine the Chopras of the world saying that observation impacts flu infection, and that we can stay healthy just by controlled observation.
That’s NOT what this means, Deepak.
Next flu season, if this pans out at all (or even if it’s just interesting ongoing research) I have a feeling we’ll be hearing from the alt-meddies on the topic, ensuring us that all it takes to stay flu-free is the right think in your thinking box. And that just makes my blood run cold.
Jim
Okay, sometimes you see something you just have to pass on. This is one of those things. The picture to the left and the accompanying blog post from 80beats at Discover Blogs are about some research around a rather intriguing condition. The chicken to the left is gynandromorphous, which means it’s a half-boy-half-girl, and not in the circus sideshow way. Right down to the inner bits, that’s a he-she of a chicken.
It’s interesting to me because the research casts some doubt on the preconceived notions we have about gender identity from a physiological perspective. Give it a read!
Jim
