On good government

I'm about halfway through Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order, one of the best books I've read in several years. Starting in prehistoric times, Fukuyama traces the development of political systems in cultures around the world including China, India, the Middle East, and Europe. One thing I'm really loving is how he integrates various disciplines such as evolutionary biology, economics, and comparative political science. The book has already led me to reconsider my notions about the historical role of religion and has dashed my hopes that the current Republican fixation on reducing taxes at any cost is a temporary aberration.

A quote on good government:

The rule of law and political accountability are desirable in their own right. Sometimes, they can get in the way of good, effective government, as when an Indian state is unable to make a decision on a major infrastructure project due to litigation and public protests, or when the U.S. Congress cannot bring itself to deal with pressing problems like entitlements due to the influence of lobbyists and interest groups.

But at other times rule of law and accountability are necessary to preserve good government. Under the right conditions, a strong authoritarian system can produce extremely effective government. Political systems need to be able to endure changing external conditions and changing leaders. The checks on state authority provided by rule of law and accountability serve to reduce the variance in governmental performance: they constrain the best governments, but they also prevent bad ones from spiraling out of control.

From what I've read so far, it's clear to me that we're in a period of "political decay." I think we could use a good psychohistorian right now...

My life on Venus

When I was in elementary school we had to read a story about a bunch of kids living in a colony on a terraformed Venus. The process of altering the climate still had a long way to go, and the weather was nonstop, driving rain. Once every few years the scientists would adjust the conditions so that the rain would dry up for a day.

All but one of the children in the story had been born on Venus; the one exception was a girl who had arrived from Earth and who had experienced the warmth of sunshine on her face.

For some reason that I've long since forgotten, the native Venusians locked the Earth girl in a closet on the day when the rain stopped. They ventured out and enjoyed an afternoon in the open more than they could possibly have imagined. But when the sun set and the rain began again, they remembered the girl and, of course, felt guilty for their actions.

I didn't think about this story much until I moved to Portland. Now I sympathize with that Earth girl a lot. Especially when driving in the rain.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, I did run across one thing that gave me a moment of delight today. A scientist has applied techniques developed for genetic analysis to identify patterns in human languages, and he made this fascinating claim:

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, ... has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: a language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.

Biology notes

The amazing, tool-making crows:

New Caledonian crows are renowned for their toolmaking skills.

In the complexity, fluidity and sophistication of their tool use, their ability to manipulate and bird-handle sticks, leaves, wires, strings and any other natural or artificial object they can find into the perfect device for fishing out food, or fishing out second-, third- or higher-order tools, the crows have no peers in the nonhuman vivarium, and that includes such textbook dexterous smarties as elephants, macaques and chimpanzees.

(Video link)

AND on the human sexuality front, research has determined that men think women are most attractive during ovulation... unless the man passing judgment is already in a relationship.

Meanwhile, women who are dating men perceived to be less attractive than them tend to flirt more around the time they're ovulating, even if they have no intentions on walking out on their mate.

More interesting insights into the mysteries of human romance and reproduction here.

Not a very good trade-off

From the New York Times:

Writing in the January issue of The Journal of Gerontology B, the authors conclude that people live longer not because they are less likely to get sick, but because they survive longer with disease.

As a result, a 20-year-old man today can expect to live about a year longer than a 20-year-old in 1998, but will spend 1.2 years more with a disease, and 2 more years unable to function normally.

One more reason to breast feed

Turns out that up to a fifth of breast milk is indigestible for an infant. So what are those complex sugars doing? Some serve as food for a strain of bacteria that coats the newborn's gut. Others mimic the surface structure of the intestines, tricking undesirable bacteria into attaching to them and thereby sweeping them out of the digestive system. Together these effects help protect the baby at a time when his or her immune system is still very undeveloped.

Amazing.

Coal 1, Tuna 0

BP may at last be on the verge of permanently capping the Deep Horizon gusher, while much of the rest of the world, from Moscow to New York, swelters in a global heat wave. Even as we may have averted the worst-case short term consequences of the oil spill, our long term trend is still headied in the wrong direction.

Last month I read an article on the continuing coal age in the New York Times that seemed another omen of a bleak future. You might think that coal is in decline given it's sorry reputation in the U.S., but worldwide the opposite is true. According to Stanford University researcher Richard Morse:

Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel (for the 8th year now) and likely will be for the next 10-20 at least. According to BP’s 2010 Statistical Review of World Energy released this month, coal now occupies a greater share of the world’s energy mix than at any point since 1970.

This doesn’t receive much attention in the U.S. because our coal market is essentially disconnected from global markets and the domestic trend is quite the opposite. But there is a reason my colleague calls the global energy era we are embarking upon the “renaissance of coal.” China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and most of the rest of Asia are predicating their growth on coal....

In my view climate regimes that don’t address the coal issue — via addressing mitigation in developing world power sectors at a much larger scale than Kyoto ever accomplished — don’t have much hope from a mitigation perspective. And that is going to be really, really hard. Thus the game is looking more and more like adaptation. As we can see in China and India, they view development of a coal-based electricity infrastructure as essential to economic development.

I've been meaning to post about this article for over a month now, particularly because just three days later a piece was published in the New York Times Magazine about the imminent demise of the bluefin tuna:

What was in the water that day was a congregation of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a fish that when prepared as sushi is one of the most valuable forms of seafood in the world. It’s also a fish that regularly journeys between America and Europe and whose two populations, or “stocks,” have both been catastrophically overexploited. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one of only two known Atlantic bluefin spawning grounds, has only intensified the crisis. By some estimates, there may be only 9,000 of the most ecologically vital megabreeders left in the fish’s North American stock, enough for the entire population of New York to have a final bite (or two) of high-grade otoro sushi. The Mediterranean stock of bluefin, historically a larger population than the North American one, has declined drastically as well. Indeed, most Mediterranean bluefin fishing consists of netting or “seining” young wild fish for “outgrowing” on tuna “ranches.”

An inability of the world's fishing nations to agree on limits that would ensure the sustainability of the remaining bluefin stocks may mean the loss of a truly unique animal:

There are two reasons that a mere fish should have inspired such a high-strung confrontation reminiscent of Greenpeace’s early days as a defender of whales. The first stems from fish enthusiasts who have for many years recognized the particular qualities of bluefin tuna — qualities that were they land-based creatures would establish them indisputably as “wildlife” and not just another “seafood” we eat without remorse. Not only is the bluefin’s dense, distinctly beefy musculature supremely appropriate for traversing the ocean’s breadth, but the animal also has attributes that make its evolutionary appearance seem almost deus ex machina, or rather machina ex deo — a machine from God. How else could a fish develop a sextantlike “pineal window” in the top of its head that scientists say enables it to navigate over thousands of miles? How else could a fish develop a propulsion system whereby a whip-thin crescent tail vibrates at fantastic speeds, shooting the bluefin forward at speeds that can reach 40 miles an hour? And how else would a fish appear within a mostly coldblooded phylum that can use its metabolic heat to raise its body temperature far above that of the surrounding water, allowing it to traverse the frigid seas of the subarctic?

Yes, bluefin tuna are warmblooded.

This may be our future. One where coal wins and the bluefin loses.

BILL GROSS, MEANWHILE, reports on the absurdity of automatic toilets in his latest commentary. He goes on to make the argument that our economic troubles in the coming decade or two may stem from this fact: capitalism depends on growth, and ultimately economic growth depends on population growth. In an era of a stabilizing world population, we may be in for long period of economic malaise.

How ironic: our insatiable appetite is cooking the planet and devouring its bounty, yet we may suffer financially because we've finally gotten the growth of our own species under control.

Vespertine

Determined to not be late for an outdoor, dusk screening of E.T. at the Edgefield Lodge, I checked online to see what time sunset was. And as it so often happens on the web, one things leads to another, and before I knew it, I was having one of those I did not know that moments.

I had always thought dusk was more or less synonymous with sunset, just as dawn meant sunrise, but apparently not.

Dawn is when light first appears in the morning sky. Sunrise is when the sun breaks the horizon, and sunset, well... duh. Dusk is when the last light leaves the sky. This diagram explains it all:

The best part of my "discovery" was the word vespertine, a biology term that describes something of or related to the evening.

Atul Gawande on the challenges facing medical practitioners

Dr. Atul Gawande gave the commencement speech to the Stanford Medical School class of 2010. It's worth a read:

When we talk about the uncontrollable explosion in the costs of health care in America, for instance—about the reality that we in medicine are gradually bankrupting the country—we’re not talking about a problem rooted in economics. We’re talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity.

Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.

It should be no wonder that you have not mastered the understanding of them all. No one ever will. That’s why we as doctors and scientists have become ever more finely specialized. If I can’t handle 13,600 diagnoses, well, maybe there are fifty that I can handle—or just one that I might focus on in my research. The result, however, is that we find ourselves to be specialists, worried almost exclusively about our particular niche, and not the larger question of whether we as a group are making the whole system of care better for people.

Allergy or not an allergy?

Here's an interesting article that clarifies the difference between food allergies and food intolerance:

Part of the confusion is over what is a food allergy and what is a food intolerance, Dr. [Matthew J.] Fenton said. Allergies involve the immune system, while intolerances generally do not. For example, a headache from sulfites in wine is not a food allergy. It is an intolerance. The same is true for lactose intolerance, caused by the lack of an enzyme needed to digest sugar in milk.

And other medical conditions can make people think they have food allergies, Dr. Fenton said. For example, people sometimes interpret acid reflux symptoms after eating a particular food as an allergy.

From conception until death: environmental exposure to carcinogens

The President's Cancer Panel has just released it's annual report for 2008-2009. Nicholas Kristof summarizes it here.

The Panel's cover letter to President Obama (my emphasis):

The President
The White House
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

Though overall cancer incidence and mortality have continued to decline in recent years, the disease continues to devastate the lives of far too many Americans. In 2009 alone, approximately 1.5 million American men, women, and children were diagnosed with cancer, and 562,000 died from the disease. With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action. The Administration’s commitment to the cancer community and recent focus on critically needed reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act is praiseworthy. However, our Nation still has much work ahead to identify the many existing but unrecognized environmental carcinogens and eliminate those that are known from our workplaces, schools, and homes.

To jumpstart this national effort, the President’s Cancer Panel (the Panel) dedicated its 2008–2009 activities to examining the impact of environmental factors on cancer risk. The Panel considered industrial, occupational, and agricultural exposures as well as exposures related to medical practice, military activities, modern lifestyles, and natural sources. In addition, key regulatory, political, industrial, and cultural barriers to understanding and reducing environmental and occupational carcinogenic exposures were identified. The attached report presents the Panel’s recommendations to mitigate or eliminate these barriers.

The Panel was particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated. With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread. One such ubiquitous chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), is still found in many consumer products and remains unregulated in the United States, despite the growing link between BPA and several diseases, including various cancers.

While BPA has received considerable media coverage, the public remains unaware of many common environmental carcinogens such as naturally occurring radon and manufacturing and combustion by-products such as formaldehyde and benzene. Most also are unaware that children are far more vulnerable to environmental toxins and radiation than adults. Efforts to inform the public of such harmful exposures and how to prevent them must be increased. All levels of government, from federal to local, must work to protect every American from needless disease through rigorous regulation of environmental pollutants.

Environmental exposures that increase the national cancer burden do not represent a new front in the ongoing war on cancer. However, the grievous harm from this group of carcinogens has not been addressed adequately by the National Cancer Program. The American people—even before they are born—are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures. The Panel urges you most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.

More on the superweeds

More on the superweed story in today's New York Times, including comments from Michael Pollan:

A few lessons may be drawn from this story:

1. A product like Roundup Ready soy is not, as Monsanto likes to claim, “sustainable.” Like any such industrial approach to an agronomic problem — like any pesticide or herbicide — this one is only temporary, and destroys the conditions on which it depends. Lucky for Monsanto, the effectiveness of Roundup lasted almost exactly as long as its patent protection.

2. Genetically modified crops are not, as Monsanto suggests, a shiny new paradigm. This is the same-old pesticide treadmill, in which the farmer gets hooked on a chemical fix that needs to be upgraded every few years as it loses its effectiveness.

3. Monocultures are inherently precarious. The very success of Roundup Ready crops have been their undoing, since so many acres were planted with the same seed, and doused with the same chemical, resistance came quickly. Resilience, and long-term sustainability, comes from diversifying fields, not planting them all to the same kind of seed.

Read on.

It's not just seabirds

From free-floating microscopic crab larvae poisoned by the oil slick to whales and dolphins that drown after being intoxicated by its fumes, the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is affecting the whole food chain.

Don't bet against the birds and the bees

Or, for that matter, against the mosquitoes and the weeds.

New research has determined that a single, easily inherited gene can make mosquitoes indifferent to the insect repellent DEET.

And on a growing number of farms around the world, including many here in America, genetic engineering has turned out to not be such a miracle after all. Heavy use of Roundup since Monstanto introduced genetically modified crops that were impervious to the herbicide has demonstrated, once again, how quickly evolution can work:

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.

“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”

Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.

“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.

One of the qualities that made Roundup unique is that it degrades quickly in the environment. Farmers are now having to turn to older herbicides that are much more toxic.

And what's Monsanto doing now? In it's apparently infinite lack of wisdom, it's working on new crops that are resistant to other herbicides. You gotta wonder how long it'll take them to produce a generation of weeds that nothing will kill.

Oh, and by the way, thirty-eight years after DDT was banned, it's still present in our food supply:

Recent studies sketch a complex profile of legacy contaminants in U.S. food - a profusion of chemicals in trace amounts, pervasive but uneven across the food supply, occurring sometimes by themselves, but more often in combination with others. Included are DDT and several lesser-known organochlorine pesticides as well as industrial chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which were used until the late 1970s in electrical equipment.

This picture raises a host of equally complicated questions: Are small amounts of these chemicals dangerous, by themselves or in mixtures? Why are they still around and how are they getting into our food?

And how about: Will we ever learn?

Avoiding temptation

If you're in a situation where you have to weigh the temptation of instant gratification vs. the deferred benefits of an alternative, it may help to think about the future: a planned vacation, a special event coming up, or... just about anything that's our on your horizon.

More from Jonah Lehrer.

Exercise and weight loss

I was skeptical when I read the first paragraph of this article, but it ended up being fairly informative. Apparently exercise heightens women's appetites but not those of most men. And while exercise alone is not always a great way of losing weight, it's highly important for keeping it off.

It's all about inertia. Your body generally wants to stay at the weight it's used to. Working out the body helps to reset that baseline.

Read the full New York Times Magazine article here.

Shopping

Jonah Lehrer recently wrote a great piece about Costco ("where you go broke saving money") and the emotional tug-of-war going on inside our brains as we shop for what we do and don't need... and retailers' strategies for manipulating that process.

In a related article, the New York Times reveals how much info may be embedded in a coupon you pull off the Internet:

A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.

And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).

Caveat emptor...

Emotional memories persist, even for amnesiacs

New research has found that while people with amnesia or Alzheimer's disease may not be able to remember any of the details of an experience, the emotional flavor does persist:

[University of Iowa graduate student Justin] Feinstein says, "Your brain is no longer able to catch onto those experiences, so your day-to-day experiences, like what you had for breakfast this morning, what you did last Saturday night, those are gone. They're vanished."

But Feinstein suspected that the good feelings and bad feelings triggered by meaningful events might linger, captured by a different part of the brain.

So, to stir up some strong emotion, he threw a mini-film fest in his clinic. He showed several people who have damage to the hippocampus a string of short movie clips from tear-jerker classics.

One was the scene in Forrest Gump where he is crying all alone at the grave of his dead wife, Jenny.

It worked. Everyone who watched the film clips was visibly moved — some to tears. Yet a half-hour later, when quizzed about the movies, they didn't remember a thing — not even one woman who had sobbed during the films.

"We test her memory, her memory's gone," Feinstein says. "What happens to her emotions? Well, it turns out she's still sad."

...

Now here's the good news: When Feinstein and his colleagues repeated the experiment, this time showing the same people clips from funny or uplifting movies, like When Harry Met Sally or a Bill Cosby special, it put everybody in a great mood.

And that good feeling outlasted their memories, too. Remember that, Feinstein says, next time you spend time with a friend or family member with Alzheimer's.

I started volunteering with a hospice again last week, and this story really drove home for me that these visits can really make a difference for people.

The full story from NPR.

I always wanted to take up falconry... (bonus: smart dolphins and dogs)

New ultralight cameras now provide an eagle-eye view from the air.

(Video link)

AND ON THE TOPIC OF THE WONDERS OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, here's video of a pod of dolphin's that's learned to catch fish in a unique way:

(Video link)

And a story about stray dogs that have learned to use the Moscow subway to get around!

Thanks to The Daily Dish for all of these links...

Check out The Frontal Cortex

I've recently discovered Jonah Lehrer's great science blog, The Frontal Cortex. Yesterday he included a fascinating excerpt from a review he wrote for a book about our ability to read and all the amazing things the brain does to allow you to do what you're doing at this very moment.

And in a recent post that looked at the emotional dimensions of our decision-making process with respect to going for a first down rather than punting, he also made this observation which is relevant to the recent changes in mammogram and Pap smear screening recommendations:

Just consider health care: the only way we're ever going to reduce medical costs is to restrict procedures that haven't passed evidence-based efficacy tests. Maybe that means 40 year old women don't get mammograms, or that we treat prostrate cancer less aggressively, or that we stop performing spinal fusion surgeries. Although there's solid evidence to question all of these medical options, such changes provoke intense debate. Why? Because our emotions don't understand statistics. Because when we have back pain we want an MRI. Because when it's our father with prostate cancer we want the most aggressive possible treatments. And so on.

The point is that there's often an indefatigable gap between the rigors of cost-benefit analyses and the emotional hunches that drive our decisions. We say we want to follow the evidence, but then the evidence rubs against a bias like loss aversion, and so we make an exception. We'll follow the evidence next time.

AND SPEAKING OF HEALTHCARE AND CHOICE, Harry Reid has decided to let the Senate vote on an amendment to his healthcare bill that will incorporate on a very small scale the key idea from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden's own bill: that people who currently get their health insurance from their employer have the choice to instead buy it on an open insurance exchange.

The orchid hypothesis

Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic noted today that there's a fascinating article about the "orchid hypothesis" in this month's issue. I completely agree. An excerpt:

Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids.

In this view, having both dandelion and orchid kids greatly raises a family’s (and a species’) chance of succeeding, over time and in any given environment. The behavioral diversity provided by these two different types of temperament also supplies precisely what a smart, strong species needs if it is to spread across and dominate a changing world. The many dandelions in a population provide an underlying stability. The less-numerous orchids, meanwhile, may falter in some environments but can excel in those that suit them. And even when they lead troubled early lives, some of the resulting heightened responses to adversity that can be problematic in everyday life—increased novelty-seeking, restlessness of attention, elevated risk-taking, or aggression—can prove advantageous in certain challenging situations: wars, tribal or modern; social strife of many kinds; and migrations to new environments. Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements.

I've long thought that societies benefit when there's a wide range of individuals within them. Years ago I drove to Santa Cruz to see a friend in a play. The story involved a young man whose great-grandparents had been making the trek from the east coast to the west coast but had ended up putting down roots in Montana. It led me to think about the way that some people stay put and others keep pushing the frontiers; how some of us are satisfied with how things are and others have to keep trying something new. The orchid hypothesis explains this perfectly: we're a "weedy" species that has thrived because we're adept at adapting, even if that means under certain conditions some of us are more vulnerable than the norm. Under more ideal circumstances, those more vulnerable may actually be the most successful.