This hypothesis states that bipedalism originally evolved as a postural feeding adaptation rather than a locomotor adaptation. I’m not sure who originated it, but the first article I read about this during grad school was this one by KD Hunt:

“…Chimpanzees fed bipedally from such trees either by reaching up to pick fruit while standing on the ground, or from within the tree, in which case bipedalism was frequently stabilized by grasping an overhead branch. The food-gathering function of chimpanzee bipedalism suggests that hominid bipedalism may have evolved in conjunction with arm-hanging as a specialized feeding adaptation that allowed for efficient harvesting of fruits among open-forest or woodland trees. Such evidence is particularly valuable when it is in accord with fossil anatomy. Australopithecus afarensis has features of the hand, shoulder and torso that have been related to arm-hanging in chimpanzees. The australopithecine hip and hind limb clearly indicate bipedalism, but also indicate a less than optimal adaptation to bipedal locomotion compared to modern humans. Locomotor inefficiency supports the hypothesis that bipedalism evolved more as a terrestrial feeding posture than as a walking adaptation. A bipedal postural feeding adaptation may have been a preadaptation for the fully realized locomotor bipedalism apparent in Homo erectus.”

Hunt gives anecdotal evidence in the above paper, which is later substantiated by Craig Stanford’s 2005 paper detailing frequency and conditions under which this posture occurs. Namely, that “[b]ipedalism was observed only on arboreal substrates, and was almost all postural, and not locomotor. Bipedalism was part of a complex series of positional behaviors related to feeding, which included two-legged standing, one-legged standing with arm support, and other intermediate postures.” Further information as to how this postural behavior may have become habitual, and eventually anatomical comes from a paper by Videan and McGrew in which they tested multiple situations in which a bipedal posture might be expected among captive chimps. Visual obstacles (such as tall savannah grass) did not encourage chimps or bonobos to adopt a bipedal posture; however, both foods that could be carried, and foods elevated relative to the chimps resulted in adoption of a bipedal posture and/or locomotion. Dr. De Waal mentions the proclivity of Pan paniscus for bipedal walking while carrying food in his book Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape* as he entreats us to look to them, not just chimps, to clues about the life and times of our common ancestor.

On a strictly logical basis, I found Hunt’s hypothesis to be extremely plausible in light of the differences in limb proportion between early hominids and H. ergaster/erectus onward:

Figure 1: Roughly to scale, but not quite. left to right: KNM-WT-15000 or Nariokotome Boy, a 12-13 year old specimen of H. ergaster. ‘Lucy’, Australopithecus afarensis. A female Homo sapiens skeleton.

Chimpanzees when knuckle-walking (jogging?) have a similar stride length and speed–though not efficiency–as a modern human. The same can’t quite be said of Australopiths (and putatively H. habilis). Thus, it simply doesn’t seem plausible that early hominids would’ve adopted an upright posture for reasons relating to locomotor patterns. In light of the fact that they would necessarily have traded off both speed and efficiency of movement, it is simply more likely that bipedalism did not evolve for reasons relating to speed and efficiency of travel.

However, if we make the mistake of teleological reasoning, it can be all too easy to fall into the trap that since modern humans move more efficently than modern chimpanzees, the early hominids adopted a bipedal gait as a locomotor adaptation.

The lesson today, kiddies, is that what structures do today may not be what they did in our evolutionary past. The mammalian middle ear bones formed the jaws of our ancestors. Terrestrial vertebrate lungs are actually evolved from Sarcopterygians’ swim bladders; lungfish lungs and our own lungs have two different embryological origins, something not expected given the fact that they’re the closest living relatives to terrestrial vertebrates. Heck, the hallmark of the tetrapods, our digited limbs, did not even evolve as adaptations for life on land. As Jennifer Clack and her colleagues showed, Acanthostega, one of the earliest tetrapods, had ‘arms’ that could not possibly have been brought underneath the body to support its weight, instead sticking straight out like the hydroplane-ish pectoral fins of a Shark (details of both the evolution of the middle ear and of limbs can be found in books by Jennifer Clack* and Henry Gee*).

The bipedal posture of Australopithecus probably conferred different fitness benefits than it does for us. It’s what’s known as a pre-adaptation. If Lucy hadn’t stood up to eat, or learn to walk on her hind legs while carrying things, H ergaster would never have stretched his legs. As to whether, as Dan Lieberman argues, later hominids evolved their distinctive body proportions as an adaptation running remains to be seen.

I’ve had the good fortunte to talk with Dr. Lieberman personally about this hypothesis after a seminar he gave at grad school, so expect a long post on it sometime in the future after I unpack my notes (blech).

*Books mentioned in this post (I don’t link books I haven’t read, and don’t link books I didn’t think were both with scientific merit and entertaining, unless I specifically say so):

Jennifer Clack: Gaining Ground. I highly recommend this one. I’m a huge fan of books about ‘beginnings’, and this one chronicling the rise of the tetrapods is among the best.

Franz de Waal: Bonobo. It’s de Waal, so not as ‘hard’ as most pop sci writing. But he’s one of the few who talks about proximate mechanisms of behavior in nonhuman primates. So he’s typically a must read for me. Also, a lot of people know a lot about chimps, and thus think they know all about our ‘closest living relatives’. Which is problematic, since Bonobos are a sister taxa. It’s an important gap to be filled for many.

Henry Gee: In Search of Deep Time. Will get a full review later. This is an excellent book covering various aspects of vertebrate evolution from proposed echinoderm-chordate common ancestors, to early tetrapods, dinosaurs, birds, and hominids. It gives a good view of the difficulty of pursuing a historical science when much of the record is obliterated. He waxes eloquent about the influence of cladistics, but that’s excusable given its influence and importance in recent years.

“No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words “no” and “not” employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution, and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.”
- Edmund Opitz

“Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.”–FA Hayek

I’ve been told that I’m not really a libertarian, just a Bush apologist looking for an excuse not to vote Democrat. I find this funny, as I probably spend as much or more time criticizing the modern Republican party as I do modern liberalism. I refused to vote for Bush in 2004, and unless the 2008 candidate is in the vein of Tom Tancredo, John Cornyn, or Ron Paul, I’ll probably refuse to vote for the Republican president again, throwing my red-state vote away on the Libertarian Party. So let me try this again, in longer form: I will never vote for a Democrat because Modern Liberalism has an IN-BUILT TENDENCY toward totalitarianism. Although the Bush administration has not been acting admirably in the above respect, this is NOT inherent to the basic platform of Classical Liberalism’s bastard offspring (modern conservatism).
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Now, for a few definitions:
Classical Liberalism: The Founding Fathers represent the most prolific example of this philosophy. I discussed probably the most important tenet of their stance in my essay On Freedom. They were committed to the idea of liberty, of being left to do as you pleased so long as it hurt no one else. In the social sphere, they made this clear with the Bill of Rights, which enshrined rights that the government would have no power to infringe; these include the right of free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, religion, and others thought of as cornerstones of modern government. In the economic sphere, they showed a preference for a laissez-faire economy with a minimum of restrictions and taxation. The essential governing document of the Classic Liberal is The US Constitution, a document whose most notable aspect was the LIMITATION OF POWER of the government to what the Founding Fathers felt was the minimum necessary to ensure protection of individual autonomy and property rights. It is my personal opinion that no better governing document has ever been written, and no better ruling philosophy has ever been realized.

Modern Liberalism is a horse of an entirely different color, on the other hand. It is tied to the idea of ‘positive liberty’ (also discussed in my earlier essay), this idea that one is not truly free unless they are free from certain practical constraints. A symptom of this is their declaration of rights what would normally be thought of as privileges, such as universal healthcare, or guaranteed education. The Modern Liberal is tied to the notion that the government is a distributor and dealer in liberty and rights; that a ruling body is necessary to bestow such rights upon one. Underpinnings of modern liberal thought can be found in the work of several 19th century philosophers, but perhaps the first Modern Liberal documents espousing a complete political philosphy were the works of Karl Marx, who, I admit, took an extreme position on the matter.

The important thing to note here is that the Classical Liberal believes that man is BORN free, and only through the depredations and tyranny of others–be they despotic individuals, or excessively intrusive governments–can liberty be lost. The Modern Liberal believes that only through government can a man be MADE free, that ‘freedom’ requires the hand of a government, that is fashioned through legislature both social and economic in nature, from affirmative action to social security.

Another thing to note is that this discussion is purely philosophical, Platonic forms representing ideal situations. A Classical Liberal government in extremis would be so ineffectual as to rival anarchy in its disorder, resulting in a net loss of liberty. An extreme Modern Liberal government, on the other hand, would be even more despotic than the Gulag-filled days of Stalin. Both yield to practicality in the modern world. Classical Liberals espouse measures that compromise and limit freedom for the sake of pragmatism. (Most) Modern Liberals hold themselves to an emasculated ‘positive liberty’ content with the idea of a so-called safety net.
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And on to the main course:
“Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.”–FA Hayek

In 1944, Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek published a work called The Road to Serfdom. This highly influential work detailed how a commitment to redistributive economic policies would inevitably lead either to failure (and economic collapse) or totalitarianism. The central tenet of the work was that the essence of invasive economic policies is central planning of one form or another. Because this planning by definition reduces an individual’s freedom to buy and sell services and goods, it necessarily requires large and widespread federal powers in order to enforce such propositions. This growth in government power will eventually impact aspects of social behavior as well, requiring, as it does, a limitation on an individual’s ability to work and trade as he pleases. Hayek made case studies of both the Nazis and the Soviet Union, indicating how their restrictive economic policies almost inexorably evolved into a despotic control of peoples’ social lives. As Thomas Sowell once stated, “Friedrich Hayek is the twentieth-century social theorist who, probably more than any other, found himself vindicated by events — if not wholly, then at least in his central contention. He is also the one who, more than any other, himself exercised a significant political influence.”

I’m no Hayek, but I’ll attempt to give an easy to understand example. Take healthcare, for instance. Now, I know that many American liberals don’t necessarily want a full socialized system like the British NHS, but they do firmly support such programs as Medicaid, recognizing, as they do a ‘fundamental right to healthcare’. Under the doctrine of positive liberty, healthcare is considered a vital part of ‘freedom’, and thus to be protected/provided at all costs. Now suppose that doctors wish to unionize. They don’t even have to be as powerful and overpaid as the UAW, or even the teachers’ unions for that matter. But if they were to work together to increase their own wages and prices beyond what the government could pay out for Medicare or Medicaid, they would reach a situation where one or the other must give. Either they’d have to forcibly dissolve the Doctors’ Union (and thus trample all over the beloved Right to Assemble), or they’d have to concede their inability to provide healthcare to the poor. As Hayek said, totalitarianism or failure.
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“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”–FA Hayek
As has oft been remarked, Classical Liberalism’s underpinnings lie in their dedication to personal autonomy and property rights: “Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly, to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can” (Samuel Adams).

Modern Liberalism, however, requires a belief that personal autonomy is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve a state of freedom. Their major argument, as FDR once said, is that freedom is only achieved when men are free from the ills of want and fear. Neither personal autonomy nor property rights can guarantee such a thing. In fact, if, as FDR and the modern liberal claims, those ‘freedoms’ are necessary to achieve liberty, personal autonomy and property rights are no longer protected in any fashion whatsoever. The government is the agent of freedom. As such, the government becomes responsible for you in your entirety. ‘Fear’ is used as the rationale for citizen disarmament (violating the 2nd amendment), for regulations surrounding anything from city park curfews to what a man can say in public without getting a restraining order slapped on him. ‘Want,’ of course, is the basis for redistributive economic systems, central planning which inevitably results in the curtailment both of personal autonomy (by limiting one’s disposable income for the sake of augmenting another’s), and property rights (see Kelo v. New London). Once government is in charge of liberty, that means man himself no longer is.
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“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. ” Edward Gibbon

As Hayek remarked, democracy and liberty are not the same thing. People vote themselves into tyranny with astonishing frequency. This disheartening trend is found when people let go of their principles; when they vote for personal gain instead of maintenance of liberty. And, as we’ve seen time and time again, pursuit of personal gain through government results in ruination of all. The only recourse is to found a government that is founded in such a way that it is ruthlessly, religiously, and almost obsessively kept from increasing its power. It must be founded by paranoid individuals who think of every eventuality, who set up checks and balances, playing their own legislature, executive, and judicial branches as Machiavelli once advised his prince to do in order to keep all rivals effete. The US Constitution was one such document, but like all creations of man, it was imperfect. It relied upon a belief that Liberty and Freedom would not find a new definition. In light of the fact that it had been religiously defined in the same sense they had used it for several thousand years beforehand, and would continue to be so for over a century more, we can forgive this small lapse of judgment. Today there are two definitions of Liberty, but even more insidious is the idea that Democracy is more important than Liberty. That compromise and the right to the vote are what makes us American. Both are in fact far older than America, and will be around long after we fall. What makes us American are the words of our founding fathers, the spirit that evoked a cantankerous rattlesnake emblazoned upon a striped flag, Patrick Henry’s ultimatum, and the commitment to Life, Liberty, and Property above all else.

Modern Liberals tell me that I exaggerate, that I draw unfair comparisons between them and socialist/communist regimes, that the USSR isn’t ‘liberal’ the same way they are. All this, despite them often picking self-confessed Marxists like Noam Chomsky or Che Guevarra for figureheads. So, from the horses mouth:
“If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government’s ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees. ” Bill Clinton, 1993.

Contrast this to one of the most formidable Classical Liberals ever to walk the earth:
“A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. ” Thomas Jefferson.

In Survival of the Fetus: Why Males Have it So Rough a startling–but unsurprising (to sociobiologists at least)–phenomenon is discovered.

In times of high stress, male feti(fetuses?) are more likely to be spontaneously aborted. This is because maternally produced cortisol, ‘the’ stress hormone, is more damaging to them than to female feti. The news snippet discusses two hypotheses:

1. The null hypothesis. Males are just naturally so afflicted. Nothing special.

2. The ‘Hardy Infant’ hypothesis. I just made up that name by the way. Ralph Catalano and Tim Bruckner of UC Berkeley found that those children born in times of stress of either sex tended to live longer than those born in times of prosperity. Their argument is thus that cortisol acts as a culling mechanism, increasing the already high spontaneous abortion rate to ensure that only the strongest of infants make it out of the womb alive. As the male fetus is weaker than the female fetus, and thus less likely to survive to adulthood, it is differentially selected against so that the maximal number of children live to pass on the mother’s genes.

There’s one flaw in that argument: They make the assumption that a weaker fetus implies a weaker child. I am in fact too damned lazy to look through public health records from famine and infectious disease epidemics to see if there is a consistent sex bias in fatality skewed toward males. But let’s just say that has to be shown first for this theory to be true.

Instead I’ll bring up theory number 3, first proposed by Trivers & Willard.

3. This is the idea that under good conditions, a female will be more likely to produce male offspring than female offspring, provided reproductive success in males is highly variable. The basic idea behind this is that females tend to have fairly uniform reproductive rates from individual to individual. Thus a daughter can be thought of as a safe investment, like an equity income mutual fund: Steady, but unspectacular returns in the form of progeny. In polygynous and polygynandrous societies, where one male may copulate with many females while other males copulate with none, a male offspring has the capacity to earn his mother a rate of return several multiples more than a daughter. Of course, he has just as high (if not higher) likelihood of returning far fewer progeny. He’s a tech stock, or a small cap high yield mutual fund. Not the kind of thing you want to bank on for retirement money. Under good conditions, a female would be more willing to take this risk, having less to lose and it being easier on her to invest the time and resources necessary to raise an infant (costs which are often extremely substantial in monkeys, apes, and definitely humans).

I’m not saying mothers actively pick the sex of their babies, but I am saying that those who through unknown biological processes, invest conservatively when there’s less to invest, and take chances when things are plentiful, will have an evolutionary edge. Now, whether humans actually fulfill the Trivers-Willard conditions, namely that male reproductive success be highly variable, is up to some debate. Some studies posit monogamy as our ancestral mating system, others polygynandry. Among modern populations, we run the gamut from polyandry to polygyny. This is, I believe, not too large a concern, as not more than 7 million years ago we parted ways with the chimps on our evolutionary journey. Our common ancestor was most likely polygynandrous, as in most higher primate societies.

Male cortisol susceptibility is a remarkably elegant mechanism to achieve the end result of the Trivers-Willard process. Those females whose male fetuses were weaker than their female fetuses essentially had an inborn investment strategy that was more logical than those whose offspring’s sex was purely left to chance. Rather than flipping a coin between the high-risk/high-gain strategy and the low-risk/moderate-gain strategy, they take risks when they are most able to ‘eat’ the costs.

Retarded Geneticists With No Understanding of the Word ‘Phenotype’ Mouth Off

A lot of us have heard that humans and chimps share 98.6% of our DNA. Newer studies, fueled by the release of the complete chimp and human genomes, reveal that we may be as much as 99.3% similar.

Some, like one of the co-authors of the paper say such inane things as:

“I think we can say that this study provides further support for the hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees should be in one genus, rather than two different genus’ because we not only share extremely similar genomes, we share similar generation time,” Yi said.”

Ignore the ‘generation time’ remark for now, since it involves discussion of the specious idea of the ‘molecular clock’ which is more of a ‘molecular hourglass’ only quite a bit more inaccurate.

Lets focus on this idea that you can decide the level of taxonomic inclusion by the degree of genetic similarity. With 99% similarity to humans, chimps are genetically more like us than they are like other great apes. Can’t deny it. A lot of people will run around saying “Chimps are 99% human” or “Humans are 99% chimp.” But, based on the same logic, we are 47% cabbage. I am not making this up. You and I share 47% of our genes with cabbage. Do you feel like you’re half leafy green vegetable? Because I certainly don’t. I don’t look, act, or behave like it either except at the cellular level where commonalities such as cell membranes, mitochondria, ribosomes and other aspects of our shared eukaryotic heritage reveal themselves. To take a different tack, Philip Lieberman, a noted Neandertal expert, advanced the idea that just seven genes stood between Neandertals and the ability to speak like us. Those of us familiar with the FoxP2 gene discovery realize that just one gene can make the difference between said ability and semi-coherent muttering.

The point here is that genetic similarity says nothing about phenotypic similarity. If we were to do a Sesame Street bit with a chimp, gorilla, and a human, singing “one of these things is not like the other…”, almost all of us would say the human sticks out like a sore thumb. In my professional capacity as bioanthropologist (MSc from University College of London in ‘05), I’d have to agree. A chimp could be 99.9999% genetically identical to us, and so long as its extended phenotype is what we see in chimps today, I’d continue to agree.

You see, out here in the physical world, genes only matter in terms of their expression in phenotype. When I see a chimp, I see a somewhat intelligent African ape that walks on the knuckles of its front limbs, has significantly more robust dentition than humans, shorter legs, opposable toes, and a ribcage shaped more like a funnel than the human-type barrel chest. This is remarkably similar to what I see in a Gorilla, and only slightly different from what I see in an Orang.

I’ll update later with a couple of references, but the genus Homo has already been pretty rigorously defined. Bernard Wood and his colleague Mark Collard have done some impressive work recently cataloguing and rigorously defining and defending the criteria by which a fossil (or living) primate could be judged for inclusion in the genus Homo. Two highly readable (even to lay audiences) and comprehensive articles are available in pdf form from his site. Specifically, ‘The meaning of Homo’ and ‘The history of the genus Homo’. They contend that even ‘Homo’ habilis, whose shared ancestor with us is less than half as old as that of the chimpanzee, does not even belong in our genus, a position I have wholeheartedly agreed with since I was first introduced to habilines. Theirs represents the most erudite, logical, and scientifically defensible position yet made on the taxonomic affinities of hominids.

I fear I’m getting long-winded at this point so I’ll try to be concise. The basic idea is that these criteria have to be exclusionary and deal with behaviorally and biologically relevant criteria: common traits such as ‘no tail’ don’t work since they tell us nothing about the differences between a chimp (or in the case of the articles, Australopithecus) and a member of the genus Homo. Furthermore they have to be at least somewhat objective. These traits are pretty dang obvious, for the most part.

Bipedality and body proportions. Big one here, the shift to walking upright implies a substantially different way of life from most apes. Australopithecines (and ‘Homo’ habilis) fail the second part of this test. Although fully bipedal, they lack the relatively long legs that are the hallmark of everyone from 1.8 million year old Nariokotome Boy to modern day humans. Archaelogical data lends limited support to the idea that the longer legs did make a difference in movement and behavioral patterns. The chimp fails to distinguish itself from other apes in this regard on both counts. It’s a knuckle walker, basically identical in this respect to the Gorilla. Orangutans walk on the side of their fists, while Gibbons brachiate (monkey bar-style) with their hook-like hands. Fail

Brain Size. This is kind of troublesome when it comes to the fossil record. Is there a magic number where some are Homo and some are Australopithecus? Some ‘mental rubicon’ that once crossed, no matter by how small a distance, confers upon the individual magical powers of cognition? This is less of a problem with chimps. While their brains are big, they’re not much bigger than those of gorillas or orangutans. In fact, the distantly related South American capuchin monkey is in a veritable dead heat with the chimp for largest brain among nonhuman primates. Fail again.

Maturation Patterns. In terms of length of growth period, dental eruption, and bone maturation, chimps, Australopithecines and habilines are hardly distinguishable from the other apes. The human pattern is decidedly different in terms of both length and pattern; it is a pattern that olds constant, again from Homo erectus all the way through us (although length of maturation is somewhat debated). Fail again.

Teeth. Humans have wimpy teeth. Very wimpy teeth. And our canines are a joke. Most primates show their teeth as a threat gesture; males use them in sexual competition. I can’t remember the last time I exposed my canines at another guy during a fistfight, and I certainly don’t feel threatened everytime someone bestows an excrement-consuming grin upon me. Chimps, like other primates, have BIG teeth. Their jaws alone seem to take up half their skull. And those canines? There’s a reason why when I work with primates in person, I like to have them on the other side of the cage from me. Fail again.

So chimps eat like other primates, they move like other primates, they’re smart, but not so much smarter than other apes, and they have very typical life histories. Despite this, they’re more like us than they are like other apes?

*scratches head, makes an ‘ook’ noise, and grabs a banana*

I endorse John Boehner

I have to admit, I’m not up on the notable aspects of each of these candidates, other than the fact that apparently Boehner has never added an earmark to an appropriations bill.

I used the position letters each of them wrote for Opinion Journal (Boehner, Shadegg, Blunt). I followed this up with NZ Bear’s aggregate of their answers to interview questions.

Blunt was out. “Party of Limited Government: Our Record of Accomplishment Speaks for Itself.” I’m already questioning him; if we want to judge him based on the GOP’s recent record, he might as well retire himself from the running. He waxes eloquent about his accomplishments as the majority whip. See above. This is followed by a discussion of the recent tax cuts and their stimulatory effect on the economy. Now we’re getting somewhere. Tax cuts are good. Problem is, they don’t directly reflect the budget, as seen by our exploding deficit. Second, as Reagan-era economists oft remarked, tax cuts can increase tax revenue. That’s exactly what happened the past couple years, which means the govt actually had MORE money to spend. Still, it’s a start.

But as to reducing pork and the overall budget, Blunt gives us mere platitudes, nothing to make him stand out from what anyone else is saying. In fact, he’s pretty much saying no more than the bare minimum of what needs to be done. Of course, this may be because he spent 2/3 of the letter patting himself and his lost party on the back. Which was the final nail in the coffin. A personal requirement of mine is that I won’t vote for a man I wouldn’t want to grab a cup of joe and chill with. Blunt is one of those bombastic blowhards that made Cornell Republicans look like a caricature of idiocy, almost worthy of campus liberals’ scorn. The kind of person, in short, who would leave me waiting for a legal and proper excuse to spread his nose all over his face with a strong right cross.

Boehner & Shadegg. I like what both of these guys had to say, and they both seem more serious and more genuine about the whole thing than Blunt. Boehner took an early lead with his lack of earmarking, as George Will pointed out. But overall they’re so similar on a variety of stances that I can’t actually hold Boehner’s apparent saintlihood against Shadegg. As I look through NZ’s questions, I find myself nodding in agreement with the two of them on issues from ANWR to guest workers to their distaste for Homeland Security Department.

But two of Boehner’s answers stood out as I read them:

Question 6. N.Z. Bear: Congressman, N.Z from Truth Laid Bear again. A similar reform related question. Would you support a law requiring that for each act of Congress, including appropriations, the law contains statements identifying the authority within the Constitution that grants the Congress to pass that law?

Rep. John A. Boehner: That’d be fine with me.

Question 16. Jon Henke: Mr. Congressman, on the NSA warrantless surveillance issue, do you believe the President has the inherent authority to do what he has been doing? Or do you think we need to codify the process somehow?

Rep. John A. Boehner: I think that it’s unclear to me. Now the President, clearly, and his people believe that they have the ability to do this and frankly I’m very interested in hearings to see in how, I mean they’ve attempted to justify it, but frankly I want to make, if it’s not clear in the law or Constitution today, it ought to be made clear in a law or the Constitution that he can do this and what the limits are. But at this point, I’m not, it’s not clear in my mind under that he has, under what authority he has to get it done.

I’m a big fan of the constitution. I happen to agree with the founders’ intent that the government’s power should be carefuly circumscribed. Boehner seemed to show a support of this twice! Possibly a record for a politician in the modern era. Specifically he didn’t toe the party line on the NSA wiretap issue, explicitly stating that he didn’t know if Bush had the power to do as he had done and that it needs to be investigated. This gets such big thumbs up from me that I can’t put it into words.

Ultimately, Boehner’s answer here clinched it for me. He’s serious about pork and has proven it with his own record. He knows what the constituion is and appears unafraid to question the White House on policy issues, EVEN AS HE CAMPAIGNS FOR ONE OF THE HIGHEST PARTY POSITIONS. This tells me he has integrity as well as a discerning mind. He’s a good voice against pork, and will be a good voice in bringing the party back into line with true conservatism.

As a gun rights activist, I’m a staunch believer in the ’slippery slope’ phenomenon. They start with ‘reasonable’ bans and curtailments (and they usually are at least somewhat reasonable on the face of it). Then the restrictions continue to get worse. Eventually, as in England which saw up to a 50% rise in gun crimes last year, despite a total ban, they stop using logic to defend the practice whatsoever.

The slippery slope phenomenon is one of my greatest fears about our permissive, even encouraging, attitude toward psychiatric medication for people with mood problems. Relacore was originally marketed to help reduce belly fat (another use for pills I look down on). However, recently they’ve begun to market it based upon a beneficial side-effect: mood enhancement. Their most recent advertisements make no bones about this, propounding its value as a ‘Feel Good Pill’ first, and a belly fat reducer second.

Intractable depression with no known behavioral cause used to be treated with MAOI’s and SSRI’s. Nowadays, known cause and grief beyond a certain length are calls to prescribe these pills. And now we have pharmaceutical companies promoting OTC drugs that do the same damn thing.

Why is this a problem?
Cocaine: Dopamine Reuptake Inhibitor
Prozac: Serotonin Reputake Inhibitor

Cocaine=bad. Prozac=good. This was somewhat tenable in the days where antidepressant prescriptions were rare and often temporary. As the criteria for candidates for these drugs grow wider and wider, as the people who take them become more and more ‘normal’, this distinction between a recreational thin white line and a ‘medically necessary’ little blue pill becomes artificial. And now, with the apparently societally acceptable use of OTC mood enhancers, this distinction has quite literally become a gently sloping line, from self-medication with illegal drugs to self-medication with legal OTCs, to a doctor prescribing you a drug because you’ve wasted your life and hate yourself. In short, abovetheinfluence.com, the oh-so-memorable “This is your brain…” commercials, and the anti-drug program just got anally raped, without lube.

Now, as a libertarian-leaning conservative, I actually have no problems with legalization of cocaine, or the fact that Relacore is advertised pretty much as a legal recreational drug. What I have a problem with is the self-delusions that Relacore and the profligate SSRI prescriptions allow.

As it becomes more and more ok to take mood enhancers when you’re feeling ‘blue’, it becomes more and more ok not to root out the cause of those thought patterns in the first place. Someone with low self-esteem takes a pill. They feel better. But it didn’t actually fix the self-esteem or the cognitive dissonances that caused it. They can’t cope with the loss of a family member, so they take the drug. They never move past their grief.

As a medical student I’m well aware that the goal of a doctor is first to cure a disease. As a realist, and a chronic nerve injury sufferer, I’m well aware that not all diseases can be cured. All doctors can do with me is alleviate the symptoms: cervical traction, antileptics, and (god forbid) hardcore pain medication down the line. Depression, anxiety, and similar mental problems aren’t the same way. Behavioral therapy is highly effective. Actually moreso than medication, according to many.

Indeed, while doctors point to ‘chemical imbalance’s, and this new protein p11 (I’ll link with my thoughts on this protein later). that’s all the rage, they haven’t actually proven that these are causes rather than symptoms of depression. Indeed, since basic neurbiology established well before I was born that modulator proteins (like p11) and chemical titers change very easily in the brain, most of these studies prove next to nothing. To draw an analogy, so far what they’ve shown is like saying that people who don’t exercise have poor cardiovascular health. Wow. Shocker.

Occam’s Razor tells us that if rates of depression in the population are as high as they are, and we have yet to find a true causative biological source (a gene, or a developmental insult, would be favorite), then what we are seeing isnt’ so much a disease as an adaptation to something…probably a mode of thought. If so, as health professionals it is our job to seek out what is causing this depression. And, in the absence of a causative factor, we must assume it is thought.

We would be remiss in our duties if we simply treated an obese patient’s knee problems with Hyalgan and pain relievers while ignoring the influence of his weight on wear and tear in the joint. We would be failing our patient if we treated their severe sunburn but didn’t caution them against the dangers of tanning. We would be doing them a horrible disservice if we merely prescribed lipitor without at least attempting to change our patients’ lifestyles.

When a doctor can fix a cause of a disease, they owe it to themself and their patient to go after that cause even as they manage their symptoms. With our permissive stance toward mood enhancers of all stripes, and our veritable endorsement of pills before psychotherapy as treatment for BEHAVIORAL problems, we forsake our jobs and our oaths. And more importantly, we forsake the mental health and personal growth of our patients.