Carnegie Museum of Natural History and University of Pittsburgh have teamed up on this effort that will leave the students with an appreciation of how evolutionary and disease patterns are intertwined. I took a class in evolutionary medicine during graduate school, loved it. I’ll be involved in evolutionary psych myself someday. Needless to say, I think it’s a great concept.

Of course, a med student with a graduate degree in human evolution would see an important and interesting area of collaboration between the two fields, wouldn’t he? No. Actually I didn’t at first, outside of psych (which I’ll leave out of the proceeding discussion for reasons of simplicity). But in the intervening years, Nick has gotten a little older, and just possibly a little wiser (although most would contend otherwise).

I’ve always said if you want to understand something–anything– you have to understand its history. You can’t understand the spell my Mustang weaves around me unless you saw the design cues harkening back to the 1969 model year. Of muscle cars, drag strips, motors so large you had to cut the frame away to put them in, of Steve McQueen and Trans Am victories. Of the days when homologation meant that the monster on your driveway is literally identical to the monsters being driven in NASCAR. You can’t understand the work of Revolutionary War era poet Philip Freneau unless you knew about the war itself and the circumstances surrounding it.

And you can’t understand Buddhism without knowing about the concurrent Jain movement, or the history of their parent religion, Hinduism.

Just like that, the very design of man from our biochemical processes to our strange pelvi and weird bipedal gait only make sense in the light of evolution. The human body has been shaped by the selection presures placed upon not-so-human ancestors. We are a collection of jury-rigged mechanisms cobbled together from structures not necessarily originally bent to that purpose. Viewing disease in this context means exploring the weak spots in our makeup left behind by inadequate negative selection pressure, and understanding when we’re operating ‘outside design parameters.’ (most of the ’softer’ psych problems–especially in kids–can be chalked up to the latter, in my opinion).

Understanding the evolutionary history of humans may not directly produce any cures, and it may not directly aid in diagnosis. But it’ll tell us where to look for problems, and guide us in our search for solutions.

I’m trying to live up to the blog community I’m part of (Life, Liberty, Property), and actually write more about the philosophy of liberty. But I suck at life. However, to correct this, I’m taking time everyday to read through posts that fellow members make. I stumbled onto this GREAT nugget from a member whose blog I hadn’t chanced upon as yet

Acadamia is full of pseudo-intellectual, self-congratulatory wannabes. The required reading material seems to be generated straight out of the post-modern generator or something like it. Most of it is utter nonsense. The authors of the course material cite other authors of course material and peer-review papers that no one but the afformentioned pseudo-intelectuals read anyway. The instructors participate in this madness by expecting that the students learners write essay material in the same mold. Fortunately, I’m a competent enough writer to create Ph.D. level nonsense.

I’m no stranger to academia. And I’m familiar enough with ‘pundits’ from ‘elite institutions’ that even the merest mention of the words “professor in the liberal arts” are enough to produce a conditioned response in the form of projectile vomit.

Call me crazy, but all the letters after your name in the world won’t make me respect you or your work if you have no idea what the real world is. I struggle to find the point of cultural anthropologists who care more about the ‘use of space’ in the traditional South Indian home than the traditional South Indian does; you can spend 20 pages on it, but I guarantee you that when Grandma says she doesn’t really care which side of the kitchen the pots and pans are put, she really doesn’t care. And neither should you. I have a serious problem with sociologists, political science professors and philosophy teachers who’ve never spent any significant time outside the padded confines of academia. Before you give me a lecture about ‘The People’ and all their virtues, how about you spend some time as part of them? (Eric Flint, one of my favorite SciFi authors actually has spent some time as ‘The People’, and is still Marxist, but I forgive him cuz he writes really well. And did an excellent alternate history involving an Andhra kicking North Indian ass. He even got a lot of our cultural themes right. He’s also the exception rather than the rule)

Liberals love to trot out their little Marxist and postmodern professors saying “Look these are really smart people, and they say you’re wrong.” I know some really smart creationists, doesn’t make them more right than a really dumb evolutionary biologist. This is my biggest problem with liberalism. While they claim to be the party of knowledge, they refuse to make the attempt to reconcile evolutionary biology, economics, ecology, and studies of basic human nature (to name a few areas of study) with their own political beliefs. When it comes to illegal immigration, any economist with half a brain can easily demonstrate how labor supply and demand issues have resulted in a net increase in poverty, both to poor domestics and to poor illegals. Liberals, however, either ignore it or say “Well, it’s a theory.” Much like the creationists they (and I) poo-poo. Even the slightest knowledge of game theory concepts helps someone understand why large central planning is doomed to failure, and why a socialist system will always be outcompeted by a capitalist system; but again “it shouldn’t be that way.” Well kiddo, it is.

Ok, I went wayyyy off on a tangent just now. Point is, letters after their name don’t dazzle me, they shouldn’t dazzle you. A PhD is more a sign of hard work and time rather than intelligence. And it certainly isn’t a sign that you actually understand the material you claim to, only that a panel of professors thought your ideas coincided with theirs. Since those professors often remain completely isolated from whatever field they claim to study, the value of that particular piece of wallpaper is highly debatable.

And no, I’m not just saying that to compensate for the fact that I decided not to get a PhD.

Made an interesting observation on the way back home today. There was a pretty big snowstorm last weekend, the subdivision was ICE all weekend long, then evaporated away in time for us to make it in for class on Monday. WOOHOO. My house has by far the most snow on it, the driveway, and the sidewalks. The only other house that came close was, interestingly enough, owned by the only other minority family in my neighborhood. As I looked around, my next door neighbor, the family across the street, and indeed everyone on my block had NONE left.

So we’ve got a situation here. My driveway’s still got a snowbank on it, there’s still snow on my roof, and there’s a veritable hillock outside my front door. Almost the same for the other minority family. Nothing even close to what’s going on with all the white families. Clearly, the fact that we’re brown and the snow hasn’t disappeared are related. Can’t just be coincidence.

Which raises the question, racists are clearly involved, but at what level? Is God mad at me for my heathen ways, and showing his displeasure by blighting the House of Rao with snow? Maybe the sun and atmosphere are racist, conspiring to keep enough radiation off our little plot to prevent the snow melting. Maybe Bush really does hate darkies, and since I’m a heathen and he’s christian, is showing his religious prejudice as well. This would explain why I’ve got more snow than the black family. Or, maybe even more insidiously, this was planned by my white-robed neighbors, who’ve carefully preserved and added snow as necessary? Whatever it is, Rosa Parks did NOT refuse to move to the back of the bus, only to see this kinda racist crap go on.

Correlation does not imply causation folks. Just because [insert minority here] is worse off than white people, or asians, doesn’t mean that racism is involved. I imagine my situation could much better be explained by things like the angle of my roof, the material of the shingles, and the way my house is situated relative to the sun’s daily path. But the Jesse Jackson/NAACP/whatever response is of course “Look at the darkies, then look at the white people. MUST BE RACISM.”

Accusing anyone, be they my neighbors, the government, or even God, or racism, is pretty much the same thing as accusing someone of a crime. Believe me there are few crimes which tick me off quite as much as racism and prejudice. A fellow student recently made an unflattering remark about non-christian medical students. I’m not the type to sit there and stew passively aggressively, and would like to confront this misguided kid and educate him, but I’m unable to. I can’t trust myself not to start yelling–or worse–as soon as I broach the subject. But I digress. In this great country, an individual is considered innocent until proven guilty. Before you start calling my melanin-impoverished friends racist, before you insist that you’re being held down by ‘The Man’ (what the hell does he look like anyway?), could you please do your ****ing jobs and prove your case?

I discussed the idiocy of the knee-jerk ‘racism cry in this earlier post, but I’ll rehash it really quickly. The real world is messy. Really messy. While you might want to study one thing (say, the role of racism in the snowbank in front of my car), there will be all sorts of entangled factors (like the roof angle, shingle material, etc.). In order to prove your point, you have to tease apart these conflicting variables. Interestingly enough, there’s an old, time-honored, pain-in-the-ass field of study DEVOTED to accomplishing just that. We call it statistical analysis. But race politics would probably fall apart if we used it. Once all those intertwined factors are brought into play, I wouldn’t be surprised if racism was still a factor. I’ve had it actually affect contest and application decisions myself. But I would be extremely surprised if it was even in the top five important factors explaining racial differences.

Now put on your tin foil hats and go back to the idea that Democrats and so-called ‘Black Leaders’ need black people to feel held down in order to keep their power.

Gary Schwartz and Dan Gebo have compared the anklebones of various hominid and hominoid species and come to the not so startling conclusion that some of the australopithecines had a different posture from ours. Unfortunately the article hasn’t been published as of yet, which leaves me whining and whimpering in anticipation.

Before I get into it, I gotta say I’m a bit annoyed at that article’s title. Robust australopithecines were not our ancestors. Instead they represent one of two daughter branches that stemmed from the ‘gracile’ australopithecines (like Lucy). We represent the other daughter lineage.

Ok, now on to the meat of this little finding. The very mechanics of walking in these guys would have been different(and less efficient) from our own. Although their feet were remarkably like ours (and thus different from other apes), the relationship between their ankles and their shin bones had a different morphology. Their lower legs angled in toward the knee a bit more, and their upper legs angled out a bit more. For a crass illustration, some obese people stand in a similar way, with their knees much closer together than their ankles.

My thoughts:
Keeping with the fat person analogy, that stance is a lot more stable when standing than a more typical human posture is. Why this is interesting is because several researchers have argued that bipedalism in earlier hominids was a postural adaptation rather than locomotor, as it is in us. Although paleoanthropology isn’t my specialty, I’m inclined to agree with this stance for the reasons discussed in this post. The strength of this argument lies in the simple fact that early hominids are pretty clearly at a locomotor disadvantage when compared both to their descendants and to the knuckle-walking African apes they likely evolved from.

Thus, that the robust australopithecines–with their short gait length–had a more stable standing posture than we do, slots nicely into the theory that they were bipedal for reasons other than movement. We traded that postural stability of our ancestors for the mechanical efficiency of walking and jogging that we now enjoy.

One of the reasons that I’m anxiously awaiting the release of the full article is that my own viewpoint only holds water if the finding is also true of the gracile australopithecines. If the common ancestor of us and robust australopithecines didn’t have these adaptations favoring stability, it means that either I’m full of crap, or that postural stability only became a driving force in the evolution of the bipedal stance in one of the two major later hominid radiations.

Please be sure to read Afarensis’ own post on this subject, which goes into the anatomical nitty gritty and has a nice picture, far more illustrative than my fat people analogy.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised upon entering OU med school this Fall. I hated most of the pre-meds I knew in undergrad at Cornell. They were largely self-absorbed geeks more concerned with a perverse view of achievement and status than learning to become healers (in addition, for many Asians, there was the pressure for parental approval). While I am self-absorbed, something of an overachiever (when not being a slacker), and Asian, that didn’t really apply to me. I won’t get into why I chose this path, but suffice to say that money, parental favor, and status played no role in this decision. Because of that experience, and the fact that I’ve been exposed to the medical community for most of my life, I have a bit of a cynical opinion of it all. I frequently doubt the quality of doctors we produce despite the rigorous process from pre-med to resident to ‘real’ doctor.

We just got through our first test block of second semester. Tested on Physiology, Neuroscience, Histology, and Human Behavior. I’m not going to lie, the tests were hard as hell. And a lot of people used to making A’s…didn’t. As you can imagine, there was a lot of ire. Here are people busting their butts, practically memorizing class notes and syllabi, and they’re making C’s instead of the A’s they made last semester.

Well, I’m not the only one who has a blog in our class. Another classmate addressed both of these issues in a recent post and made some statements and drew some conclusions that I find distasteful and misguided at best, and downright insulting at worst:

the difficulty of tests that I faced wasn’t what made me so frustrated. I grew increasingly agitated as the week progressed because of the response I observed my classmates having in regards to our results.

I was one of those classmates, playing traitor to my module and hanging out in his, and I did pretty darn well. Well above the mean in every test, and blew two of them right out of the water. I was bitching anyway. Not about my grades, which were my best of the year with the least effort put forth yet, but about the way we were taught and the way we were tested. I wasn’t the only one who did well that was critical of the test block, by far. While I did hear some complaining about grades (to be expected when you’re among overachievers), most of it was like mine; critical of what we were tested on because we felt it was irrelevant.

The trick is, most medical students are looking forward to the clinic and treating patients so much that they scorn the “basic science years.” They disdain the long hours of study, the memorization of “useless facts,” the testing over seemingly insignificant trivia…Most students don’t care about truly learning and understanding this stuff; “just tell us what we need to know to pass the tests” is the mantra they cry.

You know, the thing is, on two of our tests, Neuroscience and Physiology, we were tested on meaningless trivia. And many of the ‘conceptual’ questions were more focused on tricking us and confusing us with situations that either we weren’t likely to encounter or were physiologically impossible than they were about understanding the concepts of fluid dynamics in blood vessels or mechanics of the heart. That is what had us upset; the irrelevance.

On our physiology test, we had our first exposure to test questions that went beyond memorization into truly understanding the relatively simple concepts that make up our highly complex body systems…But I believe that this was absolutely necessary for our development as doctors-in-training. Most of my classmates disagree. “The test questions were unfair,” I heard many complain. “The f professor did a horrible job of teaching – he made it sound all easy, but the f test questions weren’t straightforward at all,” cursed many.

And again, I think he’s confusing tricky and ridiculous with conceptual difficulty. A lot of what we learned had to do with fluid dynamics. I have a pretty good conceptual knowledge of that field. One of my best friends designed a full aero-kit for racecars. For years I wanted to be an aero engineer and ate up some really technical material on wing and fuselage design and was a huge physics nerd all through high school. These questions didn’t necessarily speak to conceptual understanding and critical thinking; more often than not, they offered answers that were intentionally convoluted, dealing with secondary and tertiary effects rather than the primary effects that someone with a good conceptual basis should understand.

But these statements, while infuriating to a man with my prodigious temper, are more or less a result of being misguided and maybe lacking a view of what real medicine is. Where it starts to get directly insulting is further down the page.

Frankly, I think my colleagues are fools. If all there was to being a doctor was knowing diagnoses and treatments, I could make millions of dollars programming a robot to do just that. It’s such a low view of doctoring. It sickened me to hear that all week, and it angers me to think that patients are going to put their lives in these people’s hands.

I guess as one of the complainers, I’m a fool. I’d have liked to see him say that to my face instead of blogging about it. But here he really shows a lack of exposure to real diagnostic medicine. Diagnosis (and to a lesser degree treatment) is more art than science. Often enough a doctor can’t pinpoint why they think a diagnosis is right, but these gut instincts can catch a fast-spreading cancer before it becomes lethal. No robot in the world can do that. Which is why minutiae and trickiness don’t help us become better doctors. We need a feel for medicine, an idea of why the body does what it does. And that won’t come from the kinds of questions we were complaining about, the same questions he earlier lambasted us for complaining about. It’ll come from case studies, talking to real doctors and real patients, and being walked through the diagnostic process (which our medical school does an EXCELLENT job of considering we’re first years, overall).

But then he had to go bring religion into it…

What saddened me more than hearing non-Christians complaining in this way was the hearing the Christians I know in medical school whining the same way. It seems to me that what should set the Christians apart from the non-Christians in medical school is that we desire to become doctors because God has called us into the profession.

I guess as a dirty heathen I should be held to a lower standard. But you know, I can’t recall anywhere in the Vedas or Upanishads where we’re told to be materialistic self-serving douchebags. I guess I missed that passage. Unlike many other agnostics and evolutionary biologists, I’m on balance a fan of religion. I see more moral people come from a religious background than from secular backgrounds. But at the same time, I can point to self-serving, materialistic Christian doctors pretty much just as easily as I could non-Christians.

I’ve lived in the bible belt most of my life and most of my friends have been fairly religious Christians. We always got along well and didn’t fight much about religion because morality and who we were was more important than how we worshipped or if we worshipped at all. But this kid forgets that there was morality before Jesus. I belong to the oldest continuously practiced religion in the world, one that some (including me) contend is the oldest religion, period. We don’t worship the devil, condone stealing, rape women, or kill and eat babies.

The intimation that because I’m not Christian I shouldn’t be expected to be moral is prejudice of the lowest kind, it’s paternalism akin to Kipling’s White Man’s Burden. He almost overtly claims that Christian doctors are by nature more noble than others. Screw that and screw him. He should ask himself if Jesus would support such a sentiment. I went to a Christian school, I’ve read the bible, and you know what struck me about Jesus? Just like Buddha, or Krishna, he was a moral teacher. He taught people about right and wrong first, and about devotion to god second. But I’m a heathen, so I probably lack the superior Christian ability to interpret holy works. We have a saying in Hinduism: “The soul is the thing, and the whole of the thing.” The trappings around it don’t matter; it’s who you are inside that God cares about. Not whether or how you pray to him, but what you do.

But at least this I can agree with:

Medicine, with its highest goals requiring a high regard for human life, has left its sacred calling and rapidly degenerated into a business enterprise that are regulated by insurance policies and patient’s rights.

Ah, a martyr:

Who knows, maybe God has placed me where I am so that I can recast the vision of a noble medical profession to a population that is blinded by relativistic humanism. Whatever the case, I will continue to study this material with all diligence so that my joy will be complete. May God be glorified!

I can understand the idea of medicine being a calling. No one else played a part in my decision to become a doctor, parents, professors, mentors, friends, all wanted me to stay out of the profession. But a major part of the reason I’m here instead of playing with south american monkeys is that I was pushed by a sense of dharma, duty. I could even romanticize my decision as much as he did in his post. But I’d be lying to myself. Everyone is selfish–and that’s not just the evolutionary biologist speaking–everyone is moved by a selfish goal of some kind. They may do noble work, they may give more to the world than they take, but at the end of the day, everyone is motivated by their own desires.

But I’ll never be able to look this student in the face again without feeling the sting of that insult about my religion and about my moral character. All I can say is I’m glad the days when rage went straight to my fists are long gone.
———————————————————————————-

One of the reasons we scorn the first two years of med school (I’m actually looking forward to second year, but I do despise this year’s material with a passion) is because they really are irrelevant. It’s more a right of passage, just like a high GPA, a good MCAT score, and all those extracurriculars. Work your butt off, study hard, get good grades…then never use much of the material again. Obviously a good general knowledge of gross anatomy is important, as is a conceptual understanding of physiology and neuroscience, since those three fields more than any other contribute to what you look at in your clinical exams. But there’s a point after which what you learn no longer impacts your clinical skills in those areas.

This isn’t just students mouthing off but the words of doctors to us. Many of us have doctors in our families, many know their local doctors pretty well. When we discuss our curriculum with them, with residents, or with 3rd and 4th years, they often tell us that the material is irrelevant. This is why we complain. Why are we learning it if it won’t help us become better doctors?

You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and donâ??t enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 100% Serenity (Firefly) 100% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 94% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 94% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 88% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 81% Moya (Farscape) 75% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 69% SG-1 (Stargate) 63% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 63% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 56% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 38%

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

Really? You mean a hick who loves the open range and hates government fits in on the Serenity crew? Whoda thunk it.

Triggerfinger posted about an appeal challenging the ATFE’s decision to regulate model rocket engines as explosives. Read Triggerfinger’s entry, because he’s more insightful than I am.

All I can say is that I love scathing diatribes rendered in court opinion. Thomas’s dissent in Kelo v. New London should be considered a modern classic in political philosophy. But this one’s great just for its poignancy:

The problem in this case is that ATFE’s explanation for its determination that APCP deflagrates lacks any coherence. We therefore owe no deference to ATFE’s purported expertise because we cannot discern it.

Where’s the expertise in the expert opinion? OH so beautiful. Now if only this could be applied to the ATFE as a whole, I’d be a happy man.

Bureaucracies have a major problem in that they all fight for a slice of the same pie, due to almost invariably being run by officious and ambitious men whose sole concern is the amount of power they wield. And when they realize that there’s not enough pie for overlapping agencies (FBI, ATFE, DHS, Treasury, NSA) to share conveniently, they try to make more pie. Using my damned flour. Screw that. I was trying to make a pizza.

Model rocket engines, explosive? I’ve enjoyed model rocketry off and on for over 10 years, cobbling multistage rockets out of paper towel rolls and funnels, and once modifying a launcher into a shoulder-mounted ‘fire and forget’ kinetic weapon (it severely damaged a shrub’s careful grooming). They don’t explode anymore than the Shuttle does, Challenger excepting (yes, bad taste, I know). They burn in a controlled manner and in fact are almost identical in operation and theory to the Solid Rocket Boosters (the thin white ones) that the Shuttle uses. Dry slow-burning propellant.

This was a clear cut case of the ATFE deciding they wanted more to regulate. It’s not too different from the Brit tabloids and politicians labelling BB guns as ‘firearms’. I’ve owned a few BB guns, been shot by a few BB guns, shot at my best friends with BB guns, and you know, not once was fire or explosion involved.

A new study confirms the conventional wisdom that women with significant amounts of abdominal fat are more likely to need gallstone removal than other groups.

The 4F’s, which we learned last semester in Gross Anatomy are Fat, Fertile, Females over Forty. Don’t ask me about why each of those is a risk factor, couldn’t tell you.

As for the fatness, they think this may be because ab fat is more ‘active’ than fat below the waistline. Abdominal fat indicates higher risk for a number of weight-related health problems from diabetes to heart disease, big booties and thunder thighs, not so much.

Blood is basically a water-based solution, fat behaves like oil. Mixing the two ain’t so easy, as anyone who’s been to one of those fancy italian restaurants where you dip your bread in olive oil and vinegar knows. Bile is an emulsifier, what it does is break up the fats in our digestive system into smaller, more manageable droplets that can be moved into our circulatory system a lot easier.

So what’s happening is that in response to the higher levels of fat in circulation (due to that active abdominal fat), the liver is producing more bile. That bile doesn’t get ejected into the GI tract immediately but rather moves backward into the gall bladder and sits there till it’s needed. Bile is actually an ion, like salt. So it can crystallize, just like salt out of seawater left in the sun. Those crystals are the gallstones.

I have no idea why I blogged this. Possibly because I’ve been very inactive the past few days and felt guilty. (Not to mention I resolve to break 1 dollar in AdSense revenue within 1 month of launch…not looking pretty).

I’ve taken several of the real ones, all with off-the-mark results. They don’t distinguish between comfortable/good with people and actual extroversion. While living just a couple miles outside Central London, I once went a week without physically speaking to another soul. And didn’t notice.

This one doesn’t. Plus it hits a lot of my bad points too. Like the fact that I understand the golden retriever at my feet or the south american capuchin monkey better than I understand the rest of humanity. And my explosive personality. And my self-confessed ridiculous degree of egomania.

You Are a Hunter Soul

You are driven and ambitious - totally self motiviated to succeed Actively working to acheive what you want, you are skillful in many areas. You are a natural predator with strong instincts … and more than a little demanding. You are creative, energetic, and an extremely powerful force. An outdoors person, you like animals and relate to them better than people. You tend to have an explosive personality, but also a good sense of humor. People sometimes see you as arrogant or a know it all. You tend to be a bit of a loner, though you hate to be alone. Souls you are most compatible with: Seeker Soul and Peacemaker Soul

Sen. Coburn from Oklahoma has been campaigning against pork since the beginning, making him perhaps the first Republican I would be willing to vote for.

He has a column up at OpinionJournal. Read the whole thing. Short and Poignant.

Here’s a few snippets…

Those who argue that fighting pork distracts members from the more costly challenge of entitlement reform don’t understand human nature. Earmarks are a gateway drug on the road to the spending addiction. One day an otherwise frugal member votes for pork, the next day he or she votes for a bloated spending bill or entitlement expansion: A “no” vote might cut off their access to earmarks.

Great analogy. Pork and Entitlement spending have one thing in common: buying votes. Either through campaign contributions or bribing a given demographic, both are about keeping the incumbent in office. They are about the legislator instead of about the people.

Nowhere in our founding documents is a justification for today’s out-of-control earmarking. In fact, Madison and the other framers were clear that the general welfare clause of the Constitution should never be construed as a blank check for Congress. Pork is a modern indulgence, not an ancient or noble tradition.

If you’ve read my piece about Boehner, or my political philosophy posts, you’ll know I like when elected officials mention our founding document. I happen to be a big fan of the constitution and the philosophical ideals it represents. I also don’t like the abuse of the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses which have been used in increasing frequency for bloating government and reducing our rights.

You’ll also notice that there are few Democrats calling for an end to pork. Refer to the first quote. Democrat leaders, now more than ever, are a bunch of white guys and girls born with silver spoons in their mouths who want power more than anything. When a person like that tells you they care about the poor and it might be wise to question their honesty.

Apparently some Republicans are upset with the porkbusting crowd. This is to be expected, since although earmarks are not a conservative thing, they are the hallmark of the Career Politician *spit*.

But this just gets funny. Rep. Flake is one of the more militant anti-spending crusaders in the GOP. He’s sponsored a bill that allows, for the first time, earmarks to be challenged one by one on the floor, rather than only being able to vote for the whole package. A lot of congressmen with their ears to the ground have jumped on board, but their own records leave a little something to be desired.

The committee that controls the pursestrings compiled a list of earmarks requested last year by GOP lawmakers who favor Flake’s bill.
The total was 717 requested earmarks, although none for Flake, for more than $4.5 billion

Keep in mind that’s just who’s for the bill in the republican party. That doesn’t include those against or Democrats. That’s a lot of money. And a lot of hypocrisy.

But the best quote of this article was from Georgia Rep Lynne Westmoreland. OOOOHHH the irony.

“I am shocked that the Republican staff of a Republican-led committee in a Republican-majority Congress would do opposition research on a fellow Republican,” first-term Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia wrote in a letter to fellow GOP lawmakers. “I do not see any other purpose behind the preparation of this report other than for it to be leaked to the press.”

Pay attention to that last sentence because it’s about to cause you to roll around the ground laughing so hard you’ll be in tears.

The Associated Press obtained copies of both the Appropriations Committee tally and the letter.
By committee count, Westmoreland requested 59 earmarks last year, for a total of $536 million. His office declined to release the entire list of projects he requested.

Jeez, I’m dying here. And I don’t even need to add any commentary. ANY politician who wants earmarks needs to be voted out. This is not a Republican issue, this is not a Democrat issue. This is an issue of federalism, of respecting the government our founding fathers sought to create, and an issue of removing the stain of the parasites known as Career Politicians.

Wow, maternal SSRI use is linked to withdrawal symptoms in neonates. Really?

I am so stunned and amazed by this discovery that I’m speechless. *sarcasm alert*

It’s a well known fact that one of the best outcomes possible in an addict’s pregnancy is that the child is born with withdrawal symptoms. ER did an episode where they performed emergency detox on a kid a few years ago. One of these drugs that causes withdrawal is cocaine. Which happens to have some similarities to SSRI’s, MAOI’s, and many other drugs used for things like depression and anxiety.

A basic lesson here: A lot of us think of nerves as something like electrical circuits sending signals to each other and different parts of the body. This is only partially correct. An individual neuron does act a lot like that. But nerves connect to each other using chemicals like norepinephrine (similar in structure to adrenaline), serotonin, or dopamine. There is a presynaptic neuron and a postsynaptic neuron:

Figure 1: Synapse

The little round shapes are the neurotransmitters. When the electrical signal reaches the end of the presynaptic nerve, it causes neurotransmitter to be released. The neurotransmitter moves across that gap (the synapse) and touches the postsynaptic nerve. When it touches, the postsynaptic nerve is induced to fire and continue the electrical signal.

Normally, almost immediately after the postsynaptic nerve fires, the presynaptic sucks that neurotransmitter back up like a hoover. If the stuff stuck around, the postsynaptic nerve might fire when the presynaptic nerve didn’t. Like a short-circuit almost.

Now here’s a picture of the same synapse, only with a Reuptake Inhibiting Drug involved this time:

Figure 2: Synapse with Reuptake Inhibitor

Notice that now the presynaptic nerve can’t suck the neurotransmitter back up. The drug blocks re-uptake. Cocaine is a Dopamine Reuptake Inhibitor. It works by preventing your nerves from reabsorbing (and thus ending the effects of) dopamine. This is what gets you high…the increased amount of free dopamine. When you take the cocaine away, the dopamine gets reabsorbed, thus lowering the amount of free dopamine. For an addict, even though they still have normal amounts of dopamine in their synapses, they feel like they have less, since they were used to the higher amount. So they feel bad. Readers may have experienced caffeine or nicotine withdrawal, or if they have had surgery or really bad musculoskeletal injuries, they may have had problems getting off the narcotics they were given.

But dopamine isn’t the only neurotransmitter whose levels are jacked up by recreational drugs. Opiates and heroin have a powerful effect on both dopamine and serotonin. MDMA (ecstasy) is well known as a powerful stimulatory agent on serotonergic cells (those that release serotonin). SSRI’s act in a similar fashion to X on the same neurotransmitter, albeit at a reduced level. MAOI’s act on dopamine and serotonin, just like opiates.

So why is the medical establishment ’surprised’ at this new finding? Well, I’ve got a couple ideas why.

1. For various reasons, doctors don’t like to move without empirical evidence. As a dabbler in ‘real’ research (and future doctor), I understand this completely. Science depends on real data. Science-based fields, such as Medicine and Engineering, depend on the application of science. Thus doctors are tied to it. However, while science is ultimately rooted in empiricism, this overlooks one of the great strengths of scientific theory: that it is predictive.

2. Schooling. A doctor first gets a 4 year undergraduate degree. Then a 4 year MD. Then, if they want to become a psychiatrist, they get 4-5 years of residency before they’re treated as full doctors. That’s 12-14 years of post-secondary education and training. However, only a single semester-length class in neurophysiology and neuroanatomy is required. 13 years. One relatively broad class which spends comparatively little time on topics of interest such as ‘higher’ functioning, long-term potentiation, and the self-ordering properties of the brain. This likely won’t change in my lifetime, no matter how much of a ruckus is made, so I won’t bother.

3. Well, this is a slightly tin-foil hat idea. I once accused the mental health professions of having Munchausen’s By Proxy. Wiki it. I’m still half serious about it. But while it may be true that institutions and organizations act this way, I’m still just idealistic enough (somehow) to believe that most mental health professionals have the well-being of their patients at heart. Since I will one day be one of them, I feel it important to give them the benefit of the doubt
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Antidepressants are a topic near and dear to my heart, so I’ll be returning to it at a later point. I just wanted to make the point today that most of the medications for the ’softer’ psychiatric illnesses are basically no different from recreational drugs in function, and sometimes not even in form (Adderall doesn’t even try to pretend to be anything but a member of the amphetamine chemical family). Since they look like them chemically, and act like them functionally, it should be no surprise that they won’t escape at least some of the detrimental properties of recreational drugs.

I saw a billboard for Navy recruitment with that emblazoned upon it. “This is my country.”

My first thought when I read this was, Si este es su pais, porque usted no habla su lengua. “If this is your country, why do you not speak its language?” I’ve never understood what makes hispanic immigrants so different from other immigrants in this regard. And I’ve never understood that why, now, for this immigrant group, all of a sudden we should bend over backwards to learn their language and not look askance when some of their group make no efforts to learn English.

Oh, wait, I do know. They have been the fastest growing demographic segment in America. And thus their votes are highly coveted. Immigrants, even highly patriotic ones, will always have two loyalties: to their new country, and to their heritage. That’s just how it is. Now, while it might be different for refugees fleeing barbaric conditions, when you leave your country for opportunity, economic or otherwise, you usually hold no animosity toward your home country.

This is definitely the case for my own family. I was born in America, I’m proud to be a citizen, but I consider myself an immigrant. I’ve been to India 9 times in my 22 years on this planet. I’ve toured just about every major religious and historic site of interest. I’ve read our holy works. I speak my mother tongue (like an autistic 5 year old, but well enough to get around without speaking English). Slice me in half and you’ll see “Indian” and “American” so entwined you can’t tell which is a better definition of me.

These political ploys play to heritage rather than residence. And they’ll prevent hispanics from integrating with the rest of us. They’ll close off doors due to their inability to communicate which will then be blamed on us. America isn’t a melting pot: I’m as Indian as they come. What it is, is a salad bowl. A salad bowl with a dressing that consists of an understanding of our founding principles, and the English language. Failure to liberally apply the oily concoction will result in our dissolution.

But the most annoying thing is that they’re telling me I should learn Spanish because it’ll help me in my future practice as a doctor living in the Southwest. No thank you. I’ll have had 8 years of schooling and 4 years of indentured servitude by the time I’m a ‘full’ doctor. The least my patients can do is speak the language of the country I practice in.

But I’ll make a deal with the ‘multilingualists’. When the time comes that I can get around this country speaking only Telugu, I’ll start using Spanish, k?

Weare, New Hampshire residents voted not to put the proposal to seize Justice Souter’s ranch on the ballot. For a little background, this was in response to the Kelo v. New London ruling which declared that Imminent Domain could be used to take property from one private individual to give to another, if he could increase tax revenues from the poverty. Now, if you peek to the right you’ll see the Life, Liberty, Property button. These three are considered the most basic rights of a free society. Trampled on by our ‘liberal’ members of the supreme court.

From the mouth of one of the Weare residents that voted against the ballot initiative:

“This is a game,” said Walter Bohlin. “Why would we take something from one of ours? This is not the appropriate way.”

I beg to disagree here. This is, in fact, the appropriate way. As I’ve commented before, a career politician of any kind is by their very nature counter to the spirit of American government. A Supreme Court justice, insulated even from the farcical election process, is even more suspect than your average congressman. These people by and large do not know what it means to be a citizen, they belong to a de facto ruling class. Weare had a chance to send a message to Souter, to make one of these modern day aristocrats actually be witness to the consequences of his trampling on one of our most basic rights.

This was not a game, it was serious, dead serious. It was about accountability, about the Constitution, and about what it means to be American.

Justice Souter made his bed, unfortunately, no one’s going to make him lie in it.

What a waste of space. Roy Blunt claims that he lost the vote for Majority Leader because the media was focused on change:

“I don’t want to say the media is to blame but … if you can find a story that focused on anything but change, you come and show it to me,”

Well, he’s right. We are focused on change, because congress is broken. It is one thing that both conservative and liberal bloggers are in agreement on. Whether it’s pork or lobbying, we’re convinced our representatives no longer have anything to do with their constituencies.

And then he argues that comments made to the media don’t necessarily represent the feelings of Congress:

“The five or six people that will talk to the media about what bad shape we’re in are not reflective of 225 of their colleagues,” Blunt said.

Apparently he doesn’t understand that the 225 don’t matter; they only exist to serve you and me. Their opinions are irrelevant. If those 5 or 6 do speak for us, well then, it should be accepted that their opinions are the ones that are followed.

He also seems to forget that he is the essence of tainted. Deputy Whip under DeLay, then Whip when DeLay got promoted, then acting Leader when DeLay resigned. Not to mention an active supporter of the whole K Street mess.

I’ve got my own ideas for why Blunt lost. After 12 years of Republican Congress, and 6 years of a Republican President, it has become clear that Republican is not a synonym for conservative. So conservatives are a bit upset, and we’re a bit disgruntled. To the point where I’ve pledged to throw away my votes on the Libertarian Party until they get their ass in gear, even if it means a Dem may take office. To the point where 77% of conservatives support getting rid of their incumbent Republican senators for some new blood.

And another reason, more germane to both parties (or at least I hope so by the time Hillary announces her bid for the 2008 presidency), is that we’re starting to remember that a career politician is anathema to the idea of a representative government. The whole point of it is that we are ruled by ourselves, by fellow citizens. A career politician is by definition insulated from the real world; his job is to rule. He is in essence an aristocrat. And sure, Boehner has been an elected representative for a long time, but career politician is more a state of mind than anything. The two-term president Ronald Reagan wasn’t a career politician. The two-term president Bill Clinton was. I suspect that GWB is somewhere between those two extremes.

Blunt exudes ‘politico’ness. He has that slick hair, I bet he has a limp, two-handed handshake meant to imply sincerity while expressing nothing of the sort. In his OpinionJournal page (linked in my post endorsing of John Boehner), he defends the status quo, talking about what the Republican congress has done. He’s trying to give us his resume. Fuck resumes. As I said, citizen government isn’t about trying to prove you deserve a promotion, like it’s a damned career. It’s about proving that you will do what WE WANT DONE.

We were dissatisfied, we wanted change. We wanted reform. We wanted a congress that remembered that they are our proxies, our bitches, to be OUR, the people’s, mouthpieces. Instead he proved he hadn’t heard a word we said. Goodbye and good riddance.

And here’s hoping that some day Republican and conservative can be synonyms once again

Some might be familiar with the discovery of a fish measuring just 7.9mm (or .32 inches for us benighted standard measurement users) of the Paedocypris genus. However there has come to be some debate over whether this is in fact the smallest fish. Males of two different species, the stout infantfish (Schindleria brevipinguis) and the males of an anglerfish (Photocorynus spiniceps) are both shorter, at 7 and 6.2mm respectively (convert it yourselves you lazy bastards). Tiny rocks, one of my more attainable dreams is to do an activity and ranging study on the smallest anthropoid primate, the pygmy marmoset (100 gms). And when we get down to under an inch in length, an animal of the developmental and histological complexity of a vertebrate is just stunning.

But the only reason I’m blogging about this, really, is this fabulous quote from one of the guys at that google link:

It is easier to see how sexually mature a female fish is compared with a male fish. For a male fish, you have to carry out a histological [tissue] section to see if the gonads are ripe

Ripe testes? oh god, this is made even worse by the fact that I’m taking histology this semester. When we get to reproductive tissues, I’m not going to be able to keep a straight face.

In all seriousness, he’s talking about the fact that Paedocyprus and Schindleria represent pedomorphic species. Like the axolotl that remains in the gilled juvenile salamander stage as an adult or caterpillars that become sexually mature before becoming butterflies, these guys are basically larval Goby and Carp fish that become sexually mature. For whatever reason, there’s a selective advantage to retaining your babyfat, so to speak, in these species. For Axolotl’s, obviously the gills allow it to remain fully aquatic. For these guys, there might have been a size advantage. This might’ve occurred because of predation risk dropping with size, or perhaps that arrested development allowed them to capitalize on a relatively empty feeding niche, who knows. Its all speculation anyway, I’m just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks. The fact that they’re not closely related, but from different evolutionary lineages is fascinating in and of itself, which begs the question of which factors led to a convergent evolution of arrested development and dwarfing.

Anyway, back to the controversy. As far as I’m concerned, the anglerfish can go screw itself (considering that she nourishes the male with her own blood and that her skin grows over his, making him essentially part of her, it might be argued that she already does). At 1.8 inches, the females aren’t exactly in the Bluefin Tuna range, but they’re 4 to 5 times the size of both females and males of the other two species. Kinda outclasses them. And the males, while tiny, are basically testicles attached to a mouth; males don’t have an existence independent of females.

The other two species, on the other hand, have FEMALES of under a centimeter in length. Females tend to be longer/larger than males in fish as well as in many other taxa. As indicated in that link to the Australian museum, the Schindleria female is longer than the Paedocyprus female. So even though the Schindleria male is about a millimeter smaller than the Paedocyprus female, I’d still consider it a larger species.

My vote goes to Paedocyprus. I find both of these pedomorphic species intensely interesting, so I may be revisiting the development, ecology, and evolution of pedomorphs. Pygmy marmosets, unfortunately, aren’t so cool. They’re not even phylogenetic dwarfs, they just got small over time.

A recent news item discusses how a dominant baboon made new friends when her daughter and constant companion was killed. They talk about her glucocorticoid levels spiking (linked to stress) and lowered activity, along with a disconsolate appearance. They also talk about how her forming a grooming partnership with an extremely lowly ranked female saw a drop in those glucorticoids and a rise in her activity level. Basically, she got depressed when her closest friend died, and new friendships helped her out of that state. I linked to this because it provides useful counterpoint to the prevalence of study of ultimate mechanisms and to the doctrine of anthropomorphism in behavioral ecology.

First off, anthropomorphism. Humans have a tendency to impute emotions and goal-oriented behavior onto objects and things not likely to have them. We’ve all cursed at our computers, accusing them of being stubborn on purpose. Since computers don’t have emotions and don’t do anything other than what they are told, such accusations are necessarily false. We use similar logic in the study of animal behavior. We don’t actually know what’s going on in an animal’s head, so we can’t talk about what they’re feeling.

When a male Patas monkey insisted on trying to perforate my face with his 4 inch canines on an almost daily basis, I wasn’t allowed to say he was being a jealous bastard. That would be implying that an animal has human emotions. He was ‘performing a dominance display in the presence of a potential competitor, in order to maintain and defend his monopoly on the females.’

Because I can’t say for sure that the same emotions were going through his head that go through the head of a female friend’s boyfriend when he attempts to crush my proffered hand, I’m not allowed to say it at all. That’s fine and good from a scientific standpoint and I agree wholeheartedly with such logic. However, it’s been my experience that because we can’t talk about emotions in nonhuman animals from a scientific standpoint, we can forget they have them at all. This is particularly true when you and those you discuss sociobiology with have never done field research, and have no more exposure to the animals than what you can get from a series of sterilized scientific papers.

But I think we should all remember that the ‘primitive’ emotional centers of the brain (including the amygdala, thalamus, and hypothalamus) are highly conserved both anatomically and functionally from rodent to human. And that ‘higher’ emotional centers such as parts of the parietal and frontal lobes are pretty well conserved among social mammals, whether we’re talking about canids, dolphins, or primates. A monkey that ‘displays an aggressive posture’ has a brain that looks like an angry person’s brain.

I’m not about to start coding the behavior of monkeys as ‘angry’ or ’sad’ anytime soon in activity budgets, but at the same time, having worked with them face to face, there’s no denying that the parsimonious way of thinking about them is as having the same affective mental states as we do, in a broad sense.

Which brings me to my next point. Because as empirical, scientific researchers, we cannot record behavior of nonhumans in terms of affective states, we can’t necessarily talk about it in data-based papers. We thus fall back to ultimate causation of behavior. While writing my dissertation on the costs of infant care across neotropical primate taxa, I never once attempted to argue that marmosets and tamarin fathers play a decisive role in infant care because they have a greater capacity for emotional attachment to offspring than do, say spider monkey males. Instead I argued that they did so because it improved their effective reproductive rate. An ultimate causation.
However, the paternal-infant affective attachment is fairly obviously strong in many taxa. Indeed, among some species of monogamous monkeys, it is so strong that whereas the human (and mammalian) default is to run to mommy when we’re scared or upset, the infants preferentially run to daddy over mommy. I did in fact argue in my discussion that the proximate factor of male tolerance of infants may have served as a preadaptation for the eventual evolution of obligate paternal care. I cited a couple of related species who, although not displaying paternal care, do display a marked willingness to play with and tolerate even unrelated infants to a remarkable degree.

This isn’t such a big deal when it comes to behavioral ecology and evolution, because ultimate factors (as you can tell from the name) are the decisive reasons behind a behavior such as paternal care. But it is a bigger deal when we get to psychology and a study of evolution of human behavior. Because primatologists and sociobiologists are largely silent on proximate causes, many people make the mistake of assuming that emotion is a uniquely human thing, when in fact it isn’t. Emotions have evolved as a way to mediate our behavior in a way that will increase our fitness and reproductive output. They are shared by a large proportion of mammals, and are rooted in ultimate factors that often go overlooked by the modern mental health professions. I’d wager that you can’t truly understand familial love or intrasexual and intersexual friendship unless you understand the idea of reciprocal altruism and inclusive fitness. That you can’t understand anger without understanding why and when aggressive displays are adaptive. That you can’t understand sadness without understanding what causes the release or inhibition of hormones related to that affective state in wild animals.

Unless we find an outlet to discuss emotional states and proximate cognitive determinants of behavior in the animals we study, we risk the chance of shortchanging ourselves as behavioral ecologists, and shortchanging people at large in the understanding of how our minds work.