Continuing my commentary on UPI’s ADHD series with the newest installment…

“The main point is that stimulants alone are typically not adequate, given their lack of carry-over effects once stopped, their inability to teach parents and teachers and children new skills, and the fact that combining medication with empirically supported behavioral treatments typically yields the best chance of normalization,” said Stephen Hinshaw, professor and chair of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and principal investigator on the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD.

Sounds about right. Even the most selective of psychiatric meds can’t help but take a brute force approach. Worst case scenario is that they act on all neurons that respond to a specific neurotransmitter, in this instance noradrenergic and dopaminergic circuits. The more selective stuff acts only on neurons with a specific receptor sub-type. An example is found in the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease (think Michael J. Fox or Mohammed Ali) and Schizophrenia. Both involve problems with dopaminergic circuits, but they differ in the type of dopamine receptors in each. Schizophrenia treatments involve pharmacological agents which act on the D1 receptor while Parkinson’s drugs work on the D2 receptors.

The problem occurs in that receptor sub-types are shared amongst a large variety of circuits with many different functions. Many antipsychotics used in the treatment of schizophrenia have the side effect of causing random chewing motions of the mouth (Tardive Dyskinesia). This occurs because although D1 receptors are involved in the malfunctioning circuits that cause hallucinations, they’re also involved in the basal ganglia motor system. Because the drugs act on both of those circuits, the hallucinations are controlled, but the crazy mouth happens too.

ADHD drugs don’t even pretend to be selective, they just take a bigger hammer to the locus coeruleus (norepinephrine) and ventral tegmentum (dopamine) and jack up the levels. Such a gross intervention lacks the finesse and the selectivity of dealing directly with such issues as internalization of behavioral norms and academic success. I doubt that any drug could be.

Indeed, in a survey, 98 percent of specialists viewed multimodal therapy as most effective, but only 34 percent said they use it in all patients, reported Alistair Sinclair, analyst at the London-based market research firm Datamonitor, which conducted the study.

So they know about the importance of behavioral therapy, but they fail to push it. Of course, part of this lies in the fact that most cases of ADHD are treated without referral to specialists. All too often the buck stops at the pediatrician. Which is a problem, because while a pediatrician is trained in all sorts of pathophysiological processes, he’s not trained to understand the softer side of therapy and cognitive insults resulting in behavioral problems.

“Thirty years of research show ADHD drugs used alone do not help children avoid long-term outcomes that are a hallmark of the disorder — substance abuse, domestic problems, school dropout, delinquency and criminal behaviors,” said William Pelham Jr., University of New York at Buffalo distinguished professor of psychology.

Given a fair shake, his extensive research shows, behavioral therapy could cut the need for chemicals by an attention-grabbing 75 percent, he said.

I daresay it could be decreased even further. Which should always be the goal when we take such ham-fisted methods to an object as delicate, plastic, and complicated as the brain. He continues:

“The vast majority of ADHD children are treated with medication as first-line treatment by their physicians,” Pelham said. “Yet … there have been many studies of this over the past 30 years, and not one has found beneficial long-term effects of stimulants.”

“Unfortunately … many parents of ADHD children are not made aware that there is a well-established, evidence-based alternative to medication — behavior therapy,” he added. “Instead of immediately prescribing the drugs, physicians should be recommending to parents a sequential approach — behavior therapy first, and then add medication if needed.”

Which is exactly why I’m in med school instead of playing with South American monkeys…and getting paid to do it. It’s almost criminal to treat child behavioral problems the way we do. I don’t think anyone could disagree with the premise that the fewer chemicals in our bodies the better and the fewer drugs messing with our brains the better, yet medicate first and therapy maybe remains the dominant approach.

There needs to be a greater reliance on mental health professionals, particularly ones who practice behavioral therapy methods, in child and adolescent mental health. Pills remain nothing more than symptomatic treatments, ones which lack the finesse to deal with complicated behavioral issues.

I know I said I wouldn’t talk about immigration anymore, but with this new Spanish Star Spangled Banner crap I couldn’t help myself. Deal.

It’s not a hard concept to understand here. And I’m really sick and tired of people saying it’s not disrespectful and that it’s not an impediment to assimilation and to becoming a full-fledged part of the US.

They are all either a. too lazy to learn English b. nihilists or c. idiots. Sometimes more than one of the above at the same time.

A country has a dominant language. Someone–who doesn’t speak that language initially–moves to that country. Knowing that their lives will be heavily intertwined with those already living there, that someone would do well to learn the native language. Not only is it a matter of practicality; it’s much easier for one man to learn a new language than it is to force an entire other country to do so. But it’s also a matter of respect; it’s a sign of good will and camaraderie to learn the language of those who’ve welcomed you as a guest and future member of their country.

There really is no other way of looking at it. The onus is on the new arrival to a society to do what is necessary to become a full-fledged member. The most basic part of that is developing the ability to effectively communicate with extant members. And I say this as an immigrant.

What’s so infuriating about the ‘Spanish Star Spangled Banner’ is it’s yet another attempt to destroy our ability to communicate and our ability to look upon each other as Americans first, and whatever else second. And what’s so frustrating is how many silly gringos are buying it hook line and sinker. ‘They’re showing how much they respect the U.S.A.’ ‘Oh, so they’re showing their respect by not even saying it in the language?’

I would not go to my American girlfriend’s house and compliment her parents in Telugu (my mother tongue). Part l because I don’t have a girlfriend, and partly because if I did, she wouldn’t be stupid enough to introduce me to her parents. The most important part is because if I was trying to show my respect for them, it would help if they could understand that’s what I was saying.

The A’s, B’s, and C’s I alluded to earlier love to trot out the fact that the U.S. has no official language. The founding fathers were very paranoid, very insightful individuals. That’s why the Constitution is such a carefully crafted, expressly delimiting document meant to protect future generations against the tyranny of democracy. We all know how that turned out. And as paranoid, as distrustful as the founding fathers were, they simply never imagined a situation in which people would reside inside our borders without speaking English. The fact that English isn’t our official language–rather than lending support to the notion that a common language is unneccessay–is instead a testament to just how unconscionable the idea of any language but English being spoken by Americans is.

One of the reasons I’m in the process of founding Conservatives Against Intelligent Design is because many leftists have made the categorical mistake of associating creationism with right-of-center political ideologies. Many of the Christian Right have made the corresponding error of associating evolution with leftist political ideologies.

But the real reason for the whole evolution creation mess is that Christians have made the mistake of confusing a theological concept with a scientific one. They’ve put the biblical dictate of Creation in the same category as Evolution. They’ve tried to place a theological explanation of God’s relationship with the universe on the same footing as a rational explanation of the empirical world. Metaphysical and physical. The very names imply the necessary separation that many Christians have failed to maintain when it comes to the subject of how Man got here.

The Archbishop of Canterbury made similar comments in an interview where he drew an interesting parallel between Darwinism and St. Augustine’s idea of the ’seeds of progress’:

for most of the history of Christianity, and I think this is fair enough, most of the history of the Christianity there’s been an awareness that a belief that everything depends on the creative act of God, is quite compatible with a degree of uncertainty or latitude about how precisely that unfolds in creative time. You find someone like St. Augustine, absolutely clear God created everything, he takes Genesis fairly literally. But he then says well, what is it that provides the potentiality of change in the world? Well, hence, we have to think, he says, of — as when developing structures in the world, the seeds of potential in the world that drive processes of change. And some Christians responding to Darwin in the 19th Century said well, that sounds a bit like what St. Augustine said of the seeds of processes.

And this really is what it’s all about, people confusing what exactly ‘the literal word of God’ means (although after all the tampering, it’s hard to justify that the Bible really is the literal word. Literal in a metaphysical, theological sense, not in a rational empirical sense. As Christians themselves are fond of saying, ‘faith needs no proof.’ The same applies to Genesis and creationism. Just as in faith, one can’t look to empiricism for proof of God’s work; one can’t expect radioisotopes to show a 6010 year old world or static fossil species. One can’t expect the physical world to show the fingerprints of the hand of God when their theology tells them that this wouldn’t be the case.

To draw a parallel, I often say that I’m 100% Indian. I’m also 100% American. There is no conflict. I am a patriot, I believe in the words of our founding fathers, and I believe in the vision they had for what a great country should be. But I also speak my mother tongue after a fashion, know my religion well enough to annoy the hell out of my parents when I justify something they don’t like using scripture, and love the intertwined smells of jasmine, exotic fruit, red dust, and cow dung that are the pure essence of India. But the two don’t overlap; there is no conflict. My American-ness doesn’t threaten my Indian-ness and my Indian-ness doesn’t interfere with my American-ness.

When Creationists attempt to justify their stance with empirical evidence, they cheapen the words of the Bible and fail to understand its depth. When Darwinians attempt to extend their theory into an argument against the evidence of God, they’re guilty of making no less a leap of faith than Young Earth Creationists. Darwinian Evolution represents no challenge to Christianity or creationism; it can’t because it doesn’t use the same evidence, deal with the same concepts, or attempt to explain the world from the same perspective.

linky

Before I get into this, lemme say that kids aren’t adults. They aren’t treated as such under the law. And, unfortunately, their special situation isn’t discussed in the constitution, or any of the founding fathers’ writings that I’m aware of. This leaves us in a bit of a vacuum when determining what they can and cannot do and how far their ‘rights’ extend. Ultimately a child’s autonomy must be balanced with his/her protection. Whereas the government should have no role in ’self-protection laws’ for adults, it must have some role in this when it comes to children. This means that, much as it woudl’ve rankled me, I couldn’t have found much to disagree with in a decision that held that inflammatory t-shirts could be banned solely to protect order in schools.

Unfortunately, that’s of course not the way the decision was handed down. The idiot judges had to bring into account mental states of kids who’d be upset by the shirt. Bad road to travel down, as I’ve discussed at length (hit the political philosophy category and read around). The problem with internal states is that they’re so subjective. What causes ‘mental distress’ in one person passes as a blip under the radar in another. To bring it back to the Oliver Wendell Holmes quote about waving your fist and noses and stuff, the very act of waving one’s fist around may scare another, even though it does him no harm.

I’d like you to think about the three most distressing things you’ve seen in the past week. Now compare your list to a friend’s. They dont’ match, do they? If we were to legislate away those things that distressed everyone, soon enough we’d be allowed to say or do very little for fear of ‘causing mental anguish’.

As Idiot Reinhardt said:

“Public school students who may be injured by verbal assaults on the basis of a core identifying characteristic such as race, religion, or sexual orientation have a right to be free from such attacks while on school campuses,” Reinhardt said. “Being secure involves not only the freedom from physical assaults but from psychological attacks that cause young people to question their self-worth and their rightful place in society.”

In direct contravention to the original principles of liberty and rights established by our founding fathers at that. It’s FDR’s ‘Freedom from fear’ all over again. And my meager readership knows well how I feel about such crap.

Balance this with Judge Alex Kozinki’s thoughts:

There was no evidence that gay students were harmed by derogatory messages of the type conveyed on Harper’s T-shirt, Kozinski said.

Moreover, Kozinski, an appointee of former President Reagan, said there was no indication that a discussion that Harper had with other students about the T-shirt “turned violent or disrupted school activities.”

In fact, Kozinski said, “while words were exchanged, the students managed the situation well and without intervention from the school authorities. No doubt, everyone learned an important civics lesson about dealing with others who hold sharply divergent views.”

Such men make me question my own sexuality.

Eugene Volokh chimed in with the very thoughtful point that:

This is very much contrary to basic principles that the 1st Amendment is viewpoint neutral. It protects hostile viewpoints as well as tolerant ones,”

Personally, I remember reading that it is the offensive and the objectionable that the 1st amendment most applies to. No one tries to silence a voice they agree with, after all.

And I’ll give the last word to Kozinski, who incisively drew attention to the essential irony of the whole case:

Nonetheless, Kozinski chided the majority for concluding that it was permissible to suppress points of view while extolling the virtues of tolerance. “One man’s civic responsibility,” he wrote, “is another man’s thought control.”

Continuing my commentary on the excellent ADHD series UPI’s running on Sciencedaily, I’ll be taking a look at the newest article today.

Because I’m a demagogue, I have to draw attention to the 3rd sentence:

The treatment criteria call for moderate to severe symptoms that both parents and teachers agree disrupt home life and impair school performance.

And, because I won’t let go, I’m going to point out again that ADHD is always viewed through its impact on the teacher and the parent, rather than the child. While I’m not stupid enough to think that a 6 or 7 year old kid can tell you exactly what’s going on in their head, I’d still say that their internal state is at least somewhat important if we’re interested in their mental health.

Respected professional journals are devoid of evidence that would convict doctors of the massive overmedicating charged by skeptics, these specialists assert. If anything, they see a criminal neglect of youngsters who struggle needlessly when quick and easy help awaits in a capsule.

Antipsychotics, tricyclics, stimulants, antileptics, all drugs that have been used to treate ADHD. None have been shown to directly affect the source of the behavioral problem in the first place. The former two often causing devastating flattening of emotional behavior. And tricyclics, originally an anti-depressant now deemed too high in side effects for use in adult depression. Given what’s known about these pills, and what’s not known about how they work, some might charge that the criminal neglect lies in trying to distill the treatment of a complex psychological phenomenon down to a single little pill.

The Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD, or MTA, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, indicated pharmaceuticals trump non-drug options for speedily alleviating the core symptoms of hyperactivity, impulsiveness, inattention and aggression. But it acknowledged more than a pill is needed to address such overarching problems as arrested academic achievement, poor social skills or conflict at home or school.

Yup, psychoactive drugs are good at forcing gross behavior into the mold one wants (i.e. symptom treatment). What they’re not so good at is attacking the underlying cognitive and emotional sources of the behavior (you know, causes).

Those challenges appeared better served with a combined approach that supplemented medication with teacher consultations, 27 group and eight individual behavioral training sessions for parents and an eight-week intensive summer program aimed at boosting the child’s social, sports and scholastic skills.

Huh, I never thought that actually going after the behavior itself would be effective.

And, as always, the early gains of medication-based therapy tend to disappear over time. Because, as I said, the drugs crudely force your mind into a mold by playing with serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. They don’t do much more than that. Behavioral training, on the other hand, gets to use the brain’s greatest strength; its plasticity. Which is why generally within a year or two, the behavioral kids accelerate right past the drug kids. One group has learned to deal with the way their heads work. The other has just had it covered up.

I haven’t talked about the gas situation much. Part of this is because everyone and his dog has done so. The other part of it has to do with my rapidly disappearing ability to suffer fools.

As many others have pointed out, although oil profits are higher, margins have been pretty constant. Not only that, but at roughly 10 cents on the dollar, oil company margins aren’t particularly high in the first place, compared to…roughly 10 cents for household goods (cleaning supplies and the like) or 17-ish cents for pharmaceuticals. In other words, oil companies are making more money because they’re moving more product during a time of greater demand.

Last time I checked, one’s profits being at the beck and call of the free market isn’t considered a crime, nor is it considered an unfair business practice. There is no evidence for price gouging, fixing, trusts, or any of that other garbage, much as we’d all like there to be.

I find it funny that the ‘party of science’ is unable to understand simple concepts like margins and market forces. They are, after all, intellectually superior to anyone who questions the supposed enabling role of the state. I find it even funnier that George W. Bush validates his characterization as a village idiot by listening to these morons and ordering a probe where none is needed.

What I find even funnier–or more pathetic–is the way we wish to ‘punish’ these big bad oil companies for daring to profit by factors more or less outside their control. The ‘windfall profit tax’. Fortunately it looks like at the federal level nothing of the sort will happen. Which of course didn’t stop California from passing one of its own. It goes without saying that the revenue will be directed to yet another social welfare effort (prescription drug benefit for the elderly). I don’t even understand the [lack of] logic behind such a tax. “Oh, sorry, you’re doing too well. That’s wrong. We can’t have people succeeding now can we?”

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Punish the big bad corps by making them pay taxes!
But who’s actually making the egregious profit? The federal government currently makes 45 cent per gallon of gasoline sold in the US. Add in state taxes and (according to Glenn Beck) one gets a national average of 69 cents per gallon in levied taxes.

In other words, out of every dollar the consumer spends on gasoline, 10% goes to the oil company, about 5-7% goes to the gas station, and more than 25% goes to government revenue. If I recall correctly, the entire Revolutionary War was sparked by a less punitive excise tax.

And we want to ‘punish’ the people who are only responsible for 10% of the cost of gas (and are responsible for the fact that we have gas in the first place) by giving more money to the people who not only are responsible for 25% of the cost of gas, they also have no direct role in getting that gas to us?

This would be like taking back tip money from your waiter at Chili’s so you can give it to some fat cat at Corporate.

UPDATE: RGCombs brings us hard numbers, and the reminder that no one even takes into consideration that after government is done taxing us they then take half the oil companies’ profits. If you want to look at who’s being the biggest bastard, look at who’s gaining the most.

Read about these cool little numbers in a gun rag the other day(click for larger):

The ‘gun’ portion is a breech loading .45ACP with a grip safety along the haft. A cool feature is that it also comes with a sleeve allowing you to fire .380ACP if you so choose. The review author (sorry don’t remember the title or the month) mentioned that the knifepistol’s actually pretty easy to instinctively aim by sighting along the blade, although with the non-existant barrel and 1 round capacity, I wouldn’t expect to see these things at IDPA matches.

A pic (clickable) showing the inner workings:

Why? Well to quote the website:

Combination “weapons” such as the “sword or knife pistol”, dating back to the sixteenth century, were used for dispatching and quartering wild boars. The penknife pistols of the mid-nineteenth century were created for emergencies and the Elgin cutlass pistol of the same era was designed for and authorized by an Act of Congress in May 1836 to be used by the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition.

Here’s an example of an accurate reproduction of the Elgin Cutlass from Dixie Gun Works:

These apparently gave pretty good account of themselves during boarding operations and attempts to repel pirates. However, cruise ships notwithstanding, pirate attacks and sailors swinging from yardarms and jib booms and stuff in ship-to-ship fighting doesn’t happen a whole lot. Neither does boar hunting from closer than 50 yards.

So, again. Why? It’s made of good steel and the shape would lend itself well to a general outdoor/hunting knife. And a shot of .45ACP is rarely inadequate for behavioral modification of beastie both two and four-legged. But there are probably better dedicated knives out there, and there are definitely better firearms to have on your person if the outdoors are your thing.

But it’s an interesting, innovative, and functional amalgam of both. And although at $1300 it ain’t a bargain, there are more expensive guns and knives out there.

Most importantly, though. Why the hell not? That’s the most persuasive reason for owning something like this. And it’s all the reason a guy like me needs. The money, on the other hand, is a different story.

Creationists and leftists argue the same way. Which is funny because leftists love to poopoo creationist logic. Straw men are favorite among both groups; take the real position, strip it down to an oversimplification or misstatement, refute it, and then claim they’ve refuted the whole deal. Both groups love to be intentionally obtuse and both love the phrase ‘Well I just don’t see it that way.’ One says that about fossils, the other says that about, you know, basic economics and history. I’m rapidly losing patience for both.

Weak title, I know. Shut up. In On Human Rights we discussed how a right should be constructed and whether more modern definitions passed the logical test or not. Despite the fact that these ‘rights’ are dependent upon the coercion of other people, many leftists contend that they are fully complementary with the older conception of rights. We have already had a glimpse of their contradictory nature, but it would nevertheless be instructive to take a deeper look into what must be given up in order to establish one’s ‘positive rights’.

Perhaps the best way to proceed is to distill the original and revisionist definitions down to their most basic essence: ‘Life, liberty, propety’ vs. ‘freedom from want and fear’. Although many (most?) leftist societies over the years have shown a shocking lack of concern for the individual’s life, we’ll restrict ourselves to the two more obvious dichotomies in the above comparison: ‘liberty vs. freedom from fear’ and ‘property vs. freedom from want’. Now, these aren’t perfect distinctions as there is considerable overlap between the two, but it does serve as a useful framework for moving our conception forward (and also prevents us from having to use 4 dimensional graphs *shudder*…instead you’ll once again be subject to the glory of my MSPaint skills).

Freedom from Fear vs. Liberty
The first dichotomy to be addressed is that between one’s right to autonomy vs. another’s ‘right’ not to be perturbed. Legislation regarding codes of behavior, actions, and weapons which may be deemed ‘threatening’ are examples of protection of this latter ‘right’. Some of the more egregious examples of this kind of law-making are the infamous UK ‘asbo’s (restrictions on ‘antisocial behavior’), weapons disarmament laws, and such laws that outlaw specific forms of speech or expression deemed ‘hurtful’ or ‘hateful’.

Now, ostensibly, fear is a sort of harm, and thus if one’s actions instill fear in another, they can be said to be unethical. However, a problem arises in that unlike other forms of harm such as slander, bodily injury, or theft, fear is an internal rather than an external state. As such, ‘fear’ cannot be measured, it cannot be standardized, it cannot rise above the level of opinion. Fear may be caused by the presence of armed citizenry (a common defense of civilian disarmament legislation), or it may be caused by the lack of a welfare state (as FDR and the UN contend), or, it may be caused by something as irrational as the existence of a 210lb person of color in one’s vicinity (as in many people who would see me walking the streets of North London late at night):

In the left planel, Green feared Red’s gun and the fact that he would often drive around at 2 or even 3 am. Red never directly harmed him, but he was always afraid Red would. And so the Greens pushed for legislation both restricting civilian carry and instituting citywide curfews in the right panel. Now, although Green hasn’t realized it he’s caged himself./em> Green himself can no longer do either of those things even if he wanted to. Both of their actions are more circumscribed than they had been. And although Green hasn’t been shot or otherwise harmed by Red, he hadn’t been under the old laws either.

The problem is that the very word fear implies that the action hasn’t caused harm yet, but is believed to be able to. Restriction based on fear thus results in the presumption of guilt before innocence. ‘He could be a murderous bastard. Maybe he shouldn’t be allowed out after dark. Curfew!” Or “Well, theoretically a folding knife can be used in a crime, therefore we should make owning them illegal.” A ‘right to be free from fear’ would eventually restrict far more than it would enable.

Freedom from Want vs. Property
‘Rights’ included under this heading include those of ‘right to a standard of living’, ‘right to healthcare’, ‘right to education’, and even such lunacies as the ‘right to maternity leave’ conceived of by the UN. These have probably been beaten to death over the past few essays so I’ll restrict myself to the point, (made for about the 9th time), that these so-called ‘rights’ can only be maintained through the coerced economic contribution of others. This of course requires the abrogation of property rights in the name of ‘furthering economic freedom’. Thus, each ‘right’ to freedom from a specific want increases the size of the levee upon personal property, and therefore limits what one may do with the fruits of his own labor.

Putting it together with the ‘right’ to be free of fear, we end up with the following picture:

The left panel shows what life was like before Green heard FDR’s wrong-headed speeches. Each man had his own sphere of autonomy, both with regard to action (the Red and the Dark Green circles) and with regard to his personal property (the Bright Green halos). Unfortunately, Green soon impressed upon people the idea that no one should have to suffer the ‘ills of want and fear’. And so government was made arbiter of these ‘rights’. Government restricted how each man could act, even if said actions hurt no one. And it took this one step further, commandeering a portion of his property and returning it in services (Blue). While both men saw the return of at least some of the value of the property, both again lost the ability to do with all of it as they so chose. Whether a ‘beneficiary’ or a ‘victim’ of these revisionist rights, one sees his autonomy significantly constrained.

Conclusion
The conclusion, as before, is that although these ‘positive rights’ may improve an individual’s personal situation, they do so by restricting all individuals’ behavior. They thus limit freedom, and contravene ‘negative’ rights. To quote On Human Rights,
“they are better thought of as privileges. Privileges are those things society accords individuals which–rather than being ways one can be limited–are means by which an individual’s state of being is enhanced by the deeds and economic contribution of others. Guaranteed privileges (which are what revisionist rights in actuality are) require the enforced participation of other members of society. Therefore, societally-protected privileges by their very nature restrict the right of every member of said community to do as one so chooses.”

In political discourse, it sometimes becomes necessary to contemplate societally-enforced privileges. A widely accepted example includes the ‘right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers’ (which can only be done through the coercion of members of the jury pool). The important point is that if we are to defend liberty, we must call a restriction by its proper name, that we be cognizant of the fact that, beneficial though it may be, a coerced privilege is by its nature a limitation of freedom rather than an extension of it.

Ok, seriously, what the heck is going on?

I was watching Marvel Ultimate Avengers on cartoon network tonight. Pretty good. Good voices and thankfully none of the ‘usual suspects’ (cartoon fans have probably noticed that the same 5 or 10 people seem to do all the voice work these days). The plot was pretty good and I really enjoyed the character treatment of Captain America. Apparently it’s based off a Marvel story arc called ‘Ultimates’. Wouldn’t know, not a comic book fan. But it’s supposed to be the first in a series of movies. I’ll probably tune into future installments, although Justice League is probably the best animated comic work ever done and likely always will be.

What got me, though, was that Nick Fury was black. Still has an eye patch, the facial scarring, and the bastardity we’ve come to associate with him, but he seems to have contracted pervasive melanism in the intervening years. Nick Fury, for those who don’t know, is an ancient part of the Marvel universe. The only possible reason one can come up with for his race change operation is that someone looked at the script and said ‘hmmm, you know what this needs? More diversity.”

Which pisses me off. Diversity always happens best when it’s not forced. I’ve run in some of the most diverse social groups that any Democrat could hope to manufacture, all without a single push from the multiculturalism nazis. This is because none of my friends, nor I, really gave a damn. It brings back shades of the doofus who wanted to design the 9/11 firefighters memorial so it had a black, a hispanic, and a white firefighter instead of the 3 white ones whose picture had inspired the sculpture. He wanted it to be more ‘realistic’. Considering the NYFD is something like 97% white, that wouldn’t be realistic. It’s bad enough that race is shoved down our throats so often we can’t possibly hope to be colorblind, now they gotta change the race of already extant characters to fill quotas for fictional pursuits? Wonderful.

If anyone didn’t think unions weren’t populated by free-loaders with an outrageous entitlement mentality, this might make them rethink that.

A good night’s sleep for hotel guests can turn into a hard day’s work for the hotel staff that has to handle the hefty new mattresses and multiple sheets and pillowcases of a modern hotel suite.

Oh noes! not multiple sheets and pillowcases! whatever will we do? I can practically feel a sympathy hernia coming on as I think about those poor people lifting…ounces…at a time.

Hotel companies have been catering to customers with programs to make beds more plush and comfortable and to pile on the pillows. Now union organizers hope to turn that guest comfort into industry discomfort.

That more or less says it, don’t it. Every little thing they’re asked to do, and in this case we really do mean ‘little’, they bitch, moan, and threaten to strike about. An extra pillow per bed? An extra doller per hour, thank you very much!

“Bedding is part of the working conditions in a hotel, and it is one of our priorities to reduce the workload of the housekeeping staff,” said Joe McLaughlin, president of Local 49 of UNITE HERE, the hotel and restaurant union.

As if by calling bedding ‘working conditions’ they can somehow connect themselves to the original purpose of unions; correcting the unsafe and slave-like working conditions of the industrial revolution. But the second half of his sentence really does say all we need to know. “Our priority is to reduce workload.” Not correct injustice, not make sure they’re properly represented, merely to make their lives as easy as possible.

“Oh, it is brutal. The maids have to do a lot more work and it takes a lot longer to put all this stuff together when you’ve got three sheets, 18 pillows, shams and dust covers and duvets. They want them to fold the towels into bunny shapes and clean the coffee maker,” he said.

This process takes about 10 minutes.

If triple-sheeting and spending 10 minutes on a bed is considered brutal by these people, what would they think of the 36hour shifts that are par for the course for 1st year residents. Or heck, some of the odd jobs I’ve done, including moving a pizza, shifting 60lb bags of manure all day, moving several tons of dirt by shovel and wheelbarrow, or, you know, anything that would actually be considered real work?

I don’t know what people expect these days. To not have to lift a finger yet get paid for it anyway? I mean really.

HT: PZ Myers

Very cool find. As PZ said:

It’s a busy time for transitional fossil news—first they find a fishapod, and now we’ve got a Cretaceous snake with legs and a pelvis. One’s in the process of gaining legs, the other is in the early stages of losing them [snip] It must be rough being a creationist right now—the data against their mythology just never stop coming.

Before we discuss the new fossil itself, a little background. Pythons, boas, and the like (constrictors) are believed to be considerably more primitive than other living radiations. This is supported by genetic data as well as the fact that they retain vestigial hindlimbs–or spurs–that in some cases protrude outside the skin as little bony prominences. Edward T. Babinski has pictures here. He also points us in the direction of a paper/thesis/thingy that discusses a possible way in which limblessness might’ve evolved from a general lizard stock. The paper itself is pretty interesting, though technical. However, what really sets it apart is the fact that instead of pulling transitional forms out of thin air (like I had to do in my own thesis), the paper points us toward a modern lizard genus (Tetradactylus) which provides us with living breathing examples of not one but multiple transitional forms including one with tiny but funtional forelimbs, but no hindlimbs at all.

As a teaser, here’s a pic from the thesis:

This is really an excellent paper, so I’m actually going to spend more time on it than I do discussing the new fossil.

The main conclusion to be drawn was that transition is primarily functional and only secondarily morphological. This is proven by the most “primitive” species of the three, Tetradactylus seps, which hardly shows any difference in body shape compared to a “normal” lizard but is able to fold down both pairs of limbs in dense grass and move like a snake

Anyone who’s owned or watched a skink has seen them do that as well when moving through dense crap. First time I saw it I was stunned…seeing the obvious question of transition and evolution begging to be asked, that’s when I really became interested in the subject. Which was more or less the same motivation for the guys that actually got off their asses to research it like Berger-Dell’Mour (the study’s author).

He continues with:

The selective advantage of this ability was demonstrated to me, as the actual “predator” on the spot, in a little patch of grassland on the Cape Peninsula, where Tetradactylus seps occurs together with a skink of about the same size, Mabuya homalocephala. After a short early summer’s rainstorm the lizards were warming up in the top layer of the grass patch. On being approached, both kinds of lizard would dive into the dense grass. The skink, however, could be heard rustling on the ground, and occasionally, one would even see blades of grass moving at the top.
On the other hand, all one would hear or see of Tetradactylus seps was a quick movement when it took fright. It was clear that it moved on in the dense grass for quite some distance, but for the human observer it was impossible to determine in which direction and for how far. A bird of prey or a mongoose would definitely have more chance to catch a Mabuya than a Tetradactylus in that area. The possibility of approaching prey unapprehendedly should also be of advantage to the lizard.

So now we’ve got a demonstrated selective advantage to slithering, both in predation avoidance and predation success. Fair ’nuff. But if the guy in Figure 1 can slither AND walk, why would it make any sense for those legs to keep shrinking? And so we read on:

The general body shape of a “Schleiche” has already been attained in T. tetradactylus[Figure 2). That is, the mean index of body length over head length (as a standard) of T. africanus is only slightly greater than that of T. tetradactylus: The swiftness for moving through the grass like a snake should be much improved if the overall length of body with a constant diameter (see Gans 1975) that is used in locomotion increases. Similarly, miniaturized limbs facilitate gliding past stems of grass.

In other words, the speed of slithering increases the longer you are, at a given body diameter. And obviously the smaller your limbs, the less likely they are to snag on things; even if they’re held against the body, they do protrude a bit. For whatever reason, slithering becomes more important than walking in some of the lizards that have taken this path. This would probably have something to do with the effects on predation and prey mentioned earlier. The fact that ‘transitional’ species exist to this very day implies that there is a balance that needs to be struck, with the size of limbs and the body diameter/length ratio depending on how important the two locomotor methods are to the animal.

He also went on to explore the issue of whether the process is teleologic in nature, i.e. whether it’s an inevitability. ‘Built-in tendencies’ to evolve in a certain direction are referred to as orthogenetic processes. Like Cope’s Rule of animals of a given family getting bigger over time. Or the popular conception that Man is the great and unavboidable consequence of primate evolution (which is held even by many who think they believe in Darwinian evolution). This author beats the hell out of that notion, showing, once again, that natural selection is as Darwin himself said directionless and purposeless.

All in all, we now not only have a convincing impetus behind the evolution of slithering and limb reduction/loss, we also have reasonably decent living models of the transitional stage.

Ok, now on to the new fossil find.

As I said, pythons and boas still retain hindlimb spurs, but their pelvi are incomplete to nonexistent. Some older fossils, generally thought to be of the same radiation (macrostomata) often have slightly more complete hindlimbs and hip bones, but none of them have a sacrum. The new find, Najash rionegrina–which is at the moment the basal macrostomatan, the oldest snake yet found, andthe most primitive snake known to man–does have a sacrum.

I could show you a picture of a snake’s sacrum (and I will later), but just to put it into functional and comparative context, I’m going to ask you to grab your butts (so make sure you’re alone). Ok, I’m not really going to ask you to do that, but right where the lower back ends, and your pelvic girdle (hip bones) starts, you can feel/see that that piece right there that articulates on your spinal column feels like a bunch of vertebrae that have been smooshed and fused together. And embryologically that’s exactly what the sacrum is.

In other words, unless I’m misinterpreting things, Najash rionegrina is the only snake, fossil or otherwise, in which we see vertebral fusion along the body.

The following pic was shamelessly stolen from PZ’s blog:

Click for larger. You can sorta see the vertebral fusion, especially in the ventral picture (psv and sav). Other things to notice is that the other two bones that make up the pelvic girdle–the Ischium(isc) and Ilium (ili)–are present. The retention of features in the limb bones themselves are also notable. you can see a more or less full-featured femur (tro & fem) including what appears to be well-formed medial and lateral condyles (the femoral part of the knee).

Very cool find.

For a more general look at snake evolution, this link ain’t bad.

I’ve got a much longer post coming, much of it based on this comment discussion up at PZ Myers’s blog, Pharyngula.

But today I just wanted to bring up two of the more egregious and irrational anti-life arguments I’ve seen:

1. The ‘it’s a parasite’ argument. This discussion took place on a blog that deals with evolution day in and day out. You’d expect better from these people. I mean, if you ascribe to evolution, then you kinda have to accept that the ultimate point of sex and well, life, is making babies. To call a baby a parasite when you are evidently an evolution enthusiast just shows you how dogmatic some of these people are.

2. The ‘pro-life people are woman haters’ argument. This is even more idiotic, if such a thing is possible. Using the same logic, that means that those of us who believe divorced fathers should pay child support must hate men. Although I think the current system is broken–both ways…sometimes mom gets screwed, sometimes dad gets screwed–I do believe that the logical basis for child support payments is sound. Considering the frequency with which I’m called a male chauvinist, I’m probably not a man-hater.

Dogma. Freaking dogma.

linky

This series on ADHD with periodic installments at Science Daily is a really fine piece of work, exposing the lack of understanding of ADHD treatment of the very doctors that prescribe them, and the seeming unwillingness of them to deepen their knowledge or address the problems with the science. Here are some of my comments on earlier installments.

on to the article:

Why, many wonder, do stimulants settle down children who already appear to be overstimulated? And why do prone-to-abuse Schedule II controlled substances not only not get hyperactive children hooked but also apparently lessen their risk of future addictions, as most studies suggest and most mainstream practitioners contend?

Here’s a hint, because they’re not really overstimulated. They’re actually understimulated. Basic ecologically-valid cognitive neuroscience here. Which is why it’s so funny that they don’t get it.

As for addiction, it’s a well known phenomenon that the slower and more controlled the release of the drug is, the less likely it is to addict. Some researchers try to argue that the decreased incidence of drug addiction among children on these drugs is proof of their beneficial effect. This is completely unsubstantiated; a chronic pain patient on controlled release Morphine is less likely to become addicted than a chronic pain patient undergoing no pain treatment. This isn’t because of some beneficial psychological effect, but simply because you tend to self medicate with the street drug version ; which because of the rush is much more addictive. It’s simply because the doctor gets to the patient before the drug dealer does.

Researchers say the compounds appear to help suppress certain behaviors by altering one or more of three chemical messengers in the brain, the neurotransmitters dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin, which the prevailing, though far from proven, theory implicates in ADHD comportment. In a counterintuitive twist, the chemical change somehow leads to improved self-control — provided the dose is right, investigators say.

Too much drug, and the hyperactivity revs up into even higher gear, while attention span sputters.

In one of the first studies to probe the mystery in humans, government researchers observed in lab experiments how the stimulant Ritalin boosts levels of dopamine, the brain chemical associated with feelings of reward and pleasure, stimulating attention and motivational circuits that fire up the ability to focus and complete tasks.

And it’s not counterintuitive at all. As anyone with a basic neurobiology background could tell you, memory and attention are intimately connected with emotion, drive, and reward as even they themselves state. As one of my neuro profs pointed out TODAY, one of the things that makes 1st year medical school so hard compared to later years is that there’s less of a connection to patients, less of an emotional involvement, and seemingly less goal-driven. Which is why it’s so funny that they don’t put two and two together. These kids aren’t getting motivational stimuli from the modern classroom. Hence the low dopamine and inattention. As always, one should apply the Monkey Rule. Bad for monkeys, bad for children. Can you imagine a monkey paying much attention to the teacher in a classroom? No, total lack of interesting phenomena. Same with children. Yet, instead of fixing this lack of motivational stimuli, instead they titrate up the dopamine levels in the brain directly.

These circuits do not work at full capacity in those with ADHD, who stray off focus with the slightest distraction, the controversial theory goes. By normalizing the chemical levels, Ritalin should get them back on the attention track, scientists speculate.

Or, you know, it could simply be that these circuits never get stimulated in the first place.

As always, the tireless Dr. Baughman offers his contrary opinion (I’m a fan if you hadn’t figured out by now):

“There is no psychoactive drug that does not injure the brain short- and long-term and impair perception, learning and adaptation. So a drug abolishes ADHD behaviors, conduct disorder behaviors, oppositional defiant disorder behaviors. They do nothing but abolish,” neurologist Dr. Fred Baughman, a long-time critic of the use of psychiatric drugs in children, wrote in an April 18 infomail sent to his Website subscribers. “When is the child to learn to control these behaviors with the normal brain God gave him?”

Are there children that truly have a brain pathology and need medication? Probably. I’ve never met an ‘ADHD’ kid who fit that bill though. The challenge of psychiatrists is to explain why they use one treatment for ‘gifted’ kids and one for ‘ADHD’ kids.

The ‘gifted phenotype’ is virtually inseparable from ADHD in terms of classroom behavior. But ‘gifted’ kids have an IQ of over 120. Despite showing a similar lack of excitement in the dopamine pathways, it’s taken for granted that these kids have a fully functioning dopamine reward system; it’s just not being stimulated.

Conventional wisdoom then proceeds to pull a 180 on ‘ADHD’ children, saying that their dopamine reward system is broken. Of course, they don’t test this, they can’t show a pathology, they can’t show any difference between these children and ‘gifted’ kids except IQ. Which, as far as I know, hasn’t been shown to correlate directly to attention. There are many kids with an IQ of over 120 that don’t display the ‘gifted phenotype’.

Holes abound everywhere, holes they haven’t been made accountable to fill. Illogical assumptions are made, and are allowed to form the foundation for current psychiatric theory. Brain chemicals are clamped at certain levels, abolishing the basic plasticity that gives us personality, individuality, and flexibility. Those who don’t act as teachers, parents, and society would wish them too are simply prescribed into submission. Those who don’t feel what they want to feel simply prescribe themselves into artifical moods.

Linky

New research has found that women report more pain throughout their lifetime. Compared to men, women feel pain in more areas of their body and for longer durations.

“The bottom line seems to be that women are suffering more than men,” said Ed Keogh, a psychologist from the Pain Management Unit at the University of Bath.

You’d think a post on gender differences in pain should be in either general medicine or under science. NOPE! Because in my non-PC and completely unprovable opinion, this has nothing to do with pain perception or intensity, but pain REPORTING. A horse of an entirely different color.

First off, there’s the whole ‘We withstand the pain of childbirth, so we have to have a higher pain tolerance than men’ line of BS that we’ve heard for years. And if my adrenaline level were high enough, I could literally have my arm blown off and not even whimper. But I probably couldn’t take a saw to it and cut it off right now before I passed out from the pain. There is all sorts of hormonal and neural activity during childbirth (and adrenaline rushes) that doesn’t correlate well to everyday life.

Besides, can anyone (female readers be honest) recall a female who withstood pain better than men in general? If it doesn’t make sense, it probably ain’t right. And this study verified that yes, men do have a greater pain tolerance and threshold than women:

In another set of experiments, volunteers were asked to put their arms in an ice water bath. Men were found to have higher pain thresholds (the point where they began to feel pain), as well as higher pain tolerances (the point where the pain became too much).

There are no doubt some differences due to hormonal fluctuations and sex differences in brain wiring:

“There is evidence for hormones, like estrogen and testosterone, affecting a person’s pain experience,” Keogh told LiveScience in a telephone interview.

Women report varying pain experiences throughout their menstrual cycle, when estrogen levels vary widely. Moreover, pregnant women — who often have elevated estrogen levels — can tolerate the intense physical pain of childbirth.

Of course one can’t deny the cultural and psychological aspects of gender roles. Men must be stoic. Women are emotional:

“Social and psychological factors cannot be ignored,” Keogh said. “We have found that women will focus on the emotional response to stress.”

In contrast, men typically think only of the sensation itself, which may explain their higher thresholds and tolerances.

“Women who concentrate on the emotional aspects of their pain may actually experience more pain as a result, possibly because the emotions associated with pain are negative,” Keogh said.

From my own experience both in general social settings and in more clinical settings (not near as much of the latter, I admit), women tend to report and to exaggerate their level of pain more than men. I guess you could call that ‘focusing on the emotional aspects of pain’, personally I call it attention whoring.

Chronic pain is something I know a bit about. Due to nerve damage and the resultant muscle atrophy and joint damage, I’ve experienced more than my fair share of pain; a good deal more than most–if not all–of my readers. One thing you learn about higher levels of pain, especially when it lasts for an appreciable amount of time, is that it tends to manifest itself in certain physical and psychologic signs. I’ve never met a person who this wasn’t true in.

Pain is usually reported on a scale of 1-10 in clinical settings. I spend my time between 4 and 7 day to day, and sometimes up around 8. After nearly 10 years, no one can tell I’m in pain at around 4-6. At around 6 my back goes rigid and I start clenching and unclenching my fists. Around 7 and above I get cranky. Real cranky. And this is in a very controlled, very adapted, very idiotic individual. In most people, you’re going to see much greater signs.

When I’m shadowing or volunteering in clinical settings, I often see women come in and report relatively new pain at around the 7 or 8 level. The first time you feel a 7 or 8, you’re going to *know* it. And so will everyone else. Clenched jaws, clenched fists, rigid back, cranky and snappish as a 15 year old chihuahua (and let me tell you from personal experience, it doesn’t get much more cranky than that). You are not going to walk with a loose comfortable gait, spring up onto the exam table and say hi to the doc with a smile. But that’s what I tend to see in these women.

Un-PC? yeah. Judgmental? yeah. Right? I’d put money on it.

Once again, leftists prove that they know nothing about their beloved ‘nuance’. Part of this may come from living outside the real world, couldn’t tell you.

Today I speak as a big dark male. I mean, I’m always big and dark when I speak, but this time I’m going to speak about my experiences as a big dark male, which is a horse of an entirely different color. I’ve often wondered why if racism is still such a big problem, do recent immigrants not see near so much of it as Americans? It’s always perplexed me. Do these irrational hate-mongers single out only Americans of color, leaving us furriners alone?

Racial slurs are used all the time. Sometimes affectionately, sometimes harmlessly, sometimes maliciously, and Ssometimes with specific racist imputations. When it comes to the latter two, most people persist in assuming that malicious use implies racial motivation. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’ve been in a few fights in my time, sometimes because I wasn’t white (many of these occurring at a prominent and very liberal northeast university), sometimes because some 20-something punk with feelings of inadequacy and alcohol-fueled temerity decided to pick on the biggest guy in the room, and sometimes because you fight for those that can’t. The only fight I ever started was back when I was 14, it was the first time I was called the N word. I’d been called a lot of other things. I’d had my religion, my heritage, and my skin color insulted before. But this was the first time that particular word was used around me. I’m not proud of starting it, and I haven’t done anything so stupid since. But anyone who witnessed that incident will tell you that it was pretty clearly a racial incident.

In the 8 or so years since, I’ve been called a n***er and worse (Osama, raghead, etc.), but only on a few of those occasions has their been any prejudice underlying the comment. In an antagonistic, aggressive setting, you insult the other person. It’s just what’s done. You insult their clothes, their hair, their ears, whatever’ll get a rise out of them. Skin color is just another one of those things. It’s so formulaic that you shouldn’t even bother imputing meaning of any kind to any of their insults.

I’ve definitely called a white opponent ‘cracka’ in a fight situation once or twice. Does that imply that I hate white people? Considering the frequency with which I’m referred to as an Uncle Tom, probably not. Same thing is true of my opponent.

Racially Motivated Incident:
Some yobs back in London hurtle by in a car screamin “You f***ing raghead,” followed by 10lb chunk of granite smacking me in the elbow…hard

Not-So-Racial Incident:
Kid with a chip on his shoulder starts a fight with me because I’m the biggest guy available. I call him a cracka. Since I was out exclusively with white friends when this happened, it’s probably safe to assume my comments were not racially-motivated.

White people can do bad things to black people and it not be racial, just dickheaded. Black people can do bad things to white people and it CAN be racially motivated. But the words they use have little to do with anything.

Mapusaurus roseae

Mapusaurus is a member of the carcharadontosaurids, a group which also includes Gigantosaurus. These dinosaurs are similar in form and a little bit larger than T. Rex. The leg bones and skull of Mapusaurus appear to be a little less robust, but a little bit longer than in their older relative, Gigantosaurus. You can get a sense of the streamlined appearance when compared to the skull of say, Tyrannosaur Sue

Most interesting, the Mapusaurus finds were laid down in a group of 7-9 individuals. Although it’s well known that smaller theropods like raptors and deinonychus were pack-hunting and group living, I was unaware that over the past few years most of the larger theropods (including T. Rex and Gigantosaurus) had been found in group assemblages as well.

For a century giant meat-eating dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex were assumed to be solitary animals. Family groupings of large meat-eating dinosaurs have only recently been identified, and could provide paleontologists with information on its behaviour, the probable ways that it ate, and what can be learned about changes during growth.

“The presence of so many animals in one quarry suggests that they were living together in a pack at the time leading up to their catastrophic death,” comments Currie. “Similar sites found recently in Alberta, Mongolia and the United States suggests that this kind of social behavior may have been relatively common in Late Cretaceous (65 to 90 million years ago) times.”

Currie goes on to state that individuals were found ranging in size from an 18ft long juvenile to a probable 42ft long adult. He contends that by functioning in a pack, they would have been able to bring down even the largest of dinosaurs, the 125ft long Argentinosaurus, a sauropod like Brontosaurus.

Which makes sense. One of the reasons why size evolves in plant eaters is because their bulk acts as a predator deterrent. For sauropods to have gotten as big as they did, there had to be predators pushing selection for size. The big theropods, like T. Rex and the carcharadontosaurs are pretty good candidates. But alone they probably couldn’t manage it. I guess it shouldn’t be too odd to think of those huge beasties working in packs. Today, the largest carnivorous mammals are lions and tigers. Fairly similar in size, but tigers are solitary hunters while lions hunt in packs. Tigers tend to take down prey smaller than them, while lions can take down even elephants when they work together. Similarly, unless these big bastards hunted in packs, they would’ve had no chance against any prey larger than them.

Edit (4/20/2006): I forgot to add the conclusion to the above paragraph, which is that one would expect to see the big theropods’ grouping and hunting behavior differ drastically between open plains and jungles. Just as in lions and tigers, I see it most likely that forest-dwelling carcharadontosaurids were solitary hunters whereas plains-dwelling populations would have been pack hunters. The pattern of pack hunting being more dominant the more open the terrain is holds true for most carnivorous mammals I can think of; it is at least true of canids (which I’m most familiar with) and felids (as far as I know). Most of this has to do with the fact that the more open the terrain, generally the larger the herbivore. And thus the more a predator would gain by working with others.

Left Brain Female is hosting it this week.

A lot of good stuff in there. In particular, I’d direct you to Radical Libertarian’s submissions entitled Why Should We Have To Justify Anarchy? Which is the kind of stuff we need to keep talking about. This war won’t be won on issues, it’ll be won on ideology.

There’s also a lot of good topical stuff up there, especially about taxes and harmful government programs (to be expected). Go. Read.

Linky

I’ve tried to stop doing the article/quote/comment thing because everyone does it. Also, positions on individual issues aren’t really important compared to the task at hand of convincing those undecided or open-minded that leftism will be the death of us.

Simple fact is that the more income tax you have to pay the better, because it means you’ve made more money.

All of us in the USA should consider it a privilege and pleasure to pay part of our income in taxes to support such things as education, security and social services.

Not really much to say. Nowhere in that op/ed does he defend his position, apparently not seeing why one should question the role of government in income redistribution. It is this unquestioning nature of the role of the state in individual life that is so dangerous, so execrable. Karl Popper (the famous philosopher) remarked that this was the problem with Leftism. He went on to say that, although he had socialist tendencies himself, no one from Marx himself up through modern days had solved the problem of increasing governmental involvement that necessarily followed their intervention in economic matters. Everyone continues to ignore this inbuilt tendency toward totalitarianism, choosing instead to bury their head in the sand about the failings of their own political position while screaming about the comparatively modest-sized government then extant.

This is the problem with the Left. They do not justify themselves, they do not admit the faults of their position nor do they try to correct them. They have moved no farther than Marx did intellectually. And, as most should be aware of, Marx was never able himself to move from what had to change to how to change it. Impotence. Juvenile irrational impotence.

This’ll proceed more or less in the vein of On Freedom, comparing original definitions to the current ones, analyzing whether they’re contradictory or not, and then showing why the modern definition, rather than expanding our rights, instead serves to chain us to the rocky morasse of government (I’ve never seen a rocky morasse, but rocks are useful to chain things to, so this metaphorical morasse has rocks in it.)

The Original and Revisionist Definitions of Rights
The original definition:

Every man has a certain sphere of discretion which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbours. This right flows from the very nature of man.
–William Godwin (mentor of the Romantic Poets and father of Mary Shelley)

And even more starkly presented:

The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
–Erwin Griswold

It’s pretty clear from the above that rights can only be taken away under the old understanding. To exist with rights intact is the default state of Man.

The revisionist definition:

“’Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.”
–Dag Hammarskjold, Former UN General Secretary

I’d encourage you only to visit the following link if you haven’t eaten in a while and dry-retching doesn’t bother you.

More UN Idiocy

Finally, for a good list of what are considered Universal Human Rights by modern standards, look below. In addition to the earlier warning about possible involuntary regurgitation, I must urge liberty-lovers who are pregnant, have heart conditions, suspected aneurysms, or are predisposed to hemorrhagic stroke not to click on this link to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

What can be seen from the revisionist definition is that, rather than being qualities of a passive nature, rights are dependent upon the active participation of government and other men. Leftists cling to the belief that–as in their stance on positive and negative liberty–actively granted privilege and passively extant rights go hand in hand, seeing no inherent contradiction. However, this contention should immediately strike one as contradictory; the granting of ‘modern’ rights requiring the coercion of others through artificial limitations on behavior, control and redistribution of the individual’s material wealth, and otherwise delineating and circumscribing how one may act beyond such actions that would infringe upon another’s sphere of autonomy.

The Nature of Universal Human Rights
The key to understanding the true nature of human rights is in the word universal. For a definition of human rights to fit that descriptor, they must be omnipresent; they must exist equally no matter where a person finds himself. Whether falling to his death or luxuriating in the tender touch of a tempurpedic matress, man must necessarily retain all of the same rights. Whether there is one dollar in his bank account or one million, the story cannot change. The presence of human rights, then, has nothing to do with the state of one’s physical surroundings or possessions.

Throughout the ages, men have had occasion to find themselves alone, whether intentional as in the case of Henry David Thoreau’s fabled 2 year 2 month 2 day sabbatical on the edge of Walden Pond, or accidental as Robinson Crusoe’s own separation from humanity was. Others choose to live in cities such as Tokyo, with over 5000 people per square kilometer. Thus, if human rights are universal, the hermit alone in his cave must enjoy the same rights as a man walking the streets of New York during rush hour.

The essential point here is that, by their very universality, human rights are context-independent whether from a social or material perspective.

A Critical Analysis of Modern Rights
A look at the modern political climate reveals that the term ‘right’ is applied profligately to what would otherwise be termed privileges. ‘A right to do/have [blank]‘ is applied without justification. It seems enough to imply that no one should not be able to have/do [blank], without explaining how said ‘right’ can be guaranteed without infringing upon the rights of others. ‘Immigrant rights’, right to life, right to choose, right to death, right to maternity leave, right to education. Such terms are bandied about as if simply being born entitles one to all of the basic needs and (especially childishly) wants of life. As quoted above, ‘freedom from fear’–and, as FDR would include–’freedom from want’ adequately sums up the purpose of modern rights.

It is thus interesting that the term ‘universal’ as appended to human rights was first instated by those with a decidedly revisionist outlook, in place of the original ‘inalienable’ as in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. It is their very choice of the term ‘Universal’ that directly invalidates the essential ‘right-hood’ of modern rights, showing them instead to be dependent on either social or material context, and thus not universal.

A traverse through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reveals a startling–but ultimately unsurprising–amount of contradiction and lack of justification. In order to make any headway on the issue whatsoever, one must ignore the a priori assumptions and glaring logical gaps of many of the statements contained within the document and look at each independently (although the above is worthy of study in its own right and will be explored in detail in Part Two of this essay). Of the 30 articles in the document, many, if not most, are found to rely, at a minimum, on the economic contribution of other individuals. Others require restriction in behavior beyond that which directly and negatively affects others (for instance, a ‘right not to feel threatened’ appears in the document). Thus many of the so-called human rights contained therein directly abrogate a man’s original right to be left alone so long as he does no harm to others.

Revisionist rights cannot even exist at the level of the individual; lacking a community to provide such social and material protections, a hermit would lack these so-called ‘rights’. Which thus precludes their omnipresence. Revisionist rights also cannot be maintained without the coercion of others. Because coercion is anathema to liberty–and thus by extension rights–one is left with the conclusion that ‘modern rights’ are neither universal nor properly conceived of as rights. As has been mentioned earlier, they are better thought of as privileges. Privileges are those things society accords individuals which–rather than being ways one can be limited–are means by which an individual’s state of being is enhanced by the deeds and economic contribution of others. Guaranteed privileges (which are what revisionist rights in actuality are) require the enforced participation of other members of society. Therefore, societally-protected privileges by their very nature restrict the right of every member of said community to do as one so chooses.

This concept, that ‘modern rights’ end up constraining the individual rather than enabling him, will be explored in more detail in Part Two.

I’ll leave with a quote from Thomas Jefferson that beautifully encapsulates the fundamental discord between the revisionist and original views:

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Australopithecines are interesting because they were definitely bipedal, but almost equally definitely did not move the same way we do. I’ve discussed the possibility that bipedalism was originally a postural adaptation rather than a locomotor adaptation. And I’ve also talked about how Robust Australopithecine (Paranthropus spp.) locomotion differed. Another thorny issue is that australopithecines retained a lot of chimp-like features that aid in arboreal locomotion:

Figure 1. Showing the skeletal differences between A. afarensis and H. erectus(from a UCLA website on Evolutionary Psychology)

I searched like the dickens for a good picture of a chimp skeleton upright, couldn’t find one. I also looked for a good one of the hand bones of A. afarensis, chimps, and humans. The latter two were easy, but again, completely futile for the former. So you’re just going to have to trust me on a few things.

A. afarensis is unarguably bipedal. The pelvis shape, the inward angle as well as (lack of) curvature of the femur, and the slight arch of the foot make this much clear. But Australopithecus spp. (and to a lesser degree Homo habilis) retain several features that aid in arboreality. These include the bowl-shaped pelvis, short wide waist, conical ribcage, narrow shoulders, and long forearms. In addition, although not pictured the phalanges (finger bones) are slightly curved. Curved finger bones mean your hands naturally form a hook without expenditure of muscular effort. Humans, with our straight finger bones, on the other hand have to expend a considerable amount of effort on forming that hook because any degree of curvature of the hand requires articulating those joints in the fingers. It also means we have to use our great big thumbs to help (chimps, by contrast have some of the smallest thumbs in the primate world…A. afarensis has bigger thumbs, although not the size of ours). The Australopithecus phalanges also have a more square cross-section than do human finger bones, just like chimps.

What we’re left with is a mosaic animal. Bipedal, but probably not quite the same way as us. Arboreal, but not quite as arboreal as chimps.

The quandary comes about when we discuss what the retained arboreal skeletal features actually mean. To quote Afarensis:

In Au. afarensis this morphology is taken to indicate some aboreal component to it’s behavior. Although some have argued that this morphology is a primitive retention which doesn’t say much about behavior.

This is where things start to get interesting.

One camp says the features are adaptive. Another says they’re neutral. I happen to side with the adaptation camp. And here’s why:

1) If you’ve got it, you’ll probably use it. We know australopithecines lived in wooded areas. We know that hunter/gatherer humans who live in wooded areas frequently climb trees as part of their daily behavior. We know australopithecines had many skeletal features that would have made them better climbers than we are. If we climb, and they would’ve been naturally better climbers, chances are they climbed too. Not very ’scientific’ but not exactly a logical collander either.

2) Early hominid bipedalism was more likely a postural than a locomotor adaptation. Although the Laetoli Footprints make it pretty clear that they could walk on two feet just fine as early as 3.7mya, their stride length was shorter than either a chimp’s or a human’s (which are fairly similar). They would’ve moved slower, and walking isn’t much more efficient in humans than in chimps (but running is), so there would’ve been no locomotor advantage.

3) Studies of chimpanzee upright posture have shown that this feeding adaptation is often used when standing on a tree limb. Getting up to a tree limb would require climbing, ergo, one would expect that early hominids climbed.

4) Several of these arboreal features, including the conical ribcage, short wide waist, and curved phalanges are retained in hominids ranging from 4.5million years (Ardipithecus ramidus) to about 2.5 million years ago (Australopithecus africanus). Although material from Homo habilis (1.6 mya) is relatively scarce, they too are often considered to have both the conical ribcage and curved phalanges. This gives us a span of 3 million years during which hominids retained arboreal characteristics. That’s a long time to keep skeletal features that aren’t of much use.

Going deeper, a given trait can either be detrimental, beneficial, or neutral in its fitness effects. A neutral effect is expected to vaccilate in frequency more or less randomly (more or less being operative here), not maintain a frequency of expression of 100%. A detrimental effect would likewise–if not be completely eliminated in 3 million years–at least be significantly reduced in frequency 3 million years after hominids first stood up; which isn’t what we see. A beneficial trait, on the other hand, would be expected to be maintained at or increased from the frequency seen in the ancestral population. Which is exactly what we see.

5) The idea of walking/arboreal early hominids fits the pattern of postcranial skeletal adaptation much better. First, it allows for two separate shifts in postural and locomotor adaptations. Which makes the evolution of bipedalism easier to fathom; two small steps are easier than one gigantic one. The two steps also help explain the dramatic difference in both stature and body proportion between early hominids and H. erectus onwards. First bipedality evolved, and we got what look more or less like upright chimps. And then obligate terrestriality evolved, in which our stride length increased (terrestriality), our phalanges straightened, our shoulders broadened, and our arms shortened (loss of arboreality).

Conclusion:
Time Machine + Observer + 4-2mya = See Arboreal Hominids.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Normally, livescience is pretty good. This article, however, is execrable.

Part of it is the author’s subtle but obvious bias toward the “everything else makes me fat except the fork full of food heading toward my mouth” school of thought. Part of it is the disinformation, oversimplification, and embellishment of the researchers they quoted.

Quick genetics lesson. Genes don’t always perfectly correlate to the phenotype they code for. In addition, much of the time they don’t directly code for a specific phenotype but indirectly infleunce it. There are two terms in particular we need to pay attention to whenever we discuss how genes influence a particular physical characteristic:

Heritability - Heritability is simply the proportio of total (phenotypic) variation that is due to genetic variation. Phenotype is influenced by both genotype and environmental factors. It’s important to note that heritability doesn’t actually measure how much a trait is influenced by genetics and environment in the individual , merely how much variation in the population is affected by each.

Penetrance - This has to do with how strong the correlation is between the presence of the gene itself and the trait it supposedly ‘codes for’. In a highly penetrant gene, you’re pretty much going to develop the trait regardless. An example is Huntington’s. In a gene with low penetrance, on the other hand, even though you have that gene that ‘codes for’ it, you may or may not actually develop the physical characteristic or symptom.

Heritability is thus a population-wide characteristic that cannot be readily applied to the individual, while penetrance is a measure of genetic influence on phenotype at the individual level.

K, genetics lesson is over. You typically see heritability of about 25-50% in the studies I’m acquainted with. After looking through the actual scientific paper, I noted they gave no data on the magnitude of the effects of these genes on body shape and body fat level. Also, they focused on gene expression rather than presence or absence of a certain allele. So they’re not even looking at genetic differences, per se. Genetic expression changes all the time in response to environmental factors; it’s practically a necessity to life that expression changes. In other words, not much substantive about the size of the impact of these genes, the causative nature of these genes, or the degree of environmental lability was given in the article. Now on to a play by play of the live science article/interview.

But without looking at you, Kahn can examine a sample of your genes and tell you if you’re shaped like an hourglass or a pear and whether you have huge hips or a beer belly.

“By looking at your genes, we can tell how fat you are and how your body fat will be distributed,” Kahn said yesterday.

You probably know someone who’s been heavy most of their life, but proceeded to lose a lot of weight based on hard work alone. I know several myself. Or, if you’re a night owl, just channel flip until you get to one of those infomercials for an exercise program. According to Kahn, those people don’t actually exist. Which I find amusing.

It’s pretty easy to see that both fat distribution and total body fat levels run in families, but the idea that ‘fat genes’ have total penetrance is absurd. As I’ve mentioned before, basic thermodynamics says otherwise. Fat gain and loss intimately depends on a human’s interaction with his environment. It is therefore impossible to imply that fat and obesity are genetic. The genes can influence that interaction, but they cannot supercede it.

Three genes—named Tbx15, Gpc4, and HoxA5—express themselves so distinctly that the differences can be used to predict a person’s body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-hip ratio.

“This finding suggests that the expression of these genes could be related to the pathogenesis [production and development] of obesity,” said Joslin researcher Stephane Gesta.

Two outrageous statements here. Because, as i said, genes can influence the interaction between you and the food you eat, genotype can be used with some predictive value. However it will not be a one-to-one correlation, because, as I said, ultimately it’s a matter of caloric intake as much as it is of activity and expenditure.

The second statement about obesity having a pathogenesis is even more outrageous. Obesity is a normal physiological and thermodynamic response to consuming more calories than you expend; excess energy is stored as fat, the more excess you have, the fatter you get. Obesity can result in pathogenic process, but that’s a secondary problem. Athletes develop joint problems, especially if their training involves weight work. Due to their larger musculature and the greater forces they put on their joints, cartilage and capsules can deteriorate faster. Like obesity and related health problems, there’s a strong correlation. But is becoming stronger a pathologic process? No, it’s a normal physiological and histological response to environmental stimuli. Pathogenesis in fatties and muscleheads is secondary to their fat content and their muscularity.

The study raises huge questions: Does body shape predict obesity, or is it a result of obesity?

“While we don’t know yet whether this genetic activity is a cause or an effect of obesity,” Gesta said, “these data do suggest that different forms of obesity could be a developmental problem that begins very early in life.”

Again, these genes begin their influence very early in life. Anyone would have to be stupid not to see it. But the developmental problem is behavioral. These kids have less leeway in how much they can eat and what they can eat. So do we give them a pill so they can eat as much candy and drink as much soda and supersize their value meals? Or do we teach them how to control their weight by not being idiots?

And an even bigger one: Can you alter the potentially deadly fate your body shape might suggest is in store?

“Now that’s the big question,” Kahn said. “While we now can predict the fat pattern, we have no magic bullet to alter the outcome. But with these new findings, we have identified potential targets for perhaps one day changing body shape. We don’t have drugs to alter the pattern now, but perhaps in the future we will.”

Now this is the most ludicrous statement of the entire deal. These people act as if naturally large people have never lost weight. I’m literally at a loss for words at this point. Not because I don’t know how to reply, but because the only reply I should use at this point are profanities and the casting of aspersions on their ancestry, intelligence, morality, and personal philosophy.

I’m outtie.

You Belong in London

You belong in London, but you belong in many cities… Hong Kong, San Francisco, Sidney. You fit in almost anywhere. And London is diverse and international enough to satisfy many of your tastes. From curry to Shakespeare, London (almost) has it all!

Crazy. Since that’s the European city I lived in last year. Also upsetting because, while i wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, I’m glad it was just a year. If there was a place in Europe I could actually live, it’d probably be Amsterdam. And get your minds out of there. I don’t even take my pain pills for crying out loud. I’m probably not going to smoke dope. Amsterdam was eclectic, laid back, and everyone knew English (although I like learning languages enough I’d learn Dutch anyway). It was definitely a walking city. Which London was too. But the character of London people was entirely too much like the unholy offspring of Frenchies and New Yorkers…not pleasant.

Linky
Also, see Afarensis and John Hawks
I’m more of a monkey person than a dead people person. But I like dead people enough to talk about them.

A. anamensis ain’t new to science, but the new specimens do increase the range over which it’s been found; the original specimens were found in 1994 by Maeve Leakey in Northern Kenya (Nice site, btw).

Some paleontologists tend to act surprised when this sorta thing happens. It seems everytime hominid fossils are found outside the area where first discovered, people are shocked. Shocked and Amazed. They seem to confuse taphonomy with paleoecology. It’s actually pretty hard to get a fossil from a dead thing. All sorts of things have to happen just right. And then, after millions of years, the rock has to be weathered just right, in the perfect location, for a person to have a chance at stubbing his toe on the fossil, barely different in texture and color from the surrounding terrain. Looking at the distribution of sayyy baboons, or chimps, you get the idea that many primate species tend to be fairly broadly dispersed. Especially us. So I’m not surprised that A. anamensis was found in the Middle Awash just because it’s far away from Kenya; I’m surprised just because fossils are hard to find. I’m even more pleased because we now have two geographical points by which to triangulate their ecological relationships and maybe get a better clue as to just why hominids started standing upright.

There’s a couple of places that provide a beautiful combination of good preservation conditions and even better accessibility. The Rift Valley (especially Middle Awash) in Ethiopia, and the Leakey Areas in northern Kenya. The great thing about the Rift Valley is that we’ve got representation from most of the hominid species known to science at that location.

The Middle Awash find was particularly interesting in that they’ve been able to bracket the existence of A. anamensis to between 4.2 and 3.9 mya (million years ago). With the ancient Ardipithecus ramidus before 4.4mya and the younger A. afarensis (Lucy) from 3.9mya to 3.0mya. What’s so cool about that is because they were all found in the same geographic location, but in completely different layers, we may have a chronospecies on our hands. That’s science lingo for a population of animals that evolves over the millenia, but without daughter populations/species splitting off. Sorry, sometimes my brain gets stuck and I can’t unconvolute statements too well, but here’s a more concrete example:

Those of you who’re up on your evolutionary bio know that we didn’t evolve from chimps, rather we and chimps are daughter species of a common ancestral species. Branching, the typical pattern we see in the fossil record. But now let’s say that there was no branching, the original population merely becoming, over many generations, more human-like. Over time, the species would look more and more human-like, and less and less chimp-like. That’s a chronospecies. No branching event, merely continued change in a population’s characteristics over time (anagenesis).

Chronospecies are a pretty cool idea, and personally I think they’re more common than we realize. Large changes in characteristics of genera over time are well known, and species is just a step from there. But chronospecies can confuse the hell out of taxonomic principles and ideas of species recognition.

Most of you are familiar with the Biological Species Concept:

A species consist of animals which can produce fertile offspring

While just vague enough to be inordinately frustrating, Ernst Mayr’s concept has proved useful enough.

And then there’s the Evolutionary Species Concept:

lineage of ancestor/descendant populations separate from other lineages with its own evolutionary pattern

Which is also just vague enough to be intensely frustrating. Especially when you try to reconcile the two. I do however love George Gaylord Simpson.

A chronospecies is definitely an Evolutionary Species, but is it necessarily a Biological Species? If Lucy had a difference in chromosomal number from A. anamensis they would’ve been the same Evolutionary Species but not the same Biological Species.

Baboons belong to several genera (including Papio and Cynocephalus) but many of the different species can interbreed and have fertile offspring. (Baboon hybrid zones have been well-studied and are interesting in their own right). Which means that they could be considered the same Biological Species, but because each of them has evolved different morphological and behavioral characteristics to the exclusion of others, they are actually separate Evolutionary Species.

Confusing, huh?

This is why I play with living monkeys.

I’m trying to get off this topic but I just can’t. What’s really upsetting is that it’s mostly liberals supporting the open borders. Which is a problem because those hit hardest by the 12 million illegal immigrants plus the 10 million amnestied illegals from 1996 are the poor.

The basic economics of illegal immigration amount to a combination of outsourcing and dumping. Think Indian call centers earlier this decade and the Japanese electronic industry of the 1970s and 1980s, at the same time. I did a gigantic post on it including numbers and everything, but got lazy. Plus, no leftist apparently wants to understand basic economics. Once they do, then they say ‘Yeah, well so’ or ‘I just don’t see it that way.’ (Funny, usually with mathematics you’re not allowed to say ‘I just don’t see it that way’ when you don’t like the answer an equation gives you) Which is a great defense of importation of poverty.

Instead I’m posting a series of comments I made on a car forum of all things. These were last second desperation and anger-filled comments that, for the first time actually got a response. So maybe they’re better than my more mathematical and formal arguments. *shrug*

Argument 1: Theoretical Basis
But it’s the nature of a progressive tax system that EVEN DISREGARDING SOCIAL WELFARE, just the regular stuff, roads, schools, etc, you have to make a fair amount of money to get to the ‘break even point’. ‘Break even’ is where you pay about as much in taxes as the government spends per capita. that point comes somewhere between the top 50% and 25% of wage earners. I could calculate it out, but while I do mathematical modelling for my research career, I don’t quite enjoy it enough to do a full blown analysis that will be totally disregarded.

It’s not because they’re illegal, or because they try to cheat the system or not pay taxes or anything like that. It’s the nature of a progressive tax system. You need to make a lot more than most illegals make to be a net contributor. Therefore, through no moral wrongdoing, illegal immigrants dilute the amount of revenue the government can spend on people on a per capita basis.

[note: Again, that's not factoring the low-income assistance that some take advantage of and that more likely would if they were legal. It's a value-neutral fact; no implications about their motivations, their work ethic, or anything. Once you factor in social welfare and move from the equal expenditure per person model to the regressive expenditure model we actually have (40% of government expenditure is on social welfare, ergo a lot more is spent on the poor per capita than the rich), the picture grows much much more dim.]

Just recognize that due to the nature of our society, immigration must remain controlled in order for government’s ability to take care of its people to remain unhindered. You can have your social welfare, but you have to keep those borders closed.
[note: I don't like social welfare, just making a point]

Argument 2: A Simple Example
10 people: 4 make 10 dollars a year each, 3 make 20 each, 2 make 30 each, and 1 makes 40.

Total Income is 200 dollars. 60 of which is collected in taxes. The government then spends 6 dollars in service on each person.

The guy making 40 dollars pays 20 in taxes. The two guys making 30 dollars each pay 12 in taxes. And the three guys making 20 each pay 4 in taxes. And the four guys making 10 dollars each pay 1 dollar in taxes. It works, more or less.

Now 4 more guys want to come in, 2 of whom will make 10 dollars a year and 2 of whom will make 20. They’ll pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else.

This brings Total Income up 50 dollars to 250 dollars total, but total tax revenue only goes up by10 to 70 dollars. 14 people. 70 dollars. Now government only has 5 dollars instead of 6 to spend on everyone. Now, either government service gets 16.6% crappier, or they put the squeeze on the guys making 30 and 40 a year. The guys making 30, although probably paying less as a percentage or overall, will feel the hit harder than the guys making 40. The guys making 30 are our middle class.

When you add social welfare in, things get much uglier. Welfare/SSI/Medicaid/Medicare is 40% of our budget. Which means you basically double expenditure on the bottom end, while leaving revenue the same. Very ugly.

Argument 3: The Problem With Guest Worker Programs
Then you run into the problem of what for lack of a better term I’ll call Product Dumping. Think Japanese Electronics in the 1970’s and 1980’s. A ‘guest worker’ is willing to work for less wages than an American. That’s why they’re working the **** jobs these days. Not because we won’t do them, but because they’ll do them cheaper. Those of you who’ve ever left a city know that ‘we’ have worked those jobs, many of ‘us’ still work those jobs. Myself I’ve shoveled 20 different species of animal poop, moved bags of concrete and/or manure, am covered in scars from paint stripper (and nearly lost an eye to it…yikes), have actually sanded my skin off with a power sander on accident, have been trapped under a gigantic crate, picked vegetables and corn, been treed by a protective cow, wrestled pigs, climbed coconut trees, built windmills…get the picture? Oh, and I haven’t done jack compared to many of my friends and acquaintances. But we used to do these jobs at 50%-100% more than ‘Guest and Undocumented Workers’ are willing to work. For them what looks like a fortune to us looks like poverty. And once they start working, we’ll classify them as dirt poor because that’s what they are, despite how they personally feel about their new ‘largesse’.

Product Dumping results in unemployed Americans and underpaid Guest Workers, not a satisfactory situation. Now both the employed and the unemployed are worse off than before (speaking solely domestically)

Guest worker programs do work. If they’re held to a level where dumping isn’t an issue. If they’re actually filling bonafide worker shortages rather than artificially lowering payroll costs. And they’ve got to be properly regulated, and probably policed just as or more rigidly than traditional Visa programs. However, guest worker programs have never in this country been used for that reason. They’ve been wholly political.

Unemployment rate is 4.7%. But then that doesn’t count recent high school or college graduates, those who’ve given up, run out of unemployment insurance, have stopped looking, or underemployed. That’s a lot of people who could be working ‘those jobs’ (which if the son of a doctor and professor can do without feeling undignified, anyone can). They’d make more in them than the migrants and illegals currently filling them too because the labor pool would not be inflated by 10-20 million.

The end message is that if we actually allocated our domestic labor force better, we’d have lower unemployment and higher wages. Which I don’t think is a bad idea, personally.

Conclusion: Don’t Be Stupid
1. Even if you pay your taxes like a good little resident, you still pay in far less than you get back. Therefore, you are a net drain on the economy.
2. Because, as a pawn of the socialists migrant undocumented saintly illegal, chances are you’re from a poverty-stricken latin american country, you think 3-5 dollars an hour is living in the lap of luxury…which is why you’ll work for that instead of the 10-15 the American before you made. Now he’s out of a job, and you make half of what he made, which while not great, at least payed the bills. The US just doubled the number of people in a bad economic situation, while letting the rich get richer.
3. There is no 3. We need no 3. It’s a losing proposition. The rich get richer. ‘Working’ upper class (like I’ll be) get squeezed pretty hard. Middle class gets squeezed harder (since qualitatively they’re most affected by higher budgets and increased taxes). And the poor get poorer.

I’m no fan of rich people. And Democrats definitely claim to be anything but. So why are they embracing a move that’ll only help them while hurting EVERYONE ELSE?

Most of my visits from this will probably be by leftists. Just click on the ’science’ category and ignore my irrational, outmoded, and spittle-filled rantings if you’d like to see more of my ruminations on the natural world. If you’re interested in challenging your political beliefs, try clicking on ‘political philosophy’ to see why I don’t see much progress in progressivism.

Some may remember my Conservatives Against Intelligent Design post from two weeks ago. I’ve been in contact with older and wiser heads since then, crammed for a midterm, and started working on a webdesign (if my hand cooperates, you’ll love the logo). Within the next couple of months, I’ll hopefully have a page and mission statement up, as well as a way for people to sign showing their support (and political affiliation). As before, I’m looking for any other classical liberal, minarchist, libertarian, conservative, or Republicans who wish to either lend a hand in webdesign/maintenance, writing articles, or just have advice (I’ll take the advice from people of any political persuasion). Wish me luck.

51st Tangled Bank is up. Go. Read. Comment. I especially liked PZ Myers’ post on fossilized embryos and taphonomy. Science and sensibility reminds us that arthropods conquered the land well before we did. Personally, I find the vertebrate colonization far more interesting. Terrestrial arthropods bore me. Marine ones on the other hand do not. Cognitive daily also has a good post reminding us how we can sense and respond to things without really knowing about it. Not only is this good news for those of us prone to daydreaming while walking the crowded metropolis streets, it’s an important lesson in the evolution of the mind. Other good stuff as well.

Someone made a comment about April 10th being ‘Si se peude’ day for all immigrants. This struck me as kind of odd. I was pretty sure no one in my immigrant family knew what that meant. I live at home, because it’s free, and med school is 10 miles away. So I asked my parents, my brother. I called my mom’s sister and asked her. Called two or three cousins. Thought about calling mom’s friends, but it was 11pm and I figured my point was made by now. Nope, no one in my extended immigrant family had any clue what ’si se puede’ meant. I learned Spanish back in college, because Telugu isn’t considered a language (even though it’s spoken by close to 100 million people), so I could graduate in 3 years.

I find it funny that all of a sudden Spanish is the language of all immigrants. Isn’t that a bit racist? To assume that just because they’re the largest immigrant group in recent times they can speak for all of us?

Si se puede means yes I can.

Which brings up another question, what exactly can they do? As immigrants, we’ve had good lives. Since my dad came to this country in 1981, we’ve literally lived in every tax bracket known to man. Their oldest son, though slightly insane, is taking full advantage of the opportunities he’s had through this country. He’s also a raging patriot and liberty lover. Their younger son, he’s doing fine too. We’ve lived the American dream, from a young couple and their baby boy on 6000 dollars a year to I don’t actually know how much. It’s been a good life, and I’ve certainly got no reason to protest.

These protests are sparked by illegal immigrants, who come to this country in search of a better life. No one can fault them for their desire for a better life. But that don’t change the fact that it’s not right. A developed nation can only support so large an unskilled labor pool. And inflating that labor pool…isn’t a good idea. The result is a net increase in poverty. “They pay taxes,” ooooook, each child they put in our system costs 7500 a year to educate. Do they really pay 7500+ in taxes a year? Nope, didn’t think so. Net loss of revenue. We have a progressive tax system, this means a minority pay for the majority of taxes. Lots of people pay taxes, but very few pay as much in taxes as what they receive in government expenditure. You cannot increase the size of the lower tax brackets without negatively impacting all of us.

And then there’s the language issue. A country cannot survive without a common language. English isn’t the official language, not because the founding fathers intentionally omitted it, but because as paranoid as they were, even they found it unfathomable that there would come a day when people would more or less refuse to learn it. Without a common language, we have no ability to communicate. And if we can’t talk with each other, how can we live together?

Learn Spanish? I know it. But that’s starting a very bad precedent. Come to my country, I’ll learn your language, destroy my tax base, and worsen the conditions for the American poor. Keep flying your Mexican flag while I lean over to kiss your ass Don’t be stupid.

This is not about ‘immigrant rights’. Immigrants have no rights. We are here as guests of the country. We come with their permission, we abide by their laws. And when we’ve proven ourselves, we can become citizens, as my parents did. We do not come here, demand to be let in, demand to be made citizens, and then demand they speak our language. That. Just. Ain’t. Right.

This is about illegal aliens, this is about destroying our workforce to benefit the Latino poor that Vicente Fox and Hugo Chavez are too incompetent to take care of. And I got nothing against helping the poor. But while there are slums, unemployment, and all the other issues amongst my domestic poor, I don’t see the sense in turning my back on them to help others, who have their own governments to take care of them.

But at the end of the day, what sickens me most is the implication that these protestors speak for all immigrants. And that all immigrants speak Spanish. How’s that for racism.

orgulloso ser americano, solamente americano, y respetuoso de mi pais adoptado

I’m more interested in psychological and psychiatric therapy than I am in theory (since that’s what I’m in school to do), so I’ll restrict my discussion of this largely to that context.

Have you ever been in a situation where there was just soo many ways to attack a position that you didn’t know where to start? Kind of like your first visit to Disneyland where you spent so much time trying to decide what to ride, that you wasted too much time to actually do any of the rides? Well, that’s kind of how I feel about psych. There are just so many objections to the current state of affairs that I never know which one to bring up first; and even worse, I’ll sometimes drop one halfway through to move on to the next one. The last time I attempted to put all my thoughts on psych into a single coherent series of essays, I ended up with a laughable result (which you can see in the earliest days of this blog). But, I’m going to try again.

The problem with psych is that it operates in a vacuum.

What I mean by this is that often times psychological theory seems to be pulled out of thin air, with little regard for other disciplines that also study the brain and behavior. A perfect example of this is Maslow’s Heirarchy. Personal experience, as well as stories handed down through the ages would seem to contradict Maslow’s supposition; self-actualization tends to be driven by a desire to achieve such things as esteem, belonging/love, and safety. Indeed, those that have all 4 of the ‘lower’ needs often show very little in the way of self-actualization (think trust-fund kiddies, etc).

As you peruse the vast array of psychological schools, you see they are founded on everything from ‘progressivism’ (Critical Psychology) to, well, nothing (Radical Behaviorism). Which brings me to my main contention: Psychology has failed to harmonize itself with what is known about the origin and development of brain and behavior.

While perusing Moti Ben-Ari’s excellent Just A Theory: Exploring The Nature Of Science, I caught a diagram he’d based off of the famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Ben-Ari’s work is an excellent treatise on how science is done. Something that all psychologists and psychiatrists would do well to read. Anyway, here’s the diagram (click to see a larger one).

Maslow’s heirarchy, Piaget’s theory of child development, the psychiatric ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of depression(click on my psych or medicine categories to see more of my rants about the unscientific nature of psych), all of these are still at the pre-science stage. Their original paradigm has been assaulted by anomalies regarding the purpose of the brain (they evolved for a reason that probably had nothing to do with helping us to ‘achieve happiness and harmony’), the environment the brain operates best in (the traditional classroom is not an environment in which we’d expect what when all is said is done is basically a hairless monkey to thrive in), as well as the constancy and adaptability of the brain (unlike your computer’s circuit board, the brain regularly and constantly rewires itself).

Only problem is, these blatant anomalies have failed to result in a crisis. It’s as if all this evidence simply didn’t exist in the world of psychoogical theory and therapy. So what we’re continually stuck with is a pre-science paradigm that–because it has insulated itself from the fields which speak to the biological origins and nature of the brain and behavior–will not acknowledge a need to develop a new paradigm. Operating in a vacuum.

All theories are based on assumptions. These assumptions are usually based on observation of some sort. Over time, as our perception increases in accuracy and complexity, the observations themselves change. And with that comes a change in assumption…which will either lead to refinement or destruction of the old theory. The long-held theory that the sun revolved around the earth made sense given our observation that the sun seemed to go from east to west from dusk until dawn, only to end up on the east at dawn the next day. There was no reason to suspect that the earth either rotated on its axis or revolved around anything. With the dawn of modern astronomy, it became clear that the Earth was rotating, and–given the precession of the stars–was orbiting the sun as well. Which led to Copernicus’ famous pronouncement that the planets orbited the sun…in circular orbits. Keppler and his lapdog, Brahe, using increasingly accurate astronomical data, found that rather than being perfectly circular, their orbits were elliptical (basically take two ends of a circle and pull on them). The new observations led to new facts (elliptical orbits) which changed the assumptions and modified the theory rather than abolished it.

The psych establishment has consistently failed to take into account the new observations, assumptions, and theories developed through bioanthropology (paleoanthropology + primatology), behavioral ecology, and neurobiology; in the remainder of this initial essay, I’ll try to briefly discuss some of the more glaring omissions from psychological theory.

Darwinism:
1. The variability of traits in populations - Before (and sadly even after) Darwin there remained the idea of the ‘type specimen’ for a species of animal. If the ‘type’ happened to have mottled orange and black fur, then the ’species’ had mottled orange and black fur. Individuals who had more orange or more black were ‘imperfect’. As Darwin postulated (which makes more sense), there is actually a ‘range of normal’; rather than a species standing 27″ at the shoulder it would be characterized by the range of 24-29″. Psych currently has little or nothing in the way of established guidelines to determine what lies in the normal range and what lies outside it; the current trend seems to be that if a teacher/parent/lover makes the decision that your behavior is ‘abnormal’ then it is, and that if you don’t feel as good as you want, then you’re ‘abnormal’. (Are socially anxious people really that abherrant? Or do they merely lie at one end of ‘normal’ in a social anxiety spectrum?) Are we doing the mental health equivalent of declaring that being a 5′6″ tall male is a disease?

2. The sheer pervasivenes of ‘mental illness’ in the states must give one pause. The lifetime incidence of psychiatric illness is round about 47% if we listen to the dominant perspective. That’s sicker than dalmatians for crying out loud (for those who’ve never known one, they’re some of the most inbred, problem-filled dogs in the world due to pedigree/breeder issues). How did we get that sick? In the evolutionary struggle, those traits which make one individual less able to survive and reproduce than others will usually result in that individual’s elimination. By all accounts, depression, anxiety, and the like are not fun and substantially affect one’s ability to act in a normal fashion. They can’t have been good things to have for a hunter gatherer living in a Puma filled jungle. If depression, OCD, Bipolar, any of those ‘fairly common’ disorders are idiopathic–not due to outside factors–in nature, then how did they become so high in frequency, given their devastating effects? While natural selection can overlook more ‘minor’ faults (like the presence of an appendix, or flat feet), such large effects in such large portions of the population would not likely last. We are left with the proposition that in all but a handful of cases (I’ve only read about one family in eastern europe that is absolutely 100% depressed due to a serotonin receptor defect), these diseases are either developmental in nature, or are not diseases at all but *injuries* (I’ll come back to that later). And, while susceptibility has been shown to be heritable, see point number 1.

Bioanthropology:
1. Big brains evolved long before modern society did. Fully anatomically modern humans were around between 160,000 and 200,000 years ago. This means that the human brain was not designed to operate in modern society. And this is an important point. While it may function well enough, there will inevitably be friction when a brain designed to interact with 50-100 people intimately is suddenly plunged into a world where only the most reclusive interact with that many, to mention just one of the original ‘design parameters’ at odds with our current situation.

Why this is important is because of the ready use of the word ‘adaptive’ and ‘maladaptive’ to describe behavior in a modern setting by mental health professionals. They show a willingness to declare that a normal human behavior is ‘maladaptive’ in a certain setting and therefore must be changed. This is equivalent to saying that the response of high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, and heart disease to a junk-food-filled modern life is ‘maladaptive’ and therefore the physiological response should be changed. Yet, few doctors would say that nothing is wrong with eating copious amounts of big macs and whoppers. The way we’ve constructed our environment should be under scrutiny, but rarely finds itself there.

2. As TH Huxley–Darwin’s famous ‘bulldog’–was known to remark, he was unable to find a difference in the gross brain anatomy of humans and other primates; finding differences of degree, rather than kind. Aside from language centers, (which some argue chimps have as well), Huxley’s contention remains largely true today, at much smaller levels of resolution than were available to him. There is no part of the ‘emotional’ and ‘learning’ systems of the human brain that isn’t present in apes, monkeys, and indeed most social mammals. Studies of these parts in humans then must be grounded in their origination and purpose in ‘lower’ animals.

The conception of ‘Attention’ is one of the most lucid examples of the differences between psychological schools and evolutionary schools. Attention in animals is goal-directed. Perceive a stimulus, identify the stimulus, categorize the stimulus, act in response to the stimulus. If the stimulus is a blade of grass, it’s irrelevant. If it’s a banana, make screeching noises and run up the tree to grab it before everyone else. If it’s a leopard, make screeching noises and band together to ‘mob’ it by throwing sticks and stones until it leaves for less annoying prey. Compare this to children, who are told they are ’sick’ and then given meth in pill form if they can’t hold their attention on a non-goal-oriented stimulus. Sitting in lecture in med school, it’s hard to find anyone who can sit still or pay attention for an entire hour; and yet we expect that from our children?

Neurobiology:
1. Unlike most of the organs in our body, the brain regularly and dramatically reorganizes and rewires itself in response to outside stimulus. Most other tissues simply respond. About the only tissue that even comes close is muscle tissue. In response to type and amount (or lack thereof) of exercise, muscles can increase the size of their fibers, the metabolic type of fibers (anaerobic or aerobic), the emphasis on structural type (slow-twitch and fast-twitch), and the size of attachments to bone. The brain can and does all that regularly (see Hebbian and Anti-Hebbian synapses), but it can also change how it connects to other cells in the same lobe and other parts of the brain entirely. This would be like your muscles able to change which bones and ligaments they attach to from exercise alone.

However, the brain is largely treated as a computer. The PC on which the ’software of your mind’ is run. Plasticity and Hebbian synapses are never mentioned in the psych literature. No mention of the fact that the brain functions on a positive feedback system rather than a negative feedback system (again unlike most other tissues). Indeed the way we approach treatment to issues with the brain is much as we’d approach treating a broken negative feedback system. The brain is both software and hardware.

2. Although there is much we do not know about brain circuitry, we do know enough to begin to form a paradigm of brain function. We do know which parts of the brain do what, in a general fashion. And we know how they connect to each other, for the most part. Tying back in to my example of attention, the current psych perspective on learning and attention can be shown to be flawed through basic neurobiology as well. In most mammals, the ‘attention areas’ of the brain are connected to the emotional centers of the brain. Furthermore, in all ‘higher’ primates (humans included), the attention areas are also hardwired into the visual centers. The result is that attention is inextricably linked with emotion, in addition to which one’s attention will automatically and without conscious will be redirected to new visual stimuli. The human brain is not an attention maintaining machine, but an emotional-context-dependent goal-oriented attention switching machine.

3. Neurotransmitters, Pathways, and Treatment. As I pointed out in my earlier link, even the way we treat depression doesn’t harmonize with what is happening. In the very simple circuit I illustrated in that post, we have a ‘presynaptic’ nerve and a ‘postsynaptic’ nerve. The ‘presynaptic’ nerve fires in response to the external and internal situation (roughly speaking, firing=situation good, not firing=situation bad). The postsynaptic nerve responds to this by inducing a mood change through firing in response. This is an extreme oversimplification, but it’s a fairly accurate one. So what we have is:

situation good–>presynaptic response–>postsynaptic response–>feel good.
situation bad–>no presynaptic response–>no postsynaptic response–>feel like crap.

We medicate by changing the behavior of the postsyanptic cell. Making it fire no matter what the presynaptic cell is doing. Because the postsynaptic cell still responds just fine, this means the problem wasn’t with the postsynaptic in the first place. The problem was either in our perception of the situation, or in the presynaptic cell. Both of which continue to be ignored by most researchers, due to the fact that depression is ‘clearly idiopathic’. It fixes the symptom, but completely ignores the cause.

Putting It All Together
What we’re left with are a series of facts that the psych establishment has more or less ignored completely. They give us a clearer and more grounded picture of how the mind came to be and what it was designed to do. With this information we can proceed on a clearer footing, both in successful treatment of mental health problems (by an accurate assessment of symptom versus cause) and avoidance (by determining the ways in which the modern environment doesn’t harmonize so well with the big monkey brain on our shoulders).

The human brain is simultaneously more limited and more plastic than the psych establishment has given it credit for. The goals it was designed to reach, the way it was designed to achieve those goals, and the environment in which it was designed to function cannot be inferred by looking at humans in the modern context as it bears no relation on our origin. Only by looking at the evolution of the brain and behavior can we understand how to effectively treat the human brain.

Most importantly we need to redefine mental health problems in a more concrete heirarchy. Being a mere student myself, I have no business weighing in quite this far into the discussion, but since this is just a blog I’d establish the following three categories and definitions:

1. ‘Idiopathic Illness’–This would be the bonafide, headscratching ‘we have no clue what’s going on here’ kinda thing. Schizophrenia, that Eastern European family I mentioned, some forms of bipolar, and the like.
2. ‘ Illness’–Mental illness as a result of a definable environmental or developmental insult. In some cases it’s an event. In others it’s not learning to think in a certain way. Depending on the age of the person and how long/severe their mental health problems were, these may or may not be reversible.
3. ‘Mental Injury’–This category is the novel one, and I could see it encompassing the majority of people who have depressive episodes, anxiety problems, body image disorders, and the like. As I mentioned earlier, the only tissue that is all that similar to the brain are muscles. And muscles can get injured, partially because they, like the nervous system, also in some ways operate on a positive feedback mechanism. In other cases they get injured because we abuse them in ways they weren’t meant to be used (my mom is glaring at me and my weights when I say this one). The longer you don’t lift weights the harder it is when you start again. The bigger you get, the faster you run, the more awkward a position you get into, the more likely you are to get hurt once you leave the design parameters of the human body. It can be much the same case for humans. The horrors of war and post traumatic stress. Peer ridicule, desire to belong, and starvinve oneself. Or the basic neurobiological principle that the more you think sad thoughts the harder it is not to think sad thoughts (Hebbian synapse). With these injuries a combination of medication and therapy (depending on severity one emphasized more than other) could be used to get people back on their feet.

Conclusion:
I’m no Thomas Szasz. And I’m certainly no Cosmides or Tooby (wh0 in my opinion make the mistake of thinking that science can say MORE than it really can). And I don’t believe that people with the ’softer’ mental health problems are ‘weak’. But I don’t think they’re diseased either. There’s little evidence to support that contention. And as a person who’s suffered more than his fair share of physical ailments, there is nothing worse than a doctor who tells you that you won’t ever be fixed and will need to keep taking this medicine for the rest of your life to feel normal.

I prefer to see these mental health ailments as injuries because we’ve not shown an irreversibility that I consider the hallmark of an illness. Although some claim otherwise, my searches through everything from Ovid to Google Scholar do seem to indicate that cognitive behavioral therapy and interpersonal therapy are as or more effective than drugs. And like I said, the drugs do have a purpose, but I’d contend that purpose is to alleviate symptoms long enough to get the work of ‘fixing’ them done.

Currently it seems that every differentiation from the norm, every abherrant behavior, is an illness or a disorder. That pills are the only ‘treatment’ in sight. And that apparently 47% of us have a brain disease of one sort of the other. This is a perspective that makes little sense given the reality of our origins and the flexibility of the brain. By being honest about what is known about the brain and what really is illness and what isn’t, we can look for the origins of mental health problems and ruthlessly eliminate them. I will be happy man on the day when as few of my patients as possible are on long-term psychoactive medication, none are in my office because of mismatch between man and environment, and most come in eager to work through their injuries, aware that with a little hard work we’ll end our relationship with them free of trouble and stronger people besides.

You may have figured out from this blog that I’m kind of a political guy. Which is why I try to avoid those kind of discussions in person. But I’ve got my triggers, and when those get jounced, I’m off like a 1-megaton debating machine. And one thing I’ve noticed is that my generation has an intellectual depth that’s roughly on par with that of my dog. Conservative, leftist, whatever (but mostly leftist). They’re well-educated people in their early twenties who nevertheless form and defend opinions like uneducated children.

I don’t mean they’re dumb, just that they don’t know how to use their brains to think in terms of broad issues. It’s all shoulds, and woulds, and it shouldn’t have to be that ways. You try to argue principles and they look at you like you’re speaking Greek. You try to bring up basic economic theory and they scratch their heads like ‘Wealth of Nations’ wasn’t published 230 years ago. When you mention that maybe, just maybe we might could learn something from evolutionary biology they wonder what you do with evolutionary biology outside of protest against intelligent design. And when you mention that after they all paid 8 bucks to go see A Beautiful Mind, another 20 for the book version they never read, and all the time spent talking about how much they loved it, they just might want to [censored] understand what’s so compelling about what Nash won his stinking Nobel for.

My generation cannot make an argument that takes into account the real world. They invoke emotion and ‘it stands to reason’ in lieu of rationality, logic, and evidence. Their arguments are a little bit like our conception of force and gravity before Newton. It had ‘made sense’ for thousands of years. Which didn’t make it any less wrong. Leftists–especially young leftists–love to call themselves ‘the party of science’. Strange then, that they should refuse to apply the most scientific of social sciences (economics…specifically game theory) to their own beliefs.

Until they can argue against principles, until they can argue using real economic theory, until they can show that their political ideologies are based upon conceptions of human nature that aren’t built out of thin air, leftists will continue to be as worthless as they seem to be.

I love transitional fossils. I love the way paleontologists piece together the past from so much wreckage. I love the sheer intricacy of the pattern and process by which the rich tapestry of life is woven. And the rise of the tetrapods is one of the most interesting topics in evolution.

“It sort of blurs the distinction between fish and land-living animals,” said one of its discoverers, paleontologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago.

Specifically, it was a lobe-finned fish that was more amphibian-like than other known lobe-fins. Examples of modern-day lobe-finned fish include the lungfish (found in Australia, Africa, and South America), and the Coelecanth (off the eastern coast of Africa).

Terrestrial vertebrates, lungfish, and coelacanths together comprise the descendants of a class of fish known as Sarcopterygii. Head to your fishtank or the supermarket or whatever and take a look at the fishes fins. You’ll notice that they have what look like little spokes extending radially from the base of the fin to the end–which is why they’re called ray-finned fish. Quite a bit different from our own limb structure. Sarcopterygiids were what’s known as lobe-finned fishes. Instead of what we think of as ‘traditional’ fins, they had great big fleshy things not so different in shape or consistency from that of a whale or a sea turtle. Funnily enough (or not so much, when you think about it), the resemblance is more than superficial. Those big fleshy lobes had bones within them, and in many ways were nearly identical to the basic pattern of all terrestrial vertebrate limbs:

Yet, its front fins had bones that correspond to a shoulder, upper arm, elbow, forearm and a primitive version of a wrist, Shubin said. From the shoulder to the wrist area, “it basically looks like a scale-covered arm,” he said.

An interesting thing to note is that the similarity ends at the wrist. Because although we’ve grown used to the idea that most terrestrial vertebrates have 5 toes–a few have less as adults, but embryologically we all have 5 digit buds at one point–once upon a time there were fingered Sarcopterygians with more than five. Some had 5, some 6, Acanthostega, one of the most famous early tetrapods, had 8. Being as the evolution of digits came after the evolution of the basic limb pattern, this isn’t much of a surprise, looking back. The only reason that 5 is the default number in all terrestrial vertebrates is because we all happen to have a common ancestor that had 5; if evolution had proceeded just a bit differently, if selective forces had pushed in a slightly different way, some modern tetrapods might’ve had a default of 6 fingers, some 5, and some 8. Trippy.

Why did they come out onto land? No one really knows for sure, because it kind of happened more than 350 million years ago, but we can make some guesses based on the way they lived before they left:

Some 375 million years ago, the creature looked like a cross between a fish and a crocodile. It swam in shallow, gently meandering streams in what was then a subtropical climate, researchers say. A meat-eater, it lived mostly in water.

This isn’t so different from the way modern lungfishes spend their days. Having lived in the southwest most of my life, I can tell you that one of the big problems with shallow, meandering streams is that they like to dry up from time to time. It would kind of suck to be have that happen to you if you were a fish. The ability to pick up and move yourself over to that stream over there would be pretty useful. And indeed, that’s exactly what lungfish (and some of the more aquatic amphibians do). Which explains why they’ve developed the ability to breathe on land, but doesn’t explain why they decided to come up onto land in the first place.

Lungfish pretty much only come out of water when they have to. But earlier Sarcopterygiians probably weren’t able to breathe air. Instead, they’d have to have a very good reason to hold their breath and play around on the ground. Only as land became more and more important to their way of life would they have developed the ability to stay on dry ground.

We can get a few clues about that from their head shape:

The creature was dubbed Tiktaalik (pronounced “tic-TAH-lick”) roseae, and also had the crocodile-shaped head of early amphibians, with eyes on the top rather than the side. Unlike other fish, it could move its head independently of its shoulders like a land animal. The back of its head also had features like those of land-dwellers. It probably had lungs as well as gills, and it had overlapping ribs that could be used to support the body against gravity, Shubin said.

That crocodile-shaped head is like being smacked in the face with a phonebook. Eye position can tell you a lot about an animal’s way of life. Back in gradeschool you might have seen the little textbook picture of the deer’s vs. the wolf’s visual range. The deer, with his wide-set eyes has a lot more peripheral vision, but much less binocular vision. The wolf with his close-set eyes on the other hand, can’t see anywhere near as much in the periphery, but his binocular vision is astounding. Same sort of thing here. The visual plane of the alligator is above the rest of its body. We all know why that is. They lay almost entirely submerged in the shallows at the periphery of water, and if an unlucky animal comes too close, they’d move up and snap it in half. Sarcopterygiians probably made their living in the same way, concealing their bodies below the level of their intended attack. Like crocs, they probably also used the shallows, where, moving around the muck and the rushes, the ability to ‘walk’ along the bottom submerged would’ve been both more stealthy and more efficient than trying to swim in it.

“Here’s a creature that has a fin that can do push-ups,” he said. “This is clearly an animal that is able to support itself on the ground,” probably both in very shallow water and for brief excursions on dry land. On land, it apparently moved like a seal, he said.

It might have pulled itself onto stream banks, perhaps moving from one wet area to another, and even crawled across logs in swamps, said Daeschler.

From walking along the river bottom to holding your breath as you walk on land to being able to breathe as you walk on land to being able to make babies on land. Step by step, one adaptation allows another adaptation to be made. And each adaptation increases your ability to utilize resources and habitat. The Sarcopterygiians’ pursuit of ‘edge’ niches in the water led to their conquering the land. Pretty compelling stuff.

Sometimes a descendant can look more like its ancestors than the intervening taxa. The Hellbender is in many ways a perfect example of this. Almost totally aquatic, it walks along relatively fast-moving streambeds, is an ambush predator, and it has been known to get out of water long enough to move from one stream to the next. The head doesn’t look too different from the Tiktaalik either. Interesting.

The pattern of evolution is a combination of a mosaic and a choose your own adventure story (remember those?). Lookin back–making the mistake of teleology–its very easy to impute a sense of progress where none actually lay. Today, the surviving offspring of the Sarcopterygiians show this with startling clarity. The coelocanth is not only not a shallow stream dweller, it’s the only saltwater, deep-living, completely non-terrestrial Sarcopterygiian I’ve ever heard of, dead or alive. It’s got the fins and a ‘lung’ full of fat and completely nonfunctional. The lungfish, on the other hand, have a more fishlike head than their ancestors, yet retain most of their terrestrial abilities. But the lungfish’s lung has a completely different embryological origin than our own. The terrestrial vertebrate descendants, on the other hand, range from amphibians that don’t actually look too different from their ancestors (take the Hellbender for instance), to 3-toed no-fingered things without teeth that fly for crying out loud. And don’t forget the ones that returned to water, to end up with lobe-fins nearly identical in form and function to the ones they were descended from.

There was no pattern, there was no direction, there was merely self-interested animals looking for an edge. As always when I stare at the wonder of animal diversity and the simple, mindless processes which have created it, I can’t help but return to that overused but so perfect quote from The Man Himself:

There is grandeur in this view of life … that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”